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Tommy’s famous last words included something like “it’s just a bit of blood.”
The thing is though, coughing up blood is never ‘just a bit’, not for someone who’s been smoking for as long as he has. He can’t hide it from Alfie for long, because soon enough the once a week cough becomes once a day and once a day becomes once an hour. And from there, he’s fucked. Alfie takes him to the hospital the next day after a screaming match and a lighter fluid has leaked into the carpet and cigarettes were waterlogged in the sink. They both know that it means nothing, Tommy will buy the cigarettes and the lighters if he wants to.
Within ten minutes Tommy is booked in for a bronchoscopy a week later which he attends wordlessly. Alfie’s at his bedside in the recovery ward. Their time spent together has become terse and without the cigarettes it seems Tommy’s going to add liver failure to his diagnosis with the amount of alcohol he’s consuming.
They found nodules, precancerous. Neither of them feel angry, that’s the thing. Every emotion is strung with an undercurrent of fear. Fear of loss, fear of withdrawals.
Alfie comes with him to a support group. It takes Tommy ten minutes before he storms out and kicks the garbage bins outside with guilt and fear.
“I can’t, I can’t.”
He knows how the withdrawal makes him itch, makes him uncontrollable, explosive. He knows and he hates it. Hates the shock in peoples eyes when he bites their heads off out of nowhere. That’s when the guilt sneaks back in and he hardens his resolve.
It stays hardened, his revolve. The days melt into months and Tommy goes through more nicotine patches than he’d care to admit but he stays off the nicotine. Bloodied tissues dry up, he’s not so out of breath walking up the stairs to his office.
As the cravings reside, so does the tension with Alfie. With the worry slowly dissipating, they look forward. Tommy walks past a smoke one day and instead of the quiet craving rousing in his chest, he finds the stench nauseating. It gives him a migraine for the rest of the day.
He doesn’t need the patches so much anymore. But he keeps them just in case. Alfie does, too. When Tommy finds out about this, he does get angry. It feels like no one trusts him to not fall off the wagon. But then he realises it’s not in case he falls off the wagon, it’s to help him stay on the wagon.
Once he realises that, the tension alleviates again.
Soon enough it’s been a year and the cravings haven’t reared their head in a long time. Another year on and they’re married. Just a few months after that Alfie signs the adoption papers of Charlie. He’s old enough now to make that decision about Alfie’s guardianship.
First year’s hell, second years better, third years home. At least, that’s how Tommy sees it.