I Fell in Love with Hope(78)

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.