Devoted (The Beginning of Us #1)

Kimberly

Hope is expensive. The bill always comes due long before you know whether it was worth paying.

There were two kinds of pain, and I had spent the last year learning to tell them apart.

There was the small kind, like the split in the plastic chair outside the consultation room that bit into the back of my thigh every time I moved, and there was the other kind, the one that had no edges I could find with my fingers.

So I kept moving in that chair. I kept pressing my leg into the sharp little wound in the plastic, because at least that one I knew where to find.

The waiting area at Cascade Cancer Center was painted a color somebody in an office once decided was soothing, a pale greenish nothing.

There was a fish tank in the corner with three fish in it, a fake plastic castle, and a basket of pamphlets with titles like Talking To Your Family and Understanding Your Options.

I had read every one of those pamphlets over the past year.

They never said the thing I actually needed to know, which was where a person was supposed to find forty thousand dollars by spring.

On the other side of the glass, Penny sat on the exam table swinging her sneakers back and forth like she was nine years old and parked outside the principal’s office.

Arms crossed, chin up, that bored, who-cares look she’d been wearing for months, the one that fooled nobody and was built to fool me most of all.

She caught me watching and rolled her eyes, and I smiled at her, because that was my job. I was the one who smiled.

Twenty minutes earlier the oncologist had said his piece in that gentle voice they must teach in a special class somewhere, the one made to lay the worst news of your life on a cushion so it didn't make a sound when it hit.

The last cycle hadn’t done anything. The tumor hadn’t shrunk, hadn’t slowed, hadn’t so much as blinked.

There was another option, he told me, newer, with real promise in the early trials.

His eyes were kind when he said it, and the kindness was almost the hardest part.

Kind people didn't waste it on situations that were fine.

Then he slid a paper to the billing coordinator, and she slid it across the desk to me. I looked at the number printed at the bottom, and everything inside me went quiet and far away. Out of network. Experimental. A figure with a comma sitting in a place my bank account had never once put one.

I folded the paper in half and zipped it into my bag. I said thank you, because what else was there to say to a man who'd just told me the price of my sister's life and watched me do the math.

The girl swinging her feet behind that glass was not the girl I grew up with.

My Penny couldn’t sit still to save her life.

She was the loudest person in any room she ever walked into, the one who struck up conversations with strangers in the grocery line and came home with their whole life stories, the one who used to shake me awake at midnight because she’d choreographed a dance to a song on the radio and I had to see it right now, this second; it absolutely could not wait until morning.

She joined every club. She had a laugh that filled the whole apartment, head thrown back, no shame in it at all. People who met her once still asked about her years later. How’s your sister, they’d say. The bright one.

Then came the headaches she pretended weren’t happening.

The morning she dropped a glass in the sink and just stood there staring at her own hand, confused, because it wouldn’t close around the next one.

Then the scan, and the word nobody in our family ever wanted to hear twice.

And after the scan, the girl who filled doorways started getting smaller.

Not in her body, or at least not at first. It was in the way she let herself take up space in the world.

She quit two of her clubs and then the rest. She stopped making up dances.

She started handing me that bored look like it was a door she was pulling shut behind her, and the thing that scared me, the thing I lay awake over, wasn’t the number in my bag.

It was the suspicion that somewhere in the last twelve months my baby sister had quietly decided this was a fight she was going to lose and had stopped wasting her energy showing up for it.

I would have signed up for the comma in the wrong place a hundred times over to get the other Penny back. The one who believed she’d live.

The consultation door opened and Penny came out, pulling her hood up over her hair like she could disappear into it.

"Well," she said. "Great use of an afternoon."

I got up and slung my bag onto my shoulder before she could catch me sitting there, adding it all up with my whole face. "You want to stop and eat somewhere? My treat."

"Your treat." She looked at me, and we both knew exactly how much was in my account. "I’m not hungry. Can we just go home, please?"

It wasn’t really a question, so I didn’t really answer it.

Outside, the city was doing what it did every October, raining without any conviction, a thin gray drizzle that never quite committed to weather and never quite quit either.

The parking garage smelled like wet concrete and cold exhaust, and my old hatchback took three tries to turn over before it caught.

I pulled us out into downtown traffic with the wipers ticking on their slowest setting, and for a few blocks Penny said nothing at all, just watched the brake lights smear and run down the glass.

Then, to the window, she said, "They’re con artists, you know. All of them."

"Penny."

"They are. They take your money and they smile and they shrug and they say, well, we gave it our best shot, and then they slide you the next bill before you’ve finished crying.

" She turned her head against the headrest to look at me. "I knew that last round was useless before we even started it. I could’ve told you and saved everybody six weeks and a fortune we don’t have. "

"It wasn’t useless. It was worth trying."

"It did nothing."

"That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth a try."

"Worth trying." She let out a small, flat sound that wanted to be a laugh but didn’t have it in her. "You know that’s exactly what they said about Mom. Word for word. Worth trying. Right up until it wasn’t."

I kept my eyes on the road and both hands at ten and two, and I did not let my face move, because if my face moved, we were both going over the edge, and one of us had to drive.

Our mother had three years’ worth of trying.

Three years of treatments, second opinions, and a man on the phone walking us through payment plans like he was reading off a takeout menu.

Three years that emptied out everything our family had and a great deal we didn’t, and at the end of it we buried her anyway.

Penny was twelve. Old enough to watch every second of it, and to learn the lesson I’d spend years trying to pull back out of her: that hope was just a more expensive road to the same headstone.

"You are not Mom," I said.

"You don’t know that."

"I know I’m not going to sit here and let you talk yourself into the grave."

"Talk to myself." Her voice climbed, and she pushed off the headrest to face me, openmouthed, like I’d just said the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.

"Kim, I’m not the one who needs talking out of anything.

You’re the one who can’t say the word. Say it.

Say there’s no money. Say it out loud, one time. "

"There’s a way. There’s always a way; I just have to find it."

"There it is." She threw a hand up. "There’s the way. You and your way. You’ve been finding the way since I could remember. You found the way through Mom, you found the way through every shut-off notice, and now you’re going to find the way to spend money we will never have on a long shot that buys me three lousy months in a hospital bed, and you’re going to call it saving me. "

"I am trying to keep you alive." It came out loud, louder than I meant in the small wet box of the car, and it scraped on the way up. "Excuse me for that. Excuse me for not being ready to plan your funeral at nineteen."

"It’s just true." She was almost shouting now, and her eyes were wet and furious and nineteen. "And you can’t hear it, because if I die after you went broke trying to save me, then you did everything, and you don’t have to feel guilty.

That’s what this is. This isn’t about my life, Kim.

It’s about you not being able to live with losing one more person. "

That one stuck, because it had enough truth folded into it to bleed. I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t, not without saying something I’d have to take back, so I drove and let the wipers do the talking, and beside me Penny turned back to the window.

She pressed her forehead to the cold glass. Her shoulders gave one small jump and then went still, and I knew she was crying the silent way she’d learned from me, like there was a charge for the sound.

We didn’t say another word the whole way home.

Our apartment was four hundred square feet on the third floor of a building that hadn't been painted since before I was born, and you could stand dead center of it and nearly touch every wall.

It smelled like the lavender oil Penny rubbed on her wrists, because she said it covered the hospital smell that rode home on her skin.

Penny went straight down the short hall without looking at me.

Her door slammed hard enough to jump the picture frames, the one of the three of us at the beach the summer before everything, all of us squinting, sunburned and stupid with happiness, Penny in the middle with her arms thrown around both our necks.

The frame knocked crooked. I stood there and looked at it.

I was still standing in the dark kitchen when my phone went off. Katelyn. The middle one of us, twenty-five, running the children’s room at the community library and reading more books than any human being I have ever met.

"How’d it go?" she said when I answered. I could hear the library behind her, the rattle of a cart, a small voice asking somebody where the dinosaurs were.

"It went," I said.

There was a pause, the careful kind. Katelyn had known me my whole life. She could hear the things I left out of a sentence better than the things I put in. "Kim."

"The last round didn’t take. They’ve got something new, a trial." I stopped. The number was sitting behind my teeth, and I could not make myself say it, because saying it to her would make it real in a way it wasn’t yet, and she had enough to carry. "We’re looking at options."

"How much."

"Kate."

"How much, Kim."

I told her. I heard her breath go out on the other end, slow. Behind her, the small voice found the dinosaurs.

"Okay," she said, after a moment. "Okay. I’ll pick up the weekend shifts at the front desk, and I never cashed the Alvarez tutoring checks, that’s something. I’ll add it up tonight."

"Kate, you haven’t been paid in two months."

"It’s coming. They said the budget’s coming." She said it the way we both said things now, flat and even, as if saying them plainly might be enough to make them true. "We’ll figure it out. We always do. You taught me that, remember?"

I leaned my forehead against the cold edge of the cabinet and shut my eyes.

My sister, three dollars from broke herself, handing me my own trick back down the phone, telling me, for once, not to be afraid.

For one second I wanted, just once in my life, to be the one who got told it would be okay and got to believe it.

"Yeah," I said. "We always do."

"Is she home?"

"In her room. We had it out in the car." I rubbed my eyes. "She wants to stop. Go back to school. Says it’s not up for a vote."

Katelyn was quiet a moment. "She’s scared, Kim."

"I know she’s scared. I’m scared too. That’s not a reason to lie down and let it win."

"That’s not what I meant." A breath. "I’ll be home by nine. Don’t eat the good leftovers out of spite."

It pulled something close to a laugh out of me, which I’m fairly sure was the whole reason she said it. "No promises."

"Love you. And tell Penny I’m bringing that ridiculous vampire book she keeps pretending she doesn’t want."

"She’ll act like she doesn’t care."

"I know. Bye."

I went to pull my sweater off over my head, and the pendant caught on the collar, a small tug at the back of my neck, and just like that Greta walked into the room with me.

Greta Whitlock was the woman I had worked for until a month ago, and she was the closest thing to a mother I'd had since I lost my own. She was small and straight-backed and she had decided, for reasons I never fully understood, that I was worth the trouble of liking.

She used to make me tea on the back terrace of the house out in Medina, her orange cat Maple a dead weight in her lap, and tell me everything I was doing wrong in the garden.

"You cut them wrong," she said to me once, pointing her secateurs at a cane I’d just butchered. "But you love them right. And loving them right is the only part nobody can teach you."

I'd been so wrapped up in Penny that I'd managed to forget, for whole hours at a time, that Greta was gone too. The grief had a way of waiting for me to set something down before it picked me back up. God, I missed her.

She gave me the necklace on a gray afternoon a lot like this one.

Reached up and fastened the clasp at the back of my neck before I could get a hand up to stop her, waving off every word I had about how it was far too much.

"I have no daughters," she said, as if that explained it, "So it’s yours now. Wear it where I can see it on you."

And near the very end, when she’d gone small in that big bed and her hands had turned papery and cool in mine, she caught my wrist with what strength she had left and told me she’d set something aside for me at the company. A place, she called it. So your family won’t go hungry, she said.

A place at the company, she’d said. The company was real. I’d heard about it for the four years I’d worked for her, that tower of glass downtown, the empire her two sons ran now. She used to talk about those boys with her whole heart in her mouth.

I typed the name into my phone. Whitlock Group. I found the address and copied it onto the back of the folded paper.

I didn’t know which of Greta’s sons I’d have to face in the morning. I only knew that I was going to walk into that tower, look a stranger in the eye, and ask him to keep a promise he had no idea his mother ever made.