Page 47 of Things I Wish I Said
Yeah, that’s right. I see you, fucker.
For all he knows this really is my girlfriend.
I’m still focused on his retreating form when Sinclair brings me back to the present. “So, I was thinking . . . how about dinner before the party? A family meal seems like a good way to grease the wheels of our little scheme.”
“Sure. I don’t think I have a game, so I could make that work.”
“Good. We should probably get our stories straight since you were kind of blindsided at the hospital.”
“Like how we met and stuff?”
Ry bobs her head and takes a sip of her water. “I told her we met at one of the Healing Community meetings, which you already know. They’re these—”
“I know what they are,” I interject with a curt nod. My father had us attend one the week he was diagnosed. Little did I know he’d be on his deathbed two weeks later.
“Oh. Okay.” Ryleigh straightens, and her whiskey eyes bore through me. “So, we met there, exchanged numbers, and started talking.” She shrugs. “Pretty simple.”
“What about your cancer? I probably need to know your backstory there.”
“Right.” Ryleigh exhales a ragged breath, and I can tell how much she hates talking about it based on her pained expression. “I’m not really even sure when it started, but it’s like one day I noticed my chest was tight when I played, like I couldn’t take a deep breath. I’d get winded easily. Tire out faster. I noticed this especially off the field any time I took the stairs. It got to the point where I’d need to take a minute to catch my breathon the field. For someone they once called The Missile, that was unheard of. But I’m stubborn. I gave a million excuses for it—allergies, food, hormones, stress—and pushed on, ignoring it. Until I couldn’t anymore, and I passed out during a game. I’d been feet from scoring a goal and went down like a domino, face first in the grass.”
“That must have been scary,” I say, imagining if the situation were reversed.
“Oh, it was a blast,” she deadpans. “I was mostly pissed I missed the goal.” She chuckles a moment, then adds, “Actually, I don’t remember a lot of it, but my mom? She was scared as hell. Paramedics rushed the field. They took me off on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over my face as they carted me into the ambulance. My coach probably thought it was one of those rare cases where kids go into cardiac arrest from an unknown murmur or all that bullshit. So when I was diagnosed with stage two lung cancer nearly forty-eight hours later, we were shocked. I mean, what are the odds? A teen who never smoked a cigarette a day in her life. It all seemed . . .”
“Unfair,” I finish for her.
She stares down at her hands, and her throat bobs. “That is what I call bad luck.”
Fuck luck. It was a cruel twist of fate.
My stomach churns at her story—the unfairness of it all, the surprise and shock—they hit a little too close to home and catapult me right back to the time before my father was diagnosed. No one ever expected his stomach pains were on accountof cancer. He’d dealt with indigestion and digestive issues his whole life, so he’d pop a couple antacids and call it good. Even when he was suddenly diagnosed with diabetes and struggling to control his glucose, he thought nothing of it. If anything, it was a reason for his fatigue, a by-product of his love of sweets, and nothing more.
He was wrong.
And despite the shitty survival rates of pancreatic cancer, he was diagnosed far too late for the doctors to do anything but ensure he spent his last weeks as comfortable as possible.
I swallow over the lump forming in the back of my throat as a familiar wave of sadness crashes over me. Being here, listening to Ryleigh’s story, is every bit as hard as I imagined it would be.
Suddenly, I want to flee. I don’t want to listen to this. It’s too much. Too damn hard. Yet I hear myself asking about her treatment anyway because what the fuck else am I to do? I agreed to see this through, and I won’t back out now.
“And your treatment?” I manage.
“They started with immunotherapy, but I didn’t respond well, so they jumped on the lobectomy. It was eight weeks' recovery, and then I started aggressive chemotherapy. They were hoping to kill the remaining cancer cells while I was hoping to keep playing soccer.” She laughs dryly. “I quickly discovered I couldn’t. I was far too weak. Maybe if I hadn’t just had surgery. Maybe if I had more time to train my lungs without the cancer still eating away at them, I would’ve succeeded, but . . .” She shrugs. “The rest is history. The first roundof chemo was a failure, so they started me on a second round—a different drug. This one was six cycles. I continued to barf my brains out while saying sayonara to my hair and the love of my life. It’s been fun times.”
I take her in, unsure of what to say. No one deserves the hand she was dealt. My father sure as fuck didn’t, and someone as young and full of promise like her didn’t, either.
I scrub my hands over my face, trying to steer my thoughts to safer waters because I know I have about two seconds before I conjure an image of him I don’t want to remember. The one I’ve fought so damn hard to forget.
My legs shake. My hands twitch to swipe my keys off the table and leave.
I want to drive back to the baseball field or the batting cages.
I want to crush a ball so fucking hard it silences my thoughts.
I want to lose myself in the game. Run until my lungs scream and my legs give out.
And when that doesn’t fucking work, because all it’ll do is remind me of him, I want to call Dustin and get the biggest bag of grade-A weed I can find. Then I’ll park somewhere alone and roll the biggest fucking blunt I can manage and smoke that shit until the images fade, until I can breathe again without this unbearable pain in my chest.
