The Heartbroken - S01 E234

Story 2 years ago

The Heartbroken - S01 E234

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 234

Since that day, I always tried to bring Adrienne with

me during the weekends. Even the nurses had

gotten to know her through the visits and they

noticed, just like I did, that ever since my (then) nine-

year-old stepsister walked into his life, Cedric seemed

much, much happier.

The first time I’d ever seen Cedric’s mother pacing

around the hospital corridors was during his last

month. Somehow, the sight of her, looking

remarkably like Cedric in an understated way, made

me wonder if she regretted leaving; if she regretted

deciding to remove herself from Cedric’s life

altogether and choosing to come back only when

Cedric had lost control of his life.

The whole week before the day he died, he’d been

drifting in and out of various stages of

consciousness. He celebrated his eighteenth birthday

asleep and drugged, with rotating visitors wishing

him a happy birthday, when it was anything but

happy in that dreary hospital room.

When it was my turn to talk to him, I could hardly

say anything, too overwhelmed by the sheer irony

of the fact that he was spending his birthday trying

not to die.

It was too painful to bear and I mostly just held onto

his hand, not saying the words I’d prepared to tell

him, just trying to let him know I was there, I was

there, I was there.

Every day after that had been excruciatingly close to

torture.

I dreaded every phone call, every text message, as

each and every one of these was enough to give me

a heart attack as we all waited for what had seemed

like the inevitable back then. I’d seen it coming; felt it

happening as he took all those labored breaths in that

goddamned hospital, but when The Call happened

five days later, the news hit me so hard it was like I’d

never even expected it at all.

The days before and after that merged into one big

blur of sadness. It was a period in which I had to go

through the same things I did when my dad was the

one thrown into the cancer equation.

“Once we watched a movie,” I had said during his

funeral, my eyes too dry to produce any tears after

all the long hours I’d spent crying, “which revolves

around the concept of miracles. It was said there that

each and every one of us were destined for

something, and this something was to be another

person’s miracle.”

I kept my eyes low, not daring to look at anyone in

the crowd.

“At one point in time,” I continued, “I had hoped to

be his miracle, to be that someone who could find a

way to heal him. In the end, it was him who had

become my miracle.”

—

Adrienne set down the apple on Cedric’s gravestone.

I watched as she lowered herself down and carefully

placed it somewhere in the middle of the gray slab,

before standing up to greet him a happy birthday.

Hail and I decided to come here to give him our gifts

and Adrienne, of course, tagged along. Hail and I

once agreed that if anyone had been Cedric’s miracle,

it was Adrienne.

She was so spirited, so lively, it was like she brought

life to that dreary hospital room. He liked having her

around and while my sister never admitted it, I

suspecting she had a little crush on him.

Hail and I watched as my stepsister whispered a few

words into the air.

It was hard to believe that he had been gone for

almost a year now.

“I kind of really effing miss you,” I said, filtering my

own vocabulary around Adrienne, as I placed a set

of guitar strings somewhere near the apple.

“And you kind of effing s--k for missing out on

Senior year,” Hail added as she put her own gift—

a Beatles shirt—to the pile of our odd, mismatched

gifts.

Now I understand that you never really stop missing

someone, even long after you’ve moved on. You

simply get used to the fact that you are missing

them, changing the way you deal with their absence.

It wasn’t easy, not at all, but if there was anything I’d

learned after everything that had happened to me—

with Dad, with Seth, with Cedric—it was the fact that

it wasn’t impossible either.