Chapter 26 #3
He looks up at the moon and exhales slowly.
“You’re the first person who’s asked me that, d’you know that?
Most people don’t want to talk about it.
Not really. They want to tell me how amazing it is that I lived and how worried they were.
They want to know how I am now, and they want to hear that everything’s fine, so they feel okay about not asking.
” He turns and looks at me. His eyes are shadowed from the low light and moonlight dances over his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, washing him in shades of cool blue. “But not you, huh?”
“So.” I butt his shoulder with mine. “Are you going to tell me what it was like or not?”
We stop at a traffic light and wait for the green man to light up. When it does, we fall in step with each other.
“It wasn’t the worst part,” he says after so much time has passed that I thought he’d decided not to answer my question, “the nearly dying. For me, getting sick, being sick, and realizing my heart was giving out was the worst. That, and watching the people I love suffer because of me. It was this gradual letting go of things that mattered to me. This slow, painful acceptance that I wasn’t going to live the life I thought I would, and then a slow, painful acceptance that I wasn’t going to live at all.
That was the worst. It took a long time to get there.
The treatments worked for a while and then stopped.
Feeling shitty month in and out. Getting weaker every day.
Being in the hospital for longer and longer each time.
” He takes a breath and slows his pace. “The people who love you all look at you the same way when you’re dying, did you know that? ”
I didn’t know that, so I shake my head.
“It starts out as an almost manic look of determination. They look at you hard, eyes blazing with intention, belief, faith, whatever you want to call it. They tell you you’ll live in hard, hissing tones at first.” He pauses, slowing his pace when he starts walking again.
“They’re trying to convince themselves as much as they’re trying to convince you.
It’s like they think if they can get you to believe it, it’ll happen.
You’ll live. Like they can cheat death by making you believe you’ll live.
” He laughs softly and without humor. “That lasts for a while. And then, eventually, the look changes. It’s still a little crazed, but they can’t hide the fear anymore.
It’s there, in their eyes, plain as day.
As the sick person, it’s your job to pretend you can’t see it, and as a loved one, it’s your job to pretend you don’t feel it.
It’s all very fucked up. A strange dance where everyone is moving to different music.
Every now and then, the facade would crack, and their fears and tears would pour out onto me.
It was scary and sad and heartbreaking, and most of all,” he sighs, “it was draining. That’s what it was.
More than anything, dying was fucking exhausting. ”
I laugh, though I’m not sure I’m supposed to. It’s not that what he’s saying is funny. It’s the way he’s said it.
He’s pleased that I did. I can tell by the way his lips hitch to the side.
“Once that stage passed,” he continues, “and things got really bad, it was different. It was like a gear had shifted. It was almost a relief because the pretense was gone. The fear in my loved ones was still there, but it was overshadowed by sorrow. I was in and out a lot of the time, and in a way, that was a mercy. I couldn’t always talk, so I had no choice but to go inside myself.
It hurt to breathe, and I was aware of every beat of my heart.
That’s what I remember. Every heartbeat.
Every one. I felt them all, and braced, waiting each time, to see if that beat, the one that had just pumped blood to my body, would be the last.”
We arrive at the entrance to our apartment building at the same time as he expels a long breath.
There’s a low wall retaining a flower bed on either side of the gate, and instead of going upstairs to our apartment, Connor sits on the wall.
I do the same. He’s looking ahead of us, not at the cars parked on the street, and not at the buildings on the other side of the road.
He’s looking through all that, at things only he can see.
“It sounds really weird,” he continues, “but by the end, it was kind of peaceful. Everything was removed. My pain, the people I was leaving. They were there, but removed. It didn’t matter nearly as much as I thought it would.
The veil between this world and the next one was thin.
It was like a black muslin curtain. A gauzy film that I could see shadows and shapes through.
I wasn’t scared—not of dying or being dead.
To be honest, I was ready. I accepted it, and I don’t think it would have hurt or anything like that.
” He hesitates and stops talking to look at me.
I look back at him, and whatever he sees in my eyes is enough to convince him to go on.
“Everyone says how I’m so strong to have survived, but it’s not true.
By the end, I wasn’t fighting, and I wasn’t strong.
It wasn’t that I was clinging to life… It was that I didn’t know how to let go.
It wasn’t even that, really. This is going to sound kind of out there, but it didn’t feel like my choice.
It…it felt like something was keeping me here.
Something insurmountable. A weight attached to me.
A vise. Invisible chains I couldn’t break free of. ”
He glances at me quickly to see my reaction to what he said.
“Geez,” I say dryly, “sounds like it fucking sucked.”
It starts as a snort. A puff of air leaving him that makes his shoulders shake, and it quickly devolves to a belly laugh that leaves him doubled over and breathless. The moon and the sky hear him, the stars do too. The sky stays the same color it was moments ago, but something in me lights up.
“Yeah, it sucked pretty hard,” he says, wiping the corners of his eyes.
“So, is that what made you all wise and shit?”
He huffs softly and the dimple in his cheek dips. “I don’t know if it made me wise, but it’s definitely what changed my perspective on lots of things.”
We sit in silence for a beat, and then he gets up off the wall. When I do the same, I rock to the side, a little off-balance.
The shadows in his eyes laugh at my expense. “Are you hammered, Lennon?”
“A little.”
The fresh air has hit me. I didn’t feel this drunk earlier, but sitting down and being still has brought the effect of the alcohol I consumed earlier to the surface.
We walk to our apartment. Him steady, me notably less so.
“What’s it like? Remind me,” he says as we wait for the elevator.
“Well,” I drag the word out not entirely by choice, “it’s pretty damn chill. My arms and legs are heavy, and the world spins when I move my head fast, but it’s quiet in my mind for the first time in a really long time, especially if I ignore the sloshing sound in my ears.”
“Sounds nice,” he replies without a hint of regret.
“It is now. Tomorrow will probably be a different story.”
I undress, kicking my shoes off and dropping my clothes on the floor where I stand.
I struggle with the clasps of one of the necklaces but manage to pry it loose eventually.
I open my top drawer to put the chains and Caroline’s cuff away.
As I do it, a rusted old tin catches my eye and holds a blade to my throat.
It’s rectangular, the tin, and not all that deep.
I think my mom used to keep her emergency sewing kit in it when she was a kid.
The image on the lid is reminiscent of an English garden, a bright-blue sky in the background, with rambling old roses in the foreground.
Vintage pinks and olive greens are still visible on the parts of the lid that haven’t been corroded.
It should be ordinary. An innocent object without power or pain.
It isn’t.
It’s so far from it that I drop the cuff and chains, physically recoiling, as I slam the drawer shut.
I get into bed naked, shaken, and dizzy.
The world spins when my head hits the pillow.
I turn on my side, rest my phone on the pillow near my face, and scroll through my messages like I always do, looking for Havi’s name.
I click on Connor’s instead because it comes up first. I type a message and deliberate for the longest time before sending it. I feel sick from the alcohol, and I feel sick from disloyalty to Havi of all people.
I will myself not to think about it. Not to think about anything. Not to think a single goddamn thing.
Not now.
Not tonight.
I can’t handle it tonight.
I can’t.
Instead, I read the words I’ve typed several times. Even now, drunk as I am, I know full well I’ll regret them in the morning.
I hit send all the same.
I’m glad you lived or whatever.