She didn’t like hospitals, doctors or medical clinics, but over the last decade or so, she had more than gotten used to them.
“I won’t get too into the details because he’s okay now, but back then, even with the drug trial, he was really sick,” Eve continued. “You know Mom, once she left here that was it for us as a family. And remember Aunt Pat? She’d just had her third kid. The rest of Dad’s family wasn’t exactly dependable to startwith either. So when things started getting really bad, I realized it would be just me taking care of Dad.”
There was still an anxiety there. An imprint of the terror in Eve’s chest when she finally understood that the position of sole caregiver would have to go to her. That her father dying wasn’t something she could avoid or ignore. That she couldn’t simply give him encouragement or a hug as she passed by. That the man she had barely seen because of his work throughout her young life was now the person who needed her most.
And it had all happened so quickly too.
One week she had been climbing through Darius’s window, a lonely but happy preteen, the next she was standing in a small apartment in Texas with a father who was staring at death, asking her to hold his hand.
“We finally started getting really promising results around the time I turned sixteen,” Eve continued. “When I was eighteen, Dad was given the all clear. He still has to take meds for the rest of his life, but the shortened life expectancy we’d kept hearing about every year was finally extended.”
For the first time in years, he had been smiling too. It had been better than any present Eve could have gotten for officially becoming an adult.
At the same time, that happiness had seesawed with a new, uncomfortable weight.
“But by that point, it had been almost eight years,” she said. “Eight years of me taking care of him. Of always being on call. Being there every minute I could. Chores and exercise. Tracking medicines and making doctor visits. Having to deal with financial problems, picking up after-school jobs to help fill the gap.”
Eight years of a childhood that hadn’t been childlike at all.
Eight years of realizing that the only taste of a childhood she’d had at all was because of the man sitting next to her now.
“So when it was time to graduate high school and head to college, I couldn’t just leave.” Guilt mingled in with the feeling of being medicated. It was an old, worn and beaten kind of shame. The shame of a lie told so much that, at times, Eve had forgotten it was a lie at all. “I didn’t tell Dad that’s why I decided not to go to college. He’d just started dating for the first time since Mom left and was trying to find some normal… So I lied and told him I’d rather work.”
Waitressing, tending bar, seasonal cashier jobs, odds-and-ends gigs like cleaning and babysitting. Just anything and everything she could do to help with the bills and debt that had piled up Eve did for the next ten years.
“It wasn’t until Dad got remarried to my stepmom and moved out of that small apartment that I really realized we had finally done it. We’d gotten him out of this exhausting situation where it felt like he’d been trying to climb out of some never-ending hole for years. But that’s when I really understood the part I’d really played in helping him get out of it.”
Eve sighed.
“I hadn’t pulled him out, I’d pushed him out. Which meant I was still there when he was able to finally walk away.” She listed her next points lazily off on the fingers still resting against Darius’s leg. “I had no real friends, no real career, no life goal or dreams I was running toward. My romantic relationships came down to a handful of dates scattered between weekend shifts and overtime, and even though I managed to get an apartment that wasn’t all that bad, it was just a place I went to for sleep.”
Eve snorted, a bit of self-loathing in the sound.
It was another feeling she never would forget.
Over thirty years old and she felt like she was a kid again, standing at the beginning of adulthood without a clue about what to do first.
The spot on the wall Eve had been staring at blurred slightly.
She cleared her throat and continued.
“I tried to slow down after that,” she said. “I tried making friends, find a relationship that meant something, figure out career things and if I even had dreams. Then, through one of Dad’s old friends he’d made from his treatment days, I learned about some work the Keys Foundation had done with a medical project in a small town in Alabama. I checked their social media and found a press release about Scott Keys, praising small-town medical studies. When he named-dropped the hospital’s new research annex that was in Seven Roads—well, I was sure it was fate.”
“I applied for a job at the foundation’s headquarters in Atlanta, got an interview and probably was the most excited I had been in years.” Eve laughed, but it was short and not at all humorous. “Though, with my résumé, or lack thereof, they told me on the spot that I wasn’t a good fit. Now, believe me, I understand their reasoning. I was underqualified for sure. But to go all that way, just to be told I wasn’t good enough? It was rough.”
The small hope Eve had had?
It had disappeared into the night air then.
“I went to the bar later, ready to drown my sorrows in drinks I couldn’t really afford, when I ran into a group of guys being rowdy in a nearby alley. Three guys against one, and the one guy who was being pushed around didn’t look like he could hit a wet paper bag stuck on the sidewalk.”
At this part, Eve felt a smile curve up the corner of her lips. It was genuine.
Darius finally spoke.
“Let me guess. You jumped in to help the one,” he said.
Eve laughed a little. She nodded.
