“No, you should stay,” Daddy says, and waves us to the couch. “You have a right to know. You’ll find out soon enough, anyway.”
I watch my father lower himself in his red recliner, and I wait. I wait for him to speak, to do something, do anything.
“It’s stage 3C,” he says, so quiet, and I’m completely undone. “It’s in my brain.”
Levi is as still as I am. I can feel his heart beating in his chest where it’s pressed against my back. Yet, I can’t feel my own heartbeat.
“Papa,” I breathe.
“They can’t perform an operation because of where it’s at—too dangerous. I could lose a lot more than my life. So chemo and radiation, and whatever other special treatments we can try…they’re all we’ve got.” He clears his throat. (I can hardly see him. Why can’t I see him?) “Bee, you can’t tell your siblings yet. They don’t know, and I wanted to tell you all after my first round of chemotherapy—”
“How long have you known?” I whisper.
“A few weeks now. They predict I have three months left, unless the chemo does something. A miracle.”
The way he says it, so factual, so nonchalant—as if he’s used to this news that he’s going to die—makes me furious. I’m boiling over, red beneath my skin, pulling into myself. “How dare you,” I say, because it makes more sense than anything else I want to say.
“What?” he asks, surprised. I never talk to him this way.
“I thought you and mom were getting a divorce. I thought you’d cheated on her or that something had happened with the house—or maybe you’d lost your job. I thought so many things, and I’ve spent so many weeks fighting these thoughts because I just wanted it to be okay. But this is worse. This is so much worse!”
He stands. I can see tears forming in his eyes and that’s when I know it’s too late for me. I begin to cry, letting him embrace me, but crying on his shoulder doesn’t make me feel any better. I try to wrap my arms around him. I try to push my face into his cotton t-shirt.
I try to shut out the absolute agony inside me. It’s like being ripped to shreds.
And when it doesn’t work, I push him away. I don’t want to hug him, even though I do, I desperately do. I accidentally hit Levi’s shoulder with mine as I leave the room. He tries to stop me, but I am the Unstoppable Force. I wrench my hand away, turning the corner, and head for my car.
Minutes pass while I sit in the driver’s seat, my chest hollow, my breathing deep and uneven. It isn’t until Levi gets into the passenger seat that I realize I haven’t driven away, and I immediately shove a shaking hand toward the ignition.
His hand covers mine, stopping me. “Bee, please.”
His pretty eyes, round and blue, have never looked so sad.
“Levi,” I grind out. My voice is gone.
“Bee, please,” he begs. I relinquish my keys. He sets them in the cup holder and opens the space between us so I can climb over. I sit on his lap, my head on his chest, not hearing a word he’s saying. His fingers brush through my hair.
(It reminds me of my father, combing his fingers through my hair, through Astrid’s and Millie’s. We all have such long, beautiful hair. He learned how to braid so well, just for us.)
I want to scream, to spit, to fold myself into the tiniest ball possible. I want to shout at my father for absolutely no reason, other than that he’s dying and I can’t change it. That is an unbearable truth, more unbearable than anything I have known in my small life.
(The world is so much bigger now.)
I can’t do any of the things I want to do. All I can do is cry, and all Levi can do is hold me.
The world spins, and I feel pain everywhere, and I die a little bit inside with every tear I shed, so that I’m left feeling like a husk: empty, ruined, devoured.
Chapter 28
Whatever routine I had before (with my parents, with Levi, with my siblings) is shattered. In its place grows a creature—a morphing, changing monster that disrupts every single day.
My father comes home from his first round of chemo, three days after I found out, and I can barely look at him. His face is puffy, his walk is slow, his eyes squint in exhaustion. There’s one thing that isn’t different: his smile. And he’s smiling at me like he doesn’t care about the last words I said to him three days ago. Like he understands.
This makes me feel incredibly guilty, so I sit beside him when my mom takes a nap and my sisters start their chores. (Millie and Astrid still just think he’s sick, and I don’t know when he’ll tell them that he’s dying.) Tom drifts in and out, claiming he needs a nap to recover from his shift, but he looks wary. (I wonder if he’s already pieced together the puzzle.) Sitting on the sofa, I put my hand on my papa’s, feeling his pulse so faint beneath his skin. I don’t look at him. I can’t.
“You need anything?” I ask eventually, gripping his hand tighter.
“I’m fine. Thanks, Bee.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say simply.
He nods. “I know.”
My breath shudders. “No, I’m sorry about what I said—”
“I know,” he repeats.
(Oh, how the heart aches.) “Where’s The Boy?” my dad asks.
I can’t even laugh at this. “He’s at the shop today, then TCP until eight tonight.”
“Hmm. He should come see me.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because.” He shrugs. “He should hang out with our family more, just in general.”
“He’s here all the time, Papa.”
“Not all the time.”
A sense of dread wells in my heart. I know what he’s doing. He wants Levi around all the time in case he dies before he can see us with what we all hope will be a future together.
(1. The fact that he likes my boyfriend this much makes my heart sing.) (2. The fact that he’s preparing for what he thinks is the inevitable makes my heart weak.) “I’ll let him know,” I say, acting like my voice isn’t husky and that my eyes aren’t full of tears. I am such a pretender. (I’m only half sorry for it.) “You’d better.” He squeezes my hand. “Will you read to me?”
I smile a little. “Sure. What book are you reading?”
“Crime and Punishment,” he says. “Haven’t been able to read much lately. Bad headaches.”
I close my eyes, briefly, before grabbing the book off the computer desk. I don’t want to think about his headaches. I don’t want to remember him as the dad who had headaches so often that he couldn’t read my favorite books.
So I read for him, picking up where he left off, and immerse myself in Raskilnikov’s path to self-destruction.
“Does he get redemption?” my father asks at one point, interrupting me.
“Say what?” I ask, coming out my reading marathon in a fog.
“Raskilnikov. Does he redeem himself?”
“I’m not telling you. That’s the whole point of the book!”
Papa frowns, but nods and tells me to keep reading. What I don’t think about: the fact that there is over half the book left, and the fact that my father has three months of life in his bones. I don’t think about it because it scares me, like a fist around my heart that is slowly squeezing, slowly and painfully and with certainty. I can only scream silently behind my eyelids, and read, read, read.