by Abby Jimenez
He didn’t reply. He just looked at me, breathing heavily through his nose.
I licked my lips. “Adrian, I want to live my best life. I want to travel and have adventures and drink all the wine while I’m still able and laugh and have fun for as long as I possibly can. I don’t want to give this disease one more minute. And neither should you.”
He got up and my hand fell away from his shoulder. He started to pace. “No.” He shook his head. “No, you can’t. You have to hang on for as long as possible. You don’t know what might happen. You don’t know what developments they might come up with—”
I let out a long breath. “There’s no clinical trial I haven’t read about or study I haven’t followed. There’s not going to be a miracle. At least not in time for me. If I have this, I’m dying. And all I’m asking is for you to understand how I want to continue to live. Believe me. This isn’t some spur-of-the-moment decision. I know what I want. And I won’t change my mind.”
He shook his head at me, tears in his eyes. “No. I won’t let you do it.”
I blinked at him. “Won’t let me do what?”
“I won’t let you give up.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m just choosing to live and die on my own terms.”
He closed the space between us and put his hands on my arms. “We’re a couple. We decide things together, Vanessa. You have to fight this. Let me help you fight it. We’ll find the best doctors in the world, we’ll go anywhere. I’ll fly—” He choked on the last word and my heart broke all over again.
“You can’t fix this,” I whispered. “I know it’s hard for you not to be able to control this. But Adrian, please. I need your support.”
His anguished eyes searched mine. Then he dropped his palms from my arms. He turned away and dragged a hand through his hair.
“No. I won’t support it.” He shook his head and looked back at me. “I won’t let you abandon hope. What if there’s a breakthrough? What if you could live another twenty years?”
“And what if I can’t?” I snapped. “What if I only have one more year before I can’t swallow or breathe without equipment? One more year before I’m dead. I want to keep living my life, Adrian. I’m not wasting precious time hooked up to IVs, trapped in hospitals chasing rainbows.”
We stood there staring at each other, breathing hard.
“I’m doing this with or without you,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “Please don’t make me do it without.”
We stood there in a standoff of silence. I saw his heart breaking. It cracked and tore across his face. A strong deep-rooted tree, struck by lightning, split right down the middle. He looked instantly worn. I’d never seen him look this tired. Like some sort of vitality had left his body since I saw him last.
“I just want none of this to be happening,” he whispered.
I swiped a tear off my cheek. “Okay. Then let’s forget it’s happening. Let’s go do something fun. Let’s rent snowmobiles or go tubing. Let’s stay up late trying some acrobatic sex move in the bathroom. Get an injury we don’t want to explain to the paramedics.”
This garnered me a tiny smile—but it didn’t last. “I need to have a say in this, Vanessa.”
I blinked at him. “A say in my life?”
“It isn’t just your life. This doesn’t just affect you.”
I set my jaw.
His eyes begged me. “Please. People fight this. They try everything possible—”
I nodded. “Yes. Many choose to try everything. That’s their choice. That was Melanie’s choice. This is mine. And the only person who should be making it is me.”
He stared at me bleakly from across the room. Then he sat on the damask chair and put his face into his hands, squeezing his fingers into his scalp.
“I won’t be a captive to this illness, Adrian. I won’t spend my life catering to its what-ifs. It’s already taken enough from me.”
He didn’t look up.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might be crying.
I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay, like he’d told me once. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to give him false hope.
Then I realized that day in his office when he said that to me, he hadn’t meant it. How could he? He didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.
It wasn’t until just now that he realized how hopeless it all really was.
CHAPTER 27
THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD EVERYTHING, THEN
DISASTER STRUCK!
ADRIAN
We went around in circles about it all night. Me begging her, her digging in. We somehow faked our way through dinner and then went back to our room and picked up where we left off. Finally, we fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
I’d been in the same tornado she was this whole time. I’d been in the eye, in the calm, while it built up all around me without me knowing, and now I was sucked into the vortex, spinning in the howling black, grasping for something to hold on to, and there was nothing. She wouldn’t give me anything to cling to. Nothing to give me hope.
Yesterday I’d driven us home. We barely talked the whole six hours.
We weren’t fighting. We weren’t mad at each other. We were just at odds, and there was nothing to say.
As we’d passed a billboard for Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, she waved a white flag and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t up for any adventures or side trips. I wanted to be back in our space, where I didn’t have to pretend to be okay because we were in public—because I was not okay. At all.
I didn’t begin to know how to accept the situation.
I understood Vanessa’s reasoning, but I still couldn’t support it.
She didn’t know whether she’d have the same reaction to the drugs that Melanie did. What if she tolerated them without side effects? She wouldn’t know unless she tried them. Three months wasn’t much—but it was something. It was better than nothing. How could she throw away three months of life without even trying?
What if the next clinical trial brought the cure? Or halted the disease in its tracks? Or reversed it altogether? What if that trial was happening now, and she wasn’t there to participate in it?
It was unacceptable to me. Unfathomable.
How could she just give up?
Waves of anxiety and panic had been rolling over me for two days. I’d never been this tired. It was an emotional weariness that settled in my bones. I felt hopeless. Powerless. I wanted to save her, do something, but my hands were tied because she wouldn’t even give me one thing. Not one thing.
If she’d agreed to see someone about her hand, at least I could busy myself with looking for specialists, making appointments for her. There’d be an actionable plan, there’d be something happening. But there was nothing to do. She wanted me to just forget about it. To sit here and go to candy stores with her and pretend like my entire universe hadn’t just imploded.
When my alarm clock went off Monday morning for work, I was already up, reading ALS case studies and pouring over medical journals in my office. I’d been up for hours. There was a manic energy to it, a frantic need to educate myself, to be able to present every angle to her, counter every point.
I argued for a living. I convinced juries of twelve that guilty men were innocent. And I couldn’t convince one woman to take life-extending medications or agree to a clinical trial to save herself. There had never been anything more important, and I’d never felt so incompetent. I felt like I was riding the edge of a mental breakdown, like I was living in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from, running to exhaustion because if I stopped moving, it would knock me down so hard I’d never get up.
Nothing would ever be as good again…
From this point on, I’d always be living in the shattered afterward of this disease. Even if by some miracle this thing with her hand wasn’t ALS, she could still get sick at any time, and if she did, she wouldn’t fight then either. We w
ould never be free of it. And if she wouldn’t agree to fight it, then we’d never even have hope.
I wanted to go back to being blissfully ignorant. I wanted to forget.
I dragged myself to the bathroom and took a shower to go to work and then stood next to the bed, knotting my tie, looking down on her sleeping like I’d done last week.
So much had happened in seven days.
Last week my whole life had been perfect. Our future was bright and endless and there was nothing but possibility. I had everything. I had her. And I thought I’d always have her.
And this week she might be dying.
She’d asked me if she was my girlfriend, and I’d said that word didn’t do her justice. It still didn’t.
I wanted her with me for the rest of my life, not just the rest of hers. I never wanted to wake up another day without her next to me. And looking at her lying there, knowing that in a year she might be in the ground…
My throat got tight and that wave of helplessness crashed over me again, that thick shallow breathing that came with a panic attack fluttered at the edges.
My happiest moments might be measured in months, not years. And I knew that I should be cherishing every second with her, but I couldn’t stop looking at the sun. I couldn’t. It was careening toward the Earth, and I was angry because she wouldn’t try to stop it.
I turned and sat on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands.
I didn’t realize she was awake until she spoke from behind me. “Are you okay?” she whispered.
I dragged a hand down my beard and stared wearily ahead. I didn’t answer her.
“Adrian, you won’t have to take care of me, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ll have nurses and aides and we can—”
I shook my head. “I don’t care if I have to take care of you, Vanessa. That’s not even the fucking…” I couldn’t finish.
It didn’t matter to me if I had to spend the rest of my life in service to her. I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted her here.
I put my face back into my hands.
“Do you regret me?” she said into the darkness.
I turned around and looked down at her deep brown eyes peering up at me. “What?”
“Do you wish you never met me?”
I shook my head at her, my voice thick. “How can you ask me that?”
“I didn’t mean to mislead you. I didn’t mean for you to have feelings for me under false pretenses and have the rug pulled out from underneath you. I thought you knew…”
Her voice cracked. She draped an arm over her face and then she started to cry.
I climbed into the bed in my suit and tie, and pulled her to me. I wrapped her in my body and held her like she might vanish.
She gasped through tears, and I kissed her.
It was desperate. Frantic. Like this kiss could somehow make her change her mind, give me more time or just make me fucking forget. And she must have wanted that too because she kissed me back.
I wanted to overwhelm my senses. I wanted to overwhelm hers. I wanted to scream that I loved her, beg her to give me something, some say in what was going to happen. I would make a deal with the devil, sell my soul, if it could save her. But nothing I could do would heal her broken genes. Nothing could undo it or turn back the clock. Time was the only thing that would give us the answers, and it was our enemy.
Her kisses got more urgent. She reached for my zipper and I tugged down her underwear. Her hands fumbled to undo my shirt, but her fingers couldn’t do it. I sat up and ripped it open, buttons raining over her and bouncing from the headboard. I whipped off my belt and she grabbed my tie and yanked me back on top of her, pushing my pants down, wrapping her legs around my waist.
The sex was frenzied. Raw. I felt tears squeeze from my eyes as I thrust inside her and she pulled me in like I couldn’t get deep enough.
She was everything. Everything. I’d found the one thing that was limitless. I’d found the love that poets wrote about.
Only it was a tragedy.
She gasped under me and her back arched and I was right behind her. Then we just lay there, panting at the ceiling, tangled in each other.
“Don’t you ever think I regret you,” I whispered. “I could never regret you. I would trade fates with you if I could. I’d give anything.”
I moved to look down at her. “Please, Vanessa. Just say you’ll try. Take the medications, do the clinical trials…”
Her eyes went sadder than they already were. “Adrian, maybe you should see someone. A grief counselor. I could go with you…”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “It’s not going to help.”
Nothing was going to help.
“It will. They can help you deal with how you’re feeling.”
I shook my head.
“I just don’t know how to do this,” I whispered.
She looked up at me, beautiful, her hair on my pillow like a halo. “Nobody knows how to do this, Adrian. You need help to get through it. Please.”
I shook my head again. “I can’t do what you do,” I said, my voice thick. “I can’t act like none of this is happening. I can’t pretend to be happy.”
“I don’t pretend to be happy. I just refuse to be sad.”
If she knew how much I loved her, she’d know this was never going to be possible. My despair was multiplying like cancer. It was consuming me and eating me whole. It put shadows on everything. It stuck to the windows and light bulbs. It blocked the vents, sucked the air out of the room.
And I didn’t know how to forgive her for not making any effort to stay.
* * *
I lay there holding her until she fell asleep again. Then I went to work without waking her up. I was late, but I didn’t give a shit. Becky had been blowing up my phone, probably wondering where I was.
I didn’t even know how I was going to get through the day. All I knew was that I looked forward to the distraction. I wanted to think about something else, even just for a little while.
When the elevator doors opened on my office floor, Becky pounced on me from out of nowhere. “Adrian—”
“Whatever it is, can it wait until later?” I asked tiredly. “I can’t right now.”
“No!” she whispered, jogging next to me. “Marcus is, like, super pissed.”
I pushed open the glass doors into our office. “Pissed about what?”
“The cops didn’t give Bueller a sobriety test until three hours after his arrest and—”
She didn’t get to finish. Marcus’s voice boomed across the office. “How nice of you to finally join us.”
I stopped and stared at him with bleary eyes over the desks. He looked furious. His cheeks were ruddy and he had a sheen of sweat on his brow. I registered almost absentmindedly that he looked the human version of a heart attack.
Just like I probably looked like the human version of a broken heart.
I kept walking. I ignored him and everyone’s eyes on me, and I made my way to my office and shut the door with Becky standing outside. If he wanted to give me a dressing down, fine. But he could do it in the privacy of my office, not in front of our team.
Marcus came charging in behind me. “The Breathalyzer blow on the Bueller case was invalid. You would have seen this had you bothered to watch the bodycam footage yourself instead of passing it off to John. This whole damn case could have been thrown out weeks ago. You missed the call from the police station when Keller was rearrested so he was interrogated without counsel, you didn’t get the medical records for the Garcia trial and now we have to file for another extension. I should fire you right now.”
It was almost shocking to know that I had anything left to feel, but my stomach dropped.
He glared at me. “You’ve had your head up your ass for weeks. I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s not going to be this firm’s problem.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t be sorry. Do your fucking job. Or
pack your shit and get out of here. These are people’s lives.”
He stormed out of the office, and I felt the hushed quiet outside my door that meant everyone had been listening.
I sat heavily in my chair.
Becky came tiptoeing in a few moments later. She clicked the door gently behind her and stood quietly, looking at me with pity.
“So what does my horoscope say about today?” I asked tiredly.
“It says it’s gonna be shitty.”
I laughed dryly and stared back at her with what I knew were red, grief-stricken eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I rubbed my forehead. “I just found out Vanessa might have the gene that carries ALS.”
Becky looked confused. “Didn’t you know that?”
“No. I didn’t know.”
She blinked at me a second. “How? It’s, like, the cornerstone of everything she does. She talks about it like twenty-four seven.”
“I know,” I said wearily.
She studied me. “Well…does it matter to you?”
“It matters to me that she might die, yeah.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I mean would it have changed things. Would you have not fallen all in love with her if you knew?”
I scoffed. Like I ever had any choice.
“I was done for the minute I laid eyes on her,” I said.
I meant it. And losing her was going to kill me. And if she wasn’t willing to fight, the countdown for my end had already begun.
Everything I loved was coming undone. My universe was unraveling, one strand at a time.
I couldn’t save Vanessa. I couldn’t even convince her to reconsider her options. Grace would be gone in a few months. I’d managed to fuck up my job. I’d lost control. All of it. The tornado was flinging bits and pieces of my life in every direction and the mess was getting larger by the minute, too big to clean up.