me, a knowing look in her eyes. I look away, pain piercing my heart.
“Facing it won’t change anything Mom.” And it’s true, if I faced it all, what difference would that make. If I faced how I was feeling, would that change how he feels about me? And how stupid is it of me to think of Julian right now when there’s a photoshopped picture of my parents floating around on the internet.
“It might…or it might not,” Mom says, her voice ever so soft.
“I’m going to go ahead and say it might not, Mom.” I chuckle but it’s bitter and so out of character.
“Facing it…might change…the way you react or…think about it.” Her head tilts to the left, and I quickly right it again, then notice the frustration in her eyes.
She hates this. The lack of movement, the fact that she’s in a wheelchair and not doing what she loves to do.
“I’m sorry…I’ve been a burden,” she starts, jerking me out of my own pain. “I’m sorry…I checked out…on you…when you…needed me.”
She starts wheezing and I get up, running into the house to grab her portable ventilator. With tears blurring my eyes, I attach it to her, watching helplessly as she slumps in the chair, defeat and pain clear in her eyes.
“You never checked out on me.” The lie rolls off my tongue just as Nurse Hayley and Aunt Nicky walk into the room, a monitor in Nurse Hayley’s hand. Mom makes a sound, so I remove the mask from her face. She holds my gaze for a long second as Aunt Nicky rushes over, a worried look on her face, but Mom just stares up at me.
“Are you alright, Nancy” Aunt Nicky questions and mom rolls her eyes.
“Obviously…not,” she mutters then looks at me.
“Mom?” I whisper, my voice hoarse, afraid of the words she’s about to say.
“You were never…a good liar, baby girl,” she whispers, then she looks over my shoulder at my aunt. “Take me…back inside. I want to sleep.”
The nurse shoots me a sympathetic smile, the she presses a button, and off they go, back into her room that has more medical equipment now than ever before. She even has a cabinet full of all the medicine she’s supposed to take. She hardly eats anymore because it’s getting difficult to swallow and let’s not forget the way she has to be turned at least fifteen times during the night.
“Hey, my love,” Aunt Nicky starts, her voice soft. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I’ve had school,” I mutter, feeling that urge to slip out and go back home, to my studio.
“School has never been hard for you, not once in your entire life, and there’s the fact that you didn’t go today” she says stepping closer to me. “What’s going on, Mia?”
“Nothing.”
“This is so unlike you.”
“Yeah, well, this life you’ve plunged my mother and I into is so unlike us.”
I don’t intend to be a drama queen or to stomp out, but I run down the little path toward the beach, ignoring my aunt when she calls my name. At some point, I stop to remove my shoes but then I keep running, with both shoes in each hand, breathing in the salty air, feeling the overwhelming need to cry.
I couldn’t stand talking to my aunt anymore, even though once upon a time, we were so close.
I check my phone almost every second, hoping that maybe I’ll see a text from my dad, but there’s always nothing. It’s like to him, I don’t exist anymore.
And then Mom…
I wasn’t expecting Mom to say everything she said, hell I wasn’t expecting her to speak at all, but she did. I wasn’t expecting an apology but now that she gave it, without me even asking it tells me one thing—I had begun to silently resent my mother.
She did check out on me. As soon as she was diagnosed, the light in her eyes was just, snuffed out. Mentally, she left me alone. Kept her voice to herself and just didn’t care.
For two years I just shouldered on like it doesn’t matter.
But Julian was right all along.
I was resenting all of them. And I didn’t even know it.
But one fact still remained, I had to make Julian.
I wait for John to come back home, watching silently as he interacts with my aunt. I watch the way they interact with each other. The way my aunt laughs at his lame jokes and I also notice the way she looks at him.