Unforgettable: Always 2

by Cherie M Hudson

  Dragging a hand through my hair, I fisted it at the back of my head and glared at Amanda. “Tell me what’s going on. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m walking a fine line here. I flew halfway around the world without knowing why, because you asked. I’ve taken the news we have a son well. I’ve rolled with everything you’ve thrown at me so far, but now, I just want to know what you haven’t thrown at me. What you haven’t—”

  “I lost him!” Chase charged into the room, color high. “But I found a … oh, he’s back.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. It dawned on me the piercing above her right eyebrow was a tiny little skull and cross-bones. God help the poor sod who one day decided Chase Sinclair was the woman for him. She was going to make his life a living hell. “You came back. So the cab I was following all the way to the airport wasn’t you?”

  I shook my head, incapable of finding a word to say. I was close, very close, to losing it. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for Chase’s arrival, or resentful. Like frustration, however, resentment wasn’t something I allowed myself to experience.

  Chase rolled her eyes and let out a breath. “Great. So a taxi driver out there now thinks he’s got a dragon nut stalking after him. Yay.”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Amanda.

  Chase slid her gaze from me to her sister. “Did I interrupt something?”

  “I was …” Amanda muttered. “I was just about to tell Brendon where Tanner is. It’s time we went to see him, for Brendon to meet him.”

  “What?” Chase turned her right ear towards Amanda, thrusting her head out in a melodramatic way. “I can’t hear you. I’m deaf, remember?”

  “Chase,” Amanda snapped.

  She held up her hands. “Okay, okay. Just trying to cut the tension here. You two need to start acting like grown-ups. There’s such a thing as words, you know. You should both use them. I hear they’re quite useful at times.”

  “Chase.”

  The hands went up again, this time with an exasperation I was feeling myself. “Oh for fuck’s sake, can we all just get in the car? I’ll drive. We’re going to get stuck in traffic if we don’t go soon, and you drive way too slow.”

  I let out a tight breath.

  “Before we do …” Amanda walked into the kitchen to a tall wooden cupboard, opened the door and withdrew something from it.

  I could see what it was before she crossed to where I stood. My heart thumped faster. Harder. Tried to punch its way from my throat.

  She stopped directly in front of me, gaze locked on my face. “This,” she extended her hand toward me, “is Tanner.”

  I stared at the photo in her fingers.

  “This is Tanner,” she repeated. I didn’t miss the emphasis on the word “this”. But I didn’t understand it either.

  Pulse pounding in my ears faster than it should, I took the photo from her and studied it. A toddler grinned up at me, devilish mischief dancing in blue eyes so like my own I could never question his parentage. A tuft of thick blond hair – again, the same color as mine – sprouted from the top of his head, shaped into a short, spiky Mohawk. In his right hand was a bright yellow Transformer toy. In his left, an apple half munched on by baby teeth. He was wearing a bottle-green T-shirt with the words Try and Stop Me across the chest and a pair of shorts that showed off his chubby legs and knees. His feet were muddy. At those muddy feet a puppy sat – a black and white scruffy mutt with no discernible breed – just as muddy as he was.

  I stared at the photo. At my son. Drank in the sight of him. The obvious joy he was feeling at the moment he’d been immortalized by the camera.

  A tight band wrapped around my chest and squeezed. It stole my breath. My throat thickened. My head throbbed. My son. I was looking at my son.

  It was like looking at a photo of myself when I was that age. And yet, I could see Amanda in Tanner as well. In the shape of his jaw. In his eyebrows. My eyebrows are arched and bushy. Tanner’s fair eyebrows mimicked Amanda’s – straight blond horizontal lines above his blue eyes.

  Those eyes held mine to the photo. Kept me prisoner. I couldn’t look up from it, not even when I heard someone move to stand beside me.

  “He’s a cheeky little imp,” Chase said, her shoulder brushing my arm as she looked at the photo. “I remember the day that was taken. He’d just finished hitting Robby over the head with Bumblebee and thought he was all sorts of clever and awesome.”

  “Who’s Robby?” I murmured, incapable of lifting my attention from Tanner.

  If Chase heard my distracted question, she didn’t answer. It’s possible she didn’t. She was standing on my right, and Chase’s hearing is at its worst on her left.

  To be honest, I didn’t give a rat’s arse who Robby was. Not at that second. I was completely preoccupied with Tanner. A rush of sheer happiness crashed over me. I smiled at the photo, all too aware my eyes were prickling with wet heat. He was gorgeous.

  I know gorgeous is not a word guys tend to use unless they’re describing a hot chick, but he was. Gorgeous and full of life and fun. I could see it. There, in that photo.

  My son.

  Silence stretched in the room. It took more effort to raise my focus from that photo than it did to bench-press 136 kilograms. Chase and Amanda were both watching me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. A tickle in my brain said I was missing something very important. Something … “Why isn’t there any sign of him here?” That tickle turned to a cold finger, pressing at my heart. The hair on my scalp crawled. “Doesn’t he live here? Where is he?”

  Adopted. She adopted him out. Why else wouldn’t he be here? With his mother?

  The thought slammed me hard. I frowned, staring at Amanda’s face.

  “Where is he, Amanda? Why do we have to drive to see him? Who does he live with?” Another thought popped into my head, a brittle connection to a possibility I didn’t want to ponder. “Who’s Robby? What’s he to my son?”

  “Brendon,” Chase began, her voice louder than it should have been in the small room. So it wasn’t just me stressed then? For some fucked-up reason that made me feel better. But not by much.

  “No, Chase.” Amanda stopped her with a hand on her arm. “I got this. I should have got this months ago. Eighteen months ago. Then Bren wouldn’t be looking at us, at me, like I was … like … ah, fuck, Bren.”

  She closed her eyes and stood motionless, save for her fingers pinching at her thumbnail again. She stood there, silent, before opening her eyes again and meeting my gaze with an unwavering, unreadable stare.

  “Tanner has Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukemia, Brendon,” she said, her voice calm and yet at the same time hollow. Broken. “He was diagnosed last month. Unless he has a successful bone marrow transfer as soon as possible, the doctors have given him six months to live. Maybe less.” She stopped and drew a slow breath. “It’s rare for the parents to be a match, but sometimes they are, and the first ones tested are family and siblings. That’s why I contacted you,” she continued. “That’s why you’re here.”

  I blinked, looking at her, trying to comprehend the words that had come out of her mouth. I must have misunderstood. I must have …

  My brain caught up in the space of a heartbeat. Caught up and rebelled against what it had heard.

  Leukemia.

  Cancer.

  I blinked again, staring at her. “Are you serious?” My voice was little more than a rough breath. It was the most ridiculous question I’ve ever asked in my life.

  In my twenty-five years of living.

  Living.

  Six months to live …

  A tear tracked a path down Amanda’s right cheek. She nodded, a strange hiccupping action of her head. Her eyes however, didn’t move from mine.

  My knees crumpled beneath me. They’d been trying to desert me, abandon me, since I’d learned of Tanner’s existence and I’d denied them the victory. But now whatever determination and strength I’d had before was gone
. Robbed of me by four words: Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukemia.

  I fell onto my arse, hitting the floor with a thud. The room rushed at me, even as the air vanished. I gasped for breath, but none came. My chest turned to a vice; my gut a churning mess. I stared up at Amanda from the floor, my head roaring.

  “No,” I said. “No. You can’t do this to me. You can’t call me to the other side of the world, tell me I have a son and then tell me he’s dying. You can’t do that.”

  Amanda did that horrible, hiccupping head nod again. A part of me recognized how tormented, how haunted she looked. How drained and beaten. Another part of me saw her as something else: something cold and deceptive. Something I didn’t want to be around.

  The rest of me … the rest of me …

  I shook my head, teeth clenched, and tore my eyes from the woman in front of me, fixing them instead on the photo in my hand. Tanner grinned up at me, thrumming with life and energy and playful joy.

  “Bren …” Amanda’s choked voice filled the silence. “I had no choice, don’t you see? I’m desperate. We’re desperate. It’s not just Tanner who needs you, it’s me as well. I need you.”

  “You can’t do that,” I growled from the floor. My eyes felt full of burning sand. The image of Tanner blurred. “You can’t do that.”

  “But she did, Brendon,” Chase said. “As fucked up as it is, she did. And now it’s time to step up and show us what you’re going to do about it.”

  Beeping and Whirring Constantly

  When I was eight years old and in awe of my older brother, Ben – who could do an ollie on a skateboard without falling off even once, already had his green belt in taekwondo and was allowed to stay at home alone when Mum needed to race to the shops to buy milk – I got into a fight at school.

  A new kid, Gregory Blake, had joined my class a month earlier. He’d moved from the big city and was having difficulty with the playground dynamics of our small country school. Gregory was shy, a little wimpy, and wore glasses. I was tall for my age and already stronger than most boys in my year, let alone boys in the years above me. I was also playing football twice a week, for both the school and the local youth club. In other words, I was not only a tough bastard physically, but a school hero. (Our school was all about footy. Soccer players were shunned for reasons I still don’t understand.) Gregory Blake decided, in his first week at school, that I was his best friend.

  He followed me around like a puppy, and bought stuff for me from the school canteen. I’d only have to mention I’d like a packet of chips and he’d be at my side a few minutes later with them. It took me quite a while to realize, I’m ashamed to say, that he wouldn’t spend his lunch money on his own food in case I casually mentioned I wanted something.

  Gregory’s parents were rich. Not more-money-than-God rich, but better off than anyone else’s parents at our school. But Gregory’s parents rarely did anything with their son. They didn’t come to any school events, nor wait for him to finish class inside the school grounds, like the other parents. It wasn’t until years later, when I was old enough to truly ponder Gregory’s behavior, that it dawned on me he was lonely.

  Because I’ve never been a horrible kid, I never told him to go away. My other friends – friends I’d had since kindergarten – thought he was annoying. I just shrugged and let him tag along.

  He skimmed the surface of my daily radar, filled the hole in my stomach whenever the food my mum packed wasn’t enough, and occasionally said something funny enough to make us laugh about the other boys in the playground. Those somethings were most likely so witty they went over our heads, but eight-year-olds are not discerning in their humor. When Gregory said Richie Gribble was a “mouth-breathing knuckle dragger” we all laughed ourselves silly. My “real” best friend at the time, Lochie Perkins, laughed so much snot came out his nose.

  The next day after school, Richie Gribble cornered Gregory outside the sports equipment shed and beat the crap out of him. He was found crying and bleeding by the school groundskeeper. He’d pissed his pants, had one of his front teeth broken, and his glasses were nowhere to be seen.

  He never came back to school.

  The kids didn’t know what had happened until the day after the fight. No one knew where Gregory went. He never contacted anyone at school to let us know.

  I found out what Richie had done halfway through our afternoon art lesson, when Lochie leaned over and confessed he’d told Richie at footy practice what Gregory had said about him. I remember looking at Lochie like I didn’t know him. Like he was a stranger. I’d slept at his house more than once. We’d shared our lunches since we were five. I knew everything about Lochie, about how he was going to be a racing car driver when he grew up, how he didn’t like when his big sister walked around the house in just her underwear, and how his doodle sometimes got hard when she did, which made him feel weird.

  Lochie was no friend of Richie Gribble, nor was he a dobber. And yet, here was my best friend fessing up to the fact he’d told Richie what Gregory had said about him even though we both knew Richie would hurt Gregory because of it.

  Why?

  When I asked Lochie that very question, he shrugged. “Dunno.”

  That afternoon – outside the same sports equipment shed where he’d beaten Gregory – I turned Richie’s nose to a mushy, bloody pulp. Knocked him on his arse.

  That night, as Mum sat beside me on my bedroom floor, her hand resting gently on my back, disappointment on her face, I understood something far beyond my eight years: I wasn’t just angry at Richie for beating up Gregory. I was angry at Lochie as well. I’d taken my disappointment with my best friend out on the school bully, and while my big brother crowed about it the next day, and told everyone he was proud of me for sticking up for a friend, my disillusionment with Lochie tainted the joy I felt at Ben’s approval.

  Lochie had betrayed the trust of someone who’d been “with us”. Sure, Gregory hadn’t ever been to either of our houses, but he’d sat with us at lunch, he’d shared his food. Lochie had eaten more than one Frosty Fruit icy-pole purchased by Gregory. Gregory had been hurt because his trust had been betrayed, and for reasons my eight-year-old brain couldn’t truly fathom, I’d been hurt as well. And that betrayal had made me angry enough to hurt someone in retaliation.

  I’d regretted it the moment it happened. The second Richie fell to the ground – blood and snot spreading over his top lip in a disgusting mustache, tears leaking from his eyes, his hands trying to protect his face as he blubbered “No stop I’m sorry I’m sorry” over and over – I regretted it. But I never said sorry to him. And I never had a sleepover at Lochie’s place again.

  I need you to understand the significance of this little window into my personality. I may no longer be that eight-year-old boy with blood on his fists and righteous anger in his heart, but I still have the same core values and opinions. And I still – no matter how much I wished otherwise – have the same visceral reaction to my trust being shattered.

  And what I’d just learned, what Amanda had just told me?

  Yeah, my trust was beyond shattered.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet, towering over both Chase and Amanda. Furious. I’m a big guy. I’m not called Brendon the Biceps in any kind of ironic way. I’m a big guy with a latent strength beyond the norm, and I was pissed.

  Torn apart.

  Everything I thought I knew about Amanda, every opinion I had …

  It wasn’t just that either. In the few hours since discovering I was a dad, I’d ridden an emotional rollercoaster the likes of which I’d never experienced before. I’d ridden that fucking rollercoaster and, in patented Brendon Osborn optimism, saw the best in it. I’d accepted I was a father, I’d accepted my life had irrevocably changed, but I’d moved beyond the loss of holding Tanner as a baby to already placing myself in his life. Running with him, playing with him. Living life large with him.

  I’d done that. In a short time, yes, but that was
who I was. I’d already gone there, in my mind, in my heart.

  And now Amanda was taking that away from me as well. Not just taking it away. Ripping it from me. Tearing it to pieces in front of me. And as ugly as it makes me sound, I couldn’t help but wonder if the only reason I was there was because our son was sick.

  Bone marrow.

  I’d paid enough attention in my one semester of Human Biology 101 to know exactly the significance of the words bone marrow when connected to leukemia. The significance was that I wasn’t here to be a father … but a donor.

  Amanda hadn’t asked me to come to her, to be in her life, because she missed me. She needed me to come to donate my bone marrow to my dying son.

  And yes, she was correct: the chances of a parent being a match were rare, but still there. I knew that from my studies as well. Amanda must have been beyond desperate to call me after all this time. To reveal to me the secret she’d kept for so long. She’d have to know I’d be angry, hurt. But that fact didn’t assuage my anger. Not at all.

  I curled my fist and glared at them both, an empty ache in my chest even as anger continued to spread through me. “I’m assuming you’re not a match?”

  She shook her head. I could see she was wracked with grief at the meaning behind that unspoken no, but I was too angry to let it stop me.

  “You’re not a match, so you call me. You kept the fact I have a son from me for over a year and a half. You decided I wasn’t important enough to be in his life, not significant enough to be in his life. Until me being in his life is what’s needed to keep him alive.” I swung around to stare at Chase, standing beside her sister, hugging her with one arm. “And you ask me what I’m going to do about it? As if I’m the one who’s fucked up?”

  Amanda sobbed, her eyes swimming with tears and grief as she stared up at me. My insult was brutal. Harsh. Callous. I knew that. But I was angry. So very angry. And so very hurt. Fuck, I’ve never felt so hurt, so helpless and … and … weak, in my life.

  Life. It all came back to life. To living.

  “I’ve run out of fucking time, Brendon,” Amanda cried, her face contorted with wretched pain. “This is not how I wanted to tell you. Since the day I found out I was pregnant I’ve tried to work out how to tell you, knowing how much it would change everything. And then when Tanner started to get sick … From the day he was diagnosed I tried to work out how to tell you, but I was scared.” She dragged her hands though her hair. “And now I’ve fucking run out of time and our son is dying and all I know is I need you. Here. I need you here to save him, to save us. I need you, his father.”