True Love (20 page)

Julie struggled to focus.

“This has got to stop. Your father and I can’t bear to see you wasting away like this.”

“Please, Mom, don’t—”

“No. You listen! I’ve talked with our doctor, and he says that the way you’ve been grieving is cause for alarm. When I told him how much weight you’ve lost, he said it might be necessary not only to get you counseling, but to hospitalize you and put you on an IV.”

Julie wanted to be angry, but she didn’t have the energy for it.

“So sit up and eat or I will drive you to the hospital personally and check you in.”

Wearily, Julie obeyed. “I’m up, but I still don’t want to eat.”

“You have a visitor,” her mother announced without preamble.

“Tell Solena to come back tomorrow.”

“It isn’t Solena.”

The bedroom door inched open, and Nancy peeked into the room. “Hi, Julie. Can I come in?”

Julie hadn’t seen her since the funeral, and seeing her now caused fresh pain to stab at her heart. Still, although Nancy looked tired and she’d lost weight, she also looked serene, “Sure. Come in.”

Pat Ellis moved so that Nancy could take her place on the bed. “Your mother tells me you’re not doing so good.”

Feeling betrayed, Julie glared at her mother. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

“You’re depressed,” Nancy corrected. “I’ve been depressed too, but not like you.” She placed her hands on Julie’s. “I lost my only son, Julie. I’ll never get over the pain. But I will get on with my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m moving out to L.A. Steve’s offered me a job. He and Diedra are starting a small production company and they need an office manager. Luke talked to him before the surgery and asked Steve to take care of me.” A wistful smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “Just like Luke—to be worried about me. Anyway, I’m going where there are no memories to haunt me every day.”

The news jolted Julie. Her last link with Luke was being broken. “When will you go?”

“Just as soon as my house sells.”

Tears filled Julie’s eyes. “I’ll miss you.”

“We’ve been through a lot together through the years. Frankly, I’ve grown to love you like
a daughter. That’s why it hurts me to see you harming yourself this way.”

Julie dropped her gaze, unable to speak around the lump in her throat.

“Luke wouldn’t have wanted you to do this to yourself, you know. He wanted the best for you. He wanted you to be happy.”

“How can I be happy without him?”

“I don’t know … all I know is that someday, you will be. You’ll be happy”—she paused—“and you’ll fall in love again.”

Julie shook her head adamantly. “I’ll never love anybody the way I loved Luke. I won’t risk being hurt again.”

“Love is always a risk. Just like Luke’s surgery.” Nancy smoothed Julie’s tangled hair. “Just before he went back to the hospital, the bone marrow donor program had found him a match.”

Julie gasped. “They did? Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he get the transplant?”

“Because even if the transplant had worked, the tumor wasn’t going away. He made the decision to risk the surgery and do the transplant afterward.”

“Are you saying that he knew he might not live through the operation from the start?”

“Yes.”

“But why?” The information tortured her.

“Because in his mind, the benefit outweighed the risks. With the tumor gone, the bone marrow transplant had a better chance of working.”

“But if he’d had the transplant first, maybe he’d still be alive. He took the risk for nothing.”

Nancy shook her head. “He told me that life is full of risks and that if a person doesn’t take them, life is very shallow. And he said to me, ‘Mom, dead is dead.’ Luke hated dying by degrees. He told me that he’d rather have dying over with all at once than have it happen bit by bit.”

Julie felt no consolation. “What am I going to do without him?”

“You’re going to live your life. You’re going to honor him by doing the things you would have done if he’d never gotten sick and died.”

“How can I?”

“The same as all of us—one day at a time.” Nancy put her arms around Julie and held her for a long time. Finally, she pulled away, saying, “I’ll let you know when my house sells. Please come see me before I move. And once I settle in L.A., I want you to visit me there. Please take care of yourself, Julie.”

When she was gone, Julie flopped wearily back against her pillow, going over the meaning of Nancy’s words in her mind.
Luke had known he would probably die, but he had the surgery anyway
. She saw his face, his thumbs-up, his broad, sunny smile as he disappeared behind the OR doors.

Her mother stepped forward, holding the food tray. She set it on Julie’s lap and picked up the bowl of soup, stirring it, until the aroma and warmth filled the air. “Listen to Nancy, Julie. She knows what she’s saying. Life is for the living.”

Julie felt an unbearable weight of sadness press against her chest, but her mother looked so expectant, Julie reached for the soup spoon.

“No,” her mother said softly. “Please, let me help you.”

Their gazes locked, and Julie saw a tenderness in the depths of her mother’s eyes that shook her. “All right,” Julie whispered.

Then her mother smiled, ladled soup into the spoon, and held it to Julie’s lips, feeding her slowly and expertly, as she hadn’t done since Julie was a tiny child.

It took Julie another three weeks to regain her strength and begin putting on lost pounds.
She also began studying at home, attempting assignments, doing take-home tests. She began to talk to her friends again and decided to return to school the first of April.

Her return was bittersweet. Luke’s presence haunted the halls, and sometimes she could swear she saw his baseball cap bobbing through the crowds as they moved between classes. But kids were genuinely glad to see her, stopping her, talking to her, sharing memories of Luke with her. Her mother helped her tremendously with makeup work and arranged special tutoring for the classes Julie was too far behind in to catch up with on her own. She structured a summer tutorial program, so that even though Julie wouldn’t technically graduate with her class in June, she would at least be able to receive her diploma at the end of the summer.

One Saturday, Julie was reading on the back deck in a patch of sunlight, a blanket thrown over her lap, when her father rushed out the door. “Honey, quick! Come with me!”

Startled, she gawked at him. His eyes were glowing, his expression excited. “What’s happening?”

“I can’t tell you. I have to show you. Come on.”

“Dad, I really don’t want—”

He tugged her to her feet. “You have to come with me to the football stadium and see this with your own eyes. You’re not going to believe it, Julie. But you have to see it.”

J
ulie hadn’t thought about the new football stadium in many months. And she didn’t want to see it now, but her father was so excited, she couldn’t refuse him. At the stadium, he screeched to a halt, leaped from the car, and hurried to open her door. “You need to get up high,” he said, taking her hand. “Then you can see it better.”

Julie climbed the cement bleachers obediently, forcing herself not to think about all the times she’d come to the stadium with Luke.

When they were about a third of the way up, Julie had to stop and catch her breath. “Sorry,” she told her father. “I’m out of shape.”

“No problem. This is high enough anyway. Look.” He pointed down toward the field.

She turned and let her gaze follow his finger.
A fine stubble of wild grass blanketed the rough, rutted field with green fuzz. But there was something else sprouting in the center of the field. Green stems, arranged in neat rows, were emerging from the caked earth. She squinted. “What’s growing?”

“Tulips.”

“Why would you plant tulips in the middle of your football field? You told me it had to be smoothed out and sodded.”

“I didn’t plant them.”

Slowly, the truth dawned on her. “Luke?”

“I’m sure of it,” her father said. “It’ll take a couple of weeks until they’re all up and blooming, but once they’re finished, I think you’ll see a pattern of some kind. Like a design he planned out.”

She remembered Luke’s words: “
If it’s possible to send a message from heaven, I’ll get one to you
.” Tears blurred her eyes. “But how? When?”

“Tulips have to be planted by October, or November at the latest, before the ground freezes, so I figure that’s when he must have done it.”

“Right after he went back on chemo.”

“Probably so.”

She clapped her hand across her mouth to
stifle a sob. Her father pulled her into his arms. “Julie-girl, it’s all right. Go ahead and cry. He meant this for you, honey. He did this even though he knew he might not be here to share it with you.”

She imagined Luke arriving in the dark of night, digging holes in the hard ground, dropping each bulb into each hole, and covering it over so that no one could tell what he’d done. The bulbs had lain dormant beneath the snow all winter long until the gentle fingers of spring had awakened them. Like the thawing snow, she felt her grief begin to soften, her terrible pain begin to melt.

Every day afterward, Julie returned to the stadium, climbed the steps, and watched Luke’s testimony of tulips bloom in a rainbow of spring colors—red, yellow, purple, hot pink. The stems stood tall and straight, one series arranged in a single line, another in a crudely shaped heart, the final one in the shape of the letter U.
I love you
. Just as Luke had carved on the oak tree in her backyard the summer before.

Late one afternoon, while she waited for her father down on the field, a bulldozer roared to life and rolled through double gates at one of
the end zones. “No!” Julie cried, bolting toward the big yellow machine.

Suddenly, her father emerged from one of the stadium tunnels and parked his large body squarely in front of the dozer. “What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled up at the driver.

“Got a work order, buddy,” the driver shouted over the noise of the engine. “I need to level the field so the sod trucks can come in and get it planted tomorrow.”

“Daddy, don’t let him,” Julie begged.

“Not yet,” Bud Ellis told the dozer driver. “It’s not ready to be leveled yet.”

“But this work order—”

“I’m the football coach at this school, and I’ll take responsibility for changing your order.”

The driver looked doubtful. “I don’t know …”

“Not today,” Julie said boldly.

“Okay. So when?”

“When the tulips finish blooming.”

“What?” The driver looked at her as if she were insane.

“You heard the lady,” Bud Ellis said. “When the tulips are gone.”

She left them arguing about it and walked out onto the field, where she knelt next to a
row of colorful flowers and gently fingered the waxy petals.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Luke’s face, his playful grin, and she smiled back at him.

“So, you’re still sending me flowers,” she said to his image. “Do you think you can fix
everything
with flowers?”

In the hazy sunlight, his image nodded, gave her a thumbs-up, and faded away into the spring air.

Julie blinked, glanced around, and realized that she was standing by herself in the middle of a football field blooming with tulips. Luke was gone. But he was waiting for her somewhere. Somewhere, on the other side of all her tomorrows.

“G
ive it a rest, Reba!” Carley Mattea said. Only her friend Reba Conroy could get excited about a new patient admitted to their floor. “We’re not Knoxville General’s social committee,” Carley added. She balanced on her crutches, flipped the gears on Reba’s electric wheelchair, and guided it backward toward Carley’s room. Her new friend was an incredible optimist. Carley couldn’t understand it.

“I heard his name’s Kyle Westin,” Reba reported. “I asked a nurse and she said he’s from Oak Ridge, like you. Maybe he even goes to the same high school. Wouldn’t that be a fabulous coincidence? You come to the
hospital but end up making friends with a cool boy.”