He’d said he had stuff to get done back on campus and drove the few miles it took to get there.
The next day we were supposed to go shopping with Melda. She was a Black Friday fanatic.
Tye was found in his room. A bottle of pills in his hand. The autopsy report came back with an insane amount of Xanax and alcohol in his system. He’d just stopped breathing. His diaphragm unable to lift his lungs enough for him to catch a breath.
When the ambulance came, they had hoped they could save him.
He died that night at the hospital.
I hated hospitals.
“Look at me when I talk to you.” My dad slammed his fist against the desk, tears welled in his eyes. “I can’t lose you too!”
“I want to stay.”
“Damn it, Wes!” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “One more game could kill you. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“I gave her my word.”
“She’s a girl!” Dad all but shouted. “She’ll get over it! How do you know she even likes you? Or likes anything about you other than your good looks and money? Of course she likes you now. You’ve given her everything girls dream of, but what about when she finds out about your sickness? What about when she discovers you aren’t on the football team anymore? What do you think will happen then? Will she stick around and hold your hand? Or go find one of your teammates to screw?”
Never in my life had I wanted to punch my father so hard.
“Don’t say that about her,” I fired back. “You don’t know her like I do.”
“Young love.” My dad shook his head. “Don’t you get it, Wes? It’s not about her. I worry about you. I worry she’s going to break your heart. I worry, I worry, I worry. I can’t lose both sons.” His voice broke. “I’ve lost everything. It would kill me to lose you too. Your focus — it needs to be on getting better, not losing yourself in her. Have you even taken your meds today?”
My last pill burned a hole the size of Texas in my pocket. I nodded jerkily and then shrugged. “I have my last pill for the weekend, and then I start the final set Monday.”
Dad sighed. “Just, don’t let her get in the way of your progress, son. You need to live, I can’t—” His voice broke again.
“You have to come to grips with something, Dad,” I said in a thick voice. “I may not live.”
“No, don’t say that. I refuse to believe it. The doctors said—”
“The doctors said there was a chance I’d be fine. The doctors also haven’t worked with this aggressive of a tumor before. It may be too late already. Okay? Just… don’t put all this pressure on me to live — when my reality may be the exact opposite. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll fight hard as hell to stay here as long as I can, but don’t burden me with guilt — if fighting still isn?
??t enough.”
The room was blanketed in a tense silence. Then I saw my dad do something I hadn’t seen him do since Tye’s death. He fell into a heap on his chair and burst into tears. Shoulders shaking, the sobs coming from his mouth were heart-wrenching. My gut twisted as I made my way over to him and put my hands on his shoulders.
He gripped my hands and continued to sob. “It isn’t fair.”
“Cancer’s rarely fair,” I mumbled. “And we were never promised life would be fair.”
“It should be.”
“Dad.” My voice croaked. “Life isn’t fair, but living? Living is heaven. Living is a gift. Every gift is different — every path is different — for some reason this is ours, and the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can stop crying and start living.”
“When did you get so smart?” He laughed through his tears.
“All that damn therapy you made me go through — and sometimes, Dad, it takes going through hell to reach your heaven.” I looked at the door.
“That bad huh?”
“What?”
“You like her that much?”