Page 138 of First-Time Caller
“It’s easier for me like this. I think I convinced myself that if I loved you guys less—if I loved Mom less—it wouldn’t hurt so bad if I had—if I had to lose her.” I choke on the words. “So I kept myself apart and hoped it would help.”
Three cancer diagnoses in ten years and I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it, so I just decided not to. I buried my head in the sand and distanced myself from anything resembling emotional attachment. Like that, it was bearable. Like that, I could still breathe.
“I don’t know how you did it,” I ramble on. “How you do it. You love her so much and it—” I have to take a second. Press my lips together to stop them from trembling. “I never told you, but I could hear you crying at night. You were breaking apart and I didn’t want to break apart too. I was trying to be strong, but I think I just messed everything up.”
My dad’s deep exhale echoes on the other end of the phone. “Oh, Aiden. My boy.”
“It didn’t work,” I choke out. I dig the knuckles of my left hand into the middle of my forehead. “Or it stopped working if it ever did. I don’t know how to fix it.”
“What do you need to fix?”
“Me,” I grind out. “I need to fixme.”
This part of myself that relies on distance to function. The part that doesn’t want to get too close because the idea of getting attached to someone scares the shit out of me. I let myself get greedy with Lucie, and now I don’t know how to shut it off. I tried, but I can’t. Ican’t. I don’t know how to be the person she needs me to be.
“Aiden.” My dad sighs. “You’re not broken.”
“It feels like it.” I rub my chest. “I feel broken.”
“I think maybe you’re just bruised.” Wood creaks in the background and I imagine that tree outside the window wrapping its arms around me. “You were so young when everything happened the first time. Sometimes I worry that we asked too much of you.”
I blink at my discarded headphones. The empty space next to me where Lucie is supposed to be. “You didn’t ask me for anything.”
I remember pleading with him, begging for something. A task, a checklist. Something for me to channel my energy into. He handed me a shovel and told me to replant the lavender in the backyard. It was the best idea either of us could come up with.
But it didn’t help anything. It didn’t make my mom better.
“You had to grow up too fast. You spent more time in hospitals than out with your friends. Cancer took so much from your mom, but it took from you too. It’s okay that you need to work through that, Aiden.”
“How do you do it?” I choke out. “How do you love her when you’re scared?”
My dad laughs, a gruff, thick sound. “It was never a choice, Aiden. I was always going to love your mom. And I would never have chosen different, even with everything we’ve endured together. It makes it better, doesn’t it? To know how temporary it all is. To know how special. Love isn’t”—he sighs, a deep, rumbling sound—”love isn’t always sunshine and daisies. Sometimes it’s hospital beds and shaved heads. But I wouldn’t trade any of it. Because all of it is with her.”
“You’re braver than I am.”
“Nah. I’ve just had more practice at it.” He pauses, thinking. “I don’t think you have anything to fix, Aiden. I think you just have things to work on.”
“How?” I whisper.
“Well.” I imagine I can hear the shape of his smile. A crooked slash in the moonlight. “Here is what we’re gonna do. You and I, we’re gonna talk. More than once a month. More than we have been. Preferably not in the middle of the night when your old man is sleeping.” He pauses meaningfully and I snort a watery laugh. “You’re gonna answer your phone when your mom calls too, and you’re going to participate in the group chat. You’re gonna come over for Sunday dinner. You’re gonna come with us to baseball games. You’re gonna go back to therapy and talk to someone. I know you stopped going,” he says knowingly. “You’re gonna ask for help when you need it and you’re gonna learn what it’s like to love without being afraid, okay? You’ll take your time about it. You’ll put in the work.”
Something catches my eye on the other side of the desk. I reach forward. It’s one of Lucie’s tiny paper planes, half-hidden beneath a cluster of wires. The one she made from a chocolate mint wrapper and aimed right at my heart. I drag my thumb over one of the creases. Unfold it until it’s flat, then slowly follow the folds until it’s whole again.
“And if I mess up?” I ask. “If I do the wrong thing?”
“Then you try again. You keep trying until you find the right thing.”
My heart starts to pound in my chest. Right beneath the empty key ring I haven’t taken off since I turned sixteen. A whisper of a conversation floats in the back of my mind.
I don’t want the right thing.
Lucie has only ever wanted the real thing.
“What brought all this about?” my dad asks, a hint of amusement in his tired voice. “It wouldn’t be a certain woman you tried to set up with someone tonight, would it?”
“You heard that?”
“Oh, my boy. The entire Eastern Seaboard heard that.” He pauses. “Not your smartest move.”
