Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around Read online

  PRAISE FOR DON’T MAKE ME TURN THIS LIFE AROUND

  “With her trademark wit and charm, Camille Pagán invites us back into the lives of Libby and Shiloh thirteen years after we first met them in Life and Other Near-Death Experiences. Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around is rich, raw, and real, a new favorite . . . Readers like me can’t help coming back for more of Pagán’s gorgeously written stories. I loved it!”

  —Kerry Lonsdale, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestselling author

  “Oh my goodness! Camille Pagán has achieved such an exquisite, delicate balance, writing a profoundly moving novel that expresses both the beauty and heartbreak of loving other people. Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around is everything: funny and warm and scary and sad and reassuring—just like real life. I read this in one sitting because I simply couldn’t stop.”

  —Maddie Dawson, bestselling author of Matchmaking for Beginners and A Happy Catastrophe

  “Camille Pagán’s latest page-turner brilliantly captures the nuances of marriage and family while tackling the tough challenges along the way. Libby is every wife and mother, and when life throws her a curveball, she finds the courage to keep moving . . . and keep believing. With wit and wisdom, Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around will have you laughing and crying along with these perfectly flawed characters and asking yourself, What does it mean to have enough?”

  —Rochelle Weinstein, bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends

  “Pagán masterfully guides us on a stormy journey through a morass of middle-age malaise and deposits us on the other side with charm, humor, truth, and a few lessons about the power of love and unbreakable family ties.”

  —Andy Abramowitz, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Free Fall

  “Camille Pagán pens another hit with the compulsively readable Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around. I trust Pagán’s storytelling, and in her latest, she masterfully guides us through a woman’s journey through real ups and downs in marriage and motherhood.”

  —Tif Marcelo, author of Once Upon a Sunset

  ALSO BY CAMILLE PAGÁN

  This Won’t End Well

  I’m Fine and Neither Are You

  Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties

  Forever Is the Worst Long Time

  Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

  The Art of Forgetting

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Camille Pagán

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542026468 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542026466 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542026475 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542026474 (paperback)

  Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino

  First edition

  For my sister, Janette Noe Sunadhar

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Read more about...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  I won’t say everything happens for a reason; whenever someone said that when I was going through cancer treatment, I wanted to punch them in the mouth, then ask them to give me the reason that’d just happened. As a dyed-in-the-wool optimist, however, I had to believe that getting lymphoma again was a tiny part of some greater plan the universe would later reveal.

  Now, technically I hadn’t been diagnosed yet. But dread had been sitting like a stone in my stomach for weeks prior to my biennial checkup. Because I knew—the way you just know the lurker on the subway is seconds from pulling out something you don’t want to see—that it was back.

  As my oncologist welcomed me into her office, her outstretched arms were nothing if not a pair of blazing red flags confirming my deepest fears. Then she hugged me so hard I could taste the bagel I’d had for breakfast, which seemed like even more evidence she was about to tell me I wasn’t long for this world.

  Except she wouldn’t try to squeeze the stuffing out of me if my torso were riddled with tumors . . . would she?

  “Libby, did you hear me?” Dr. Malone, who had sat back down, was staring at me from the other side of her desk.

  “What’s that?” I said, blinking hard. I’d just been thinking that if freedom was another word for nothing left to lose, then midlife must be its antonym. At forty-six, I had nearly everything I’d ever wanted: a happy marriage, two delightful daughters, a meaningful career, a lovely home. I’d basically won the existential lottery.

  Well, it had been fun while it lasted.

  “Congratulations,” she said, beaming at me.

  On instinct, I returned her smile. Then I remembered why I was sitting in front of her. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m sorry—why are you congratulating me when my cancer is back?”

  She laughed. “It isn’t, Libby! I’m sorry if I slipped into medicalese. To be clear, your scans were spotless. There’s no evidence of cancer anywhere in your body.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “It’s normal to expect the worst,” she said, but she had a funny look on her face. “Well, for most patients. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Fine,” I assured her, because at least my eyes had started leaking a little. I’d live to see my twins, Isa and Charlotte, become teenagers. That was more than my mother, who’d died of ovarian cancer when I was just ten, had been able to say.

  “I’m glad, but if you’re not fine, maybe this will help,” said Dr. Malone, peering at my chart, which was pulled up on her computer screen. She looked away from the monitor and smiled at me again. “Your official anniversary is next month, but I think we can safely call this ten years cancer free.”

  A full decade. “That’s . . .” I was going to say amazing, but I couldn’t get over the fact that I didn’t feel amazed. In fact, save the couple of tears that had already escaped, I felt . . . kind of underwhelmed, to be honest. “Time flies when you’re still alive,” I finally managed.

  “Doesn’t it? I’m so happy for you,” she said, rising from her chair. She came around to the other side of the desk, which was my cue to stand. “This is a big deal, so I hope you find a way to celebrate it.”

  Dr. Malone didn’t have to add what I’d already been thinking abou
t in her waiting room: some of her patients wouldn’t have that chance.

  “That’s a great idea,” I told her—and because I’m not a sociopath, this time I was the one to initiate the hugging. “Thank you so much for everything.”

  “You’re so welcome, Libby,” she said. “I’m glad you won’t have to see me again unless anything changes, but your sunshine will be missed around here.”

  I thanked her again and fled before she could figure out that my sunshine was hiding behind a rain cloud.

  As I escaped the frigid medical building for the sweltering, overcrowded comforts of Manhattan’s streets, I wondered why I wasn’t hearing birds sing sweet melodies or smiling like a just-burped baby. After all, I was only thirty-four when another doctor all but declared me a goner—but he’d been dead wrong. It took nearly two years of treatment, but I’d gone into remission. Now my lucky numbers had been drawn yet again. Why didn’t it feel that way?

  No woman is an island, I reminded myself; I probably just needed to share the news with someone in order to get in a celebratory mood. I ducked under the awning of a flower shop and pulled my phone out of my bag. My husband Shiloh, who was a pilot, was in the middle of a flight, so I’d have to tell him later. My finger hovered over my twin brother Paul’s number, but it occurred to me that he was probably stuck in a marathon of meetings. Anyway, I could let him know when I saw him for lunch tomorrow.

  So I called my father. Paul claims that I inherited my rose-colored glasses from my mother, and she was certainly the more exuberant of our parents. But much of my sanguine outlook was owing to the guy who’d done the job of two parents most of my life. He’d always managed to shine a light on a dim situation by sharing a few choice words or a story that started out completely unrelated to the topic at hand, only to reveal itself as precisely on point. Really, he was the first person I should have reached out to.

  But his phone had only rung once when I remembered he would not be picking up. Not today. Not ever again.

  Now all of the tears that I’d been anticipating in Dr. Malone’s office sprang to my eyes as I remembered that he was dead.

  He may be gone, but you are here, I reminded myself, drying my eyes on my sleeve before I descended the stairs to the subway that would shuttle me back to Brooklyn. Rather than wallowing, it was my job to do all the living that my father could no longer do—that’s what he would have wanted. How incredibly lucky I was to still have that opportunity!

  So . . . why didn’t I feel more alive?

  TWO

  There were years, many of them, when I thought I would never get the one thing I wanted most, which was to be a parent. Finding out that I was pregnant with my daughters was the second- happiest day of my life (the first, of course, was the day they were born). Even so, sometimes mothering felt like being asked to put out a raging fire with nothing but a cape and a pair of pom-poms. It required degrees of grit and patience I could not have imagined possessing before two tiny humans emerged from my body.

  It helped to try to be the mother my own mother was to me. There was a lot I couldn’t recall about the brief time we had together—but if there’s one thing I did remember, it was that she led by example. I couldn’t storm around while expecting Charlotte and Isa to act like they were sliding down a rainbow. No, I needed to adopt the same attitude of gratitude I was always telling them to have. And so, on the several-block-long walk back from the subway, I made a point to focus on what I was thankful for. How blue was the sky, how lovely were the brownstones in our cozy Brooklyn neighborhood! How wonderful it was to be coming home to the people who loved me!

  My life, I reminded myself as I let myself into our apartment, was charmed.

  “No, you shut up, you stupid—”

  “You’re the stupid one! I am so sick of your dumb—”

  I can’t bring myself to relay the rest, but let’s just say I can’t believe my daughters kiss their mother with those mouths.

  “Girls!” I said, flinging their bedroom door open. They were tangled up on the floor like a couple of cage fighters, and the irritation on their faces made me feel—if only for a split second—like I’d interrupted something important.

  But I must have been staring back at them just as fiercely, because they quickly released their headlocks and scrambled to their respective beds.

  “What,” said Isa, who’d tucked her arms into her T-shirt and wedged herself into the corner where her bed met the wall. At least her nose wasn’t in a book. She spent nine-tenths of her waking hours reading and pretending the rest of us didn’t exist. Ever the pessimist, Paul said it was normal—reading was a perfectly healthy way to cope with the dumpster fire that was reality, he claimed. But lately when I tried to get her to bake or go out with me, even to her favorite bookstore, she had absolutely no interest.

  “I told you we need our own bedrooms!” said Charlotte, glaring at me from the end of her mattress. She’d had her hair cut pixie short the month before. She’d always resembled Paul, but now she looked so much like him as a child that I sometimes had to stop myself from doing a double take.

  “And I told you that’s not happening.” I was trying, with only moderate success, to keep my voice from rising. “You know Papi and I are saving up so you can go to college without racking up massive debt. Regardless, I wish you’d try to look on the bright side,” I added, ignoring the obvious eye rolls Charlotte and Isa were exchanging. “We gave you the big bedroom. We would be thrilled to have this much space.”

  We had a nice-sized apartment, at least by New York standards. It occupied the ground and garden floors of a brownstone, and had big bay windows, a second half bathroom that kept us all from murdering each other, and a small stone patio out back where Shiloh and I liked to sit, weather permitting, as the sun went down. We’d been lucky to buy the place during a major dip in the market, though we’d probably pay it off the same week we hobbled into a nursing home. It was worth it. The very first time I visited our neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, I knew it was home. Which was saying a lot for someone who grew up outside of Grand Rapids and once thought Chicago would be her final resting place.

  Still. Shiloh and I were jammed into a bedroom that barely fit a queen bed; the closet was so cramped that I kept my clothes on a rack next to the washer and dryer. Our room, unlike the girls’, faced the street, and though I knew what I’d signed up for living in New York, the mega grocery store that had recently been erected a few blocks away had more than doubled the traffic volume. Sometimes as I was drifting off at night, I could almost convince myself that the cars whizzing past harmonized with the ocean waves coming from our white-noise machine.

  “Whatever. But you can’t yell at us when we fight. We need more alone time,” hissed Charlotte.

  I stared at her for a second, willing myself to remember the sweet, pink-cheeked toddler who only wanted to be with me—on me, technically, in the koala-style latch she’d been so fond of. What on God’s green earth had possessed my daughter?

  Oh, yeah—estrogen.

  I supposed that wasn’t entirely fair. Charlotte had always been small and lean, but last year, she got unusually thin and was constantly guzzling water. It was summer, so Shiloh and I chalked it up to the heat, and that for Charlotte, to be awake is to be in motion. I’ll never forget Isa’s face peering down at me in the middle of the night. “Mom,” she said firmly. “Mom, get up right now. Charlotte’s sick.”

  I denied it for the longest time, but the truth is, twins do share a psychic hotline. There’s literally no other way Isa could have known that Charlotte was this close to falling into a coma, considering they’d both been fast asleep. Charlotte was so asleep, in fact, that we could barely rouse her—and when we finally did, her words were slurred. A few hours later, a physician informed us that our daughter had type 1 diabetes and would need to take insulin every day for the rest of her life in order to stay alive. Carb counting, constant shots, monitoring for any sign that her blood sugar was too high or too low:
it was a whole heck of a lot to put on an adolescent whose primary goal had been, up until that point, to ready herself to be the captain of the US women’s soccer team. And given how harrowing the situation had been and sometimes continued to be—there had already been a few close calls—I couldn’t fault her for being cranky.

  “Come on, you guys,” I said, softening my tone. “Let’s not do this right now, okay? This isn’t why I let you stay home.” We’d decided to hold off on summer camp because we had yet to find one that truly knew how to handle Charlotte’s diabetes, and the girls had vetoed a sitter—they knew how to entertain themselves, they said. I had reluctantly agreed, unaware that by entertain, they meant engage in hand-to-hand combat every second I wasn’t hovering over them. “Why don’t we walk over to Prospect Park?” I suggested. It was a bit of a hike, but I knew spending time with them would lift my spirits.

  “I’m going to finish my book,” said Isa, turning her back to me.

  “I’m going to see if Cecelia can hang out,” said Charlotte.

  I sighed. “I’ll be here if you don’t need me.”

  I can’t say the girls did wonders for my mood, but as I made dinner, I was mostly able to forget about my blahs for a while. And just as well—Shiloh had been working long hours lately. The last thing he needed was to come home to Debbie Downer.

  “Hey, you,” I said, kissing him hello after he let himself inside the apartment.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said. He looked handsome in his crisp, white pilot shirt and navy pants, but there were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin, though naturally tan, looked like it could use more vitamin D.

  I followed him into the kitchen. “Long flight?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, leaning against the counter. “It felt like it took three years.”

  “I’m sorry.” I resisted the urge to mention that he could cut back. He’d worked his way up at the private air carrier where he’d been employed for more than a decade, and now he mostly shuttled executives around the US. It was a solid gig and paid well enough that between that and the modest salary I drew from the foundation I ran, he could afford to take off another day each week. But business was booming and his boss relied on him, so he’d been flying right up to the legal limit.