Page 97 of The Facade

“H-how are you feeling?” I asked once I could speak again. “Better? You look better.”

I couldn’t look away from her, because even though she was barely more than skin and bones, she looked radiant.

“Better now that you’re smiling,” she said.

How was this possible?

I’d heard of miracles before. My dad had spoken about unexplainable things happening to his patients before. About them coming in with a huge tumor that would somehow disappear on its own. Or about a patient only having a prognosis of weeks to live and miraculously surviving for several years.

The instances were few and far between, but even though we weren’t a religious family and didn’t claim to know the workings of the universe, my dad freely admitted that there were things that couldn’t be explained by science and could only be described as a miracle.

So was it possible that we’d received one?

Had all the time we’d spent preparing for the worst been only something to help us appreciate each other even more?

I hoped so. Because if my mom was going to get better and if we’d just received the miracle we’d been hoping for, I knew I would never take a single moment of my mom’s life for granted.

Never.

Before I could even pull together everything I still wanted to talk to my mom about, I realized I had tears leaking out the sides of my eyes. Tears of joy and thankfulness that she was talking and smiling and happy.

“Something wrong, Mack?” Mom looked at me with concern etched in her eyes, noticing the emotion streaming down my cheeks.

“No.” I shook my head and wiped at my eyes. “I’m…” I drew in a deep breath to calm my emotions. “I’m good. I’m just so happy to talk to you again.”

“I’m happy to talk to you, too.” She squeezed my hand. “In fact, I’ve been wondering about something the past few days.”

“You have?”

“Yes,” she said. “I never got the chance to ask you if you ever did anything about that girl you liked.”

“That girl?” I asked, trying to remember exactly who she might be talking about since I’d never told her about my brief relationship with Cambrielle.

“The girl named ‘Nothing,’” she said. “Who liked another guy.”

Oh.

So she remembered the conversation we’d had before the Halloween Dance.

“So, did you ever do anything about it? Or did you let her go off and date that other guy?”

Here we were, after a full week where my mom could barely string more than a few words together, and the first thing she wanted to talk about was a girl who I may or may not like.

But I guess it made sense. My mom had always been a hopeless romantic and had gobbled up any information I was willing to share about my love life.

And so I said, “I actually danced with that girl at the Halloween dance and even convinced her to date me for a little while.”

“You did?” she asked. “And you didn’t think to tell your dear old mother about it?”

I shrugged. “It was a secret.”

“Ooooh,” she said. Her eyes sparked with excitement. “A secret relationship.”

I chuckled, loving that my mom was so animated and just lapping this all up.

“It was very forbidden.” I winked.

“Itwas?” she asked.

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