Read Online As Close as Sisters by Colleen Faulkner - Free Book Online Page B

I felt my lower lip tremble. The floodgates were about to open. I’d cried three times already since I’d arrived. Of course I cried when McKenzie talked about her illness. But I’d cried earlier when Janine was telling us about a homeless teenager she found under a local bridge. I also cried when I saw a mom and dad on the beach with a little boy, flying a kite. Janine and Aurora looked at me like I was crazy. Even Fritz thought I’d lost it. But McKenzie . . . she understood. I guess because she was a mother.
    I knew I wasn’t a mother yet. But, I was, in a way. I was mom to all those little souls that had lived in my hostile womb for a brief time. I truly believed that.
    McKenzie rubbed her hand over my belly, and I smiled, bringing myself back to the here and now. It was something I was working on. It was time to stop always looking to the future, Matt told me. It was time to live in the present. And he was right.
    So I lived in the present, here at this moment in bed with McKenzie. Her hand felt good against my taut skin.
    “I’m so happy for you,” she said. “I’m mad at you for cheating me out of knowing all these months.” She smiled, looking into my eyes. “But I’m so happy for you, sweetie.”
    Her turban had shifted when she rolled over to face me, and now it sat askew. I reached out to readjust it and cover the tiny bit of red fuzz beneath it.
    She rested her head on the pillow again, and we just lay there.
    “Lilly, I want to talk to you,” she said after what seemed like a long while.
    I realized I was drifting off to sleep. I needed to get up. I needed to go upstairs to my own bed. “Not tonight,” I told her, opening my eyes.
    I knew what she wanted to talk about. About her cancer. But we already talked about it tonight. Of course, when we talked, it was in a general way. Like a recap of the information we already knew. I wasn’t the only one who had cried. Janine had cried then, too. I saw her tears, even though she was trying to hide them. I’d always loved that about Janine. She could get her bull dyke cop on when she had to, but she could still be a girly girl with us. She could still cry for us. The way we’ve cried for her. The way I still cry for her sometimes for that night. For all of those nights we didn’t know about, until after the fact.
    “Lilly.” McKenzie whispered my name. Her green eyes were so intense, more so now that her face is thinner.
    “I know,” I whispered back. “But I can’t, honey. Not tonight.” Then I sat up. Awkwardly. I kissed her forehead, right where the knit turban met her pale skin. “You okay?” I pressed my palm to her cheek and frowned. “Do you have a fever? Your . . . face looks red.” I looked at her more closely.
    She pushed my hand away. “I’m fine. It’s . . . one of the medications. I get a little bit of a fever sometimes. If I get lucky,” she joked, “maybe I’ll break out in hives by morning.”
    I don’t know how she can joke about this. If it were me with the cancer, I wouldn’t be cracking jokes. I’d be curled up in a ball on the floor, unable to speak or function.
    I made myself smile. “Okay,” I said slowly. My gaze went to the nebulizer on the table beside her again.
    My mom had died of lung cancer. She’d had a three pack a day habit in her prime. I knew my nebulizers. My oxygen tanks. I knew how a person with lung cancer dies. How their life slowly eked out of them with each struggling breath.
    “Go to bed,” McKenzie ordered. She gave me a push, but she didn’t lift her head off the pillow. I think maybe she was so weak that she couldn’t.
    I paused at the bedroom door and looked back at her. She was lying there, half asleep, half smiling. I knew she was happy we were all here together. Happy, like the rest of us. It seemed like we lived our lives just waiting to get back here. To be together again, here. Just the four of us.
    Kind of sick, when you thought about it.
    “Yoi yume o,” I told her.