Page 120 of When Lemons Give You Life

“Not one that’s written down. Seems to be the one thing that sticks in my head. Grab a pen, and I’ll dictate it.” Frank plugs in my phone then scrawls the recipe out on a notepad and gets to work.

I fall into a deep sleep, woken when my mobile springs to life on the bedside table. Two missed calls from Griff; I never deleted his number after his phone was supposedly disconnected when he went into care.

“Are you okay?” Frank enters with a mug of tea and some freshly made Anzacs. He glances at the notifications on my screen. “Lis? I know it’s not my place to say, and I can’t imagine what you are going through, but he is your brother. And he has just given you his kidney.”

The biscuit in my mouth turns bitter. I swallow it.

“Sweetheart . . . you know why he did it, right?”

I roll over to face the wall. “I need another nap.”

“Okay.” Frank kisses my head then leaves, shutting the door behind him.

Of course I know why. I didn’t give Griff a chance to spell it out, but he didn’t have to. Beau was always his reason. Never me. And as much as I understand that—really, truly understand it, and in some strange way am even moved by it—I’m still furious. Not because he loved Beau that much to do something so astonishingly selfless and selfish, but because he didn’t spare a single thought for me. He never has. He could have been civil to my dad; he could have saved our mum. I was always an afterthought, if a thought at all. Why doesn’t he love me?

The next forty-eight hours pass in a blur. Maybe it’s the back-to-back painkillers, ones I don’t technically need but take anyway, craving numbness. I drift in and out of consciousness. I dream of grown-ups shouting. Of hiding under the bed. Griff rings again and again, but I don’t answer. Frank comes and goes, leaving water, tea, cookies. Helen visits with flowers and lasagna.

I glance at my phone. Four more missed calls from Griff. My guilt reflects back at me from the screen as a message pops up.

Lisa, I don’t expect you to forgive me, but please let me explain. I’m coming out of hospital today. Please call me back.

Lifting up my nightgown, I study the dressing on my tummy. His kidney should have gone to Mum, not me. My heart skips a beat: if he had donated to Mum, he couldn’t have donated to me. I swallow my guilt and flick my phone to aeroplane mode. If only my brain had that setting, where nothing could get through.

I’ve said goodbye to too many people. Let someone else take a turn. I grieved Mum alone. I grieved Beau alone, while Griff sat there, silent and blank.

I pull out the order of service I made for Beau’s funeral from my bedside drawer. His face stares up at me, mid-laugh, holding the viola in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Shirt rumpled. Collar askew. Hair too long. God, he was beautiful.

I run my thumb along the corner over a faint blur where my tears had landed. There was a reading from Winnie-the-Pooh—he always said children’s books told the truth better than most adults ever could. A string quartet played songs he had composed. Even though Beau had no living relatives, the sunflower-laden chapel had been bursting at the seams with his community of found family dressed in all the colors of the rainbow. His friends, students, colleagues, neighbors. Two couples had even flown in from New Zealand.

But there was one person missing. I hadn’t brought Griff, because the nurses advised against it, saying it might confuse or distress him. So I’d left him behind.

It lands in my chest like a boulder. Griff was lucid. He felt every moment. He grieved Beau in full, brutal color, in that awful nursing-home room, even more alone than me.

78

Griff (age 64)

18 December 2024

Beau’s hair is thinner than it used to be but still silky, like the pajamas I gave him for his birthday. My fingers move slowly, finding the familiar part above his left brow, soft and silvered in the lamplight. I take the brush and style it just the way he likes. The carers don’t bother about the little things; they probably don’t even matter to him anymore, but they matter to me. He leans into the touch, barely.

Somewhere down the hall, “Silent Night” is playing. I used to dread Christmas—the pressure, the noise—but with Beau, it was different. He adored every part of it, and his excitement was impossible to resist. Every year, he bought us both chocolate advent calendars, counting down the days like a kid who never stopped believing.

I reach under the bed and pull out the one I ordered online: a glossy box with a grinning snowman on the front. I pop open number eighteen and place the Santa-shaped chocolate gently in his mouth. “Only one week to go, handsome.”

Beau swallows but doesn’t respond; words are rare these days. There’s no reaction to taste, just the tick of the clock, the gentle brush of my thumb over his temple, and the foreboding sense that this will be the last Christmas we’ll have. And he doesn’t even know it.

He watches me. Golden-brown eyes hazy and trusting.

My gaze rests on the photo of me on his bedside table, labeled GRIFF.

Beau stares at it too, blinking like it’s a word from another life, his eyes glassy, lips moving soundlessly for a moment. His voice, when it finally emerges, is paper-thin, worn down by the disease. “I knew a Griff once. He loved someone very much.”

I grip the armrest to steady myself. “He still does.”

Beau’s gaze drifts, then falters back. His mouth trembles. “I hope . . . I was good to him.”

I press his knuckles to my lips. “You were the best thing that ever happened to him.”