by Leddy Harper
“Why are you talking like this? Like you’re throwing in the towel?”
Her head shook confidently side to side against her pillow. “I’m not giving up. I promise. I’ll fight until the very end. But in the event I can’t win this one, I didn’t want you to know. I knew you’d race here, and I was right. You chose to stay in North Carolina for a reason, and my cancer shouldn’t be what makes you finally leave. It shouldn’t be this way…”
I placed my fingers over her lips, preventing her from saying anything more. “No, Layne. I didn’t come here because you’re sick. I left because I need you. I came after you because I can’t live without you.”
Her eyes widened.
My fingers still hovered over her mouth. “I didn’t find out until I walked in here. I swear, Yen. Yes, had I known, I would’ve been on the first flight out. I would’ve come completely empty-handed. But I had no idea. I fucking wasted four days getting here.” A sob escaped and I had to pause to catch my breath. “I wasted a year.”
“How did you know?” she asked with nearly soundless words.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and then pinched the bridge of my nose, ineffectively attempting to regain control. “I’d tried to call you…several times. The day I left, I tried again and Drea had your phone. I told her I was on my way. But she never told me you were here. She never told me you were sick again.” My shoulders drooped forward, any semblance of strength having completely evaporated from my body. “My God, Layne. I came in here thinking you were working for the hospital. I thought…I thought…” I huffed and dropped my gaze from hers to the medical band around her wrist. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“You shouldn’t be here, Creed.”
“I can’t be anywhere else, Layne.”
Chapter Eighteen
My eyes popped open and settled on Layne’s parents coming through the door. I sat up, realizing I’d fallen asleep in a chair next to her bed while holding her hand. I glanced to my side to find her still asleep—her lips parted, eyelids closed, and her body at ease. The sorrow expressed all morning after I came in had seemingly vanished from her face. Yet it still held strong to me, weighing heavily on my chest.
I carefully released her hand and stood, taking one more look at her before greeting her new visitors. They didn’t seem surprised to see me, although they didn’t appear to be overjoyed about it, either. Her father’s brows were drawn and he held his lips in a fine line. Not angry, but rather as though he wanted to say something, yet the search for words was futile. My gaze drifted to Layne’s mom. Her eyes were soft and round, and the corners of her mouth loosely held a frown. Sad. Possibly worried.
I nodded at each of them, trying to respect Layne and not wake her by talking. I offered her dad a firm handshake, and then leaned toward her mom for a gentle hug. I backed away and found Drea peeking through the barely opened door. With a short, jerky nod, she silently suggested I follow her into the hall. I didn’t want to leave Layne, but I knew her parents wanted time with her.
Before she’d fallen asleep, we talked for a little while. I knew her parents had gone to California because my mom had told me, except I hadn’t known they’d been here for months. They’d flown out as soon as Layne’s doctors had discovered the cancer, and never returned home. Layne had begged everyone to keep it from me, which explained why her mother never told mine. I hated how she didn’t want me to know, and despised her reasons even more—although I had no room to argue. I couldn’t blame her for making that decision, whether I liked it or not. It was her choice, and I’d been the one who’d let her come here to make the choice alone. I had no one to blame but myself. However, the time for blame was over. Now, it was time to move forward, press on, and figure out what to do next.
“Come on, let’s go get something to eat,” Drea whispered.
I glanced over my shoulder once more, finding Layne still asleep, and then followed Drea down the hall in silence. No words were spoken while we took the elevator to the food court on the first floor. Only a few glances were exchanged as we bought our food and found an empty table in the courtyard. But once we sat down, facing each other, after unfolding the wrappers to our sandwiches, Drea decided to speak.
“You need to have realistic expectations.”
I froze, barely able to swallow past the growing lump in my throat. People moved and talked around me, yet I paid them no mind. I couldn’t do anything other than feel Drea’s words echo inside me.
She must’ve understood my silence, or maybe the complete surprise on my face, because she continued. “I know this must be hard for you…coming in here like this. We’ve all known about it for a while, been around it since the beginning. We’ve witnessed the minor progress, and then the setbacks—you haven’t.”
“You’re right.” My voice lowered several octaves to a deep, rumbled wave of emotion I had never experienced before. It consisted of resentment and hurt I never knew could exist on such a level. “I haven’t been here because everyone kept this from me.”
“Stop it. You’re not the victim here, Creed.” I don’t think she’d ever spoken to me so harshly before. We’d had our fair share of fights and disagreements, but she’d never put me in my place so fast, so strictly before. “I understand it must suck to find this out now, but in reality, you were never supposed to know—for a reason.”
“Yeah, a ridiculous and selfish reason, I might add.”
“Selfish?” She slapped the table and leaned forward, as if ready to jump over our food to get to me. “Layne would’ve rather you hate her for the rest of your life than to mourn her loss. Do you really think she didn’t want the love of her life by her side while dealing with this? Of course she did! But she knew what it would’ve done to you, and she wanted to spare you the heartache. That’s not selfish, Creed, it’s selfless.”
My empty stomach felt full, aching with the truth of her words. Slowly, the heaviness raised into my chest before settling at the base of my throat, burning my esophagus with bitter acid. “I’m sorry,” I choked out.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what this must be like for you…but you need to realize and accept what this is like for her. She’s been in and out of here. Surgery after surgery, one treatment after the other. Things start to look up, only to have any hope ripped away. She doesn’t need you coming in here questioning why she didn’t tell you. Nor does she need you holding her hand and telling her to fight. She knows this already. This is beyond anything she’s ever suffered from before. More than what she went through with you the last time. Encouragement is one thing…however, you need to be realistic about this and not put pressure on her.”
“Realistic? What are you trying to say, Dre?”
“She’s on a lot of narcotics to manage her pain. But at the same time, they’ve scheduled another evaluation for next Monday, hoping they might be able to start treatment again. They can’t do anything until her body can handle it. And while we wait, the cancer is getting worse.”
“I just don’t understand…she’s beaten this before. Why is her body failing now? And why is it so advanced this time? If she’d used her doctors—”
“You can’t keep going back to that. Cancer is like a fingerprint in the sense there’s no two alike. No two patients have the same reaction, no two treatments are the same, and on top of that, every doctor does things a little differently. You can’t compare this time to the last, or even the one before. You can’t pull up statistics from other patients and assume Layne will have the same outcome or reaction. It doesn’t work that way. That’s where you get fooled, or you hold on to some hope which may not even exist in this case.”
“But cancer is cancer.”
“Yes…in the sense it’s an evil disease. But you cannot look at Layne and compare it to someone else. You can’t look at what her doctors are doing now and compare it to what her old doctors did. You just can’t, Creed. Trust me, when she first got sick when we were in high school, I looked up ev
erything I could to help me know what to expect. Some women went through treatment lasting six months, while other’s lasted six weeks. Some had to go through radiation. Sometimes their hair fell out, sometimes it didn’t. Even the difference in reaction to the first and second time is enough to prove that—and she had the same doctors. She was never that sick the first time. So please, Creed, I’ll ask you again, be realistic about this.”
“Why do you keep saying that? What do you mean by realistic?”
“She’s a fighter, always has been. Don’t think for one second she’s given up, because she hasn’t. Although, her body may have. She might not wake up tomorrow…or she could be here next week. They could run the tests and find she can withstand treatment again, and pull through. Or they could make her wait longer. We don’t have answers. It’s all up in the air at this point, nothing is guaranteed. I know you want her to pull through, because it’s what we all want. But we’ve been here since the beginning, and as much as we want another sixty years with Layne, we’ve come to terms with the fact we might not get sixty days. Hell, at this point, even the next sixty seconds is crucial.”
“So you want me to come to terms with the fact she’s dying?”
Drea didn’t verbally answer. Instead, she nodded and glanced away, tears coating her dark-blue eyes, turning them almost black with anguish. Her tight lips pulled back, and without taking in the rest of her expression, it almost reminded me of a pitiful smile. Except it wasn’t. Grief marred every feature from her creased brow to the deep wrinkles next to her closed eyes. Her chin dimpled and quivered as she fought to hold in her sob.
I reached across the table and placed my hand over hers, blinking away my own tears so I could see clearly. I couldn’t recall one time I’d ever seen her this upset, this broken, and it added another knife to my already wounded chest. Reality settled over me in that instant, heavy like a net made of thick rope, holding me down.
Finally, Drea shook her head and wiped away her tears, relaxing her face as best she could in order to get her words out. “Trust me, Creed…” Her words were thick with tears and she had to clear her throat before she continued. “No one wants to accept this. It’s not like we all sat there next to her bed, listening to the doctors, and just said ‘well, you put up a good fight.’ We all know—including Layne—how this will probably end. It’s not what any of us want, but if we don’t prepare ourselves now, we’ll never make it through losing her.”
“It just sounds so cold.”
“You’re right. It does. But think about it this way…things are left unsaid when we are convinced our loved ones will pull through. The whole, ‘I’ll tell her tomorrow’ could lead to her never hearing it. But when we accept the possibility of her not making it to tomorrow, we tend to say everything we can think of. And I’m sure there will still be things we will come up with, things we wished we could’ve said, but the important thing is she will leave knowing exactly how we felt about her.”
“So you want me to say goodbye…”
“No. You don’t have to say that. Being in this position has taught me a lot. It’s taught me to say what I’m thinking, tell people how I feel about them regardless of their health. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. Never. You can tell her how you feel about her without saying goodbye.”
“But you want me to accept she’s dying.”
“We’re all dying.”
I stared at my untouched sandwich, no longer wanting any of it. I hadn’t been hungry when I bought it, but now the sight of it made me physically ill. I began to fold the paper back over it when Drea’s hand stopped me.
“You need to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
She pulled my hand away from my food and locked her fingers with mine, waiting patiently for me to meet her soft gaze. “I understand, but you still need something. I know you, Creed. You forget I was there while you tended to Layne the last time. You barely took care of yourself. I won’t allow that to happen again. You need food, and you’ll need sleep. I have room at my place for you. You can either take Layne’s room, or take the couch.”
I couldn’t even begin to think about sleeping in Layne’s room without her. The thought alone suffocated me. As well as the idea of being so far away from her. Sitting a few floors down from her was hard enough; I couldn’t imagine leaving the hospital completely.
I shook my head and gripped her hand tightly. “No. I can’t leave her. I don’t care if I get a permanent kink in my neck from sleeping on the chair next to her bed. I’m not leaving. You’ve had five months with her…I haven’t. There is no way you or anyone else can convince me to leave her side.”
Her shoulders lifted with the deep inhalation she took, her eyes never falling away from mine. She squeezed my hand a couple of times before letting go. Her tongue peeked out enough to moisten her dry lips, and then she said, “If you get me your clothes, I’ll take them home tonight to wash them and bring them back in the morning. I’ll concede to you wanting to stay with her, but I won’t relent on your eating habits. You have to eat. Even if I have to drag you down here three times a day, you will eat.”
I agreed, even though I didn’t want to. At least she didn’t put up a fight about me sleeping in Layne’s room. I reopened the wrapper and proceeded to eat my lunch, knowing the faster I finished, the sooner I’d be with Layne again. I ended up eating half the sandwich, and with Drea’s slight nod of approval, I tossed the rest into the trash bin before returning to Layne’s room.
Her parents were still there, so I sat off to the side and let them have their time. Nurses came in and out while I waited in silence. I listened to her parents talk to her about nothing, and realized they must’ve done this every day, not having anything new to converse about. It left me wondering about all I’d missed. However, I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I actually fought a sudden wave of self-inflicted anger for waiting so long to come after her. I knew I should’ve moved with her, but that was neither here nor there. Nothing I could do to change what had happened. I couldn’t continue to beat myself up over my choices, or even Layne’s. The past was just that, and the very thought of the future—the uncertainty if Layne would even have one—put things into perspective. I had this moment. Right here. Right now. And I would make it count. Concentrate on the words I needed to say to her. If this would in fact be my last chance to say something, I needed to make it count. Dwelling over things I can’t take back or change wouldn’t help anything.
Drea returned to the room with a bag in her hand and called me to the hall once more. I glanced up at the clock on the wall, noting it was dinnertime, and rolled my eyes. I knew this was her way of forcing me to eat again. Reluctantly, I pulled myself from the couch, left the room, and closed the door behind me.
“I wasn’t able to get much, but I grabbed one of your old T-shirts from Layne’s closet and a pair of Colin’s sweatpants from my room.” The tiniest smirk caused one corner of her mouth to twitch. “Don’t ask…women have some morbid need to keep clothes from an ex. Just take them and wear them tonight so I can wash your clothes. I also packed you a burger—I didn’t have much in my fridge, so I ran through a nearby drive-up. But I’ll make sure to stop by the grocery store tonight and buy something to bring to you tomorrow.”
I took the bag from her hand, feeling my own smile fight to prevail. “Thank you, but you didn’t need to do all this.” I glanced over at the closed door and sighed. “I don’t think your parents want me in there.”
“They do. They never agreed with Layne’s decision to keep this from you, but they respected her wishes anyway…much like I did. I’m sure they just don’t know how to handle it all, you know? You were always more than Layne’s boyfriend—you were a son to them. And when you chose to stay in North Carolina, your silence was felt all around. But it doesn’t mean they don’t love you, or they don’t want you here. It’s an adjustment for everyone.”
“I’m trying to give them time with her, but it’s hard as hell, Dre. I want to
be sitting next to her, holding her hand, talking about the weather or what’s going on in the news.” I took a breath and stood up straighter. “But I know that’s selfish. Your parents need time with her, too. As do you. It’s so hard not to be greedy…” My voice tapered off into airy words, my emotions taking over too fast to control.
She placed her hand on my bicep and squeezed in reassurance. “We’ve had this routine for a while now. I get breakfast with her before my shift starts, and then she rests until lunch. My parents are here from lunch to dinner, then I takeover again after my shift. I stay for an hour before heading home, giving her the rest of the night to sleep. Now we simply have to find a way to add one more person into this schedule. I know you have so much you want and need to say to her, and it probably seems like my parents are wasting time by sitting around talking about what Aunt Steph did yesterday…but it’s what they need. You’ll have your time. I promise.”
I nodded, knowing she was right, even though it ate me up inside. It was so damn hard to step aside and be selfless when all I wanted was to spend every second with Layne, and Layne alone. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped once I noticed the orderly with the cart of food coming toward us.
Drea moved around me and opened the door. She held my forearm and led me into the room again. “Dinner is on its way,” she said in a singsong voice, the complete opposite of how she’d sounded in the hall.
It confused me for a moment before I realized the purpose of her cheeriness. I hadn’t once thought about what it was like for Layne to have gloom around her all the time, and it suddenly made sense why her parents talked about mundane topics with her. Just like that, a wrecking ball crashed into my chest, demolishing everything I’d wanted to say to her. And I was left not knowing how to put my love into words without casting a dismal shadow over our time together.