Page 122 of Changing the Playbook
I fish the crumpled protein bars from my pocket—peanut butter chocolate-chip, the ones she pretends she doesn’t love but always steals bites of mine. “Well, good news. The hospital vending machine was having a sale on disappointment, so I got you two.”
She takes one but just holds it, turning the wrapper over in her hands. The crinkling fills the silence between us. But then she’s opening one of them and eating it, chewing more than necessary, as if working her jaw will slow her mind down a little.
“It’s just like last time,” she finally whispers, in between bites. “The exhaustion she couldn’t shake. The infection. I should have seen it coming.”
There it is. The guilt that’s been eating her alive since this afternoon, probably longer. The same guilt that had her pacing that hospital corridor, trying to walk back time. And, when that failed, the guilt that had her attacking the doctor like she was prey.
“Sophie—”
“I know what you’re going to say.” She pulls back, eyes full of unshed tears. “It’s not my fault. MS relapses happen. There’s nothing I could have done.”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you’d developed psychic powers recently. Because that’s the only way you could have predicted this.”
Her laugh is more exhale than sound. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. When did you become clairvoyant?” I grin. “And why didn’t you use these powers to help me with my biomechanics exam?”
“Mike,” she says, but the corner of her mouth twitches.
I cup her face in my hands. Her skin is cold and damp from the tears she’s fighting. “Listen to me. You could watch your mom every second of every day, follow her around with a medical scanner, hire a team of neurologists to trail her, and MS would still do what it wants.”
“But I’m supposed to notice?—”
“Notice what?” I let a hint of bluntness creep into my voice. “The symptoms her own doctor said could be anything from stress to a cold to sleeping wrong?”
Tears spill over then, hot against my thumbs. I pull her back against my chest, and this time she doesn’t hold back. Her shoulders shake—not the dramatic sobs you see in movies, but the quiet, exhausted tears of someone who’s been holding too much for too long.
I hold her a while before speaking again. “You know what my therapist told me about guilt, Soph?”
She makes a sound that might be interest or might be resignation.
“She said guilt is like picking at a scab. It hurts, but at least it’s a pain you control. It’s easier than accepting that sometimes terrible things just happen.”
Sophie goes still against me. Then, she speaks so quietly I almost miss it. “When did you get so wise?”
“Tuesday. There was a workshop. I have a certificate and everything.”
She actually laughs—small but real.
“I keep thinking about Hazel,” she continues. “Finding Mom on the soccer field. Seeing her today, hooked up to all those machines…”
“Hazel who brought her bug encyclopedia to read to your mom? Who spent twenty minutes explaining the mating habits of praying mantises?”
“That doesn’t mean she’s not traumatized.”
“Or it means she knows her mom is sick but not broken. That loving someone with a chronic illness means accepting the bad days along with the good.” I press a kiss to the top of her head. “Kids are resilient, especially kids with big sisters who show them how to cope with grace.”
“Grace?” She pulls back, eyebrow raised. “Did you see me reorganizing the nurses’ cart because their system was ‘inefficient’?”
“I saw you making sure your mom got the best care possible. Even if you did make that one nurse cry.”
“She was new. And she didn’t cry, her eyes just watered a little.”
“Sophie.”
“Fine. But she was using the wrong gauge needle.”
The protein bar wrapper crinkles again. She’s managed three small bites, which I’m counting as a victory. Below us, Pine Barren University glows—the ice rink where I’ll play my last season, the nursing building where Sophie pulls all-nighters, the dorms where my sister is probably driving Em crazy right now.
