In Memory (29 page)

S
wallowed, immediately frightened of those words.

“How dare you make him smile, and be happy, and be loved when you are only going to leave him? You are selfish, and ignorant.”

At that, I was angry. “I’m with him because I love him, and for right now, he needs me! Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it becomes today!”

“You are torturing him. Your death will destroy him, and despite other people’s warnings, you still persist to give him false hope? You are cruel.”

“Yeah, I’m stupid. I’m an idiot for believing I can change my fate. But maybe there’s some way I can change his. I’ll love him, and I’ll show him that there is a reason to love this life. If I can show him the kindness he deserves, and that he can be happy, maybe… just maybe he can live without me. If that hope is cruel, then I guess I’m a sick son of a bitch, but there’s no way I’m not going to try. I’ve accepted it, I’m going to die, but he doesn’t have to be killed with me.”

There was a long silence before he replied. “I am sorry. I understand your intentions.”

“Let him go.” I said, “Stay where you belong, in my dreams.”

“I do not belong anywhere.”

The anger was gone, and I heard Noah take a deep breath.

“Aerie…”

“Noah. It’s okay now. Let’s go.” I stood up, helping him up as I did so, and we approached the door. It sounded very normal out there, the usual hustle and bustle of the hallways.

O
pened the door and peered out, squinting at the bright fluorescent lights. No one seemed to be paying much attention to us, so we surreptitiously made our way back to the room, and had lukewarm tea.

D
idn’t tell him about talking with Tobias. And he didn’t mention it at all. Apparently, he was unaware of the whole thing. That’s kind of a disturbing notion; he doesn’t remember even though technically he was present.

S
uppose that also explains his extreme overreaction to his loss of memories. It must happen enough for him to notice, and it bothers him to have huge gaps.

His knowledge seems to matter a great deal to him, and any loss of it is devastating.

69 Days, 20 December, Saturday

We went home today.

What a relief to write that sentence. Like we’re a family, and returning to our home together is the most natural thing in the world.

Upon returning to the house, however, we discovered that there was little to no good food handy. I guess we had some celery and some carrots that had seen better days, but nothing to make a satisfactory meal with.

D
id a quick run to the store, and left Terra and Noah together at the house.
D
unno
what they talked about, but I have every confi
dence that they got on well. P
ictured a scene where they were laughing about something, and Terra called him Sailor again, and he smiled.

The snow was getting seriously nuts though. It had gotten much worse since I went to the store, and I was having serious reservations about walking back. When I got out into the
carpark
, though, they were waiting for me in the car.

It’s always a pleasant surprise when something like that happens, but it’s all the more pleasant by the fact that it’s the two most important people in my life.

“
Haha
, hey guys!” I grinned as I opened the door, feeling the warming rush of the interior air. “I’m glad to see you!”

They both smiled.

“Hurry now, get on in!” Terra motioned for me to get in, so I did, sitting down beside Noah with a rustle of plastic bags.

“
Haa
! It’s really cold out today, huh?”

Noah nodded, and then grabbed my hand, rubbing it between his own.

Terra put the radio on; there was an upbeat Christmas tune playing, which made her look round. “It’s almost Christmas.”

“That is true.” I answered, with obvious amusement.

“I mean
,
it’s in five days! It snuck up on me this year!”

“It was Christmas Eve before you realised it last year, Terra.” I grinned, taking Noah’s other hand.

He smiled appreciatively, shuffling closer to me.

“Well, this year, I thought I should be more on top of it, but with everything that’s happened, and all this crazy stuff, it was easy to forget!”

“Well what do you
wanna
do?”

“Well, we’ve got candles for the window already, but I
dunno
, should we go get the holly or something?”

“I did buy the raisin bread already. I thought that far ahead.”

“Excuse me. What sort of purpose do holly and raisin bread serve?” Noah asked.

“Oh, it’s just stuff we’d have from back home.” Terra laughed, “It seems weird to not keep the traditions up.”

“Do you mean home as in overseas?”

“Oh yeah! I remember how the house would always be decorated, and Dad would tell us the reasons for all of the traditions. It was always one of the best parts. We’d all sit round the tree, and then Dad would tell stories, and sing songs. Mum would always play the flutes and stuff. They invited pretty much the whole pub, so it was always really busy. And you, Aerian,” she looked at me in the
rearview
mirror, “You’d try and sing with Dad, and play flutes, and decorate the tree and cook all at the same time.” She laughed, “You were always so interested in everything, it was so funny.”

I smiled, not really sure of what to say.

“And then Mum and I would braid yours and Dad’s hair, and put bits of holly and stuff in it. Then we’d take pictures and eat cake…” she sighed. “It was always really fun.”

After a moment of semi-awkward silence, I spoke up, “So… did you want to do something like that this year?”

I think the best thing to do right now is
make
her as happy as I can. Only 69 days left, right? If she wants a pub party, with all her crazy friends, and music, and food, then that’s what we’ll do.

“Yeah! That would be fun! I’ll have to dig up some proper party stuff! It’s been a while since we had a big party, huh?”

“I can’t even remember having a party here.”

“Well, that settles it then! We’ll have a huge fun Christmas Eve party! On Christmas Day it’ll just be the three of us, and we’ll have a quiet day. Like a recovery day.” She laughed again as we pulled into the drive. “Not that you
guys’ll
need it I guess.”

M
ade a small batch of rigatoni and a cabbage salad. A lot of people say that cabbage salad is coleslaw, I guess. But there’s seriously a difference between cabbage salad and coleslaw. Coleslaw has teeny pieces, and cabbage salad doesn’t. There’s a distinction.

N
ot sure why that was important enough to write down.

G
uess insignificant details are what make up our lives.

68 Days, 21 December, Sunday

Today was a really fun day too. Noah and I spent a lot of the day in the kitchen, and made all sorts of desserts and things. I found my recipe for shortbread, which is always something we’d have at Christmas time, and always had the little maraschino cherries on it.

We made sugar cookies too, and ended up eating rather a lot of the dough instead of cooking them first.

L
ove cooking when we have a lot of good food, it
’s always more fun. K
eeps your options open more than just week old celery and carrots ever could.

For the most part, though, Noah stayed seated at the table, and helped only from there.
I’m not inclined to ask him to do much more than that
,
he is still in recovery
. He takes everything very slowly, and is much more deliberate about all his movements than he was before.  I mean, he always moved carefully, but now it seems like his every move is planned out exactly in his mind.

K
ind of admire that, because I’m kind of a
spaz
.

G
uess we balance each other out, like May mentioned before. Opposites attract after all.

A
lways wondered why we got on so well and apparently it’s because we complement each other. That makes sense. Yeah.

It didn’t take long for him to fall asleep after we settled down after supper. We were listening to Terra’s Christmas CD’s, a
nd he leaned on my shoulder. F
irst thought that he was just initiating a cuddle, so I wrapped my arm around his shoulder. He sighed out a soft breath, his face slack and peaceful.

“Oh, Aerian, if he’s falling asleep, you really should take him to his bed. I don’t recommend the couch, it’s hard on his back.”

N
odded, gently awakening him by stroking his cheek with the back of my hand and saying his name softly. “Noah… wake up.”

Noah’s eye opened, but
the bright blue was obscured by his lashes, just from the angle I was on
.

“I’m going to take you to your bed, okay?”

He murmured a noise of assent, and we stumbled off, awkwardly
manoeuvring
down the hallway as he was falling asleep while walking.

G
ot him settled in nice and snug, layering him with multiple quilts. The peaceful silence had returned.

S
tayed beside him longer than I had intended, just enjoying the sound of his breathing, without t
he tether of those machines. N
ever appreciated it as much as now, the absence of extra noise.  At least five minutes of peace passed, and then I kissed him goodnight.

The impulse to crawl into the bed beside him was almost overwhelming. It felt weird to go upstairs to my own room.

It was lonely.

67 Days, 22 December, Monday

Noah and I have now worked out what we call ‘Guildenstern’s Law of Sibling Distribution’.

It was a weird discussion, (as many we have are), and had to do with my general proficiency in household chores, and Terra’s general lack thereof.

Noah elected that between all siblings, there are an allotted number of skill points, and they are distributed throughout siblings to create individual skill sets.

That is to say, that if I am skilled at cooking, Terra is likely to be less skilled, as there are only the two of us, and so more skill points were given to me, and less to her.

I offered gave another example of three siblings,
all proficient
in art, but in varying degrees. Where the one sibling was more skilled in art, they lacked other qualities the other two possessed. Such as social skills, and etcetera.

It was sort of fun, and you really had to think about how to word things before saying them.

There was a lot of repetition of the word skill though. Doesn’t even look like a word anymore.
Skill
skill
skill
.

Kills.

….

Hm.

Maybe that applies here too. I can hope.

If I’m going to die at a young age, maybe that means Terra will live a good long life.

There has to be a balance, right?

Balance is in everything.

Here's an idea.

The glass is
neither half-full or
half-empty, because you can't have one without the other. Enjoy the fact that, for once, you get both.

Have your cake, and eat it too, my friends, and revel in the truth of balance.

Happiness for misery.

I can take this to mean that after all of this sadness and pain, he’s going to be immeasurably happy. That’s his equal reward isn’t it?

We went shopping today as well.

It was sort of funny, we went to the little dollar store, and bought each other gifts, little tacky things, but we all realised it was the thought that counted. I don’t mind getting a spatula if it’s given with love.

Actually, we found a cane for Noah today too. Apparently, it belonged to
Granpa
, and Terra dug it out of the closet, and presented it to him. (He’s using the cane so he doesn’t have to walk so heavily on his ankle.) The cane has a snake carved into it, wrapping around the length of it, and there’s an etching in the handle. There’s a crown and a cross, which I take to mean is some sort of religious thing, and the handle is a pair of carved wings. It’s really odd, and Terra said she kept it as a souvenir of
Granpa’s
oddity. It was one of the few things she actually brought with her from Ireland.

Noah looked on it with reverence, admiring the obviously impressive craftsmanship.

That got Terra interested in all of her other stuff from back home, and she went and got
Gran’s
jewellery
box. There was a lot of really cool stuff in there, even some of Mum’s
jewellery
. As she held up all the different articles, and told us stories regarding each of them, one in particular caught my eye.