by Sarah White
I know I must get to them but I don’t know why. I push against the sand and call out to them hoping to get their attention. One little girl looks at me and then smiles, wiping her hair from her face then returning her attention back to the other girl. More determined than ever I march ahead until I am in a full sprint so that my feet have no time to sink in the sand below them.
The sound of the waves is building in the background and I look quickly to see where it is coming from. There is no water in sight, just two little girls playing. When I finally reach them I look down at what has their attention and see the small box between them. I have seen that box before and now I know I must be dreaming. The girls open the box and the ashes begin to scatter all around us. Out of now where a wave crashes down, pulling the girls out to sea.
Chapter 38
Cait
“Wake-up Matt, let’s go to bed. I will wake up to give her the morphine, you should get some rest.” We make our way down the hall and into the bedroom. I feel as if we have done this for years and when he lays back I snuggle up to his chest and breath in his scent while he plays with my hair. Tonight he agreed to take what he could and not see our time together as a contract and promise for tomorrow. I focus on doing the same thing, reassuring myself that he will leave me first, going back to the military lifestyle and then I can leave him, into the dark unknown.
The alarm on my phone wakes us both and I turn it off and then make my way down the dark hallway. The weight is back and it crushes my chest as I reach the door to her room. I stand there for a minute not sure what I am hoping to find on the other side of it. My heart wants her there, waiting consciously for her next dose while my brain tells me it is best if she is gone, no longer in pain. I feel my heart pound in my chest and I bend over to rest my hands on my knees. I try to steady my breath and fight off the panic attack I feel coming on. I did not notice Matt come up behind me but I can now feel his warm hand on my back as he asks if I am okay.
“I don’t know what I want to find in there,” I confess and I break into a sob and bury my head in his chest.
“Me either,” he replies as he strokes my hair and rests his chin on my head. When I get myself composed I turn back to the door and open it knowing I have no control over the fate that will play out for Court.
“She’s okay,” he whispers behind me and while he searches for the morphine I climb into the bed beside her. I fight back the tears when she does not wake up to talk before we put the dropper in her mouth and administer the medication. “She didn’t wake up,” I say desperately while looking to Matt for an explanation.
“I know,” he whispers as his eyes fill up with tears. “It’s happening to fast,” he says returning the desperate tone.
I curl up next to her and drape my arm across her body. It is so much smaller than it was even just days ago when I first felt her weight against me as she rested on my lap. Her skin is pale and her nightgown hangs from the bones that protrude from her skin. Matt sits down in the chair next to the bed and takes her hand in his. He puts her hand up to his cheek and closes his eyes as if praying could bring her back to us.
Chapter 39
Matt
Holding her hand is the only thing helping me to keep it together. I love her so much and I don’t know how I am going to make it through the rest of my life without her here to check in with. She hasn’t woken up since the last dose. I know that she is letting go of this world and our life with her. I would give anything to make it stop right now, to have her wake up and feel better.
As Court lays here sleeping I realize I won’t get to tell her about Cait and how I finally made it right. Even if I only get tonight I feel like I have said my peace and let her know how I feel, freeing my sister of her need to keep my secret. I now love Cait in the open and I will never again hide how much I need her. Please Court, please wake up so I can tell you.
Seeing Cait curled up in the bed next to her is excruciating. I can think of nothing worse than watching the person you love suffer and right now I am in a room in the company of the only two women I love, watching them both let go. When Court passes, Cait is going to fall into a deep disappear and I am not sure what I am going to be able to do to help her out. She has suffered so many unbearable losses in her life and I have failed to protect from those as much as I am failing to protect her from this one.
The cancer has taken so much from us already and it has done so quickly. Our nights at Pete’s Place are over and we will no longer be able to play our game in the ocean without feeling the loss of the soul that is missing. I imagine it is going to take what is left of her soon and the thought makes me want to throw up. Pain is a horrible thing and there no cure for the havoc it is wrecking on my heart. Now we just sit and wait for death to come take her and we are defenseless to it’s attack.
I need to be strong for Cait so I hold it together. I feel sick to my stomach and I am suffocating. I cannot expand my lungs against the tight grip my muscles have locked onto my chest. Many times I have watched the end of life in my tours overseas but the enemy over there takes life quickly. This enemy my sister is fighting has crept up silently and slowly drained the life from her. If there was any mercy in this world cancer would take you instantly. My years have taught me there is never any mercy.
Chapter 40
Cait
I watch her chest rise and fall as she struggles to take in a breath. I want to call Candy to ask her what to expect but I know she won’t have the answers I need to hear. The bottom line is I know what to expect, one day I will come in here and she will be gone, her chest no longer rising with the struggle to breath. Matt will run from the sadness, emerging himself in a battle far away and I will end mine for good. For now we just wait, watching her slip away by the minute, helpless to stop what fate has already determined.
When Court does not wake for the next dose either, I lose hope that I will even be able to hear her again. Matt has pulled himself together but I don’t know how. When Candy comes she finds Matt in the chair and me in bed with Court. Matt leaves to give his sister some privacy and to get it together I take his seat in the chair beside her bed.
“What is next?” I ask Candy as she cleans Court and checks her vitals.
“Honestly?” she asks looking at me in a way that speaks louder than words.
“Honestly,” I say feeling as though I have just consented to her ripping my heart out.
“She is going to die. I don’t know what you believe about souls but I have done Hospice care for a while now and once they stop opening their eyes it is as if their soul has left and all we are here with is a shell.” She looks up from her work for a minute to see if I have heard her.
“How long?” I ask calmly now knowing she can only guess.
“If she can’t wake up she can’t eat or drink,” she looks over at me waiting to see if I can register what we all learned in school. No eating and no drinking equals death within a few days. I know this but I can’t imagine watching it happen.
“Is there anything we can do?” I ask as she rolls Court over and checks for sores.
“You can love her,” and with that I know it is done. Candy pulls the blankets back up and gathers her stuff. “We are all dying really, sometimes we get more time here and sometimes it is cut short. I had the pleasure of talking to Courtney a lot before she sent for you guys and she has been ready for some time. I hope that when my time comes I can face it with the grace that she has faced her death with.” I can see the tears wet her eyes and she reaches down to clasp Court’s hand. “It will be any time now Courtney, be proud you have fought a good fight.” A tear makes its way down Candy’s cheek and I am so impressed with her compassion for my friend.
“Thank you,” I say swallowing the lump in my throat as tears relentlessly stream from my eyes. Candy nods and lets go of Court’s hand. I know I have no right to know but I ask her, “How do you do this everyday? You spend all of your work hours surrounded by death.”
“
I do it for my daughter,” she says and I can see her lip begin to quiver. “I was sixteen when I got pregnant, the same age my mom was when she had me. I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. She was four when she started getting sick and five when we finally got the diagnosis. She had a tumor on her brain stem and there was nothing anyone could do. I was young and scared with no idea what to expect. When Hospice was called in a wonderful nurse came out and sat with me. She told me what to expect and even cried with me sharing in my grief that my daughter was going to be taken from me soon.
“My daughter survived six long months, fighting every step of the way. When she finally lost her battle I knew that I could never repay what that nurse did for me but I could help other dying patients. It was hard at first to loose my patients, many of them becoming my friend before they passed. Loosing people is hard, but watching them suffer is worse.”
She reaches inside her scrubs and pulled out a tiny locket and opens it to show my the small pictures inside. One of a baby and the other of a small child, both were clearly her daughter. I put my hand to my chest feeling for my small cross, the reminder of the loss I shared with her. I had never had the chance to meet my daughter, but grieve for her everyday. Candy had met her daughter, held her close, held her hand and shared five years before she was taken. The grief I feel can never be lifted but I silently said a prayer for the first time in years, thanking God for the swiftness he had exercised in taking my daughter, knowing that what Candy had survived I could not.
Candy closes the locket and puts it back under her scrubs. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” I say, although the depth of which her story healed me she will never know. She nods and then smiles to me as she leaves the room. When she closes the door behind her I no longer fight the tears. I am instantly back in the dark hole and the darkness around me is crushing my heart, making breathing impossible.
Matt comes back into the room after Candy leaves and I can see that he has been crying. I reach down and hold Court’s hand in mine and he kneels beside her bed and holds her other hand. We both sit and wait for something even though we do not know what that something is. After a while Matt sits back against the wall and rests his head and I lean back in my chair. The next two doses happen without her even opening her eyes. The day is spent at her side, stroking her hand and her head, switching between praying she wake up and praying that He just take her.
I remember in my practice hearing stories of families who have watched a loved one die and they all talk about what it is like in the end. This strange place where you find yourself not sure what you want anymore. The praying for the miracle of life or the peace of death. It is as if at some point your heart faces what is coming and the prayers for life slowly are out numbered by the prayers that the suffering will end. Our miracle prayers are out numbered some time that night as we have to open her mouth for her to give her the morphine. We no longer pray for life, we sit helpless hoping she leaves us soon.
Chapter 41
*Court
My eyes are closed but I can hear their voices and I smile even if my mouth won’t let me. Stories of our younger days fill the air between us and I pray they keep talking as I drift in and out of consciousness. Matt has always taken care of me, something that I could have never repaid in this lifetime. The sacrifices he has made for me are tremendous and one of those sacrifices laughs as he recalls a summer long ago.
At fifteen I could not have given him permission to love her, my heart too young and selfish. I had seen his attempts at feeling the lonely space, none of which were successful for long. My adoptive parents allowed him his space and would tell me we all fight our demons in our own way but I saw the worried look on their faces as he snuck in girls to his bedroom. They weren’t his parents and he had made that clear so the only option they had was to love him from afar and provide a place for him to figure himself out.
Cait was my best friend. I needed her then as much as I need her now and I know that I would have made a selfish choice back then if he had asked. Matt loved me too much to make me choose so he denied his heart what it wanted most and tried to fill the empty space with sex and alcohol. His behavior tarnished what he thought of himself and began to make true the idea that he was not good enough to deserve her. Too late to intervene when I finally figured it out, I sat by and watched him distance himself from this place that he loved so that he wouldn’t be reminded of that choice he made.
They laugh again and I try so hard to open my eyes. I want to tell them how happy it makes me that they are spending time together and that I don’t want them to loose sight of that love when I am gone. My heart breaks to think that I was the thing that stood in between the two of them and the perfect love they could have had. My plan to bring them together is working and I pray that my death brings them closer instead of finding them each too deep in their dark holes to see the light the other could provide.
My body is failing, it is hard to breath as my lungs fill with fluid. Each beat of my heart is slower and I know that it will stop soon. Pain is everywhere, aching in my bones and burning in my muscles. The intense pressure in my head is only relieved slightly with the morphine but at least it makes me sleep. As I lay here dying I can’t distinguish between what pain the cancer is causing and what emotional pain my death is causing. Dying is sad but my grief is for the living.
Cait is a strong woman. She has experienced so much more than any person should have at her age. Her mother was a mess leaving Cait no choice but to raise herself and her mother. As young as seven Cait was wiping up her mothers vomit and listening to how horrible men were. I was amazed she had any courage to marry Elliot at all.
Elliot is an asshole and I had tried so hard to tell Cait not to marry him. I knew she loved him only because he promised her an escape from this little town. He had a good career ahead of him, he seemed like the staying type and he never drank alcohol which made his morals priceless to Cait. Elliot had always been a liar, something Matt and I had known for a while but could never bring ourselves to tell Cait. We never had any proof, but word is he was out on the town a lot more than Cait knew and while he never drank the women he kept company with certainly did.
On the night before her wedding she and I rode down to the beach together, we dropped our bikes at the sand and ran into the crashing waves. As we floated on the surface we laughed at how boring it was when we did not have Matt to come find us. We discussed our dreams in life and her fears of being married. She told me that there were places on this planet where the sea is so rich with salt that everything floats. I told her that it would be so fun to play our game in that water, to float with no effort and feel the weight of the world off our bodies. Her reply was stoic; she told me that sometimes what we think we want because it seems like it would be perfect turns out to be painful and deadly. Living creatures cannot survive in water that salty; it poisons their habitat making everything toxic. She didn’t have to explain what had brought that up, I knew already she was talking about her future with Elliot.
Elliot was toxic to her. He gave her false hope that there was a perfect life outside this town. He built her up so the fall would be longer. As we climbed out of the ocean that night she told me she knew marrying him was a mistake but that she felt incapable of being loved by anyone else. I begged her to run away with me, we would go anywhere in the world for a while until the wedding day had past and people forgot she ever was getting married. She talked about the invitations and gifts and the expectations of the people that supported them. I told her fuck them all he would ruin her. We both knew that she was going with him and her last moments of freedom would be the hardest. Knowing that Matt would be here soon and she would have to let go of any hope she had of being with him was going to be so painful.
That night I had seen the look on her face when Matt walked in the room. I had seen the look on his face too. Neither of them noticed I was looking because their eyes were locked on each other as they said so much without really saying a
nything. As the night went on I pretended to fall asleep so that they could finish what they had started. In the morning when I had seen Matt, devastated and a shell of his former self, I knew she had made a safe choice instead of going with her heart. My biggest regret is that I let her.
Her wedding day was so sad for me. She looked beautiful as always but the emptiness was suffocating. Matt and I were her only guest and the chair where her mother should have been sitting held the basket full of programs instead. That day I watched a piece of my brother’s heart break and until this week I believed it would never be fixed. He left after she said, “I do,” Matt snuck out before the kiss, blending in with the staff preparing for the reception.
Wedding guests danced around and visited with each other at the small tables that sat his whole family. I watched my brother from a window inside the hall as he sat in his truck and drank a beer he had managed to sneak on his way out. It was too far to tell but I was sure he was crying and as much as I longed to comfort him I too believed he had lost his chance with her. Now with her wedding behind her I was sure there was no going back. He drove away as Elliot pranced Cait around showing his prize to his family and friends. I was still at the window when I saw her reflection behind me, wandering and searching the guests for a familiar face, but a face that was not mine.
Cait didn’t have to ask me if I had seen him, or pretend she had another reason for wandering around lost and sad on the night that should have been the happiest of her life. I told her quietly that he had left and I watched as she drew in a sharp breath between her teeth and covered her stomach with her hand. I knew she had just experienced the loss of her lifetime, trading true love for a predictable life.
Cait would never be a martyr. She nodded to me and we exchanged knowing looks and then she brushed her hand over her hair smoothing out bumps that weren’t there. Slowly she ran her hand down her dress and turned to start her life without him. I thought of the toxic ocean and I imagined her floating in it. My only peace was knowing that one day when she found herself there in the thick of the salt, Matt would come and find her just like he always had.