IT WAS OFFICIALLY THE WORST BIRTHDAY EVER.
I was sitting on the couch next to Warren, while Gelsey lay on her stomach on the floor in front of us, her legs turned out, froglike, and resting in a diamond on the carpet behind her, something that never failed to make me wince. We were all watching a sitcom that none of us had laughed at once, and I had a feeling my siblings were only there because they thought they had to be. I could see Warren sneaking glances at his laptop, and could guess that Gelsey wanted to be up in her room, which had been turned into an ad hoc dance studio, working on her fouettes, or whatever.
My siblings had tried to make it feel like as much of a celebration as possible under the circumstances—they’d ordered a pineapple and pepperoni pizza, my favorite, put a candle in the center of it, and clapped when I blew it out. I’d closed my eyes tightly in anticipation, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a birthday wish and actually thought anything might come of it. But this was a fervent, eyes-closed-tightly wish that things would turn out to be okay with my dad, that everything that was happening was just a mistake, a false alarm, and I was imbuing this wish with as much hope in the outcome as the ones I’d made when I was little, when all I’d wanted from the universe was a pony.
The sitcom laugh track blasted through the room, and I looked at the clock on the DVD player. “What time were they supposed to be home?” I asked.
“Mom wasn’t sure if they were making it back tonight,” Warren said. He met my eye for a moment, then looked back at the television. “She said she’d call.”
I nodded, and focused on the antics onscreen, though I could hardly follow them. My parents were at Sloan-Kettering, a cancer hospital in Manhattan, where my father was getting tests done. They’d been there for the last three days because it turned out that the back problem that had been bothering him for the last few months wasn’t actually a back problem at all. The three of us had been left to fend for ourselves, and we had been doing our own chores without complaint and getting along much better than usual, none of us talking about we were all afraid of, as though by naming it, we would make it real.
My mother had called me that morning, apologizing that they were missing my birthday, and while I assured her that it was okay, I had felt a hard knot start to form in my stomach. Because it felt like, on some level, this was what I deserved. I had always been close to my dad—I was the one who went along with him on errands, the one who helped him pick out birthday and Christmas gifts for my mother, the only one who shared his sense of humor. So I should have been the one to realize something was actually wrong. I could see the signs, after all—my dad wincing as he eased himself down into the low driver’s seat of his sports car, working harder than usual to lift things, moving a little more carefully. But I hadn’t wanted it to be real, had wanted it to be something that would just quietly go away, so I hadn’t said anything. My father hated doctors, and even though my mother could presumably see all the same things that I did, she didn’t insist that he go to one. And I had been focused on my own drama at school—convinced that my breakup and its fallout was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
I was thinking just how stupid I’d been when headlights cut through the darkness outside the window, cresting up the hill of our driveway, and a second later, I heard the hum of the garage door. Gelsey sat up, and Warren turned off the volume. For a moment, we all just looked at one another in the sudden silence.
“They’re back, so that’s a good sign, right?” Gelsey asked. For some reason she looked at me for an answer, and I just looked at the television, where the hijinks were winding down and everything was getting happily resolved.
I heard the door open and close, and then my mother appeared in the doorway of the TV room, looking exhausted.
“Could we talk to all of you in the dining room?” she asked. She didn’t wait for us to answer, but left the room again.