It was quiet in the chemotherapy room of the hospital. It was the kind of silence that penetrated my nightmares. There was a texture to it, thick and slippery against my skin so that it refused to emit noise even when I felt my body should have made some. It lent a muffled quality to the sound of nurses bringing in new patients and administering their drugs, little Dixie cups full of poison pills and IVs full of a different kind of toxins. Patients often sat with friends or families while they waited for the drugs to obliterate their blood but even their conversations had a hushed property that made my ears tingle.
I sighed deeply and tipped my head back against the high headrest then flinched when the needle pulled painfully at the back of my hand. I had “unfavourable” stage two Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which basically meant that I didn’t have a tumor they could nuke with radiation or cut with surgery. Instead, the cancer was an invasion of micro-ants in my system, spread above and below my diaphragm, which made it the “unfavourable” kind. I’d already had something called a Stanford V twelve-week round of chemo last spring but it hadn’t done much so now the doctors were going for a short but dramatic combo; more drugs, higher toxicity but for a shorter amount of time. I’d have three cycles of treatment, once a week for three weeks with one week off so that my body could recover. The doctors had already warned me that the third cycle would be crueler than I’d ever experienced, that I had a high likelihood of losing my hair, vomiting excessively, diarrhea, infection and loss of respiratory function.
Something to look forward to.
I always wished someone would sit with me during the treatments. Bea would have if she didn’t have school or extracurriculars, but my parents made sure she was always busy so she wouldn’t be underfoot.
I knew Ruby would have, if I asked, but I felt she did enough by driving me to and from my appointments.
Zeus would have, but he still didn’t know about the cancer and with each passing day it became harder and harder to explain to him why I hadn’t.
Saying I wanted him to treat me like a normal woman—a whole person and not one half drowned by sickness—would not go down well with him. I knew that and still I put it off. We were having such an amazing time together despite everything going on with the Nightstalkers MC, with H.R. and my parents. I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.
Which would probably be that night when I went over to the Garro house for Sunday dinner. I couldn’t believe that a biker family like that had such a banal tradition but Zeus told me that he’d started it after becoming Prez to encourage brotherhood and family. It wasn’t always a full house but usually a handful of brothers and their women and family would roll up to the Garro house on the far rocky edge of Entrance Bay Beach for beer and food.
It sounded like the kind of family fun I’d always wanted but never had.
Only Harleigh Rose would be there and, apparently, she hadn’t spoken to her father in the two days since our fight at EBA and most of that time, she’d been out with her boyfriend Cricket. So, even though I wanted to be excited about hanging with the brothers and seeing Zeus’s house for the first time, I didn’t have high hopes for the night.
This was exacerbated by the fact that I’d lied to Mute.
To say he’d become my best friend in the last few weeks seemed too trivial to define the way our friendship had developed. True to his orders, Mute was my constant shadow tracking all my daylight hours just one silent step behind me. Sometimes, I barely noticed he was there and didn’t really know the extent of his watchfulness. He took me to school and picked me up like a dad would (though not my dad) but when I asked him, he told me he usually worked at Hephaestus Auto during those hours. Whatever the case, if it was school or ballet or an appointment, he was there the second I was finished, waiting outside on the curb beside his bike like he’d never moved.
We also hung out though. He ate breakfast with me in the mornings and surprisingly, he loved to cook, only healthy things packed with superfoods and nutrients, but each morning he made me a delicious smoothie and some nights we helped Mrs. Henry, my parents’ chef, cook in the rarely used kitchen at the back of the house. We devoured cult classic films, played cards because I wanted to learn how to play poker and there was no one with a better poker face than Mute, and sometimes, I even read to him from a book. He liked books, he told me, but he couldn’t read very well. He still didn’t like to be touched unless I gave prior notice but he loved my hair and touching it, tugging it and wrapping it around his fingers seemed to center him in a way that playing with toy blocks soothed Sammy.
I found out a lot about Mute in the last couple of months and life before his presence in it seemed like a faint and lonely memory.
So, I felt like shit for lying to him. I’d told him I had cramps and would stay in my room until dinner at the Garros that night but instead, I’d slipped out the back door just in case he was watching and hitched a ride with Ruby, who’d been waiting a block away for me in her red convertible.
If he found out, he’d be pissed and even worse, so would Zeus.
“There’s my darling girl,” Betsy’s voice sung out, the only thing to cut through that laminated silence.
I opened my eyes to smile at the middle-aged woman who’d nursed me as a child and passed my letters back and forth to Zeus until I was old enough to go to the post office myself.
She hooked a stool with her foot and slid it beside my chair then ducked down to look into my eyes and check the pulse at my throat.
“Always a nurse,” I muttered as I rolled my eyes. “I thought you’d give me a kiss before you inspected me like a prize horse.”
She clucked her tongue and then sank onto the stool. “You know I care about you, that’s why I do it. I know this sucks, honey, but I think Dr. Radcliffe’s course of treatment is the right one.”
I nodded because we’d already talked about this. “I know.”
She tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “How are you, honey?
I bit my lip because I hadn’t seen Betsy in a few months so she didn’t know about Zeus.
Apparently, I didn’t have to worry about telling her because her eyes widened like camera apertures zooming in on me. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
“You could say that.”
“Oh God, he finally did it, didn’t he?” she asked the heavens. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said fiercely. “You of all people shouldn’t judge us.”
“I don’t, sweetheart. I’m just concerned. He’s…an intense guy with an intense life.”
“I know all about it,” I told her with hard eyes.
She nodded slowly. “He told you about what happened with his uncle Crux?”
Fuck.
“Of course,” I lied boldly.
Her face softened with empathy as she reached out to pat my thigh. “He didn’t. You ask Zeus Garro what happened with his uncle ten years ago and then we’ll still see if you have stars in your eyes over him.”
I glared at her as she pulled out her knitting and went to town on a hideously ugly olive-green sweater. “This is for you,” she beamed at me.
“Great,” I muttered, looking away and hoping to hell that what she’d said about Zeus wouldn’t destroy anything between us.