The Promise Read online

  Then, at last, there was nothing.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke to silence. No roar of scarlet, no cannon-fire, nothing but a heavy thick emptiness that seeped through my battered skull like melting snow; a pure, swift relief.

  I breathed, unsteady, as the hum of distant conversation and the beep-beep-beep of a machine filtered gently through the sleep-settled daze. White noise, blessed calm rolled over me, and slowly, I remembered how to think again. I was in a hospital bed, somewhere, dressed in a thin paper gown, tubes hooked up to an IV by my bedside, a heart monitor chirping steadily at the end of a tangle of wires. What did I . . .?

  “You’re going to be OK, sweetie. You need to just relax.”

  I remembered it then: the fall, the searing pain. An ambulance careening through the streets of Boston, and Theo—fuck, Theo—gripping my hand, the steady reassurance of his voice betrayed by the panic in his eyes.

  I was already looking around for my sweatshirt when the curtain yanked back and he stepped into the makeshift room. “You’re awake.” Relief flooded his face. “How do you feel? The doctor gave you something, they said you’d be groggy for a while.”

  “I’m fine.” I tried to sit up, pulling the IV line from my arm. The needle bit into my skin and I flinched at the tear, but I didn’t stop. I had to get out of there, the fight-or-flight instinct rearing hard with only one goal.

  Theo rushed to my side. “What are you doing? Claire, you need to lie down. They still want to run some more tests—”

  “This is all a mistake.” I shook my head, then had to gulp as the room spun gently. “I don’t need tests, I just got a little dizzy. It happens all the time.”

  “You hit your head.”

  “And I’m fine now!” I forced a smile, held a finger in front of my face and moved it from side to side, like an old optometrist trick. “See? Theo, please.” My voice dropped, pleading. “I don’t want to make a big deal about this. All these tests, the ambulance . . . I don’t have insurance. How much is this going to cost?”

  “You shouldn’t worry about that.” Theo stubbornly blocked my path.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “It’s not.” He stood his ground. “But you don’t cut corners with this stuff, Claire. Come on, let’s wait at least to find out what the doctor says.”

  “I already know what he’s going to say.” I shivered in the thin gown. “That I need to stop skipping breakfast, and be more careful when I get up.”

  “Then you’ll get to tell me ‘I told you so.’ ” Theo carefully leaned over and fluffed my pillow, resting his palm against my cheer. “Just do this, please. For me?”

  His face was wide open, guileless and true. He’d dressed in a hurry: belt forgotten, his buttons done up wrong, but he was still too golden and perfect in the harsh hospital lights. I didn’t want to think of the panic I’d caused him, so I just buried my head against his chest.

  “I hate these places,” I whispered softly.

  “I know. But it won’t be long.”

  I knew better. A late-night emergency room was always one step from chaos. I’d spent hours in my lifetime waiting on hard plastic chairs; Hope loved to calculate it, decrying the time totaled up on the back of a notepad. “Seventeen weeks!” she would curse wildly. “I could have learned to scuba dive, or speak fluent French, or hiked the Himalayas by now.”

  “You hate the cold.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing.”

  Sure enough, it was hours before someone came to check on me that night. We passed the time dozing, curled together on the narrow mattress as the nurses outside calmed belligerent drunks, and children cried down the hallway, and my stomach twisted as tight as the rubber bracelet on my wrist until at last, the curtain rattled back again, and a middle-aged man in a rumpled white coat wandered in, flipping through a thick stack of charts.

  “Claire Fortune?” he asked, not looking at me. “I’m Doctor Benson, the head of neurology here. I hear you had a fall?” He was doughy and balding, but there was a deftness to his gaze as he finally looked up and stared down the bed at me.

  I turned to Theo. “I never did get those eggs,” I said softly. “Can you go find me something to eat? Chips, maybe, or some of that pudding.”

  “You want hospital food?” he smiled, disbelieving.

  “I know, I got a taste for it all the time I spent with Hope. Besides,” I added. “Doctor Benson here is about to give me a lecture about not skipping breakfast and letting my blood sugar get too low, isn’t that right?” I smiled lightly up at him, guilty to the core.

  Doctor Benson cleared his throat and looked away.

  “Pudding, you’ve got it.” Theo got up. “I’ll be right back.” He leaned over and smoothed my hair back, dropped a careful kiss on my forehead, so light, it was like I was made of glass. Then he left us, the curtain swinging free behind him as he headed down the fluorescent hall.

  Dr. Benson slowly approached the bed. He checked my heart monitor, and made a scribbled notation on my chart. “You were unconscious when the ambulance brought you in, so we ran a CT scan and a full blood-work.” He paused, opening his mouth and then closing it again. Another second ticked past, another minuscule rotation of the earth.

  Beep beep beep.

  “The scans we took,” he began slowly, and the hesitation was so heavy I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It’s OK,” I said softly, listening to the hospital shift and whisper, just out of reach. “You don’t have to break it to me gently.”

  I’d swallowed back the words for months now, but they were alive again, fluttering and swarming to escape my mouth.

  “I know about the tumor.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I met Hope during yet another round of chemo, hooked up to the machines at the shiny new hospital wing in the city, sitting in a room of pale, grim faces as poison dripped into our veins. She marched right up to the free seat beside me and sat herself down with a groan. “These shoes are killing me,” she sighed, slipping her feet out of the pink stacked sandals and wriggling her clashing scarlet toes. She offered me a raspberry popsicle, and by the time our tongues turned blue, we were friends. As if I’d ever had a choice.

  Her tumor was metastatic: a gift from the cancerous cells she already had lurking in her bones. Mine was primary, the doctors’ way of describing the bullseye painted two inches below my cerebral cortex, right there in the back of my skull. A time bomb that had stayed hidden for years, laying in wait, readying for the perfect time to strike.

  It had started when I was fourteen: dizziness and a pounding headache that left me breathless, grasping for solid ground. I lost my balance and fell on the way to homeroom one afternoon, but the school nurse sent me back to class with an aspirin and a juice-box. Low blood sugar. Nothing to worry about. The headache lingered all year. Mom took me to get my eyesight tested, and warned me against sketching late at night under the covers, but I didn’t mention my unsteady spells at home, didn’t think about it at all until I passed out halfway down the stairs one night, and was taken to the ER with a fractured wrist and quarter-sized bump on the back of my head. This time, the over-eager med student ran up a laundry list of tests and scans, and buried there amongst the blood-work, she found the same aberrant numbers that caused Dr. Benson such pause. Elevated white blood cell count. Shadows on my CT scan. They strapped me into the MRI machine, a space ship of an instrument so echoing and white, it felt like I was passing into the realm of science fiction, a passenger on a voyage heading far away. And there, mapped on my brain, they found it waiting.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  That first specialist fell in love with my tumor at first sight. He spoke of it in hushed tones, so reverent it was as if the hospital room had become a church in which to worship; he gazed at my scans in awe, describing breathlessly how it had nestled, undetected for so long, slowly creeping to claim more territory until the cancer was gently threaded through my most vital brain functi
ons. Untouchable.

  Inoperable.

  “It’s like it knew exactly how far to grow.” He’d sketched the shadows with his fingertip, illuminated up on the lightbox, my mind sliced open in neat segments for the world to see. “Small enough not to threaten your vital functions, but big enough that we can’t risk cutting it out. The perfect self-defense mechanism.”

  It was mutually assured destruction, just the way I would learn about in history class. My tumor and I, locked in a curious battle of the wills, too deeply intertwined to ever be free of each other. Oh, we tried. There were scans and testing, and specialists all over the country; more hours curled waiting in those hard hospital chairs. But all of them agreed, a détente was the best course of treatment. I was stable and young, and could function almost as normal. Better to shrink the cluster of cells as much as possible than risk cutting into my brain and spark some landmine that would irrevocably blow my life apart; losing speech, or movement, or even my memories, too.

  So, half-measures it was. A schedule of meds and chemo sessions that poisoned me from the inside out, leaving me weak and wretching in bed all summer while my classmates blithely dated and gossiped and hung out at the Dairy Queen down the block. I learned to live with the panic in Mom’s eyes every time I lost my balance; to ignore Dad bent for hours over paperwork in his tiny office, those heavy sighs and days lost to insurance company phone lines, begging for half a chance to let his daughter live. But it was OK. Saying that now, it seems incredible, but those years passed by in a steady equilibrium, at least compared to other patients. Most tumors won their wretched victory within months, but mine seemed content to lay in wait. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, attending school like normal, studying for tests and worrying about grades, then surrendering myself to a summer of chemo like Persephone in the underworld, my deal with the devil, to secure my place in the world. We believed that the prescriptions were true, that we could box that tumor into no-man’s-land, keep it neat and contained, as if it wouldn’t define the life I’d yet to lead.

  But of course, it was smarter than that. My tumor was worth the praise, outfoxing us all. It grew back, every time, and soon, the chemo was every six months. Every three. By the time my classmates were embarking on their senior years, full of plans for college and beyond, I was too behind to even try. My world shrank, just as theirs was getting bigger, until my life revolved around the thirteen square feet of my childhood bedroom, endless daytime TV, and those hospital rooms, neon and unforgiving. I could feel my life slipping away, leached by the chemo toxins, and worse still, by the endless exhausted days. Is it any wonder that by the time Hope arrived, I’d all but given it up? She was my avenging angel, the one person who could still make me double over with a gasp of laughter, who could drive me into the desert one night to scream into the cold, starry sky, cursing our cancers with every last breath of our poisoned, hopeless souls.

  She reminded me what it meant to be alive, after so many years shrinking into the space that my illness allowed. That I was capable of more than just sitting around, pumping poison into my body for the simple privilege of existing one more day. And when her body finally gave up the fight, she made me swear not to slip away the same way: docile in the hospital bed where she’d spent too many years, like that was any way to greet the end. She didn’t go gently into the good night by any measure, she raged long and hard, clinging to this world for months by her bare and bloody fingertips.

  And still, it made no difference.

  It was too late by then; her chance to make it matter. All the big ambitions in the world are out of reach when you need a machine to breathe, morphine on a steady drip just to make it through an aching hour. Waiting for the moments to slip past, waiting around to die. The final insult to a sick joke from a world that had once shone, full of vivid possibility.

  “You have to do it all now,” she would insist, every time I sat by her bedside. “Why are you even wasting your time here with me? There is no fucking tomorrow.”

  “You should put that on a greeting card.”

  “I mean it.” Her hand shot out, her cheeks flushed and fervent. “Think of all that time we spent sitting around in chemo, the years I believed this bullshit treatment was going to save me. I can’t get it back, Claire. It’s too late, I can’t get it back.”

  Neither would I.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dr. Benson frowned at me, our corner of the hospital suddenly hushed. Blood was pounding in my ears, and I prayed that Theo took his time, that the warren of hospital hallways swallowed him up in a dozen wrong turns. Anything to keep him away from this pathetic bedside. Anything to keep my secret locked tight.

  “When was your last MRI?” Benson demanded, his sleepiness gone now, that stare alert. “I’ll need records from your regular physician, and to run more tests.” He started scribbling notes. “You should be in treatment, aggressive treatment, we can—”

  “No.” I cut him off, final. “More tests won’t tell you anything I don’t already know. It’s inoperable.”

  “But surely—”

  “I’ve seen every specialist in the country, tried every new drug. I’ll be dead in three months, six if I’m lucky and it doesn’t spread to my spine.” My voice cracked. “One more round of chemo isn’t changing that.”

  There was silence.

  There’s one thing I’d learned about doctors, after all that time on the other side of the consulting chair: that for all their noble goals and sworn do-good determination, nobody likes a losing battle. Sure, they would wade in with treatment plans, as if they alone could face down the beast lurking in my skull, but once they grasped the true nature of the demon—once they surveyed the battlefield of scans and test readings, and realized just how outflanked and outmaneuvered they were—the fight simply faded away. I used to take it personally, but in the end, I couldn’t blame them. The number of bodies they saw in my chair—it must have been exhausting to care, to hurt, to grieve. So they marshaled their resources for a fight they could win, kept their gunpowder dry until there was someone on the table who could be saved. And we all knew by then that body wasn’t mine.

  But this one surprised me. He gave me a measured look, unconvinced. “I’d like to talk to your primary physician, all the same.”

  I shrugged, the sleepless night catching up with me. “Knock yourself out.”

  Before he could push any more, the curtain rattled back. It was Theo, bearing a pudding cup in one hand, coffee in the other. Sleepy-eyed and messy-haired, and the only thing worth a damn in this entire building.

  “Perfect timing,” I said, slipping out of the bed before anyone could say a word. “Doctor Benson said I can go. Nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s great.” Theo’s whole body exhaled in relief. He paused. “But what about the headache, and the fainting?”

  “Low blood sugar, like I said.” I met the doctor’s gaze. “I’ve got some pills, everything will be fine. Once I get some sleep, that is.”

  Doctor Benson stood, blocking my path for a moment. I pleaded with him silently, my world poised on the knife-edge of his indecision. Then, at last, he stood aside. “This is my direct number,” he said, passing me a card. “Call me if you show any more symptoms. If you change your mind at all.”

  I tucked the card away and grabbed my clothing from their plastic bag on the chair. “I’ll change,” I told Theo. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I was about to step into the hallway, when he caught me against him, holding me close. “You scared me,” he said softly, pushing my hair back from my face. “Don’t do that again.”

  His smile was gentle, but the look in his eyes made me cringe, unsettled deep in my chest. He kissed me then, and when I looked up, the doctor’s eyes were still on me.

  I held Theo tightly all the way home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke at dawn after only a few hours sleep. Theo was sprawled beside me, his face so clear and innocent in the pale morning light. T
he guilt in my chest shuddered awake. I tugged a blanket around my shoulders and padded softly out to the kitchen. Two pills swallowed down with a glass of icy-cold water, and the dull ache in my head began to ease.

  This was my life now, the end of it, at least. I’d ignored the slow creep of symptoms as long as possible, pushed those familiar headaches and dizzy spells aside for weeks, but now they were finally catching up with me, nipping at my heels so eagerly as they saw their victory in sight.

  How much longer could I play pretend?

  Theo was waiting when I slipped back between the sheets. His arms closed around me, his warm mouth pressing a good morning kiss onto the back of my bare neck.

  “How do you feel?” he murmured, tucking me into the waiting curve of his body as if I belonged there.

  “Fine,” I lied softly. “Embarrassed I caused all that trouble.”

  “It was no trouble at all.”

  Now he was the liar. I twisted around, facing him, side by side on my narrow bed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” Theo frowned, gently stroking the outline of my jaw. “I’m just glad you’re OK.” He smiled then, a dawning light on the dark horizon. “And that your roommate is out of town.”

  He grinned as his hands skimmed lower, lazy and exploring, and even through the dull pain still echoing in my head, through the shadow of nausea and twisting betrayal of guilt, I still felt it. I felt every whisper of touch like a blaze of sensation, strong and sweet enough to blot out the dark. And as Theo leaned in to kiss me, rolling us until I was pinned beneath him, reveling in the weight of his body, I let that sweetness spread; I surrendered to that bright gasp of hope, those restless hands, our hours together exploring each new plane of his body. I clung to the heat until it suffused every last cell, chased away all my bleak and lonely shadows and made me feel, just for a moment, like I was more than flesh and fallible bone.