All Dolled Up!

Charlie’s POV

Nothing I could say at this point could change my father’s mind, and so I didn’t bother. Well, whatever, given how things were going with Charlotte, I was going to have to introduce everyone to her eventually. Maybe this could be a blessing in disguise and present the perfect opportunity?

“Aren’t you scared?” Suzy asked.

Well, all my family members were very uptight up till this point and I was the jovial one trying to uplift the mood. I guess that question would come to anyone’s mind though, and my mother didn’t hit Suzy this time, likely because she was wondering about the same thing.

“I mean, I was and still am,” I said. “But I’m also in this for the long haul, you know, and nothing’s going to happen immediately that I should be afraid of.”

My father didn’t say anything in response to this but nodded.

“Is there anything at all that we can do for you?” my mother asked.

I thought about it and was about to consider asking them to fetch that book from my house - it was a bit out of the way to go to my house and back but not terribly inconvenient. This was before I realized that it would just be easier to have Charlotte send me pictures of it if I wanted to finish it.

“Not - wait,” I said. I was going to say ‘nothing yet’ but there was something that I’d been wanting to do, but that I’d been putting off for a while. Maybe they could help out? “Was Grandpa there at Thanksgiving?”

“He did pop in for a while, why?”

Oh, then I had made a mistake excusing myself. “Nothing, I just wanted to speak with him in person once and hadn’t gotten around to fixing a time for it. I might’ve made a bit more of an effort to come to Thanksgiving had I known he’d be there.” Granted, I only thought this in hindsight because I now had a potential ticking time bomb when it came to my lifespan. If it weren’t for that, I definitely would’ve just stayed at home and waited for a more opportune moment.

“Oh, I don’t know whether he’ll come to Christmas,” Dad said. “He mentioned offhand that he was doing something else-”

“Well, what could possibly be more important than this? One of his grandchildren has cancer?” Mom interjected. She winced a little after saying the ‘C word’ which was something she had avoided saying whenever she spoke to me.

“Well, he probably doesn’t know that yet, but I’ll definitely give him a call-”

“-you don’t have to do anything like that, it’s not too important, just something I wanted to bring up with him,” I said. I wanted to know how much he really knew about the house, but I was also aware that such a line of questioning was likely to get nowhere. As such, there was no point in insisting on it anytime soon. “Anytime before, uh, I guess March would be fine? He doesn’t need to drop whatever he’s doing to come to me, I might even just give him a visit.”

“Right,” Dad said. “Um, speaking of, I know you probably don’t want to think about this right now, but what’s the situation with your job and all?”

“Oh, the thing is that what I have is covered by my insurance and also there’s this state law regarding it,” I said. “I should still be getting payments if the doctors decide that I can’t work - which I do think they might because of all the heavy lifting I have to do. If I hit something by accident, I might end up with a huge bruise or have a large amount of bleeding, so I think they’re going to advise I don’t go to work - and if they write that I should get something from the state that’ll cover the bills at least.”

“That’s good, but if you need anything on that front, don’t hesitate to ask,” Dad said.

“I won’t, but I’m good for now,” I said.

The conversation then finally moved onto more pedestrian topics and away from my cancer, which I was quite grateful for. In a way, it was nice to sit here with my family, and because of my diagnosis they didn’t go into any heavy topics like they might have otherwise such as my sister’s job which was sure to have caused some friction.

It was actually quite pleasant - as long as you put aside the reason why I was in the hospital in the first place, that is.

Still, it eventually turned in a direction that I was ill-equipped to explain away. “So, how is Charlotte?” Suzy asked. “Still haven’t met her, by the way.”

“Oh, she’s dropped by,” I told them. “But I guess she couldn’t today.”

“Really?” Mom asked. “Because when we spoke to the nurse at the desk, they said that this was the first time you’d had visitors since you were admitted.”

I almost swore at that moment - did they have to go and babble on about a detail like that? I remember my own days working, something like that would not be something I’d bring up in conversation. “They probably don’t remember, or she visited when that nurse wasn’t on duty.” I thought of a reasonable alternative and tried to keep my face as natural as possible.

“I see.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon chatting, and the doctors did swing by and spoke to my family as well.

Everything went fine, though eventually the time limit for visitors came and my family waved me off.

“Alright, thanks for visiting!”

“No problem, we’ll stop by on the weekend too,” Dad said. “And Suzy will if she’s not too busy.”

“Uh, yeah, I should be able to come too,” Suzy said.

“And don’t forget, Christmas is at your place,” Dad said. I had been hoping that they might conveniently forget about planning that, but they hadn’t. Suzy and my mother hugged me and then left.

I glanced out the window - yes, now Charlotte would be awake. I started a video call with her.

“Hey there,” I said, giving her a smile. The first few days that I had talked with her like this, her face had always been stained with tears. She was either better at hiding them, had cleaned up beforehand, or (what I was hoping) not taking this as hard as she was before. As it was, between her and my family, it was a bit ironic that I was the one trying to keep the mood light of all people.

“Hello,” she said. “How did today go?”

“Same old, same old, but my family all came by! Oh, by the way, they said they wanted to celebrate Christmas at my place,” I said.

“That’s great!” she said.

“We might need to tell them about all of this then,” I told her.

“Right,” she said. “Do you think it’s time.”

I didn’t want to say that I felt like I might not have much more time, I just said, “We have to tell them eventually, and I would rather it be now rather than later. I’ll think of how to do it though…”

“Don’t stress yourself about that,” she said. “We can also do it later if you can’t think of something. It might be too much for them, given everything going on…”

She did have a point there. And it wasn’t like there was an immediate rush, I could still do it two or three months later.

“How is the treatment going?”

“Well, I’m not longer vomiting out my insides anymore and I had a few bites of food today,” I told her.

“Does the medicine really taste that bad?”

I chuckled, despite the gravity of the topic being spoken about. “Oh, you don’t drink this stuff, silly, it goes into your veins. It still causes you to be really nauseous though.”

“Is that why they put that thing in you chest again?”

“The same. My counts have dropped, but it’s going to be a few more days until they’re wiped clean.”

“I’m sorry if this is dumb, but I still don’t understand why this has to go down and then back up?” Charlotte asked this question with some apprehension.

“Don’t apologize- of course you don’t get some of this stuff,” I told her. “First they kill all the cells, even the bad ones, and then slowly let them recover, hopefully eliminating the cancer completely. But, while they’re too low, something could happen, so I’m stuck here twiddling my thumbs until then. Oh, speaking of which, can you take photographs of the remains of that book which you found? I might as well spend time going over it.”

“Of course, no problem,” she said.

“Also, just letting you know, I might be losing some of my hair soon,” I told her. “I might need to come home wearing a wig. It should grow back though.”

We talked a bit more, to the point that someone came in to see what the noise was, and then Charlotte wished me a good night and I drifted off to sleep.

The next few days were another slew of tests, waiting, and more tests. I had a few more times where I had to vomit and couldn’t stomach anything, though that went away soon enough. This was replaced by clumps of my hair slowly falling out, to the point where I just shaved a lot of it off to spare myself the hassle.

All that time did give me a chance to reflect on things, and I began making some changes to my bank accounts. There were several things I needed to do when I got back home.