Reality isn’t kind to those who deny it. It thrusts itself back upon you, not with a knife in the back, but through the lung, staring down at you distastefully for leaving it behind.
A metronome is all reality leaves behind with its blade scraping the ground. It pulses in the form of a heart monitor, drawing a steady string of green mountains on the screen.
We cling to it, to the beat that slows with each passing hour, afraid that if we let go, it will become lax, and the beat will turn into an infernal, constant ring.
I sit up in my chair, careful not to make noise. The ICU is loud outside this room, but with the door shut, you could hear a feather drop. Neo, C, and Hikari sleep in three chairs on the wall facing the bed. They fell asleep when the doctors left.
The harsh acceleration of the truck, the horror-stricken yelling, Sony’s choking–it’s all there–in their dreams, haunting them. We arrived at the hospital with Sony fading in and out of consciousness. They rolled out a stretcher and took her from C’s arms.
Despite Hikari’s inability to handle the fear and the panic, she managed to calm down enough to call Eric in the truck. He was waiting in the ER, and when they wheeled in Sony, he did something I’d never seen him do.
He froze.
He saw the blood and heard Sony’s struggles, and he just stopped moving.
A mass of people surrounded her. They stuck a hole in her chest, a geyser of liquid spurting out. Then they took her away, yelling one code after another, sticking her with needles, and disappearing with our Sony still unable to breathe.
We shook. Hikari buried her face in my chest, hands fisting my shirt as I held her against me.
Eric tried to run to where they treated her, yelling over nurses and doctors that didn’t know Sony, about her history, her treatments, everything.
They had to kick him out of the room. Neo, C, and him stared at the hall entryway to the ICU and we waited an infernal set of infernal minutes until a doctor came out.
Now, Sony lies in a room I can only describe as blue. A path of tubes works under her nose. Her chest is a mess of medical work. It must’ve been an infection, working slyly without symptoms until it pulled the drain and flooded the battleground.
“We got caught, huh?”
I look up to a grating voice. It’s weak, rocks scraping the back of her throat. But it carries a melody I know. Sony is there, behind those half-lidded eyes. A flame burning low, but still burning.
I rush for her hand, nearly disrupting the fragile systems all connected to her, through needle, tube, or whatever apparatus.
“We always get caught,” I whisper, squeezing it.
She doesn’t squeeze back. I don’t think she can. She can’t sit up or move. She can barely turn her head.
“They didn’t ruin my wings, did they?” she asks.
The tattoo isn’t visible beneath the bandages, but her wings were too young to undergo so much. All that’s left is ink feathers plucked and fallen beneath the crown of her collarbones.
“No,” I say. “They didn’t.”
“Good.” Sony smiles. “I’ve always wanted wings.”
I nod, coursing my touch back and forth over her knuckles.
“You said that to me the night we met, you remember?”
“Of course I do,” she rasps. “You never had chocolate before, you little stranger.”
“You introduced me to candy and ice cream and fries too.”
“Gosh, I’m a bad influence.”
I chuckle. She wants to laugh too, just to join me, but I think that is also one of the things she can’t do right now. She can’t sit up or move to look for herself. She can barely turn her head.
Sony realizes the sadness it brings me. She tries her hardest to close her fingers over mine. They shake, unable to apply any pressure, but her smile outweighs their weakness.
“It was a good day, wasn’t it, Sammy?” she whispers.
“Yeah, it was.”
I wish I could tell you that her skin still smells of salt and her cheeks retain sunblush. I wish I could tell you that people retain who they are in these moments, but they don’t.
Sony has reached the point of sickness where she no longer looks like herself. Her freckles are faint, her skin pale and laced in sweat. Any animation, any dimple that could’ve led you to believe she was a smiler is gone. Her limbs lay limp from deoxygenation. All that is left to fight is that half of her chest rising and falling, over and over, never giving up the game.
“How long have you known, Sony?” I ask.
She swallows, but it hurts, like a letter opener across the tonsils.
“The day you fell in the road, I had a tickle in my throat. The chest pain came next. Then, when I stumbled, I knew.” she says. “I don’t know how, but I just knew.”
She gives me an apologetic sort of look, the kind you give when you’ve been keeping a secret as monumental as this.
“You never said anything–”
“There was nothing to say.” She speaks as if the subject is moot. As if any preventative measure would’ve been useless, and she would’ve ended up here, anyway.
“Sammy the night we met, I told you I’d had a hiking accident, do you remember?” Sony’s words overlap, slurring a bit from the drugs, but I can make them out. She attempts to move her arm, to move closer to me. Tears well in her eyes as she struggles, not from this pain, but from another, older kind. “I lied to you, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I whisper, catching beads of sweat on her forehead with my sleeve.
“I am though. I’m so so sorry for what I did. I was young, and I didn’t know what to do,” she cries. Neo, C, and Hikari stir, but they don’t wake.
“Sony, it’s alright,” I whisper.
“I got pregnant,” she spurts out. And then I remember more clearly. The bruises on her legs and the butterfly-stitched cuts on her face. The anger. The way she kept touching her belly.
Sony’s breath hitches, saliva dripping down her chin. I wipe it with my sleeve again, but Sony keeps on talking, trying to get it all out like a nauseating bite of food. “My mom would’ve understood. She would’ve helped me raise the baby, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her. The night I met you, I took the car, and I drove until I wasn’t on the road anymore.”
The night we met, Sony had scans done. Scans that showed trauma to her left lung. The lung they had to remove.
“Sony.” My voice shakes. “Why?”
Sony’s escapades, the ones where she fled from Eric’s watchful eye, they never seemed purposeful, but they were. She never stole for herself. She stole for her kids. She spent her time with them. Not because they were sick, but because that’s who Sony is. Like a child, she is curious and fiery, and brutally beautiful. She lives for the races, the thrills, and the games. She rescued a broken cat and gave it to a place where broken people come to heal simply because it is her nature.
“Did you see the toll it took on my mom?” she asks. “Having to see me gradually become half of who I used to be?”
“Your mother adored you.” I shake my head. “Every part of you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Sony says. The materials keeping her alive strapped to her chest blur in her periphery. “I couldn’t take the risk knowing the child might end up like me. It wouldn’t be fair to it.”
Sony cherishes children. It isn’t till now that I understand just how much she cherished the child she never had.
Every fantasy I ever had of Sony as a woman starts to fade, an old photograph I never got to take withering. I saw her, somewhere in a distant future that doesn’t exist. I saw her with a lover and a child in her arms. She blew endless kisses, nuzzling a baby with its mother’s wild red hair and little freckles that danced when it laughed.
Tears stream down Sony’s jaw as she catches that picture in me. Then, they stream down mine.
“It’d only be a chance,” I whisper.
Sony smiles. A smile of acceptance marred by sadness.
She knows it’d only be a chance.
But a chance is enough.
“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “I wanted to tell you that even if I have regrets, the last two years with you don’t hold any of them.” She squeezes my hand harder this time. Then, she looks beyond me, at our friends.
“You’re my second in command. You have to keep them in line, okay?” Sony says. “Oh, don’t cry, Sammy.” She lifts her arm. I help her, bearing the weight as she rests her palm on my cheek. “It was a good day.”
I choke on a breath, wetness gathering at the back of my throat.
Today is worth infinitely more than tomorrow. But Sony’s tomorrow held a career, the end of Neo’s manuscript, a look in the mirror to a new tattoo, and a sparking infinity of futures that rightfully belong to her.
I knew that there would come a day of no tomorrows.
I knew, and I cry, anyway.
We’re lucky, I think. Today was a good day.
Sony and I hold each other’s gaze as I whisper, “I just wish I could’ve given you more.”
Eric comes back a few minutes later with Hee in his arms. He’s panting, quickly laying the cat down by Sony’s legs. He checks all of Sony’s vitals, mumbling to himself, obsessing over every tiny detail.
Sony is only half conscious. He pats down her head, asking her all sorts of questions in a soft voice. Neo, C, and Hikari wake up, each careful not to crowd her.
I stand to give them room as they gather around their friend.
Time, in a turn of kindness, slows. It stands beside me, watching, as it has since I was born. It whispers no cruelties or taunts. It drags a hand down my back and slows the metronome, holding it off until that inevitable flat note rings.
“Sony?” Hikari cries. “No, no, Sony!”
Eric yells at all of us to leave. Sony’s doctors flood the room.
Hikari is so distraught I need to carry her out. C cries, following us, covering his face.
Neo is the last to leave. He shuts his eyes to the yelling and kisses Sony’s face. When he’s ushered out of the room, he takes Hee with him.
We cry together in the empty hallway, huddled from the blue and the cold. When we sink to the floor, there is the inevitable weight of something missing, like a limb cut clean from our bodies.
From outside the checkered windows, I watch with blurred vision as Sony takes her last breath. Once her eyes close, they don’t open again.
—
Death isn’t playful.
Death is sudden.
It has no taste for irony or reason.
It is a taker, plain, direct, no tricks up its sleeve.
But at least,
This time,
Death was kind enough to wait for goodbye.
