Last Chance

Chapter 15:

“Mark?” I question picking up the phone.

“He's throwing up,” Mark replies calmly with sympathy.

Maybe the drug trial wasn’t working.

“I’ll be there soon,” I reply hanging up.

“Nial, we have to go for a car ride,” I say trying to pretend it’s supposed to be exciting.

“Go see Jo?” he asked looking at me curiously.

“Yeah, we’re going to see Joel. He isn’t feeling well though so we have to be quiet, okay?” I reason.

I figured Nial talking to Joel might make the headache and sickness he was feeling worse, it would be easier to warn him now rather than later.

“Okay,” he replied.

He helped me pack up his things and load them into the car so they’d be ready to hand off to Alexandria, since she’d probably be back by the time we got back from the school.

I put his car seat in, got him situated with a plane, and buckled him in. I got in the front seat and started the car up. Nial was holding the plane up alongside the window as if it were flying in the white cloudy sky outside.

He was pretty quiet the whole drive.

When we arrived Joel and Mark were waiting outside with some of the office staff and a few concerned students. Joel was sitting on the steps holding the bottom of one of the handrails as if the world was still spinning. Mark got up and went to me.

“We got him some Ginger Ale but he still doesn’t feel that great,” he explains.

I approached him and knelt down in front of Joel. He looked pale, his blood sugar was probably low considering he’d just thrown up his breakfast and the Ginger Ale would only make it go up and come right back down.

He smiled at me nervously and sheepishly.

“Guess I pushed too hard,” Joel commented.

I smiled.

“Yeah, are you sure you want to come home?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he replies.

The students “Aw!” collectively.

“I’ll be back, don’t you guys worry,” he said with a smile.

I helped Joel up and to the car.

“I see we have a guest,” Joel commented looking into the back seat of the car.

“The elementary school had a snow day, and Alexandria had to go to work. I said I’d watch him,” I reply.

I help him into the car, the students and staff are waving from the front step, and Joel rolls down the window and waves back. I wave, too before going around to the other side of the car to get in.

Nial continues to play quietly with the plane.

“Cool, plane,” Joel comments.

Nial smiles.

“Jo,” he says and points to Joel.

Joel smiles back.

We drive home and when we get there Alexandria is standing on her doorstep watching for us.

I park the car in our driveway and get out. I go around the back and get Nial, his bag of toys, and the car seat out and walk to Alexandria who is now on our sidewalk.

“Thank you,” she says again taking the car seat and Nial who is now wearing the bag.

“You’re welcome,” I reply.

“I hope he wasn’t too much trouble,” she continues.

“No, he was a good kid,” I reply.

“Is Joel okay?” she asks.

“He threw up, it’s not a good sign probably a day after his second treatment,” I answer.

She nods, “Thank you, again,” she states smiling before turning and walking back to her own house.

I go back to the car and help Joel into the house. I sat him down on the couch, removed his shoes for him and took them and his coat back, and place them by the front door. I went back to him and knelt in front of him.

“Do you need anything?” I asked quietly.

“Can you get me the Advil?” he asked.

“Of course,” I reply touching his cheek before getting up and going into the kitchen to the medicine cabinet to get him the Advil.

I take the pill bottle back to him and he opens his Ginger Ale and swallows two of the pills in one swallow. Before Joel got sick he hated swallowing pills, and found it really hard, now after years of headaches he had perfected an art I wish he’d never had to.

“Do you want to go upstairs, or are you okay here?” I ask.

“I want to take a shower,” he replies.

“Okay, do you need help?” I ask.

I didn’t want to be overbearing but I didn’t want him to have stumble or seizure in the shower and fall and hit his head.

“Sure,” he agreed, getting up slowly.

We made our way upstairs and I closed the bedroom door. I undressed Joel and laid out new clothes for both of us before undressing myself and joining him in the bathroom. We locked the bathroom door and went inside the shower. Joel sat down on the seat in the shower. I turned the shower on and played with the nobs until I found the right temperature.

I went back to Joel, I studied the top of his head. It was almost impossible to see the surgery scars on his scalp now with the rate his hair was growing. I reached out and ran my hand across his scalp. He looked up at me nervous through my fingers.

“We should have had kids,” he whispered suddenly.

“We still can,” I reply. “If you want to.”

“I don’t want to leave you hanging with a kid when I die. Or make the kid feel like I abandoned them, or it’s their fault,” he replies shaking his head.

“It’s nobody’s fault you’re sick,” I reply quietly.

“I know, Luka. But a kid’s not going to understand that or not feel it regardless,” he continues. “You’ll have a hard enough time keeping the house and looking after Jamie when I’m gone, you don’t need more. I want kids but, what’s the point if I’m not going to be here for them?”

I sit beside him and rest my head on top of his.

“If you want one, maybe we should get a girl so we have a flower girl,” I whisper into his hair.

“Did we ever even talk about names?” he asks.

I was surprised. We’d had a kind of joke conversation about it when we were nineteen. It hadn’t been serious and we hadn’t written it down, but thought he’d at least remember it.

“It’d probably be easier to adopt a child, they’d most likely already have a name but we wanted to name our kids Trent for a boy, and Eleanor for a girl,” I reply.

If I had kids now I wanted to name one Joel, I wasn’t sure my new significant other would be approving though if I did that.

“I still like those names,” he replies.

“Do you want to try to adopt a kid?” I ask.

“That would be a lot, we already have a lot with you working, the drug trial, the wedding,” he reasons.

“I want you to be happy, we could always adopt an older child so they wouldn’t be as much work,” I reply. “Lots of older children need homes.”

“Are you sure?” he asks looking at the tiled ceramic floor of the shower.

“Only if you want to,” I reply quietly.

“I’ll have to call the lawyer again and have him fax over the forms so we can get approved to be foster parents,” he replies quietly with a small smile.

“Should we tell Jamie he’s going to have a housemate?” I ask.

“If we get approved we can tell him, he has enough as it is,” Joel replies.

“Okay,” I reply quietly smiling, I kiss him on the top of the head. “How old do we want the kid to be? We have to look into schools, too,” I continue.

“Between nine and fourteen maybe?” Joel replies. “I don’t know many teenagers who wanted to be a flower girl more than a bridesmaid eventually,” he answers.

“Do we want a teenager? We already have one, do we want to deal with more mood swings?” I ask joking a bit.

“We’ll see, we have to connect with the child, too,” he replies studying the depths of my eyes.

“Of course,” I reply.

“We get to have a child, of our own,” he mumbles into my chest quietly.

“We do,” I reply quietly.

But all I could think about was what Joel’s parents or Charlotte would say if they were here.

The child won’t really be yours. It’s a child that somebody else didn’t want that you took in because you couldn’t have your own. It’s your fault he can’t have biological kids, if you have just said no, refused, and lied he could have ended up with a good Christian girl, had kids, and lived a long healthy life, but you were selfish, you took that from him, now he’s dying, and he doesn’t have biological kids.

We could have gotten a surrogate and had biological kids but Joel didn’t have that kind of time to wait nine months and then only know his child for three months or less. Family isn’t necessarily blood, it’s who you let into your life and who treats you as you want to be treated. Joel was my family, and Jamie was my family. I could stretch it to Alexandria and her kids, they were nice and I’d been raised with our neighbours being like our family, looking after each other’s kids, playing together, listening to each other’s problems and all the other things related family does.

After we got out of the shower and dressed, Joel telephoned the lawyer the papers were faxed over along with the address of where they needed to be sent once they were filled out and we started to complete them. Joel could use his teaching education and experience as a good reason to trust us and we tried as best we could to explain Jamie’s situation, so they knew we technically already had one child. We mentioned we were interested in an older child and preferably a girl. We postmarked the envelope and I walked it down to the neighbourhood mailbox. We’d have our answer in about two weeks.

I saw Troye walking home by himself this time since Nial had had his snow day.

“Is Joel okay?” he asked when he saw me. “He didn’t seem that good at school.”

I never did ask Alexandria which middle school Troye went to but I guess it was one of the closer ones so it made sense Troye went to it. Troye most likely only knew him from the other older students who had had him as a teacher as at the time Joel was there, Troye would have been in elementary school.

“He’s okay now,” I reply.

No sense in worrying the kid.

“He got sick, is he going to get better?” I ask.

I guess he knew Joel was sick, but he didn’t know the extent.

“I don’t know,” I answer quietly.

I didn’t want to disappoint this kid, either.

“Troye,” Alexandria calls from the front door of their house and waves, his face goes red, embarrassed but he looks back at me.

“Bye, Luka,” he finished and scampered off towards his house.

I watch him and then go back inside my own house away from the mild winter cold.