Within These Walls (36 page)

“How did she even know?” she asked.

“Her doctor. He’s her uncle. In his blind love for her, he told her before it was official.”

“She should have never known.”

“I know, but she does, and I can’t blame Marcus for loving her. It’s an easy thing to do,” I said.

I moved ahead and told her about what Lailah had decided after the denial from the insurance company and why I’d left.

“Jude, I admire what you did, and I’m so grateful to have you back in our lives again. But are you sure you made the right choice?” Her expression was warm and comforting.

I looked down to the floor, gathering my thoughts. “If you had the choice, right now, between spending a lifetime alone or a single year with Dad, which would you take?”

“The year,” she answered without hesitation.

I nodded without looking up. “But what if it were in reverse?” I questioned, meeting her gaze. “What if you had to choose for him? Only one year with you or a lifetime, Mom? Would you choose differently?”

Her lips pursed together, and I knew she understood.

“Why does it have to be one or the other, son? Why can’t you have both?”

“Because I can’t be in two places at once,” I answered.

“YOU FILED AN appeal?” I bellowed, slamming my salad fork down on the hard wooden surface of my mom’s solid oak dining table.

She startled slightly from the noise, and I watched her eyes widen in surprise.

“Yes, um…” she stumbled before blotting her lips with her cloth napkin and sitting up in her seat. She glanced over at Marcus, who had suspiciously joined us for the evening. With a nod, she turned back to me. “I know you asked us not to, honey, but this is your life we’re talking about, and I—we couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.”

I looked at the two of them. “So, both of you were in on this?”

They nodded their heads.

“When?”

“When what?” Marcus’s brows furrowed together.

“When did you submit the appeal?”

“A day or two after Jude left,” he said.

My heart fell at his answer. For a split second, when they’d mentioned an appeal, I’d thought Jude might have been behind it as well. He’d been so angry, so firm against my decision, that I just thought maybe he would have done something.

I hadn’t wanted him to, so I didn’t know why it saddened me that he hadn’t.

“So, you submitted an appeal. What now?” I asked, picking up my fork to push a grape tomato around the bed of greens on my plate.

“Nothing.”

I looked up at my mother, who was smiling.

“What do you mean, nothing? Did they already deny it?”

“No, Lailah. They approved it.”

My fork tumbled from my fingers, falling to the floor with a clattering clank. My eyes stung with repressed tears as I jerked them from Marcus’s jubilant expression to my mother’s.

“Approved?”

They both nodded, rising from their chairs with open arms that wrapped around me.

“Are you sure?” I asked as the emotional dam broke, and moisture dampened my cheeks.

“Yes.” They laughed. “We’re sure.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Change of heart. Divine intervention?” my mother said.

I looked up at her with a dubious expression, and she laughed.

“Who cares? It’s approved!”

“Oh my gosh! I can’t believe it!”

My mom took my hand, pulling me up from the chair. “Come on, I made something special for you. It’s in the kitchen.”

We all followed her into the small galley kitchen and watched as she moved things around in the refrigerator. Finally, she turned to face us, proudly displaying a bowl full of homemade chocolate pudding.

I stared at it, frozen in place.

“I always saw the empty containers in your trash can at the hospital, so I figured you had a thing for it even though those store-bought ones are so high in sodium. Really, Lailah, you should know better.”

Flashbacks of Jude pulling out tiny packs of pudding, his dimple etched into his megawatt grin, before we spent the night talking over our spoonfuls of chocolate. The night he’d fed me in the hospital, and my stomach had turned into butterflies came blazing back and then fizzled into a moment not too long ago when we’d spent an evening in his apartment, licking the sticky dessert off each other’s bodies.

“I’m actually not that hungry,” I blurted out, turning my head away to flick away the tears that had begun to trickle down my cheek. “Maybe some popcorn later though?” I added quickly, looking up with a fake smile plastered on my face.

My mom nodded, looking over at Marcus, who just shrugged.

We settled down onto the couch and watched a movie together. Eventually, Marcus did make a bowl of popcorn. No one touched the pudding. I thought it had been blacklisted even though neither of them understood why.

It had been nearly a month since I’d seen him, felt his touch on my skin, and heard his deep voice whispered against my ear. Every minute had felt like a year. I’d always thought watching time go by in a hospital bed was agonizing. Seeing the seconds tick by without Jude was hell.

I couldn’t turn on the television without eventually running into his face. He was everywhere. He was like the lost city of Atlantis for the financial world. Even the Hollywood gossip magazines and TV shows were picking up on it, taking photos of him on the street, as they told the story of his tragic past.

Will Jude Cavanaugh find love again?

The world all wanted to know.

“Will you tell him?” my mother asked.

I looked up to find her staring at me. The TV was off, and Marcus was gone. Two hours had gone by, and I had stayed locked up inside my head.

“Who?”

She raised her brow as if to say,
Really?

I gave an exasperated huff. “No,” I answered. “He left me, Mom. He wasn’t strong enough to stay when things got hard. Just because I have the approval doesn’t mean the road ahead is paved in gold. What if he came back, and the transplant didn’t take? Would he leave again?”

“I don’t know,” she answered as sorrow etched her features.

“He chose his own life, and now, I guess I’m choosing mine—alone.”

Waiting for a heart to become available was a lot like waiting on a natural disaster. I knew it would eventually happen, but I didn’t know when, and I didn’t know how.

For weeks, I was glued to the phone and pager the hospital had provided.

After the third week, I started to lose hope.

It’s never going to happen.

“It will happen, Lailah. Give it time,” Marcus encouraged as we sat on the couch one evening, watching
The Vampire Diaries
.

“I know. But will I be sane by then?”

“Probably not, especially if you keep watching this ridiculous show. Seriously, it’s horrible.”

I hit pause on the remote and turned to him. “Say you didn’t mean it.”

“What?” He grinned.

“Turn to the screen, look deep into Damon’s gorgeous blue eyes, and say you didn’t mean it.”

“Um…”

“I’ll call you Uncle Marcus,” I sang, causing him to laugh.

“Fine,” he grumbled. He repeated the words, which were nearly inaudible due to the amount of mumbling.

“That was terrible, but I’ll take it. Damon and I forgive you. Now, quiet, Uncle Marcus, and finish the show with me,” I said.

I must have dozed off after the show had ended because I was suddenly being shaken awake.

“Lailah, wake up.”

“What?” Why? Just let me sleep here,” I protested.

“The hospital just called,” Marcus said. “It’s time.”

I jolted upright, looking around the room, until I found him standing in front of me. My mom was racing around the apartment, packing things into a duffel bag. Absolute fear took over as I watched her.

This is real. No more waiting for the phone to ring.

It is happening—now.

I could die. I could die on that operating table, and this could be my final moments with my family.

I’d die never seeing his face again.

“Lailah, breathe,” Marcus said gently, pushing my head to the floor, between my knees. “Deep, slow breaths through your nose,” he instructed.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I cried out.

Every single procedure, surgery, and test came racing back at that moment. I remembered every minute of recovery time, every second of pain.

“Oh God,” I moaned.

Suddenly, I wasn’t staring at Marcus’s feet anymore but his face. Kneeling down, he grasped my chin and centered me.

“You are the strongest person I know, Lailah. UCLA has some of the best surgeons in the country. You’re going to do just fine.”

“Okay,” I said weakly, nodding my head.

He cradled me in his arms like a child.

My mother followed us as we walked to the car, and he tucked me in the backseat. I stretched out and rested my head against the cushion as I watched the two of them work in tandem, throwing bags in the car. Marcus drove and pulled out of the complex. My mother was bent over her phone, her fingers furiously dancing across the keys. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her use it for anything other than brief conversations.

“Who are you texting?” I asked.

“Grace,” she answered, stopping briefly, before continuing again.

I realized, sitting in the back of that car, that this was probably the closest thing I’d ever have to knowing what it was like to go into labor. I’d watched my loved ones run around on my behalf, making frenzied calls and text messages, before the rushed late-night car ride to the hospital. The only difference was, at the end of the day, the only new life would be mine.

What would I do with it?

Within fifteen minutes, we were pulling into the UCLA medical plaza parking lot and walking through the glass doors of the transplant center. After signing about a zillion forms that I honestly didn’t pay attention to, we headed to a room and waited for the surgeon.

Already dressed in scrubs and booties, a middle-aged man greeted us a few minutes later, shaking my hand firmly and introducing himself as Dr. Westhall.

“Nice to meet you,” I answered softly.

He turned and did the same greeting to my mother. Then, he perked up when he saw Marcus.

“Good to see you again, Marcus.”

“You, too, Todd,” he replied.

“So, this is your niece?” Dr. Westhall said, taking a casual seat in the free chair near the door.

“Yes,” Marcus answered. “She’s the closest thing I have to a daughter, so please take care of her.”

He smiled and winked. “We’re going to fix you up good as new, sweetheart.”

Well, at least one of us is sure.

Dr. Westhall proceeded to go over the procedure in detail, outlining the length of time and what would happen during the operation. After questions were asked by all of us, he excused himself, and we were left to wait while they finished prepping for surgery.

The waiting was always the hardest part, staring at the closed door while wondering how much time was left until it opened back up.

An hour passed until a nurse finally came to retrieve me. After a teary good-bye with a long group hug, I was wheeled into the operating room and prepped. They scrubbed and shaved the fine hairs from my chest and set up my IV. A friendly motherly-looking nurse stroked my forehead as I looked up at the ceiling. Breathing through my mouth, I counted the tiles above my head.

“We’ll take care of you. Go to sleep now,” she whispered.

And the world faded to black.

White clouds hovered above me as my eyes fluttered open for a brief second. I heard loud whooping and sharp beeps. Everything felt distant and out of place, like I was listening to myself from another room with cotton balls shoved in my ears.

“She’s awake,” I heard my mother say. “Or at least she was.”

“She can’t see me,” a deep voice whispered.

“She won’t remember any of this. Just hold her hand, and talk to her. I’ll be outside.”

A soft click added to the mechanical noises, and I felt a deep warmth spread through my fingers.

“I miss you so much, angel.”

I know that voice.