“Isn’t he lovely?” the old woman beside me asks. (She has tears in her eyes now. Her small hands are trembling.)
“What?” I reply, but it sounds like a gasp.
“He’s so young, but he’s got the loveliest voice. He and his boys’ choir are singing in Carnegie Hall this winter—can you believe it?”
I nod, hoping she thinks my gape is because I’m surprised about Carnegie Hall. I am surprised, but I’m also sickened and angry because this little boy has to sing at his father’s funeral.
I’m sick because he gets to sing at Carnegie Hall in the winter—and his father won’t be there to witness it.
I’m sick because I’m now thinking of my own father. I’m learning to let go, that I might have to say goodbye. I’m fighting, desperately, my head held under the water as I drown. Breathe, I shout at myself, but I have no gills to keep me alive.
(Papa, you can’t leave us.)
Oh, God. I wipe away tears. I’m too angry to feel embarrassed; warm droplets fall away, onto my neck and shoulder, with the swipe of my hand. “I’ve got to go,” I say quietly, turning. I don’t know why I said anything to her; I don’t think she heard me.
Levi is setting the last spray, circular and heavy with roses, on its display stand. He looks up when I pass, sees me crying, and immediately follows me. “Bee?”
“Don’t.”
His hand is on my shoulder, but I shrug it off. I don’t want it there. I don’t want Levi—anywhere, because he only makes it worse. He reminds me of happiness and a summer I can never have back, a time that wasn’t marred by the shadow of death. His presence makes me ache.
“Was it the singing?” he asks quietly.
I start to nod, but then I’m shaking my head instead. More honesty. Way to go, Bee. Just when it’s too late. “Did you see the pictures?” I whisper, the back of my hand against my eyes to block more tears. “I don’t want to watch a little boy mourn his father like I’ll have to watch my siblings mourn my father.” I unlock the company vehicle, swing the door open, and slam it behind me. Levi is still on the sidewalk, keys in hand, staring at me in shock.
I drive away, hoping he knows how to get back to the shop. I have to gun it; I’m going to be sick.
Tracy’s in the shop when I get there. I slam the clipboard with the trip sheet onto the counter and, despite her concerned questions, lock myself in the bathroom.
I puke the second I bend over the toilet, grabbing my hair out of the way. I can’t breathe for a moment, but then, when I sit back on my heels and start to cry, the gasping sobs become my breath, and my lungs work again. (Just barely.)
“What’s wrong?” Tracy asks, outside the door, but she’s not talking to me.
I didn’t hear Levi come in, but I know he’s there. After a moment, he sighs. “She left the funeral crying. Her dad.” That’s all he says, and I can just imagine him spreading his hands like he doesn’t know what else to say, like it’s self-explanatory.
“Bee?” she tries. “Sweetheart, are you all right?”
I can’t speak yet, so I grab napkins and wet them and drag them across my mouth to get rid of the taste and smell. I suck in the deepest breath I can, getting myself under control, forcing the sobs to stop. My stomach is still clenching in pain and my head is pounding. All I need is to get home.
I open the door to see both my boss and my boyfriend standing outside, mouths pressed grimly. Tracy reaches for me, wrapping her arms around my neck in a hug that calms me more than I expected. “Bee, sweetie, are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. My voice shakes.
“You take today off, okay? I’ll close the shop for an emergency and do the wedding and wire the deliveries to another florist.” She leans away and looks me in the eye, tucking my hair behind my ear.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Thanks.”
“No need.” She waves away my words, pressing my hand tight, and leaves me standing in the dark hall outside the bathroom. The sliver of light from the bathroom lands on Levi, who just looks at me, his eyes a thousand questions. My heart trips, beating a million beats per minute, as he reaches for my shoulder.
I shake my head and step away from him. Not right now, I can’t right now, I try to say, but my tongue is tied inside my mouth.
So, instead, I run.
Chapter 44
The air is chilly from the rain that has started pouring since I left for the shop earlier, and my house is empty. Tom is working late this morning, and when he gets home he’ll go straight to bed. Astrid and Millie are at school, and Mom is probably at the hospital, prepping with Dad for the surgery. (Spending time with him, as I should be.)
I message Gretchen, looking to vent, or cry, or something—anything—but she isn’t there, and she doesn’t respond. I wait for thirty minutes, curled into a ball on my bed before I decide it’s time to stop waiting around and do exactly what I’ve been dreading. My stomach hasn’t stopped burning, my head is still throbbing, and I know it’s not going to get better. In fact, I have this obnoxious feeling it will only get worse until I do what I’m supposed to do.
After another hour of debating, denial, and wishing, I come to the conclusion that nothing happens unless I make it happen. So I drag myself out of bed and throw on a pair of sweats and a hoodie, putting my hair into a loose bun on the top of my head.
I stand just inside the front door and text Levi to see where he is. Still no response from Gretchen, so I resign myself. Taking a deep, steadying breath in, I run to my car, but the rain is falling so hard that I’m soaked by the time my seatbelt is on. I check again for Levi’s response (I’m at the new office. Come see me.) and I set my course for the south end of Escondido.
Traffic is terrible because Californians don’t know how to drive in the rain, but eventually, ten minutes longer than it usually takes, I arrive in front of TCP’s new office. I want to cry because it looks like home, a home I that love, with its wide porch and picket fence that they’ve painted dark blue since I was last here, and the window at the top of the house that lets you see out from the attic.
The attic where we had our first fight.
I swallow and text him again. Can you come out to the porch? Then I pull my hood over my face, turn off my car, and make a beeline for the front door.
It swings open as I’m walking up the porch steps, and Levi comes out. I get a tiny glimpse of color and joy behind him before he shuts the door and pulls me tight against him. It breaks me a little, how warm his arms are, how they welcome me back, despite everything.
I can’t keep doing this to him.
Then his lips are on mine, suddenly, and my chest aches. I grip his face, fingers coming into contact with the frames of his glasses. I am tempted to slip them off, to make things more familiar, but I’m being stupid—I can’t kiss him anymore. Period.
I turn my head.
Levi pauses, then continues along my jaw, making me shiver, guilt pressing into my stomach, rotting it out.
“Levi, stop, please.”
Like a good boy (always the good boy) he stops. “I was worried about you,” he murmurs.
I close my eyes and drop my head and take a step back. Because I’m the Queen of Bad Moves, I ask, “If you were worried, why didn’t you come after me?”
I think he won’t have an answer for that (oh, why am I still fighting this?) until he says, “Because I didn’t think you wanted me to.”
Right. I didn’t. I hug myself, arms crossing, shoulders sagging.
Moments pass before he breaks the silence. “Bee?”
I’m hardly breathing as I say the words, “I can’t do this anymore,” through my teeth.
He goes as still as he did the night I told him I couldn’t be there for both him and my family. He’s smart—and he’s equal parts optimist and realist. He understands wh
at I’m saying. “I assume you mean our relationship,” he says, voice low, his mouth a grim line.
“I mean our relationship and my life right now.” I shake my head. There are a few tears on my cheeks. “Every day is a challenge. It takes so much effort to remember to ask you something as simple as how your day has been when all I can think about is my dad dying.”
He laughs, harsh and short. There it is again—that word I don’t like, coming out of his soft, pretty lips. “Bee, you don’t need to ask me something as petty as how my day is.”
“But I want to. I care so much about you and everything you do, but I can’t give you the time. I can’t be who I want to be for you.” I pause and sniff, my breath coming out as a wavering sigh. “It is what it is, Levi. I can’t run from you anymore.” I look up, catching the incredulous expression on his face. “I can’t run from anyone.”
“There has to be a different way to do this.” He swears again.
I cringe. “How? Tell me how, and I’ll try. I swear I will.”
“How about we don’t break up at all. How about we take a break? Or work through it—this. Shit.”
I don’t have the energy, the emotional capacity, to work through this. Taking a break would be the same as breaking up. The break would last as long as my dad is sick, which could be a short time or a very long time. He knows this, I’m sure of it, because his eyes light up with sudden understanding.
“I’m so tired,” I say for the second time. “I can’t keep up. I’m weighing you down.”
“That’s bullshit. Who said that to you?”
I blink slowly. I’m not going to answer that question because he’ll only be angry with my answer. “Who do you want me to be for you, Levi?” I ask quietly.
He pushes the sleeves of his sweater up to his elbows, looking like he’s ready to fight me for this. “Whoever you are, I want you to be her. You know, the girl who wrinkles her nose at Bon Iver and still listens to him for my sake, the one who plans weddings and sits by my side while I go over applications. The one who laughs too loudly and sometimes doesn’t know her glasses are crooked.” He shakes his head. “She’s not that far off, Bee. Who said you aren’t allowed to be lost every once in a while? I love you, lost or found.”
He’s making this hard, too hard. “I know you do.”
“So why can’t I have you?”
“Because I’m not ready!” I shout. Then I immediately put my hands over my mouth. That is not what I wanted to say, not how I wanted to say it—despite how true it is. “Maybe it’s a good thing I never told you my name,” I whisper, beneath my shaking fingers.
His jaw locks.
I know, immediately, that I’ve dealt the fatal blow. (And how I hate myself for it.)
“You were never planning to, were you?” he asks, his voice tinged with disgust.
(He looks so hurt, and I am so broken.) “I’m sorry.”
“You gave yourself a way out, just in case things got hard.”
He’s right again. Blow after blow after blow. “Levi—” I begin.
“I wanted that with you, you know? Hard. I wanted fast and awful and perfect and hard and wonderful and slow and terrible with you.”
I try to catch the whimper that is coming up my throat and out of my mouth, but it’s bigger and stronger than my willpower. I cry silently, my tears mingling with leftover rain on my cheeks. “I know it’s not fair for me to say I love you,” I cry, “but I do. I love you so much, but it’s not enough because I don’t love you as much as you love me. That right there is the biggest reason why I’m not going to drag you through hell.”
“That’s not—”
I interrupt him. “We haven’t talked through a single thing, because every time we’re together, something is overshadowing me. We haven’t even worked out that first fight—Levi, that was weeks ago. We should have been over that for a long time now, but we’re not.”
This time, he’s quiet. Stunned.
“Please don’t make this harder than it has to be,” I beg, even though he already has. I wipe the backs of my hands across my eyes.
“Bee,” he grinds out, holding out his hand like he’s going to grab my shoulder, but because the movement is uncertain, I only have to take a step back. He drops his arm to his side again.
“Don’t wait for me,” I say. And because it hurts too much to look at him, I turn around and leave him there, alone, on the middle of the porch in front of the house we found, trapped by my words and the rain.
Chapter 45
This weekend, I make a new playlist: every Bon Iver album I can find. I listen to them all on shuffle, headphones in my ears every chance I get. The songs go around and around in my head (some surprise me into liking them; others do not), and I can’t stop listening because I hope someday, somehow, they will help me heal.
On Saturday I sit and watch movies on my laptop with Papa and Tom while my sisters are at the beach. I offered to take them, but my mom insisted I stay in, claiming I looked a little under-the-weather. I didn’t argue with this because, yes, Mother, I’m under-the-weather and no, I won’t tell you why. I don’t know how to tell them what happened without disappointing them or bringing them grief, so I leave it alone for now. When they find out is not important, not with everything looming. I’ll tell them when the storm has passed.
The stomach ache I had yesterday hasn’t gone away, not really. I don’t eat much, either because I’m not hungry or I feel like I’m going to puke again. I’d hoped it would all disappear when I said goodbye to Levi, but in reality, I think I just have a small case of the stomach flu. Otherwise, I was dead wrong.
I wasn’t dead wrong.
I cannot be dead wrong.
I shuffle Bon Iver again. (I’ve started calling this playlist The Incredibly Painful Recovery Playlist.) I go into denial, about a lot of things. That I will never kiss Levi again, that he won’t look at me with happy, hungry eyes, that I won’t go back to TCP when all this is over. Reality hasn’t dawned yet.
Like everything else in my life, I’d like to keep it that way. (At least for a little while longer.)
My father’s surgery comes on Sunday morning, and I sit impatiently with Tom and my sisters in a waiting room full of equally impatient strangers. My mother paces in front of us, her body taut with stress and fear. But after six hours of waiting, we find out she has no reason to be afraid—none of us do—because the surgery went exactly according to plan. The tumors were removed, the flesh was sewn back together, the body was set to heal.
After another couple of hours, when he is once more awake and cognizant, we’re allowed to visit him. He smiles as much as he can, then sleeps until the nurse gives him more pain meds, and then he smiles some more.
After one of his many short naps, he calls me to his bedside with a quiet, “Hey, Baby Bee.” He holds out a hand for me, very slowly and carefully, and I take it as gently as I can.
“Daddy.” I kiss his forehead.
“Miss you, kiddo.”
“I’m right here.” It’s my turn to whisper, and only because I’m about to start sobbing. With relief, fear, exhaustion—whatever it is, it’s taking hold of my sensibilities (if I have any left).
“I know you are.” His face twists in pain for a moment, then untwists into ease again. “Ready for me to come home?”
I nod, smiling and teary. “Yeah.”
“Good. Me, too.”
We set Papa up in the coolest room in our house—the back TV room. It’s spacious enough for his hospice bed, with all the amenities: a bathroom close enough to rush to, a kitchen around the corner and a water dispenser close by. We put him close to the couch, which becomes Mama’s temporary bed.
It isn’t until after a few nights later that I decide I want to sleep there as well. So my mom and I trade off whenever we feel like it, and
the nurse who comes daily to check on Papa puts up with all of our belongings trapped inside this makeshift hospital room. (I have to have a few books at the ready to keep me company.)
I don’t sleep much when I’m out there (the couch is short and my legs get awkwardly propped up or tucked under), but I don’t mind. I can hear Dad breathing a few feet away, and that’s all that matters.
Breathing is good.
He looks relatively okay, too. I’m not sure what to think about this. Is it a good sign, that he has some color in his cheeks and that his smile is back? Or does it hide the decay underneath that will eventually kill him? I have no choice but to let it be a happy thing, however, because the other option is to sit and worry and never enjoy a single moment with him.
Sometimes, when Tom is about to go to work, and the girls come home from school, and I come home from work early enough, Mama brings home In-N-Out for us. We lay out a blanket over my mom’s favorite rug (so we don’t destroy it with Special Sauce) and pile on like we used to when we were little. Dad used to make steak dinners on Friday nights, and we would eat our dinner over an indoor picnic. Afterward, we would fold up the blanket and curl up on the couch for a movie, during which my mom would trim my dad’s hair. (Thing You Should Know About Me #2183: I’m super nostalgic about these sorts of things.) (Oh, wait…you probably knew that already.)
It’s during one of these fast food dinners, two weeks after we brought Papa home, that he makes an announcement. I’m just sitting there, enjoying the silence, passing the ketchup to Millie for her fries, when Papa says very loudly, “Bee’s going to take a floral design class. Right, Bee?”
I close my eyes, briefly. I’m less than amused, and I make sure he sees the scowl on my face. “Papa…”
Everyone is as surprised as I gathered they’d be, which is why I never said anything. I haven’t thought about it once since I found out TCP was funding the chemo.
“I’m not doing it,” I say, firmly.
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