Page 146 of My Unfinished Heart

He stares up at me. There’s disbelief at first, then defiance. I watch as it comes and goes. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, the snuffing of his beautiful light. Once it’s gone, all that’s left is resignation. Not defeat, but something worse.

A forfeit.

I think I expect him to argue with me. To distract me like he always does. To ignore what I’m saying and change the subject—to make me feel better—to pull me out of this swirling vortex of shame and fear and nothingness.

Because when he gives up and leaves, I’m shocked.

So fucking surprised.

Connor was right. I didn’t even see it coming.

In the hours and days that pass, I tell myself I was right to let him go.

I had a good friend in Seattle named Darren. Darren had leukemia, diagnosed at age 22. On Saturdays, I used to hang out with him at the cancer center while he got his chemotherapy. We played blackjack, and I drew sketches for him. We talked about The Mariners, music, school, cost of living—the usual.

Through it all, I learned a few things about chemotherapy. Chemo drugs target rapidly dividing cells—the cancer. They find the cells, they stop the replication process, and they kill them—ideally. Hair is also a rapidly dividing cell so it can’t grow in the presence of the drugs. Same goes for bone marrow, which is busy trying to crank out some decent new blood cells. The drugs are toxic. They make you sick and miserable, but in the end, you might get to live, cancer-free. And then your hair eventually grows back. But—fingers crossed—the cancer won’t.

To put it another way—I know that eradicating myself from Tristan’s life will hurt and make him miserable for a while, but the end result is he’ll get to live—Archer-free. And so will Connor.

But for me to live through losing him and everything that led up to it—it turns out I need actual therapy.

My episodes start the same every time. I’m doing nothing, then I’m sweating. Sitting in front of the TV in the air-conditioning, I start dripping sweat. Then the shaking comes. Tremors wrack my body and bend me over while I grab onto whatever is nearest to steady myself. I lose my breath. My chest hurts. I fear I’m dying. I cough as my stomach clenches. I drool. I choke on my vomit before I make it to the bathroom. If it only happens two or three times a day—that’s a good day.

I can’t leave the house—I can barely make a sandwich.

West stays with me a lot the following week because of these episodes. He knows I’m afraid I’ll fall down and crack my head open on something because I tell him I am. He watches me go through the same thing over and over, but he never says anything about my needing help. It’s a conclusion I come to on my own.

Being wealthy comes in handy in times like this. One day I’m puking my guts out, having an epiphany, the next day, I’m in front of a therapist who said she wasn’t taking new clients until I offered to triple her hourly rate. I would have done more than triple it, though.

Once I’m seeing her twice a week and meet with a psychiatrist to get properly medicated for my Acute Stress Disorder, I’m able to function in the world again. For a while there, I lost the ability to shut myself down, and—according to my therapist—the resulting flood of “repressed emotion” overwhelmed me. Medication helps. It shores up my remaining defenses, and I get a handle on myself again.

I do grapple with how I treated my brother, though. Tristan’s words that night in the hospital cut right to the quick. What kind of man lives two miles from his brother for four years and never checks in with him? If you see a baby bird with a broken wing on the sidewalk—what do you do with it? I’m sure there are plenty of schools of thought on this, but what I did was I picked it up, broke the other wing, and left it to die.

Who does that?

I’ll tell you who—the kind of guy who was raised to be a sociopath.

To clarify, I would never do that to a baby bird.

That I did it to my little brother is something else I have to learn to live with, because I can’t turn back the clock, no matter how much I wish I could.

On a Wednesday over a month after that awful night, I think I’m doing better. I’m hanging in there. Some days are better than others, but I keep going—sometimes for no other reason than West wants me to. The playoffs are coming up. The Rangers are doing great, and West keeps me busy. He keeps me in the loop. He brings me back into the fold. It’s a start.

I even sat down last week and had a long talk with Helen after Saturday dinner. I apologized to her for possibly making her regret telling me what she did, and I gave her the longest hug I’ve ever given anyone in my life. She told me she loves me and said she’d do it all over again, and I told her I hoped like hell that’s true.

What that conversation told me was that to her, at least, I was worth the trouble.

Now, four weeks into the fall semester as I’m putting my sandwich for the next day into my lunch bag, my brother calls me. I don’t recognize his voice.

“It’s Connor,” he says.

Something loud happens in my brain when he says it. A head on collision of trains. Something that roars and crashes. Then my other ear starts ringing.

“Are you there? Archer?”

“Yeah.” I have a sudden urge to lie down on my bathroom floor.

“Is this a bad time?”