Maybe you’d even pack up your house and move to the town that had the best cancer treatment hospital in New England.
I’ll tell her. I’ll describe everything that’s happened. If she stops thinkingshe’scrazy and thinksIam instead, at least that’s a start.
But here’s the important thing: She’s not dying. She doesn’t have cancer.
She can’t, because she’s my mom, and she’s all I have left.
Distantly I hear the door opening downstairs, and my mother’s voice calling my name. I try to walk out of her office, but I find myself rooted to the spot.
She appears in the doorway, her cheeks flushed. She’s wearing the black leggings and oversized sweatshirt she always wears when she goes for a long walk.
People who are really, really sick can’t go for walks,I tell myself.
“Edgar,” she whispers, looking from me to the desk with all of those horrible, awful papers. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” I mutter through clenched teeth. I have to hear the words out loud. I have to hear her say it.
She opens her mouth. But before she can speak, her eyes roll up so that the whites are showing. Her whole body begins to convulse.
I catch her just before she hits the floor.
OLIVER
In here, everything is too bright. The trees seem neon; the moors glow. And there’s a flatness to the landscape that is disorienting, something I never noticed before. I keep bumping into corners and edges, misjudging the space around me.
The worst, though, is the claustrophobia. I feel like I’m boarded up, boxed in. Like the walls are closing in on me. Or, at the very least, the pages.
This morning I walked the entire length of the book—twice—and I still feel restless. Socks trots behind me, the bells on his saddle giving me a massive headache.
“Must you make all that racket?” I snap, looking over my shoulder.
“Someone got up on the wrong side of the stable,” Socks murmurs.
“Someone’s going to wind up in the glue factory,” I counter.
“C’mon, Ollie. Look on the bright side.”
“Oh,dotell me the bright side. . . .”
Socks thinks for a moment. “Orville made me a hair mask.”
“What the devil is a hair mask?”
“I don’t know,” he confides, “but it’s supposed to help with my split ends.” Socks hesitates. “I’m sure he’d make you one too if you asked nicely.”
“I don’t need a hair mask.” I need Delilah.
“Can I ask you a question?” Socks says. “You haven’t seen me in a while. Do I look . . . different?” He blinks at me when I don’t respond. “Bigger? Smaller . . . ?” His voice trails off. “I hear that sometimes, when you’re not with someone every day, you notice the changes more . . . and I’ve been eating only baby carrots for the past month.”
“You look great, Socks,” I say, without even bothering to glance in his direction.
He prances around me in a circle. “I knew it. I absolutely knew this would work better than the cleanse. You know, I actuallyfeellike I have more energy.”
Instinctively I leap over the edge of a page, onto the next.
“Are we going somewhere in particular?” Socks asks.
“No,” I say.
