Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

Author:Suleika Jaouad [Jaouad, Suleika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Everyone did their best to support me when Will went to California that fall. My friends made a renewed effort to reach out and to drop off home-cooked meals from time to time, a neighbor volunteered to walk Oscar during chemo week, and my parents found someone to help clean the apartment. Will did his best from afar, calling several times a day to check up on me. For the most part, our conversations were full of the usual warmth and humor, but there were moments, especially when I was back in the emergency room or flailing under the stress of having to manage on my own, when it was hard to keep the resentment from creeping into my voice. But mostly, I just missed him. I thought often of Will’s words from that first night in Saratoga after my diagnosis: A lot of bad things are about to happen. We need to put our relationship into a box and to protect it with everything we have. And at first we had, the illness bringing us together, closer than ever before. But somewhere along the way, both of us had stopped protecting our relationship—worse, we’d turned against it, against each other in moments. Now the illness had pushed us three thousand miles apart.

In Will’s absence, I began spending more time with the cancer crew. Without my ever having to ask for anything or explain, they understood I was in a low-down place. Erika made sweatshirts with the words Team Susu printed across the front in varsity lettering, and Kristen accompanied me to urgent care or to my chemo appointments so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. Max was always showing up at my apartment with ninety-nine-cent slices of pizza and expertly rolled joints, and Melissa rallied the troops, organizing game nights, dance parties, and the occasional outing. A hiccup of genetics had brought us together—all of us bound by rogue, malignant cells and a heightened sense of our mortality—but at some point we’d become more than circumstantial friends. We were family.

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