Page 1 of Trusting You
1
Carter
The night my best friend died, I’d been thinking about Skittles.
She holds my hand, the pale of hers almost translucent compared to my tan, her blue veins swelling in ways they hadn’t nine months before.
Before.
That’s the classification I’m cursed with. Before, when Paige was healthy. After, when she is dying.
“Do you remember?” she asks now, a weak smile on her lips.
Her voice is hoarse as if a breathing tube were inserted and removed, although that hasn’t happened, thankfully. And never will.
“Remember what?” I ask, leaning forward so I can hear better. The beeps and blips of the hospital machines echo her every breath.
“At the end of freshman year, how we met by fighting each other for green Skittles?”
It’s such a rare moment of clarity. Paige’s grass-green eyes are usually glazed over in a chemical-induced fugue. She’d stopped eating days ago. Stopped drinking the day before yesterday.
I bark out a laugh at the memory.
“God,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I can’t believe that’s what you’re thinking about.”
“You took the last one,” she says, then chuckles hoarsely.
“As I said then and will now, you took the last one and blamed me.”
“Who likes only the green ones anyway?” She smiles. It’s a brief glimpse of visceral health until the muscles fall and she goes back to ghostly sick. “Everyone knows the red ones are the best.”
“Not according to us.” I make my voice stronger than the utter cave-in my insides are suffering through, the crumbling and cavernous twists that began their avalanche ten minutes ago.
I’d been getting coffee from a beaten-up vending machine down the hall when a nurse gently tapped me on the shoulder.
“It’s getting close to time,” she’d said, somehow managing to be grim, but kind. She held my stare, understanding the process it took to go from looking for the cream button to saying good-bye to your best friend forever.
The walk back to Paige’s room was like taking the Green Mile; the execution of my heart, of Paige’s soul, imminent. Yet I lift my feet, for her. I’m by her side, for her. Nobody wants to watch the person they love most die before their eyes. It takes a certain form of bravery to wait for death, to hold it in your hands and watch it pass through the body of your soul mate, a wonderful woman, who did not deserve to be the next one chosen. And whom, if you could, beg whatever force was taking her to take you instead.
It was a nightmare to go to bed each night, thinking Paige might not be breathing the next day. Yet, the lead-up was somehow worse than the actual moment. Beside her now, I feel a strange sort of calm, an ability to help her through these last hours, maybe because the last thing I want her to see is me hysterical beside her, my twisted, devastated expression her last image on this earth.
“It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?” she asks me now. Somehow, despite her pain and opioids, she can read me as well as ever.
“You’ve been out of it a few days.” I clear my throat of the rest of the clogs. Her last sounds can’t be of me keening and howling beside her.
“So, that’s a yes.”
I stroke her hair, once a cascading blonde, from her face. It’s short now, growing in uneven, frizzy chunks, since they’d stopped her chemo a few months ago in favor of hormone therapy, managing to extend her life a little bit more. That’s what it comes down to—a few more options for a few more months. Then a few days. Until they can only extend hours. Until it becomes minutes.
“Lily?” she asks.
“She’s fine.” I top off the reassurance by kissing Paige’s cold, damp forehead. “She’s at the daycare downstairs. I’m picking her up after…” My voice catches.
This time, Paige squeezes my hand. “I don’t think I’m gonna go by the time daycare closes at five.”
I tremble out a surprised laugh. “Then our neighbor will come get her. I’m not leaving you, Paige.”
“And her? Lily?” Paige is blinking slowly but becomes wildly alert. “You’ll never…”