17 days, 23 minutes, and one leg.
17 days.
It has been 17 days since Chloe had fainted at the sight of an empty house. 17 days since she and Stacie drove to the hospital to find Beca. 17 days since Beca collapsed, sobbing, into her arms, in a busy hospital waiting room.
17 days since the world slipped out from under them.
Again.
And beyond the two words that had kicked it all off, Beca has said nothing about what was happening.
She was there, at home. She was in the flat: in her room watching TV, or sometimes taking long, long showers (in the shower, in the wetroom, with the grab rail, because no one would say that Beca’s friends didn’t love her), or, just occasionally, in the kitchen, pouring a bowl of cereal. She was in the sitting room in the evenings, snuggled under a blanket, in an arm chair by herself. She did not attend the mere 6 hours a week of contact time expected of her, as a 3rd year English student, and she was not present at Bellas practises, despite still being the Captain, in name at least. But she was there. She was around.
She wasn’t even quiet or morose. She asked the girls about their days, she listened eagerly to stories of reptiles are children’s parties, of inconsiderate consultants and lab experiments gone wrong. She even spent some of her evenings hunched over in a corner of the living room with Legacy, discussing recording and producing, tracks and layers and balances and sounds.
So she was there, and she was loud. She just wasn’t talking, and she wasn’t touching. She wasn’t answering questions, she wasn’t hugging hello or goodbye, she wasn’t even sharing her bed with Chloe, despite a summer of passing out in a wave of chemo-exhaustion every night of the summer. The one time Chloe had tried, the night they had come back from the hospital, the first day Beca didn’t say anything, the last time Chloe had brushed her teeth with the younger girl, changed into her pajamas, slid into her side of the bed to join Beca, slipped an arm around her girlfriend’s waist, Beca had stiffened so suddenly and so completely that Chloe had pulled her arm away as though from fire, before Beca could burn her further by shrugging it off herself. She had fumbled some excuse, made something up, rushed from the warm duvet in the warm room and into her own, barely slept in bed. She had cried herself to sleep, and in the morning, when she saw Beca in the kitchen, matching puffy eyes, they hadn’t talked about it. Hadn’t mentioned it. Hadn’t done anything except dance around each other to make cereal, to take back to their respective rooms and eat in silence.
But it had been 17 days now, and Chloe didn’t know what was happening, and it was not ok.
“What’s going on, Bec?”
“Umm, I’m watching Gossip Girl, what does it look like?”
“Beca, you know what I mean.”
“Nope, I don’t. Cos all that’s going on is I’m trying to watch Gossip Girl, and you’re missing it!”
“Beca, cut the shit. You KNOW what I’m talking about. Please, just talk to me, please.”
“Look Chlo, they want to cut my leg off and I’ll probably die anyway, but I really want to know who Gossip Girl is, so can you please just give me a break until the end of this episode and then we can talk?”
“…” Chloe isn’t sure she’s even breathing at this point, let alone speaking.
“Good.”
Because what does a person even say to that? Chloe was become all to intimately familiar with the feeling that the floor had disappeared from under her, the lurching of her stomach into her chest and her heart into her gut, the pounding of her heart and the fainting ringing in her ears that signalled a sheer inability to engage with reality, an utterly physical withdrawal from the here and now, as if her whole body and mind were momentarily sucked into a different plane, out of time, before crashing, bodily, into irrefutable existence and an uncontrollable presence in the present. It’s hard to explain, that feeling, as if for a second you whole body leaps, and then it lands, and you’re there, and your girlfriend’s body is still riddled with cancer, and Gossip Girl is still playing on the laptop in front of you.
It is, in fact, 23 minutes later, when the body beside Chloe reaches forward, pressing the spacebar to pause the show before the almost unstoppable countdown of 16 seconds until the next episode starts. Chloe was still feeling numb, still tingling in her body and brain when Beca gently slipped a hand into hers and she snapped out of it, reminding herself for the umpteenth time that this was happening to Beca, and she had to be the strong one.
“It’s spread a lot, Chlo,” Beca starts, one hand still in Chloe’s, and her voice softer now.
“It’s spread up the blood vessels in my leg. It’s past my knee and into my thigh. The only thing they can do is to cut my leg off, really high up, and then give me batshit crazy chemo which might kill me itself. They want to cut my leg off, Chloe, and they want me to let them.”
Beca spoke quietly, kept her voice level, stayed calm. But Chloe’s mind is reeling and the world is spinning and she has literally no idea how she is supposed to respond in this situation.
“What do you mean, you have to let them?” is the first question she manages to ask.
“I mean, I have to consent to it. I have to sign a piece of paper that says that I’m ok with them cutting my leg off. I have to sign a piece of paper to say that I’m ok with them taking away an entire limb, I’m ok with having to learn how to walk again, to being completely dependent on crutches or a wheelchair for months, maybe forever. I have to say I’m ok with probably never being able to dance again. They want to take my leg Chloe, and maybe I could do without a foot, y’know? But you can’t do shit without a knee. I have to let them do it, or I’ll die. And I might die anyway, and I don’t even know which one I would prefer.”
“I’m sorry Becs,” Chloe says, because honestly, what is she supposed to say at this point? Her mind is reeling and she can’t think in a straight line between now and when everything will be ok.
“It’s ok,” Beca sighs, and for a minute the silence hangs heavy in the air between them. Chloe feels like she should say something, but she still doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s late. You wanna brush your teeth?” is what she eventually offers, and it probably isn’t the right thing to say, but somehow Beca gives a small smile anyway, and Chloe stands up first, reaching back to help the other girl off the bed, finding her, her crutch, and opening the door for the pair of them.
When they’ve brushed their teeth, Chloe goes to the loo first and heads downstairs while Beca is in the bathroom. She hesitates outside Beca’s door for a moment. She hasn’t slept in Beca’s bed, as she did every day before (before the hospital, before “it’s spread”, before Beca sobbing in her arms) and now it is after and part of her wants nothing more than to go to bed with Beca and hold her while she sleeps, hold her tight and close while she’s warm and breathing and has two legs, all the while vehemently denying that any of those things might change.
But then her eyes fill with tears and the air rushes out of her lungs as if someone has punched her diaphragm up and she is in her own room with the door shut before she hears the clunk of the bathroom door unlocking.
By the time Beca has made it out of the bathroom door, Chloe is face down on her bed and crying like she has never cried before.
Eventually, in an hour or so, she’ll fall asleep, and a couple of hours after that she’ll wake up, body stiff, uncomfortable with the unfamiliar feelings of being asleep in jeans, in her bra, with her make up on. Her eyes will string from the daylight-bright spotlights in her room, and her face will ache with swollen eyelids and salted tear tracks. She will stumble to the light switch by the door, turn the light off before pulling her jeans off, will kick them away from her, completely inside out. She’ll slip her bra straps down her arms, take it off without removing her t-shirt, and collapse again, under the covers this time, before falling asleep again, and waking up in the morning with puffy eyes and a second of confusion before the pit will return to her stomach.
All that is to come, but right now, she lies on her bed and sobs.