The Promise Read online

  “It’s great you’re here,” Theo continued, oblivious to the stampede of terror thundering in my chest. “Are you visiting for the holidays?”

  Christmas. I’d forgotten. By the look on their faces, they had, too.

  “Yes,” my dad finally spoke up. “We thought we’d surprise Claire and drop in. It’s a time for family, after all.”

  The words sat, heavy. I cringed to hear them. I’d been gone only four months but it could have been years from the panic-aged faces staring back at me, worn lines around my mother’s eyes, and that weary look of my father, so defeated.

  I’d been so selfish, I could see it now, but still, I wanted more from them.

  Don’t say a word. Please, don’t say a single word.

  The silence stretched, and even Theo sensed the tension. “Well . . . I’ll let you guys catch up. It was good to meet you, sir.” Theo shook my father’s hand again, then turned back to me, questioning. He wanted a sign, some permission to stay, but for the first, and only time in my life, I needed him gone.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I told him, still desperate, still so guilty.

  Theo moved towards the door, but paused beside me, touched his hand to my arm, brushed a kiss to my forehead. It took everything I had not to flinch, or back away from the golden touches that had been so pure. “Goodnight.” He gave me a smile, that same reassuring crinkle in his eyes, and then he was gone. The door closed behind him, and the terror in my chest eased, just a little.

  “Theo.” My mom repeated his name, louder now. There was a bitterness to her voice, a sharp-edged scorn. “Theo. Is this the reason you disappeared halfway around the country, and scared us half to death? So you could stay out all hours with some boy, and shack up in this garret doing God knows what?”

  Dad placed a calming hand on her shoulder. “Your mother’s just worried. We both are. We got a call from some doctor, he said you’d collapsed, refused treatment, and just walked out. God, Claire what were you thinking?”

  Somebody cleared their throat. Tessa was still stranded just on the outskirts of our world, looking mortified. “I’m going to the library,” she said, carefully avoiding our gazes.

  “No, Tessa, you don’t have to—”I tried to protest, but she gave me a look.

  “You take your time. Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Fortune.”

  It was all so formal. Mr. and Mrs., handshakes and polite farewells as Tessa packed up her things and struggled into snow boots, and finally left us in the silent wreckage of our family.

  Where could I even begin?

  “I’m fine.” I said the words slowly, still holding my chair-back tight. It was a life raft, my only tether in this storm. “You didn’t need to come. I’ve been texting you. I’m doing fine.” But my mother only snorted, her cheeks flushed like a high fever.

  “That’s not what the doctor said. Claire, you need to be back in treatment. He sent us the CT scans, the tumor’s growing. We need an aggressive plan, right away—”

  “No,” my voice whispered.

  “You’re coming home,” she continued, determined. “We can pack up your things and have you booked in with Doctor Mortimer back home first thing Thursday morning. We’ve already talked and had the scans sent. He agrees it’s late, but if we get you back into chemo as soon as possible, we could stand a chance. I’m sure your roommate won’t mind, we can pay for the notice on your lease.” She was pacing, restless, as if she was about to go start pulling sweaters from my dresser drawer to hurl in a suitcase. “I’ll call the airline, we can have a delivery company pick up the rest. It’s not too late, we can still buy some more time.”

  “Mom!” My voice echoed sharply. “Mom, stop, please. You have to stop.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” she shot back, her face cracking open to reveal something desperate and raw. “Just sit around back home waiting for a goddamn phone call to say it’s all over? Waiting around for my baby to die?”

  I felt her grief like a slap, shocking the last of my afternoon reverie from my body, and wrapping me instead with a smothering expanse of guilt. This I knew by heart, the cotton-wool concern, pressing gently, dry and scratching, making me gasp for air. She’d wrapped me tight for years, locked in the soft anxiety of her embrace until I couldn’t breathe, crushed under so many delicate layers of fear and desperate hope.

  She loved me. She loved me, and it still wasn’t enough to save my life.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, looking down. “I didn’t mean for you to worry. I told you I was doing fine.”

  “This doctor said you were brought in unconscious in an ambulance.” Mom’s voice was still wretched, every word an accusation. “That’s not fine.”

  “I would have collapsed back home, just the same.” I lifted my eyes, pleading with them both. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t make a difference where I am, or what we do. This thing is going to kill me, and it’s just a matter of time.”

  Mom clenched her jaw and looked away, as if death was standing right in front of her, and she was just plain refusing to acknowledge its existence. My dad stepped up, instead. “If it doesn’t make a difference, then why can’t you just come back home?”

  “Because I need to be here.”

  “For this Theo?” he asked, those watchful eyes on me again. It felt like he could see every sweet, reckless hour we’d spent tangled in each other’s embrace, but I refused to feel ashamed of anything we’d shared.

  “For everything.” I held on tighter. “I have a job here, friends. Don’t you see?” I asked, begging them, “This is my last chance. My only chance to have a life.”

  “You have a life with us,” my mom insisted.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “We’re not enough?” She threw my words back at me, and my heart broke all over again. For their grief, for the years of anguish I’d brought them, and this, the last simple truth.

  “No.”

  I saw the betrayal in her eyes, but there was no taking it back. I’d made my choice the day I boarded that Greyhound bus and set off into the unknown horizon, and now, with Theo’s lips sill burning their imprint on my body, I wouldn’t change it even if I could. Maybe that made me selfish, but she was too, to want me back where she thought I belonged. Safe at home in my childhood bed, swaddled in her hand-stitched comforter, just down the hall. Cuddled on the couch together watching daytime soaps, my pills lined up neatly on the counter to follow a grilled cheese sandwich and tea. The hours slipping past, same as they’d ever been, as the cancer grew and my body failed and my heart ached, restless in my chest. I had so little time left, God, so little fucking time. I couldn’t sacrifice another day to stay there, safe, in my mother’s embrace, even if it broke her, even if it broke both of our selfish hearts.

  “It’s too late,” I whispered, begging. “You know it’s too late. There’s nothing you can do anymore.”

  She pressed her lips together in a thin, frantic line. “No. I refuse to believe it.”

  “So don’t. But this is my life, what’s left of it, and it’s my choice now what that means. I’m staying, mom. I’m not going back there.”

  She turned away, and my father cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about this in the morning.”

  He was always the reasonable one, steady with plans and charts while my mother barreled ahead, full-steam with determination. “We’ve been travelling all day, I think we could all use a little rest.” He took my mother’s hand, a reassuring squeeze. “We’re staying at a hotel over the river. Why don’t you come meet us for breakfast?”

  “I have work.”

  “Then we could come to you. I’d like to see this café of yours,” he added, hopeful, and I felt the guilt again, moving my head for me in a nod.

  “Fine. But, you can’t say anything. Nobody knows I’m sick, I can’t . . .” It was too much to even put into words, the great aching fear trapped just below the surface. “Please, don’t tell them. You’re just in town for the holidays, there’s no
thing wrong.”

  My mother pressed her lips again, furious, but my dad nodded. “OK. We won’t mention it.”

  “I mean it.” My desperation was clear. “Not one word about hospitals, or treatment, nothing around them. Promise.”

  “I promise, sweetheart.”

  I let out a shaking breath, and gave them the address for Wired. I told them to come after the first morning rush, and please, not make a fuss. They moved to the door and reclaimed the suitcases I saw propped there for the first time. They really had come straight here, fleeing headlong through airport check-ins and taxi ranks, driven on by the panic of that unexpected phone call. Doctor Benson. I should have known.

  “Tomorrow?” Dad gave me a stern look, as if he half-expected me to pack my cases and run again before they could make me stay.

  But there was nowhere to run to, not anymore. I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

  I closed the door behind them and rested my head there against the scratched wood, listening to their footsteps drift away down the stairs. It was aching again, that dull, desperate throb that seemed to be in the background of every thought, waiting to rear up and break through. Soon, the pain would be as much a part of my life as breathing, but then, it still came and went in waves, pushed back to shore by the line of neat prescription pills until another swell could rise. I let myself feel it for a moment instead of racing for those white tabs. The roar, the sharp rush. This was my tumor screaming its victory, the only way I would ever feel its presence, that taunting, vicious pain.

  God, I hated it. Some therapists try to make you personify it—give it a name, a presence to fight against. I would see it in the hospital wards, those childish scribbled pictures, like a twisted version of a family portrait. There was one girl who drew it as a piranha, sneaky and sharp. I shared a room with her, during a week-long battery of tests for an experimental program out of state. Lucy, she was called, a sprite of a ten-year-old with a fuzz of copper red hair. She was already shorn from her last surgery, sitting patiently hooked up to her IV and the monitors in the middle of her row of plush teddy bears. She was too old for them, she told me, with all the weary wisdom of a battle-scarred warrior, but her mom liked to bring them to keep her company at nights, while she worked double shifts at a call center downtown. It was the two of us in the room, and Lucy and I would play gin rummy on her tray table, late into the night when the wards slipped into that otherworldly neon silence, nothing but the yawning night-shift nurses and an occasional intern on the rounds. That was her fourth surgery in three years, she informed me, matter-of-fact, as we traded out vital stats: cancer, location, stage of decline. She’d already had her Make-A-Wish trip to swim with the dolphins in Orlando, and now it was nothing but Hail Mary shots in the surgical dark. She hoped to make it past Christmas, for her mom’s sake. She didn’t want to ruin Christmas for them by dying too soon.

  I didn’t tell her that Christmas would be ruined, regardless. That every year they would weep for her, whether she lived those extra few weeks or not. I never found out if she made it that far; my tests were finished, my cancer deemed all wrong for the program, and I went back home to a brittle, dry Texas December. I didn’t try to track her down; by then, we all knew it was a useless task. The guy from chemo, that girl waiting on an MRI. We were passengers on the same trip but after the first few funerals, we learned not to get too close. Hope was the only one who broke that golden rule, but then, I still hadn’t met her yet. So my mom made eggnog, and my dad put up a tree, and I thought of Lucy as the clock ticked over into dawn on Christmas morning, and some other family, miles away, faced the day with her death looming large.

  And now it was my turn. My family, my last Christmas, one way or another.

  The fear gripped me again, and suddenly, the attic was too small to contain it.

  This was the end.

  I’d been running from it for months, carefully ignoring all the symptoms and warning signs as if the words strung together didn’t make a death sentence, but it finally crashed through me then, unavoidable, the realization as cold and unforgiving as frigid steel.

  This was the end I’d been hiding from.

  You’d have thought that after living years with the inevitability hanging over me, I would be used to it by now. Calm and resolute. But it was still the thickest black panic I’d ever know, an abyss I couldn’t bring myself to gaze into, despite all the warnings. I’d seen it play out in a dozen other tumor patients, one excruciating heartbeat at a time. I wouldn’t be like Hope, wheezing and stuttering as the domino effect of decay tumbled through her vital organs. No, my cancer would hit my brain hard and just keep hitting. First, the blackouts would become more frequent, the headaches blossoming into an electric storm that the painkillers wouldn’t touch. My shaking hands would get worse, my motor functions confused. Speech would slur, my eyesight fail, even my memories would snag and unravel. And the pain, that pain would consume me, devour every waking moment and breath—unless I picked the half-life relief of a drugged-up, woozy end, trapped in bed and clinging to a plastic cord delivering opiates to my poor, weak system. Maybe I would slip away easy, or maybe it would be me begging by the end, but one day soon, that tumor would consume some last, desperate function and I would be gone.

  Just like that, a flat-line on a flickering monitor. There, then not.

  I gasped for air. The unfairness ripped me apart, and I sank onto my heels, biting down on my shirtsleeve so I wouldn’t weep aloud. Alone on that floor, I felt the loss that would soon become so familiar—not of what I wouldn’t have, but the things I’d only just begun to glimpse. Theo. God, Theo. He was mine now. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? This was all I’d craved. And now, having it, having it to lose, it felt like the cruelest punishment of all. Maybe I couldn’t run from this again, but I could run to something this time. To the only thing that mattered now, the one spark of life bright enough to burn the pain away.

  I swallowed my pills like a promise, grabbed my bag, and set out into the night again. I’d never made this trip before, but I had the address printed in a text on my phone. Six blocks to the subway, four stops, and another three streets to his door, but when I rang the ancient buzzer, it was Kelsey’s smudged kohl stare that greeted me through the crack in the door.

  “Claire?”

  She unhitched the chain and stood aside, dressed in a pair of men’s boxers and a threadbare tank. I didn’t ask about Guy; I didn’t have the words in me to keep from crying. Her eyes swept over me, at the hands I had clenched into two bitter fists at my side. “Down the hall, last door on the right.”

  I nodded a thanks and followed her directions to his door. Theo answered on the first knock, and I kissed the surprise from his lips before he could even say a word. We tumbled back, the door barely closing, and then there was nothing but a soft mattress, and ink-blue sheets, and his hands, God, those glorious hands pulling me under, someplace safe and golden, and far from the future I was fighting so hard to ignore.

  If anything could have healed me, Theo’s hands would have been it. His hands and mouth and the sweet press of his body. That distant look of wonder in his eyes, unraveling above me. He wasn’t even trying, but it was everything to me, a pleasure wild enough to blot out the sun, to wrestle even my head-splitting pain into submission as it carried me past the darkness into a fresh, pale dawn.

  Chapter Nineteen

  One more day gone. One more night I was never getting back.

  I would tell him, I promised myself, watching the sun rise across his body the next morning, his breath so steady, that sleeping face so unaware.

  Next year.

  It wasn’t far now, a week until the clocks turned over, and that fresh calendar page sat waiting, full of resolution and promise.

  A week to savor him, enough to last my lifetime. A week of half-truths I couldn’t admit were lies. Didn’t the universe owe us that much, however desperate it may be?

  I would tell him, soon.

 
Just not today.

  “You’re awake.” His eyelashes fluttered, then his mouth spread in that sleepy smile. He crushed me closer and let out a yawn. “Did you sleep OK?”

  “Enough.” I smiled, sitting up. In the light, I could see his room for the first time, the teetering bookcases and simple lines of his furniture and desk. A laptop, light winking, a lamp beside the desk. There were no photographs, I realized, no souvenirs. It was as blank a slate as my own attic room, before the sketches and canvas frames expanded to claim every last wall. I twisted my head to look at him, still splayed there, half-dreaming. “My parents are coming to the café today,” I said slowly. It was the first time I’d ever mentioned them to him; it felt like breaking a secret, and worse still, breaking it far too late.

  Theo played with my left hand, tracing gently in the crevice between my fingers, and twisting his thumb around mine. “Is that OK?” he asked, measured.

  No.

  “I guess.”

  I hated lying to him, hated every sharp guilty word. But still, he didn’t ask, that wasn’t his style. Instead, he just watched me, waiting for me to want to share enough that I opened my mouth and offered up my half-truths, carefully weighing every almost-word.

  “I ran away,” I admitted. “Not, really. I mean, I was nineteen. An adult. I left a note . . . God, how pathetic does that sound?” I caught myself right away. “A note. But I couldn’t tell them I was going. They would only have found some way to make me stay.”

  Theo kept tracing my hand, the fine fortune-teller lines of my palm. I closed my eyes. “I needed to get away, make my own life, but they don’t understand. They want to keep me safe.”

  “And they’re worried about you? I know it’s a big city, and you’re far away, but . . . you can take care of yourself.” Theo’s grin spread. “You can be pretty bad-ass.”

  I smiled. “It’s not so simple. After Hope . . .” I paused, my voice fading to a whisper to remember it, the months stretching in a haze of black and grey and slashes of vivid red. “I was in a bad place. So, I understand why they worry.”