Everything Left Unsaid (21 page)
Read Everything Left Unsaid Online
Authors: Jessica Davidson
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic
Early January
As I’m preparing to start uni, Tai’s doctor decides that he’s sick enough to be admitted to hospital for a while, though he won’t say how long that is, exactly.
I visit him in hospital early that day. Tai seems sicker than ever, and there’s a panicky look in his eyes as well.
He grabs my hand. ‘Don’t let them play crappy songs at my funeral,’ he whispers, and I’d laugh at the absurdity of it except he’s not joking. ‘Promise, Juliet, promise me you won’t let them.’
I don’t even know who
they
are, but I say, ‘Okay, Tai. I promise.’
‘And don’t let them dress me in that suit I’ve only worn once.’
‘I’ll tell them not to. You’re kind of scaring me, Tai.’
‘Sorry. I’m just . . . I’m petrified. What do you think it feels like, that second when you die?’
I’m trying desperately to think of an answer, gripping onto his hand though I want to run, scared, when Hendrix and River burst through the door, followed by Tai’s parents.
Thank god
, I don’t say.
Hendrix and River jump on the bed and River says to Tai, ‘What are they doing to you, Tai?’
Out of the corner of my eye I can see Mia and Stanley look up, startled. But Tai barely blinks. ‘Today, you mean?’
River nods.
‘They’re going to look at the tumour, I guess, and see what’s happening with it.’
‘But how do they look at it, when it’s inside your head?’
After Hendrix and River have discussed, at length, what the inside of Tai’s brain looks like, a nurse comes and talks to Mia quietly. Even though they’re keeping their voices lowered, I feel like I’m kind of intruding, so I promise Tai I’ll come back tomorrow – and leave.
When I visit the next morning, Tai’s lying on the bed, curled up in a ball on his side. He tries to smile but his eyes are dull and it’s not long before he gives up. Mia and Stanley are there too, sitting in the uncomfortable chairs beside the bed, but after a minute they stand up, say they’ll give us some time alone, and close the pale green curtain around the bed as they leave. The curtain, like the blanket and pillowcase, is imprinted with ‘Alherm Hospital’ and I look at Tai.
‘Do you think people actually steal these stupid curtains?’ I want so badly for him to smile, but he doesn’t.
‘Juliet?’ Tai’s voice cracks on each syllable. ‘Can I have some water?’
There’s a polystyrene cup with a straw in it on his bedside table and I walk over to pick it up. For a second I wait for him to sit up, to reach out and take it, but he doesn’t. I kneel on the floor and hold it while he drinks. When Tai’s had enough I put the cup back and lie on the bed beside him, taking care not to crush any of the tubing that snakes from him to the IV pole that stands next to the bed. Tai closes his eyes and a lone tear escapes, running down his cheek and onto the pillow.
‘Tai?’
‘I so want to kiss you, but everything hurts too much.’
I gently hug him and we lie there like that for a little while until Tai shifts abruptly and moans. ‘I don’t feel so good. Shit, Juliet, move!’
By the time I move, it’s already too late. Tai grudgingly lets me wipe the vomit off his face and swap the pillow and blanket for clean ones I manage to find in the cupboard beside his bed. When I’ve done that I go into the bathroom in the corner of the room, rinsing off my arm in the sink, sticking my head under the tap to wash it out of my hair.
When I’m done I walk over and am about to sit down again when Tai says quietly, ‘Can you go, please?’
‘Go? You mean home? You want me to leave?’
He won’t look at me but he nods, and something deep inside me starts to unravel.
For some reason things feel different. I don’t feel like I did the other times. Everything is kind of blurry, and I’m still slow and shaky, even though I’m supposed to feel some kind of good again. The doctor, too, knows something is different, gives me more painkillers, doesn’t mention anything about me going home. Later that day I hear Dr Dellar talking to Mum outside my hospital room, telling her he’s alerted the palliative care people that we’ll be needing them within a few weeks, and then it clicks.
Oh
. It’s a bitter, hard little thought.
Oh
.
Dr Dellar comes to see me the next morning and sits on the edge of my bed. Mum and Dad are there, too, each holding on to one of my hands.
‘Tai,’ he says, and it’s that special, quiet,
sorry-I-have-to-break-this-to-you
voice that I’ve learnt to hate. ‘I’ve been looking over your results from the latest tests. And I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
I look at him blankly.
I’m not sure there can be anything worse than telling me I’m dying, and you’ve already done that, doctor. But try me
.
‘Unfortunately, Tai, at this point I don’t think it’s worth considering any other active treatment. The tumour just didn’t respond to the last cycle of chemotherapy as I’d hoped. If anything, you’ve gotten worse rather quickly. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.’ He smiles at me sympathetically.
I don’t want to but I nod.
It’s true, Tai, and you knew what was happening before he did, even though you didn’t want to admit it, not even to yourself
.
‘At this stage, Tai, we need to consider what’s best for you. And my opinion is that another surgery, as we’d planned, is no longer in your best interests.’
‘But wouldn’t the surgery help?’ Dad tightens his grip on my hand.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he answers. ‘Tai is one very sick boy, and his body simply wouldn’t be able to handle something as invasive as that.’
‘What about another cycle of chemotherapy?’ Mum demands. ‘You could use different medications, couldn’t you? Stronger ones?’
The doctor looks at me, instead of them. ‘I’m sorry.’ He clears his throat and then stands up. ‘I’ll talk to you more a little later on,’ he says to no-one in particular before he leaves.
Dad sits down heavily in the chair while Mum strokes my arm, my face. They’re both crying, and seeing them like this is worse than the pain in my head.
• • •
That night after everyone’s gone home, I lie there and cry, not caring who sees. The nurse who comes in for the night obs looks at me sympathetically. Instead of telling me she knows how I feel, or to cheer up, both of which I’m completely expecting, she gets a tissue, wipes my face and says quietly, ‘I go home and cry at night, too.’
I want to be angry, like I was in the beginning, like I was when I felt like fighting this. Instead I just feel scared. I don’t know what it’ll feel like, when it’ll happen, who’ll be there . . . What if I’m by myself when it happens? What if I’m not?
A nurse appears in my room the next afternoon. She’s holding something that looks kind of similar and announces, ‘The doctor thinks we should pop a syringe driver in, Tai. It stays in your tummy and means we won’t have to jab you with a needle every time you need some morphine.’
I obediently lift up my shirt and turn my head away.
Everything the doctor predicted, everything he said would happen, was right, and I can practically tick off items on the checklist in my mind. Tired: check. Falling asleep in the middle of conversations: check. Need more painkillers, more and more: check. I want to hate him for being so right but it’s strangely reassuring.
He comes to visit one day and asks if there’s anything I’m worried about, anything I want to ask him.
I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Am I
really
going to shit myself when I die?’
He smiles, like I’ve told him a joke, and nods. ‘Yes, Tai. But you won’t be the first one to have done it, and you won’t be the last. Anything else?’
‘How do you
do
this job?’ I ask. It’s plagued me for weeks. ‘Don’t doctors want to save people and deliver babies and sew arms back on? Who picks telling people they’re going to die as a career? Did someone give a special talk on it at Careers Day when you were at school, or what?’
He stops smiling then, and says, ‘I don’t have to tell everyone who comes to see me that they’re going to die. Some of the time, I get to say they’re going to be just fine.’
February
A month after Tai was told he wouldn’t be having any more operations he’s still tucked up under those starched white sheets. One day, as Tai’s watching the clouds through the window while everyone else in the room watches him, he says, ‘I want to go home.’
They arrange for a nurse to go to their house every day, calling it ‘home-based palliative care’. Mia learns how to administer the medication: how to count out the pills and give injections (though the really strong stuff has to be injected by a nurse).
Once Tai’s at home, we fall back into our old routine of lying on the bed together, sharing headphones. Sometimes we nod at each other. ‘Good song.’ Tai’s too tired, or too medicated, to say anything meaningful, and I don’t know what to say anyway. Sometimes Tai catches me looking at him and whispers hoarsely, ‘Die young and leave a beautiful corpse, remember?’ It’s not funny anymore, not that it ever really was. The difference is now I know there’s no such thing. There isn’t anything beautiful about this.
One day when I visit, Mia seems more teary than usual.
‘Hey, what’s up with your mum?’ I ask Tai as I enter his room.
‘Is she crying again?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh . . . The doctor came to visit yesterday, and I asked how long I had left now. And he pretty much said I could count the weeks on one hand.’
I long to shake him, to get on my knees and beg him.
No. Not yet. Fight, Tai, fight more. Fight harder. It’s not time yet – I can’t lose you yet. I’m not ready
.
Later that night when we’re lying under the covers, sharing headphones, Tai looks into my eyes and says, ‘If you want to cry, you can.’
I start weeping, sticking my face into the pillow to muffle the sobs, while Tai strokes my hair.
‘I’m not ready to lose you yet, Tai,’ I whisper.
‘I’m sorry, Juliet,’ he whispers back, kissing me. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Me too.’
• • •
After that, they change Tai’s painkillers, giving him stronger ones, and more of them. He tells me they’ve doped him up real good on morphine and he’s not lying. I start getting panicky, desperate to spend as much time as I can with him. I don’t want him to be alone, don’t want him to be scared when it happens.
I’m not the only one who feels that way; I hear Mia and Stanley arguing one night – she won’t take the sleeping pills the doctor’s prescribed in case Tai wakes up, calls out, and she doesn’t hear him when he needs her. Tai tells me that another night he’d ended up with both River and Hendrix sleeping in his bed, that River had had a nightmare and Hendrix had come looking for his little brother when he realised he was alone in the room they share.
‘Tai, where will I go when I have a nightmare and you’re not around?’ River asked.
Hendrix responded before Tai could, ‘Well, I’ll be the biggest brother then, so you’ll come to me. Der.’
River had another question. ‘Tai, you know how you say we’re only allowed in your room when you say we can? Well what happens when you’re in Heaven and we don’t know if we’re allowed or not?’
Tai tells me, ‘I told them they’re always allowed, Juliet. So are you.’ He smiles, and stretches; the lastest dose of painkillers have kicked in. He gazes around the room happily while I try to hide my despair.
There comes a point when the painkillers don’t work so well anymore. I tell the doctor this when he next visits.
‘Okay. We might look at getting the nurse to start giving you some injections with something a bit stronger.’
‘Will they make my head stop hurting – totally, I mean?’
‘These will be more effective, I would think. What you would’ve had post-surgery.’
‘They made me pretty out of it. I’m not going to be like that again, am I?’
‘Unfortunately, Tai, medication isn’t perfect.’
‘That’s a yes, then, isn’t it?’
His eyes meet mine, squarely. ‘Yes.’
‘If I’m going to get worse and worse, and then I’ll need more and more, I’m going to get really out of it, aren’t I?’ I’m vaguely aware that Mum’s crying beside me, but I don’t care – I need to be sure. ‘Will I even know where I am? Or who everyone is?’
‘It’s hard to say, Tai. We don’t know exactly how the medicine will affect you. All we can do is make an educated guess and see what happens.’
‘But how do I deal with that? How will I deal with everyone freaking out and crying because I don’t remember them anymore, because I don’t know who they are?’
‘It might not happen. And if it does, you won’t know that you don’t know. You won’t feel any emotional pain from that.’
I hear the news from Mia one day when I arrive to visit Tai. She pulls me into the kitchen so Hendrix and River don’t hear.
‘They’ve changed Tai’s medication, Juliet,’ she says, slowly and deliberately. ‘It’s a lot stronger now. Part of the palliative-care plan.’
‘I’m not really sure what you’re trying to tell me,’ I say.
‘He’ll have good days and bad days, like he has for months now. But the bad days will be a lot worse.’ She’s pausing, deciding what to tell me.
How much
to tell me, I think.
She reaches out and takes one of my hands in both of hers. ‘You make him so happy. And I’d like to think he still makes you happy, too.’
I nod.
‘Tai doesn’t look like the Tai we all know at the moment. And sometimes he doesn’t act like himself either. Try not to let it scare you. Your visits, I think they do him good.’
I nod again, but it isn’t until I walk into Tai’s room that I see what she really means.
I don’t stay long.
Tomorrow
, I promise myself.
Tomorrow I won’t be so shocked, I won’t have to remind myself not to stare, I’ll find lots of things to talk about and we’ll be ourselves again. Tomorrow I can do this. Do it better
.