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“What life? It’ll be the slower crawl to my death. It will hurt you and Wyatt more to watch me die even slower.”
I wasn’t understanding any of it. “This isn’t about me or Wyatt. This is about you. We will take every fucking day we can with you. I’ll bring you to every appointment. I’ll take care of you. There’s a chance you could live another five years. That’s longer than Wyatt has been alive!”
“That chance is extremely low. We will all suffer, and I don’t want that.” His eyes flitted between each of mine. “You understand, right?” He took my face in his hand.
“No. I don’t understand. I don’t understand how you are just giving up!”
“I’ve had two thousand, one hundred and twenty-eight bonus days. And maybe I’ll get ten more, maybe a hundred.”
“I want a million more days with you.” My voice shook.
“Me too, baby. But that’s not how this goes.”
I buried my face in his chest. Of course, he’d be the one helping me while he was the one being told he was going to die. He held me tightly with his uninjured arm and pressed a kiss into my hair.
My best friend was dying.
Thirty
In the blur of the hours and days following Eli’s accident, I barely registered everything else going on around me. The band was on a break, so my sudden disappearance wasn’t too disruptive to them, not that it mattered to anyone. They just picked up and did the things I left waiting. Including my sister, who was the newest manager of the band.
People were in and out of the house helping with Wyatt, bringing food and generally checking in on us. Wyatt was eating up the extra attention, and the chaos left me little time to really let reality settle in. Eli’s injuries meant he needed help with most things, and it was easy to pretend that it was the problem. Especially since we didn’t tell anyone about the tumor.
I was fantastic at living in denial for the first couple of weeks. But as Eli’s injuries slowly began to heal, the headaches and dizziness only got worse.
“Can you please just take something stronger?” I pleaded.
His voice was exasperated. “No, Cee. I’m an addict.”
“Eli, you are an addict with a death sentence. You can die in pain, or you can be comfortable. Why are you doing this the hard way?”
I didn’t mean for it to come out as harsh as it did, but seeing him in so much pain for no reason was killing me.
“I fought too hard to get off that shit to go back to it.”
“You fought for your life. It’s not what will kill you. This is different.”
“Not to me.” His tone was final. I handed him the ineffective, but non-addictive, painkillers and left the room, needing a minute to calm down.
I didn’t see Sergio had come into the house while I was arguing with Eli, so I was taken aback when I shut the door and saw him playing on the floor with Wyatt.
“Oh, hi,” I said, taking in the scene. Trains surrounded the two of them as Wyatt showed off his favorites.
Sergio stood. “Hey, how are you holding up?” Sergio pulled me into a hug. I shook my head and glanced at Wyatt. “Hey, buddy, mind if I talk to mom for a minute?”
“I wanna pway outside,” Wyatt responded.
“Sounds like fun. We’ll go out in five minutes, okay?” Sergio promised. I lifted an eyebrow, not sure he understood what he was volunteering to do.
“Okay!” Wyatt bounced.
I led Sergio into the spare room and shut the door. “He’s dying, Serge. The accident didn’t kill him, but he has a brain tumor that will,” I whispered. It was the first time I told someone, and the words made me sick to my stomach.
Shock lit his eyes before they softened with concern. “Oh, Kate. I’m so sorry. There’s nothing they can do?”
“Nothing that will save him. Prolong his life, possibly, but the result is it kills him in all the scenarios.”
He grabbed my hand. “Shit. What can I do? What do you need? How do I wingman this?”
