Chapter Twenty Eight
When we pulled into the parking lot at Prescott Park, I turned off the engine and sat back against the seat. “Where to?” I asked.
“The formal gardens,” Drew said without hesitation, his forehead against the window.
We got out and began to walk.
I’d seen the formal gardens once or twice during the warmer months. Seeing them in the winter was like seeing them for the first time. It was as if we’d stepped right into some Disney winter fairytale.
The Japanese crabapple trees were bowed down with a heavy pile of snow. The three big fountains in the middle had been turned off for the winter, but snow and ice had covered their surfaces in just the right combination to make them look like ice sculptures, twinkling in the sunlight. The benches lining the gardens all had a few inches of snow on them. Everything was covered with a cold, serene white blanket.
“Wow,” I breathed, my breath a cloud as I looked around. “This is...”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Drew’s cane made a deep hollow in the snow as he leaned heavily against it. “It was funny you mentioned having Jack’s birthday party here. This is my favorite place to come in the winter.”
“Apparently you’re not the only one,” I said, my eyes stealing across the gardens to the other corner. A bride and groom were having their pictures taken by a wedding photographer. In between shots, a woman handed her and her groom steaming mugs of something.
“Yeah, this place is pretty popular with the wedding crowd.” Drew began to walk gingerly down the brick path.
Looking at him set my teeth on edge. I could imagine him slipping on a patch of ice, cracking his head open on the brick. I wondered if he’d be offended if I grabbed a hold of his arm, then decided against it. I settled for walking beside him instead, just in case.
He turned left at a bench and used his cane to clear off the top of it. The snow fell to the ground with a soft whoomph. Drew gestured to the spot beside him. I sat down, tucking my jacket under me so I wouldn’t get my jeans wet. Faint laughter from the bridal party reached us, the sound flat and hushed in the snow-laden environment. I’d always liked that about snow, how it seemed to suck the emotion right out of words.
“Do you think you’ll get married someday?” Drew asked.
I looked at him, wondering if he was still hurt about me being snippy in the car, but his eyes were far away. He was looking toward the bridal party, but, it seemed to me, not quite seeing them.
“I don’t know,” I said, fiddling with my gloves. “I haven’t really thought about it. What about you?”
He replied without hesitation. “No. I refuse to leave my would-be wife a young widow.”
“Some might say having a few years of true love is better than having none,” I said.
“And anyway,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’m not going to die around people I know.”
I studied the profile of his handsome face, the strong nose, the shadowed, stubble-covered jaw, the full lips. His bottom eyelashes were so long they curved and rested on his skin. “What do you mean?”
He looked at me, his blue eyes a silvery aqua against all the snow. “I’ll leave. When I begin to get too sick to look after myself, I’ll leave.”
I looked up at the crabapple tree, its limbs reaching down to caress the snow-covered ground. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m researching facilities.” He tapped his cane on the snow under our feet as he talked, the soft crunching sound of snowflakes being crushed somehow deafening between his words. “The day I left my parents’ place,” he said, “I looked back as I was driving away with a friend. They had the blinds to our apartment pulled down, as usual, but in one of the windows, there was a yellow Roman shade instead of blinds. I have no idea, to this day, where that shade came from. In all the time I’d lived in that hellhole, I’d never seen it. Did someone put it up that day? Did something happen to the mini-blinds that used to be in that spot?” He shrugged, hanging his cane from his knee, like he’d done at Sphinx. “Anyway, when I got to Ridgeland, I had a hard time finding an apartment. No work experience except for a few gigs, no references, you know. I’d already looked at several apartments when a friend told me about my current place. He said to meet him there, that he knew the landlord and could probably get him to rent it to me. When I pulled up, there was a yellow Roman shade pulled down in that front window. I knew I was going to get it, and I was right.” He looked at me, grinned. “I’m not a big believer in a loving god, but I do believe in destiny. Fate. So I think wherever I go, I’ll be okay.”
“Just look for a yellow Roman shade,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah. Something like that.”
I wished I could be as sure as Drew. I wished I could be one of those people who were completely secure in the fact that everything happens for a reason and things always work out for the best.
I’d always considered people who felt that way less intelligent than those of us who believed humanity was fucked. Humans were the only species intelligent enough to figure out that we were nothing but stardust, and conceited enough to think that the world centered around us anyway.
“What are you thinking?” Drew asked, yanking me out of my thoughts. “Your jaw muscle’s clenched tighter than a jail bird’s buttocks.”
I laughed, surprised at his crude joke. Bending down, I gathered a small snowball and began to shape it. “Just wishing I could feel as surely as you do that everything’s going to be okay. Personally, I don’t think the universe gives a shit about any of us.” Throwing the snowball up in the air, I batted it with my hand, hard enough that it crumbled into nothing. “And if Fate does have anything to do with my life, it has a wicked sense of humor.”
“But you don’t know how your story’s going to end yet,” Drew said. “So how can you tell whether it’s a tragedy or not?”
“I’m prescient about endings,” I replied, bending down to get another handful of snow.
“What if, tomorrow, they discover a cure for MS? Or better yet, MS and FA?”
I looked at him, this man with the wide open face, the gorgeous blue eyes flecked with silver, the long legs that would one day simply refuse to carry him. I saw his hands, placed neatly on his thighs, the fingers beautifully tapered to pluck guitar strings, beginning to weaken and wither. I saw the ferocious hope he carried on his shoulders, the weight of it surely more than any dying man should be forced to carry. In that moment I knew that Drew’s hope weighed more than my hurt and anger and loneliness, and in that moment, I wanted nothing but to make him feel safe and loved and wanted.
A pulse began to beat deep inside me as I got up, pulled the cane off his knee, and tossed it into a pile of snow. I straddled his legs, sitting on his lap, and his look of confusion quickly turned to a look of pure lust. His eyes grew darker, his gaze fell to my lips. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. I just covered his mouth with mine, the ecstasy of making him live in the moment, the power of reducing him to the basest pleasure overtaking every other sense in my brain. After a moment, his hand tangled in my ponytail. He pulled on it, making me expose my throat to him. He nibbled along the tender skin there, and I gasped. I could feel his erection pressing into my inner thigh where my legs were spread, wanting more.
I pulled back. “We could go somewhere,” I whispered.
He nodded.
Chapter Twenty Nine
Driving with Drew by my side was excruciating.
I didn’t dare touch him during the slow walk to the car, and I didn’t want to look at him during the drive. I feared I’d lose my nerve. What did I think I was doing? I wasn’t some sort of seductress, not by the widest stretch of anyone’s imagination. I’d lost my virginity in high school to a drunk football player on a field trip. I hadn’t wanted to have sex since; it was too much bother for not enough return. Besides, I already had my first love. Disease. I didn’t need a boy.
But Drew? T
he words he’d said to me once echoed in my mind: There was something about him. No matter how hard I peered into the center of my soul, I couldn’t find a shred of pity for him. I wasn’t sorry in that maudlin way Nigel was that he was losing his coordination or his silver voice. It wasn’t just that I was hypnotized by his illness, though I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make a difference. There was something about him, about the core of him, about the way he smiled and looked at me and pulled me close to kiss me. About the way he’d told me about the yellow Roman shade.
My body performed the motions even as I was lost in the overcrowded city of my thoughts. We pulled up in front of the Golden Manor, a hotel my dad put his business associates up at sometimes. It was large and faceless, and I knew we could disappear into its gilded depths without anyone raising an eyebrow. Pulling up to the valet parking, I handed the car keys to a young suited guy who stepped forward.
Drew came up beside me and looked up at the stone building, at its enormous snow-covered fountain in the front. “This is nice,” he said. “But I don’t think I can afford to pay their rate.”
“Um, no problem. It’s on me.” I had a credit card my parents gave me when I left for college and had forgotten to ask for back. I used it to buy my medical supplies, but it had a twenty thousand dollar limit, and I was nowhere close to hitting that.
We walked in the revolving doors, Drew maneuvering just fine in spite of my worries.
I walked up to the big marble desk, behind which a placid, smiling woman waited, a blood-red bowtie like a gash at her throat.
“Welcome, ma’am,” she said, in spite of the fact that she was old enough to be my mother. “How may I serve you today?” If she thought it was scandalous that I had a young man with me and we obviously had no luggage, she didn’t show it.
“I’d like a room, please.” I slid my credit card over.
“Certainly. Smoking or non-smoking?” she asked, typing away on the computer.
I didn’t know if Drew smoked, but I assumed not. “Non-smoking.”
“King-size bed or Queen?”
I felt a blush begin at the tips of my ears. “King will be fine.”
I filled out some paperwork, she slid my card through the reader, and then the key was ours. I turned; Drew’s eyes burned as they slid from my eyes to my lips and back.
We made our way to the elevator, which was occupied by two businessmen discussing how more snow was headed our way. It smelled like smoke and mints in there, and the giant mirror magnified every flaw on my face.
In spite of all that, I was more aroused than I’d ever been. I wanted Drew with a hot, breathless kind of desire. I had trouble maintaining a sane thought. I wondered if I’d always relate the smell of mints and smoke with this moment, as we tended to do with our memories, scent and event combining into one thick, indistinguishable sensory rope.
After a lifetime, the elevator beeped and the doors opened to birth us onto the fifth floor where our King-size bed awaited. It was quiet after the weather-bummed businessmen departed. I glanced at Drew, shadows under his eyes from the recessed lighting in the hallway.
When the door to our room opened, it made a thunderous sound. I walked in and sat on the bench at the foot of the bed, staring straight ahead. Something within me had shifted. Something had changed.
I felt Drew approach me from the right. “Are you okay?”
I looked up at him, standing there, leaning hard on his cane. His messenger bag was slung around his shoulder as usual, full of papers that fought for the right of another sick boy to choose how and when he’d die. His eyes shone a brilliant blue—velvet rather than the ice they’d been earlier at the park. His jaw, so strong, so hard, and yet so given to softening with a smile. I opened my mouth, to say what I wasn’t sure, but before it came out, I began to cry. I put my face in my hands and, not knowing what to do, sat there on that embroidered bench and simply wept.
Guilt coursed through me—guilt for all the lies I’d told, all those lies that had led to Drew kissing me and then led to us coming to be here, in this hotel room together. There was fear too, for what was to become of my mother, the person I’d so resolutely, so stupidly believed held all of life’s answers. Anger at myself because I knew I wasn’t going to confront her, because I never did. Anger at myself, too, because I knew I was too much of a coward to tell Drew the truth. The truth about who I was, what I was really doing at that hospital.
Maybe the shrinks were right when they said Munchausen went hand in hand with a personality disorder. Maybe my diseased brain couldn’t think outside of itself, outside of what caused the endorphin baths it so craved. Maybe I was a loathsome creature for not coming clean to Drew. But I couldn’t do it right then, even though I knew I should. Even though I’d been lied to myself by the one person I’d trusted and I knew how much it sucked. I just couldn’t.
Drew pulled me up and against his chest, his cane pressing into my back and shoulder as he rubbed slow circles between my shoulder blades. “Shh,” he said. “Shh. It’s okay.”
I pulled back and wiped my eyes. Putting a hand on either side of his face, I said, “I really like you.”
He smiled, kissed me on the mouth. “That’s good. Because I really like you, too.”
I felt that breathless hunger ignite in me again, and struggled to rein it in. “But...I have secrets, Drew.”
He looked into my eyes for a long moment, so it felt like all I could see, the whole world, was blue. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care if you have secrets.”
And then we kissed again.
It felt like the whole world went quiet. I stepped back from Drew and unzipped my hoodie. Letting it fall to the floor, I took off my t-shirt and stepped out of my jeans. He watched me as I stood there in my underwear while he was fully clothed; vulnerable, exposed. The expression on his face was inscrutable except for a tick in the muscle in his jaw. I felt his eyes take in the bloody bandage on my chest, the faint scars here and there from being poked and prodded needlessly in doctor’s offices, but then they climbed back up to hold my own eyes.
He stepped toward me, tossed the cane aside. Slipping my bra straps off with just the tips of his fingers, as if he was afraid any more than that would hurt me, he kissed the ridge of my collar bone. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered.
I unhooked my bra, let it fall to the floor. Then I lay back on the king-size bed and looked at him. Every scar on my body, every old wound, every fresh one, was on display. I’d never done this for anyone before. It was the most frightening, most exhilarating experience I could remember in the past two decades that were my life in its entirety.
There is nothing more, I thought as I lay there. There is nothing more in life than this, than us, right here, right now in this moment. We are life, we are fate, we are god.
Afterward, I lay curled in Drew’s arms, with him fitted snugly against my back like a shell on a tortoise. There was a trail of clothes from the bench to one side of the bed. It was funny how you could read them like a book.
He nibbled the spot right under my earlobe, making goosebumps sprout on my arm. “What are you thinking?” His hand traced lazy circles on my thigh, then stilled.
“Mm. Just looking at our clothes, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.”
He chuckled. “Hansel and Gretel were brother and sister. Let’s not make that comparison.”
I turned so I was facing him and smiled. “You’re right. I didn’t think about that.”
He kissed me, and then his eyes fell on my bandage. His expression sobered. “You’re sure that’s nothing serious?”
I blushed and turned again so I was facing away from him. I found I couldn’t repeat the lie otherwise. “Yep. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Dr. Daniels. The one Carson uses.”
“Mm hmm.”
He breathed deeply, his chest pushing against my upper back. “If you trust him. Carson says he’s okay, not the most competent doctor. But his parents
like him.”
“Mine do, too,” I said.
There was a brief silence as I tried to swallow away the bitter aftertaste of my lie.
“Hey,” Drew said, nuzzling the back of my neck through my curls. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I can tell you’re self-conscious about it.”
“It’s okay.” He didn’t realize the truth—that I was self-conscious not of my bandaged wound, but of the reason that I even had it.
“I’ve had so much crap happen to me after I got diagnosed with FA that I don’t even think about the self-conscious aspect of it anymore, I guess. TIDD group hazard.”
I picked up his hand from where it lay on my waist and examined it. “You know, I can’t tell that there’s anything wrong with your hands. They look so graceful.” I kissed his fingertips one by one.
“It’s getting harder to do the simplest things,” he said. “I won’t even really be thinking about it and then bam, I can’t text some word I used to text before. Or I can’t brush my teeth for the full two minutes like I used to be able to. Stupid shit like that. I think when my coordination really goes, it’ll be the small stuff I miss.”
I thought about my mum, the water bottles of vodka I never noticed. The cups of tea always at her elbow, which were probably more than just tea. “Yeah. It’s the smallest things, I think, that really make a life what it is.”
Chapter Thirty
Five days passed, five days in which I didn’t talk to my mother and during which she didn’t talk to me. I couldn’t tell if it’d been a conscious attempt on her part to avoid me, or an unconscious attempt on mine.
Zee and Drew had set things up with Jack’s mom so we were supposed to get to Prescott Park at three p.m. for his birthday party. It was supposed to be an unseasonably pleasant day for mid-March, near fifty degrees Fahrenheit and sunny. The perfect weather for a bunch of sick people—and I included myself in that category—to have a party to celebrate life.
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