7. Beckett
Beckett
My parents have this beautiful suburban home. It’s nothing crazy—no sprawling mansion with rolling hills and a pool or anything like that.
Twenty minutes north of Toronto in a suburb that started to blend into the city, it was built before every house became a replica of the one next to it, so it has a bit of character—two-car garage, wraparound porch, and beautiful bay windows.
I offered to buy them something bigger—something better. But they wanted this one. They mortgaged it twice, and I guess the sentimental value won out.
It was where Sarah got sick and where she got better, where Nathaniel practiced equations and conducted fake experiments with a chemistry set in the basement, and where my dad first threw me a ball in the backyard.
Picture-perfect and beautiful, if it weren’t for all the memories of vomit, blood, hair fall, chemotherapy drugs being administered by IVs, and Nathaniel and me being left alone more often than not when we were both too young.
It’s picture-perfect right now. You’d never know anything bad ever happened—my mother and sister wrapped up in big, fluffy blankets sitting on the patio while my dad stands vigil over steaks he’s probably going to overcook anyway and my brother haphazardly tosses me a football in the backyard.
He can’t throw for shit, but I don’t catch for a living so it’s fine.
“How’s it going with the kids? I haven’t seen you around during visiting hours. Thought maybe you bailed.” Nathaniel pulls his arm back and releases the football. It wobbles horribly, and I lunge forward a few feet to catch it so it won’t hit the ground.
I palm the football and cock my arm back a few times before tossing it to my brother. He lurches forward, arms splayed wide, hands flexed entirely, his palms slapping it with no purchase, and he fumbles it.
“Don’t be so rigid. Your hands should be looser.” I tip my chin at the ball where it lies in the grass.
“I’m not trying to go pro here. And last time I checked, you’re not a wide receiver anymore.” Nathaniel rolls his eyes, but he bends to retrieve the ball anyway, his hair flopping over his forehead. He pushes it back with his elbow, palming the ball again and winding his arm back unnecessarily. “But seriously, where’ve you been? Did you give up on the publicity stunt?”
“It’s not a stunt,” I mutter, raising one hand and snatching his wobbly throw from the air. “I didn’t bail, I’ve been hanging out with the adults. Greer’s been taking me on rounds with her.”
“Greer?” Nathaniel blinks, before his face pales again. “You’re not talking about Dr. Roberts?”
I nod, tossing the ball up in the air and catching it on the inside of my foot. “Yeah. I ran into her in the elevator on the first day. She said she didn’t think children had any influence on public perception, so I went with her instead. We hung out a few nights ago after her shift.”
I texted her after she left the other night, looking half like she wanted to run away from me at top speed, to ask if she was okay, and all I got was a thumbs up. We don’t text—like she said, it’s strictly business—and I haven’t had a chance to go back to the hospital yet. Preseason starts tomorrow, and despite all the warnings, I don’t think I’ve ever come closer to ripping a hamstring or quadricep from overuse than I have this week.
Maybe she just really didn’t want to see my Gatorade commercial.
“Why?” Nathaniel practically hisses, leaning forward and dropping his voice to a whisper. “She’s scary.”
“She can’t fucking hear you, man.” I widen my eyes, kicking the ball up again and catching it. “And she’s not scary. Or mean. She’s prickly at best.”
“Prickly? Prickly?!” His voice goes higher the second time. He shakes his head. “I can think of ten residents off the top of my head that she’s made cry.”
I lob the ball to my brother, who snatches it from the air with more finesse than he’s been managing all evening. “That doesn’t really sound like her.”
Something that’s half like a scoff, half like a snort comes from him, and he clutches the ball to his chest. “She’s brilliant. She’s an incredible surgeon, but she’s fucking terrifying. You can ask anyone. I talked to her for, like, ten minutes last week when she was scrubbing after surgery, and it was the scariest ten minutes of my life.”
“And was she mean to you?” I hold out my hand for the ball again, but he clutches it tighter to his chest. “Or prickly?”
Nathaniel narrows his eyes before passing me the ball. “No. She wasn’t what I would call friendly, but she wasn’t that bad. I don’t know how to explain it, sometimes she’s just short. And it comes out of nowhere. Or like, in the OR, apparently she won’t let anyone change the song or touch her playlist. She prefers when people don’t speak if she’s concentrating. She’s weird about shit like that.”
“Huh.” I shrug. She definitely left abruptly the other night. I’m about to cock my arm back to toss him the ball again when our dad calls us over. It’s almost like a scene from an idyllic childhood—wholesome, endearing. Two brothers passing a football back and forth while their proud father watches on, their mother and sister huddled together whispering secrets.
Ours didn’t look like that. Our parents were never here. Or if they were, it was just one of them and they were trading off shifts with Sarah at the hospital. Whoever was home, slept. I made all of Nathaniel’s food, I picked up after him because my parents were on a hair trigger more often than not, and I practiced calculus equations with him even though I had no fucking idea what I was doing or saying.
On the rare nights both our parents were home, they were usually alone in their room because one of them was crying.
If Sarah was here—if we were all home—we certainly weren’t sitting outside, because it was too cold for her and she got tired too easily.
I came out here sometimes after everyone went to bed, running routes by myself or lobbing a ball up as high as I could to practice catching it from different parts of the yard.
My dad smiles broadly at us, and he looks significantly happier than he did back when all those sad, lonely things happened during our childhood. A happier man, lines around the eyes but ones that tell stories of how much he has to smile about, not all the ways life started carving chunks out of him before his time. A fuller stomach from nights out here, acting like the dad he never really got to be.
I look at him, and I smile, because it is a nice sight—my father, healed and whole. My entire family, healed and whole.
But sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see this person who’s probably just a shell of someone he was expected to be, not actually who he was, and I wonder if it all came too late.
He reaches forward and messes up Nathaniel’s hair, like he’s still a child running around the house. I know what’s coming before it happens—he’s going to reach out and punch me in the shoulder.
He does that sometimes. Treats us like we’re still children in these odd, affectionate ways.
It used to be my thigh, like a fatherly attempt at a charley horse, but he stopped doing that when my legs started making millions and solving years of family debt brought on by childhood cancer.
His fist connects with my shoulder, and I only have it in me to raise my eyebrows before I duck into the chair my sister pulled out for me.
Sarah smiles up at me, wide and big and beautiful. I can’t help it, but I reach out and mess up her hair, too.
She likes it when I do that, I think, even though she’s twenty-six; she’s in love and trying to have a baby, like the fully-fledged adult she is.
But she never got to be a child whose older brother tugged on and cut her hair when she wasn’t looking or stuck gum in it.
I spent a disproportionate amount of time making sure whatever hair she had, or her wigs, were in pristine condition.
Sarah blinks, leaning into my hand for a minute before she sits back, wrapping the blanket tighter around herself. “How’s work going this week?”
“You’re the second person within a few days to refer to it as a job.” I say, voice dry.
She cocks her head to the side and studies me. Like she sees right through me, and I’m not always sure how that could be, when to me, for better or worse, she’s stuck in time as this little girl who needs me to be something for her.
But she looks at me like she wants to be something for me, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“It is your job,” Sarah whispers softly, lips tugging up. She stares for a moment longer before she scrunches her nose and turns back to the table, eyeing our brother. “How’s the hospital?”
Nathaniel raises one brow, leaning back in his chair and looking a bit to me like a kid trapped in time, too.
I wonder what I look like.
He shrugs, reaching forward and grabbing a beer from the perspiring bucket our father left on the table. “Good. I’ve got some really great kids I’m working with. And the other week—we found a new kidney for that girl I told you about. Actually, Beckett’s special friend came through and operated on her.”
Sarah furrows her brow, but before she can say anything, our mother leans forward, green eyes just like ours practically bugging out of her head when she drops her chin to her palm, propping her elbow up on the table. “Beckett’s special friend?”
Nathaniel nods enthusiastically while he sips from his beer. He practically fucking chokes trying to hurry up and speak. “Dr. Roberts. She’s a transplant fellow. She’s taken Beck under her wing.”
Our mother bats her eyes at him, her special little star who fixes daughters just like hers before her eyes swing to me. She’s still looking at me like a mother looks at a child, like she loves me, but it’s not the same.
My mother looks at Sarah like she can’t believe she’s real—like she’s the most precious thing in the world to her. A shooting star she saw in the sky and chased to the ends of the earth.
As she should.
She looks at Nathaniel with this sort of understated reverence. Her smile softens and her eyes go watery, like she might prostrate herself at his feet and thank him for saving kids like Sarah for the rest of her life.
As she should.
She looks at me like I’ve done her a sort of favour. Held open a door for her, picked up something she dropped in the grocery aisle. She’s thankful for me, but she doesn’t really understand my value. What I did to change or shape her life. Like she can’t see the future and she doesn’t know that if I hadn’t held that door open for her, the handles to all her bags would have broken, and everything she had worked so hard to be able to afford to buy would have shattered on the floor. That if she hadn’t stopped to say thank you to that stranger who took a few minutes out of their day, she would have left the grocery store a few minutes earlier and she would have gotten hit by a car, and life as she knew it would have ended.
She looks at me like I’m something—not nothing—but she’s not quite sure what.
As she should.
Because I think I look at myself like that—I’m something, not nothing—but I’m not quite sure what either.
She’s looking at me right now like she’s amused by the whole thing. She means well. But sometimes, her well hurts.
“Oh?” My mom smiles, scrunching her nose up, barely sparing my father a glance when he drops a glass of wine in front of her. “Who’s this Dr. Roberts, Beck? When do we get to meet her?”
“I’m not sure you want to meet her, Mom.” Nathaniel snorts, kicking one foot up on the table for a minute before Sarah reaches across and shoves it off. “She’d scare the shit out of you.”
My dad pulls out a chair beside Nathaniel, pointing at me and the bucket of beer. I shake my head. “No. Preseason starts on Saturday. I need to be at the stadium early tomorrow. And she wouldn’t scare the shit out of you. She’s just a friend, helping me out.” I narrow my eyes at Nathaniel, tempted to reach out under the table and kick him in the shins. “Quit saying shit like that. She’s not mean. She’s nicer to me than most people are lately.”
Nathaniel pulls his head back, our mother deflates, our father looks awkward, taking a too-long sip of his beer, and Sarah blinks.
No one tells me they don’t hate me. That it’s okay. That it was a mistake, that humans are allowed to make them and that’s the beauty of being alive—that it was just a kick, and it was just a record and it was just a stupid trophy and just a stupid game.
They’re looking at me like they feel sorry for me in the face of my public humiliation.
I bite down on my lip and shrug, leaning back in my chair before throwing them a grin. “Gatorade commercial’s still crushing though.”
Everyone lightens at once, like whatever my feelings have done to weigh them down, gets picked up off their shoulders and put on mine.
I sink in the chair a bit, I think. But no one notices, because I’ve been smiling while I carried a mountain for them for years.
Our mother gives me a small smile, and then she turns to Sarah, reaching out to tuck her hair behind her ear again even though she doesn’t have to. “How’d it go at the specialist?”
It’s a weighted question. Sarah wants nothing more than to have a baby she can give the childhood she never had, but she’s too nervous to try and get pregnant because she’s scared of her own genetics—so I paid a dumb amount of money for something that should probably be fucking free for more than one round so her partner Lily could try to get pregnant through IVF.
I didn’t mind. I’m glad I can do it. But I hate that every failed embryo makes her feel like this, and I hate that I feel like I’m failing her, too.
“We’re out of embryos.” My sister looks down, picking at a loose stitch in the blanket she’s still wrapped up in.
“Oh.” Our mother’s voice falls, and her eyes start to go glassy. She reaches out, a hand finding Sarah’s shoulder, fingers feathering there before she snatches it back. She pauses, thumbs digging in and picking at cuticles that already spent a lifetime raw before she looks at me. “But that’s okay. There’s always the chance to try again with another round.”
She’s not looking at me because she’s a mother looking at her son, hope and desperation pouring off of her and out of her.
She’s looking at me like she needs me to hold the door open for her. To pick up the box of cereal she dropped.
She’s not looking at me like I’m her son, or a living, breathing person who had things taken from him, too—she’s looking at me like she needs another favour.
I’m happy to do it. I am. I have this stupid life and this stupid job.
But sometimes, I wish they’d just look at me like they loved me.
I wish they’d just ask.
I’d say yes.
But I glance at my sister, lips tugging up to the side before I reach out and ruffle her hair again. “As many tries as you want, Sarah.”