by Abby Jimenez
My mouth fell open and I couldn’t even breathe. No one had ever said anything so beautiful to me. Ever.
“Adrian…”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s just true. And I never had any choice in the matter.”
The welling tears broke free and slid down my cheeks.
I felt so lucky to be cared for by him. And to be different for him than anyone else had ever been.
He was different for me too.
I was in love with this man. There was no other way to put it. I was in love with him. And he wasn’t even trying to make me love him. He was just being who he was.
I’d seen so much of the world. But I’d never see enough of Adrian. Even if I got a lifetime on this Earth, to be married to him and grow old with him, it wouldn’t be enough.
A sudden, bottomless, aching sadness overcame me. Invisible fingers reached up and choked me from the inside.
I was probably going to die. Soon.
This realization hit me in a way that it never had. In all my years of living with this unknown, I’d never felt it this deep in my bones. It had never been this savage.
I’d always suspected I would die young. Then my hand started acting up and I knew I would. I was at peace with it, for the most part. I’d lived a great life. I had no regrets. But now everything was different.
I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay with him.
And the fact that I couldn’t, that I couldn’t get all of him that I wanted, was devastating.
I didn’t want to leave him.
How could the universe show me how pure, how perfect, love could be, and then kill me?
A wave of grief poured over me. That forbidden emotion that I never let in. I looked right at the sun and it exploded, crashed into me, and seared me alive.
I started to cry. Racking, choking sobs.
His arms wrapped around me. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head into his chest. “I’m so afraid of losing you.”
“You won’t,” he whispered. “You will never lose me.”
No.
It would be the other way around.
He would lose me.
CHAPTER 25
10 SIGNS THAT YOUR
PERFECT RELATIONSHIP IS
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
ADRIAN
I woke up on Christmas morning, my arms wrapped around her warm body. She was in nothing but a baggy T-shirt. Her hair was pulled over one shoulder and I kissed the bare skin on her neck and she tipped her head to one side.
She smelled like vanilla. She smelled like home.
I couldn’t even understand how I had lived without her once. How I’d gone through my days not knowing her. I was turned to her now the way a house plant leaned toward a sunny window. I felt like the luckiest man in the world.
Christmas was one of the best I’d ever had. We ate breakfast and opened presents. I got Richard and Mom an espresso maker. A smaller, less vulgar (as Vanessa called it) version of the one in my own kitchen. We’d gotten the approval from the rescue and we talked to Richard and Mom about Harry. Grandma was already holding him when we told her, and she was very excited.
Vanessa’s mother’s ring was my main gift to her. When all was said and done, I could have bought five rings for the price of what it cost me to find this one, but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. The look on her face when she saw it was priceless.
I also got her an Office shirt with Jim’s face and BEARS, BEETS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA on the front. She loved it.
Since Badger Den hadn’t panned out, she got me a bottle of 2010 Château Lafite Rothschild Pauillac. She said it was “a Bordeaux with a strong sense of its own self-importance”—a lot like her dad. Her words, not mine. She also bought me an ant farm, which was ironic since my last gift to her, still en route to her apartment, was a butterfly habitat.
After presents and lunch, Dad offered to take Vanessa ice fishing with him. I opted to stay back and spend some time with Mom and Grandma. Grandma went to take a nap about thirty minutes in, and Mom and I moved to the four-season porch on the back of the house overlooking the pond. It had a little fireplace in it, and we were on the couch. We could see Richard and Vanessa like two little dark specks out on the white frozen tundra.
“She’s exceptional,” Mom said, putting her teacup down on the coffee table. “And she’s perfect for you. I never liked Rachel.”
I laughed. “You only met her once.”
“She couldn’t look me in the eye!”
Well, I guess that made sense.
“Thank you for coming,” Mom said. “It meant the world to me.” She nodded to the pond. “And to him.”
I gazed out the window at Vanessa and Dad.
Vanessa was right. I needed to forgive.
I didn’t realize the weight I’d been carrying around on my back all these years until it was gone.
It seemed so pointless now, all the time I’d hated him. I felt like if I’d ever given him another chance, I would have realized that I never really did.
I’d gotten something back today that I’d lost a long time ago. Maybe it was him—or maybe it was just the place I used to keep my feelings about him. Either way, there was room inside of me for other things now. Better things.
And I was looking forward to them.
“I’m glad you’re happy, Mom. You’ve got a nice life here. I can see why you wanted to make the move.”
She smiled. “I am happy. I really am.” Then she seemed to remember something. “Vanessa says she wants to talk to me about joining a club she and Kristen are in?”
I started choking on my coffee. “Don’t join.” I cough-laughed. “Trust me. You’ll learn more about me and Josh than you’ll ever care to know.”
Mom smiled. She nudged my arm. “I like her. You know, I think it’s destiny that you met this girl.”
And then I had to laugh, because I think it was the first time in my life that I actually believed that. But what other explanation could there be?
If I hadn’t met Rachel, I wouldn’t have gone to Vanessa’s apartment that morning. If Becky had taken the studio when it was available or if Vanessa had moved into a different building—or even into a different unit—we wouldn’t have met. I’d have never known her or Grace.
It had to be destiny. Stars aligning. Some master plan.
I wasn’t ready to have Becky drop my horoscope into my email every morning, but I was open to considering that there might be more to all this than I’d given it credit.
Mom nodded at the baby sleeping in her swing. “I have to be honest, I never thought you’d be like this.” She shook her head. “And to be with someone like Vanessa, even knowing that she might be sick?” She smiled at me. “You’ve grown into a good man, Adrian. I’m so proud of you.”
I wrinkled my forehead at her. “What do you mean? She’s not sick.”
“No, I know.” She waved me off. “But with the ALS always being a possibility for her. God, Richard and I must have watched half her videos after you told us you were bringing her. She is so brave.”
I stared at her. “What are you talking about? ALS is random.”
She scrunched up her eyebrows. “Well, yes, most of the time. But it runs in her family. She has a fifty-fifty chance of getting it.”
I felt the color drain from my face. What?
“You saw this on her channel?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.
“She talks about it in almost every video she does.” She waved me off again. “But you knew that.”
I blinked at her for a long moment.
“I have to go change the baby,” I said, getting up, trying to keep calm. I grabbed Grace and made a beeline for my room.
As soon as I got there, I locked the door and pulled out my laptop. I googled “Vanessa Price First Video” and hit Search. When I saw the one I was looking for, dated three years ago, I played it, my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
A
younger Vanessa came onto the screen. “Hi,” she said, waving at the camera. “My name is Vanessa Price.”
She held up a glass with something dark sloshing around in it.
“My sister died yesterday. I just poured myself a glass of Sambuca and decided that it was too gross to drink straight so I poured some grape juice in it, which only managed to make it worse. And I sat there staring at this and I asked myself, ‘Vanessa, do you really want to be the kind of person who deals with loss by drinking shitty cocktails?’ And I decided no. I don’t want to take the edge off my sister’s tragic and untimely death with disgusting alcoholic beverages because, one, she wouldn’t want that. And secondly, I don’t want that either. You see, I might be dying too. And dying changes things. I’ll get to all that in a minute.
“If I know my days might be numbered, I want to savor each day. I want to enjoy every single thing I eat and drink, and all the people I meet, and every last second on this Earth. I want to laugh. I want to explore. I want to live my life, what’s left of my life, like a butterfly in the wind and go where the world takes me. I definitely don’t want to sit around in my dead-end job and wait for the next installment from the creepy old guy in Monett, Missouri, who met me in an online support group once and now sends me handwritten love letters in cursive.” She leaned into the camera. “Let me just tell you, as someone who might have a fatal health condition, there’s still nothing more terrifying than a handwritten letter in cursive. Especially when it’s accompanied by a Ziploc bag of his slightly-moist-for-some-reason homemade beef jerky. Trust me on this.
“So, I cashed in my 401(k), all $1,023 of it. Oh, and by the way, Patrick, I quit. Sorry you had to find out like this. And I’m leaving today. Now. Right after I upload this video. Actually, no. Right after I have a yard sale, sell my hair, and pawn my jewelry. Then I’m leaving. So, like, maybe tomorrow.
“Probably nobody will watch this. I don’t even know who I’m making this for. But I figure if it leads to even one dollar donated to research or one person deciding to live their best life, then I guess it’s worth it, right? Now, about my sister.
“My sister died of a rare fatal disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. You probably know about it because a few years ago everyone was doing that Ice Bucket Challenge and dumping ice water on themselves in support of ALS research.
“I know about this disease because it’s been a part of my earliest memory. It is my family curse. My family has what’s called familial ALS, meaning it’s hereditary. The strain my family suffers from starts earlier and kills faster than the sporadic kind and the limited treatments available will only extend your life about three months. The particular mutated gene that causes it in my family hasn’t been identified yet. Meaning I can’t even test for it.” She paused. “I might have a ticking time bomb in my DNA.
“My grandmother had it. My aunt had it. My mom had it, though she died in a car accident before ALS took her life. My sister Melanie had it. And there’s a fifty percent chance I have it too…”
What she said after that, I don’t know, because my ears started to ring.
I’d been pacing, but now I had to sit. I had to sit or my knees were going to give out.
A 50 percent chance?
I mean, I knew about Melanie, but I didn’t know about the rest of them. She never told me, I didn’t know, it wasn’t in Drake’s videos or…She probably thought I knew because—
Her hand…
I started to wheeze.
Her hand…
She had told me. She told me and I didn’t fucking listen. I didn’t fucking hear her.
Information came flying back to me in patches, each bit sticking until it pieced together into some black, macabre obituary.
Hand weakness.
Her reasons for not dating.
Her tubes were tied, her saying she couldn’t adopt Grace because she wouldn’t be here in a year…
No…no no no no no.
I couldn’t breathe.
It was a wrecking ball to my universe. The shattering of everything. A beautiful stained-glass window in a thousand pieces at my feet.
She might be dying. The love of my life might be dying.
And I was going to have to watch.
CHAPTER 26
YOUR WORST
NIGHTMARES RANKED!
VANESSA
After ice fishing, I jogged up the steps and let myself into our room. Adrian was standing in front of the fireplace facing the door when I came in.
“Hey,” I said, pulling off my beanie. “God, I love your family. Your dad’s like a mountain man or something. Do you know he—”
“Are you sick?”
I unraveled my scarf. “What?”
“Sick,” he said again. “Are you sick? Do you have ALS?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “I don’t know…” I stared at him, confused. “Why are you asking me this?”
“I didn’t know…” he breathed.
I blinked at him. “You didn’t know what?”
He shook his head, and I realized how pale he looked. “I didn’t know it was hereditary.”
I felt my face fall. “What do you mean you didn’t know it was hereditary?” I said carefully.
He let out a shuddering breath. “I didn’t watch all your videos. I just…I just watched that one where you talked about meeting me and then ghost peppers—”
“Ghost peppers? That’s not even my channel. That’s Willow Shea’s channel. It was a collab.” My stomach dropped. “Adrian, what are you saying? Are you saying…you actually didn’t know about this?”
“I didn’t know,” he said again.
And then he started to wheeze.
I darted over to him. “Adrian!”
He was doubled over with his hands on his knees, gasping for air.
“You’re having a panic attack. Sit down. Sit.” My heart was thrumming in my ears.
It took me a moment to get him moving, but I finally led him to the edge of the bed.
I crouched in front of him. “Slow down your breathing. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe through your nose. In through your nose, out through pursed lips.”
He took a few labored breaths.
“You need to go to the doctor,” he rasped.
“What?”
“Go to the doctor. I’ll go with you. We need to know if that’s what this is.”
“I…Adrian, you don’t just walk into a doctor’s office and come out with an ALS diagnosis. There’s no test for it.”
He looked me in the eye, breathing shakily through his nose. “There has to be a test for it. People get diagnosed with it.”
“It’s diagnosed by excluding other diseases and monitoring your deterioration. It’s months and months of testing to rule out other things. It can take a year to get a diagnosis—”
“Then go do that.”
I scoffed. “No.”
He stared at me.
“No. I won’t. HIV, human T-cell leukemia, polio, West Nile virus, multiple sclerosis, multifocal motor neuropathy, Kennedy’s disease—they all mimic ALS. I’ll be tested for all of it, poked and prodded in the hospital for months and for what? I either have it or I don’t. And if I do, it’s fatal. There’s nothing they can do about it.”
He blinked at me. “But…but what if that’s not what it is? What if it is something else?”
I shrugged. “Then it won’t progress, and it won’t be a problem. If it’s still around in six months, but nothing else has changed, I’ll have my hand looked at again. But the most likely contender was carpal tunnel, and they’ve already ruled that out.”
He stared at me like I’d gone mad. “How can you live like this?” he said incredulously.
I shook my head. “What choice do I have, Adrian? What choice do I have but to live like this? I’ve always lived like this.”
His breathing was ragged. He looked like he was going to be sick. I felt like I was going to be sick too.
I sat next to
him. “Look, let’s just calm down. Okay?” I rubbed his back. “We can talk about this when you’re calmer.”
“No. We talk about it now.” He was so out of breath it took him a minute to say the next thing. “If you don’t have a diagnosis, how can they get you on the right medications?”
I felt my heart shattering.
He knew nothing. None of it. None of the things that I thought he did.
How had this happened? How did something so big slip through the cracks?
“Adrian,” I said gently. “I won’t be taking any medications.”
He froze to stare at me. “What?” he breathed. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not seeking treatment.”
“What do you—you need medications, there’s clinical trials—”
“So I can spend the rest of my short life getting spinal taps and dealing with side effects worse than the disease? In exchange for maybe a couple of extra months of life expectancy? And that’s if they don’t give me a placebo. And treatments?” I scoffed. “Do you know how few medications there are to treat what I might have? Do you know what they do? They give me three months, Adrian. That’s it. Three extra months. Melanie took them. She had headaches and vomiting and was so dizzy and tired she could barely keep her eyes open. She was hooked up to an IV every single day, they had to constantly monitor her blood and her liver function. I don’t want to live like that. I’ll be tied to whatever hospital is treating me, I won’t be able to travel—”
The look on his face could only be described as horror.
“But…what if there’s a breakthrough?” he said. “What if it’s happening right now? What if they find a cure and you’re not in the trial? Vanessa, you have to get treatment—”
I shook my head. “No. I won’t. I’ll do physical and speech therapy virtually so I can travel. And when I need help breathing and eating and moving, I’ll take those steps. I’ll do what I need to do to stay comfortable and independent for as long as possible. But I won’t take the medications and I won’t enter a trial. If I have this, it’s already too late. My family’s strain progresses too fast. Not any of the promising research they’re doing in those trials reverses the damage of the disease. It only slows the deterioration. By the time I got a diagnosis and got in a trial, there wouldn’t be any fixing what it had already done to me—and then what? I get to be a guinea pig? That’s it? That’s the rest of my time here?”
