They weren’t nothing. Weeks passed, and we got our answer. Three words that entered me like a virus, bringing with it the new kind of darkness I had never known before. Acute myeloid leukemia. The darkness invaded me, dispersing like a black dye dripped into a glass of water. Spreading, moving, growing blacker, blacker. Darker, dark.
We were sitting across the desk from the oncologist, in our separate, ice-blue chairs. River grabbed my hand that hung limply toward the floor. I looked over at him and we held each other’s gaze.
Chapter 21
Which was worse: the diagnosis or the prognosis? I wasn’t sure.
We were told one year. Twelve months. Three-hundred and sixty-five days. All of these numbers that sounded impossible in my head. We started treatment right away. The oncologist and the nurses explained the medical details to us each step of the way—what was happening in River’s body, how exactly the treatment functioned, the side effects we could expect. As a former nurse, it should have all made perfect sense to me. I should have been tracking all of the jargon, asking technical questions, thinking about everything from a clinical perspective.
But I wasn’t. I couldn’t. It didn’t make sense to me, and I couldn’t track it all, and I couldn’t think of any technical questions to pose. All I could think of, all I could see, was River, sick and broken.
The first few days after we found out, River held me in his arms as I cried. I remembered a similar moment, when I had confronted River about Julian’s death, back when we were nine-year-olds. He had held me then, too, when I cried, and I had been just as aware that it should have been the other way around.
But that was River. That was who he was. I cried in our unmade bed when we were home, and he wrapped his arms around me and told me stories of our past—happy ones and funny ones and even some of the sad ones, until he was fatigued, and we both fell asleep—a merciful, brief pause from our reality.
Milo knew. They say that animals can tell when their owners are sick, a claim I had never put much stock into before. But then I saw for my own eyes how Milo followed River around the house wherever he went, and how Milo slept just below River’s feet for the entirety of River’s increasingly frequent naps.
We tried going on walks the first week post-diagnosis, in between treatments and sleep. I never wanted to, afraid it would be too much exertion, but River insisted on getting out every day. We would slowly stroll down the gravel road or amble around the property behind our house, hand-in-hand. As the week progressed, the walks got shorter and shorter until we resorted to simply sitting in the swinging bench River had built on our front porch.
One morning, as we reposed in the bench, gently rocking it back and forth, the air around us was feeling aptly crisp and cool for late October. We were dressed in sweaters, and a wool blanket covered our laps. I rested in the crook of River’s arm and gazed beyond our house at the trees in the distance, their branches just a matter of weeks away from being totally bare. A sharp twinge of pain arose within my body as I studied those trees. Everything around me was dying. All I wanted to do was scream stop, to make it all come to a halt, or at least make it slow down, even the slightest little bit.
“I always knew you were beautiful.”
River’s statement shook me out of my miserable thoughts. He was smiling at me, and for a moment it made me forget about the lilywhite ghostliness of his skin, the dark moons under his earthy eyes. I mustered up the strength to smile back.
He continued: “But I didn’t fully understand it until high school. That’s when it hit me in a whole new way.”
A corner of my lips lifted as a teasing mood overcame me, a highly unusual one for me lately. “It hit you?”
“You know what I mean.” My response was simply a raise of the eyebrows. “You’re gonna make me say it, are you, Drew? Okay. I mean . . . that was when I first saw you in a . . . sexual way.”
“River!” I laughed out loud, the sound of it in the atmosphere surprising myself.
“You prodded me to say it. And it’s only the truth.”
“This happened all the way back in high school? Back when we were still just innocent childhood best friends?”
“Freshman year,” he said. “The very first day of the year, actually. I hadn’t seen you for a few weeks before school started. I think your family had been gone on a long camping trip. But then, the first day of school, you came up to me at my locker that morning, and it hit me.”
I pulled away from him, readjusted on the bench so that I was facing him more directly. “Go on.”
“Okay, well . . . You were beautiful. In more than just the way I had known you to be since I first met you. Back then, it was just like a fact at the back of my mind. But all of a sudden, it was like something I could feel. You were wearing your hair down, and it looked thicker to me. It was like it fell down your shoulders in this new way I’d never noticed before. Your skin was tan from Summer, and I wanted to know what it felt like. And it was like you had magically developed these curves of your hips, and your lips looked smooth. And suddenly, there I was, picturing myself kissing you and caressing your arms and hair and hips, and I had to snap out of it pronto because you were asking me questions, and I wasn’t listening.”
I laughed again, not knowing how else to respond, and River made an exaggerated frown at me.
“My past pains amuse you, do they?”
“I’m sorry.” I coughed as I tried to suppress my laughter. “I honestly had no idea I was causing you any pain.”
“Oh, there was plenty of it over those next four years. Summers were probably the hardest. All those days swimming in your pool.”
“Are you serious? We had been swimming together since fourth grade.”
“I’m perfectly serious. You started wearing bikinis, Drew.”
“What teenage girl wears a one-piece?”
“I’m just saying . . . I couldn’t help but notice and think about certain . . . you know, features.”
I pushed at his leg, gently, as not to bruise him, and I gave him an incredulous look.
“I mean your breasts, in case you need me to spell that out for you, too.”
“I know what you meant!”
“Then there was senior year’s prom, and that dress you wore. But you wore it for Aaron Ingram.” He winced. “Talk about pain.”
“Well, maybe I wouldn’t have dressed that way if I had actually understood all this gross stuff that was going on in the teenage boy’s hormonal brain.”
“So, you were completely innocent? You didn’t think about me that way back then, ever?”
I considered his question. “There were some times, I guess. Like, I would notice it felt nice when you touched my hand or hugged me. Or I might notice the muscles under your sleeves or a look in your eyes. It didn’t really hit me until Seattle, though. Guess I’m a late bloomer or something.”
“Okay. Seattle.” River made a circular gesture with one hand, prompting me on. “Your turn to spill the details.”
“Hmm.” I inhaled and pictured that moment when I saw River standing in Riley’s house. I remembered the overwhelming joy I felt, the sound of my shoes against the wood floors as I walked toward him, the way he smelled like rain when we embraced. “I hadn’t seen you in three years. You looked different in some ways—older. I was struck by that, little things like the stubble on your face.”