That’s What Friends Are For Ch. 7: The Decision
A/N: This chapter is unusual in a couple of ways, first it’s longer than the others, pushing 2300 words, and second, this time we get to hear from Becca herself. Tagging all the usual suspects: @ultrarebelheart @illegalcerebral @dontshootmespence @reid-effect @stunudo @analyn100
When I woke up to the sound of my newborn daughter crying and realized that I’d been asleep since I last fed her, almost three hours earlier, I knew I was running seriously low on time. I dragged myself off my mattress and over to the pink bassinet I’d bought at a garage sale a few weeks earlier. She was tiny, with soft, flawless, alabaster skin, adorable round cheeks, and a thick mop of black hair as dark as ink, and as thick and silky as my own. She looked a lot like me, even at only a day old.
“Hold on, Sweetheart, I know you’re hungry. I’ll feed you in just a minute.” I told her softly.
I sat down in an old wooden rocking chair next to the bassinet before daring to pick her up. I was so weak that holding her and standing up at the same time without help was a risky venture. So, I took her into my arms, sat her up on my lap, and supported her tiny head with one hand as her mouth instinctively found the nipple of my right breast and began to suck. I hadn’t named her yet, so I called her by various terms of endearment instead, Sweetie, Sweetheart, My Darling… things like that; because she wasn’t mine. I knew my body wouldn’t allow me to stay in this world long enough to raise her, and that the best I could do was to ensure that she would be safe even after my life ended, and I wanted the friend I’d chosen to raise her, to be the one to name her.
Sitting there, holding her, I grimaced at the thought of the bruises I knew even the weight of her tiny body would leave on my legs. I glanced over to the corner opposite my bed, where a portable oxygen tank with tubes that could be connected either to a nasal cannula or a face mask, depending on just how desperately I needed the help at any given time, sat in a wheeled, backpack-like setup on the floor between the window and my dresser. On top of the dresser sat a bunch of pill bottles, most were vitamins and supplements, immune supports, prenatal vitamins, women’s multi-vitamins, those sorts of things. Since being told that unless I sacrificed my daughter for chemo and radiation I would only have six months, I’d accepted all the medical help I could get, except the kind that might actually save my life. It wasn’t about me anymore. Everything I could do to stay as strong as possible, as healthy as possible, long enough to bring her to term, long enough to give birth, I did. The leukemia that was not-so-slowly killing me might, and almost certainly would, take my life, but I wasn’t about to let it take hers.
As she finished feeding, she started to cry, wanting some time with me that didn’t center on food. I bit my lip as tears ran down my cheeks, knowing that all too soon I’d have to set the next phase of my plan into motion. “Don’t worry Sweetie, soon you’ll have a Daddy, a strong, kind Daddy, one who will take good care of you and love you as much as I do,” I told her, praying that she’d somehow, miraculously understand.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, I took it out with my one free hand to see the familiar face of my best friend filling the caller-ID screen. Speak of the devil… I thought to myself as I waited for the call to go to voicemail. I didn’t want him to think I was avoiding him, but I couldn’t tell him about her, about my illness, about what had led to her existence in the first place, about any of it, not yet. I knew that what was about to happen would hurt him and I didn’t want to prolong his suffering, or give him a false sense of hope, let him think, even for a second, that there was a way to fix this, to save me. I couldn’t do that to him. I bit my lip as memories of our time together flooded my brain…
Spencer and I had known each other since I was four and he was almost seven. That was the very first time my Mom had gone crazy at me. I had been laying on my stomach on the wooden floor of our living room, painting when she came down the stairs in a rage. She kicked the tray of watercolors against the wall under the window, the red splashing on my denim jumper as it whizzed by. Then she’d blamed me as though I had done it, and my punishment was being lifted into the hair, her grip so tight around my arms it almost cut off circulation, as she shook me and screamed at me about the awful thing I had supposedly done. When she finally let go, she dropped me then went back upstairs, leaving me on the floor cowering and sobbing. When I realized she was gone, I ran downstairs, through our family restaurant, out the front door, and down the street. For a while I just wandered, not really caring where I was going as long as it was away from there. Then, I literally ran into someone, knocking both of us to the ground. When I looked up, I saw a boy, no more than two or three years older than I was, fumbling around on the sidewalk like he couldn’t see. Then I saw a pair of round, thick-rimmed glasses laying in the dirt a few feet away. I walked over to pick them up, cleaned them off using the clean part of the hem of my jumper, and gave them back.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to ram into you like that,” I told him as he put the glasses back on and looked up at me.
“Who are you?” He asked, eyeing the splattered red paint from earlier.
“My name’s Becca. What’s yours?”
“Spencer. Hey, do you want to go to the park or something? You’re out here all by yourself and you’re even younger than me.”
I nodded in relief. I had half expected him to grill me about why there was paint on my dress and a gaping tear in my tights, but he didn’t. Instead, he seemed to want to play with me, and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to go to the playground with him, to have fun like a normal kid, far away from my mom and what she’d just done.
Our friendship had only just begun that day in 1988. Over the months and years that followed we discovered that we had a lot in common that most people would simply never understand. One evening, when I was six and Spencer was nine, he came into our restaurant with his parents. Occasionally, when his mom felt stable enough to handle it, they’d come just after we opened for dinner before it got busy.
On that particular night though, he walked in to see my mom with her hands around my throat, choking me. His mom and dad stood there utterly dumbfounded, barely comprehending what they were seeing. Spencer, however, sprung into swift and decisive action, throwing himself, with the weight of his entire body, into my mother, knocking her down and forcing her to drop me. Then, as I knelt on the floor, coughing and sputtering, he stood, still as a statue, between me and her. His arms were outstretched, his stance wide and firm, brown eyes glaring at her with an iciness I never saw in them before or since.
“Why you little brat…” She hissed.
“Leave her alone!” He spat back, his voice hard as stone. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward his own parents. “Come on Becca, we’re leaving. You’re coming home with us.” He said. It wasn’t an order, it was more like a declaration. I half expected his parents to stop him, to force me to stay there, with my own family, with my mother, but they didn’t.
“I think that’s a good idea.” His dad agreed, then turning to me, he said: “Becca, go get some PJs, we’ll wait.”
I ran up the two flights of stairs to my room and yanked my favorite nightgown and some pajama pants out of my dresser drawer. When I came back down, Mr. Reid was eyeing my parents watchfully, warning my mother not to come any closer to either Spencer or me. Then we left. We got burgers and milkshakes from the diner down the street instead of my Dad’s food. Then we went back to Spencer’s house. Around nine o’clock or so, we found ourselves in his parents’ bed, lounging against the pillows on either side of his mother as she read to us from some book I don’t remember the title of anymore. When she finished, it was time for bed, and being the gentleman that he is, even back then, Spencer gave me his room while he slept out on the sofa in the living room. That was the first night in almost three years that I truly felt safe, safe enough to really relax, to let my guard down and fall asleep without fear making my mom the monster of my nightmares.
Mr. Reid had reported the incident he’d witnessed between my mom and me, and CPS had investigated, but somehow Dad made it go away, and I was forced to continue living with my parents, in the apartment above the restaurant.
I would return the favor a little over two years later when he was twelve and I was not quite ten. He was a child prodigy, an academic genius capable of high school work while still at a grade school age. One afternoon, I waited and waited for him to walk to my place on his way home and pick up supper for himself and his mom, as he usually did on Friday nights, but he never came. Hours passed and as they ticked by, a sense of dread grew within me. I knew something was up, I just didn’t know what. Finally, with mom upstairs and dad busy making food for hungry customers, I snuck out into the dim light of the chilly Last Vegas night. It never got really dark here, even in the middle of the night, it was bright enough to be what, in most other places would count as twilight. I made my way to Las Vegas East High, knowing that was the last place where I knew for sure he’d been.
It wasn’t until I made my way around to the practice field that I saw him, tied to a goal post, naked. I ran up to him as fast as my legs would carry me and immediately started fingering out the knots in the rope that bound him there.
“Becca? What are you doing here? How did you find me?” He asked.
Even in the dim light, I could tell that he was mortified that I had been the one to discover him, that I was seeing him like this; but I didn’t care. Once he was freed, I slipped out of the massively oversized hoody I was wearing, a big, comfortable red one that came down almost to my ankles and covered my hands in its sleeves by several inches. I gave it to him to put on so he wouldn’t have to walk home like that.
Someone else might have questioned why his mother wasn’t out looking for him, or why no police had been called, given how long he must have been MIA and how late it was getting, but I knew the answer. It was more than likely Mrs. Reid was in a near catatonic state and may not have even noticed that her son had yet to reappear. I followed him until we got to his front door. All the lights were off except for a floor lamp in the corner of the living room, next to his mother’s favorite chair, the warm yellow glow visible through the curtains. I was right. Clumsily, he removed the spare house key from inside a ceramic frog near the doorway, turned the lock, and went inside, whispering a ‘thank you’ and promising to wash and return my sweatshirt within the week. Then I turned and started marching down the street back the way we had come, back to my own house, shivering in my short-sleeved polo and rubbing my hands against my arms as I went. Deserts weren’t always as warm as people tended to think, not that time of year, and especially not that late at night.
My thoughts suddenly returned to the here and now and I peered down at the tiny infant in my arms. Yes, Spencer was the perfect person to take care of her, the only one I could trust to safeguard one of the few good things in my life besides Spencer himself.
My phone started buzzing again, and once more, an old photo of him filled my screen. This time I hit ‘accept’. I couldn’t avoid him for long or he would definitely know something was wrong.
“Hey, how are things going? It’s been awhile…”
“You sure Becca? You sound tired, are you ok?”
“I’m fine, Spencer, it’s just,” I paused, hesitating just for an instant, I had to choose my next words very carefully, “been a really long day…”
