True Love (6 page)

N
othing had prepared Julie for Luke’s diagnosis. She moved through the next day in a numbing fog of disbelief. She sobbed into the phone when she told her father and felt an odd kind of comfort in his display of explosive anger. Her mother was sympathetic, and sorry, but she wanted Julie to come home—Christmas was only a week away. Julie refused, becoming adamant about staying with Luke’s mother at the Ronald McDonald House. She couldn’t leave Luke. She simply couldn’t.

He was started on chemo, and the side effects were immediate. He began vomiting continually. “It takes some adjustments to arrive at the right combination,” Dr. Kessler said. “The important thing is, Luke has to keep eating.”

His advice seemed stupid, since Luke couldn’t keep anything down. Luke begged Julie to go home. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” he moaned. His skin looked ashen.

“I’m not leaving,” Julie insisted. Yet, the weekend before Christmas, she decided to return home long enough to replenish her wardrobe—and to appease her mother. She rode the high-speed train from Chicago to Waterton, where her father picked her up at the station.

“You look thin,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she told him.

Walking into her house, she felt like a stranger. The decorations were up. It was the first time in all of her seventeen years that she hadn’t helped with the festivities. She went quickly to her room, and felt like a stranger there too. Everything was familiar, yet alien. She’d grown used to the hospital smells and sparse furnishings. Her room seemed too colorful. Too cluttered.

Julie kept a tight rein on her emotions as she dumped the contents of her suitcase on the bed and started toward her closet for fresh clothes. Midway, she stopped. Draped on a hanger from atop the molding of the closet door, exactly where she’d left it, was the black
taffeta dress she was to have worn to the school holiday dance.

The dress looked beautiful and pristine. It reminded her of a simpler time, a throwback to days of unhurried sweetness when nothing was more pressing in her life than studying for a test. Or talking on the phone with Solena. Or making plans for a date with Luke. She felt a catch in her throat.

Slowly, she approached the dress and fingered the satiny material. How foreign it felt. Her hands were used to touching hospital sheets, hospital-issue pajamas, and cotton blankets. The dress’s elegant fabric no longer belonged in her world. She wondered if there would ever be room for such an extravagance again.

Tears slid down her cheeks, wetting her skin. She felt her shoulders begin to shake as sobs, unchecked, poured out of her.
Luke, Luke … What’s going to happen to us?
She couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t stop aching inside. Julie buried her face in the dark fabric and felt the dampness soak into the material. She could almost hear her mother saying, “Be careful. Water will stain taffeta. It’s not a very practical dress, you know.”

But Julie only wept harder, not caring.
Somehow the tearstains seemed appropriate. The dress would wear the watermarks forever, a symbol of the lost innocence of her life. Of the cruel and bitter upheaval in Luke’s. The dress was fantasy. The heap of practical clothing on her bed was real life.

Quickly, Julie jerked open the closet door and, with muffled weeping, began to repack.

On Christmas Day, Luke’s hair began to fall out. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said without mirth, holding up the wad of hair left on his pillow.

“It’s only hair,” Julie said. But inwardly, she was shaken.

At her mother’s insistence—as well as Luke’s and his mother’s—she had gone home Christmas Eve and spent Christmas morning with her parents. Then, bringing gifts, she and her family had driven over to Chicago to visit Luke.

The hospital staff had done its best to make the day festive for the patients on the oncology floor, wheeling them out of their rooms to gather round the decorated tree in the rec room next to the nurses’ station. They had bought and wrapped gifts for all their regulars, which Julie found touching. It struck her that in a weird way, they were all part of a family,
one held together by the disease of cancer. Many of the patients were worse off than Luke, but he was the youngest one on the floor, and clearly a favorite of the staff.

Coach Ellis brought him a football signed by the players on the Indianapolis Colts, and she had given him a baseball hat, a sweater, and a glamorous color photograph of herself. He sat holding it, staring down at her smiling face. “You’re beautiful, Julie. You look just like Marilyn Monroe.”

“Oh, stop it,” she chided, embarrassed by his compliment. He’d been a fan of Marilyn’s for years; posters of her hung in his room beside posters of NFL superstars. “You told me once that you wanted a good picture of me, so I had it made for you. It’s nothing special.”

“It is to me.” He looked into her eyes, and in spite of his gaunt face, his thinning hair, and his sallow complexion, she still considered him handsome. “I bought you this last October. I’ve been paying it off a little at a time. Mom got it out for me last week when she went home for the day.” He handed her a small, wrapped box.

Inside was a gold bracelet, the chain thin and delicate, with tiny pearls set like staggered snowdrops along its length. She thought it was
the most wonderful gift she’d ever received from him and told him so by kissing him in front of the entire assembly. Everybody clapped and Luke blushed. “I got you this too,” he said, and produced a rose, which gave her another opportunity to kiss him.

That night, Julie and Luke’s mother returned to their room at the Ronald McDonald House. Nancy put away her few gifts. Julie’s parents had been generous to Luke’s mother, buying her a stylish cable-knit sweater and a gift certificate to a Waterton area department store, which Julie had brought to Chicago.

“Being stuck in the hospital is a crummy way to spend the holiday,” Julie announced as she climbed under the covers. “And I know the hospital kitchen tried, but my mom’s Christmas dinner is so much better.”

“Perhaps she’ll give us a rain check on that dinner.”

“I know she will.”

“I can’t thank you and your parents enough for all you’ve done for Luke and me. When Luke was younger, I was so afraid he’d take up with the wrong crowd. But then football came along, and with it, your dad. He’s treated Luke like a son.”

“Luke’s never talked much about his father.
Not even to me. I guess he misses having one more than ever now.”

“I don’t think he remembers Larry very well.”

“He died in a fall, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He was walking the steel riggings. He’d only been on the job for a few months. The company paid his funeral expenses and I was lucky enough to be hired on as an office worker.”

“Well, you’re the office
manager
now,” Julie said.

“It’s taken me seven years of hard work to get there. That’s why I want Luke to go to college.”

Although Julie believed Nancy accepted the way she and Luke felt about one another, Julie also knew Nancy had dreams for her son. She prized education and always urged Luke to get good grades so that he could have a better life. In that respect, Nancy and Julie’s mother thought alike. They equated getting out of Waterton with optimum happiness.

“You’re lucky to have such a nice family, Julie. I wish I had more family around me. Especially now.”

None of Luke’s grandparents was living. “Luke’s uncle Steve knows what’s going on,
doesn’t he?” Steve was Luke’s father’s only brother.

“Yes, but he’s all the way out in Los Angeles. Except for phone calls and cards, there’s nothing he can do. We haven’t seen him for years. He’s a bachelor with a job connected to the movie industry. He has a life of his own out there. No … I’m afraid all Luke and I have for support is each other. And your family, of course. Your family has made all the difference in our lives, Julie.”

Julie wondered if Nancy would be so comfortable if she understood how much Julie’s mother wanted Julie and Luke’s relationship to cool off. “I’ll always be here for Luke,” Julie declared. “No matter what.”

Nancy smiled. “Right now, you’re the only thing holding my son together. This chemo business has knocked him for a loop. Kids—boys especially—think they’re invincible. Why, I can count on one hand the number of days Luke’s been sick in his life. When he gets sick, he doesn’t mess around with the small stuff, does he?”

Tears filled Nancy’s eyes and Julie thought she might break down. “The chemo treatments won’t last forever,” Julie said hastily.

Nancy sniffled hard. “And he isn’t nearly as sick as he was in the beginning.”

“Still, it’s a crummy way to spend Christmas.”

“A crummy way,” Nancy echoed.

Their conversation had come full circle. They gave each other a good-night hug, turned off the lights, and went to bed. Julie lay in the dark staring at the window. Even though the curtains were closed, she could see the faint outline of Christmas lights aglow in nearby buildings. Their soft colors reminded her of her tree back home and filled her with longing to be a kid again. To be exhausted from getting up too early to see what Santa had brought. To be full of Christmas dinner and too much candy. To be snuggled in her own bed, in her own room, with nothing to think about but playing with her new toys when morning came.

But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. And this Christmas, she was miles from home, in a rented room, with a hospital a block away. With Luke, the only boy she’d ever loved, receiving chemo for a rare and deadly form of cancer. She fingered the bracelet on her wrist and stuffed her fist into her mouth, so that Nancy wouldn’t hear her cry herself to sleep.

D
r. Kessler allowed Luke to return home New Year’s Day. Luke was to remain on chemo for another week, then go off treatment for two weeks, then begin the process all over again.

“The county can get you tutors so that you can stay on grade level,” Julie heard her mother, who had brought a casserole to Luke’s house for dinner that night, tell him.

“I might want a tutor,” he said. “I’d really like to stay caught up with my class.”

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to Julie that Luke might not go back to school. The term started the next day and she had to return. “You should come to school,” Julie said once her mother was gone. “Everybody’s asking about you. You’ll feel better seeing the gang.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I look pretty
grim.” He wore his baseball cap all the time to hide his bald head.

“Not to me.”

“Then you’d better get glasses.” He sighed and flopped back against the couch. “I look like a freak, Julie. And I feel like one too.” He pulled the neck of his sweater up higher, making certain it covered the catheter near his collarbone.

“You can’t stay out the entire term,” Julie insisted.

“When I’m off chemo, I might consider going back. But once I start treatments again, I’ll have to drop out. I don’t want to start barfing in the classroom.”

“Not even in Ms. Tyler’s?” She named the most formidable English teacher at the high school.

He ignored her attempt to be funny. “Don’t pressure me. This isn’t something I can decide now. Will you come over tomorrow afternoon and tell me about your day?”

“Sure,” she said, but she was disappointed. Somehow, she’d assumed that once he got out of the hospital, he’d act more like his old self.

Julie returned to Waterton High and was bombarded with questions about Luke all day long. Students, teachers, even the principal
and office personnel queried her. In the cafeteria with Solena, she could hardly get her lunch down for the interruptions.

“Frank says that the guys on the team want to do something for Luke, but they don’t know what,” Solena said after the crowd momentarily cleared away from the table. “Some of the guys are weirded out about it. They think Luke hung the moon and they can’t imagine him being sick this way.”

“Then fire up your imagination—he really is.”

“But
cancer
! It—it’s so
unfair
!”

“Please, Solena, don’t talk about it. I know it’s unfair, and I get mad whenever I think about it. So why don’t we just change the subject, all right?”

Solena looked contrite. Julie heard the drone of nearby voices, the clatter of silverware, the clack of plates being scraped and stacked. After a few minutes of awkward silence, Solena said, “Frank’s taking me into Chicago Friday night for a concert. I wish you and Luke could come with us. We haven’t doubled in ages—it would be like old times.”

“Well, we can’t.” Julie hadn’t meant for her voice to sound so sharp, but Solena was getting on her nerves.

“What are you going to do with yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you … you know … date anybody else?”

“How could you suggest such a thing? I would never run around on Luke. Especially now.”

“I—I didn’t mean get
serious
with anybody else, but golly, Julie, what are you going to do Friday and Saturday nights? Just sit at home? Or go over to Luke’s all the time?”

Julie hadn’t thought that far ahead, but all at once she saw the weeks stretching in front of her in one long, monotonous string. With Luke sick and not willing to come out of his shell, there’d be no dates, no special events in their lives. The thought upset her. And she was upset with Solena for making her think about it. “He won’t be sick forever,” Julie snapped. “As soon as he’s finished with his chemo treatments, he’ll be well and he can pick up his life again.”