Slow Burn

Chapter 26

Emotionless, I stare at myself in the mirror. I take in my swollen eyes and the dark circles beneath them, noting the disbelief still in their hollow reflection. I can still hear my mother’s shriek from earlier when I told her, as well as see the stunned look on my dad’s face, followed by his gritted jaw and sudden departure so he could go break down in his bedroom over not being able to protect the only woman left in his life still untouched by the monster that has decimated his family.

I shake off those painful recollections and begin tugging my clothes off, suddenly desperate to take a shower and scrub every single part of today from my body. My mom’s perfume lingers on my skin. The perfume that shouldn’t be there because I shouldn’t have seen her today.

So I welcome the scalding water as I scrub and cleanse, even though I know I can’t wash this away. I tell myself I need to call Rylee later and apologize for being rude and brash rather than appreciative and gracious for all that she’s done for me. I know she understands why, but it still doesn’t make it right.

I climb from the shower and grab a towel, which I twist around my hair and on my head. I grab a second, so emotionally drained I’m not thinking straight, and start to dry off and cross into my bedroom to grab my robe on my bed. As I near it, I look up and catch sight of my naked body in the mirror hanging on the wall beside my dresser.

I freeze. Then I walk toward it, completely lost in my thoughts and drowning in the fear from earlier today. I can’t take my eyes off my breasts in the reflection.

They’re pert and full with pink nipples. I stare at them and wonder how something that looks so harmless can hold so much power over me? I wonder how something that can bring pleasure, can nourish a baby, can also steal my life so easily.

Then I begin to wonder what I’ll look like when they are gone. Will I look like a patchwork quilt of scars? Will they be able to salvage my nipples so that I don’t have to have fake ones tattooed on so that I can pretend to look normal? What will be physically left of this major feature that expresses my gender, my sexuality?

I won’t even have my hair to help with that … so I’ll be a bald, flat-chested person with only makeup on my soon-to-be-bloated face to denote that I’m a female.

The thought staggers me. Suffocates both my thoughts and my breathing.

I like to think that I’m not a vain person, but everybody is in a sense. Is this God’s way of punishing me for always being pretty? For never going through that gawky stage as a teenager when every other girl was gangly and awkward and I was svelte and desired by the boys? The things I have always taken for granted, always been so comfortable with are going to be taken from me, and while I never thought I’d really care, all of a sudden I’m terrified of what I’m going to look like and how people will perceive me.

The tears that I’ve kept hostage all day finally erupt into a maelstrom of sobs. I drop the towel as I bring my hands to my boobs and cup them, feeling the weight, the smoothness of the skin, their roundness. I’ve had them my whole life, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever thought to memorize everything about them. Such a weird thought.

I tell myself through the exploding grief that when I get through this, I’ll have them reconstructed. That while I think my natural breasts are pretty close to perfect now, when I’m sixty, they’d be saggy and flat, so I’m lucky because the new boobs I’ll get will remain perky and full well into my nursing home days. Rationalization at its finest.

And then I start to laugh through the tears as I recall a Shel Silverstein poem I read to Maddie the other night. One about how a little boy shaved his head because he hated his wavy hair only to find out his hair was straight and it was his head that was wavy.

I don’t know why the thought is so funny to me now, but I can’t stop laughing as I look at the mirror and wonder what I’ll find beneath my hair. Tears fall as fast as the laughter from my lips until the sound dies but I continue to cry.

I stare again through my tear-blurred vision, my hair wet and stringy—my towel having fallen from my head during my laughter-sob fest—and my body still pink from the scalding water of the shower. This is the same body I’ve looked at for the last twenty-eight years, and yet I know that in the coming weeks it will no longer seem like or look like mine.

I close my eyes, not wanting to focus anymore on what will never be the same. I crawl onto my bed and beneath my covers, trying to find some kind of solace, but I don’t think it’s an emotion one can hope for when facing a cancer diagnosis.

Next I lose myself to my thoughts, suddenly questioning my knee-jerk decision this afternoon at Dr. Blakely’s office. Should I opt for a single mastectomy and save my other breast? Keep a piece of myself?

That’s stupid. The remaining breast would just be a continually ticking time bomb. I made the right decision. I tell myself that over and over as the tears slide silently down my cheeks and wet the pillow beneath me.

But the doubt still niggles its way into my psyche.

I know what to do to reinforce my decision. I reach to the edge of the bed and grab my cell. Within moments my voice mail is activated, and Lexi’s voice is filling my ears.

Time is precious. Waste it wisely.

“Give me strength, Lex,” I whisper into the silence.

I realize how much I don’t want to be alone right now. I know it’s the loneliness talking, but I miss the sounds of Dante moving about in the kitchen downstairs. I reluctantly admitted to Rylee what had happened with him and why he’s gone merely because I didn’t want to lie to her again but knew she’d be worried that I was alone.

Shockingly she gave in to my need for solitude after I explained that with her knack for planning, I knew after the surgery I’d probably never be left alone. And I needed as much time to myself right now as I can get. But lying here with only my thoughts screaming through the silence, I wish I would have accepted Ry’s offer to spent the night and snuggle up with me.

But I didn’t.

So I replay the voice mail again.

And again.

Because I know if I keep the phone replaying the message, it will prevent me from dialing Becks.

I miss him. Desperately. I’m doing the right thing because if I feel like this after such a short time, it makes me realize just how he’d feel if he went through all of this with me and then was left alone in the end.

Fucking brutal.

Exhaustion starts to win the battle over my internal thoughts. My finger hitting the repeat command every two minutes and thirteen seconds as the voice mail ends to start it anew.

I begin to drift off to sleep.

I don’t walk away from the people I love without a fight, and damn it to hell, Haddie Montgomery, you’d better prepare for that fight because I’m in love with you.

The words flicker through my mind, and I’m so tired and worn-out from the day that I vaguely wonder if I’m remembering or if my finger actually dialed his number and I’m hearing him say them to me.

Regardless, I succumb to the pull of slumber, my last waking thoughts focused on Becks conquering my heart rather than the cancer invading my body.