Say You'll Remember Me(91)

“You can’t keep living like this, Xavier. I don’t want you working like you have been anymore, okay? Please promise me.”

“Then I won’t be able to come see you as much—”

“Then don’t come see me as much. I’d rather know you’re here and healthy than working yourself sick. And I don’t like that you had to give up the rescue stuff. I don’t like any of it. If you’re not going to have a life with me in California I want you to have a life here. I want you to have time to see your friends and go to the gym and sleep. Things that keep you sane and healthy. Maybe we’ll just have to be okay with quality instead of quantity. Maybe we see each other less, but then when we do, we’re not in the ER.”

“I’m fine—”

“No, you’re not. And neither am I.”

She peered at me, her red eyes sad. “I promised you on our first date that I’d always tell you if things aren’t okay,” she said. “They’re not.”

I swallowed. “Are you unhappy?”

She threw up her hands. “Of course I’m unhappy. I’m watching my mom vanish before my eyes, my family is falling apart, I don’t get a break, I don’t have a job, I don’t have my person. Those small moments when I have time for me or time for something, anything, that isn’t Mom, you’re not there. I can’t call you when I’m having a particularly shitty day and say hey, take me for margaritas. Or hey, it’s Wednesday, let’s get wings. We already don’t get to make memories and when we do, they’re like this.”

“It won’t always be this way,” I said.

“Yes, it will,” she said. “Because nothing about our situation is going to change.”

I wished the tightness in my chest was just the fluid in my lungs, but it wasn’t.

“I can’t have you killing yourself for this relationship,” she said quietly. “I already feel guilty that I’m not strong enough to leave you for your own good.”

My heart rate on the monitor was jumping.

“I don’t want to break up,” I said. “Don’t even talk about that.”

“I don’t want to break up either, but—”

“But nothing. That’s not the solution. I will never be happier without you.”

She drew in a shaky breath. “Neither will I.”

We looked at each other. Another silent standoff. And I didn’t even know for what because we both wanted the same thing.

She climbed into my bed. The mattress was small, but I wrapped an arm around her and she nuzzled up to me and I felt more healed from this contact than anything they were putting into my IV.

“I will never leave you,” she whispered. “I just wish this wasn’t so hard.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. She put a hand on my chest and I covered it with my palm.

“I love our fantasy life,” she said softly. “The one where we have goats and a garden and we can wake up together and be a witness to each other’s lives. And maybe we have kids and they’re playing in the yard and we get unlimited memories. We just get to open our eyes and make them, every day.”

I couldn’t respond to this. If I did, I was going to cry. She lay there with her ear pressed to my breaking heart for a long time before she spoke again.

“You know how when you see a movie or read a book you really like, and you haven’t seen it in a few years and you start to lose the details?” she said quietly. “You forget some of the great lines or the subplots, the names of side characters? After a while all you remember are the main characters, the broad strokes, the big things. And you can’t even remember how those happened, just that they did. When someone asks you to tell them about it, all you can recall is it’s a Western or a drama or an action flick.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’d like to look back on my life and remember every single thing. But if I don’t, I hope I remember that it was a love story. And that the love story was about you.”

I couldn’t muscle down the lump in my throat this time. I was too tired and too sick and I missed her too much even though she was still here. Tears slid silently down the sides of my face.

I had never done anything harder than this in my life. I doubted I ever would.

Sometimes the challenges we face either break us or they make us stronger.

And sometimes they do both.





44





XAVIER


WE SPENT ALMOST her whole visit in the hospital. I got out Monday. On Tuesday she went back to California and I went back to work. I wasn’t ready. I was still weak, but my fever was gone and the antibiotics had finally kicked in and I couldn’t bring myself to go home. She wouldn’t be there. There would only be the thing that she left in her absence instead. The void. And I had no intention of spending time with it.

I dropped Samantha off at the airport, then dragged myself to the clinic.

When I walked in, I stood there in the doorway unnoticed for a moment. Temporarily invisible. It felt like a scene out of an alternate universe. My practice. My staff. Even my dog who had been staying with Maggie while I was too sick to take care of him—but a different doctor. Hank was in his scrubs and lab coat, shuffling out of an exam room with my tablet in his hand.