Chapter Twenty-Six

Georgina

 

 

I saw the pick-up truck coming over Julie’s shoulder in the split second before it hit. It spun out over the wet road, coming too fast around the corner. I opened my mouth to scream, and then everything was wrenched apart. Glass sprayed through the air. Tires squealed. Metal crunched and groaned. Air-bags burst and slapped against us. I was thrown out of Julie’s embrace as she jolted back and forth. The side of the car sheared away. My head hit the doorframe behind me.

Pain. Crushing sounds.

Darkness.

I woke up to the flash of lights. Red, blue, and the bright white of a paramedic flashing a torch in my face. She nodded at my blinking eyes, talking with other people surrounding us. People moved everywhere, but everything was jarred and blurry to me. Time skipped as memory and the present jumbled into each other. I was in the car seat as they cut the seatbelt off me, then I was on a stretcher. A man—the pick-up driver?—sat in the gutter, crying. I was in the car again, glass flying, suspended in slow motion, then I was being asked questions I could barely hear.

The only thing I could clearly see was Julie. Three paramedics surrounded her. There was blood. Her body looked wrong.

I was loaded into the ambulance, screaming out for Julie as they closed the doors.

 

 

 

I didn’t know if I blacked out again, or if I was sedated. I woke in a hospital bed. I was stiff and sore, but alive.

My dad sat in the chair beside me. He stood and came straight to my side at the first sign of movement. The look on his face said everything.

My response was instant and primal. My face scrunched in on itself. Every part of the invisible armor I’d built had fractured in the crash, and now it shattered like the glass in the car.

“She didn’t make it,” I sobbed.

“I’m so sorry, honey.” He wrapped his arms gently around me, careful of my battered body. I wept into his shirt.

Every one of us dies. Was that what Blake had said? But not Julie. She wasn’t meant to die. How could she be dead? She was the girl who had one days, with a carefully planned future and the drive and intelligence to get there. She was the one without cancer. The one without a ticking clock hanging over her. Who thought eating chocolate for breakfast was the naughtiest thing in the world. She was my friend.

And now, Julie was gone, just like that.

Her family—I couldn’t imagine how they felt right now. Worse than I felt. How I imagined my dad would feel when he lost me.

Was that what life was? A series of painful losses? There was too much. I’d lost my mom. Blake lost his wife. Julie is gone. Dad lost Mom as well, and would lose me.

He almost just lost me.

I pulled away from his embrace so I could look at him. So I could look him in the eye and tell him the truth I had hidden for too long.

I could see how relieved he looked that I was still here with him. And now I was going to break his heart.

“Daddy, I found another lump.” I barely got the words out. They rattled through my gasping breaths. I ached all over as I reached my arms to him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“A lump?” He froze in place, lifeless for a moment before he took my hands. Only the white circles around his eyes, put there by shock, gave away just what he was thinking and feeling. “I’m here for you. You are my little girl. We’ll get through this together. I would do anything for you.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I don’t think I can do it again. I don’t think I’m strong enough to go through treatment a second time.”

Dad swallowed hard. “Georgie, treatment is your best option.”

“It wasn’t for Mom.”

“Things were very different then. There was nothing like the medicines they have now.”

My lips trembled. “Daddy—you don’t know what it’s like.”

“Is it better than the alternative?” Dad’s bushy brows dropped over his eyes and he shook his head. “How long have you known?”

“I don’t know anything for sure yet—”

“Since you started missing classes? Why did you wait so long to tell me?”

I flinched. Dad was rarely angry at me, but I could tell he was now by the strain in his forehead, pushing veins to the surface. I stuttered. I didn’t want to keep lying to him, but I didn’t want him to know how I had ignored the problem so completely. So I lied again. “I’m still waiting for the results. I wanted to get them back first, in case it was nothing.”

“Even nothing isn’t nothing!” Dad growled, but then he snatched me so quickly into a bear hug I lost my breath. “You think waiting on results to see if you have cancer is nothing? I’m your father, Georgie. It’s my job to be there for you when things are hard. I’m meant to protect you, not the other way around.”

His beard scratched against my cheek, his arms squeezed me into his soft stomach, and I could feel my chest shaking with grief and guilt. I was like a five-year-old, sobbing into my daddy’s chest because my mommy was never coming home again.

When I had stilled enough to accept some tissues to blow my nose, Dad stepped back. “Listen to me, Georgie. The only reason there are no photos of your mother during her last days up around the house was for you. I thought it would be better for you, for how you remembered her. But I think that was a mistake.” Dad opened his wallet and pulled out a folded photo. It showed Mom in a hospital bed. Bald, and frail, with a tiny me cuddled up next to her. We were both smiling. “For me, she was always the woman I loved, right up to the end.”

He carefully folded the photo and tenderly put it away, as though it were the most precious thing in the world. “That saying about making lemonade if life gives you lemons is bullshit. The lemons themselves are valuable, beautiful. Life is everything we have, and the bad is just as valuable as the good. It’s harder. It’s painful. But it’s ours. It’s proof we’re still here, that we can feel things, which is a miracle in this infinite and unfeeling universe. We should do whatever we can to hold onto that for as long as possible. I will always love you, understand? Always.”

I nodded.

“When will we know?” Dad asked.

“In a few days,” I answered. “You will be the first person I call.”

He nodded back. “I talked to the doctors about your injuries from the accident.”

The accident. Julie. My face scrunched closed around burning tears. The smash seemed like it was a million miles away, separated from me by fear and disease. The pounding head and dull ache through my whole body could have been as much from emotional exhaustion as from the crash. I felt awful that that was all I’d suffered, when Julie had been irreparably broken. That wasn’t fair. I should have been the one to die. I would have swapped our places in a heartbeat. I didn’t want to die, I wasn’t ready, but I knew what was fair, and this wasn’t it.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re under observation for a concussion, and have some cuts and bruises. They think you’ll be able to walk out of here in a day or two, which is a miracle as well. I’m so sorry about Julie, but I have to be happy I still have my girl. Do you need anything right now? Any painkillers? Do you want to see the counselor? Is there anyone you want me to call?”

“No.” Blake. “I’m okay.” I am ripped open right down the middle. “How about you? You want Louisa with you? She can be here for you if you want.” I want Julie with me again.

Dad made a quick range of facial expressions that ended with a shrug and shake of the head. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing her again. I don’t think she was right for us.”

For us. Louisa may have been a bit pushy, but Dad had seemed genuinely happy around her. Then I’d reacted badly to her, and suddenly, she was no longer in the picture. I had blown Dad’s chance at happiness yet again.

He was barely forty. He had married my mom at twenty, and I had followed less than a year later. He was still young enough to start a whole new family, and that comforted me.

I was smart enough not to say that to him right then. Still, I hoped he might work things out with Louisa, or find someone else soon. He could continue living every moment, good and bad, for as long as he had. And maybe I should, too.

A doctor came in then to check me over, and Dad went to make some phone calls and talk to Julie’s family. Once I was alone again, I lay back in the bed and made plans. Plans for the future. For whatever I had left.

Tomorrow, I had three things to do on an all new list.

Get a morning-after pill.

Apologize to Blake and end things finally.

And get tested for cancer.