Page 29 of A Thousand Little Goodbyes

She was proven right when she and Grandma entered the recital hall that weekend, Grandma all dressed up in her best church clothes and hat. The two of them sat in the front row so Chrissie would be sure to see them, so they missed it when Chrissie’s parents came in.

They didn’t miss it when the Thomases left, though. No one in the hall did.

“I have to get down to the job site,” Chrissie’s dad hissed after a drum solo that made the entire room shake. “I’m sorry, Moira, but this deal with the developers is too important. They’re trying to pull one over on me with the import taxes.”

“And what about my Junior League meeting? I had to move a lot of things to be here, and you know how long they draw out each performance to justify the costs of—”

The rest of the argument was cut short by the arrival of a short, cherub-faced violin player who screeched like a pair of cats in the alley behind the apartment, so Scarlett didn’t hear the rest. She and Grandma peeked over their shoulders, though, to find that Chrissie’s dad had made good on his threat to leave, leaving Chrissie’s mom sitting next to an empty seat. She perched ramrod-straight in her own, her purse clutched in her lap and her face looking so bored at thethought of making it through another hour that Scarlett wanted to scream.

Today wasn’t supposed to be about them. It was about their daughter—the daughter who did everything they asked and nothing they didn’t, who had refused a sleepover of epic proportions in the vain hope that she might get their whole attention for all of five minutes.

In that moment, Scarlett came up with several excellent plans of action.

Plan number one involved pulling the fire alarm so that the entire recital crashed and burned around them. Plan number two achieved the same results without a fire alarm, but with Scarlett jumping up onto her chair and screaming all her fury and outrage until there wasn’t any left inside her. Plan number three, however, was different. Smarter. Sneakier.

And much more difficult to put into action.

“Don’t they know how much they’re hurting her?” Scarlett asked her grandmother after the cherub-faced boy finished his violin song and Chrissie took the stage. She seemed so grown-up in a floor-length dress of dove gray, but the moment she scanned the crowd to find her mom sitting alone, she looked like she wanted the stage to open up and swallow her whole. “We have to do something, Grandma. We can’t let this keep happening. They won’t stop until she’s as broken inside as they are.”

But even though Grandma looked like she wanted to burst right out of her skin, she only pursed her lips and gave a lighttsk.

“She doesn’t need us to fight on her behalf,” she said. “She only needs us to be here.”

“But—”

“But nothing. That girl is stronger than you know. She’s already been broken and put back together more times than most people five times her age. And what’s more important—she’s done it with grace and dignity every step of the way.”

Scarlett assumed this was a commentary against her own nature, which contained nothing even approaching grace and dignity, but she didn’t take it as an insult. Instead, she smiled and waved until Chrissie noticed her. She clapped harder than anyone else once the sad, beautiful song was over. And she decided right then and there that she’d stop at nothing—and she meant nothing—to ensure that Chrissie didn’t suffer a second more than she had to.

* * *

“I know I’m not supposed to just stop by like this,” Scarlett announced as she arrived, uninvited, at Chrissie’s front door after school a few days later. “But I have terrible news. It’s about my Hodgkin’s.”

Chrissie reacted to this news exactly as Scarlett expected—with a cry and a hug and the door thrown wide open.

“Come in,” she said over the sound of the Thomas family housekeeper running a vacuum cleaner in the background. “You can stay as long as you need. My parents won’t be back until late.”

Then, with a peek over Scarlett’s shoulder, “Don’t tell me yourode your bikeall the way here! Do you need a glass of water? To sit down?” Chrissie was already halfway through her house and pulling out a chair from the kitchen table. “I think my mom still has the tea your grandma gave her. It’s probably super stale by now, but the smell might make you feel better.”

Each suggestion was offered more and more urgently—and sounded more and more like torture. When Scarlett had pictured this conversation playing out inside her head, she’d forgotten just how much she hated being treated like an invalid.

“Can’t we go outside and work on our tans or something?” she asked. But then she noticed the notebooks laid out across the table and hesitated. She hadn’t pictured this part, either—the life Chrissieled that didn’t involve her, this entire half of her she wasn’t allowed to touch. “Oh. Um. Are you busy? Should I come back?”

“I was just studying.” Chrissie waved the mountain of biology textbooks away. “I have a test tomorrow, but it’s not important. Not anymore. Tell it to me straight. How bad is it?”

If she were to tell the truth, this answer would be an easy one:Pretty good, all things considered. At this point in Scarlett’s life, she was an official six years in remission. She still had to go to the doctor an annoying number of times, and her grandma was still obsessed with “health-forward” food combinations like acai-and-spinach smoothies, but she’d managed to avoid the hushed and always lingering specter of relapse.

“Your long-term risk of a secondary malignant neoplasm is four times higher than average,” the doctors would drone every chance they got. “Particularly in the breast and respiratory systems. And that’s not counting the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disorders that—”

But here she always tuned them out. She already knew all the terrible and painful things that might happen to her over the course of her lifetime, but what she was more interested in was what that life held for her beyond the doom and gloom. Why didn’t they tell her what the chances were of her someday visiting Paris in the springtime? Or which of the Jonas brothers was most likely to see her across a crowded street and declare his everlasting love for her?

For once, however, Scarlett was grateful for all the medical jargon they threw at her head every time she set foot in that office.

“They think I might be exhibiting B symptoms,” she said with a determined lift of her chin. “They’re especially worried about my lymph nodes.”

Chrissie didn’t react as she nodded to the housekeeper and kept walking, her footsteps soft as she led the way down the hall toward theoutdoor patio—the same patio they’d broken into a few years back. Scarlett hadn’t been inside the house since then, but it seemed fitting that they’d return to the scene of their original crime.

But the moment she safely closed the door behind them, Chrissie’s face started to crumple. “Oh, Scarlett. I’m so sorry. What does your grandma say? Is she okay? Does she need anything?”