CHAPTER 27
THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD EVERYTHING, THEN
DISASTER STRUCK!
ADRIAN
We went around in circles about it all night. Me begging her, her digging in. We somehow faked our way through dinner and then went back to our room and picked up where we left off. Finally, we fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
I’d been in the same tornado she was this whole time. I’d been in the eye, in the calm, while it built up all around me without me knowing, and now I was sucked into the vortex, spinning in the howling black, grasping for something to hold on to, and there was nothing. She wouldn’t give me anything to cling to. Nothing to give me hope.
Yesterday I’d driven us home. We barely talked the whole six hours.
We weren’t fighting. We weren’t mad at each other. We were just at odds, and there was nothing to say.
As we’d passed a billboard for Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, she waved a white flag and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t up for any adventures or side trips. I wanted to be back in our space, where I didn’t have to pretend to be okay because we were in public—because I was not okay. At all.
I didn’t begin to know how to accept the situation.
I understood Vanessa’s reasoning, but I still couldn’t support it.
She didn’t know whether she’d have the same reaction to the drugs that Melanie did. What if she tolerated them without side effects? She wouldn’t know unless she tried them. Three months wasn’t much—but it was something. It was better than nothing. How could she throw away three months of life without even trying?
What if the next clinical trial brought the cure? Or halted the disease in its tracks? Or reversed it altogether? What if that trial was happening now, and she wasn’t there to participate in it?
It was unacceptable to me. Unfathomable.
How could she just give up?
Waves of anxiety and panic had been rolling over me for two days. I’d never been this tired. It was an emotional weariness that settled in my bones. I felt hopeless. Powerless. I wanted to save her, do something, but my hands were tied because she wouldn’t even give me one thing. Not one thing.
If she’d agreed to see someone about her hand, at least I could busy myself with looking for specialists, making appointments for her. There’d be an actionable plan, there’d be something happening. But there was nothing to do. She wanted me to just forget about it. To sit here and go to candy stores with her and pretend like my entire universe hadn’t just imploded.
When my alarm clock went off Monday morning for work, I was already up, reading ALS case studies and pouring over medical journals in my office. I’d been up for hours. There was a manic energy to it, a frantic need to educate myself, to be able to present every angle to her, counter every point.
I argued for a living. I convinced juries of twelve that guilty men were innocent. And I couldn’t convince one woman to take life-extending medications or agree to a clinical trial to save herself. There had never been anything more important, and I’d never felt so incompetent. I felt like I was riding the edge of a mental breakdown, like I was living in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from, running to exhaustion because if I stopped moving, it would knock me down so hard I’d never get up.
Nothing would ever be as good again…
From this point on, I’d always be living in the shattered afterward of this disease. Even if by some miracle this thing with her hand wasn’t ALS, she could still get sick at any time, and if she did, she wouldn’t fight then either. We would never be free of it. And if she wouldn’t agree to fight it, then we’d never even have hope.
I wanted to go back to being blissfully ignorant. I wanted to forget.
I dragged myself to the bathroom and took a shower to go to work and then stood next to the bed, knotting my tie, looking down on her sleeping like I’d done last week.
So much had happened in seven days.
Last week my whole life had been perfect. Our future was bright and endless and there was nothing but possibility. I had everything. I had her. And I thought I’d always have her.
And this week she might be dying.
She’d asked me if she was my girlfriend, and I’d said that word didn’t do her justice. It still didn’t.
I wanted her with me for the rest of my life, not just the rest of hers. I never wanted to wake up another day without her next to me. And looking at her lying there, knowing that in a year she might be in the ground…
My throat got tight and that wave of helplessness crashed over me again, that thick shallow breathing that came with a panic attack fluttered at the edges.
My happiest moments might be measured in months, not years. And I knew that I should be cherishing every second with her, but I couldn’t stop looking at the sun. I couldn’t. It was careening toward the Earth, and I was angry because she wouldn’t try to stop it.
I turned and sat on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands.
I didn’t realize she was awake until she spoke from behind me. “Are you okay?” she whispered.
I dragged a hand down my beard and stared wearily ahead. I didn’t answer her.
“Adrian, you won’t have to take care of me, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ll have nurses and aides and we can—”
I shook my head. “I don’t care if I have to take care of you, Vanessa. That’s not even the fucking…” I couldn’t finish.
It didn’t matter to me if I had to spend the rest of my life in service to her. I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted her here.
I put my face back into my hands.
“Do you regret me?” she said into the darkness.
I turned around and looked down at her deep brown eyes peering up at me. “What?”
“Do you wish you never met me?”
I shook my head at her, my voice thick. “How can you ask me that?”
“I didn’t mean to mislead you. I didn’t mean for you to have feelings for me under false pretenses and have the rug pulled out from underneath you. I thought you knew…”
Her voice cracked. She draped an arm over her face and then she started to cry.
I climbed into the bed in my suit and tie, and pulled her to me. I wrapped her in my body and held her like she might vanish.
She gasped through tears, and I kissed her.
It was desperate. Frantic. Like this kiss could somehow make her change her mind, give me more time or just make me fucking forget. And she must have wanted that too because she kissed me back.
I wanted to overwhelm my senses. I wanted to overwhelm hers. I wanted to scream that I loved her, beg her to give me something, some say in what was going to happen. I would make a deal with the devil, sell my soul, if it could save her. But nothing I could do would heal her broken genes. Nothing could undo it or turn back the clock. Time was the only thing that would give us the answers, and it was our enemy.
Her kisses got more urgent. She reached for my zipper and I tugged down her underwear. Her hands fumbled to undo my shirt, but her fingers couldn’t do it. I sat up and ripped it open, buttons raining over her and bouncing from the headboard. I whipped off my belt and she grabbed my tie and yanked me back on top of her, pushing my pants down, wrapping her legs around my waist.