My gaze shot to his. “What?”
“I’m not sleeping well these days.” He smiled, the grin quickly followed by a grimace. “The pain is worse at night.” He glanced at me. “I might have seen more than one pair of feet disappearing up the stairs last night.”
The next swallow I took was too large and too hot, but the burn felt good. “You know, you make it awful hard to be … I don’t know … a teenager!”
He chuckled. “That’s the point, dear Hawthorne.”
“You really aren’t angry?” I stared. “No lectures? No plans to buy me a chastity belt?”
Uncle Gregor choked on his coffee. “A chastity belt?” Patting his chest, he threw me a look as he fought to recover. “We really need to get a TV. I think you may be reading too much.”
My brows rose. “Seriously, you aren’t angry?”
He grinned. “Honestly, I think you two are good for each other right now. That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to be careful. I just think people are often brought into our lives for a reason, and I’d rather you have someone you can lean on when I go.”
His easy manner should have comforted me, but a wave of unexpected anger swept over me instead, cross words tumbling out of my mouth. “How can you be so nonchalant about it all? You’re dying! Shouldn’t you be angry! Something! Anything!”
My tirade surprised me, and I froze, the words shocking me, my heart swirling with emotions.
Uncle Gregor’s mug paused halfway to his mouth. “Angry,” he said slowly, his eyes falling to his coffee. “I can’t allow myself to be angry, Hawthorne. Or sad.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Because I’m afraid if I get angry, I won’t be able to get out of that place.”
Tears trekked down my cheeks. “I’ll be angry for you.” The whispered words were broken by sobs.
I hated myself for the tears, hated myself for the anger. I didn’t want to be that person, the one who broke down when she needed to stay strong. The one who didn’t even know she was angry in the first place, the one who exploded in moments when she shouldn’t.
My body shook, so I set the coffee mug down, my fingers trembling.
Uncle Gregor’s hand found my back. “Do you think I haven’t railed? Do you think I haven’t yelled at the skies, haven’t cried and asked myself why?”
My tears came harder. “You should have told me sooner.”
“And there’s the crux of it,” Uncle Gregor whispered. “That’s what you’re really angry at, Hawthorne. Not the illness. You’re mad at me because I haven’t let you carry it with me, but I didn’t want you to stop living.”
I couldn’t remain standing any more. My feet simply couldn’t hold me up. I fell into a chair near the kitchen table, my nose and eyes running, my chest burning with the pain.
“I would have liked to try.”
Uncle Gregor sat in the chair across from me. “Look at me and yell. Scream at the top of your lungs. Be angry. Grieve. Do it all, Hawthorne.”
He was dying, and yet despite the fact that it was his body suffering, his body racked by pain, he was giving me permission to be upset about it.
“What would that help?” I sniffed.
“It won’t,” he answered. “It won’t help, but it gives you a voice. That’s the hardest part about all of this. Cancer is a silent enemy, but the people affected don’t have to be quiet.”
“You are.”
My hand rested on the table, and his hand came up to cover it. “Because I’m okay living the rest of my life watching you be happy.”
Some tears can’t be held back. Some tears destroy you. My tears were a flood, never ending. My chest heaved, each intake of breath harder than the last.
“This is okay,” Uncle Gregor promised. “It’s just hitting you, and that’s okay.”
My swollen, red eyes met his clear ones. “It’s okay that I yell?”
He squeezed my hand. “Yell, Hawthorne. Yell loud.”
I did. I screamed and screamed, the shrill, eerie sound tearing through the empty house. It was a shaky yell full of tears, a rage-filled shriek releasing all of the anger, frustration, and fear I’d been holding in without realizing it. The scream tore me apart.
A door opened and shut, but my uncle and I didn’t move.
Pounding feet tore through the house, stopping just short of the kitchen alcove where we sat. “I heard screaming—” Heathcliff’s winded voice began.
“There’s nothing we can do, is there?” I asked.