Page 11 of My Heart Before You

He placed his hand on the door jamb of the entrance and stepped deeper into the elevator to let her pass. “It was good to see you.”

Seeing the button to the parking level illuminated, she stepped out into the lobby. “You too.”

He nodded, sliding both hands in his pockets before the doors engulfed him.

When the softening early evening light filled her vision, she took a deep breath of city air, trying to shake the effervescent sensation that slipped down her spine.

?Chapter 4?

Colin refreshed his email screen for the third time and topped off his cup from the coffee carafe on the granite island. He hadn’t had two days off in what seemed like a lifetime. He’d spent most of yesterday weight training and finishing out his charts for the week before dinner out with Max.

His friend had grilled him again between bites of steak about unpacking his things. And Colin had argued that the king bed on its new masculine frame with a distressed wooden headboard and accompanying nightstand and lamp were already pretty impressive. Especially since for the last several years, his mattress sat unadorned on a metal frame.

Turning from his perch on one of the barstools that came with the kitchen, he stared at the bare living room. Only boxes littered the hardwood floor besides his father’s old recliner. Most of them contained clothes, additional shoes, and odds and ends for the kitchen, but there were several boxes that he’d packed from his father’s house. In his haste in moving, he hadn’t labeled them.

The other piece of furniture missing from his condo pushed a hole through his stomach. Tension returned in his forearms as he fingered an arpeggio on the countertop. He could be playing out some of the emotions roaring in his chest if he hadn’t sold their family piano in the darkest days after his father’s death. Balling his fist, he rose from the stool to dispense some of the itchiness that flowed through his arms and legs.

“It’s just stuff,” he told the empty room.

He opened a large cardboard box, and a sigh of relief left his lungs when he found his own belongings instead of those belonging to his parents. His hiking boots still carried a faint scent of campfire smoke as he lifted them from the box. He removed two coats and hung them in the small closet in the entry. When he returned for his snowboarding jacket, gathering its slick material into his hand, a small wooden box was revealed.

With his free hand, he rubbed the center of his sternum. He hadn’t touched his box since before . . . when it used to bring him comfort. Tentatively hinging open the lid, he slid his fingers into a smooth, unsealed envelope and took out a familiar handwritten letter.

Dear Colin,

I want you to know how incredibly proud of you I am. You have always been such a smart, focused, and inquisitive person that I know you are capable of whatever lies ahead of you in this new job. I know that your father will be a wealth of knowledge and comfort to you in this transition as he was always good with being flexible and understanding that change can be good. I love you so incredibly much and want you to know that there is nothing you cannot achieve. You have such a fire and a light to you, you always have, that I truly believe that the world will open itself up to you so long as you put forth a good effort and no doubt you have. I only hope that you are doing something that you truly love, something that makes you especially happy. I love you so incredibly much, my sweet boy.

My whole heart,

Mom

He folded the letter along its well-worn creases and placed the college-ruled page back into its envelope.When you get the job of your dreamswas scrawled on the front in her beautiful, flowing cursive. Placing the envelope with the many others, he lifted them all to look at the photos at the bottom of the box. There was a picture of his mother with a large smile and a larger pregnant belly, one of his parents laughing at each other on their wedding day, and his favorite, the picture of the three of them in the backyard on a warm day. A younger version of himself was on his father’s shoulders as his mother’s face tilted up from under her sun hat—the three of them beaming at the camera.

The memory of that day always played clear in his mind like a movie preserved in time. He rode on his father’s shoulders as he raced barefoot on the grass chasing his laughing mother—a game his father had created to stop his seven-year-old self from crying when he cut open his leg falling off his bike. He remembered distinctly the sting of his knee, the feeling of weightlessness as he was lifted up, and his mother’s eyes squinting shut from laughter under the straw hat she always wore gardening.

He felt the next strongest memory flow in like the tide occupying the space it just vacated—his mother’s paper thin, cold hand in his as she drew her last breath.

Words like “ovarian cancer” and “stage IV” and “metastasis” make little sense to a thirteen-year-old boy, but he came to understand the impact of those words over the next nine months. He watched his bright and beautiful mother shrink, which was strange because she was the tallest woman in the neighborhood and always seemed to be a force of nature.

His mother took on every treatment that was available from chemo to radiation to surgery. Wearing brightly colored scarves on her head, she meditated and drank wheatgrass juice. She sat outside on their back deck whenever she could, claiming as she often did that “fresh air could cure anything.” One day he came home from school to find a woman dressed in wide skirts and colorful shawls waving a burning plant and chanting over his mother while she lay on his parents' bed. His father said she was trying everything, and if it made her feel better, then who was he to knock it.

His father took an immediate leave of absence from his position teaching at the university once she was diagnosed and despite their best efforts, they watched her grow weaker and smaller. After coming home from school each day, Colin would hold her hand and read to her because it was too exhausting for her to do herself. When she tired of her books, he would play her favorite songs as many times as she wanted on their family piano.

Colin helped clean the house on the weekends, in addition to his chore of mowing the lawn, and though he’d been doing his own laundry for years, he started doing his father’s and mother’s as well. Sometimes her clothes would be stained with rusty spots that he knew from years of cuts and scrapes was blood.

Neighbors and friends started making meals and bringing their families by more than in the beginning, and both he and his father were grateful for them. The kids at school had avoided him in the first few months, as if their mothers would catch cancer like a contagious disease just from talking to him. They began to come back one by one; their parents having explained what was happening in the Abernan house.

Soon, his mother was on oxygen, a clear tube always on her face like a cruel, inappropriate mustache. A hospital bed was brought into the living room because she didn’t have the strength to climb the stairs. An aide started coming by four days a week for a few hours to bathe her, brush her hair, and take notes for her in a notebook. She always requested privacy when Phyllis came to care for her, joking that she needed a little girl time.

His father used this time to take him to do athletic things: hitting balls at the batting cage, playing one-on-one basketball, going for long runs together, trying to dissipate their pent up aggression at the complete unfairness of the situation. The hitting of baseballs was most effective in the beginning, but they ended up running the most. Quietly running, side by side, processing through the day’s pain, trying not to acknowledge that for an hour or so they were running away from the hellish existence that was their life.

It seemed as if after her diagnosis, the air in the house was always charged with electricity like before a thunderstorm. Small victories were overshadowed by soul crushing defeats, slowly pushing them closer towards an inevitable and loathed end. When school finished, many of his teachers hugged him too long, blinking back tears as he said goodbye.

One warm summer day, his father had encouraged him to go with some family friends to Wrightsville Beach. When he returned, the energy in the house felt calm, which immediately unnerved him. He found his parents on the couch, his father’s strong arms wrapped around his mother’s frail body. They told him that it was time to stop fighting, that his mother was going to stop treatments, and begin hospice care. Colin ran straight from the house and kept running for the next hour and a half.

In those final days, he would often wake in the middle of the night and find his father next to his mother’s bed with his strong hand woven between her bony fingers, his head on her lap, both asleep. Kind, quiet-footed hospice nurses worked around his mother like soft angels. Doctors came to the house, every time with compassion and a best guess to their never-ending question of “How much longer do we have?”

On a hot and muggy day in August, a hospice nurse asked him to his mother’s bedside while he was making his dad a bowl of cereal. In her lap sat an inlaid lidded wooden box filled to the brim with sealed envelopes. Various titles covered the front,When you graduate high school,When you fall in love,When you become a father,written either in her familiar cursive or in Phyllis’s tidy block print.

---