That’s how long the surgery took to complete. We were all too scared to leave the building until Auntie was out of the operating room. Lexi raided the vending machine at one point, but we barely touched the bags of chips she set in front of us. Mostly we just sat in silence—or as close to silence as you can get in a packed hospital waiting room. Through murmured sentences here and there, I learned how Auntie had been brushing off a case of nausea and heartburn for the past few days as a ‘little bug.’Onclewent to the corner store this afternoon and came back to find her unconscious on the floor.
It was another half hour after she was out of surgery before they let us in to see her. When the nurse asked if we were all family members,Oncleput his hand on my shoulder and spoke for the first time since I got to the hospital. He told her I was Auntie’s son.
They tried to prepare us for what she’d look like, but nothing can prepare you for something like that. She seemed so small, surrounded by more machines than I knew one person could be hooked up to. She looked broken. For one spine-chilling second when we first walked in, I thought there’d been some kind of horrific mistake and that she was gone.
The machines were still blinking out her heartbeat, though. That was the only thing that made her look like a living person.
They said she probably wouldn’t wake up until the next day. We all sat there and watched the shallow rise and fall of her chest long enough to be convinced they weren’t lying to us and that she really wouldn’t slip away. After that, it took all three of us to convinceOnclethat he needed to let Lexi take him home. He looked about ready to have a heart attack himself; while the rest of us could handle the stress and lack of food, he was fighting total exhaustion. Still, the only way Lexi got him out the door was for us to promise Auntie wouldn’t be alone tonight.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” Lexi told Nadia and I, after she hadOncleout of earshot. “I’m going to take him to my place for the night and check on Rémy and the girls. I’ll bring us all dinner.”
Now it’s just Nadia and I here to witness the whirring of the machines that seem to be keeping the woman in front of us alive. I should probably say something, but even at a time like this, I’m not really one to fill the silence.
“I wonder what she’d say,” Nadia eventually muses, staring straight ahead where she sits in a plastic chair next to mine, “if she could see us in the same room like this.”
The unceasing echo of footsteps sounds out in the hall. I watch the slight motion of Auntie’s breathing.
“I think she’d be happy,” Nadia adds. “She was always telling me that I should just talk to you again.”
I exhale in answer.
She lets out a chuckle and starts shaking her head. “Talking’s still not your style, huh?”
Something between us eases just a bit.
“I guess not,” I admit.
She full-on laughs for a second, and the sound shocks us both. Just a few hours ago, I wasn’t sure any of us would ever laugh again.
“To be honest,” she tells me, “I’ve been thinking about asking to see you for a long time. I’m not sure what stopped me from doing it. Maybe it was fear, but it also felt like...I don’t know, like giving in. Like giving you a free pass on what happened. I wanted to stand my ground. You really hurt me, Cole. It’s not like I haven’t moved on; I’m happy with my life now, and I wouldn’t want to change it, but that hurt...That cut me deep.”
“Nad, I—”
She holds up a hand to cut off my apology, and it’s probably for the best; I’m sure would’ve been so much less than what she deserves.
“It took me a long time, but eventually I realized how much I must have hurtyou.”
She gives me the same look she did before she hugged me, and I recognize what it is now: regret.
“I always had this...idea of us in my head. I mean, we grew up like some kind of teen romance movie. You were the cute, complicated boy next door who got dropped on our doorstep. It just seemed like we weremeantto fall in love, like that’s how things were supposed to be. I was so sure we were right for each other that I ignored all the things that were wrong. I tried to make you into something that would fit this...thisplanI had, and you let me, so I kept doing it. I took advantage of how important this family is to you.”
“That doesn’t excuse what I—”
Again, she doesn’t give me a chance to pull a sentence together.
“No, it doesn’t. I still think most of what happened is on you, and I want you to know that, but I’ve gone through a lot to realize what I did to you and how bad it must have been. I think there was a time when I saw you as the cure to everything that’s ever been wrong in my life. I put all my effort into working onuswhen I should have been working onme. But that’s not right, is it? You can’t expect to save your life by saving a relationship. You can’t use another person as your crutch or your key or whatever you want to call it. What we had—or what Ithoughtwe had—meant so much to me that I was willing to hurt us both just to keep it.”
I stare at Nadia as she speaks, but all I can see is Roxanne. I can hear her voice just like she’s speaking the words again right in my ear.
We need to work on ourselves, Cole. We’re just two buildings crumbling against each other.
Yet I was willing to let us both crumble even more if it meant keeping her here.
“This mess belongs to both of us, Nadia,” I say, because I can’t let her take any more blame. It’s not right. “All that might be true, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have stopped it. I could have been strong enough to walk away before things turned out like they did. I could have been honest with you. I could have been honest with myself.”
For the first time, I start to see why Roxanne did what she did. She was trying to find the courage to walk away from something that was broken.
I was so fucking blind. It took hearing the words from Nadia’s mouth to realize that what she did to me is almost exactly what I was doing to Roxanne. I took advantage of her. I exploited how much she cared about me to make her feel like she had no choice but to stay. I made her life so much harder than it needed to be just because I couldn’t see what my own would look like without her in it.
