Emilia paused for a second before she answered the question. “Music and silence.”
“That’s a contradiction.”
She gazed at the colorful sky. The sun was setting in the horizon. “My head is filled with music all the time. I didn’t get my dad’s talent in the singing department, but it’s in my blood. Everything I hear I turn into a song or a melody, and when I close my eyes, it grows louder.”
“And the silence?”
“I use it when something frightens me. When my father passed, I didn’t hear any music for a long time. It was as if the world had shut off.” She moved her fingers in the sand. “When I’m content with life, there is music all around me. I love my job because I’m around it, but when something scares me, I choose the silence. I come here.”
“Are you scared now?” I tried to keep a steady voice.
“Petrified,” she whispered.
“Why?” I needed to know.
“You make me feel things I’ve never felt before.”
“I know that feeling well.”
She was yellow gel.
“I know the basics,” Emilia said while she dug her toes into the sand. “You’ll be a music legend. You have an adorable little girl. I love you unconditionally. I know the basics. Tell me, Weston Carter, what’s inside your head when nobody’s listening?”
I moved my head down her neckline and inhaled her scent. “Music and silence.” I gave her the same answer she had given me six years ago.
“You know, now that I think about it, that really doesn’t make any sense.” She laughed and looked up at me.
I kissed the tip of her nose. “You are my music and you are my muse. You’re the beat of the drums. You’re the power behind my voice. You’ve become the music that lives within me. I feel that if I don’t have you, I will lose my music.”
“And the silence?”
“When I lay in bed, the silence wakes me. When I can’t hear you softly snoring, you whimpering, or even you softly breathing because you may have turned away from me… For those three seconds, the silence terrifies me to the bone. I can’t live in a world where you don’t exist, Emilia.”
“You can’t say that. You have Lyra, and I will live through her. I will live in your heart. Regardless what happens to me, you need to be there for her. You can’t do what my Dad did to me.”
I wrapped my arms tightly around her. “I promise that I will never let anything bad happen to Lyra.”
* * *
Later that night I cooked dinner and, for dessert, we roasted s’mores outside on the fire pit. Afterward, I tucked Lyra into bed and Emilia and I stayed on the couch a while longer talking about life. Soft music played in the background and when Emilia stood up to make a new cup of tea, I pulled out my laptop and surfed through a clinical study I had found without her knowing. Her PET scan was in a few days and I wanted to know every possible outcome. Emilia had never mentioned looking into a clinical trial, but I figured it was worth a shot in the event the IP chemo wasn’t working.
“You said something today that got me thinking.” She returned and I put my laptop down on the coffee table.
“What did I say?” I asked and patted the cushion next to me.
“That without me, music doesn’t exist for you.” She sat, resting her head on the back of the couch, and I watched her lips curl up into a small smile.
“It does exist. It just doesn’t seem right.”
Emilia covered her legs with a blanket and brought her cup of tea to her lips. “Are you working on something new right now?” Her eyes grew wide when she saw the laptop. Emilia loved talking about music.
“I am,” I lied. I didn’t want to dampen our conversation anymore.
“Daddy?” Lyra’s little voice appeared from behind us. She held her HoHo in one hand as she rubbed her eyes.
“Saved by our daughter.” I pushed off the couch and tapped Emilia’s knee.
“What’s the matter, princess?” I scooped Lyra into my arms.
”I had a bad dream.”
“Come on. Daddy will tuck you back into bed.” I kissed Lyra’s forehead and mouthed ‘one second’ to Emilia.
Laying Lyra in her bed, I brought the covers under her arms. “Do you want to tell me what your bad dream was all about?”
“I had a dream Mommy went to the hospital and never came home.” Tears pooled in Lyra’s eyes.
I ran my hands through her hair, brushing it back. “That’s not going to happen, Lyra. The doctors are taking very good care of Mommy and Mommy is a fighter, so you don’t need to think like that.” She nodded and rolled to the side. “Close your eyes, sweetheart.” I kissed the top of her head. “Daddy won’t let anything happen to you or Mommy, I promise.
My heart weighed heavily as I walked out of Lyra’s room. I hadn’t stopped to think about how all of this was affecting Lyra. Exhaling, I tried to keep my thoughts positive. I didn’t want Emilia to worry even more than she had to. When I walked back into the living room, Emilia had my laptop on her lap.
Fuck!
“What’s this?” She turned my laptop to face me.
I sat down on the couch. “It’s a clinical trial.”
“Weston, you told me you were working on music. Why would you lie to me?”
I shrugged. “Why would you go through my computer?”
“Because I realized that you haven’t touched your guitar in weeks, and I haven’t heard you sing any of your new songs. You don’t act as if you’re releasing an album soon. This is your gift, Weston. This is what God gave you. You can’t shut down because I’m going through this.”
“You’re not going through this, Emilia, We are. Together. I don’t physically feel the same pain that you do, but I’m right there with you, fearing every second of every day. And it’s just not me and you, it’s Lyra too.”
“Why didn’t you come to me with the trial?”
“Because I’m hoping that when we go in for your PET scan, the tumor has shrunk and that instead of a sixty–five percent chance, you’ll be at a seventy–five percent survival rate.” My hands ran across my scalp. “I need to have hope that everything you’re going through, that everything our family is going through, is just a small bump in the road. That this is only going to make us stronger.”
Emilia exhaled, tears dripping down her cheeks. “You know what I think of sometimes?” She didn’t wait for me to respond. “What if I had told you about Lyra sooner? What if I had called you from the hospital? Would we be here? How different would our lives be?”
“You can’t think like that. You’re never going to be able to predict the future.”
“But there are days I think there is no future for me.” Her gaze was focused on the coffee table.
“Em—”
“What if I’m not there for Lyra’s first date?” She swallowed back a soft cry. “Or when she goes to prom? What if I miss every special moment in her life?”
I shifted on the couch and moved closer to her. Wrapping my arms around her body, I pulled her to me. “Stop thinking like this. Please.”
Emilia buried her head in my chest. “What if I miss her wedding day? I had eleven years with my mom, and that was too short. The stories have become a blur, and it’s so hard to make out her face when I close my eyes.”
“Emilia, listen to me.” I pulled her away from me and framed her face. My thumbs brushed away her tears. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“How can you be so certain?” she asked shakily.
“Because I made a deal with God.” I grinned.
Emilia laughed and hugged me tighter. “A deal? Weston, you don’t even go to church.”
“I don’t need to go to church to talk to the man upstairs. All I need is faith and I have plenty of that. I had faith you’d come back to me. I had faith that you and I would be together as a family. So trust me, babe. Nothing will happen to you.”
The night grew longer and the hours passed, but we didn’t move. She rested h
er head on my chest as I drew her a love letter across her soft skin.
23
Anger
Emilia sat on the examination table, swinging her legs back and forth. She reminded me so much of Lyra when we’d gone to the doctor’s office a few months back. Emilia was in a cotton gown, and the scarf she had worn wrapped around her head was tucked away with her clothes.
The radioactive tracer had been injected into her vein and we had to wait forty–five minutes before a nurse would take Emilia to get a scan. She’d leave this room and her life would be in the hands of a machine. This petrified me. The notion that the results were out of our hands only made it harder to sleep at night.
“Do you want me to hold your hand?” I asked with a joking smile on my face. I needed to focus on anything but what was happening.
Her lips pouted. “I’m not Lyra.”
“She looks a lot like you.” I smiled at Emilia’s face.
“Thanks. Though I think the features she has from you makes her more beautiful. Look at her eyes, for crying out loud.” Emilia giggled and shook her head. “She is going to give us a headache when she’s older. You know that, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Boys.” Emilia cocked an eyebrow. “They are going to be knocking on our door. And she is so loving to everyone that they will all be wrapped around her little finger.
“Fuck that!” I threw my hands in the air. “She’s not allowed to date. Nope. I don’t care what you say. Fuck. That. She has to go to school until she’s thirty.”
“What’s wrong with dating?”
“Dating leads to sex, and sex leads to pregnancy, and that’s how you get babies.”
Emilia’s laugh bellowed through the room. Why did she find it so funny? This was our daughter. “It’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not, but this helped calm my nerves.” Emilia rested her hands on her knees. “I didn’t know you would get so frantic over Lyra dating. And let’s not forget that you and I dated at one time.”
“She’s not dating. End of story,” I reminded her.
Emilia giggled again, but her laughter was interrupted when Suzy, the nurse who injected the radioactive tracer, tapped on the door.
“You two seem to be having a lot of fun in here,” Suzy said. She wore colorful flower–print scrubs, and her black hair was pulled back into a low ponytail.
“Weston refuses to let our daughter date until she’s thirty.” Emilia gave Suzy a kind smile and then looked over at me.
“Oh, if she resembles you two, you are both in for some fun times fighting off the boys.” Suzy brushed her hand toward me and winked. She helped Emilia off the table and then turned to me. “It will take about an hour. You can wait in the waiting room or in here if you’d like. Either way, as soon as she’s done I’ll come get you.”
I stood and walked over to Emilia. Kissing the top of her head, I whispered, “I’ll be outside. I love you, my yellow gel.”
Her brown eyes peered up into mine. “I love you, too.” Her words were no louder than a whisper.
“Are you ready?” Suzy asked, holding Emilia’s elbow. I held the door for them as Suzy walked Emilia out of the examination room.
I turned to the left, exiting out into the waiting room, and then I continued outside. It had been a long time since I gave Jeremy an update.
I wasn’t a smoker. The urge to bring paper and burning tobacco to my lips didn’t appeal to me, and I never understood how that could relax you, but as I paced outside Dr. Marino’s office, I wanted a cigarette. I wanted something to calm my rapid heartbeat.
I scrolled through my contacts until I found Jeremy’s name. Hitting the send button, I brought the phone to my ear.
“Hello?” Jeremy answered after a few rings.
“Hey.” I cleared my throat. “It’s Weston.
“Is she okay?” he asked. There was no point in dragging out the conversation.
Inhaling all the oxygen my lungs could take, I closed my eyes and exhaled. Jeremy didn’t know about the ovarian cancer. “She’s getting a PET scan at the moment. About two weeks ago, I found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.”
“Fuck.”
“She has ovarian cancer. The doctors say she has a sixty–five percent chance of survival. They’re giving her new chemo, which makes her very ill, but she’s strong.”
“Why are they doing the scan now?” His voice was low on the other side of the phone.
“They want to see if the chemo is working. Apparently, ovarian cancer is very hard to detect because you only feel the symptoms after it’s already there. I guess with the uterine cancer they caught it early so it wasn’t a difficult situation, but this one they’re not sure of because of how fast it’s grown.”
“Fuck!” I heard Jeremy slam his hand down. “And Lyra? How is she?”
“She knows her mom’s sick, but she doesn’t know the extent of her illness. Leslie has taken some time off of work to help out around the house, and my mom’s here two weeks a month. Everybody is trying to keep Lyra’s life as normal as possible.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“If you have a spare lifeline hanging around, now is the time to use it.”
“Can you call me after the scan and let me know what the doctors have to say?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks, man.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
My conversation with Jeremy lasted five minutes. I still had fifty–three minutes to go before Emilia would return from her scan. Fifty–three minutes. Three thousand, one hundred and eighty seconds.
I sat on the bench near the entrance, my head hung low, my gaze focused on the little rocks that had been mixed with the cement when they put in the sidewalk. Each minute was torturous. My feet tapped on the ground. My hands slapped my knees in rhythm to my feet, and I inhaled and exhaled heavily every few seconds until I began to feel lightheaded.
It was the longest hour of my life.
When there were only ten minutes left on the clock, I returned inside. I made it halfway through the waiting room when Suzy opened the door and called for me from the scan room to go back to the examination room. My heartbeat accelerated.
This was the moment of truth.
The scan would tell us if the chemo was working. It would tell us that we were one step closer to beating this terrible fucking disease.
Emilia returned to the exam room and I rushed to her side. Her hands rested on my cheeks as I brought my lips to hers.
“It was just a scan.” She looked up at me and smiled a full, beautiful white smile. It was one of the many reasons I’d fallen in love with her.
“I know, but I missed you.” I leaned in and kissed the tip of her nose.
“You two are so stinking cute,” Suzy said while she wrote down a few notes on Emilia’s chart. “Emily, you get dressed and then you can go over to Dr. Marino’s office so he can discuss the scans with you.”
* * *
I examined Dr. Marino’s office a little closer than the last time I was here. I wanted to see what kind of person he was because Emilia’s life was in his hands. I needed to know everything possible about him.
His office was painted cream, and his mahogany furniture matched the picture frames of his multiple degrees and certificates on the wall. A large desk sat in the center of the room, and a bookcase filled with medical journals and pictures of who I presumed were his wife and kids stood behind it. His wife was very attractive with blonde hair and blue eyes, and his three sons seemed to be very active in baseball, football, and basketball. I was confident that we were in good hands with Dr. Marino. He was a family man. He understood the value of having both parents in a child’s life.
I held Emilia’s hand, my thumb tracing a heart over her knuckles as we patiently waited for him to arrive with her results. I’d thought three thousand one hundred and eighty seconds were long, but the two thousand and one hundred seconds we had to wait felt like
an eternity. Each second that passed dragged longer than the one before.
I sighed and threw my head back dramatically. “Why is time moving so slowly today?”
“Tell me a story.” Emilia’s eyes were glued to the nameplate on the doctor’s desk.
“A story?”
“Yes.” Emilia looked over at me and a sad smile appeared on her face. “Tell me about the moment you fell in love with me. Tell me about when you knew I was your yellow gel.”
I brought her hand to my lips and kissed her soft skin. “You were mean to me.” Her eyes widened and I laughed. “Girls came easy to me, but not you. You had these rules.”
“You were a musician and a womanizer.” She giggled.
“I wasn’t a womanizer, but I did go out of my way to have a girl around me anytime I saw you. It seemed to piss you off and, let’s be honest, you’re cute when you’re mad.”
Emilia slapped my knee. “Jerk!”
I chuckled. “But you never took the bait. I went to Sparrows and you brushed me away as if I was nothing. So after a few months, I took matters into my own hands and stole your phone number.” A smile grew on her face as she remembered. “The night of my birthday, something changed. You finally let me in. The way you took care of me, the way you made sure you gave my keys to Axel—I knew right then and there you would be mine.”
“A little presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“No.” I reached for her hand, our gazes locked, and I hoped she understood how much I loved her. “I’d been searching for you all my life. And now that I’d finally found you, I wasn’t letting you go. I called in so many favors to make sure you had the best twenty–first birthday. And when you finally let me kiss you...” I pressed my lips to hers. “I was a goner. You had me.” Emilia reached up and cupped my cheek. “But do you want to know when I fell in love?”
“When?” she asked.
“When I took you home to meet my mother. It was the way you hugged her and Mama that confirmed you were my yellow gel. You had the purest heart, and I knew that if I let you go, I’d be a fucking idiot.”
Endless Love Letter (Love Letter Duet Book 2) Page 15
