Page 31 of Glad You Exist

He then informed Dan to check on Mom first before letting me know.

Oh, and by the way, Mom has cancer.

That is why I am currently ignoring all the texts and calls from my father.

I huff and angrily delete Dad’s newer messages without reading them.

I hastily delete his voicemails without listening to them as well.

Because he had the gall to drop that bomb on my brother on thephone. Then continued to tell him not to call me until he’d spoken to the doctor.

Like,why? Toprotectme? When that did the exact opposite and insinuated that I’d kept my mom’s illness from my own brother.

I was upset with him. No, scratch that.I’m still very much pissed.

An emotion I never want to feel for my parents, yet here I am angry at both for keeping secretsagain. For alwaysalwayskeeping Dan and me in the dark only to stab us with the truth later on. How did they still not understand that it would have made everything ten times easier had we known all this before?

Poor Danny. He is trying his best to stay strong for me. He has only let me see him cry once. Since then, he has spent his days driving me to and from school—thanks to Mom’s accident, he’s become paranoid about letting me behind the wheel—then going back and forth to the hospital to watch over Mom.

Thanks to Aunt Rose, I only have to be home alone three days out of the week but that in itself is torture. I hate how quiet the house is without Mom blasting music as she writes in her office downstairs, or her singing karaoke on her many writing breaks.

It’s only been over a week, but I’m already missing her eccentricities that I once thought were annoying. Now I would do absolutely anything to get those back.

The way she leaves the TV on in her room on as she records her Filipinoteleseryesbecause she refuses to believe that even with the TV off, it will record properly or that there is a thing called On Demand where the episodes are stored automatically after airing.

“You can’t be too safe. Technology is only great when it works Lizzy,”she would say to me whenever I rolled my eyes at her and attempted to explain how it works.

A gasp comes out of me as a memory unexpectedly hits me.

It was three weeks ago, when she had last repeated those words to me. She had taken the weekend off from writing. She was bingeing a show in her room wearing one of her signature robes and face masks. She patted the spot beside her in bed and invited me to watch with her. I declined saying I had to finish an essay due on Monday, then I went on a spiel about On Demand and how it works.

It was a Saturday for crying out loud. Why didn’t I just cuddle with her and shut up?

What if that was the last chance, I had to do that?

How could I have been so blind to my mother’s pain and suffering?

I lived with her. How could I have not known this was going on?

That she was terminally ill?

A sob almost chokes me and now the tears fall on my phone as it lays forgotten once again on my lap. I cry so hard that my body starts vibrating as sob after sob wrecks through me.

I climb up on the hospital bed and curl up next to her in a fetal position, falling sleep after a few moments from the utter exhaustion of it all.

I wakeup to the sound of whispered conversations. I stifle a groan at how heavy my eyelids have become as I struggle to open them. I feel someone shift beside me. I jolt upright in surprise to find six pairs of eyes staring at me.

I don’t know when they came in or how long I have been sleeping, but at some point, my brother came back with Summer, who is sitting on the chair beside him as he perches on the side of Mom’s bed. Aunt Rose is also here, nestled beside Mom on the other side. Brad and Kyle are lounging on the couch. Kim is sitting with her knees curled up, beside me on the guest bed.

Wait.Wait.I’m on the guest bed?How did that happen?

A blanket falls off my shoulder and I realize someone had tucked me in as well.

“Lizzy, you okay?” Dan has somehow made his way across the room in seconds. He’s kneeling in front of me, my hands in his.

“Did you move me to the bed?”

Aunt Rose beams at us from across the room, “Brad did, honey. We got here first.”

---