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A few more people enter the gallery, either studiously analysing the plaques or drunkenly giggling at some of the funnier names, but they steer clear of us.
‘How are you feeling?’
I ask the question, but her emotions sit across her whole body; the sadness pulling her shoulders in, anxiousness in the twist of her mouth, and something else in her eyes. Guilt?
She frowns like it’s a stupid question and picks at a loose thread on her trousers. ‘It’s knocked me. Because he seemed okay, you know? And he will be again.’ She nods decisively. ‘But it’s brought back some memories I’ve spent a long time trying to push down. It took me a while to get out of that space the first time, and now I can feel myself going back.’ She sighs. ‘It’s never been fair that I’m healthy and he’s not. Sometimes it feels like… It feels like anything that’s happened to him could’ve happened to me, if the tiniest thing were different. Like maybe itshould’vebeen me.’
Trying to ignore the way my heart is shattering at what she just said, I shuffle over to sit next to her, hoping that my proximity is as healing to her as hers is to me. ‘You can’t think like that.’
She doesn’t respond, only continues to tug that loose thread.
More people enter the gallery, stumbling around the corner of the central glass case and running away with drunken giggles when they spot us on the floor. Their carelessness sends a flare of uncharacteristic anger through me. When the group leaves I murmur, ‘It must’ve been a shock.’
‘It was last time. It was hard to even process while it was happening. We just had to deal with it day by day. I think if it were a more common type of cancer, maybe it wouldn’t have felt quite soscary because I would’ve heard about more people who’d survived it. But then, it’s not like there’s ever agoodtype to have. It’s always terrible.’ She looks straight ahead, breathing shallow, fingernails curling into her palm. I take her hand, sliding my fingers under hers to unfurl them, reminding her that she’s on solid ground, and I’m with her. ‘I can’t really explain the feeling of watching him when it happened. It’s this weird, prolonged sense of grief. Like, a preemptive mourning. It was draining. Constantly fighting against the what-ifs. What if this doesn’t work? What if this is the last version of him I see?’ The words snag in the air, bulky and difficult to see past, and I feel her tense.
‘Hey. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
‘I think…’ She looks down at our hands like she’s only just noticed she’s been drawing circles on mine with her thumb and slowly, she says, ‘I do want to.’
‘Okay.’
She inches closer, pressing the side of her body against me, and I desperately hope that, at the very least, I can absorb some of her sadness by osmosis. Her throat bobs as she swallows. ‘Last time, he responded really well to treatment and was getting better. He had chemotherapy first, which got rid of most of the cancer, and then was set to have what they call limb-saving surgery. After the initial shock wore off and we realised he was improving, it felt like things were looking up. Max got very good at makingawfuljokes. Our parents never laughed at them, but it was our way of coping, I guess.’
Briefly, she smiles like she’s nostalgic somehow, and then sadness contorts her features into something I don’t recognise. ‘He was healing from chemo, waiting out the weeks until surgery, when he took a turn for the worse. Because the twisted thing about chemotherapy is that while it kills all the bad cells, it gets rid of thegood ones too. And when Max didn’t have enough good ones to fight an infection, the infection triggered sepsis. So he was in the ICU, hooked up to a ventilator, and he seemed so out of reach.’ Her voice cracks on the last word.
‘I dropped out of uni not long before he got the initial infection. I’d been going home a lot anyway, but I realised I needed to be with everyone. I didn’t even tell Josie why at the time. I thought that if I didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t real. I distanced myself from the few friends I’d made at uni. It was only because Josie’s so relentless and wouldn’t stop messaging me that we managed to keep up the friendship afterwards.
‘My parents and I were staying at a hotel by the hospital and I’d lie in bed every night praying to gods I didn’t believe in, wondering what kind of deal I could strike to make Max better. Then I worried that by thinking about those horrible what-ifs in the first place, I was putting negative energy out into the universe and would end up manifesting them into existence. So I tried the best I could to stamp the fear out.
‘Some mornings I’d wake up and realise my face was wet, so I’d dry my cheeks and go next door to my parents’ room and be the one who didn’t cry, because they were already going through so much. I can’t imagine how it feels to watch your child deteriorate, knowing it’s entirely out of your hands.’
‘He’s your brother, Ava,’ I say, brushing a tear from her cheek. ‘You were entitled to be upset too.’
She shrugs, and I realise there’s not much I dislike about Ava, but I despise how she deflects, how she discounts her own feelings.
‘One night we got a call from the hospital. There’s only one reason hospital staff call you in the middle of the night, so we got there straight away. And he was just sosmall.So fragile. So unlike him.
‘And I probably just imagined it as some twin telepathy thing,but I swear I felt the moment he slipped away. It was like a tug on a piece of rope, like he’d stumbled off a cliff. Then the heart monitor made that terrible sound, and the doctors came in and I knew I was right. I knew it because it felt like my own heart had been torn open. Like he’d grabbed at it for purchase as he fell, and took a piece with him over the edge.
‘I’d thought those misdirected prayers I’d been sending out were loud before. But as we were bundled out of the room, they were deafening.What do I have to promise to get him to stay? I’ll do anything. Take anything you want from me, take me instead if you have to, just please, give him back.’
Tears trail down her face as she continues to look blankly ahead, and I blink the moisture away from my own eyes.
‘When we were kids he used to joke that the minutes I was out in the world and he wasn’t were the loneliest moments of my life. But that’s not true anymore. It was that night in the ICU. Knowing he was on the other side of us. In the dark.’ She sniffs and pauses before she speaks. ‘Then somehow, they managed to restart his heart, and he came back. Reckless and stubborn until the end. But you don’t forget that type of sadness. It lives and breathes with him.’ She lifts our linked hands to her face and wipes more tears away.
‘It was touch and go for a while. He took such a long time to heal. It really took a toll on him, and he still had to have his surgery, heal some more, and do physio after that. But in the end he was okay. And I guess I’ve always felt like I’ve never had the right to be sad about it because he got better. Because he came back.’
‘You have the right,’ I say. ‘You spent months in this state of anxiety and dread and then the worst thing happened, and then you still had to live through more of that fear while he healed. There’s no way that wouldn’t affect a person. Especially not when you’re as close as the two of you.’
‘So many people aren’t as lucky. We got him back.’
‘Your family is lucky to have you too, you know.’ She ignores me, and I’m willing to repeat it over and over until she admits it’s true. ‘They are. If I can see it, so can they. You try so hard to hold your emotions back, but you feel so much for the people you love. It’s a wonder they don’t collapse under the weight of it.’
‘I don’t think it matters. If saving someone were as simple as sending out love and tear-stained pleas, no one would die.’ She swallows hard and continues, ‘So even though I knew in my heart that it was medicine and sheer coincidence that brought him back, on the off chance it wasn’t, I couldn’t risk it. I kept my life small and quiet, hoping the universe wouldn’t hear and remember I owe it something. But slowly, I started to let the happiness in. Started to think it was safe to relax. And now, here we are. It’s happened again.’ She grits her teeth and mutters, ‘And I hate that I’m scared and upset when Max is the one who has to go through it all. I’mashamedof it.’ Her chest heaves when she stops, and mine tightens at the sight.
‘They’re not mutually exclusive. You can be sad for both you and him.’
She blinks a few times and says, ‘Maybe.’
