by Ella James
I swallow. I blink, and tears fall down my cheeks again. “What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he stay here?”
She leans toward me, reaching across the table. Time slows as I watch her red lips move.
“Cleo—I’m sorry to have to share this news with you, but... Kellan is in the most advanced stage of leukemia.”
HAVE YOU EVER HAD YOUR whole life rearranged by something someone told you? It feels like surgery in a second. Like someone reaching in and moving things around so fast you’re different before you even realize what they’ve done. Maybe they’ve removed a part, or maybe something’s added. Maybe everything’s the same, but shifted slightly leftward.
Surgery on the heart changes the way the blood is pumped to every other part.
It makes sense. I can’t deny that much. It makes so much sense now that I know the truth.
When he disappeared from the deck off the windowed room that afternoon—after the grow house? We’d been playing rough, and he had asked me for a safe word. I said “sloth.”
The next day, he took me out for chicken pizza. Then the roasting of pecans. So many questions from him. Then Snow Queen, The Unicorns, Olive’s grave. What could make more sense than this?
They say God has a sense of humor. But it isn’t funny, is it?
I remember when we fell asleep on the couch and Kellan had that nightmare. How I draped my arm around his shoulders. All those other times, when he was always reaching for my hand. Between the dirty talk and his pretty, perfect cock, he was always reaching for me. Trying to fill every second with sex, at least when I first met him. Trying to interest me in taking over his business, because he was “leaving.”
How many sick people are getting marijuana at no cost because a bunch of college students pay for it?
Robin Hood.
I’m not even surprised he set up something like that.
And yet, I’m so surprised. I don’t believe it—any of it. I can’t fly to New York with him. When the doctor tells me what she tells me, I take a taxi back to Chattahoochee, to my car. I see the swamp, the puncture in the rail, the road muddied from where they hauled his car out, and it’s meaningless to me. Like a scene from a film I watched while half asleep.
I drive straight to Kellan’s house and find it unlocked. I go to the windowed room and go to sleep, and wake up in a ray of thick gold sunlight. Afternoon, it seems.
I reach the river as the sun sets, pinkening the sky over the pine trees. The black cat joins me. When I start to feel ill and I know I need to move, she follows me back to my car and twines her sleek body around my legs.
“And if we catch her and we have to put her down instead?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
“It makes you sad to think about putting down a feral cat you’ve never even met?”
“I think pain should be reserved for something painful…”
I scoop Helen up and take her with me. I don’t know where I’m going until I realize I’m in Lora’s parking lot.
‘I’m here. Coming up,’ I text her as I look up at the third story.
I carry Helen up the stairs and knock and ring the bell. Lora’s not home, but there’s a spare key underneath the frog statue sitting by her mat. I take Helen straight to the kitchen, where I serve her water and a bowl of ham.
Then I pull a wicker chair out from the breakfast table and sit down.
Tired. I feel—
Don’t.
I pull my phone out of the pocket of the jeans I got from the overnight bag in my car, and turn the screen face down so I can’t see the texts or missed calls.
Denial burns inside me, prickly, unsettling. I stand up and start to organize the counter. Toothpicks, Lora? Three boxes of toothpicks? I move two dirty plates, a vase of crumpled roses, and a sheer pink blouse, then spray the grimy counter down with a bleach-based cleaner.
The air in Lora’s house is cinnamon-vanilla. It feels heavy, like the pressure of the water on a scuba dive, which I did once and hated.
I’m wiping the counter slowly, letting the bleach fill up my head, when my hand bumps into a stack of mail partially obscured by the toaster oven. The thing on top is from the power company. It’s marked urgent.
“Lora, Lora…” I tear the bill open and mount it on the refrigerator with a magnet. I wipe the counter two more times and then thumb through the rest of Lora’s mail. This girl makes me look organized. Probably because she has so much money. What’s a late fee? I thumb through her other bills but don’t see any that look urgent enough to justify my opening them. I’m setting the envelopes in a seashell-shaped pewter bowl beside her paper towel holder when a small, white square slips from the bottom of the stack. It flutters to my feet. I bend to scoop it up and...it’s addressed to me?
I blink down at my dorm room address, and something starts to buzz inside my head.
I set the post card down. The post card with the campus scene. I turn around to face the throughway between living room and kitchen, leaning my back against the countertop. I touch my throat, which stings, as if I swallowed a sharp chicken bone.
I turn back around, compelled, and as my hands grab for the post card—
Thwack!
I whirl toward the breakfast table. My phone has fallen to the floor. Vibrating. I step over to it. Face-down, so I can’t see who’s calling…
Dr. Marlowe’s voice echoes. “A relapse after three years… hasn’t sought treatment… team waiting for him in New York…”
I scoop the phone up, see the number, answer. “It’s Cleo.”
Desperate. Desperate. Desperately, I clutch the phone. I sink into a wicker chair. My mind cranks like an airplane: spinning slowly, faster faster…
Cindy. Be The Match.
My fingers tremble on my iPhone as she lets me know my blood arrived. I am a match. She starts to tell me things I know from last time. I stand up. Circle the kitchen. I step over to the counter, frame the post card with my fingers.
I blink and stroke the glossy cover of my post card as she talks.
My brain…I must be tired. I feel wound up. Like things are connected when they aren’t connected. Like I’m about to cry, or barf. I look over my shoulder. Where is Lora? Is it chapter night? What day is it?
I’m going to pass out.
Just turn the fucking post card over.
I feel strong resistance to the idea. Cindy’s voice is driving me insane. She prattles on. My heart swells like a balloon behind my ribs. It takes up all the space. With a flick of my wrist, I turn the post card over. Read the time stamp: September 19, 2014. So…today.
I blink several times, and scan the text. It blurs as pressure builds behind my eyes.
“Cindy?”
She takes my interruption as a sign that she should wind things down. “So to proceed, we’ll need a commitment. Verbal and—”
“Cindy?” A tear falls onto the card.
“Miss Whatley? Are you okay?”
I swallow, but my voice is still a rasp. “I have a question.”
“Sure,” she says indulgently.
My heart hammers. I swallow, but it doesn’t help me breathe. Again, the chicken bone. “Can you tell me…when did R. die? What day?”
My chest is on fire. My head on fire. I lean against the table as my hand mangles the card.
“If you really want to know, I guess it couldn’t hurt. Just one moment, Autumn, okay?” I can hear her fingers clicking on a keyboard.
“Cleo.”
“Cleo? Okay, Cleo. I’ll be back in just a moment.”
My chest rises… My head spins.
“Sloth,” he says. “Is that a nickname?”
“Chicken pizza? Are you kidding me?”
“What can I say?” He smiles. “Chicken? Pizza? It works. You agree?”
“I think we might be soul mates.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You just played a song I really like, one I usually play wh
en I’m coming here. But other things too,” I add.
“What things?”
“Like you how … you made me drink the Snow Queen. My friend used to always say to drink before I come here.”
“Anything else?”
“I just…feel weird about you. Good weird. Like I know you, even though I know I really don’t.”
I hear a click. “Okay, Cleo.” Cindy’s voice is clear and crisp.
I close my eyes. I mouth the date. I mouth the words, because I know before she tells me. All this time I didn’t know and I know now. I know.
“It was in September. September 18, 2011. That’s the date, according to the charts.”
I hold my breath as Lora’s kitchen slowly tilts.
“I’m sorry, Cleo.”
I jump up. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I look down at the crumpled post-card. Then I dash into the living room, where I hung my purse on the front door handle.
Cindy’s voice pipes up: solemn, concerned. “I hope this doesn’t make you feel…”
Her voice is static in my ear. I pull the check out of an inside pocket, fingers shaking.
No surprise. It’s no surprise now. Now I know.
It’s R.’s handwriting. Kellan’s check. R. and Kellan. Kellan, R.
Lyon. Robert. Robert Lyon?
Lyon is the real R., and Kellan was his stand-in. Thanking me for giving bone marrow to his brother after Lyon was dead.
I murmur a goodbye to Cindy. Then I lunge for Lora’s sink and vomit while the cat looks on.
I WALK THE HALLWAYS OF Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for hours, blank and brainless, carting all my bags. And I decide he didn’t know. Kellan never sought me out at Chattahoochee College. He didn’t know about our strange connection until I said “sloth” on the balcony that day.
This is the universe’s setup. God’s joke. It’s so insane that as I wash my hands outside his room on the bone marrow transplant floor, I question whether he’ll really be in there. If Jesus can escape tombs…
Kellan’s nurse, a pretty brunette named Arethea, interrupts my magical thinking with a bunch of facts.
I don’t like any of them. Even though I’m here, I can’t seem to believe. Or maybe I believe too much. Blind faith that none of this is real. It’s all a lie.
I would never let Kellan have cancer. I wouldn’t let him die. He’s perfect Kellan. Duh.
You know Manning texted me? That girl is not his fucking girlfriend. She was Lyon’s girlfriend. Now she’s in medical school at Emory, which explains why she popped up in the parking deck
After she and Kellan’s Uncle Pace popped up to beg Kellan to seek treatment, Manning said Kellan was worried I’d find out. He wanted me to go away. He wanted to protect me. So he made it up, the bit about the pregnant girlfriend.
“Your hands seem clean to me,” Arethea says kindly. I look over my shoulder at her.
“You want to go inside? I think he’s sleeping.”
It’s horrible, the stepping through the door. With every cell I have, I protest. My stomach twists into a knot. My forehead sweats. My heart hammers so hard I barely notice my surroundings: teeny tiny hallway, widening into a wider room with pale blue walls.
He’s not in here. He’s not. I would believe that if I could. If I didn’t want to see him so badly. But I do. I want it more intensely than I fear it.
I take soft steps down the tiny hall. I pause at the mouth of the room so I can listen to the beeping, breathe the strange, cool air. It smells like plastic, and some sort of cleaner.
“Why is Daddy in that bed? It has a rail like Olive’s baby bed.”
“He’s sleeping, honey.”
“Will he sleep forever?”
“I don’t know.”
Kellan’s bed is empty, the sheets tucked neatly, as if it’s not been used. It isn’t hard for me to accept. In fact, I’m overtaken by a rush of mindless joy.
He isn’t here? I knew it.
But I see an IV pole. With IV bags. I see a rolling table with a newspaper, a black thermos. Both things are right beside a recliner. The chair is angled toward the room’s far right wall. I can see the foot-rest part is out—and something white on it.
I walk closer. It’s hard to breathe.
I don’t know what I think I’ll find, but as I come to stand in front of the recliner, I’m shocked and not surprised at all to find him lying on his right side, bundled up in sheets. They sag down his left bicep, so I can see how bruised his shoulder is.
I blink a few times. There are pillows propped behind his back and left side, propping him in this position, so all his weight is on the right side of his body. I can’t see under the sheet, but his ribs are hurt just like his shoulder. I remember that.
I rub my palm against my lips and blink, and his swollen, bruised shoulder blurs, as if the bruising is nothing but a watercolor. I could reach my fingers out and smudge it all away…
And still, it’s easier to look there than at his face. His cheekbone and the skin around his eye are bruised deep purple, almost black.
Anger bubbles up in me, even as I sink into a crouch beside the chair’s right arm. My face is level with his now. When he opens his eyes, he’ll see me. Breathe, Cleo. I watch his eyelids…watch his mouth. I can see his pulse throb over his brow.
Wake up, Kellan. Please wake up…
My fingers flex. I want to touch him. Stroke his hair. He hasn’t shaved. Does that mean he’s too hurt to get up? I blink, and a tear drops down my cheek. His mouth tautens, lips pressed together. It’s just a flicker of expression, there then gone, but it’s enough to make my hand grip the chair’s arm.
I lean closer to the chair and say his name…so soft, but loud enough to rouse him if he isn’t sleeping hard.
His eyes stay closed, but he shifts his shoulders, the tiny movement just enough to send the sheet over his torso sliding down more. I peruse his pretty throat, his collarbone, and…shit. The sheet falls lower still, and I can see his hand against his chest. The IV tubes—which disappear into his chest—are threaded through his fingers, and his palm is pressed above his pec, as if he’s holding himself together.
I tip my forehead toward the chair and sit there with my head bowed, hot tears dripping out my eyes.
I’m in a knot. I want to scream.
My palm trembles over his arm. I lean a little closer, till our faces are so close I feel his breath on my cheek.
Cleo is here. I might be dreaming, but... I think I’m not.
I smell her tea perfume. I hear her voice is in the air. I try to. I perceive it as something soft... not just sharp.
I have a fever. I can’t think because... the IV. If she’s here, then she can see me. I float up from where I’ve been and I can hear the beeps of the pulse ox machine.
Pain flashes all around me—I’m waking up. My face, my shoulder, ribs... My hips and back...
I feel Cleo’s hand. I twitch, and I can feel the IV tubing tug. My chest is sore...
Regret and shame.
I don’t want this.
She knows.
I can feel her fingers in my hair. Her fingers... being nice. Making me tired. But if I fall asleep, I’ll miss her. I peek and... fuck. Cleo—right here. Her pretty eyes. Her pretty mouth.
I can see her see me, because her face goes soft and sad. She says, “Sweetheart.” Her fingers dance across my brow.
“You’re sleepy, huh? You’ve got the good drugs going. That’s good.” She strokes my temple. I moan, in bliss, inside.
“I wanted to tell you, Kellan... I figured out about the letters. And R. I wanted to say... I understand. It’s crazy... like, a big surprise. But I’m not upset with you or anything.” Her fingers... sifting through my hair. “I talked to Manning just a little. It’s amazing, what you guys are doing. You’re amazing. I came to visit, but—” Her fingers dance like fog over my skin. I feel her face come up against mine, feel the warm rub of her cheek, and I’m surprised that she would... get so clo
se. “I’m really here because... I think I’d like to stay with you. Like... for a while.”
I must be dreaming.
I think Cleo’s crying, even as her soft hands stroke my hair. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t know. About all this, and R. I’m sorry I’m crying. I’ll be fine. I’m just...”
I shut my eyes. I try not to feel her hands, so I won’t feel them when she goes.
I float a little. All the Dilaudid. I try to stay, though. To stay near her. I
But I keep my eyes closed. I don’t want to look at her. To see... her look at me.
“Can you look at me, baby? I just want to see your eyes.” Her voice cracks. “If I can help you over to the bed... I want to lie down with you. You seem sort of uncomfortable in the chair.”
My eyes drift open, but a moment I see her, close, but blurry—then they sink back shut... because the Dilaudid. I would like to have her touch me, but... I’m dirty. Sweaty. Messed up. Just the last few days... have gotten bad. With pain.
She strokes my cheek, and my throat aches.
“I can help you get to the bed, or even call a nurse if you want. If you don’t want to snuggle, I’ll just leave you alone. Your shoulder, the left one... is it hurting? You keep moving it.”
I do?
She kisses my hair. It feels good.
I sit up, gritting my teeth against the pain of my ribs. I forget to hold the IV lines. They pull from where they’re threaded into my chest. Did she see that?
I curl over my lap, holding my head. My heart races. Cleo should go.
“You... need to go.” My eyes roll toward her, the words slurring.
I reach back for the IV pole, and brace against it as I push the chair down with my legs and stand. I shuffle as quickly as I can to the bed, but the rail is up. I have to move a lot to lay down. Moaning...
I feel the cold linen under my fever-warm body and curl up, shivering. I put my hand up to my face. I tell myself that anyone would go.
And then I feel the mattress indent. My eyes lift slowly open. Cleo’s right in front of me. She melds herself around me, so my face is near her neck.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs, one arm wrapping lightly around my back. Her hand curves around my head. “Just go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
