Page 16 of The Unraveling

It slides like a jagged stone through my chest to my stomach. I can’t stop thinking about it sitting there unnaturally with the sweet blood the entire time Daisy eats a chocolate bar.

“You look paler since you ate,” she notes. “And not in an immortal way. In a sickly way.”

“It just needs to settle,” I grind out.

Her lips pinch. “We need to call Dr. Smith,” she whispers, so low I nearly don’t hear her.

I simply shake my head.

She heaves out a noisy breath and stands, disappearing from the kitchen for a few long beats of my heart before she darts back—looking over her shoulder as she scurries to my side with Victor’s cellphone.

Daisy sets it in front of me, and I scowl at how it’s all screen and no buttons.

“Call for help,” she whispers as she opens John Smith’s contact card and places the phone in my palm.

With nausea pulsing through my body and sweat budding cold through my skin, I stare at the digital image of a phone.

Then, I’m sitting in the hard plastic chair of that thrift store break room, my heart choking me as I stare at the phone in my hand. Dread constricts my limbs, knowing I need to call my mom.

I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve known for weeks that something is wrong with me. The weakness, the easy-come bruises. The scale needle that keeps tipping lower and lower like sweating each night is emptying me. The bone-deep aches and fatigue.

And only twenty minutes ago: passing out on the bathroom floor and waking up to see the bloody vomit in the toilet I was leaning against.

I think of the corded phone on the kitchen counter in my childhood home, how my mom always twists her finger in it to occupy herself. She’ll probably twist her hands in her hair this time instead, thinking about how much this unknown illness—which I’ve been trying to suppress for months like it will simply go away—will cost us financially.

They’re still paying off the birth of one of my brothers and can barely afford his insulin. They have payment plans for emergency room visits. Grandma needs help paying for her medication, too.

Whatever this is will ruin them. How am I supposed to help with my share of bills if I’m too sick to work?

Tears fill my eyes as my thumb hovers over the call button, guilt heavy and rotten in my gut. Maybe I should have told her sooner. Maybe whatever this is would have been cheaper to fix if I hadn’t waited so long.

Things begin to feel like memories, my head swimming.

When she picked up the phone after I finally got the nerve to dial, my two younger brothers were roughhousing in the background. It was Saturday.

“Hey, Mom,” I choked out, tears spilling from my eyes and blurring my sight. “I-I don’t feel good. Can you come help me? It’s . . . I think it’s really bad.”

I hated handing her that burden over the phone, but it spilled out after I’d been holding it behind gritted teeth for so long.

With a long pause, I hung my head, imagining her scrambling in panic—blaming herself all those times she asked me if I was okay and I assured her nothing was wrong.

“Isla?” she asked, voice detached.

“Yeah,” I breathe. “I know you’re probably in the middle of something but⁠—”

“Isla.”

The firm voice has me jolting, and reality splashes over me like a bucket of cold water. Daisy’s hand covers mine, gently lowering the phone. Half of the numbers to my childhood home are typed in.

“You’re at home with me—Daisy—and Victor. You’re not back in Bakersfield, California and haven’t been since nineteen ninety-five. You can’t call your mom when she thinks you’re dead.”

My chest tightens, the memory of a dozen phone calls clinging to me and making me stiffen.

Phone calls were a part of the broader treatment—properly preparing both the patient and their loved ones. The first handful were to establish that treatment was underway. Dr. Todd instructed me to tell my family I was responding, but not to give them too much hope. The preceding ones were to cement that despite trying, my illness was progressing faster than the treatments could keep up with, though I still insisted I wanted to stay. Insisted that I wanted to keep trying until the end. That I wasn’t upset they couldn’t visit, since it had never been a plan due to the cost.

And that last call was goodbye. Not a formal we’ll-never-speak-again, but formulated to be as fulfilling as possible for a final call in such an impossible situation. Set up for my parents to think: “Well, at least we got a proper goodbye, even if we didn’t know it would be the last time we’d speak.”

It moves through me with an ache now, the teary laughter as I prompted favorite memories and listened to everything that had been going on while I was gone.