Chapter Text
“It’s back?”
Everything is falling apart, and these are the only words that Hope Madeline van Dyne can manage to string together. She feels frozen, feet rooted to the floor at the base of her chair, and distant, as if she’s having some kind of out-of-body experience.
Peggy reaches out, palm facing up, so Hope can take her hand if she wants to. She doesn’t. She remains very still, fingers pressed between her legs and the seat, and Peggy rests her hand on the armrest instead. Not family, but close enough; she’s stuck around since Hope’s mother died, a close enough friend of Janet’s that Hope has always considered her more of an aunt than a family friend. She practically insisted on driving Hope here, and is familiar enough to all the nurses and doctors that they let her sit in here even though Hope hinted rather heavily that she could just wait in the car. Now that they’re sitting here, with the news hanging in the air, making the oxygen taste bitter and metallic like a sign of the future, Hope can’t decide whether she’s glad Peggy is here or not.
She’s quiet in the car, the whole way home. Peggy takes the major roads, driving precisely at the speed limit, and leaves the radio at a low buzz so it’s not dead silent. Tapping her fingers on the back of her phone, Hope stares blankly out the window, trying her hardest not to think. It’s hard; every thought that enters her mind seems to orbit around one particular topic. A song playing on the radio mentions (figuratively) dying and she can only think about (literally) dying. She runs her fingers through her hair, a habit that took a small eternity to break and that she will only have to break all over again. It brushes at her shoulders now, finally growing back from the last time. How long until she loses it now? She sees a truck shaped like an oxygen tank and wonders how long she has before the little rolling cart carrying air for her has to make a comeback.
They pull into the driveway, the house looming up over them. Peggy doesn’t ask if Hope wants her to come inside; she just comes in, anyway. Shutting herself in her room without a word, Hope waits her out. Eventually, she leaves. The front door clicks shut behind her, lock sliding into place, and Hope watches her car back out onto the street and roll smoothly away.
Her cancer is back, but she doesn’t cry. She just shuts down.
Three days later, her father comes home. She wakes up early in the morning to him opening her bedroom door, blinks sleepily while he crosses the room and sits gingerly on the edge of her bed. “Aunt Peggy called you,” she guesses. The words stick in her throat, the only thing she’s said aloud since the hospital. A routine checkup gone horribly wrong, and now Hank is back from wherever it is he’s been for the last several weeks. Somewhere in Europe, maybe Germany. It doesn’t matter. “You didn’t have to come back.” But of course he has. When she’s healthy, he is – at best – an absentee father. He disappeared on her after her mother’s funeral and while he came back eventually, physically speaking, he has never been the same. He is colder, more gruff and serious, deeper frowns and mouth set in a thin, straight line. The only changes came when she was sick, the first time. He was suddenly more present, took time off work and kept her company instead, doing everything he could to bridge the gap between them. It’s like repairing their relationship only matters when there’s a chance he might lose her.
For a while, this works. It gives Hope something to focus on as her health deteriorates, her lungs fighting a battle that might not be winnable this time. It’s easier to ignore calls from her friends when she’s got her dad to take up her time. Her life becomes about her dad and Peggy and, yes, tiny tanks of oxygen trailing along behind her in a small wheeled cart, delivering each next breath directly to her through clear tubes. They tickle when she first places them there, looping the right spots behind her ears, uncomfortable until she teaches herself how to be used to their presence again. She spends the summer confining herself to the house and Hank lets her, probably under the impression that her social life will improve once school starts up again. It doesn’t.
“I’m concerned about this self-imposed social isolation,” says her doctor, like he thinks these are big enough words to simply scare her into spending free time with her friends. This is, technically, a childrens’ hospital, on account of the fact that this is where she came when she was sick before. But she’s sixteen now, too old for the brightly-coloured wall decorations to make her feel any better. Hope rolls her eyes, picking at a loose thread by the pocket of her jeans; she can see her father in her peripheral vision, nodding. “What’s going on, Hope?”
“What’s going on?” she repeats disbelievingly. She doesn’t look at either of them, instead narrowing her eyes at that loose thread. “I’m dying, right? The cancer is back, and it’s worse. It’s not like I haven’t been listening. So what’s the point in talking to my friends?” She can hear him starting to object, but she’s not finished, and she cuts him off abruptly. “All it’ll do is hurt them more when I’m gone. I’d rather just save them the trouble.”
He’s clearly not hearing her, because he offers her a Post-It with information for a support group before she goes. She doesn’t take it, but Hank reaches for it gratefully. “Thank you,” she can hear him saying as she yanks the door open and heads down the hallway. He jogs a few paces to catch up with her before she reaches the elevator, and is smart enough not to mention the support group on the way down.
In fact, he doesn’t mention it at all. He’s more subtle about it, subtle enough that she doesn’t catch it in time. He drives straight past the grocery store the following Tuesday afternoon and before she knows it, he’s pulled up in front of a church. “What are we doing here?” she asks, frowning, and when he doesn’t answer right away, that’s when she pieces it all together. “Oh, no. No, Dad, I’m not doing it. Not a chance.”
He leans across her to pull at the handle, the passenger door swinging wide open as she crosses her arms stubbornly. “You’re definitely going,” he counters in his best no-nonsense voice. He’s just as stubborn as she is, and he wins out this time by threatening to carry her in. “I don’t think you want the other kids to see that, do you? Besides, I was talking to Bill, and this is the group Ava goes to.”
“Fine,” snaps Hope, clambering out of the vehicle. It’s a tricky process now that she’s got the cart and the oxygen tank and the tubes to work around, and she turns back once she’s out to narrow her eyes at him. “I’m not going to like it,” she informs him loftily through the open window.
“Have fun,” replies Hank, and drives away.
The group meets in the basement; she follows a kid down, maybe twelve, lifting the oxygen cart to carry it down the stairs. It looks dreary. She stands at the bottom of the stairs and takes it all in: A drafty room too big for the amount of people in it, a circle of folding plastic chairs in the middle, a table off to the side with exactly two types of cookies and a pitcher of lemonade. Seven others are gathered already, holding plastic cups of lemonade and making small talk. As Hope examines the cookies and reaches for a cup of her own, a familiar face pops up next to her.
“Hope! I heard you might be coming!” Ava is skinnier than she remembers, has sprouted up taller than she was the last time they saw each other. They’re friends of the sort that kids make at hospitals when they’re both there for chemo, and aside from the occasional text messages since Hope went into remission, they haven’t exactly been keeping in touch. The other girl hugs her tight and waits only until Hope has lemonade and a cookie in hand before dragging her across the room to a free chair. She turns sideways in her own seat to face Hope more directly. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” answers Hope truthfully. Ava is different from her other friends, easier to talk to by simple virtue of understanding. “I just thought it was over, but… here I am, you know?” She lets Ava squeeze her wrist sympathetically, and then a twenty-something guy is clapping his hands to get their attention like an elementary school teacher, and the moment is over.
“Hello, hello, welcome! For those of you who are new here, I’m Jimmy Woo, your group leader,” the guy announces, but he’s looking at Hope frequently enough throughout the introduction that it’s easy to determine she’s the only one who doesn’t already know him. He launches into his backstory with the practiced air of someone who recites it at least once a week, and Hope tries to tune it out but manages to pick up on the general gist of it: Cancer in his balls, of all things, and the amount of time he spent being told he was going to die only to not die, and how he’s transcended all the terrible things in his past to be here, leading a support group for teenagers. This is all said as if it should be inspiring, except that it heavily implies that cancer is something he’s overcome but here he is, talking about it for an hour and a half, once a week. And there’s something disheartening about looking around the room as he speaks and wondering how many of the people here will die.
The time passes exactly as Hope thought it would and yet, somehow, it’s worse than she could have possibly imagined. They start by going around the circle and introducing themselves: Name, age, diagnosis, with a feeling tacked on at the end. “I’m Ava, fifteen,” says Ava when it gets to her turn. Obligatory pause for everyone to echo, Hi, Ava, like some depressing and cliché movie moment, and then she continues. “Leukemia. I’m feeling pretty good right now.” And then it’s onto the next. Jimmy makes Hope introduce herself like the new kid in a classroom, asks her to stand up and everything. After that, the circle dissolves into talking about what they’re all going through, how they’re handling it, whether anything is going on that they want to talk about. There’s one kid, Luis, about Hope’s age, who does an awful lot of the talking. He’s already lost one eye – retinoblastoma – and it’s been replaced with a glass one, and now the other eye is experiencing a recurrence. There’s a girl sitting on Hope’s other side who insists she’s feeling strong, small bright-eyed smile as she describes how good she is at kicking cancer’s ass, and how she’s been in remission for six years to beat Hope’s four. It’s like she needs to rub it in. At the end, everyone holds hands and Jimmy leads a memorized group prayer, except for the part where he reads off a depressingly-long list of names, all the other teenagers who once occupied a seat here and never will again.
Her father is already waiting outside when she emerges from the depths of the church, and the only social interaction Hope has left in her is a small wave to Ava before she climbs into the car. “How was it?” asks Hank.
“Please just drive,” Hope grumbles, reaching for her seatbelt.
Of course, she goes back the following week, and the week after that. She tries to fight back, insisting that she’s fine, that she doesn’t want to go, that it’s ridiculous and not helpful at all. She’ll invite Ava over once a week instead, she swears, but Hank doesn’t believe her. Which is sort of fair, because she probably wouldn’t have followed through on it. So he puts his foot down (“You’re going, Hope, whether you like it or not”) and continues to make the drive to and from the church each Tuesday, aside from the one when he’s got a meeting he can’t reschedule and he recruits Aunt Peggy to take her instead. This is, if possible, more embarrassing.
On this fifth Tuesday, when she has officially been coming here for over a month, there is a new guy at the snack table when Hope walks into the room. Her immediate feeling is one of relief, because it means she’s no longer the newest addition to the group, but it turns out once they’ve all taken their seats that he’s only a temporary visitor. Annoyingly, he looks at her with a curious expression the whole time; she can feel his gaze on her when she’s looking away, although every time she so much as glances in his direction, he’s no longer looking. She hates it.
“I’m Scott,” he introduces himself when Jimmy turns his attention to him. Hi, Scott, mumbles the room in acknowledgement. Bemused, Scott continues, “I’m seventeen. Bone cancer a couple years back, but I’ve been in remission for two years. Had to say goodbye to half my leg, though.” He taps his right leg just above the knee, below which a prosthetic takes over.
“And how are you feeling today, Scott?” Jimmy prods.
“How am I feeling?” There is the slightest frown at his brow, as if maybe he doesn’t get asked this question very much anymore. That’s how it goes, in remission. Hope knows. She spent four years getting asked less and less frequently, and all that’s come out of it is landing back in a hospital room. “I’m great. Thriving, you know. A rollercoaster that only goes up, right? I’m only here ‘cause Luis asked me to be. Sort of. I’m basically his personal cheerleader.” It makes sense, really, that he’s Luis’ friend; he talks a lot, though not nearly as much as the other boy. They’re a good match.
For his part, though, Luis is – for once – rather quiet today. “Luis, seventeen, retinoblastoma,” he rattles off. “I’m feeling shitty.” There’s a heavy silence after that in which everyone digests the fact that he’s dropped a real swear word in a church, even if it is just the basement. Then he launches straight into an explanation instead of waiting for all the introductions to be over. “I have to have surgery in a few weeks and then I’m gonna be blind, like, for real. Totally blind. Nothing more anyone can do but, like, I’ve been hanging out with Scotty for, like, two days straight and he’s helpful in terms of, uh, distracting me, so – there’s that. Plus, I might get a dog, which is cool.”
An uncomfortable beat, here. Hope glances around the circle as subtly as she can, trying to guess who’s going to say something first. Jimmy opens his mouth and then closes it and then opens it again. Normally, he would have to try extraordinarily hard to rein Luis in from a rambling aside, but the one time Luis has quieted down on his own, he seems to have no idea what to say. Eventually he settles for, “Luis, we’re all very sorry to hear that,” and a desperate look cast around at the others. “Does anyone have some encouraging words to offer Luis?”
After that, they carry on with their introductions, and Hope is next. “I’m Hope, sixteen, recurring in my lungs. After four years,” she makes sure to add, as if it will make Scott rethink his optimistic outlook on the future. She hates herself a little for actively attempting to wreck someone’s sense of security, but she can feel him looking at her again, and she hates that more. “I’m okay.” This is the feeling she gives every week, and sometimes Jimmy tries to press her for more, but Luis’ impending blindness has thrown him for a loop, and so he simply nods and moves onto Ava.
Midway through group, Jimmy turns hopefully back to Scott. At least, Hope knows who he’s looking at; she doesn’t follow his gaze right away, because she can tell Scott is eying her again. “Scott,” says Jimmy to get his attention, “Maybe you would like to share your fears with us.”
“My fears?” echoes Scott, taking his eyes off Hope now. She turns her head to look at him critically, and Jimmy nods with this little encouraging tight-lipped smile. He clearly means cancer-related fears, like it coming back, but Scott doesn’t seem to want to follow the near-scripted conversation. Instead, he leans back in his chair, lifting his hands to the back of his head, elbows out, trying to look incredibly relaxed in such a stuffy, uncomfortable place. “I fear being forgotten. Being inconsequential. I fear it like…” He pauses thoughtfully, looking off into the distance as if there’s very far to look, and says each word carefully, like he’s quoting something. “Like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
Luis interjects, “Too soon,” but he’s smiling as he does.
Straight-faced, Scott gives a little nod. “Was that insensitive or something?” he wonders aloud. He’s messing with all of them, and while he looks mostly impassive, there’s this tiny glimmer in his eyes. He knows exactly what he’s doing. “Damn it. You know, sometimes I can really just be blind to other peoples’ feelings. It’s quite unfortunate.”
With a snort, Luis erupts into laughter that he tries to keep quiet. Everyone else is silent, trying to figure out whether it’s even okay to react to these particular jokes. Jimmy raises a hand awkwardly, which does nothing to stem Luis’ laughter. He looks as if he has no idea at all how to proceed, more evidently not cut out for this type of work than ever. “Scott, please, let’s focus on your struggles here,” he tries, raising his voice just slightly as Luis clamps a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. “You said you fear being… inconsequential. Does that resonate with anyone else?”
Maybe two people nod, but everyone else is quiet. Hope puts her hand up halfheartedly.
Jimmy, overjoyed, claps his hands together twice. “Hope! Yes, go ahead!” He’s been trying to prompt her to talk for weeks now, getting mostly one-word or two-word answers in return.
Hope directs her gaze to Scott, who’s (predictably) already looking at her. She meets his eyes stubbornly, hers narrowed slightly, a challenge; he doesn’t turn away. “We’re all going to be forgotten one day,” she starts, which is more words than she’s ever said outside of introductions in the whole month-and-a-bit she’s been coming here. “You, me, everyone in this room, everyone out of it. It doesn’t matter what we say or do in our lives. One day there will be nobody to remember Albert Einstein or Angelina Jolie or King Arthur’s knights, either. You’re going to die someday; it’s just a matter of when. Everyone who’s ever known you exist is going to die, too, and then that’s it.”
Silence.
“You must be really fun to have at parties, huh,” says Scott. It’s not a question.
Crossing her arms over her chest, Hope shrugs. She lets her gaze flicker back to Jimmy. “That’s it.”
She doesn’t say anything for the rest of group, and neither does Scott. It’s only after the final group prayer, joined hands and too many names to remember by the time Jimmy finishes listing them, that Scott ends up next to her at the snack table. She’s pouring herself a second cup of lemonade, which is probably the only good thing about this ridiculous support group besides getting to see Ava, when Scott clears his throat somewhere to her right. And it would be rude not to acknowledge that, so she turns reluctantly to face him.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” he announces. He’s taller than her, standing with all his weight on his good left leg, green eyes and barely-crooked nose. Hope frowns and opens her mouth to answer, but he raises a finger to stop her. “No, me first. I would like to argue that nobody will ever forget Angelina Jolie. She’s far too cool. Secondly, maybe you’re going to die one day and I’m going to die one day and everyone ever is going to die one day, sure, I’m not saying that’s not true. But you can’t possibly believe that it doesn’t matter what we say or do.” He’s on a roll now, picking up speed with each word, like he’s been practicing this debate in his head for the last forty-five minutes. “My life is going to have at least some kind of effect on everyone who knows me, and so is yours. If we just ceased to exist, there would be consequences. The George Bailey rule.”
“George Bailey?” Hope sets down the pitcher of lemonade. Ava is eying them both interestedly from her spot by Hope’s shoulder, munching on a cookie.
“Yeah. Jimmy Stewart? It’s a Wonderful Life?” he prompts. Luis finally makes his escape from where group-leader Jimmy has cornered him to talk about his upcoming surgery, and Scott cuts off the conversation abruptly to loop him in. “Pretty sure that was actually, like, twelve times worse than you said it was going to be, man. Why do you even bother coming?”
Luis shrugs and reaches for the cookies, loading up with four of them; after-group is a different world, with no real limits at all. “I don’t know,” he manages around a mouthful of chocolate chips. “Sometimes it kind of helps. Just to, like, talk about stuff, you know? Plus my mom wants me to. You know I can’t say no to her. Anyway, so I had this meeting with my surgeon today and I was trying to tell him how I’d rather be deaf than blind, and he was all, Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that, and I was like, Obviously I know that, I’m just saying that if I had the choice of which sense I was gonna totally lose, I would pick being deaf, and you know what he said? He literally explained to me how retinoblastoma doesn’t affect the ears, like it’s good news. Like, thanks, man, for educating me on how my eye cancer won’t make me lose my hearing. Just absolutely mind-blowing. I never would’ve known, otherwise.”
“Ridiculous,” agrees Scott, “but I’m going to need to revisit that in a moment. I’m having a very intense debate with Hope here, who has yet to make a rebuttal to my first or second point, so I’m totally winning.” He turns back to Hope with a grin that doesn’t seem to match the challenge in his tone. “You know who George Bailey is, right?”
“Totally,” Hope replies unconvincingly.
“Yep.” That’s Ava, and she sounds even less sure.
“You’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life?” Scott spins to Luis dramatically, hand placed over his chest to show just how offended he is. “Luis, they’ve never seen the 1946 classic film It’s a Wonderful Life. Unbelievable.” Returning his attention to Hope and Ava, he takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose as if it actually hurts him to think about the fact that they haven’t seen an old movie. “It proves my point exactly, you see. It’s about this guy, George Bailey, who’s going to commit suicide, except his guardian angel appears and shows him what might happen if he never existed. The entire point of it is to prove that life has meaning and is important. I can’t believe you guys haven’t seen it. What does your family watch at Christmas time?”
“Um… How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Home Alone,” Ava fires back immediately, determined to prove that Bill has instilled her with a strong sense of Christmas spirit. Hope says nothing. She’s seen those ones, obviously; Aunt Peggy played them for her and Sharon when they were very small, and she’s pretty sure they were on the TV screens at the hospital on loop all December the first time she was sick. But she and Hank don’t watch anything at Christmas time. Often, he’s not even in town. Standing tall and confident even though she’s the youngest among them, Ava suggests, “We should all hang out, the four of us. We can watch your weird death movie and Hope can kick your butt at this debate or whatever.”
“It’s a Christmas movie?” Hope checks warily.
“Bro, it’s only October,” complains Luis. “I want to like, experience Halloween first.”
But they all exchange numbers and Ava starts a group chat with a single Christmas tree emoji, all their phones lighting up at the same time. “This is going to be awesome,” she announces, flashing her teeth at each of them in turn. “We can do it at my house. I’ve gotta go, but I’ll text you guys and we’ll set it up, ‘kay?”
“I have to go, too.” Luis shoves his phone into his pocket and backs a few steps away. “Thanks for coming, Scotty. Come over tomorrow and I’ll kick your ass at FIFA again, yeah? Gotta get all my wins in while I still can.”
Which is how Hope finds herself heading up the stairs with only Scott keeping pace on one side of her. He even pauses gallantly at the top of the steps, giving her a moment to set her oxygen cart down and transition to rolling it behind her. Aunt Peggy hasn’t pulled back into the parking lot yet; her dad has been sitting obstinately in the car most Tuesdays, as if he’s waiting to make sure she doesn’t slip out instead of actually attending, which is a trick Peggy seems to think is unrealistic. Hope sinks down to sit on the curb, moderately surprised when Scott takes a seat next to her.
“So, what’s your deal, Hopeless Hope?” he asks. She glances at him questioningly and he grins before offering her an explanation. “I think it’s funny, you know. Your name, and then you’re all negative and pessimistic, no one is ever going to remember any of us, blah blah blah, et cetera.”
She shrugs. “It’s just a fact.” A sorry hovers on her lips, but she doesn’t let it out. Instead, she finds herself – for no real reason at all – opening her mouth to let out something entirely unexpected: A truth she hasn’t spoken about out loud much at all since her re-diagnosis. “I was diagnosed with lung carcinoma when I was ten, and I got better, like you. Four years of freedom, but here I am again, and you know why? Because life doesn’t give a shit how hard you fight, and you’re never really free. It’s worse this time. I’m probably not going to survive it.”
Scott lays a hand over hers on the edge of the sidewalk. “I’m sorry, Hope,” he says, and it’s sincere. She hates hearing sorrys, always has, even before that first diagnosis, but especially afterward. Everyone wants to say sorry after they find out someone is sick – it’s ingrained into them in the name of being polite, and after hearing it enough, it becomes meaningless. But from Scott, maybe it comes across differently. This isn’t reserved for just him; it’s something Hope has noticed among other cancer patients, too. They all know how unhelpful a sorry really is, and so when they say one, it’s not out of the belief that it will actually fix anything. That’s when the significance of the word manages to really be heard.
And then he has to go and pull out a cigarette.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she snaps, pointedly scooting a few inches away from him and yanking her hand out from under his. She doesn’t feel so bad about dropping the word outside the building, even if they are still on church property. “You think that’s cool or something?”
Scott holds the cigarette between his teeth and frowns at her. “What are you,” he starts, but it’s Hope’s turn to talk now.
“You know, you seemed not so bad for, like, five seconds back there,” she carries on, voice rising a little. “A little condescending and obsessed with some Christmas movie from the 1940s, apparently, but not horrible. And yet – yet – even though you literally had cancer, you’re over here giving these big companies a whole bunch of money just to get a chance to get, what, more cancer? And you think I’m not going to tell you how stupid that is when I just told you I’ve got lung cancer? For the record, not being able to breathe” – she tugs gently at the tubes carrying her air for her – “it’s shitty. Really, really shitty.”
A familiar car pulls up around the loop of the church parking lot, stopping several feet away, and Hope stands up to make her exit; Peggy has impeccable timing. She heads for the vehicle, watching the woman tap her thumbs on the steering wheel through the slightly-tinted glass. She’ll definitely be trying her best to get out of the movie night Ava has promised to text about.
Scott jogs around in front of her so she has to stop short to avoid running into him. He’s taken the cigarette out of his mouth now, still unlit, and is instead holding it in his hand. She scowls up at him and he just looks back at her earnestly, unfazed. “I’ve never lit one,” he says, which sounds completely ridiculous. “It’s a metaphor, okay? You put the killing thing right between your teeth, like this,” and he demonstrates like that’s the part she doesn’t understand. “But you don’t give it the power to do its killing. Get it?”
Hope snorts. “You’re full of shit. And that’s not a metaphor, that’s symbolism.” She sidesteps around him and carries on towards the car, but she turns back at the last moment, just before being within reach of the door handle, to add, “Really bad symbolism, too. You know you’re still giving your money to companies that essentially manufacture cancer, right?”
And then she leaves him there, standing a few paces into the parking lot with his unlit cigarette.