Page 2 of Trusting You
“Not for a second,” I say, and mean it. “She will be taken care of. Adored. Will know everything there is to know about you. Including your love for green Skittles.”
Paige smiles, but it’s not even half the glimmer she used to give off. “I should tell you…”
“Save your strength,” I say, then try for a joke. “All this chitchat is exhausting me.”
“What am I saving my strength for? Dying?”
I pause with my mouth open. She has me there.
“I need to tell you…” She exhales, then her chest rises with a big breath. “I want Lily to know her father.”
I swallow, buying myself time in a moment where there are so few seconds left. “We’ve never talked about that.”
“I know. But it’s time. When Lily grows up, when she understands she doesn’t have a mother… I’m not leaving her as an orphan.”
“I’ll be here,” I say to her firmly. “Lily will never understand what it’s like not to have parents.”
“I know, honey, but…” Paige’s breathing slows, labors. Her eyes drift to a spot on the other side of her hospital gurney, filming over as the morphine pump blips its administration. “I know she has you. And I know it’s enough. But Lily needs more. She’d want more.”
“Yes, I…” I rub my lips together. “You’re right. It’s just, you said he was a one-night stand. I don’t know if showing up at his door with a baby would…”
“Because this is the last thing he’d want, I know, but without me, without a mother…” Paige chokes up, and I brace myself forward, holding her hands tight.
“She will know you. Okay?” My attempt at being strong fails miserably. “She will know her mother.”
Paige nods, her shaking lips parting. And she murmurs his name.
“Oh,” I say, thoughts shifting to a little over a year ago, where we were, where he was. Who he is. My brows furrow.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” she says. “But promise me. Promise me you’ll tell him.”
As my lips waver, they feel wet. I taste salt. I don’t like this, not at all, but I can’t dismiss a dying wish. “On all the green Skittles on this Earth, I swear to you.”
Paige gives me a long look. She says quietly, “If I had the energy, I’d cry with you.”
I break under her soft, wise gaze. “Don’t go. Please. Don’t go.”
Paige shakes her head, a gentle side-to-side. “Not my choice anymore.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Carter. So much.”
My head bows, and, when the weight becomes too much, rests on her stomach. Her arms come around, stroking kindly, weakly. We stay that way for a while, mostly because I can’t summon the energy to rise, to look up and see my friend’s slow seeping of spirit. I’d rather feel her warmth and movement through her breath and strokes. It means she’s here for the moment. She’s staying.
The slow up-and-down of her chest, the candor of the machines around her, almost forcibly lull both of us to sleep.
And when I wake up, she doesn’t.
Paige remains alive—physically—for another twelve hours, her body ever so slowly succumbing to the end. It’s an education I wish I’d never received: what a death rattle sounds like, how the body reacts to the deprivation of food and water. But this is what Paige chose—do not resuscitate. And I’d go through it again. Whether or not Paige is aware of my presence, when she went into the unknown, she isn’t alone.
I hold vigil, look upon her face, until the official proclamation that she is gone. The nurse has to quietly but firmly remove my hand from Paige’s, whispering kind assurances with an all-too-knowing calm. And while reality is a brutal, terrible beast, my last words to Paige are about us. About Lily. Letting her know that her daughter will be okay.
But as I take these steps out of Paige’s hospital room, I have something important to hold me down. An essential person who continues to tie Paige to this lifetime. A whole-hearted presence bearing Paige’s namesake and sweetness. Lily James Tobias.
While she doesn’t understand it yet, Lily lost her mother today.
And now I must find her a father.