Angel

17 - Jeremy

"Are you going to tell him?"

I stared at my hands, wrapped around a half-empty cup of tea. I was just going through the motions, really; the only thing colder than the tea was my hands, but I held it all the same. As though it could provide warmth. Or comfort. Or... or something.

As if I could feel anything.

I didn't know where this anesthetized sensation sat on the five stages of grief. Maybe it was depression, but I thought I'd passed that a few days earlier when I'd looked in the bathroom mirror and saw not myself, but the father of a dying child.

I thought that had been moving into acceptance.

Depression had been what brought me to my parents' place. It was just supposed to be for the night, but then Noreen... well.

She stood in front of me, broken as I was about my son, and struggled to explain why she just couldn't. And I tried to tell her. I tried to let her know it was okay. That I wasn't mad. That I wasn't giving her even a fraction of me because all my attention was focused on a time bomb ticking away.

That I loved her and she deserved so, so much more.

Because I did. I was in love with her. It didn't matter if it was circumstantial or temporary or the real, forever kind of thing. It didn't matter if nothing ever came from it after... well. After.

True love is as selfless as it is selfish. It's more than soul mates or a perfect kiss or white horses and sunsets. It simply is love that is truly love, and for whatever it was worth, I truly loved Noreen.

But I also loved my son, and my son's time was limited.

Maybe that had been acceptance.

Maybe the stages weren't linear. Maybe it wasn't a path: denial followed by anger followed by bargaining. Somehow, I'd accepted what was happening and in my acceptance, had gone numb and cold and blank.

"Jere?" she asked, pulling me out of my thoughts. "Did you hear me?"

I looked up from the cup of tea. Shayla was sitting across from me at the table, worry in her dark brown eyes. My sister had flown back home the same day I'd called her, even though I'd told her there was still time, that he wasn't... there, not yet. He had time, he had at least a few months and he was still gonna be here when she came home for Christmas and—

"I don't care, Jeremy!" she'd practically screamed. "I'm, I... I n-need to be there."

Unreasonable guilt had wracked me. I couldn't get her here, so she was spending money she didn't have on flights. She was missing classes she needed to go to in order to follow her dream. But after Dad picked her up from the airport and she walked into their house, I got it.

She'd been wearing a baggy university hoodie and had a backpack over her shoulder. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she still managed a huge smile the moment she saw Ethan.

"Auntie Shay!" Ethan--the only person in the world allowed to call her just "Shay"--had shouted, so excited he nearly fell off the couch.

"Bubba!" Shayla rushed forward, scooping him up in an enormous hug.

And that hug explained everything.

She was a trooper, that was for sure. As exhausted as she must have been, she chatted and played with Ethan until it was time for his bedtime meds, which were thankfully the only ones that made him really sleepy. He, of course, threw a fit about having to take them because he was "having fun with Auntie Shayla, Dad, why do you always make me stop having fun?"