Prologue #3
Noel enters through the sliding glass door, stepping carefully over the threshold, ducking under the frame.
The rented hospital bed occupies the center of the living room, where the sectional and coffee table once were; the sectional has been separated into its component pieces and pushed to the sides of the room.
A heart monitor blips quietly and steadily, and an IV drip-drip-drips.
Taylor is a thin shape beneath a flat sheet, and her favorite patchwork quilt is an heirloom passed down through several generations. Her chest barely rises and falls.
Noel approaches the bed hesitantly, shuffling his giant feet with his massive shoulders hunched. He looks, in this moment, like nothing so much as a gargantuan, overgrown child. "Mom?" It's barely a whisper. "Jesus Christ. Mom." The second repetition is a quiet, intense hiss. "Mama?"
That wrecks me—he hasn't called her "Mama" since he was seven.
I remember the moment vividly, because it was so damned funny and cute.
He marched his skinny ass up to her apropos of nothing, planted his little fists on his little hips, and announced that he wasn't gonna call her Mama anymore because that's for little kids and he wasn't a little kid anymore.
He stuck to it, too, god bless him. It was Mom or Ma thereafter.
Hearing him whisper “Mama” so softly, so brokenly…I can't stop the tears from escaping.
"Noel?" Her voice is barely audible. "My baby boy. You came."
"Of course I did, Ma." I can feel him injecting strength he doesn't feel into his voice. "Of course I'm here."
"You shouldn't have retired, No-No." With great effort, Taylor extricates her hand from beneath the covers and reaches for him, gently patting the back of his hand.
Noel lets out a slow, shaky breath. "My wrist is done, Ma.
It's the same wrist I broke junior year at the state finals.
I coulda kept playing on my knee for another few seasons, but the wrist?
" He shakes his head. "No. The moment I saw the X-ray and how fucking shattered it was? I knew my career was over."
"As long as you didn't do it for me," Taylor says; again, classic Taylor.
Noel chokes. "You think I'd…what? Stay in fucking Seattle and keep playing while you're sick? Of course I'll be here, Ma. There's nowhere else on the planet I'd rather be than here with you."
Taylor sniffles. "My sweet boy. How I've missed you."
"Missed you too, Mom. You're gonna get better, okay? We're gonna fight this. You're a survivor."
Taylor's laugh is weak but sharp. "Oh, dear. Noel, sweetheart." She lets out a shuddery breath as she reaches for his jaw—he lifts her hand to his face and holds it there. "There's no fighting this one, kiddo."
"Mom, c'mon. You—"
"Noel." It's a sharp bark full of Mom authority. "Listen to me, honey. Since when have I ever given up on anything? Remember when you had that science project we couldn't get to work, and I stayed up literally all night because I refused to give up?"
Noel sniffs a laugh. "I did get an A-plus on it because of you."
"Your father was upset with me over that. He felt you should have done the project yourself, pass or fail."
"Kids' school projects oughta be done by the kids, not the damn parents," I grouse, rehashing a now decades-old disagreement between us.
"Hush, dear, I'm talking to our son," Taylor says to me, giving me a wink and a playful smirk, a gut-wrenching glimpse of her usual self. She turns her attention to our son again. "My point, Noel, is that if there was anything to be gained by fighting this, you have to know I would."
Noel's head bobs in agreement. "Yeah, I know. I just…"
She regards him sadly. "I'd give anything for more time with you, my darling boy.
Anything. And I'm…I'm sorry, I'm not strong enough.
Go through chemo or radiation and be even more miserable than I am now, and only get a few days or weeks more?
I just can't put myself through that. Maybe it's selfish of me, but I'd just…
if I've only got a little more time left, I want to spend it at home with my boys, not puking my guts out in a cancer ward. "
Noel's shoulders shake. "Fuck, Ma. Goddammit."
“I know. I'm sorry."
He collapses forward onto her, and she gamely does her best to wrap her thin arms around bear-like shoulders. "This is all wrong. It's all wrong."
"I can't say it's my favorite thing in the world, myself," she says. She pats him on the back, and her tone turns artificially chipper. "Now. Enough maudlin nonsense. Tell me the latest news from your life. Been on any hot dates with supermodels lately?"
Noel is famously—or perhaps infamously—private, especially regarding his love life. He's been known to go to great lengths to avoid being spotted in public, especially if he's with a woman—and he has dated a few famous ones, just never anything serious.
Noel laughs. "Yes, actually. I had a very nice dinner last week with Alicia Van Ehlen."
"A very nice dinner? What does that even mean? I need the tea!"
Noel sighs. Normally, he's reticent to share these kinds of details with us. He's allergic to seeming hoity-toity, never name-drops, and keeps his personal life mostly private, even from us. But for her, in this context?
"It means we went to a classy steak joint, shared some overpriced wine, ate some overpriced food, and talked." He shrugs. "It was fun. She's a sweetheart."
Alicia van Ehlen is one of those up-and-coming stars that just sort of appeared out of nowhere—at least to a Luddite old fart like me.
I'm still using the same Nokia I've had for twenty years, and we only just upgraded two years ago from a satellite dish to the newfangled in-ground internet cable thing.
So when someone like Alicia Van Ehlen becomes popular because she did a dance or something on TikTok, my brain short-circuits a little.
Like, this girl did a funny thing on the internet, and now she's world famous and starring in the latest limited series on Netflix?
What happened to good old-fashioned movie stars?
This is just context, I guess. I've never met the girl, but she's beautiful, that's for sure.
"Just a nice dinner?" I ask my son. "Nothing else?"
Noel rolls his eyes at me. "Yes, Dad. Just a nice dinner. She's not really my type, it turns out."
Taylor chuckles, the laugh dissolving into a weak cough that leaves her short of breath momentarily. "What, she wouldn't go fishing with you?"
Noel snickers. "Her idea of wilderness is Discovery Park.
We DM'd back and forth a few times, and she claimed she hiked a lot.
Come to find out, her idea of hiking was putting on her Lululemon leggings and Nike sneakers and walking the paved trails in the park.
So no, Alica would never in a million years ever sit in a tin fishing boat in a lake fifty miles from the nearest town for four hours, catching nothing but mosquito bites. "
Taylor laughed again, weakly. “Well, when you put it like that, how could a girl say no? That's every woman's dream date, obviously."
Noel laughs, but it trails off, and he looks at her with a complicated expression. "How can you be in such good spirits, Mom?"
She smiles, and it's as bright as her smile has ever been. Just…more tired. "You're here, my boy. How could I not be happy? I may not have a lot of moments left, so I'm damned well going to appreciate the ones I have."
Noel's shoulders shake again, and Taylor draws his head to her chest, cradling him like a toddler and playing with his hair.
"You and your dad, No-No. You have to take care of each other.
He'll forget his vitamins, and he'll need someone to grocery shop for him, or he'll live off of Hormel chili and takeout from Lorna's.
" That being another Tomlin Falls fixture, a breakfast-and-lunch cafe where the local old farts like me gather for coffee, eggs and bacon and hash browns, and town gossip.
If not for Taylor and her home-cooked meals delivered to the station, I would, in fact, subsist entirely off of canned food and Lorna's on my 24-on-48-off shifts.
God, the woman knows me.
I sit and watch my wife and my son chit-chat idly for a while, Noel filling her in on the lives of his teammates, most of whom do not share his reticence for the limelight or his need for privacy.
"She sold his jockstrap for how much?” Taylor asks, cackling breathlessly.
"Five grand, apparently. Craig's game-worn gear goes for big bucks, I guess," he shrugs. "I dunno. He thinks it’s funny. He once ate a bunch of gas-inducing food and then spent an entire day wearing a pair of compression shorts and farting into them before he sold them."
"Wait, he sells his own gear?"
Noel nods, laughing. "He does. It's a whole thing. He donates the money to the animal shelter where he adopted Cruiser, his Doberman rescue."
"So the girl who stole his jockstrap…”
"He wasn't pissed that she stole and sold it; he was pissed that she did it for her own profit."
“What a weird man," Taylor murmurs. She goes quiet, and her eyes flutter shut for a moment.
Noel covers her hands with his massive ones, thumb gently rubbing her knuckles as he watches her drift off to sleep.
Once she's well and truly out, I fetch a couple cold ones from the fridge and take them out onto the porch.
Noel follows me, eyebrow lifted. "It's eleven in the morning, Pop."
I sigh, sipping. "I know, son."
"How long?" he asks in a barely audible voice.
"I don't know,” I answer. "A few weeks at best. But then, that’s what they said in November, so…” I shrug. “I don’t know.” I glance at him. “Son, your career—"