by Lindy Zart
He nods brusquely, his throat bobbing as he swallows. The intensity of his gaze singes me. I'm going to miss him looking at me. Although, how will I even know I'm missing it? My expression must reveal something of the pain this knowledge gives me because his hands cup the nape of my neck and he tugs me to him, his mouth hungry and urgent against mine. I let my mind slip away for a moment, feeling the sensations he evokes in me, feeling joy and happiness and wholeness I have only felt with a damaged boy. There are tears in the kiss, and as I pull away, I see there are tears on his face and feel my own. He knows something. Even if the doctors told him nothing, he knows anyway.
“I had...an episode. I didn't know what it meant. The pain was so intense—the headache was so bad I passed out. When I woke up, I knew whatever had happened to me wasn't normal. Sometimes I wish I hadn't decided to have it checked out. But I was scared, so I did. They did scans of my brain. The results weren't good. They wanted to do more testing, but I said no. They told me it was inoperable, so what was the point in taking more pictures and whatever else they wanted to do?
“If I hadn't passed out that day, if I hadn't gone to the emergency room at the exact moment I did, I wouldn't have seen you, broken and bloody, as you were brought into the hospital. I was sitting there, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now. Your mother and Thomas were in the hallway, crying and holding one another. I'm telling you now, Rivers, Thomas loves you. Maybe not in the way you want or need, but he does. He was scared, grieving. Maybe it was partly from guilt, but it was also because he cares for you. You don't cry for someone like that just because you don't want your mistake found out.” I inhale, looking away from his vulnerable face.
I want to tell him I love him. I love him so much. But I know it will be piercing to hear right now, although it will never truly be one hundred percent received with solace. With love, comes pain. But I do, I love him. And I know he loves me too. Even if we have not verbally spoken the words to one another, it is so clear to me. Every glance my way, every touch of his skin against mine, the way he responds to me without being aware of it, even the sound of his voice. I can see everything in a way I wasn't able to before all of this.
I love a boy I pulled from the dark and he loves a girl who will return to it.
“I was in the store a month or so later. I didn't realize it was your mom right away, but it didn't take long for me to realize who I was talking to. She offered the job. I accepted. I'd already known I wanted to help you somehow, I just wasn't sure how yet. It was sort of perfect, in a way.
"I made a choice. I could spend the rest of my time feeling sorry for myself, or I could help someone. Your mom...and you. I could live with the past hovering over me or I could step away from it and be the way I always wanted to be, the way I could have been if I hadn't let everything around me determine who I was. I could choose to be sad, or I could choose to be happy. Life—it's one choice after another. And how our lives are, that's our choice as well.
“Maybe if you hadn't been in that accident, you wouldn't have been able to know the real me. And maybe if I hadn't discovered there was something wrong with me, I wouldn't have been able to be the real me. I like to think, it had to happen this way for the two of us to find each other. Because even with all I grieve for, I cannot regret you. I didn't expect to care about you so much. I didn't expect to see past my misconception of you and be rewarded with knowing the real you. I had a goal, Rivers, and you ruined it for me, but I am so glad you did,” I whisper.
He is openly crying and I am crying with him. I think the sound of his anguish is even harder to take than seeing it, but both are equally ravaging to me. His tears are wounds to my heart and I am crying blood for him in return. I try to imagine a life without Rivers, and it guts me. And I know what he is feeling. It would be a world cast in gray, without the sun, without light, without warmth.
My mom and Monica find us together on the bed, our arms locked around each other like if we just keep holding on, we won't lose one another. Monica's mouth pulls down and her eyes water as she takes in the sight, quickly looking away as she inhales sharply. My mom's face crumples and she can't even walk toward us, her legs stiff and immobile. Rivers' mom puts an arm around her to gently prod her forward and they make their way to the bed in a shuffling gait. It makes me think of the first agonizing steps I witnessed Rivers take at the beginning of the summer and my arms tighten around him.
“The doctor will be in soon,” Monica says quietly, her eyes touching on me and resting on her son. “Rivers, let's go for a little walk.”
Torn between where he wants to be and where he needs to be, he carefully disentangles himself from me, giving my forehead a lingering kiss. He sweeps bangs from my eyes and smiles, his gaze steady and true. That smile tears me apart. I hear my mother's broken cry behind him and my eyes burn. He leaves with his mom, glancing back at me as he goes. His expression is panicked and desperate, like he is sure he isn't going to find me, but when our eyes meet, the lines fade a little from his face. Monica puts her hand on his arm and unconsciously rubs it as they walk from the room.
I have no choice but to face my mother now.
Looking at her is hard. She no longer resembles the young image I normally procure in my mind when I think of her. Janet Bana looks like all the years of heartache have finally caught up to her and lambasted her into accepting that life is cruel, that life takes more than it gives, and that it is going to steal from her once more.
"You know Henry Miller? He lives down the street from us."
She wordlessly nods.
I look down, staring at the stark white of the sheet peeking out from beneath the hospital-issued blanket. "I think about him a lot. All the time, lately. He lost his wife to cancer, his son to a hunting accident, and his daughter was murdered." I blink and release a set of tears. They slowly trickle down my cheeks. "How can one person be expected to go through so much? It's horrible. And he's so sad. He's in his eighties and it's been years since he lost them all, and he's still just so sad. I see it every time he sits on his porch. It radiates from him. Sorrow like that—there is no way to get past it." I wipe the tears from my chin. "I don't want that to be you." My eyes meet her injured ones. "I don't want you to have to lose everyone you love."
Her lower lip wobbles and she turns her face away, hugging herself against my words.
“Did they tell you?”
She wipes at her eyes, finally looking at me. I find it odd that she is standing away from me, like she has to distance herself from the pain being too close to me evokes in her.
“The doctor said he had to talk to you first.” The look she gives me is hard-eyed and searching. “He has records, Delilah. Confidential records on you. Records I couldn't see and records he wouldn't say a single word to me about. He's hiding something—something big, something terrible. I can see it every time he won't look at me, every time I catch that hint of resigned acceptance he tries to cover up. What is it? What won't he tell me?”
I look at the blanket covering my legs and squeeze it between my hands, then release it. “I—”
“Just tell me this,” she interrupts. She straightens her shoulders and looks at me with determination to stay strong in the set of her spine and the directness of her eyes. She wore that look a lot after she lost Neil. I used to think she wore it for herself, but now I wonder if it was for me. And now—as she wears the same look—is it for me as well? She is so much stronger than I ever gave her credit for. She always reminded me of something frail, but I understand now that I was seeing her wrong, like so many other things.
“Is it...” Her eyelids slide shut and she takes a deep lungful of air. She looks at me, not like I am her daughter, but like I am an equal, and it grieves me that it has come to this. I wanted her to remain oblivious. I wanted to spare her the pain until there was no way around it.
Her voice cracks as she asks, “Is it terminal? Are you dying?”
The tears that fall from my eyes are her ans
wer and I see her sway around the blur of them, fumbling with a chair until she falls into it. She doesn't say another word. She sits in the chair and she holds her face and weeps; loud, broken, gasping sounds of grief that tighten my throat. I can't watch her, but I can't turn away. My mouth quivers and I stare at the ceiling as she cries, blinking my eyes against my own steady flow of tears.
Pressure forms in my chest and I wonder if this is what it feels like when your heart breaks, when the sorrow becomes too much and it has to go somewhere, so it flows into your heart and makes it ache, each beat of it agonizing to your soul. Your heart beats to keep you alive, your heart beats so you know you can still hurt. Because to have pain, is to live, and there is no life without it. The pain makes you know you're alive.
I guess as long as my heart keeps aching, I know I am still breathing.
She stands abruptly, moving toward me in hurried steps. Reaching down, she takes my face into her hands and kisses my cheek, pressing her tear-stained one to mine. “I love you, Delilah. You are my gift. You are my heart. And we will get through this.”
I try to nod, but I can't move from all the emotions slamming into me and over me. Relief, hope, loss, sadness. I whisper instead. And what I whisper is, “Yes.”
IT SEEMS ODD THAT OUT of all the rooms in the house, the one I feel like I need to be in is Neil's—or maybe that is exactly where I should be. The air is stuffy with the smell of a room shut up too long. I immediately go to the set of windows along the far wall and open the curtains, sliding a window open to let a cool breeze inside. The sun is down and the stars are out. I watch the black and white sky for a moment, and then turn away.
"I miss you, Neil, every day," I quietly tell an empty room. Is this what my mom will do? Sit in my room as she mourns me, talking to the ghost of a memory so she feels closer to me?
Blinking my eyes, I take a stabilizing breath of air. This room reeks of sorrow, of a life taken too soon, of dreams never known, and laughter forever silenced. For weeks after he died, I was in here on a daily basis, sitting on his bed, falling asleep among his blankets at the most random times. I missed his smell—dirt, sweat, and laundry detergent—so badly that I went to his room to procure anything that reminded me of him. My mom would find me in his room and quietly pick me up and take me out. It must have hurt her so much to be in here, to find me in here.
I didn't understand that he was truly gone, I couldn't comprehend that I would never see him again. Part of me thought if I waited long enough, he would come back. Because, really, how can someone just be...gone?
The room is still painted sky blue with sports paraphernalia and airplane models on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. His clothes were donated to a secondhand store along with his toys, but there were some things my mother could not bear to part with, like the Spider-Man shirt I hold within my hands, and the trinkets in the room that were dear to him. I found the Spider-Man shirt on my mother's bed after Neil's funeral. She never mentioned me taking it—she never said a single thing about it. I wore it to bed every night until I outgrew it.
And one day I realized that my brother was gone forever, and I never came back in this room after that. I began to call my mom by her first name, and I grew a shield around myself, a shield that was never fully taken down until this summer—until now.
Funny how we all finally decide to start living only when we irrevocably know we are dying.
I carefully lie down on the bed, holding his shirt to my chest, and close my eyes. Contentment flows through me and over me like a warm blanket, filling me and slowing my breaths. I drift away to the sight of golden eyes twinkling like glitter and an infectious laugh, only awakening at the shifting of the mattress as my mom lies beside me, wrapping me in her arms and in the security of her love, before I sink into the darkness once more.
THE BRAIN TUMOR IS INOPERABLE because of its stellar location inside my head. The risk of trying to remove it would be too great to me—there's the tiny matter of major blood vessels that surround it. Basically, chances are I would bleed to death. Radiation was suggested to try to minimize its size, but most benign tumors regrow. Do I want to live for the duration of whatever time I have left of my life sick? No. They said it could be hereditary, but as I have no knowledge of who my father is, that means nothing to me. It was suggested I go to a support group, but I decided to find my own form of therapy. I guess I did that when I saw Rivers and his mother. When they started talking about experimental surgery, I left. Until yesterday, I never went back.
Maybe I am being unreasonable, but if I can't decide when I get to die, I can at least decide how. Just as I can decide how to live while I still have that option.
I looked it up online, trying to see if there was some way to naturally get rid of it. I knew I was searching for impossible answers when I did so, but I had to at least try. Maybe my affinity to burn in the sun, and thus stay out of it unless slathered in sunscreen, was to blame. Vitamin D is necessary to remain healthy. Maybe I ultimately killed myself or helped the process along in some way. Maybe it was something I did or didn't eat. Maybe I wasn't active enough, maybe I was too active. Maybe something with my chromosomes changed and messed it all up. Who knows. And really, does it matter?
Each year, more than one hundred thousand Americans are told they have a brain tumor. It is not clear why many of these tumors occur. Those that originate in the brain, primary brain tumors, may be due to genetic or environmental factors. Others, called secondary brain tumors, are the result of cancer that has spread from other parts of the body. Benign brain tumors, while slow growing and non-cancerous, may be inoperable. And unlike benign tumors in other parts of the body, benign brain tumors often recur. The tumor in my head is benign, but for whatever reason, it is also aggressively growing, and one day, it will be too much for my brain to take—and it will kill me. I know all this because I googled it. Google has helped me these past few months in ways nothing else could.
I'm not saying I just accepted it. I didn't. I mean, when I saw Rivers brought into the emergency room, I found a purpose to not fall into a hole of despair, but I already had it set in my brain that I wanted to fight. Only I didn't know how. So I decided that living as much as I could while I had the chance, was the way I could fight it. And I have. I am not sorry for that. But I am sorry for the people I will be leaving, and I am sorry for the pain I will indirectly cause them when I go.
I sit on a threadbare blanket on the porch with my knees up to my chin, staring at the white house with tan shutters across the street, my eyes focused on the sunflowers reaching toward the windows. I feel like that plant right now—proud and strong for months and then wilting and dying before it should be time. It could happen at any moment. Today. Tomorrow. One day, I will have a headache so bad I will lose consciousness, and I just won't wake up.
Pain forms a fissure in my heart, growing as I remember the shattered look in Rivers' eyes yesterday. I put my cheek to my knees and close my eyes. I didn't plan on falling in love with him. It just happened. I wasn't even aware of it until it was too late. He wrapped himself around my heart without me realizing it. I couldn't have stopped it any more than the current beating of my heart.
He shows up with a baseball bat poking out of the top of a red backpack slung over his shoulder. A stillness spreads through me as I take in the sight of him. A dingy white cap is pulled low over his eyes and my pulse speeds up in response to how darkly handsome he is. He climbs the few steps to reach me and then stands looking down at me. It's the hat, and the look on his face, that affects me the most. His face is determined, his stance telling me to not even bother arguing with what he has planned.
Lips pressed into a firm line, he lifts one eyebrow. That's it. That's all he does. As though he expects me to just blindly follow him without knowing what we're doing or where we're going. Well, I will. Because with him is where I want to be, and he seems to know that.
I get to my feet, fold the blanket up, and set it beside the door. And
I wait.
"Hey."
I smile faintly at this adopted form of greeting we seem to have deemed as ours. "Hey."
He hops off the last step of the porch with the ease he used to move with and my heart clenches, but it is a good hurt. His body has always moved with grace, even the disjointed form he had at the beginning of the summer.
“You're getting better,” I tell him, nodding to his legs. “You've improved a lot in just one month.”
“My legs getting better isn't what's changed me this past month,” he replies. He doesn't even pause to ask, “Know what I did last night?”
I swallow, feeling the sting of tears in my eyes. I blink around it. I cried enough yesterday at the hospital. After my discharge, I wasn't sure when I would see or talk to him again or what to expect. I certainly didn't expect this. I was scared he would stay away and I was scared he wouldn't. I'm not even sure how I should act or how he thinks I should. Obviously he must want me to play ball. He's watching me expectantly.
“Decide to play baseball today?”
“I bawled my eyes out. Pretty much all night.” Rivers walks backward down the sidewalk, his eyes never leaving me. “Know what else I did?”
I frown as I slowly follow him, uncomfortable with his behavior, pain going through me at his words. “No.”
“I thought, I just found her and she's going to leave me.”
I look down at my toenails presently painted pink.
“I cried some more.”
My head jerks up and I put a hand across my stomach, hurting from what he is telling me. I open my mouth to tell him to stop, but he narrows his eyes at me, effectively halting me.
“I decided I had two options. I could be angry, I could give up, I could feel sorry for myself.”
“That sounds like three options.”
Ignoring that, he continues, “Or...I could be glad I got to know you, continue to be glad I am knowing you, and make the rest of this summer and whatever time we have, the best you've ever had. Guess which one I chose?”