Stories from the Back of His Motorcycle

It was hard not to hate Vaughn in that moment. Looking at his slumped body, defeated expression, knowing that he’d all but given up even the notion of fighting anymore. If I hadn’t been so heartbroken at his confession I’d undoubtedly be pounding my fists into him and screaming at him to get a grip.

“So,” I choked on the sentence, butchering it before my tongue had untied itself, “you’re telling me that you’ve given up?”

“What?”

“Given up. You know, you’ve accepted that you’ve got Atrial Fibrillation and that’s the end of it. Nothing can be done. You’ve accepted that you’re going to die and won’t even think about getting a donation because you’re not going to fight anymore.” I couldn’t help it. The anger seeped into my tone, into my body, and it was an effort not to shout at him.

For weeks I had been making myself sick with worrying about him, with staying up late at night to research Atrial Fibrillation – what the doctors knew of it and what could be done to help the patient. I wanted to know when he was in pain so I could hold him, and keep him with me, and help him. I wanted to know why he was in pain so I could fight it with him. I wanted to know everything any doctor knew just so that we’d never be caught off guard.

I’d done everything and given everything I had into trying to save him. I refused to let him see how scared I was just so he’d only have to focus on saving himself. That’s all I wanted. For him to save himself, because nobody could do it for him.

“Don’t talk to me about fighting it Alice. I’m fucking sick of fighting it and going to the hospital and getting my hopes up every time we have a minor breakthrough. That’s all this is. A minor breakthrough. There’s no guarantee I’ll get a donation. There’s not even a guarantee I’ll survive the fucking surgery itself. This isn’t a one-stop-fix sweetheart and as much as it sucks the chances of me living through this disease are awfully slim.”

I managed to swallow back the urge to cry, blinking sharply just to stop already building tears from spilling. Every word he’d said hurt like a physical blow, my stomach folding in on itself again and again until my entire body was hollow. I wished my heart could be hollow too. I wished myself back the way I’d been before Vaughn when I could hide behind the ice queen facade so easily.

“So you just give up then because it’s going to be hard?”

“No,” his eyes were too intense for me to watch “no Alice, try to understand what it’s like for me.”

“I am,” I stood from the couch, strolling around the coffee table to look out of the large windows. I couldn’t stand to be next to Vaughn, I couldn’t even stand to look at him. Waves of nausea crashed over me and engulfed my entire being. We were delving into truths we’d both been putting off, cold hard facts that I’d been ploughing through under the pretence that he’d definitely get better. That he’d definitely turn it around.

“But I still can’t understand why you’d turn down a donation when it could be the last thing we have to make you better,” I felt my voice waver more than heard it. “Surely you must want to get better?”

“I do want to get better. I want this entire thing to just stop and leave me alone.”

I remembered then, amid my anger and desperation and fear, that Vaughn still wasn’t sober. His eyes held that glazed over stare and some of his words blurred together. He wasn’t thinking straight. This meant he didn’t know what he was saying. And this meant he was the most truthful and open he’d ever been. I wasn’t stupid – I knew just how far he normally went to avoid the subject of his illness. Him being drunk was partially a gift because he let me in for a moment, let his barriers drop.

“I want that too Vaughn, I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t. I was so terrified this morning when I thought something had happened to you, just the possibility alone had me scared to death. I couldn’t even go in without knowing the truth so I stood outside school and cried,” I finally let my eyes settle on him, taking in his intense eyes with an intense stare of my own. “Because you’ve got me sucked in deep and there’s no way I could leave you or let you give up now without a fight of my own.”

I needed him to realise that, drunk or not. I needed him to understand something for me. He should have known that I wasn’t going anywhere and I certainly wasn’t going to buy his ‘it’s complicated’ bullshit. He should have known by now that, even if I couldn’t say it, I loved him.

“Alice,” he reached out his arms like a baby “come here.”

I was slow when moving back over to him, partly because I was reluctant to lose my head at being so intimate with him again but mostly because I was still angry. He hadn’t given me a proper reason for turning down a heart transplant, and he hadn’t given me a proper reason for getting so drunk. He was making himself worse. He was pushing me away and pulling me closer all at the same time, making my head hurt with the struggle.

He curled me up to him when I was just within reach, he took my body and pulled it taught against his and held me with an unspoken promise of never letting go. I would have settled for that. If he kept me there, in that moment with him I could stop him from drinking any more, stop him from talking crazy. And I never wanted to leave him to himself and his demons because that is exactly what they made him do.

Warmth spread from the tips of my hair to the tips of my toes as he rested his chin on my head. It would have been a perfect moment if I could have just pretended that I couldn’t feel his tears running down me. One dripped right down my face, prickling my skin, burning me – inside and out.

“Oh, Vaughn.” I tried to turn and face him but his arms just held me tighter.

“You know I love you, right Alice?”

I sighed. Another tear ran down a strand of my hair, dropping onto my lap. I watched it disappear into my skirt and had to bite my lip with every bit of strength I could muster. One of us had to be strong. I wasn’t going to let down Vaughn now when he was so vulnerable and raw, when he had finally stripped away his outer shell.

“I know Vaughn.”

“You know that I’d do absolutely anything for you? Absolutely anything. I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” I reached a hand up above my head to rest on his wet cheek.

“I’ve lived my whole life knowing that I was going to die. And die young. The doctors were surprised when I lived past ten, amazed that I made it to my twelfth and find it impossible to believe that I’m still breathing. I live doing everything impulsively because I’m scared that I won’t wake up tomorrow. All of the drinking and smoking and my motorcycle are things that I wanted to do before I died, just so that I wouldn’t look back and wonder ‘what if?’”

He stopped there and took a few shaky breaths. My hand stroked the tears away blindly, desperate to ease him just that tiny fraction, desperate to pull him back together and mend him up. I could only sit there and listen to him though. I couldn’t fix him.

“And then I met you and I realised that you were something I wanted more than anything else. You would have been my biggest ‘what if?’ So I tried to get you to fall in love with me, selfishly not even considering what this would do to you, try and make you feel even a fraction of what I feel.”

“Then take a heart donation and stay with me,” I finally turned on the couch, his arms going slack around me as he fought with his emotions. “You have me now.”

“But I don’t Alice. Taking the donation would mean that I have been living for nothing, all of my recklessness and stupidity would be just that – reckless and stupid. Try imagining setting out your whole life with a goal in mind, a definite deadline, and suddenly someone tells you that things could be different.”

“I’d take it,” I cradled his beautiful head in my hands and kissed his forehead again and again. “I’d tell them that I’d take it.”

“To think that I could still be here when I’m thirty,” he smiled bitterly through filled eyes “is exciting but it’s daunting too.”

I nodded, understanding him but not condoning what he believed. It was impossible for someone like me to fully grasp what he’d been through and how that ill baby boy had learned to live his life as if tomorrow would be stolen from him. For me, tomorrow was just an inevitability. For him it was only a possibility.

“You’re scared.” I looked him straight in the eye and refused to let him look away.

He lifted a hand to show me how it was trembling before burying it somewhere in my hair. There were still tears collected in his dark eyes, slivers of silver running down the ridges of his cheeks, making him terrible and devastating in the slanted sunlight.

“But so am I, so is your Mom, so is Keisha. We’re all scared because all we want is for you to be okay. It’s okay to be scared and unsure of what you want but that doesn’t mean you should follow what you were told when you were young. Just because you’ve lived like this up until now doesn’t mean you have to keep going to an early grave.”

“I don’t know what to be if I’m not this,” he moaned.

I leant forward and kissed him gently, our kiss echoing around the room like an explosion. I smiled as I kissed his wet cheeks, his nose, his forehead, and then his lips once again.

“You can be whoever you want to be and I’d still want you the same, heck, you could put on that cardigan again and pull up in your Dad’s car and I’d still kiss you like this.”

I saw his bottom lip quiver again so I gave him my best smile, trying to ignore the fact that is was watery and showed my vulnerability.

“Vaughn, I don’t need you to tell me right now that you’re going to take a heart donation if it comes up. I don’t need you to tell me you love me. I don’t even need you to tell me that you’ll carry on fighting. I just need you to know that I won’t give up fighting for you, and if that means knocking you out myself and dragging you to hospital for that donation then so be it.”

He chuckled so softly I could barely feel it “I know you don’t need to hear it sweetheart but I love you. And I’d take a million heart donations if they would make you happy.”

I rolled my eyes “oh, you romantic you.”

“I’m serious Alice, there’s nothing that keeps me going through the hospital appointments, and false alarms, and bad news, like you.”

“Are you just saying this stuff because you’re still kind of drunk?” I asked, hiding a smirk as I buried my face into his shoulder.

“No,” he replied, voice thick with mirth instead of misery “I’m saying it because I’m still thinking about getting you out of this skirt.”