“Oh, Alexis, I do understand, but we’ll only be gone three days. You’ll be home Sunday night. And the team’s counting on you.”
Alexis shook her head. “I just can’t go. Maybe nothing will happen to Adam if I go, but I can’t take a chance.”
Mrs. Wiley slumped in her chair. She looked befuddled. “I—I don’t know what to say. You’re the team captain. You’re our top debater.”
“Tessa can do it. She’s really better than I am in a lot of ways. She’ll lead the team, and she’ll fight to win.”
“Of course she’s good, but you—”
“Won’t be there,” Alexis stated firmly.
Mrs. Wiley pursed her lips. “I was going to save this until we arrived at the hotel, but professors from Stetson are coming, at my special request, just to observe you.”
Alexis felt her heart squeeze, but still she shook her head. “That was nice of you, but I—I can’t.”
Mrs. Wiley removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. She released a deep, weary sigh. “All right, child. I know you well enough to realize you’ve thought this through, and I shouldn’t be putting pressure on you. It’s just that we’re so good with you on the team. You’ll be missed.”
Alexis shifted her book bag, knowing that once she walked out the door her high school debating career would be finished. “Thank you. I’d be glad to call everyone on the team and explain.” She’d already told Tessa, who hadn’t even tried to dissuade her.
Mrs. Wiley said, “No . . . you have enough on your mind. I’ll tell the team.”
“Tell them that they’re very good and that they can do this with or without me.” She turned to leave.
“If you change your mind . . .”
“I won’t,” Alexis said over her shoulder.
She made it out of the school and into her car in the parking lot before she broke down and cried.
The debate team left Thursday afternoon for the state capital. On Friday morning, Eleanor woke Alexis up. “Hurry, get dressed. Adam’s breathing is bad. Your father’s called the paramedics and they’re on their way.”
NINETEEN
At the hospital, Adam was checked in to the ICU and put on a ventilator. “It will help him breathe,” the doctor told Alexis and her parents. “But he won’t be able to speak with the tube down his throat if he regains consciousness.”
“Will he wake?” Blake asked.
The doctor’s expression was sad. “That’s doubtful. His body’s pretty well worn out. His liver function is almost nil, and his kidneys are failing too.”
Alexis felt the doctor’s words in her soul. Adam would not go home again.
“H-how long?” Eleanor’s voice trembled, and Blake put his arms around her.
“Hard to say exactly. Maybe twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish we could have helped him.”
Alexis returned to the waiting room where she’d spent the night when they’d first brought Adam to the hospital months before. In the daylight, the room appeared shopworn and dingy. Two other families were hunkered down, awaiting turns to visit their loved ones in the ICU. For Adam’s family, there were no time restrictions on their staying with him. They could come and go at will since the end was near.
Alexis found a couch off to one side of the room and sat down to collect her thoughts and tattered emotions. She didn’t want to fall apart in Adam’s room. A nurse had told them that hearing was the last of the five senses to go for a patient, and Alexis wanted to be strong for Adam’s sake.
“Hey, pumpkin. Can I join you?”
She looked up to see her father. “You haven’t called me pumpkin since I was six.”
“That’s when you told me not to call you pumpkin anymore because you were too big and it was a baby name.” A little smile crossed his mouth. “You’ll always be my pumpkin, you know.”
She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to locate that little girl for him again. He looked tired and older than he had ever seemed to her before.
“Do you want anything?” he asked. “Food? Coffee?”
“I want to call Tessa, but I know she’s right in the middle of the tournament, and it wouldn’t be fair to tell her this now.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t be with your team. I know how hard you’ve worked.”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to be here.” She leaned on his shoulder and he put his arm around her. “Daddy, this is so hard.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll never have another son.” His words stabbed at her heart. “I’m glad I came home for lunch every day this past month. Did Adam tell you?”
Surprised, she shook her head. He had not told her.
“We ate in his room. And we talked. Gave your mother a break too.” Blake stroked Alexis’s hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t take more time to get to know him better sooner.”
“Adam understood.”
“There’s no excuse, Ally. A person can’t buy back lost time.”
Alexis felt tears well up. Ultimately, Adam’s illness had afflicted all of them. Like a destructive moth, it had eaten into the fabric of their family, leaving holes none of them had mended. “For so long, you and Mom were like strangers. I thought you didn’t care about us anymore. . . . I was scared.”
“Defensive mode,” he said. She saw the stubble of his beard on his chin, dark, mixed with gray. “If you don’t care, then you can’t get hurt. Trouble was, I couldn’t not care no matter how hard I tried or how many long hours I worked. Back then, the notions that my son was sick and his doctors weren’t sure they could make him well just didn’t compute for me. There I was, one of the best-known attorneys in the city. I fixed things for clients. I solved problems for people all the time. But I couldn’t fix my own son. The feeling of total helplessness almost did me in, and instead of pulling us all closer, I disappeared into my work. I handled things badly, and I regret that.”
Alexis picked at her fingernail polish, then looked up. Her heart began to hammer, and she knew it was time to ask him the question that had been on her mind for months. “Dad . . . I saw you in a restaurant once with another woman. She was blond and young and pretty. I wasn’t spying. . . . It just happened.”
His face reddened, but he didn’t say anything. Alexis squirmed and wondered if she’d stepped too far out of bounds. Maybe it would be better to not hear his explanation. She wasn’t sure she could endure more bad news.
“Her name is Amy,” her father said eventually. “She’s a law clerk at the firm—bright, energetic, not unlike you. She looked to me as her mentor, and I was flattered. I took her to dinner twice. But nothing ever happened between us, Ally.” He lifted her chin. “Nothing. I have never been unfaithful to your mother. We’ve had our rough spells, but I’ve never loved any woman but her. And that’s the truth.”
Alexis felt relieved, but also embarrassed to have even asked the question. In her eyes, her parents had once been perfect, her father a god, her mother the queen of the world. She saw them now as ordinary people, flawed and desperately trying to find purpose and reason within a darkness too vast to comprehend. A darkness that was about to swallow them all. Her heart hurt and her mind felt numb. Both her parents had come to her with their confessions, and she realized that both wanted absolution from her. She was the one who remained. She was the one who held their shared memories of things done and things left undone. She was their daughter. Their only daughter, and the keeper of their dreams.
He stood. “I should go stay with your mother.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” She watched him leave, knowing she would wait before going in to give them time together to be with their only son.
Around five in the morning a sense of urgency woke Alexis from a sound sleep. She gathered up her belongings and returned to the ICU room where her parents held vigil over Adam. She dragged a chair alongside theirs, and curling her legs beneath her, she joined their bedside watch. The rails on the bed were up,
and she reached through them and put her hand over her brother’s to connect them with each other.
By seven o’clock, and with the hospital’s shift change, she noticed people drifting into the unit, nurses and caregivers whom she recognized from the oncology floor where Adam had stayed for so long. They came in quietly, touched his motionless body, and left. Often, they had something kind to say, like “Your son was the nicest kid I ever cared for,” and “Adam brought so much happiness to the floor. Everybody liked him,” and “He was one in a million. Like a big brother to the little kids.” Their words and gestures brought Alexis comfort, and she hoped Adam somehow knew how many people cared about him. He gave no sign that he did know. The ventilator did its job of breathing for him. The monitors kept track of his vital signs.
The end came gently. His heart simply stopped beating. A monitor let off a loud whine that caused them all to jump. A nurse came running. She switched off the machine. The only sound was the hiss of the ventilator. “He’s gone,” the nurse said.
Gone. Adam’s soul, his essence had vanished from their time and space. “Turn off the ventilator,” Blake said.
She did, and the air stilled. “You can stay as long as you want,” the nurse told them, fighting tears.
Alexis felt a tearing inside her mind, a rending, a sense of aloneless she had never felt before. She could no longer reach through the bed’s rails and touch her brother’s life. He had gone someplace without her, and only her own death would allow her to meet him again.
Suddenly the room seemed to close in on her, and she could scarcely catch her breath. “I—I’ll be down the hall,” she mumbled, and left on wobbly legs.
Outside the unit, the air felt cooler, less suffocating. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself, looked up. The hall was dimly lit, but she saw someone standing down by the elevator. He was backlit, but there was no mistaking the tall, square shape, the tousled hair. She broke into a run, and Sawyer opened his arms. She threw herself against him, sobbing. “Adam died.”
“I’m sorry, baby. So sorry about everything. Please forgive me.”
“H-how did you—?”
“Tessa told me you weren’t going to state. When I got home from school, I called you and I kept calling, but there was no answer. I finally figured out where you must be, so I came.”
His arms closed around her, and she clung to him. He was her anchor in this sea of agony. He was her safe haven, and for the moment, he was her home.
TWENTY
On graduation day at the Miami-Dade Civic Center, in a class of 513 seniors walking two by two, Alexis Chappel walked alone. Dressed in a navy blue cap and gown, she carried a single long-stemmed white rose. Tessa, Glory and Charmaine had given it to her in the staging area to carry in Adam’s memory. The graduation program offered a brief paragraph about losing Adam to cancer, which the principal read from the podium. When her name was called, Alexis walked across the stage and took her certificate from Mrs. Wiley, who shook her hand and beamed her a congratulatory smile. The debate team had finished second in the state tournament, but it was losing only two seniors—Alexis and Tessa—and there was always next year.
Her parents took her to dinner afterward. She told Tessa and Sawyer that she’d meet them at the graduation party at Charmaine’s house later. All through the meal, the empty space at the restaurant table for four seemed especially poignant. No one mentioned it.
When dessert was served—crème brûlée; her favorite—her father handed her a gift bag and placed a large, heavy manila envelope on the table. “The goodie bag’s from me and your mother.”
Alexis removed a small velvet box, raised the lid and discovered an exquisite pair of diamond stud earrings. “Oh my gosh! They’re beautiful!”
“There’s a bracelet that goes with them when you graduate from college, and a necklace when you’ve passed the bar,” her father said.
“You’ll spoil the surprise,” Eleanor chided.
“Sounds like bribery to me,” Alexis said.
“So call a cop,” her father joked. “Turn me in.” He slid the envelope toward her. “This came last week, but we saved it for you to open today.”
Alexis saw that the return address was Stetson University, Office of Admissions. Her heart raced. “A rejection letter wouldn’t come in an envelope this big, would it?”
“Open it and see,” Eleanor said.
Alexis tore open the packet. Her letter of acceptance was on top. She waved it at her parents. “I’m in!” The other material consisted of financial and housing forms, booklets and pamphlets. “There’s so much stuff!”
“Congratulations,” her mother said.
Alexis hugged the sheaf of papers to her. “I thought I’d blown it. I thought that because I didn’t go to state, they wouldn’t consider me.”
“I guess you were wrong,” her father said.
She looked from one parent to the other. They looked happy. She hadn’t thought they’d ever smile again, but now they were smiling, and they looked proud of her. And she was proud of them. They had joined Candle Lighters, a support group for parents who had lost children to cancer. There was a teen support group too, which Alexis was planning to attend. The loss of Adam was fresh and painful, but no amount of tears could bring him back to them. They all had to learn the new math for their family. The four of them had turned into three, and the three would turn to two when Alexis moved away to college.
“We have one other announcement to make,” her mother said.
“I’m listening.”
“Your father and I are setting up a foundation in Adam’s name. Your dad’s doing the paperwork, I’m doing the fund-raising. The goal is to make sure every child who enters a Miami hospital, for whatever reason, gets a brand-new teddy bear to cuddle. We’re calling the foundation Adam’s Boo-Boo Bears. A kid’s age won’t matter, because as you once told us, you’re never too old for a teddy bear.”
Tears welled in Alexis’s eyes. “Never,” she said, remembering the day they’d all worked on Adam’s Christmas project.
Her mother leaned forward, her expression one of eager determination. “I have big plans for the foundation. We’ll raise money to buy toys and other things for the pediatric floors that the hospital can’t afford. We’re even thinking about doing Christmas baskets and throwing parties every time a child completes chemo. What do you think?”
If anyone could pull off such a grand plan, it would be her mother. “I think Adam would be pleased,” Alexis said.
“You helped make it happen, you know. You made a difference, Ally, and we want you to be a part of it. Your ideas are welcome.”
“If I have any, I’ll let you know,” she said. “When I’m not studying to earn that diamond bracelet.”
Both of her parents laughed, and the sound flowed through her like an electric current, radiating warmth to the depths of her heart.
Sawyer came over to her house a week later, waving a letter and grinning broadly. “My scholarship to Duke came through.”
“Way to go,” Alexis said, giving him a hug. She was pleased for him because it was something he’d wanted for so long. Duke University had an NCAA soccer team that was one of the best in the country.
“I’ll ride the bench for the first year, but that’s okay. I’ll have top coaching, and I’ll play with some of the best talent in the country. Aside from myself, that is.”
She rolled her eyes.
He said, “I’ve been looking over the schedule for the season. We play a tournament in Orlando in the fall. And that means you can come be with me.” Deland, where Stetson was, wasn’t that far from Orlando. “Then for spring break, I figure we can both head over to Daytona Beach. What do you think?” His blue eyes grew serious.
“Spring is a long way off. You know, you may find a girl at Duke you’ll want to date.” She didn’t want to lock him into a commitment he might regret later.
“You’re the girl I want,” he said.
“But jus
t maybe—”
He pressed his fingertips to her lips. “Are you trying to dump me?”
She shook her head. “Your feelings could change.”
“Impossible.”
She slipped her arms around his neck. “All right. Let’s see how it goes. Just remember, I have the ability to read minds.”
He pulled back, grinned. “Then read this,” he said, and he kissed her.
Alexis felt she had one piece of unfinished business left before she could head off to college. She chose a warm summer day when she was alone in the house and when she knew she wouldn’t be interrupted. She’d been thinking about doing it for a long time, and now the timing seemed perfect.
She found a large box in the garage and dragged it upstairs. She paused briefly at the closed door of Adam’s room, took a deep breath, opened the door and walked in. The room was pristine, with every item in its place and the scents of lemon wax and freshly washed linen saturating the air. The cleaning woman had done up the room the week after Adam’s death, but Alexis saw him everywhere—on his bed, by his closet, at his desk. She knew that her parents sometimes slipped inside to sit on the bed and soak up what remained of their son. It was something they’d learned at their support group meetings. Grieving takes time. Don’t rush it.
Alexis didn’t know how long they would leave the room intact; that would be up to her mother and father. She only knew what she had to do for her sake. She was going to gather up some of Adam’s things and create a time capsule of her own. She planned to tuck it away, just as Ms. Lola had saved the papers from their first-grade class; then one day, perhaps when she was grown, or married, or a mother herself, she would open it up and revisit the brother she had loved and lost.
She picked up his baseball. The well-worn hide was smudged, but she held it along the stitching the way she’d often seen him do. She thumped it once against the wall behind the door, and the familiar, solid thud made her smile. She went through his dresser, found a sweatshirt that still held his scent. She buried her nose in the fabric, fought the urge to cry and dropped it into the box with the baseball. She combed the room methodically, choosing from his favorite comic books, his baseball trophies, his Matchbox car collection. She tossed in several of his school notebooks and a few important photographs from an old box where he had stashed them along with the negatives.
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