Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Aunt Joan has taken over an entire corner of the waiting room. There’s a grocery bag on the chair next to her, a massive purse on the ground, and a pile of romance novels filling two chairs on the other side. She’s crunching on barbecue potato chips and talking on her phone.
I cringe and look around the room at the people trying not to give her dirty looks.
They’re failing miserably. Why did she have to come?
I’d rather wait for Mom alone. I need to work on my novel anyway.
There’s only three weeks until my thesis evaluation, and Aunt Joan is a distraction I can’t handle right now.
“She’s here. I’ll call you back.” Joan throws her phone onto her purse and hops to her feet. Crumbs fall to the floor all around her. She grabs me, pulling me into her with all the force of a suction cup. I don’t expect it, and before I can stop myself, the tears are breaking past my defenses.
She hugs like Mom, with her whole body and heart wrapped up around you. My shoulders shake, and she coos softly in my ear while she rubs my back. “It’ll be okay, kiddo. It’ll be okay. You’ll see. She’s gonna be fine.”
But I don’t know if that’s true. That’s the whole point.
Anything could happen. She could have a reaction to the anesthesia.
She could bleed out on the table. They could fail to remove all the tumors.
She could make it through surgery, only to have the cancer grow back.
Surgery could go perfectly, and she could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Or have a heart attack tonight.
There are no guarantees. I could have hours with her, or days, or that hasty goodbye we said in the hall could be the last time I ever see her.
My sobs turn into quick gasps, coming faster and faster.
My chest is too tight, throat scratchy and dry.
I shiver, freezing, but sweaty. The room spins.
My muscles shake. I’m leaning so hard into Aunt Joan she stumbles.
My thoughts are too quiet and too loud. Everything is moving too fast and too slow.
I can’t think. I can’t breathe. Something is wrong.
Really wrong. I’m being pulled apart, and there’s nothing at the center of me. I can’t breathe.
My toes are numb. My fingers curl in, like claws, and I can’t straighten them out. Why can’t I straighten them out? Am I having a heart attack?
Aunt Joan guides me to the chair she was sitting in and tells me to put my head between my knees. I obey, insides buzzing, screaming. But it all feels far away.
I don’t realize Aunt Joan has left until she comes back with a paper bag and tells me to breathe into it. Each breath takes focus, concentration. So much energy, just to breathe. In and out. In and out. It hurts.
“Count with me,” Aunt Joan says in a soft voice. “Inhale, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four, five, six.”
Slowly, my hands uncurl. My chest expands more with each inhale.
I have no sense of how long we repeat the cycle, how long she rubs my back. Eventually, I don’t feel like I’m dying anymore. Exhaustion covers me like a weighted blanket. I curl into a tight ball, and with my head on the armrest, close my eyes.
When I wake, Aunt Joan is crunching away on potato chips in the seat next to me. I pull myself up, push the mess of hair falling over my face to the side, and say the first thing that pops into my head. “I told you not to come.”
“Ptsch!” She brushes away my protest. “We’re long past listening to each other, kiddo.
” She digs through the grocery bag until she finds a packaged brownie from my favorite bakery.
She tears open the plastic, puts it on a floral napkin from another grocery bag, and sets it on my lap.
A romance novel soon appears next to it.
“She’s gonna be fine.” She says it with all the force of a boulder. Then, she takes her phone and walks out of the room, presumably to call back whoever she was talking to earlier.
I look at the brownie and romance novel, thinking about how Aunt Joan didn’t ask me questions about Mom or how I’m feeling.
She just showed up with things I like (even if I haven’t admitted aloud to liking the romance novels), and then she left, giving me space.
Maybe Mom isn’t the only one who knows and cares about me.
My throat tightens with more tears, but I don’t give in to the desire to break down. Not again. If I do, I might fall and fall and fall, never stop crying. I swallow, take a sip from the water bottle the nurse gave me before I left Mom, then dig into the brownie and romance novel.
I’m not sure how much time passes before Aunt Joan comes back into the room, quietly takes a seat next to me, and opens her own book. I’m surprised to realize it’s not a romance novel, but Anna Karenina.
“How can you read that? Russian Lit is… insufferable.” Even for me.
Joan stuffs another potato chip in her mouth and shrugs one shoulder. “I contain multitudes.”
I try not to smile. We go back to reading and eating our snacks, but it’s harder to focus. I look at the large screen hanging from the ceiling and find the number the nurse gave me. In Progress, that’s all it says. In progress. So vague. It means nothing. Have they already made the first cut?
Television portrayals of surgeries pop into my mind. Beeping machines. Shining tools laid out on trays. Gloves and masks and science jargon I don’t understand. Mom is in there. My stomach sways, and I wish I hadn’t eaten the brownie.
I try to distract myself with more reading. Aunt Joan chomps on her chips. The clock crawls forward. Doctors come in and talk quietly with a family on the opposite side of the room. They leave a few minutes later.
I check my phone and find two texts from Kiara checking in on me, a text from Sullivan doing the same, and twelve messages from Jeremy. I don’t have the energy to respond to any of them. A phone rings, and the woman behind the desk at the front answers.
“Hazel Berton,” she says loudly, holding the phone out to the room.
I stand on shaking legs and take the phone from her. “H-hello.” My voice quivers so much I don’t sound like myself.
They told me someone would call and give me an update during the surgery, but I didn’t expect it to feel like this. Like all the air is sucked out of the room as I wait to hear what they have to say.
“Is this Hazel Berton?” The woman’s voice is itchy, like the sweater Jeremy sent me last year for Christmas.
“Hmmmhmmm,” I respond, not sure I trust myself to speak a proper word, much less a full sentence.
“This is the head surgical nurse.” Her tone is clipped and precise.
My stomach drops through the floor. Something’s happened.
Aunt Joan watches me with wary eyes. A woman near the desk silently rocks a baby on her lap as she stares out the window. The clock ticks forward, second after second.
This is it. The nurse is going to tell me something went wrong. The surgery failed. Mom’s not going to make it.
“I’m calling to let you know everything is going well,” the nurse says. “Dr. Newberry and his team are halfway through. She’s still got a while to go, but she’s stable, and they’re happy with how things are progressing.”
Did I hear that right? “What?”
“Everything’s good so far,” the nurse says gently.
Mom’s okay. I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Thank you,” I squeak out.
“We’ll call you again when she’s in recovery. Alright?”
Words are too much work, so I make an affirmative hum in the back of my throat and the nurse says goodbye. I hang up and drift back to my seat.
“Everything alright?” Aunt Joan asks. I can hear the tension in her voice, the apprehension so familiar to my own.
“Yeah?” My response sounds like a question, and I work to make it more convincing, both for myself and for Aunt Joan. “Yeah. They were just calling to let us know it’s going well.”
I feel hazy, like I’m in a dream rather than reality.
Aunt Joan lets out a relieved huff of air. “Oh, thank God! That just about scared my ass right off.”
A few people give Aunt Joan annoyed looks for her colorful language and her volume, but she’s unaffected and returns to her book with a deep sigh of relief. The surgery isn’t finished yet, but the same relief trickles through me.
I contemplate trying to work on my thesis, but I know I don’t have the attention span for it right now, so I pick up Aunt Joan’s romance novel again.
It’s a little easier to sink into the story now that I know Mom is doing alright.
With each page, I shed a little more of my anxiety and focus only on the stresses of the characters—so different from my own.
I’m not here in this hospital waiting room anymore.
I’m in a ballroom in Regency England, flirting with a mysterious bachelor.
No one’s life is in danger, and the only real tension is sexual.
By the last page, everything will be wrapped up and happily resolved.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been so drawn to romance novels lately.
No matter what, there’s always a happy ending.
I wish life came with that kind of certainty. The guarantee that everything will work out. The couple will end up together. The conflicts will end the way you want. And everyone will grow and change, becoming slightly better versions of themselves.
Life isn’t like that, though.
People might change, but not always for the better.
There’s no guarantee that everything will work out.
In fact, most things don’t. The person who promised to love and cherish you ends up having an affair and leaving.
You’re forced to stop the cancer trial that was supposed to make everything better, with no guarantees that the next step will work.
The bills come due without a mysterious benefactor paying them off.
The hot, unattainable guy doesn’t fall for the awkward girl.
He remains unattainable. There are no guarantees of a found family.
No happily-ever-afters. There’s just a handful of happy moments sprinkled in with the shit.
That’s what life is—a shitshow with sprinkles.