“You know I will,” I promised her.
She took one of my hands in hers, her palms slick with sweat. I worried that she was running a fever and putting on a brave front. “Thank you,” she said. “The only thing I’ll ask of you is the same thing I’m going to ask of them. That you three always remember that you’re family. They’re your people.”
When a tear plopped down on our joined hands, I realized for the first time that I’d started to cry.
“Don’t say that. You still have so much time left.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, rubbing my hand in an attempt to comfort me. “I’m not saying this for today or tomorrow. But whenever the time comes, I want you to have each other’s backs.”
My vision was now completely cloudy, but I could make out a trail of liquid on Mel’s cheek. Or was it sweat? Would she let me take her temperature?
“Do you promise?” she asked me, and I nodded.
“I promise.”
“Good girl,” she sniffed. I snuggled closer to her, and she held my head to her chest and ran her hand over my hair the way she had when I was a little girl. My mother hugged me sometimes too, but her hugs were seconds long, quick and controlled, as if to remind me that I couldn’t have her for too long. She belonged to something bigger and stronger than I am.
“Mel—” I said before I could stop myself. “Why did you ... When we were kids, why did you choose me?”
I sat up so I could look at her.
“Well, first of all,” she said, smiling, “it’s cute that you think you’re not a kidnow.”
I rolled my eyes but smiled too.
“Second, I didn’tchooseyou.” She said the wordchooselike there were quotation marks around it. “I mean, Ro was your doubles partner. You guys became best friends.”
“I know, but like, how did you know that I needed ... you?” My face heated as I said it. That was another of the few things Mel and I had never really talked about. The actual surrogacy, the way she had taken me in. As far as I was concerned, it had just happened. One day I wasn’t part of the Cohen family; then one day I was. “Was it my clothes? Could you tell that my dad was clueless and didn’t know how to take care of my hair?”
Mel laughed. “None of the above, actually,” she said. After a moment her face sobered. “I don’t really know what you’re asking me, Jessi. I treated you like I’d have treated any of Ro’s or Luke’s friends, but from the beginning, you just ... you fit.
“I don’t know what that means,” she continued. “Whether it was destiny, meant to be, or any of that stuff. I couldn’t care less about the mechanics of the whole thing. I only know that whenever you were with us, it felt like you’d always been here, you know? Like you always would be.”
I nodded, feeling my heart swell.
I’d always be a part of them.
What she was describing sounded a lot like what I’d always thought, what I’d hoped they felt too. It sounded like family.
“Love you, Jessi-girl,” Mel said now, and hugged me again.
“Love you, too.”
When I told Mel that her body felt warm and asked if she wanted me to call her doctor, she shook her head and insisted that she just needed to sleep.
I was back home, fast asleep in bed, when Ro called, his voice strangled and quiet, as he told me she was in the hospital.
NOW
I still feel a pinch of relief every time I walk into her house and find Mel sitting in the living room, smaller but alive.She’s still here,a voice in my head says, but there’s another voice, a quieter voice, that says she’s not really. She’s not the Mel I knew, and with every day that passes, she drifts further away from that person and becomes someone else.
“Jessi-girl,” she says today as I come into the living room, and I’m hit with a wave of guilt.
Just because she looks different, it doesn’t mean she isn’t still Mel.
“Hi,” I say, going around the couch to hug her. As I do, she throws a blanket over what looks like a pile of papers in her lap.
“What are you doing?” I ask, trying not to sound as hurt as I feel at her secrecy. She never used to hide stuff from me.
