A Taylor-Made Life (12 page)

He gave her a halfhearted smile as he
took the bill from her. “Thanks. You look great.”

The aide wheeled in a chair. “Here you
go.”

His chest ached at the thought of his
empty house, and his hands wrapped over the armrests as he sat in
the chair.

Taylor threw his overnight bag across
her shoulder and followed them to the elevator. “I parked out
front, so let me get the car.”

They rode down to the lobby in
silence. The elevator doors opened to reveal a middle-aged couple
holding each other and sobbing.

Taylor stepped out, dropped the bag
and ran to them. They opened their stance and engulfed her in the
hug. Her hand covered her mouth, and she shook her head.

The Johnsons?
Creatures of
CROG
, he hoped not. He looked up at the woman pushing the
wheelchair. “I can make it from here.”

The aide rebuffed him. “But, Mr.
Taylor, we’re supposed to wheel you out.”

“You’ve done your job. Thank you.” He
gave her his most pressing stare.

She nodded and after he stood wheeled
the chair away. Still a little unsteady on his feet, he slowly
walked to the group.

Taylor stepped back from the couple
and slid her arm around his waist. She laid her head on his
chest.

He covered her crocheted hat with his
hand and whispered, “Rachel?”

She nodded against him.

“I’m so sorry. What can I
do?”

Taylor tilted her head up at him,
“Don’t leave me.”

He cupped her face. “You got it,
Sweetness.”

Her body melted into his, and they
stood for a few moments, trying to gather themselves. Maureen and
John hurried in.

Maureen transformed before his eyes,
and he blinked—twice. The sweet-faced woman took on a look of
determination that startled him and gave him comfort in the same
breath.

“Taylor, take Gavin home. I have the
guest room set up for him.” Turning her attention to the grieving
couple, she said, “Ruth, have you signed all the paperwork
here?”

The broken woman nodded.

He gawked, hardly believing his eyes.
He would’ve never guessed Maureen could’ve been so persuasive,
take-charge. Even if he hadn’t already decided to stay with Taylor,
he didn’t think he would have the guts to go against her maternal
command.

She braced the broken woman’s
shoulders and stared in her face. “John’s going to drive you home,
and I’ll follow him in our car. I have a meal prepared, so don’t
worry about tonight’s dinner. Is there anything you need? I can
stop at the store on my way.”

The couple shook their heads and
headed out with John.

Taylor grabbed his arm and his bag and
walked him to her mini-SUV. She opened the passenger side door and
threw a crap load of stuff from the front seat to the back. He
chuckled. Guess she wasn’t a neat freak, and the gesture made her
seem more like a normal teenager. He climbed in. A music CD
crunched under his foot. He lifted his loafer from the broken
mass.

Taylor slipped her key in the ignition
and glanced down. “Oh, don’t worry about that. I don’t listen to it
anymore.”

“Good thing.” He peered at the pieces
as he pulled out his phone and called Rick to reschedule the
jet.

* * * *

He lay in his bed in the Smiths’ guest
room. The full moon peeked through the mini-blinds and cast slatted
shadows over the bed. He’d tossed and turned for the last two hours
even though his body should’ve been exhausted. He’d tried breathing
exercises, stretches, a small snack he’d snuck down to the kitchen
for. But nothing worked.

The door of his room creaked open,
Taylor’s pajama-clad form silhouetted in the frame.

“Are you awake?” she
whispered.

“Yeah. Are you?” he whispered
back.

She snickered quietly and closed the
door. “No. I’m sleepwalking.”

He laughed.

“Shh. You’ll wake the neighbors.” The
edge of the bed gave as she sat.

Staring at her, he was barely able to
make out her face in the dark. Lines of moonlight fell across her
body. “What couldn’t wait until morning?”

She wrung her hands in her lap. “I
couldn’t sleep.”

“And you thought I could help or keep
you company?”

The shadows of her shoulders moved in
a shrug. “I don’t know. I keep thinking…I can’t get Rachel out of
my head. You know, I told her about you. About our
kiss.”

His mouth went dry, and he tried to
steady his voice. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her voice broke, and the bed
shook with her quiet sobs.

He scooted toward her and wrapped her
up in his arms. Taylor needed to grieve for her friend, the brave
young woman Rachel had been and the one she never got the chance to
be. Nothing wounded the soul like a fresh life cut too short. She
cried, and he let her.

After a while the tears dried. The
silence of night stretched over the room.

He could make out the soft rise and
fall of her chest. “Can you reach my overnight bag at the foot of
the bed?”

She leaned over and looked. “I think
so.”

“Right on top is a stuffed animal.
It’s for you.”

She grabbed the white bear and sat up
next to him. “When did you get this?”

The wonder in her voice made him
smile. Out of all the things he could give her, she was thrilled
with a little bear. “I bought it at the hospital before we left.
When I thought I was leaving.”

“Oh.” Her voice fell in
disappointment.

“But I want you to have it now. For
Rachel.”

She held the bear out and lifted it
even with her face. “Then I’ll name her Racer15. That was Rachel’s
online name.” She hugged the toy with a gasp as if to stay a new
flow of tears. “I taught her how to play
LAION
and Rift. She
was pretty good, too.” She turned her head toward him. “You know,
lots of the kids in the ward play your games.”

A chill rose over his body. “I didn’t
know that.”

“They occupy the empty hours but it’s
more than that. They make us feel like we can fight and win. And
when we don’t, there’s always another life waiting to be
played.”

The holiness of the moment crashed
over him like a tidal wave. He’d never realized he’d helped anyone.
It was all fun and games, or so he’d thought, and it suddenly
brought the true value of his company into focus. And it made the
urgency to find someone to preserve it more acute.

“Gavin, how did you find out?” Her
quiet voice broke through his thoughts.

He didn’t have to see her face to know
what she was asking. “I went to the dermatologist for a mole that
was growing on my left shoulder blade. He told me not to worry.
That it was a normal mole.” He fluffed up his pillows and leaned
back against the headboard. “Six months later it had grown so big I
insisted he remove it, regardless. Three hours after leaving the
office, he called me back in. It was malignant, Stage IV
Melanoma.”

Taylor angled toward him. “Were you
scared?”

He shook his head. “Not at first. I
thought skin cancer was on the skin. And they’d gotten that, right?
But when the doctor scheduled me for an MRI, a PET scan and got me
an appointment with an oncologist, I realized it was something much
more serious.

“In the first scan, they found a small
spot on my liver and several lymph nodes. I had surgeries to remove
those and began Interferon treatment.” He snorted derisively. “That
was bullshit. Interferon was never designed for melanoma, but
because it has no unique treatment path, the doctors treat it like
other types of cancer. But the chance that Interferon will work on
a melanoma patient is less than twenty percent. When I asked the
doctor how I’d know if the cancer was gone, he said, ‘if it doesn’t
ever come back.’”

Taylor sucked in a long
breath.

He could feel her gaze on him and took
her hand, the warmth radiating up his arm into his chest. “After a
year, I completed the Interferon and waited. I had PET scans and
MRIs done quarterly. Six months ago they found more, and I started
a clinical trial, because I sure as shit wasn’t going through the
torture of Interferon again with no better odds.” He dropped her
hand and rubbed his face. “The trial failed, although it slowed
down the spread. Now, I wait.”

“Did the doctors give you…a
timeline?”

“Pinning them down for a definitive
answer is like trying to catch a fish with your bare hand. My
oncologist, Dr. Monroe, gives his best guess. They do what they
can.” Not that he particularly wanted to know the exact date and
time. It numbed him to think about it. “Six months to two years.
But they don’t know.”

Her voice was soft and full of
emotion. “I’m sorry. I hate it. Cancer is the ugliest thing in this
world.”

He couldn’t disagree with that. “How
about you?”

“I collapsed while I was on a date
with Matt and was rushed to the hospital. I thought, at first, I’d
overexerted myself at cheerleading practice.”

He grinned at the thought of her in a
short little skirt with pompoms in her hands.

“But when they took my blood, they
found my white counts were really high. They ran more tests and
diagnosed me with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. A week later I had my
spleen removed and, at the demand of my mother, started four weeks
hormone therapy where they harvested six of my eggs. Then I got the
first of forty-four weeks of chemo cocktail split into three
phases. The funny thing is—AML is rare in people under forty and
much more common in men than women. So I guess my blood cells think
I'm an old man.”

An old man? I don't think so.
A
small laugh spilt from him as he allowed his gaze to wander down
the outline of her body against the darkness. Her skin glowed in
the moonlight and his breath caught in his throat with the desire
to nuzzle his nose at her neck.

She propped her chin up with her fist,
her elbow resting on her knee. “I lost my hair and all my friends,
including Matt. High school kids are like herds grazing in the
flatlands. When a predator comes, they run, but once the danger’s
gone, they go back to living their lives like nothing’s happened.
Even if the lion is eating their best friend a few yards
away.”

She picked at a thread on the blanket.
“But by the end of the treatment I was in remission.”

The very scenario she’d described was
the whole fucking reason he didn’t have friends, and to think of
her in the hospital, scared and abandoned, made him want to break
something. No one knew better than him how cruel kids could be. He
took a deep breath. “How long were you in remission?”

“Five and a half months. When they
found the cancer again, I immediately started a new twenty-two
weeks of chemo, and the doctors began searching for a bone marrow
match.”

His chest tightened. Through the dark
he focused on her face for any inkling she knew he was a transplant
match. She didn’t appear to. Was he a selfish bastard like her
friends? He sure felt like one, but he kept his mouth
closed.

“After they’d done a boatload of tests
and my chemo was completed, they sent me home. That was three weeks
ago. Right now, if you drew my blood, I’d have no cancer cells, but
in three to six months, I will. The timelines are wonky for sure.
The doctors can’t give answers; they can only guess. But they’re
pretty sure without a transplant I won’t make it to my nineteenth
birthday.”

They sat in silence.

He wanted to comfort her, take away
the pain.

Taylor laid her hands on her legs with
a clap. “Well, aren’t we a bundle of good cheer? I bet I can sleep
peacefully now.”

Her sarcasm caused a grin to spread
over his face, and the heaviness of the moment lifted a little. The
lines of right and wrong blurred in his mind. If he could give her
a little comfort, then he needed to. He scooted over and raised the
covers. “Here, get in.”

Even in the dark, he could see her jaw
fall open and eyes round. “Really? You don’t think
it’s….”

He raised his eyebrows with unspoken
concern. “Probably.”

She slipped in next to him and warmed
the chill he hadn’t known he suffered. Peace washed over him as he
wrapped his arms around her. She snuggled close, and they both fell
asleep.

* * * *

I settled Gavin back in his room after
the services. The grayness of his face told me the activity had
worn him thin, but more than that, he seemed…preoccupied. After the
funeral, he’d barely said a word in the car, though he kept a
protective arm around me the whole time. Having been released from
the hospital a few days ago, his strength wasn’t the greatest. And
God knew, going to a funeral was a sucky way to spend your
energy–my breath hitched—especially a funeral for a
fifteen-year-old.

Rachel had been a friend, but she’d
also been a girl. A human being who never got to live. Not really.
I knew teenagers who threw their lives away, using drugs, hurting
their bodies. But Rachel had wanted to live. It wasn’t fair. I
blinked back the tears that again threatened. Rachel wouldn’t want
me to cry. She’d want me to live.