35. Greer
Greer
Sunlight slips further along the wrought-iron table between my sister and me, steam rising off matching cups of coffee, bags laden down with books strewn across the surface.
It’s become something of a ritual between us. Whenever the end of my longest call shift of the month happens, she moves her schedule around and we go to the bookstore together, find a coffee shop, and try to spend the afternoon in relative silence, reading, until Stella inevitably gets bored.
She’s been quieter for longer than usual today, and I don’t know if it’s because I still look exhausted—she made me ice roll my face for ten minutes before we left the house—or if she can feel the way each beat of my heart strains against its borders, the way these empty spaces in me bloom with Beckett and my brain can’t help but trample over the freshly tilled soil and beautiful sprouting things that happen to be the exact same shade as his eyes.
She’s many things, but she’s perceptive.
I shift in my seat, debating which book to start, and I absentmindedly run my fingers along the strap of my earmuffs where they hang around my neck, tracing the stitching that spells out Beckett’s number.
“You’ve grown quite attached to those.” Stella’s eyes flick up to me from behind the pages of her book, voice bemused.
I shrug. “They’re practical. It’s October in Toronto. The grass frosts more mornings than not.”
The corners of her lips furl upwards into a smile that looks more catlike than anything, and she blinks at me. “So that wasn’t a grainy photo of you I saw on that Instagram account dedicated to the WAGS of all Toronto sports teams?”
“I’m neither a wife nor a girlfriend.” I pick up the book closest to me—I’ve been waiting for this one where a human girl touches an ancient sword, and she gets transported to a fae realm and held captive—before leaning back in my chair. “So, you must be mistaken.”
She tips her head, and a wave of auburn hair, brighter than usual in the afternoon sun, escapes her bun. “Could have fooled me.”
“You sound like Beckett,” I say absentmindedly, opening the book to the first page. “He says he doesn’t think we’re friends.”
“Because you’re not.” She snorts, looking back down at her book.
I think she’s right , my heart stumbles.
But I think of our father—or maybe my brain sends the memory of him in the hospital bed, all ashen skin and crackling lungs, to the forefront so I can never, ever forget what’s at stake.
“We have to be.”
Stella drops her book and folds her hands together over top of it. She angles her head to the side and asks me a question that should have a simple answer, and maybe it sort of does. But it’s still the one thing I don’t think I can tell her.
“Okay, but you’ve never told me why. You’ve made these grand speeches and soliloquies—” She holds up a hand when my lips part, indignant, and she continues. “I’m not saying that to be cruel. I’m saying that to make a point. You have these firm convictions about needing to be alone because you give too much, but you’ve only ever made loose references to your job. How much that takes from you, how draining it is. Give me something real, Greer. No deflection. No evasion. No bullshit.”
“Do you talk to your clients like this?” I try, but Stella’s lips pull into a flat line, and she makes a carry-on gesture. She’s going to wait me out.
My fingers feather uselessly in space, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to tell my sister that even though I love her—I love our father—I like to think there’s another world out there where I didn’t say yes, and that maybe, in that world, someone else died for him.
I stretch my hands out, and I study my fingers, pink against the fall air—hands that might be the biggest hypocrites of all, that somehow take life and give life all at once—and I feel a hand much bigger than mine brush over the back, a finger hooking against my pinky, and I hear it.
Promise me you’ll think about telling her. As long as it’s right for you.
Looking back up at my sister, sitting here in front of me—healthy and whole with no evidence that her skull was fractured once upon a time and her pancreas hung in tatters in her abdomen.
She looks like nothing ever touched her. Whole. No empty pieces left over from where she carved something vital out of herself. My voice cracks. “Do you ever think about the car accident? What happened after?”
Her eyebrows knit, lips pulling to the side as she chews on the inside of her cheek before answering. “Yes. But I don’t think it’s quite like you do.”
“Why do you think that is?” I whisper, and I really do want to know—I think I’d like to be as unburdened as my sister seems.
Stella takes a measured exhale. “I had time to heal. When my body was stitching itself back together, so was my mind. And it got to stay that way.”
The last words catch in her throat, and it hangs between us—the empty space of me.
I inhale, squeezing my eyes shut before looking at her. “Sometimes—most times, actually—I wish I could go back in time. We were so young, and I know—I know he got sober, and we got to have this beautiful thing and a second chance with him that most people don’t get. But sometimes, I wish...”
My words fall into nothing, and I think they might plummet into that all that emptiness—but maybe they land on the ground, on all that soil with all those beautiful things peeking through the dirt, and it’s a safe place for them.
Because even if she doesn’t, can’t, won’t understand—someone did.
I blink up at my sister, inhaling and shoulders shuddering when I finally, finally tell her. “I wish I said no. I wish it wasn’t me.”
Stella pulls her head back, her eyes go wide, and I think tears pool along her lash line, but she keeps waiting.
“I wish I didn’t have to. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t forgiven him for what he did our entire lives and what he did when he got behind the wheel. I didn’t want him to die, but if I could go back in time to right before and someone said to me it doesn’t have to be you, but someone else needs to die for that to happen, I think I would have said yes. How fucked up is that?” I watch the steam still rise off my coffee, and I grab it without thinking, tapping my thumb on the plastic lid before I finally look back at her. “And then I just became this person who takes the way something was taken from me. What if the people I’m operating on felt like me? It’s not like I have a chance to ask. What if all the car accidents—”
She shakes her head and leans forward, stilling my fingers and gripping them in her hand. “You shouldn’t have had to do it.”
My heart and my brain both screech to a halt. For once, I think everything in me goes silent. Because there it is. This thing I’ve been waiting to hear from someone else my whole life. But they whir back to life, because it’s all we’ve ever known. I start to shake my head. “You weren’t a match.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Stella whispers. “I wasn’t a match. You were. But that doesn’t mean you should have had to do it. This is a fact, Greer. You shouldn’t have had to give a piece of yourself away so someone else could be whole. We never should have been in the situation to begin with.”
“But we were.”
She nods softly. “We were. And you did an impossibly hard thing. You were brave again after a lifetime of being brave. You gave something to him—” Her voice breaks and she squeezes my fingers. “You gave something to me. And maybe we haven’t given enough back to you. You felt empty, and instead of talking about that, giving it life, filling you back up the way we should have, we just skirted around the entire thing. And I’m sorry for that.”
It feels nice against my skin, her apology, her acknowledgement. But it’s not a miracle. “Do you ever think about how we—I don’t know—you spend all day with people like our dad, and then I’m walking around with livers and kidneys in my hands that don’t belong to me?”
“Sure,” she agrees, squeezing my fingers before letting go and leaning back in her chair. “Addiction is a cycle. We know that. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think it means that either of us are just continuing to give away pieces of ourselves to this disease we were never going to win against. Maybe some days it looks like that. But other days we’re compassionate, and kind, and we understand someone in a world that doesn’t. Healing isn’t simple and it’s not linear. You aren’t going to wake up one day with the knots of all these complicated feelings untangled.”
“I don’t want to be this person who doesn’t leave enough for themselves. I don’t want to—”
Stella holds up a hand, cutting me off.
“I’m not qualified to operate and fix people the way you do. But I am qualified to tell you this.” My sister leans forward, and somehow, she’s both the fifteen-year-old I was desperate to save and this fully-fledged adult who knows so much more than me. “Somewhere along the way, you’ve confused setting a boundary with closing yourself off.”
“Have you been talking to Rav?” I ask through a wet laugh.
“Sure.” Stella shrugs, waving her hand in the air, silver rings adorning her fingers catching in the afternoon sunshine. “We trade case notes on your file.”
I smile softly. “I’ll be sure to report you both to your various governing bodies.”
“So, this is it? The big secret reason you want to be alone?” She blinks, lips tugging to the side with a small exhale. “I’m not minimizing, but as far as I can tell, Beckett Davis isn’t asking for one of your organs.”
Except that there is this piece of me I think he wants. It sits in my chest, where it beats and keeps me alive.
“I’m not sure it’s that easy,” I whisper.
“Why not?” Stella counters. “Has he ever once asked you to give him more?”
I don’t think we’re friends.
This tentative toss of a rope that maybe I could grab onto while I’m treading water and this stupid storm of my brain rages around me.
But that’s it. It’s as far as Beckett would ever go, even though I know he’s probably tempted to dive in and hold me above water at the detriment to his own oxygen intake.
I exhale. “No, but—”
She interrupts again, palm coming down on the table and jade eyes wide. “I know you deal in absolutes. Levels and blood markers and the certainty of a scientifically proven match of an organ. But grief, trauma, and healing are not some formula that’s going to click into place for you. If you’re waiting for a day you wake up and magically feel healed and whole, that day is never going to come.” Stella smiles, but it’s sad and she shakes her head before her voice goes soft. “That’s not how life works. The human experience”—she reaches forward and taps the cover of my book—“is very rarely one of those.”
I don’t say anything. But I sit back in my chair, inhaling and exhaling as my heart sings, because here it is—permission to leave its cage—while my brain tells me she doesn’t understand, she didn’t give a piece of herself away, and it’s still not safe.
But my sister is wiser than me, and her features stay soft when she raises a finger to the front of her face, pointing at me. “Think about it.”
I swallow, nodding, and I stretch out my fingers again. I look at them and I imagine Beckett’s fingers traipsing over mine, and I think of something else he said. Looking back up at Stella, I ask, “Can you please stop forgetting about Dad’s meds? And check in more to see when he needs a refill?”
Her hand finds her chest, like there’s a visceral pain there, and understanding flashes in her eyes. The jade dulls for a moment, but then Stella nods, leaning forward and whispering, “I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”
It’s a promise, and I think she might want me to make one to her—that I’ll try, that I’ll open myself up and maybe I’ll stop being so scared, that maybe I’ll give this thing that sits in my chest away.
But I’m not so sure, so I toss the word out into the storm with Beckett’s rope— maybe —and I lay a drawbridge down across whatever cavern stretches between my sister and me.
“I hope Beckett plays well on Sunday. It’s the last game before they play Baltimore.”
“Oh,” Stella’s eyes lighten, and she nods. “I hope they win.”