Chapter Thirty-Four Sawyer
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sawyer
The IV pole that I drag along with me from the bathroom across the hall is the only thing keeping me upright after the last twenty-four hours.
According to the doctor on call, it’s a miracle I didn’t sustain worse injuries outside the scratches, scrapes, and bruises marring my body.
A miracle.
Two people are dead, and I’m still here.
How is that a miracle?
My body is still stiff and sore, but I’ve refused pain medication. It makes me too groggy, and I prefer feeling the weight of reality. Drowning it out will only make the comeback ten times worse when I remember what I’ll be walking into once the hospital releases me.
When I get back to my room, the new shift nurse, Melody, offers to help me back into bed. I shake my head, determined to show them I’m perfectly fine on my own.
After all, I’m a walking miracle.
I snort to myself, making Melody’s brows pinch in confusion. Once I’m seated, she helps me get the blanket over me. “Have you reconsidered?”
She’s asking about my parents.
I’m legally an adult, so nobody needs to tell them I’m here. “They would freak out,” I whisper.
Melody gives me a small smile. She can’t be much older than me, but it seems maternal somehow. Not sympathetic, but something close to it. “Wouldn’t they feel the same way if they found out after the fact? You’ve gone through so much, Sawyer. They should be here for you.”
They’ve been through enough because of me.
My recklessness.
Everybody who’s dealt with me knows the circumstances of my health. My scans all lit up like a glow stick. I was all but a Christmas tree that the medical students are probably sad they missed out on. “Would it matter?” I doubt, not bothering to shrug as I settle into the bed.
She doesn’t answer, but I can tell she wants to argue with me. We both know that’s not her job, though, even if it’s frustrating for her. “Do you need anything?”
To get out of here.
To go back to that night.
To stop Dawson from getting into that truck.
I close my eyes. “No.”
A hand comes down and touches my shoulder. “The oncologist will be in shortly to speak with you. Then we can discuss your departure. Okay?”
I say nothing, closing my eyes before the nurse leaves sometime later. When I open them, I’m greeted by the darkness in the room.
The tick tock, tick tock, tick tock seems so much louder than it actually is, and nothing I do can quiet it.
Then the door reopens, and an older man in a white lab coat enters, introducing himself as the head oncologist. I don’t hear his name. I barely even hear the first half of what he says.
He’s patient but stoic. I suppose in his profession he has to be. Not cold, but not overly friendly. Why put effort into people it won’t make a difference to? He can’t grow attached to the types of people he sees, or he’ll never survive his own life.
“Do you understand?” I hear him ask.
It’s only then that I finally look at him. He’s older than my father, if I had to guess. There are age speckles on his face. Wrinkles on his forehead. He’s well kept. Groomed. Clean shaven. Nothing about him sticks out. He’s not wearing bright colors but neutral tones. Even his socks are white. There’s nothing special about him.
Or about this conversation.
He must know I haven’t been listening, so he says, “The survival rate for people with your type of stage-four cancer is fifty-seven percent over the course of ten years with treatment. I don’t need to tell you what that entails, from what I’ve heard. But a decade is a long time, especially for somebody so young.”
Ten years is also a long time to slowly wither away, losing all that youth and letting the people you love watch it drain from you no matter the money they sink into medications or the hope people offer in their prayers.
A decade’s worth of pain and suffering and watching people crumble around you is not what I want to be put through.
Not again.
I choose silence, letting him have a one-man conversation to tell me what he came here to.
“But,” he adds, the word a scratch to my soul. There’s always a “but,” and it always leads to bad news.
At least my mother isn’t here to witness it.
“Dr. Miranda noticed the start of discoloration on your skin and in your eyes when he examined you earlier, and your labs are showing significant damage to the liver. All of this to say that the cancer has spread since you stopped your treatment.”
It’s the first time anybody has said those words—that I stopped treatment.
Not finished.
Not won.
Ended it.
I never got to ring the bell.
Never got a farewell send off with claps and cheers from the oncology team.
After five years of battling, of broken hopes, of sickness and weakness and mental and emotional debilitation, I was done.
Mom begged me to reconsider. “One more, baby. Try it one more time.”
But I had tried.
I tried over and over and over.
I tried for her.
I tried for me.
I tried for Dad and Bentley and my grandparents and aunt. I gave everything I had until I had nothing left to give.
Maybe she finally saw that, finally realized I couldn’t keep going on the blind hope that a miracle would happen.
So I stopped. Told the doctors no more.
I told them it was time for me to live my life.
What time I had left, anyway.
“There are tests we can do to figure out a better timeline—”
“No,” I finally say, voice small. “No tests.”
He pauses, clearing his throat. “Miss Hawkins—”
“You’ve seen firsthand what we go through,” I cut him off, looking him straight in the eyes for the first time since he walked in. “I’ve been doing this for five years. For five years . I’ve seen people get their hopes up that this treatment will be the last. And then the treatment after that. It never ends. I don’t want to live like that anymore. I don’t want to live…” I stop myself when my voice becomes hoarse, shaking my head and staring down at my hands fidgeting over the blankets.
The doctor nods once, standing and flattening his palm along his shirt before pulling a card from his front and holding it out. “You’ve had to make a lot of tough decisions at such a young age. For that, I’ll never envy you or any of my patients who’ve had to do the same. If you change your mind, call my office.”
I take the business card and stare at it, not saying a word as he leaves the room.
I’m grateful he doesn’t apologize.
I’m sick of people saying they’re sorry.
It doesn’t change anything.
A single tear falls on the rectangular piece of cardstock in my hand.
Then another.
Then another.
* * *
I’m stuck in my head, reliving the final moments of the boy that the police officer who came in two days ago said was dead on arrival.
Partially ejected were his exact words.
The questions they asked were hard to digest, knowing what I knew. I didn’t want to tell them anything that would make Dawson out to be a troubled person, even if he was. He was gone. Why make his memory into something it didn’t deserve to be?
Somebody else died, Officer Pedler reminded me when I was stuck in my own grief. If you know anything to help us put her family at ease, now would be the time to tell us.
Dawson was a good person with bad habits.
Addiction.
He should have never gotten behind the wheel or looked away from the road. Maybe if I wasn’t there…wasn’t arguing with him…
Swallowing, I squeeze my eyes closed.
I know it wasn’t my fault, but I can’t help but feel the gripping weight of guilt on my conscience anyway. How could I not? It was bad enough Dawson was de—
The word gets stuck, causing the nausea to come back. I was suspended upside down by my seat belt while Dawson lay somewhere half in the vehicle and half out of it, through the windshield because he hadn’t had his seat belt on.
I don’t know how I got out, but I did.
All I can hope is that it was quick for him.
That he didn’t suffer.
Sniffling back tears, I clear my throat.
I’ve had three days to think about what it must have been like for him while I slipped in and out of consciousness before the firefighters finished pulling me out of the vehicle.
I have no idea who the second person was, the one driving the other vehicle—couldn’t gather the courage to ask for a name. It was another student from LSU from what I heard. I wonder if the school will have a vigil and if it’ll be for only her or for both of them.
Not wanting to think about it anymore, I swallow down the emotions crammed into my throat and take a deep breath.
Despite not wanting to tell my parents what happened, I wish they were here—wish Mom could run her fingers through my stubbly hair and tell me everything will be okay. I’m sure she’d say she’s glad that I’m still here.
Maybe that’s what I want to avoid.
I don’t need to hear that.
It should have been me.
I’m stirred awake sometime later by the nurse knocking and letting me know that my sister is here to see me. I don’t have the energy to point out that I don’t have one or to bother with my appearance, knowing I look as bad as I feel.
Dixie walks in, stopping short when she sees me. The real me, not the version I’ve been hiding for almost three months. Nobody knows what happened to my wig, and I haven’t cared enough to worry about how much money is gone with its disappearance.
Her lower lip wiggles, but she doesn’t cry. If her red, puffy eyes are any indication, she’s been doing that enough as it is.
She has to have heard about Dawson by now.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers once the nurse leaves us. She stays by the door, fiddling with her hands. “I should have stayed. I should have driven you two h-home. I could have. If I’d stopped thinking about my feelings, if I had thought rationally…”
I’m not mad.
Dawson isn’t her responsibility.
Neither am I.
Her eyes go to my head, walking in hesitantly to take a better look. “Your hair…” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t look bad. You didn’t have to wear a wig if you were uncomfortable with it.”
I wish vanity was the only illness that plagued me. Living life would have been a hell of a lot easier if that’s all I had to worry about.
Still feeling numb, I curl into the blankets.
How much money is this going to cost? Another hospital bill stacked up and weighing on my conscience. Will Mom and Dad have to pay for this one too?
“Sawyer,” Dixie pleads. “Talk to me.”
I blink, my eyes finally meeting hers. She looks so far away even from beside my bed, somehow seeming so much more fragile than I do. She knows how this accident impacted people, unlike me, who’s locked far away from the people I started integrating with regularly.
Dixie looks at me with glassy eyes, waiting for me to say something. Anything. Then she looks around, seeing the notes on the patient board hanging on the wall.
I know the second she sees the two words in red under the specialty notes.
Cancer patient.
Her breath catches as she stares, as if she read it wrong somehow. When she turns back to me, her eyes go to my hair, then down to my face.
Then she says, “Your skeletons.”
I release a breath before closing my eyes and fighting back the tears. “We all have them. Some of ours are just bigger.”
She starts sniffling, so I reach out until she takes my hand. We hold on so tight that I can’t feel my fingers, but I don’t care. It’s what we both need.
I don’t know how long we stay like that before I whisper, “I’m sorry about Dawson. I know you…cared. I did too.”
Her lip quivers.
Then I say, “I told Banks I should have chosen Dawson. But I…I didn’t mean it.”
She stares at me.
“He deserves more than me.”
She swallows.
“You all deserve more than me,” I whisper.
Dixie shakes her head, her mouth starting to open.
But I don’t let her argue. “He’s going to need you.”
Her mouth parts again and then closes.
All I whisper is “Someday.”