“I’ve been taken hostage by this horrible…thing. It’s got me and it’s not letting go. So I want to let go of it instead. I want to start my life. I want to move on and do…anything. I want to do anything that isn’t sleeping, vomiting, or being pumped full of drugs.”
“It is letting go of you,” I tell him. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it working?” I ask in a panic. Maybe he’s not been truthful with Grant.
He exhales. “It is working. I think it’s worked and I don’t want to do any more because I think it’s worked enough so far. I don’t think I need the last one. I can’t do any more. It’s relentless. It makes me sick just thinking about going. I want to curl myself up in my bed, pretend it’s all gone away, then wake up and be anywhere other than here.”
“Davey, how long?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“How long does it take? Each session? Each day?”
“Hours,” he says. “Hours and hours and hours. All day for three solid days, and then a few more hours in another few weeks. But it’s not only that. It makes me so weak. It’s cruel. I feel OK today, but I’ll feel sick tomorrow, during, after. I can’t even move afterward. It’s such an effort to get up and use the bathroom. It’s such an effort to think.”
I can hear him crying. “Davey,” I soothe. “You have to go in tomorrow. You won’t beat this if you sit at home wishing it away.”
“I know. But I’ve had enough.”
I’m going to regret doing this, but I say it anyway. “I can’t imagine a world without you in it. If you don’t fight…” I trail off. And then I become brutal. He’ll never speak to me again. But I have to do this. “There are people who would kill for this chance to live. There are people out there every day begging for one more treatment. Begging for another drug that doesn’t exist to save them from an illness they’ll never survive. And you’ve been handed this…this combination of drugs that works. You’re two-thirds of the way there. This last third—just do this last third. I want to ask you to do it for me. I want to ask you to do it for your mum and dad. I want to ask you to do it for Grant. But I want you to do it foryoumore than anything. Not for Davey in the now. ForDavey in the future. The one who will bounce back, having beaten it. Because you can. Because you have to.”
He’s stopped crying.
“Hello?” I ask.
“I’m still here,” he says.
“Davey. Will you promise me you’ll go in tomorrow? Promise me? Honestly, the next time I hear from you, I want it to be because you’ve been in, started this last round. You’ve got so much to live for. Don’t give up. Don’t give up now. Please. I am really begging you. I’m desperate.”I love you,I think.I love you. Even though you’re with someone else. Even though I’m with someone else. I love you. I can’t make it stop.
“I have to go,” he says.
“No, Davey, don’t—”
But the line goes dead. I look at the screen. He’s gone. My chest is tight, but my mind is numb. I don’t know what to think. What to feel. It takes a few seconds and the tears that threatened to fall the entire way through the call burst forth and streak my face. If Davey doesn’t attend his chemo appointment, I realize that now all I will do is wait—a year, two years—for the call from Grant telling me that the cancer took Davey, that Davey has died.
The thought of losing him, even though I know I already have, is so painful and I feel my chest crushing me from within. I can’t do anything else. I gave it my all. But I don’t have the power that Grant made me think I had.
The front doorbell sounds and I go toward it, wiping all trace of tears from my face. George is on the other side of the door.
“You’re here,” he says. “Where the hell did you go?”
I look around the hall. “Here,” I say as if both of us can’t see that I’m in the hall.
“You’ve been gone forever. I got worried. You weren’t behind me.”
“No,” I say simply. “I don’t feel well.” I lie. “I’m exhausted. I need to sleep.” This bit is true. I am drained.
“OK,” he says, putting his hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel warm. But you look awful. You been crying?”
I shake my head, rub my face, which must look blotchy.
“Want me to run you a bath?” he asks.
The last thing I want to do is wallow in hot liquid. “No. I just need to sleep.”
“Want me to stay?”
“Weren’t you going to stay?”
“Not tonight, no. I’ve got to be up early. Client at sixA.M.”
