The Promise

by Melody Grace

  He shrugged. “Dad was permanently hung over, even then, and Mom wasn’t about to ruffle any feathers. She figured I could look after myself.” Theo looked out at the snow again, innocent and clean. “But when I got here, it didn’t matter. There were plenty of other neighborhood kids out, you couldn’t tell who was all alone. We just threw ourselves down the hills, had snowball fights for hours. I used to pretend I belonged to one of the other families here,” he added. “One of the fathers who built snowmen, and was always tugging their kids’ scarves and mittens back into place. There was one family, I saw them every year. Three kids, two boys and a girl. The dad would bring these old-fashioned wooden sleds, and they’d play all day long. Once, I took a bad spill, and the mom patched me up with a Band-Aid and gave me hot chocolate from the thermos she had in her purse.” Even now, decades later, I can hear the wistfulness in his voice, the affection for that one tender gesture, twenty years ago. “I used to imagine that when it was time to go, I’d leave with them instead, and we’d go home, and nobody would ever notice. I would just belong to them instead.”

  I could see him, just a kid, sitting on this same hill, watching the worlds he would never be a part of. But before I could say anything, Theo took a breath, and the past seemed to melt from his face, parting to reveal that warm smile. He leaned over and kissed me lightly. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ramble. Ancient history.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” I said simply. “I want to know. All this stuff, who you were, what you went through. Everything.”

  Theo looked bashful, his nose tipped pink in the cold. “I try not to think of it. Being here just brought it all back. I haven’t come out here in years.”

  I paused. “How is your dad?” I asked, not knowing if I was crossing a line, but unable to stop myself from edging over the boundary all the same.

  Theo let out a long breath, steam shivering in the crisp air. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him since the fall. That could be good or bad.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll find out tomorrow, I guess. I go for Christmas lunch every year,” he explained. “It’s our depressing version of tradition. We go eat dry turkey and stringy casserole at a café around the corner, and he gets drunk, and I get mad, and every time it’s done, I swear it’s the last year.”

  “Sounds delightful,” I quip, bringing a smile to his mouth.

  “The best. I’d ask you to join us, but . . .”

  “I’d love to.” This time, I wasn’t joking, and Theo looked over, confused. “I mean it. I’ll come with you. But only if you want,” I added, wondering if I was trampling that boundary again, but Theo just shook his head.

  “I can’t ask that. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, let alone . . . you.”

  “You aren’t asking, I’m offering,” I said, and I cradled his hand between both of mine, twisting our fingers together so you couldn’t tell where one of us ended and the other began.

  “What about your parents, don’t you have plans?”

  “They’re not staying,” I replied. “So we’ll go see your dad, and eat dry turkey, and maybe he won’t get so drunk, and maybe you won’t have to get so mad. And even if he does, then I’ll be there, and we’ll blow it off and go ice-skating afterwards, and make out on every street corner, and everything will be OK.”

  I made it sound simple, even though I wasn’t naïve enough to believe it could be true. Still, I meant every word. I thought of Theo, all those years ago, sitting on this hilltop, alone—going back, every holiday, biting his tongue and holding back the disappointment, alone. Had anyone ever been there for him? Had anyone made him feel like they were on his side?

  “You don’t have to do this on your own anymore,” I said, determined. “You’ve got me now.”

  Theo didn’t speak for a long moment, he just looked out at the snow, and for a terrible moment, I wondered if I’d gone too far. This was his story, these were his scars, and I had no business meddling, not when secrets of my own burned deep beneath these layers of cotton and wool.

  Then he leaned over and kissed me, his mouth hot and sweet, his hands pressed warm to my frozen cheeks. He kissed me, and I felt the ache in him, felt the tenderness of his confession, something fragile spun like sugar on our tongues. It hit me then, what I’d never realized before, echoing out across the sunlit valley.

  He needed me, too.

  “OK.” Theo sounded raw when he finally pulled away. “Dysfunctional family Christmas ahead.”

  Make that two of them, I silently added, thinking of my own parents, waiting in their hotel room.

  “Come on,” I said instead, getting up. “Let’s go find the others, before our toes freeze right off. I’m starving.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We met the others and trudged back to the Jeep, worn out and wet through, but glowing in the pale sunlight. Lunch was steaming hot soup and sweet cherry pie; we crammed into a booth at a college haunt on Boylston as the gang chattered and flirted and Theo’s fingertips drew blazing circles on my knee. And when the last mug of coffee was drained and we had split the bill with worn dollar bills, I was so buoyant that I decided to have them drop me at my parent’s hotel.

  “See you later?” Theo asked, dropping a kiss on my lips as I squeezed out between them, climbing down to the curb.

  “I’ll call, see if I can come over,” I agreed. “I might be working.”

  “No holiday break for the caffeine junkies.” He grinned. “Get home safe.”

  I headed into the lobby, trailing wet snow from my boots across that spotless floor. My parents were on the third floor, down a worn, carpeted hallway that led me past cheery tourists and bored-looking staff. I knocked, not sure if I should have called first, but when my dad opened the door and his face spread into a delighted smile, I knew I’d made the right call.

  “Claire, what are you doing here? Come in, you’re soaked through.”

  “I’m fine.” I followed him into the room: a small, navy-appointed space with heavy drapes and a view to the buildings beyond. “We went sledding in the park, a whole group of us, Tessa and all her friends.” I looked around. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She just went to take a walk,” he said, the smile slipping, just a little, and I knew my good mood couldn’t last for long.

  I sat on the chair by the desk and made a slow swivel, bracing myself again. “What did you guys do today?”

  He cleared his throat. The past months hadn’t worn him the way they did Mom; his hair was a little more salt than pepper now, but he was still sturdy, dressed in his cable knit sweater, as comforting as ever.

  “We met with Doctor Benson,” he said slowly, and I was pulled back to reality again. No snow-swept hilltops, no warm friendship. My sickness lived in sparse hospital wards, and just the mention of it brought a sting of antiseptic scent to the air.

  “Why?” I was immediately on edge. “We did the tests. You saw the new scans. It’s all going the way we knew it would.”

  My father sat on the edge of the bed nearest to me, resting his elbows on his knees as he leaned closer, beseeching. “Your mother wanted to find out more, about this trial.”

  “Daddy.” I deflated. “No, please. You know she’s clutching at straws.”

  “Maybe not. He took us through the science, all the progress they’ve been making. Those two patients who made it through the surgery, the results really are remarkable.” His face was brighter now, animated. “They use new genome technology. They map your DNA and come up with a targeted delivery system, so they can use a much stronger cocktail, and it only attacks the cancerous cells. See, I have the reports here.” He reached for an envelope on the bed, sheaves of paper. “The ones who made it through surgery, they saw a dramatic shrinkage of the mass, one was even downgraded from Stage Four to a Stage Two.”

  He offered them to me, but I refused to take them. “Your mother thinks there’s a real shot,” he added. “At least read the material.” />
  “Why?” I countered. “You can’t let her do this again. You know it only gets her hopes up.”

  “But if there’s a chance . . .”

  “Like with Stanford?” I countered, and he stopped. His hand lowered, pain skittering across his face, and I felt it too, after all this time. That ache of what if, almost, not quite, what might have been.

  Stanford. The last surgical trial. The last big experimental drug. I was sixteen then, and we’d heard about it everywhere; news like that never stays hidden for long. Whispers on the hospital wards, phone numbers scribbled and passed between every parent support group. They were using a new cocktail, radiation, and targeted surgery, and to everyone’s shock and wild, distant hope, it seemed to be working. Shrinking tumors, extending prognosis. Even failure wasn’t a death sentence, the cancer simply continuing its crawl. In our world, thirty-, forty-percent success rate was a lottery win, an embarrassment of riches, and even I let myself hope that this, finally, was the answer we all were praying for.

  My mother set about hunting me down that winning ticket, with a fervor I’d never seen before. We flew in half a dozen times for tests and assessments: physical exams, psych evaluations, essays, and more, like a college application where the stakes were life and death. The competition was fierce, can you imagine? Every dream-starved parent in the nation laying siege to that research hospital, but only a dozen of us would even make the grade. Even Hope got in on the act; her cancer was all wrong, but that didn’t stop her poring over my materials right along with me, approvingly noting my white blood cell count, the growth on my latest scans. “They’d be a fool not to take you,” she’d say with authority. “Your tumor is perfect for this.”

  The day I was accepted into the next round of trials, we celebrated with dinner at my favorite local Italian restaurant. My mom was laughing, bright-eyed; my dad choked up over the sparkling cider toast. And I was swept up right along with it. The dreams I’d been blocking for so long began to unfold, right there in the cramped vinyl booth, laid out on that wax-paper tablecloth. Maybe I could go to art school. Maybe I could move to the East Coast.

  Maybe I’d live to see twenty-five, after all.

  Those sweet daydreams propelled us across the country to a new city, another short-term rental for my parents, a bright new hospital room. The California skies were clear that spring, and the cab from the airport took us past palm trees and stucco buildings, depositing us at the hospital doors beneath eighteen floors of polished windows, sparkling into the blue with a new kind of optimism. We all felt it, infectious, and even though we knew the risks, we were believers back then. We could feel it. This time. This time.

  I never even had a chance. We were unpacking my sketchpads into the slim bedside dresser when the surgeons came and broke the news. The trials had been cancelled, permission pulled by the powers-that-be. They’d had a string of fatalities before me that week; the new drugs were flawed somehow, and they had to stop, and start their formulation over again. They didn’t know when they would resume: months, a year from then. They didn’t say the rest, but I knew it from the looks on their faces.

  By then, it would be too late for me.

  “I won’t do it again,” I said softly to my father, even though we’d both been betrayed by that failed trial. “I can’t get my hopes up, and you shouldn’t let Mom, either. And compared to Stanford, this is a shot in the dark. At least they’d had success, the chances would have been good for me. And what does Benson have now? Dead bodies on the operating table. I won’t do it, Dad. I can’t.”

  He nodded, slowly, reality sinking in again. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

  He looked so forlorn; I ached to see him like this. All my childhood, I worshipped him. There was no problem he couldn’t solve, no frown that wouldn’t be turned upside down by a penny plucked from behind my ear, or an afternoon wobbling on my bright-green bicycle as he jogged, cheering alongside.

  But now, of course, my problems were beyond fixing.

  “How much longer are you staying in town?” I asked, as gently as I could.

  “I’m not sure. Your mother thought that maybe we could go to church together tomorrow for a service.”

  He looked so hopeful, I had to accept. “I have plans for lunch with Theo, but we could find a morning one. I don’t know about the churches here, but there should be one close by.”

  “That would be nice. It’s been a while since we all went together. I know it would mean a lot to her.”

  “But you’ll talk to her?” I checked again. “I don’t want another fight, Dad. There isn’t enough time.”

  “I know, sweetheart.” He opened his arms to me, and I went, sitting beside him on the bed with my head against his chest as he held me. I took a breath and pulled back, a familiar acrid scent stinging lightly in the back of my throat.

  “You’re smoking again?”

  Dad looked guilty. “Just a couple, now and then.”

  “But you tried so hard to quit!”

  “I know. I’ll give up soon. Next year,” he promised.

  “You better.” I settled in close, strangely comforted by the routine of it all—his hugs and the old quitting conversation. We’d done this a hundred times over nineteen years, and now, again, I felt the well-worn grooves of our back-and-forth. “Or I’ll tell Mom.”

  “Don’t. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “My daughter, the taskmaster.”

  “It’s only because I love you.”

  “You too, Claire-bear.”

  The snow was falling again, light as clouds outside the frosted windowpanes. Next door, I could hear someone moving around, muffled voices coming from down the hall. He held me, and I tried to remember everything in that moment: the steady weight of his arm around me, and the scratch of his raw wool sweater on my wet cheeks.

  Somehow, I knew it would be the last time.

  Tessa was right: the city became a snow-swept ghost town, and Christmas morning we walked to church on hushed, silent streets that had been teeming with tourists and last-minute shoppers, frantically hunting down the last, perfect gift. Now, slush-trimmed footprints were the only proof of life; the morning skies were clouded and winds slipped icily under our bundles of coats and scarves as we passed the storefronts filled with ornate decorations, already out of date.

  “It’s a shame Theo couldn’t join us,” my mom said, leading the way in her polished black boots. “It would be nice to spend more time with him before we leave. You said you’re meeting his family today?”

  “His dad. And it’s not a big deal,” I added, in case she had visions of us all crowded around a kitchen table somewhere, toasting the year ahead. “They don’t really do the holidays. I’m just going to support him.”

  “Let Claire have her plans,” Dad spoke up, his hands in his pockets, and his cheeks red against the plaid scarf I’d given as a makeshift holiday gift. “It’s better we get back home, anyway. Travel after the holidays is always a madhouse. The airport should be nice and quiet today; you hate the crowds.”

  Mom strode on, and he gave me a wink. Dad had kept his promise. There had been no talk of surgery or drug trials, but I could see the unspoken words in Mom’s eyes, and felt the weight of her anxiety every time she opened her mouth to speak and then bit the words back, remarking instead on the old Boston architecture or twinkling lights. By the time we reached the church, I was ready for sanctuary, for the cool, sweet hum of carols to drown out the rest of all our fraught conversations. The old Trinity Church stood timeless on the edge of Copley Square, its stone steeples reaching up amongst a grey, gleaming clutter of modern office buildings and department stores, as if the centuries had marched onwards, but it somehow existed in a solemn bubble all of its own. I felt a tremor, intimidated by the grandeur, but the moment we stepped through those ornate wooden doors, there was warmth and brightness, the wooden pews packed and pale sun scattering through vast stained-glass fr
iezes to dance in a kaleidoscope on the worn stone floors.

  In a flash, I remembered Theo, the first day we met, the sugar canisters, and those rainbows that had danced in his eyes. It felt like a lifetime ago, and brand new all at once.

  “Claire.” My mom’s voice was hushed but impatient, and I quickly followed them to a pew, shuffling apologetically past morning worshippers to a place by the edge of the great room. I was still awestruck by the building: carved and ornate, the ceilings soared higher, and everywhere, there were statues and frieze scenes, the altar rising up at the head of the room. It was a work of art in itself, every inch constructed with love, a world away from the sparse, modern space of our church back home, with its simple community rooms and the prayer spaces where I had tried, and failed, to find some kind of peace.

  The service began, my parents following on the crinkled Xerox handouts as the priest began his homily about the Christmas miracle, about welcoming strangers from afar, and about the world breaking apart outside these stained glass windows, but my mind wouldn’t still. I felt the same itch that always stroked softly in my veins in places like this, that bittersweet ache of guilt and regret.

  How much easier would this all be if I could just believe?

  My mom did. Her conversion was heralded by those first grey smudges on my MRI scans, and as many hours as she spent doing battle with hospital administrators and insurance red tape, she must have passed just as many at the Oak Hills church with the pastor there, talking and praying and talking some more. She’d wanted to take me, too, and over the years, she wasn’t the only one: hospital chaplains and therapists all tried to nudge me gently towards faith, the way so many terminal patients managed to make sense of their fate. And I tried. I prayed with my mom in the back of Sunday services, I read the prescribed passages, and I tried to grasp the higher purpose some deity might have for me, how my death might just be the beginning, but the words on the page lay empty to me, and no matter how hard I tried to pour some meaning into them, I still came up blank.