Page 3 of Things I Wish I Said
I fight to maintain a pleasant demeanor, but it’s a struggle. I’m not in the right frame of mind to handle my mother’s boyfriend and his daughter today. As mean as it sounds, John is a lot to handle. He’s always trying to fill the gaps of silence with idle chitchat and trying to connect with me in ways that don’t work while Katie usually sits idly by, rarely saying more than two words anytime we’re together.
Frankly, I wish he’d give up. I’m not interested in whatever relationship he wants to have. He already has a daughter, and I don’t need a male role model or whatever the hell it is he’s trying to emulate. In truth, I can’t figure out what my mothersees in him. He’s nerdy and reserved, while Mom is like a living, breathing watercolor. She’s carefree and gregarious and charming, a free spirit if there ever was one. Polar opposites.
“Really? Again?” I try to hide the surprise in my voice, but something in my tone must alert my mother to my displeasure because she glances over at me, her gaze sharp.
“Sorry,” I grumble, diverting my gaze. “I’m just tired.”
“He’s been here a lot lately,” Mom says like I don’t already know this. “I hope it’s not too much. I just . . . He and I . . . This is different,” she says, answering my unspoken question.
Mom has dated on and off throughout the years but has never been serious about anyone. Never invited them over for regular dinners or got to know their children. She’s right. Thisisdifferent, and I don’t need her to tell me to know. Even if I couldn’t see it with my own two eyes, I could feel it.
Doesn’t mean I like it.
“John is unlike any of the guys I’ve dated in the past,” she continues. “He’s nice and?”
“Oh, well if he’s nice,” I interrupt.
“Stop.” Mom shoots me a meaningful look before she grabs the stack of mail off the end of the island.
“Mom, you described the man you’re supposedly falling for as ‘nice.’ I have blankets that are nice. The old lady at the library who steals all the free bookmarks is nice. Fuzzy socks are nice. Pumpkin lattes. Graham crackers. The new Taylor Swift song. But shouldn’t the benchmark of a man you’re serious about be a little more than nice?”
“You know what I mean, and you didn’t even let me finish the sentence.” She starts rooting through the stack of mail. “Oh, here’s something for you,” she says, passing it off to me.
“Ooh,nice.”
Mom snatches a dishcloth off the counter and playfully smacks me with it.
Grinning, I tear the envelope open without even looking at the return address, but the second I slide the letter out and see the bold Gatorade logo in the upper left-hand corner, my heart stops.
I quickly read, scanning the words a second time just to be sure, blinking as if it’s a mirage. “Holy. Shit,” I rasp out, breathless for the first time in a while due to something other than my fucked-up lungs.
“Language,” Mom snaps.
I stand abruptly, the letter clutched in my bony hands, when a wave of vertigo hits me. The room spins, tilts, forcing me to cling to the table beneath my palms to steady myself.
“Ryleigh?” Mom’s hand gently grips my arm.
“I’m good,” I say as my vision clears. “Just stood up too fast.” I take another second before I offer her the paper with a trembling hand. “I won. I did it.”
“Did what?” Mom’s eyes focus on the print in front of her while the wave of sorrow that accompanies anything related to soccer threatens to crash over me.
“I’m the national pick for the Gatorade Player of the Year award. They picked me out of the entire country. Six hundredstate winners and twelve national winners, yet they chosemeto win the singular national title.”
Mom glances up from the letter, eyes glistening. “That’s wonderful, honey. You earned it.”
My throat aches, burns with the fresh sting of tears pricking the back of my eyes. God, I love soccer. I love it more than anything I’ve ever loved in my measly eighteen years. No longer being able to play is torture. Months of watching the years of conditioning go to waste as my treatments and disease weaken my body has killed me more than any amount of cancer ever could. Even after my diagnosis in December, I fought like hell to keep playing and continued into my spring league. But despite my valiant effort, when immunotherapy went sideways and I had to have surgery to remove the inferior lobe of my left lung, I knew I was cooked. Forget sucking in wind and gasping for breath. I’d have eight weeks of recovery, then chemo.
By the time March rolled around and I started chemo, I finally accepted I was done. I couldn’t ignore how weak I was. I could barely walk the length of a soccer field without getting winded, and that was before my treatment started.
It was a cruel form of torture, losing soccer before I died and not after.
But this letter—this award—is proof of the mark I’d made on the sport. Had I not gotten sick, I would’ve played at Florida State in the fall with the Olympics in my future. All eyes were on me. I’d won the Golden Boot and made the U-18s. All beforethe age of eighteen. All before I got sick. Headlines touted me as the next Mia Hamm.
I was a machine. Brilliant on the field with uncanny instincts.
I had no idea what these last few months would bring. No clue my scans following the lobectomy and first four cycles of chemo would reveal I still had cancer. But as I stand here, clutching the letter in my hands, I vow that if I could just go to the ceremony in July and accept my award, I’d die happy.
I need this. More than I need to breathe.
