From somewhere behind me, I could hear the sound of tires crunching on gravel, then car doors slamming, and I knew my parents had finally arrived. I pushed myself up and trudged across the dock, wondering just how I’d gotten here.
chapter four
three weeks earlier
IT WAS OFFICIALLY THE WORST BIRTHDAY EVER.
I was sitting on the couch next to Warren, while Gelsey lay on her stomach on the floor in front of us, her legs turned out, froglike, and resting in a diamond on the carpet behind her, something that never failed to make me wince. We were all watching a sitcom that none of us had laughed at once, and I had a feeling my siblings were only there because they thought they had to be. I could see Warren sneaking glances at his laptop, and could guess that Gelsey wanted to be up in her room, which had been turned into an ad hoc dance studio, working on her fouettes, or whatever.
My siblings had tried to make it feel like as much of a celebration as possible under the circumstances—they’d ordered a pineapple and pepperoni pizza, my favorite, put a candle in the center of it, and clapped when I blew it out. I’d closed my eyes tightly in anticipation, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a birthday wish and actually thought anything might come of it. But this was a fervent, eyes-closed-tightly wish that things would turn out to be okay with my dad, that everything that was happening was just a mistake, a false alarm, and I was imbuing this wish with as much hope in the outcome as the ones I’d made when I was little, when all I’d wanted from the universe was a pony.
The sitcom laugh track blasted through the room, and I looked at the clock on the DVD player. “What time were they supposed to be home?” I asked.
“Mom wasn’t sure if they were making it back tonight,” Warren said. He met my eye for a moment, then looked back at the television. “She said she’d call.”
I nodded, and focused on the antics onscreen, though I could hardly follow them. My parents were at Sloan-Kettering, a cancer hospital in Manhattan, where my father was getting tests done. They’d been there for the last three days because it turned out that the back problem that had been bothering him for the last few months wasn’t actually a back problem at all. The three of us had been left to fend for ourselves, and we had been doing our own chores without complaint and getting along much better than usual, none of us talking about we were all afraid of, as though by naming it, we would make it real.
My mother had called me that morning, apologizing that they were missing my birthday, and while I assured her that it was okay, I had felt a hard knot start to form in my stomach. Because it felt like, on some level, this was what I deserved. I had always been close to my dad—I was the one who went along with him on errands, the one who helped him pick out birthday and Christmas gifts for my mother, the only one who shared his sense of humor. So I should have been the one to realize something was actually wrong. I could see the signs, after all—my dad wincing as he eased himself down into the low driver’s seat of his sports car, working harder than usual to lift things, moving a little more carefully. But I hadn’t wanted it to be real, had wanted it to be something that would just quietly go away, so I hadn’t said anything. My father hated doctors, and even though my mother could presumably see all the same things that I did, she didn’t insist that he go to one. And I had been focused on my own drama at school—convinced that my breakup and its fallout was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
I was thinking just how stupid I’d been when headlights cut through the darkness outside the window, cresting up the hill of our driveway, and a second later, I heard the hum of the garage door. Gelsey sat up, and Warren turned off the volume. For a moment, we all just looked at one another in the sudden silence.
“They’re back, so that’s a good sign, right?” Gelsey asked. For some reason she looked at me for an answer, and I just looked at the television, where the hijinks were winding down and everything was getting happily resolved.
I heard the door open and close, and then my mother appeared in the doorway of the TV room, looking exhausted.
“Could we talk to all of you in the dining room?” she asked. She didn’t wait for us to answer, but left the room again.
As I stood up from the couch, I could felt the knot in my stomach get bigger. This did not seem to be the good sign Gelsey was talking about, and the one that I had wished for. Because if it was good news, I figured that my mother just would have told us. She wouldn’t have needed to tell us in the dining room, which in itself seemed ominous. In addition to the few times it was used each year for eating fancier dinners on nicer plates than usual, the dining room was the place where things were Discussed.
I followed Warren and Gelsey through the kitchen toward the dining room, where I saw my father was sitting at his usual spot, at the head of the table, looking somehow smaller than I remembered him being only a few days ago. My mother stood at the kitchen island with a square white bakery box, and she pulled me into a quick, awkward, one-armed hug. We weren’t really physically affectionate in my family, making this as worrying a sign as needing to hear news in the dining room.
“I’m so sorry about your birthday, Taylor,” she said. She gestured to the white box, and I saw that the sticker keeping the box closed read BILLY’S—my favorite cupcake bakery. “I brought these for you, but maybe…” She glanced at the dining room and bit her lip. “Maybe we’ll save them for afterward.”
I wanted to ask, After what? but I also felt, with every minute that passed, that I knew what the answer was. As my mother took a deep breath before heading in to join everyone, I looked to the front door. I could feel my familiar impulse kick in, the one that told me that things would be easier if I could just leave, not have to deal with any of this, just take my cupcakes and go.
But of course, I didn’t do that. I walked behind my mother into the dining room, where she clasped my father’s hand, looked around at all of us, took a breath, and then confirmed what we’d all been afraid of.
As she spoke the words, it was like I was hearing them from deep underwater. There was a ringing in my ears, and I looked around the table, at Gelsey who was already crying, and my father, who looked paler than I’d ever seen him, and Warren furrowing his brow, the way he always did when he didn’t want to express any emotion. I pinched the inside of my arm, hard, just in case it might wake me up from this nightmare I’d landed in and couldn’t seem to get out of. But the pinching didn’t help, and I was still at the table as my mother said more of the terrible words. Cancer. Pancreatic. Stage four. Four months, maybe more. Maybe less.
When she’d finished and Gelsey was hiccupping and Warren was staring very hard at the ceiling, blinking more than usual, my father spoke for the first time. “I think we should talk about the summer,” he said, his voice hoarse. I looked over at him, and he met my eyes, and suddenly I was ashamed that I hadn’t burst into tears like my younger sister, that all I was feeling was a terrible hollow numbness. As though this was letting him down somehow. “I would like to spend the summer with all of you up at the lake house,” he said. He looked around the rest of the table. “What do you think?”