Chapter 11
After leaving the shelter, I called my dad to see if Aaron and I could stop by, but there was some sort of crisis on one of his job sites that would keep him working until well into the night. I could tell he felt bad putting me off. We hadn’t spent much time together since the funeral. I suspected he was using work as a distraction from dwelling on his loss. I guess we all cope in our own way. I sent Aaron a text to cancel our plans.
At home, my brother and his friend, Trent, were hanging out in the kitchen waiting for a frozen pizza to heat up in the toaster oven. Aaron sat on top of the counter tossing an oven mitt from hand to hand. They were laughing, a noise which sounded out of place in the House of Gloom.
"Hey," Trent grunted at me when I entered through the back door.
"Hey." I was still keyed up from the Lucy situation and wasn't in the mood to socialize.
So, Aaron was going on with his life. He had the right idea. We would all miss Lony, but tears couldn’t bring her back. Sleeping fifteen hours a day only put off the inevitable. We all had to move on. Faint gray shadows were still visible beneath my brother's blue eyes and his smile still held a fake, plastic-like quality, but it was a smile nonetheless. He was trying.
Up in my bedroom, I decided I would try, too. I put the morning's events out of my mind and went to work catching up on my studies. If I was going to go back to school Monday, I needed to work hard to catch up to the rest of my class. Good thing it was still so early in the school year. I hadn’t missed too many important tests or project deadlines.
I was in the middle of typing a writing assignment when my cell phone rang. I rubbed my eyes, strained from staring at a computer screen in the fading evening light. I flipped on my desk lamp and checked the caller ID. Bronwyn.
“So my parents wanted me to ask you...” she said, her tone dripping with reluctance, “The topic for Youth Group this week is Placing Your Sorrow on Jesus, like about dealing with grief when you lose a loved one, and they want me to invite you to come. There will be a guest speaker from Grace Christian who’ll be talking about the loss of his daughter from cancer and then a group discussion.”
“I don’t know, Bron,” I sighed and tried my best to be polite. “You know how I am about the religious stuff. And I’m not sure I want to work on my grief issues in a room with a bunch of kids I don’t know.”
“Oh, you are already going to a support group meeting up at the hospital? Too bad they meet on the same night.”
Ah, I get it. One or both of her parents were standing over her making her call me. This kind of thing happened a couple of times a year, usually to invite me to a Youth Group social function or to a church service they thought might be of particular interest to me. Her parents felt it was the duty of all true Christians to “shepherd non-believers into the loving arms of the Lord” or some crap like that. As if for every person you converted you got bonus points on God’s Great Scoreboard. I don’t know, maybe they would win some prize when they got to heaven like a golden harp or a cloud with a view of the Grand Canyon. Being such a good friend, I decided to mess with her.
“Sure, Bron, I’d love to attend! I’ll wear my leather teddy and carry a riding crop. Think a studded dog collar would be too much?”
There was a slight pause before she replied, “It’s okay if you break down and cry. That’s what support groups are for. I’m sure no one will fault you for getting snot all over your sleeve.” I heard a murmured hiss in the background telling her to be more sensitive. I laughed.
“They say emotional trauma can cause teens to act out in inappropriate ways, but I would have given the football team blow jobs anyway. After all, they did beat Davenport last week.”
Bronwyn made a choking sound like she swallowed a laugh and quickly covered it with a fake cough. “Well, okay, Cady, I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. Bye.”
I hung up the phone, my grin fading. I missed my best friend. The few times I saw her since the accident, her discomfort had been obvious. Bronwyn was great listener, but not so great at knowing what to say in awkward situations. I guess talking to me qualified as awkward now.
I opened a new window on my screen, and signed into Facebook. I’d been avoiding social media since the accident because I didn’t really want to read the outpouring of sympathy from my classmates on my Facebook wall. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the thoughts, I just couldn’t deal with it all yet. A couple of days after the accident I posted a short thank you, and hadn’t looked at it since. I wondered what the protocol was for deleting Lony’s page. I could probably do it myself. She had never been very creative with passwords, and I’m sure I’d be able to hack it inside of five minutes, but was that right? Maybe Facebook has some sort of death cancellation policy where my parents could call them to delete the account.
Once Facebook loaded, I clicked over to Bronwyn’s wall and left a message for her to meet me after she got off school tomorrow. It was time for me to start getting out of the house more.
That night as I was changing into my pj's for bed, Bryan phoned. Three nights in a row? He asked me about my day, and without planning to, I began telling him the story of Lucy and the mass in her lung.
"Are you sure you didn't feel a lump or something? Maybe something small enough that the doctor didn't notice?"
"I'm sure," I insisted. "It wasn't a lump at all. It was a vibration. And cold. You know, way cooler than the other skin around it. I thought I could hear it, too, but now I'm not so sure that part wasn't my imagination."
"Hmmm..." he pondered. "Maybe the mass inside the dog isn't a tumor at all, but an object. It might be radiating something, or you might have felt a magnetic pull. Were you wearing any metallic jewelry on your hands?"
"No. I didn't have jewelry on at all. Not even earrings."
"And the vet is going to let you know what she finds?"
"Yeah. Dr. Kristy promised to call right after the surgery. I thought about going out there, but I have my appointment in the afternoon."
"Ah, the therapist... You sure you don't need a ride?"
"I'm sure," I said with a smile. "Bryan, you don't have to be so nice to me just because my sister died. I mean, I appreciate your help and concern. You're about the only person I can really talk to right now, but I don't want you to go out of your way because you think you have to take care of me."
"Do you really think I'm just being nice to you because your sister died?"
The way he said it made me feel badly for even bringing it up. "I guess not. But...well...why are you being so nice to me? There are a lot of other kids in the school that you could be friends with who would be much better company than I am right now."
"I don't want other company. I want your company."
My breath caught in my chest and my brain froze for a comeback.
"I'll have my cell with me all day tomorrow,” he continued. “If you want to get a hold of me during school, just text, alright? I'll talk to you soon. Sweet dreams."
I held the phone to my chest long after the line disconnected.