“Rose, repeat after me,” our new favorite Justice of the Peace began.
Harley’s hand shoots out to grasp mine, and I snap my gaze toward him in surprise. “You don’t … have to … do this.”
I smile and nod. “I don’t have to, but I want to.”
The celebrant gives us a gentle smile and says, “Shall we proceed?”
I nod.
“With this ring, I thee wed.”
“With this ring, I thee wed.” I place the ring on Harley’s finger and recite my vows after the preacher, then when it’s time for him to do the same, he fumbles. He pushes the ring on my finger, and I try not to cry at how weak he is, how fragile those large, beautiful hands that used to hold me and bring me to the brink of pleasure with a few sure, steady strokes have become. I bite my lip; it’s all I can do to keep from breaking in front of him, and I don’t want that for today. I don’t want that for him, and even though we’re standing in a hospital room, I don’t want my memories of this day to be tainted by how sick he is.
So I smile wide, and the tears fall anyway, but I don’t give them time for their grief. There’ll be time for that in the days, months, and years to come, but not now. Not today.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride,” the JP says, and this Harley has strength for, even if his breath fails him before he can deepen the kiss and he has to pull away, abruptly sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“Harley,” I say, concern twisting my voice.
“I’m okay, love.” He squeezes my hand and tells me not to fuss.
“Congratulations, darlings.” Mom comes forward and envelopes me in a hug as Dad and Harley’s parents congratulate him, and I grin like an absolute fool because though I’m afraid of what’s to come, I just married my best friend, the love of my life. It wasn’t the wedding I’d always dreamt of, but it is the happiest day of my life, just like I knew it would be.
***
The nurse ushers everyone else out a few minutes after we say I do. She wants to check his vitals, and is worried the excitement was too much, but I think she knows our time is precious, and as much as I love our family, I want to soak up as much time as I can with my new husband.
Harley is in a private room now, out of the ICU, but the fluid on his pleural cavity seems to be increasing despite the nurses attempts to drain it with the thoracostomy tube. The nurses have wheeled another bed into his room so I can lie beside my husband on our wedding night. There will be no honeymoon for us, no consummation of our marriage, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters are our joined hands and tender touches, and stolen kisses between ragged breaths. My tears finally come in a torrent, and his do too, because that’s the way we’ve always been—when we’re not driving one another mad, we are so crazy in love it hurts like hell.
Now, he wipes away the tears that fall thick and fast down my cheeks. “No more tears … for me, Rose … my beautiful … wife.”
I smile at the sound of that. “Okay.” I nod, but I think we both know I don’t mean it.
“To die would be an awfully …”
“Don’t,” I plead, covering his lips with my hand.
He leans forward, kissing my forehead, and I close my eyes. “When I’m gone … I want you … to find someone else … to love.”
I scowl at him. “What?”
“Not now. Give it … at least a month … before you … take my … ring off your finger.” He laughs, but it’s a broken sound. “Find someone to love, Rose. Find someone … who’ll give you the kind of life … I wish I could give you. Find someone who’ll steal your heart … and not break it the way I have.”
“You haven’t—”
“Not yet, but I will. When I go it’ll be as if … I’ve reached in … and pulled that beautiful heart … right out of your chest. I know it … you know it. But when … I’m gone, I want you to find a man … who’ll put those pieces back together.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” I shake my head. “Please, I can’t talk about this.”
“Promise me.”
“No.”
“Rose … I need you to.”
“Fine, I promise, but I won’t ever love him the way I loved you.”
He smiles then, not smug but sadly as he says, “I know. I wish I … could thank him, whoever that lucky bastard is. I kind of want to … punch him, too, for touching … my wife, but … I want to see you happy again and loved.”
“I am happy.”
“If you could … see your face right now … you’d know that’s not true, but you will be one day. Whether it’s five months … or five years from now, you will … be loved, Rose, and that lucky … son-of-a-bitch doesn’t know … how much I hate him right now, but you tell him … Will you do that for me?”
“Harley?”
“Please? Tell him that I loved you first … and that he better take care … of you. He better take every opportunity … to love you right, because the man that would give anything for you … never got the chance. Tell him that if I could … I’d move … heaven and earth to be the one to … hold you every day. I’d go through a thousand cancers … for the chance to stay, but I can’t. So … you tell that lucky son-of-a-bitch that … I loved you first, and that he better fucking treat you right … or I’m gonna preform … some poltergeist crap like he’s never seen.”
“I will. I’ll tell him.” I’m gasping for breath so hard that I can’t breathe, I can’t see through my tears.
Harley wipes his thumb across my cheek and smiles. “Don’t cry … It’s your … wedding day.”
“Then stop making me,” I say. He nods and tucks my head under his chin. He reaches for the dial on his morphine drip but misses, so I move it closer for him. He drifts in and out of sleep for a while, and I hold him as closely as I can without disrupting his rest or the oxygen tube over his face.
“Love you … Wendy,” he whispers, when I think he is asleep. “From now until … the end of forever.”
“Forever is an awfully long time.”
“Yes, it is.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Rose
My husband, Harley Hamilton, died in his sleep at 3:23 a.m. We’d been married exactly twelve hours and they’d been the best and worst hours of my life. A flurry of medical staff entered the room, but their attempts to resuscitate him failed and the doctor called his time of death twelve minutes later. I climbed back into the bed beside him and lay there for some time, studying his face. I didn’t see the way cancer had ravaged his body, but instead I saw the way he’d always been to me—beautiful, golden skin, high cheekbones, a stubborn jaw and lips that I wanted to kiss forever. Perfect in every way. He’d always been perfect. He was the love of my life, and now he is gone, and despite what I told him, I knew I lied. I won’t tell any man those things he asked, because I’ll never love any man enough to let him take the place of my husband.
I kiss his lips, lingering there, feeling how soft and yet how cold they are already. I kiss his forehead, and every finger on his cancer-ravaged hands before I get up and I take my leave of him. I leave his body in the same hospital I’d married him in just twelve hours earlier.
I walk through the streets across town, disoriented, heartbroken, and completely shattered. I walk and walk until I make it back to his apartment. I let myself in, and I sink to the floor where I fall apart.
It’s another hour or more before I crawl across the wooden floors and climb into his unmade bed. It smells so much like him still, though he hadn’t been here for a week. Everything here smells like him, so I wrap myself in the sheets and pretend they’re his arms, and I cry.
In one day, I’ve married and lost my best friend, the only man I’ve ever loved, the only man I’m likely to ever love. I lost everything, and I don’t expect to ever be whole again.
Harley is dead, and I plan to spend the rest of my life here in this bed, his bed. I don’t need anything else because everything I loved is gone, and th
is is the closest I’ll ever get to him again. The boy who stole my heart as surely as the real Peter Pan had stolen Wendy’s; the boy who was my salvation and my savior, my torment and my hero in every sense of the word, is gone.
Pan finally grew up, and the world is a lonelier place because of it.
Chapter Forty
Rose
Three months on
The weight of losing my best friend still crushes me every day. I haven’t left his apartment to sleep in my own because there isn’t anything of him in there, and there is so much of him here. Too much, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of a single thing. Neither can Rochelle and Dean, so while it probably isn’t the healthiest option, we all go on living as though Harley were just out of town on a job.
The episode of My Wedding Affair aired last month and mom wanted to host a ‘Darling Buds TV Debut’ party, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch. I knew I wouldn’t cope seeing him alive and healthy, smiling that perfect Pan grin as I jumped into his arms—I was barely hanging on as it was. Instead, I put on his favorite sweater, got blind drunk and fell asleep in his closet, surrounded by clothing that still smells like him.
Mail addressed to Harley arrives every few days, and I don’t think much of it. Except for the thick, heavy envelope that I hold in my hand. It’s marked confidential, and has no return to sender. I don’t know if I am supposed to open my husband’s mail after he’s deceased or not, but I often do to fix up certain accounts he has with his landscaping business or letters from his tax agent. I figure the police can come arrest me if they need to, but I’ll be damned if they are cutting off my cable. Say Yes to the Dress is in its fourteenth and best season, after all.
Picking up the letter opener I’d bought Harley for Christmas one year, I jam it in the side of the envelope and jimmy it open. I stare at the letterhead and frown. I don’t understand it, and my gaze darts across the page, swallowing up words that don’t sink in until my third read through.
Dear Harley,
We are writing to inform you that the sperm deposit we have frozen and stored in our facility is almost due for re-entry into our systems. Please advise us if you wish to continue to rent space in our freezers within fourteen days of the issue date of this letter. Failure to do so will see the specimen destroyed.
Kind Regards,
San Francisco Bay Fertility Clinic.
My hands shake as I read the letter over and over again, and I sit down hard on the bed. Then I read it once more and just stare at the page with tears streaming down my face. He never mentioned anything to me about this, but I suppose he made the deposit before he began chemotherapy. And that hurts. God does that hurt, because I had always dreamed one day of having babies with that man, but not like this. I don’t want them like this, so forgetting how late it is, I pick up the phone and dial the number on the letterhead.
Three rings later, it switches over to an automated message telling me to leave my name and number and that they’ll return my call during business hours. I don’t bother to leave a message. Instead, I throw my phone on the bed and stare at the now crumpled piece of paper in my hand. Then I tear it into a million pieces and sink onto the floor beside the bed. The hollow ache in my gut returns, the one I’ve tried so hard to ignore for so many weeks now. It’s back, and it is as real as it was the day he died. I am as raw, as exposed as I had been the day he left this Earth, and I hate him for it all over again.
“Why did you leave me?” I cry to the empty room, but as usual, as expected, I get no response. He isn’t here with me the way everyone always says the dead will be. That “I’ll stay with you forever; I’ll always be with you in spirit” is bullshit. He isn’t here, he is gone, and nothing will ever bring him back. The hole in my stomach will never heal because I am empty. I am incomplete. Hell, without Harley I’m not even a real person. Just a drone. A shell. The empty husk of a woman who lost the will to do anything the day her husband died. And even worse is that I’m okay with this. That’s the truly heartbreaking part of it all—that it wasn’t just Harley who died that day. I died right alongside him.
Chapter Forty-One
Rose
Two days later, I’m at the shop getting ready to close up when the bell above the door rings. I sigh and come out of the cool room to find a bike messenger standing, waiting impatiently for me to serve him. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, you Rose Perry?”
“It’s Hamilton, now, but yes, my maiden name is Perry.”
“Delivery.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t order anything.”
“Look, lady, I don’t ask who does or doesn’t order the shit I deliver. All I know is I’ve got to get up Market Street before six p.m. So if you’re Rose Perry, sign the goddamn form.”
“Fine,” I say, making a grabby gesture for his pen-pad thingy. “I know you’re just delivering the packages, but it wouldn’t kill you to be nice.”
He raises a brow and pops his chewing gum at me as if he were a bored teenager. “Have a nice day.”
I roll my eyes and follow him to the door, slamming it closed and flipping the lock to ensure no one else comes in. I turn the open sign to closed and pull down the small blind over the door. Then I tear into the package. There’s no note, but when I reach into the small satchel I pull out a clear DVD case. I stare at the blank disc and hope I didn’t wind up the unlucky recipient of the video from The Ring as I climb the stairs to my apartment.
I work downstairs every day, but it feels like forever since I’ve been here, as evidenced by the thick layer of dust on the TV cabinet. I pop the disk in the DVD player, locate the remote, and stand in front of the TV, waiting for something to happen.
The screen flickers a few times, and then I’m met with Harley’s face. A guttural cry escapes me, and I cover my mouth and sink to my knees, crawling closer to the screen. He looks good, full faced and not with the gaunt gray complexion he had the last month before he passed.
“Hey, Rose,” he says, giving me a smile and a small wave. “So, if you’re watching this it means I’m no longer there to torment you. Sorry about that. I told you blue balls would eventually kill me.” He laughs at his own terrible joke. Tears stream down over my hands that are pressed so tightly to my face I can’t breathe.
“So here’s the deal. Right now you’re likely filming your episode of My Wedding Affair, and me? Well, I’m currently in a hospital room about to have a testicle removed. I gotta say, I kind of wish you were here to hold my hand, but I didn’t know how to tell you, and I didn’t want to take away from your big day, so here we are, you at the shop and me in a hospital gown that shows my bare ass to the world. I may or may not have mooned my nurse.” He waggles his eyebrows and chuckles. I clutch a hand to my chest because that simple gesture hurts so much.
Harley exhales a long, drawn-out breath. “Anyway, I don’t know what happens after this. I don’t know if I’ll come clean or if I’ll keep this to myself and hold out as long as I can—all I know is that I love you. I’ve loved you since we were five years old, and you pushed me over in the sandpit. Last night was … it was everything. It always has been everything when I’m with you.” He wets his lips and glances down at his hands in his lap. I’ve seen him do this a million times, and yet I watch with rapt fascination as if it’s the first.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, but loving you was never one of them. So, if you’re watching this and I did in fact die, I’m so sorry, love.” He tears up, and mine spill over as I press my hand against the screen to stroke his face. “The good news is that a little earlier today I jerked off into a cup, they wanted to make sure I had a backup plan for populating the earth with teeny tiny little baby Harleys in case the problem arose and I didn’t get my swimmers back after chemo, so … San Francisco Bay Fertility Clinic are holding my sperm hostage until you decide if you want a couple of rug-rats with me.” He scratches at his stubble.
“Fuck, I didn’t think this would be so hard.
I know this is crazy—believe me, I’m not even sure you’ll talk to me again after the way I’m about to shut you out, but you have to know I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it to free you of me. Because I can’t stand the thought of you being alone for the rest of your life if I don’t make it through this. So there it is, my sperm are waiting for you to rescue them.” He laughs. “Jesus, that sounds sick, doesn’t it? If I had it my way we’d do this the old-fashioned way and you never would have seen this video at all, but I don’t know if I’ll get my way.” He shakes his head and glances down at his hands that rest in his lap. “Maybe it’s selfish, a last-ditch effort to immortalize myself in your life forever, a way to tie you to me for good, but either way, it’s there, even if I’m not.”
He huffs out a deep breath and clears his throat. “Well, I gotta go. Some asshole’s about to bust one of my nuts, and I wish I could say I wasn’t shaking in my fucking boots, but I am.” His brow creases, his eyes brim with tears, and he wipes them away with the back of his hand. “Just know that I love you, I have always loved you, and I always will. And if you do end up watching this and I am in fact dead, I’ll be waiting, Wendy. Second star to the right. I’ll be waiting.”
The screen goes black and I stare at it for entirely too long, and then I grab the remote and play it again, just so I can see his face and hear his voice. It isn’t the same as having him here, far from it, but I spend the night lying on the floor beside the TV replaying the disc over and over, and I imagine he’s here with me, until finally, with his words in my ears and my heart as ruined and raw as it’d been the day he’d died, I climb into my bed alone.
***
In the morning, with a clear head and a heavy heart, I make a decision that will change my life forever, but there really isn’t another choice to make. My friends and family may see it as not moving forward with my life, but for me it is a gigantic step forward—it isn’t wallowing in the past, stagnant and unchanging, but a step toward the life I’ve always wanted with Harley, only with one crucial element missing: him.
Harley & Rose Page 26