About a week and half after she’d fished his future out of him, Eddy accompanied Reagan and Mrs Crowe back to the hospital. This time they had an appointment. It was chemo time.
Reagan was nervous as anything, but on that front she was only marginally ahead of the rest of them. Where she stood head and shoulders above them was in the pain stakes. It appeared to Eddy that the cure was worse than the disease. They’d instructed her to up the meds leading in to the chemo and that took a massive toll on her. It seemed to be ripping her from the inside out. Watching on as she threw her head back to swallow yet one more pill, he was both crushed with sorrow and amazed at her courage. Each new pill was another package of side effects and horrid reactions and yet she continued to take them.
Yet while she was brave on the outside, inside she was still a frightened little girl. When they’d taken her into the radiology suite, she’d looked back at Eddy with an expression that had killed a piece of him. A pile of pills a day was one thing, this was something more sinister altogether. But what stabbed him worst was that he could do nothing to stop her being wheeled away from him. She had to go, even though she so desperately didn’t want to.
And in the end, it had been every bit as bad as he’d hoped it wouldn’t be. She stayed that full next week and a half in the hospital, most of it spent recovering from the vein-deep bouts of radiation that, despite their best efforts of targeted application and pain management, wracked her to the bone.
Seeing her there, amid the four corners of her recovery room, Eddy felt an immutable urge for circles. Life was all about circles, not squares. Squares had ends, hard, sharp ends that refused to budge. Circles, on the other hand, never ended, they just kept renewing themselves. Hospitals would be much better places for healing, he concluded, if they were designed as circles. No architectural reason, just a sense.
Reagan wasn’t up for talking most of that time. He couldn’t blame her. She had more tubes poking in and out of her than an engine, and Eddy figured maybe that was how the doctors saw her. An engine. Something to be tinkered and tweaked. Does this work? Does that work? What if I tighten this or loosen that?
Damn it, she was a girl, a human being, a creation too great to fully comprehend. There had to be a less intrusive way. If she was going to die, let her die in peace.
When the doctors and nurses weren’t measuring one thing or another, Eddy would read to her. Happy stories. Stories with pages of hope and blessed ever-afters. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even sure she heard him, but that didn’t deter him. It gave him something to do, something that, even in the tiniest of ways, might just make her painful existence a touch easier.
When she was consumed by a sudden and vicious bout of vomiting, he’d be there too, the first to grab the bucket and hold back her hair. The same hair that would soon begin to thin and fall out.
And at no time whatsoever, despite seeing her at her lowest of lows, did he ever stop seeing her as anything but beautiful.
Those times when she was fast asleep, when he knew she couldn’t hear him, nor could anybody see them, he’d put the book down and watch her. Her appearance may have changed but she was so much more than that. The girl who’d made him countless jam sandwiches was still in there, and he’d tell her that. He’d talk to her in those solitary moments. Not much more than a whisper, but loud enough so that if she was awake deep down inside, she’d be able to hear him still. So that his words would touch her soul and find a haven that could never be wiped away. She’d stamped herself on his soul and he just wanted to do the same for her.