by Ella James
Have fun. Do what you love. I’m leaving you some money, baby. When they bring the check to you, take it without a fuss. For me. I still want to take care of you. It’s important to me. You deserve the best.
Please don’t regret a thing about the time we shared. Everything you did was good enough. Your marrow is a lovely thing. Do you know how much it pleases me to know we share your DNA? I’m going to leave this world perfect.
Don’t worry with my resting place. I won’t be there. Once a year, baby. That’s all you need to do.
I want you to travel. See the world for me. Leave your angel DNA on every continent. Find someone to love, who loves you back, and take him (or her) with you. Share a cot in a hostel. Go to the beach a hundred times a year. Dancing in the rain is fucking cold and, in my opinion, unpleasant, but enjoy other spontaneous things, like extra nights on vacation, and a good fuck. Yeah—that’s right. Don’t forget to use that pretty pussy.
Also, keep painting. There’s a grant waiting for you at my mother’s foundation.
Don’t hold onto bitterness and anger. I know it’s easier said than done, but I want you to remember what, to me, is the most important fact of my life: I died knowing that you loved me.
Maybe I wasn’t here for very long, but while I was, you gave me the greatest gift you could—your heart.
I don’t know why I was here, or exactly how I got here, or even where I’m going, but I know the point of it was loving you. There is no doubt in my mind, Cleo. We love each other. I think that’s the point, baby. I think that’s why. We didn’t need a lot of time. We took what we had.
Please keep Truman close to you. Don’t walk down dark roads at night, baby, take a self-defense class. Be careful who you trust, or sensible. Cherish what I value most, okay?
When you meet your next love, kiss them as soon as you know. Put the poor bastard out of the misery of guessing.
Make sure he treats you like an angel. You are, and always will be, mine.
Your Kellan.
The bedroom door pops open before I have a chance to swallow back my wrenching sobs. I see Olive’s small, blonde head, then Mary Claire’s stunned face.
She scoops Olive up, stroking her hair. She reaches around Ol and, with her brows drawn tightly, MC signs, “Are you okay?” Her eyes widen, to emphasize surprise. “Do you need anything?”
I shake my head. “Go away,” I sign back. My daughter’s green eyes meet mine, and I give her an unsteady smile. “It’s okay Ollie, Mommy’s sad, but I’ll feel better soon,” I fudge. “Go play with Aunt MC.”
My four-year-old nods knowingly. “I love you Mommy.”
I feel a flash of mom guilt as MC carries Olive off, but it’s lost quickly in the typhoon of grief roaring through my soul. I drop my head down to my pillow and give in to hysterics.
Outside my window, waves crawl up a long, deserted shore. The sky looms low over the sea. A bird caws, frantic—like I feel.
I hold my pounding head and squeeze my pillow close. I miss him. I miss Kellan so much. I picture his face and sob so long and hard my stomach starts to churn. I drag myself into the shower and sob as I wash. I pull a swimsuit on, then flop down on my king-sized bed. I need to get out of the house. Instead I grab the nearest framed snapshot off my nightstand and grip it to my chest, as if that can ease my pain.
I hear my daughter’s gleeful scream echo down the hall. Poor Helen’s sharp meow as Olive dashes after her. The sound of crashing waves floats in through the half-cracked balcony door. It’s a perfect summer afternoon. I have to stop. No use in grieving all this now.
And yet, the more I tell myself to stop crying, the less I can. I curl over on my side, weeping helplessly…for how long?
I cry for both of us. For Kellan, mainly—all he went through, my poor K.—but for myself too. For all the pieces of my heart that cracked and fell away. The ones I never found again, and never will.
I used to think the pain of this would pass, but now I know it’s a lie, what they say: that time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. Time fades the scars a little, but like physical scars, soft spots on our hearts don’t really mend. If you press hard enough on them, they ache. They even break wide open sometimes.
Like today. August 7. It’s no wonder I’m a mess.
The door creaks, and I tense. I drag a deep breath into my lungs and brace myself for Helen’s lithe body, or Olive’s wide, green eyes.
Instead, I hear my husband’s long, strong strides over the hardwood. I cover my puffy face with my arms and wait to feel his hands on me.
I feel him over me. Then his hands are on my back.
“Cleo?”
He clasps my shoulders, firm and gentle, then seems to decide against rolling me over onto my back, and takes my face between his hands instead.
His fingers brush the hair out of my eyes. He sees my blotchy face and murmurs, “Fuck.”
I peek up at him. His blue eyes are wide and startled. His perfect face is twisted in alarm. “Did something happen? Lyon?” He bends down over me, kissing my cheek. “Don’t leave me guessing, baby…”
“Not Lyon.” I shake my head and wrap my arms around his shoulders. As I pull him down on me, he sees the letter. He hovers over me for a long moment, eyes locked on the yellow pages. Then he sinks down to the bed, pulls me to his chest, and tucks my head against his strong pec as he reaches for it. I can hear the papers crinkle as he holds them out in front of him.
“Cleo…why? After so long…” He sets the papers down and leans away from me, forcing me to lift my head off his chest so he can see my face. “Why right now, when things are so good, baby?”
My eyes fill with tears and tenderness gentles his face. He brushes his lips over mine, presses his cheek to mine. His skin is hot. He smells so good. Like…marijuana. And spices. Like Totally Baked, the marijuana bakery we started several years ago.
I inhale a long, slow, soothing breath. “I don’t know,” I murmur. Or rather, can’t explain what made me open Kellan’s goodbye letter this year, on this particular day.
I sink my hand into my husband’s soft, gold hair. I can’t help smiling at him. “You’re home early. How did that happen?”
“Magic.” He gives me a gentle smile. “I got something you might like.” His eyes gleam. “From our old stomping grounds.”
He reaches behind him, fingers delving into the back pocket of his jeans. He holds up a tiny swatch of pale grey fabric.
“Ohhh. A Chattahoochee College onesie.” I take it from him, rubbing my thumb over the soft cotton.
“Got a shirt for Olive Arethea, too. I gave it to her.” He grins. “She said, ‘It’s just like Mommy’s!’”
I smooth the onesie over my pregnant belly.
“Looks good on you,” he says softly. He reaches for my face, stroking his thumb over my jaw. Tears fill my eyes again. He wraps an arm around me and I turn to face him…my gravity. He smiles and draws me closer, sheltering my body with his larger one. His mouth brushes my eyes and nose and finally….so carefully…my mouth.
“You gotta tell me,” he whispers. “What’s with your timing, wife o’ mine? Two days I’m down in Georgia with the franchise, you take a walk down memory lane?” He smooths my hair back off my forehead. “Lucky I got business taken care of fast and raced home to my woman, mmm?”
I wipe my eyes. “Not lucky! Unlucky. No more leaving till the baby’s born. I mean it.”
Kellan chuckles. “You would think I leave you all the time.”
“You do.” I wrap my arms around his broad, strong shoulders. My nipples harden as my breasts brush his chest. “That makes twice this pregnancy. No more. Please…say you won’t.”
His lips tug into a crooked smile. “I won’t. On one condition.” He reaches for the letter, and I watch him fold it. He smirks as his eyes flick up to mine. “You’ve gotta talk to me.”
He slips the folded letter into his back pocket. Then his fingers tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “You trying to feel sad
? Get your pregnant woman emo thing on?” He’s teasing, trying to make light of such an awful, painful subject. But the weight inside me can’t be lightened.
I shut my eyes and rub my lips together. Tears drip from my eyes. “I want to be reminded of unhappy times. Because we’re happy. That’s why.” I wipe at my eyes as my voice cracks. “We were them too, remember. You wrote that to me, Kell. Can you imagine? If I really had to read that?” Tears stream down my cheeks.
He strokes my hair over my shoulders. “No. I can’t imagine. Never have and never will. We haven’t had to.” His blue eyes are deep as oceans. His big hand cradles my belly. “We are all four healthy. Here. Together. I’d say we’re pretty fucking happy, no?”
I wipe my eyes. “We are.”
“We earned it, yes? We waited for it. For a long time.”
I nod, dabbing at my cheeks. After our engagement, we waited almost two years to get married. Kellan wanted to feel healthy, and that took some time. The day he passed out in the hall, I found him when the paramedics showed up, bustling and bumping the walls. They told me they thought he’d had a heart attack, and I was wailing when he started reaching for my hand.
The chemo did damage his heart. But it repaired itself.
Even now, with six years of remission under his belt, we still have our moments. But they’re so many fewer. We forget for weeks and even months sometimes. Despite some aches and pains, expected side-effects from all his treatments, he’s healthy and cancer-free. I know we’re fortunate. I watch him smile again.
“Do you know what day it is?” he asks.
“Of course.” I reach for his hand.
“Our anniversary.” He kisses my knuckles. “I brought THC fudge from the café. In the fridge. But I really want to celebrate alone.” His eyes darken. “What say you?”
He’s already up, getting my soft, white cover up from the armchair and my favorite flip-fops from their spot beside the balcony door. I watch him move around our bedroom, gathering a blanket, a bottle of water, both pairs of sunglasses…even my favorite hair band.
He takes my hands and pulls me up from my beached whale position, smirking a little as I shift my hips to accommodate my belly. “Turn around. I’ll get your hair.”
I turn my head and feel his fingers sift through my locks.
I yawn. “Love it when you do that. Feels so good.”
“That’s what I’m good at. Making you feel good.” He takes his time pulling his shirt over his head. Ensuring I’ll relish the way his hard chest looks in motion. Like always, I feel warm between my legs. Like always, it’s a struggle not to outright gawk at his bare body. I lick my lips as he kicks his shoes off, leans down to roll his pants up.
I love the way his shoulders ripple as he moves. I love everything about him. By the time he’s got our beach bag slung over his arm, I’m smiling. He takes my hand and leads me out onto the porch…and down the sandy stairs, out toward a tiny wooden beach shack that is only ours.
We walk together on the hot sand, slowly first, and then with long, hungry strides. Kellan picks me up and twirls me, and the skirt around my bathing suit flips up.
I can’t stop laughing. Then we reach the beach shack and I feel my pulse pound. He unlocks the door and I nip at his back.
He turns and sinks his teeth my neck. He pushes the door open, revealing just one room.
“Get in there…” He shoves me in front of him…but he can’t keep his hands off me for long enough to let me “get.” He scoops me up and lays me on the mattress. Parts my legs and crawls between them.
“For a woman who lives on the beach, I don’t think you’re wet enough, my dear…” He grins and slides a finger into me. He leans down, holding my gaze, and strokes my sweet spot with his tongue. “My wife…”
I grip his shoulders. “Husband.”
“Always…”
THE END
Author’s Note
On August 7, 2011, I gave birth to my first child, a beautiful son with a myriad of rare health issues we had no idea about before his birth. I would say my worldview changed forever, but that doesn’t even touch it. No words really can. During R.’s first year of life, doctors told me more than once that he might die. I signed consent forms agreeing to treatments that might hurt my baby even as they helped him. The stress and pain was unimaginable, as any mother of a very ill child knows. I struggled to find a foothold in the madness, but each time we would visit our state’s children’s hospital, my heart felt more broken.
We befriended a family whose six-year-old daughter had nearly died dozens of times while waiting for a donor heart. Finally, the call came: a heart was on its way. The heart was perfect. Better than most donor hearts, even. But open heart surgery has many risks, and one of them is stroke. When I met this girl and her family, she was in a wheelchair, stricken with mental and physical challenges that to me seemed unspeakably unfair.
In our time at the hospital, we met many families with afflicted children—many struggling with congenital heart defects or cancer. Facebook is a game-changer for families of sick children, and through Facebook we connected with another Alabama family whose young daughter was fighting leukemia. Often, we brought R. to the children’s hospital and left the same day, and I remember buckling him into his car seat dozens of times and thinking of the other family, locked up in the bone marrow transplant ward, unable to even leave their child’s room many days.
There is no way to come to terms with these things. Eventually I realized that, and I stopped trying to make sense of it. My child was alive, and I was joyful. But as months and then years passed, I found myself drawn back to these children’s Facebook pages. Even now, years later, I follow half a dozen children I met when R. was a baby. When possible, I enjoy donating to charities supporting children with congenital heart defects, but I’ve found myself especially drawn to pediatric cancer causes. Two wonderful blogs (and accompanying charities) are www.superty.org and www.rockstarronan.com.
How many of you will click those links? Probably only a few. And I understand that. No one likes to be sad. But people really hate to be sad over sick or dying children. The unfortunate result of this is that pediatric cancer research receives much less funding than breast, prostate, lung, and other cancers that afflict adults. Less funding means less effective—and less safe—treatments for kids with cancer.
In many cases, no one has even bothered to calibrate child-friendly dosages of radiation and chemotherapy, so children receive adult dosages by default, often with devastating consequences.
Lilianna, the girl with leukemia who was at the children’s hospital when we were there so frequently, received a bone marrow donation from a woman in another country through an organization called Be The Match. (www.bethematch.org). I remember her mother’s Facebook post explaining how incredible this was—that in all the world (at least as far as the bone marrow donors’ registry knows), this woman was the only possible match for Lilianna. Quite literally her only hope.
The quote at the beginning of part three (“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.” –e.e. cummings) is personal to me because it reflects the only conclusion I was able to reach with any peace.
When I learned about Be The Match from Lilianna’s family, how easy it is to sign up for the registry (they mail you a q-tip, you swab your cheek and mail it back), and how unlikely it is that you will even be called to donate blood (only 1/500 get a call) before the cutoff donor age of 44, I started pushing my friends and family to sign up, too. This book is really just an extension of that effort.
I took some liberties in the hospital scenes—mostly to give Cleo and Kellan more…ahem, access to one another—and oversimplified other parts of Kellan’s transplant to move the story along faster. But many of the details are correct, and I think it’s safe to say that Kellan’s experience is realistic.
(In a stroke of irony, I received an email from Be The Match a few months after I started working on Sloth, telling the story of id
entical twins who both needed transplants at the same time).
One of my main goals for Sloth was to be able to give a portion of my income from its sales to Be The Match, which offers the money to families of transplant patients who have financial needs. I can’t announce this contest on my social media without revealing Kellan’s secret, but…I’m giving away signed Sloth paperbacks to the first 20 people who sign up for the worldwide bone marrow donation registry via Be The Match, and the first 5 who donate $25 or more.
If you decide to do this, e-mail me at [email protected] with proof, and I’ll try to get a paperback out to you in the next few weeks.
Bone marrow transplants are often the last ditch option for children (and adults) with chemo-resistant leukemia. The idea is to use unusually harsh doses of drugs and radiation to kill the cancer cells (and, unfortunately, lots of healthy cells as well), completely demolishing the patient’s immune system, to the extent that the patient will be unable to recover without the transplant, in which a donor’s bone marrow (blood cells, etc.) “fills in the holes” and essentially re-maps the immune system. When successful, the donor’s immune system is “engrafted” in the recipient’s body, begins making healthy blood cells (on the basis of the healthy person’s DNA), and saves the life of the recipient.
A large number of donors who do get a call from Be The Match are only asked to donate PBSCs (so, basically, donate blood). A smaller number are asked to donate bone marrow (like Cleo did), but the procedure is so minor many are back to work within a few days.
And…I think that’s all I have to say about that. ;) You should probably get a prize for reading to the end of my little sermon.
I wrote Sloth during a tumultuous seven months—a long incubation time for an indie author. It was supposed to take no more than two or three months, and was formatted as a series of serials.
