Chapter 28

Whatever routine I had before (with my parents, with Levi, with my siblings) is shattered. In its place grows a creature—a morphing, changing monster that disrupts every single day.

My father comes home from his first round of chemo, three days after I found out, and I can barely look at him. His face is puffy, his walk is slow, his eyes squint in exhaustion. There’s one thing that isn’t different: his smile. And he’s smiling at me like he doesn’t care about the last words I said to him three days ago. Like he understands.

This makes me feel incredibly guilty, so I sit beside him when my mom takes a nap and my sisters start their chores. (Millie and Astrid still just think he’s sick, and I don’t know when he’ll tell them that he’s dying.) Tom drifts in and out, claiming he needs a nap to recover from his shift, but he looks wary. (I wonder if he’s already pieced together the puzzle.)

Sitting on the sofa, I put my hand on my papa’s, feeling his pulse so faint beneath his skin. I don’t look at him. I can’t.

“You need anything?” I ask eventually, gripping his hand tighter.

“I’m fine. Thanks, Bee.”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say simply.

He nods. “I know.”

My breath shudders. “No, I’m sorry about what I said—”

“I know,” he repeats.

(Oh, how the heart aches.)

“Where’s The Boy?” my dad asks.

I can’t even laugh at this. “He’s at the shop today, then TCP until eight tonight.”

“Hmm. He should come see me.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because.” He shrugs. “He should hang out with our family more, just in general.”

“He’s here all the time, Papa.”

“Not all the time.”

A sense of dread wells in my heart. I know what he’s doing. He wants Levi around all the time in case he dies before he can see us with what we all hope will be a future together.

(1. The fact that he likes my boyfriend this much makes my heart sing.)

(2. The fact that he’s preparing for what he thinks is the inevitable makes my heart weak.)

“I’ll let him know,” I say, acting like my voice isn’t husky and that my eyes aren’t full of tears. I am such a pretender. (I’m only half sorry for it.)

“You’d better.” He squeezes my hand. “Will you read to me?”

I smile a little. “Sure. What book are you reading?”

“Crime and Punishment,” he says. “Haven’t been able to read much lately. Bad headaches.”

I close my eyes, briefly, before grabbing the book off the computer desk. I don’t want to think about his headaches. I don’t want to remember him as the dad who had headaches so often that he couldn’t read my favorite books.

So I read for him, picking up where he left off, and immerse myself in Raskilnikov’s path to self-destruction.

“Does he get redemption?” my father asks at one point, interrupting me.

“Say what?” I ask, coming out my reading marathon in a fog.

“Raskilnikov. Does he redeem himself?”

“I’m not telling you. That’s the whole point of the book!”

Papa frowns, but nods and tells me to keep reading. What I don’t think about: the fact that there is over half the book left, and the fact that my father has three months of life in his bones. I don’t think about it because it scares me, like a fist around my heart that is slowly squeezing, slowly and painfully and with certainty. I can only scream silently behind my eyelids, and read, read, read.

Later I find Levi in his room, putting clothes neatly into his dresser. His door is wide open, so I let myself in and sit on his bed.

“Want to talk about it?” he asks. It’s like he senses me, because I haven’t made a sound.

“Hell, no.”

“You have to talk about it eventually.”

“Eventually doesn’t mean today.” I pat the bed beside me until he joins me. He tucks his arms around my middle and lays us backward, his nose pressed to my shoulder. My eyes are level with his wild hair, but I can hardly see it through my tears. So instead I thread my fingers into it, my lips on his forehead, waiting as teardrops silently drip onto his skin.

He only squeezes me tighter.

“He wants you around the house more,” I eventually say, sniffling wetly.

“That’s…possibly the best thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

“Why?”

“It means your dad likes me more than I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. I’m the one who had a shitty dad all my life—what was I supposed to expect?”

I shake my head, lips rubbing gently back and forth across his hairline. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to expect from all this stuff, either.”

“What…stuff?”

“Dating.”

He puffs a breath onto my shoulder, leaving chills to crawl their way up and down my spine. It feels altogether too pleasant. (I don’t have the emotional capacity to think about that.)

“Well,” he says, quietly. “I can stop by once a day if that will make him happy.”

“I’m sure he’ll be way too happy for his own good.” (I say it as an act of rebellion; I know there’s no such thing as too happy for someone who’s dying like my father is dying.) “But are you sure you can fit it in?”

“Bee,” he says, in that gentle tone reserved for me. “Of course.”

“Well, do what you can. He’ll be happy either way.”

My ears are hit with a sudden wave of “Forever Your Girl” by Paula Abdul. We sit listening, silent, for a whole minute before we burst into laughter. Levi rolls onto his back so we’re both looking up at the ceiling, our legs dangling off the edge. Once again, his feet touch the ground. Once again, mine do not.

“You’d better not be laughing at me,” Suzie says, entering the room. Her hands are covered in flour.

“Oh,” Levi says, laughing harder. “Not at all.”

“Levi Brenton.” She says it with such severity that we both stop and lift our heads to look at her. Then she grins. “No more tears tonight, Bee. Let me teach you my ways, with the help of a personal favorite.”

I smile. “I’ll be right in there. Thanks, Suzie.”

She leaves us alone, dancing off to the beat of her music. Levi stands up, hands anxiously adjusting his plain gray tee by pulling on the hem. I totally notice the gray accentuating his form, how lean he is, how nicely toned his arms are, and I want to pull him back to me.

I stand instead. “Hey, Levi?” I ask, tentatively.

Levi takes my hand. “Hmm?”

“I haven’t told Gretchen yet. I just don’t know...how.” I’m whispering, even though there’s no reason to. I know I should feel ashamed for not telling her, but my fear of what she’ll say, of her sadness mirroring mine…I’m not ready for it.

He nods and swallows hard. “It’s not going to be easy. Want me to be there when you do tell her?”

“I just don’t want to talk about it, remember?”

“Oh, I remember. And I’m just reminding you that your denial has to come to an end soon.”

“I’m not in denial,” I protest, slightly hurt by his (all-too-true) accusation.

He shakes his head. “You’re not talking about it because you hope you’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all have been a lie.”

He’s hit the problem in the head, but I’m not ready to confess. I shrug it off. “It’ll be hard no matter what, when, or how.”

“I know,” he whispers. “But for now, let’s bake. Pauluzie is waiting for us.”

I laugh (half-heartedly) at this name combination, taking his hand. “We wouldn’t want to disappoint,” I say, even though my feet are stuck to the floor and my will to move is weak.

Levi seems to notice my hesitation, because he grabs both of my hands and, walking backward, starts to dance. I roll my eyes (my way of getting rid of tears), but his movements pull me in. The beat of the music carries me, and Levi knows all the lyrics (of course he does), and hearing him sing the words “forever your giiiirl” makes me laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he says. “I had no choice but to memorize this song.”

“You can’t even blame this one on childhood,” I say, lightness coming back into my step. “This is all since the divorce.”

Laughing, he accepts the bowl of unmixed ingredients Suzie hands to him and lifts himself up onto the counter. The heels of his Chuck Taylors hit the cupboards, hard enough that his mom says, “Levi, don’t kick the cupboards—you’ll scuff them up.”

“Mom, Mom,” he says over the blaring music. “I will repaint them if I have to. Just let me live a little.” Then he winks at me, pulling me into the little spot he’s made between his legs. I rest my head and shoulders back against his chest, elbows on his thighs. He brings the bowl around to my front so that he’s mixing the dough and holding me. It feels so good to be here that I could cry in relief.

“Hey, Mom, how about a song we all know?” he asks.

Suzie obliges, and after a second of silence from the iPod, Freddie Mercury starts to sing, mournfully and soulfully.

“Now, Bohemian Rhapsody I can definitely do,” I say, and start to sing the next part of the verse. Levi joins in, chuckling, and after one more stir he gives the bowl to his mom and lets me lick the spoon. All I can think is, Levi, like his name is a blessing, like it’s a kiss or a lifeline or a photograph. I’m also thinking, So the baking thing really does work, as I lean into Levi’s embrace.

I let his warmth envelope me.

I stay one more hour, which means I get sent home with a warm plate of cookies. I bring them into the kitchen with me, feeling lighter than I have since my beach day with Levi. I set the plate of cookies down on the counter. “Astrid, Millie?” I ask, but when I turn, I realize they’re already there.

I also realize they’ve been waiting for me, and that they’re crying. Millie leans against Astrid for support, but Astrid doesn’t seem too strong, either.

“Hi, girls,” I say quietly. What else am I supposed to say? They know now; there’s nothing for me to say.

Millie bursts into tears again. I’m carried into their arms by my own need for comfort, wrapping myself around them and into them until we’re entwined, a sister-pretzel, all of us crying over our father. Our tears mingle and mix; our hiccup-sighs are almost a harmony. Then Tom joins us. He wraps his long arms around all three of us girls, kissing my forehead. His sigh is heavy, and it shakes, and that hurts me more than anything.

Not for the first time, I wonder when our hearts will break, or if they’re just dissipating, inch by inch, until there’s nothing left.