You Know Me Now

I thought about writing this story as fiction: two women, a later-in-life, larger-than-life friendship that changes both of them, a sudden fatal illness. Fiction can fix the broken, prevent the disaster, turn around the inevitable. The child can be saved. The bad guys can be caught. The terminal patient can beat all odds. By choosing fiction, I could change the ending of our story, Diana’s and mine. I could keep her alive. But no. If I did that, it wouldn’t be our story anymore.

I knew about Diana Marcum long before we met. If you read the Los Angeles Times, you knew about her. Without a college degree, she landed the position at The Times previously held by respected journalist Mark Arax, who became her close friend. Her job was covering the people and places of the San Joaquin Valley, where we both lived, and her series on drought, won The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. After that, she wrote two travel memoirs.

I’m a Central California-based novelist and editor, and for about twenty years, I’ve cohosted a monthly TV book club. After I finished Diana’s second book, The Fallen Stones, I recommended it on my segment, and she sent an email thanking me.  

Our first meeting took place on a cloudy Monday afternoon in September of 2022 at La Boulangerie, a French bakery, which Diana called La Bou in a familiar tone as if referring to an old friend. It was located about midway between our houses, in Fig Garden Village, the one Fresno shopping center that had stood the test of time.

I took in Diana’s appearance—the V-neck black blouse, overly formal for the setting, the friendly eyes, the auburn hair, and wondered where to begin. I didn’t have to. She was already talking. We got paper cups of too-hot, too-weak tea, found a place to sit on the chilly patio, and then we were off. Two hours off. Interrupted sentences off. Tangential side conversations off. 

“I love the way we interrupt each other and take all these sideroads,” Diana said that day. “Don’t you?” Then, before I could reply, she was on to another topic.

We talked about writing. We talked about our histories, our loves, our betrayals, our hopes. She was living with a man she loved; I was married to my second husband, a well-known abstract expressionist. My first husband? Well, he had been my high school English teacher, a story too long and too sad to share right then. Finally, the conversation shifted to age.

“I’m turning sixty next year, and I hate it,” she said.

 I replied with a word package about how great she looked. It was the truth. Diana was natural yet polished, attractive without the patina of high-maintenance.

 “I feel like I’m on an airplane.” Her eyes grew wide, and in drama-queen fashion, she continued, “And I’m screaming to everyone else on the plane, ‘We’re all going to die!’”

“First of all, you’re not going to die,” I told her, “not for a long time. Maybe I could have a party for you. An annual sixtieth birthday party! How does that sound?”

“Well.” Her grin was slow in coming. “I’ll have to think about whether I want a party.” I already knew she did.

 I don’t know if I’ve ever before loved anyone after two hours, but by the end of that afternoon, I loved Diana Marcum. Despite her brilliance, she was uncertain about everything from what to cook for dinner to what to write next. Although accepted to a major university, she had gone to work for Winchell’s Donuts in her teens to save her younger brother from the foster care system after the deaths of her adoptive parents. Diana was the little sister I didn’t know I needed. She filled a hole in my life I didn’t know was there.

Our friendship was a series of texts, tea, Portuguese coffee, and farmer’s markets. “Are we past the courtship phrase of friendship so we can get back to wearing yoga pants?” Diana asked after only a few meetings.

Two weeks later, she invited me to breakfast at her bungalow in Fresno’s Tower District, one of the few parts of early Fresno that’s retained its personality. For years, it was minutes from the former location of The Fresno Bee, where Diana and I both worked at different times.

When I walked inside her house and joined her in the yellow dining room, full of light from the south windows above the white-painted cabinets with their glassed-paned doors, I felt as if I belonged there. The house and the long, narrow backyard with its purple bee balm, butterfly garden, and raised planters felt familiar and welcoming. I bonded on sight with George, the dog Diana and her partner, photographer Mark Crosse, rescued in Portugal. George loved the toy I brought him that day, an outrageously orange carrot with an annoying squeak. Diana later admitted that it kept Crosse and her up at night, but as she said in a text to me, “It gives him such joy.”

Although Diana was determined for Crosse and me to connect immediately, he and I took our time. I wanted to savor those first visits with her, while she wanted everyone to be together doing everything. To reach out to him, I baked a batch of breakfast cookies and sent them home with her. Crosse thanked me in a text and said that they were not breakfast cookies; they were anytime cookies. Diana suggested we get together and bake some, and that’s how Crosse and I finally met.

I already knew his work; I could recognize a Mark Crosse photograph the way I could recognize the work of a writer I admired. He was lean and handsome with an angular jaw, mostly gray hair, and he had the build of someone who rode his bicycle daily. What I hadn’t counted on was how comfortable I’d feel around him and them. Their kitchen was small and organized with a white-tiled counter and the tiniest dishwasher I’d ever seen. I’ve been in large rooms with only one or two people and felt crowded, but the four of us—Diana, Crosse, George, and I—fit easily into that small space because of the compatible energy, the house’s and ours.

We shared a lot of conversations in that kitchen. When the weather was cool, and it was unseasonably cool that year, we moved onto the deck, drank Crosse’s coffee from Portuguese pottery mugs, and played fetch with George.

I soon learned that Diana and I had similar holes in our lives. Early on, we commiserated about how growing up without knowing our biological fathers, not even their names, shaped our attitudes about ourselves and about men. My mother’s refusal to discuss anything about my father’s identity, even after I was an adult, ultimately ended our relationship. From the age of twelve, I imagined my “real father” had a sophisticated job—that he was an attorney, perhaps—because of my fondness for Raymond Burr as Perry Mason on television. Diana’s adoptive mother told her that her father was comedian Lenny Bruce.

Perry Mason and Lenny Bruce. What did that say about us, about our expectations of the men we would meet? The men who would have to measure up to a fantasy.  

“Maybe we are sisters,” Diana told me one day as we sat on her backyard deck. “You don’t know who your father was, and I was adopted in the Bay Area. Didn’t you tell me a psychic said you have a half-sister in San Francisco?”

I looked at her, tall and auburn-haired, with long, slender arms. Her eyes were her most striking feature, layered browns touched with hazel and gold. Then, I compared her to me, “almost 5-foot-four,” I liked to say. Dark hair, blue eyes, features that made some people think at first I might be Asian.

“Sure,” I told her. Maybe we are.”

Imagining ourselves as sisters was like imagining Perry Mason and Lenny Bruce as our dads. It couldn’t possibly be true, but when you grow up in a world of secrets, anything is possible.

When I suggested a DNA test, Diana said, “No way. Believing that got me through a childhood of poverty and bad haircuts. I don’t want to find out one way or the other.” I understood the emotional barbed wire surrounding the topic of imaginary dads and let the conversation end there.

One day, as dusk gathered around my house in northwest Fresno, we took George for a walk toward the San Joaquin River. There’s an easy honesty, a freedom, that can happen on early evenings, not really night, not really day, with a close friend and no expectations.

 As we walked, Diana told me about the call she got when she was notified of her Pulitzer win.

“The woman wanted to know who my escort would be.” Her voice rose. “I burst into tears and said, ‘I just won the fucking Pulitzer Prize, and it’s still about whether I can get a date?’”

“You could bring your mother,” the caller said, to which Diana replied through her tears, “My mother is dead!”

We walked farther, and she asked me how I’d managed to marry my English teacher.

“I was looking for a daddy,” I said. “But I picked him because he taught me how to think. He gave us a test with only one question. ‘Would MacBeth go to hell?’ I wrote five pages and thought I was in love. It took me sixteen years to admit I was wrong—about the love, not about MacBeth.”

 She listened, unblinking. Her gaze was naturally intense, and that night, as the sun set, she seemed to see something in me she hadn’t before.

“Well,” she finally said. “That was probably cool back then, telling people about your teacher and all. But as we know today, it was rape.”

The word was its own punctuation mark.

I stopped walking. “But I was the one who came onto him.”

“That’s what sixteen-year-old girls do, Bonnie. They test their sexual appeal. He was the grownup, not to mention a man in a position of power.”

“Except…”

I couldn’t go farther. I thought about it, about the grooming, although he and certainly I would not have called it that. The perfect grades and notes on my papers. The conversations before class. The invitation to accompany him to a play only one day after he filed for divorce from his current wife. How he claimed me seconds after kissing me for the first time, speaking of marriage, no children, just the two of us. I thought about how much I had punished myself for not fitting into that marriage.

“Rape,” Diana said again, and I nodded, still wordless, trying to reconstruct a story I had told myself for most of my life.

On her birthday the following February, we planned the party I had promised her, a taco bar at my house. That party is a series of photos in my mind. The taco bar, kimchi coleslaw, champagne, and Grey Whale gin and tonics. Crosse and my husband Larry talking about art. Her friends and mine sitting in a circle. Diana in her black retro pleated skirt on my purple sofa next to Crosse, his arm around her, love on his face, as she laughs and watches while George—sporting a crisp bandana and a hair trim that makes his dark coat gleam like cut velvet—works the room.

The next day, she told me, “My hope in life is that someday someone will look at me the way Crosse looks at George.”

“Diana.” I raised my voice to get her complete attention because it was pretty much the only way I could. “I wish you could have seen how Crosse looked at you at my house when he put his arm around you.”

“Really?”

Something in her face changed, softened, and we sat there for a moment, not speaking, as she let my words sink in.

Not long after that, we were sitting outside the French bakery about five o’clock when I noticed the sky had darkened, and we were the only people on the patio except for two men who had just moved to the table next to us. They were in their fifties, maybe older, tanned, with short dark hair.

Finally, one of them approached.

“Are you two girls sisters?” he asked. It was the tired line men use when they try to meet women.

Without even looking at each other, we replied in unison, “No! Are you brothers?”

Then, impressed with ourselves, we collapsed with laughter. The men were good sports. They gave us tiny boxes of raisins, and when I asked if they were raisin farmers, they said they were.

They said goodnight, and Diana and I began to head away from them, toward the grocery store.

“Diana,” I said, after we took a few steps. “Those men…were they…?”

“…Hitting on us,” she said, finishing my thought.

We laughed again, and  after a few more steps, I added, “I would’ve gotten the ugly one.”

Without missing a beat, Diana said, “I thought he was kind of cute.”

“So, is that a thing?” I asked her after we’d walked a little farther. “Is the patio of the bakery a pickup place now?”

“A lot of lonely people go there,” she said. “I did once.”

“Why?”

“Because I was alone. Sometimes you just want to talk to someone.”

We finally approached the store, and I tried to imagine Diana—with friends all over the world—Diana, with her vibrancy and brilliant mind, sitting on that patio alone, hoping someone would talk to her.

“I wish I’d known you then,” I told her.

“You know me now.” Her grin was childlike and cute, an attempt to blot out the sadness I knew she could hear in my voice.

After many conversations, Diana decided to write another travel memoir, and she received a sizeable advance for it. She,  Crosse, and her friend since community college, bought a vacation house in the Azores. She and Crosse were leaving in late June. A mutual friend would move into their home and care for George. I promised to visit him while they were gone.

Before they left for Portugal, Diana often forgot when and if we were going to meet.

“I’m losing it,” she told me.

“You’ve got too much going on.” I listed the reasons:

Quitting her job at the Times

Buying a house in Portugal

Contracting for a travel memoir she wasn’t yet sure how to start.

She kept complaining that she wasn’t herself, and her friends and I encouraged her to get checked. Her medical exam revealed nothing, and when she described what was going on, the doctor suggested that she consider speaking to a therapist.

I met her at her house and told her I thought it was a good idea.

That night, she sent a text: “I’m getting ready for bed and thought today was better. Then I wondered why for a half second before I pinpointed being around you.”

“I needed to hear that today,” I wrote. “Thank you.”

“It’s coming from a drudge but it’s so heartfelt. You dazzle me.”

“You are far from a drudge.”

“I am, but I’m trying to stage a comeback,” she wrote. “I’ve had the strangest fatigue and fog. I had some tests but nothing showed. But somehow I get around you and start laughing and believing I’ll find my way out of this.”

At first, Diana sent photos of new appliances and furniture they had bought in Portugal. Soon though, her text messages from the Azores became more convoluted. And then, “Oh BHH I MISS TOU like. Cray. I;m Wa runs simeBHH SPARKLE.”

And finally, “I fell in the bathroom. Crosse had to help me up. We’re coming home.”

A couple of weeks after leaving, they returned. She called that night after they arrived.

“How do you feel?” I finally asked her.

“Being awake and being asleep,” she said. “They feel almost the same.”

I pulled out some well-worn platitudes like, “It will be okay,” and “Whatever it is, we will get through it.” But I was scared.

We communicated throughout her day in the ER, her night there. The diagnosis was brain cancer. She had surgery the following morning.

Afterward, she sent a group video of her speaking in Portuguese and saying she was still alive. Then, everything changed.

Fluid on the brain.

Hydrocephalus.

A coma.

Palliative care.

They came that fast. Like punches. Like fists.

Finally, Crosse let me know that Diana was home. Home hospice.

Time began to speed up. Past tense became present. I could no longer hide from the truth. Diana was going to die, and soon.

On Thursday, August 3rd, our friend Mark Arax called and offered to drive me to see her the next day.

Around 11 o’clock, we made our way past the road construction on Palm Avenue to the Tower District. On the way, he told me that he had spoken to Diana’s biological mother.

“Her father wasn’t Lenny Bruce,” he told me. “He was a Lenny, however, and later, her mother was with a guy named Bruce.”

The fiction of the biological father. I understood it well.

Entering Diana’s living room felt dreamlike. I looked around at the same white sofa, the same glass-paned liquor cabinet, the same turquoise blue Grey Whale gin bottle on the mantle holding a spray of purple bee balm from Diana’s butterfly garden. But no Diana.

Crosse and I headed toward the hall leading to their bedroom and the adjoining office, Diana’s writing room, the one she rarely used because she preferred working on the dining room table.

“She’s Diana, but she’s not,” Crosse told me. “But she’ll know it’s you.”

Through their bedroom, a doorless entry led to the office room overlooking the backyard. I realized that, at night, Crosse could see the back of her hospital bed from the bed they once shared, as if they were in the same room. I stood behind Crosse as he leaned over the back of her bed.

“Are you going to wake up?” he asked her, his voice soft and encouraging.

She didn’t respond, and he nodded toward the chair beside the bed. “It might take a few minutes.”

I sat down, and he left the room. Now, it was just Diana and me.

She lay, eyes closed, breathing evenly, thick strands of dark auburn hair pushed back from her face.

I knew she was paralyzed on her left side, the side next to the wall, so I put my hand over her right arm, which was closest to me. It was thin, veined in soft blue streaks.

“Diana, I’m here.”

No response.

Then, I started talking, about people we knew, about things we’d done. I talked for maybe five minutes, possibly longer.

“Diana,” I told her after a while. “I was thinking about those raisin farmers who hit on us that day at the French bakery.”

Her lips curled into a smile. Finally, I’d connected.

“Can you believe it, Diana? You know they thought I was your mother.”

“No,” she whispered. “Sister.”

I held her hand, and she lightly pressed back.

For some reason, I glanced down at my fingernails, broken, uneven, polish-chipped, and remembered how she always complimented me on how well I kept them. Since her sudden illness, I hadn’t cared.

“My nails look like hell,” I said.

Her eyes blinked open.

“They look just awful,” I continued. The fury that had been building in me finally found a focus. It was the only way I could express how angry I was and how helpless I felt.

With her eyes still open, she grinned.

I squeezed her hand, and her fingers fluttered over mine.

“Oh, Diana…” I couldn’t finish, nor did I know what I was going to say.

She closed her eyes.

I continued to talk about memories of our time together. She drifted off. I stroked her arm, watching her breathe, saying nothing. Finally, I leaned over the bed, speaking close to her ear. “Diana,” I said, “you are one of the best friends I’ve ever had.”

Her lips curved into a smile. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you too.” I kissed her forehead.

I’m not sure if she heard. Her breathing was the only sound in the room.

I thought I would spend many seasons in Diana’s garden, that we would share birthdays and ordinary days, that we’d discuss our lives and our books. Not long after I left her that Friday, she stopped responding. The following Wednesday, with some of her closest friends in the house, she died.

Everyone tends to think the grief at someone’s passing is theirs alone. In a way, it is. This is my story, the one I couldn’t write as fiction. There is no true antagonist here, no evil other, only death, that drive-by killer. Now, I know what  Diana and I found in each other, what we called sisterhood, was actually recognition. She and I truly saw each other, and in each other, we saw ourselves. Our friendship was both a confirmation and an acceptance of who we were. When I remember her, I try not to focus on that last visit. Instead, I hold an image close to me: the two of us sitting on the deck in that long, narrow yard, drinking Crosse’s fine coffee and talking about the future as I throw a bright, squeaky toy for George. In that image, Diana is laughing, and around us, in her garden, everything is as perfect as friendship can make it.

-Bonnie Hearn Hill

Bonnie Hearn Hill is the author of 16 novels, as well as numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent publication was in the 2024 Anthony-winning anthology Crime Hits Home: A Collection of Stories by Crime Fiction’s Top Authors, edited by S.J. Rozan. Bonnie has co-hosted a monthly book segment on a major Central California television news network since 2002. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.