Where the Light Is [Part One]
Title: Where the Light Is
Author: heroes_and_cons
Pairing: Kradam: AU, established couple, parent!fic
Word Count: 10,370
Rating: R for language, mild sex, drug references
Disclaimer: don’t own Adam or Kris. Caden is a figment of my imagination. Title credit to John Mayer
Warnings / Triggers: terminal illness, character death, drug use, divorce. Please do not continue if any of these triggers could be unsettling for you.
Authors’ notes: The story itself jumps around a lot; it’s linear, but told in snapshots, without dates given. Just a heads up : )
Prologue.
At some point or another, Adam genuinely believed that the most difficult feat he would ever have to overcome was being a father.
It was even more daunting than it seemed. Being responsible for the well-being and health of another person, a human, was terrifying in itself. At least, this was what Kris said was his main concern. Adam, on the other hand, worried about happiness.
“You’re freaking out over keeping our kid happy?” Kris asked one night, raising an eyebrow. “Adam, you’re thinking too hard about this nature-versus-nurture thing. You’re going to be an awesome dad,” he’d murmured in Adam’s ear.
Adam had silently vowed to give his child everything it could possibly need. Other than the obvious necessities, this encapsulated the non-materialistic: open-mindedness, acceptance, character, courage. Love.
Ironically enough, in the end, it would be none of these things Adam had to worry about. Nor would it be the responsibility that Kris had been concerned with. It would be something so far out of their reach that it was painful; something so beyond their control it made them ache. Something that would detract from the basic childhood Adam assumed their child would have.
Being a father was not be the hardest obstacle Adam would have to overcome. It was learning how to let go.
One.
The morning that Caden was born, it snowed in Los Angeles.
Not actual snow, but the kind of snow where the flakes flitted down from the ashen sky and melted the moment they touched the ground. The kind that evaporated so quickly that you had to look back up at the clouds and confirm that they were actually there.
“It’s snowing,” Kris had murmured absent-mindedly from the breakfast table.
Adam had ignored him. Snow in Los Angeles was like getting struck by lightening twice in one lifetime. Needless to say, Adam pulled open the window shades in the living room to see the flakes sticking to the panes for a flash of a moment, then dribbling down the glass as they melted into raindrops.
Twenty minutes later, they had gotten the call that Jessica was going into labor.
“I wonder if this is, like, an omen or something,” Kris had smirked, pulling on his jacket. “Our kid is born on the first day it snows in L.A. in over twenty years.”
Adam hadn’t been able to speak as they left the apartment in a hurry, mostly because Kris’s words echoed endlessly in his mind.
Our kid.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Jessica was seventeen years old and aspired to be a lawyer someday. Her boyfriend, a tall, dark-haired hockey player, had accidentally gotten her pregnant; they both wanted to go to college, and decided to give the baby up.
Jessica’s and her boyfriend’s physical features were what intrigued Adam at first, when meeting candidates for closed adoption. He had noticed Jessica’s blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, her boyfriend’s strong build and obsidian hair. Meanwhile, Kris had been taking mental notes on whether or not they said “please” and “thank you”, what kinds of students they were at school.
Jessica’s face lit up when Adam and Kris walked into the examination room, despite the fact that her hair was clinging to her damp forehead and her chest heaved from panting.
“Snow, it’s crazy, isn’t it?” She laughed, arching her head back onto the pillow.
“How is everything?” Kris said, a tinge of concern threading his voice. “How’re you doing?”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Jessica muttered. Her mother glared.
“Nine centimeters dilated,” a nurse smiled. “Almost ready.”
Almost ready. Almost here.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was over relatively quickly.
Jessica’s mother was the only one allowed in the room while the actual birth transpired. Adam and Kris had anxiously paced the waiting room of the maternity ward. After a short fifteen minutes, one of the nurses came through the double doors, pulling her facemask down.
“It’s a boy,” she smiled broadly. “He’s healthy and perfect. Seven pounds, three ounces.”
Adam exhaled, almost as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time. Maybe, on some subconscious level, a part of him had.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The baby felt heavier in Adam’s arms than he’d been expecting.
He was swaddled in blue, eyes like the sea on a clear day, ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and bow-tie lips that parted into a perfect O. He had a head full of hair, dark hair that jarringly contrasted his translucent, porcelain-pale skin. And in the moment his weight became situated in Adam’s arms, he stopped squirming and screaming, cerulean eyes shifting up towards his father’s.
“Hi,” Adam said quietly, almost as though he were talking to anyone else. “I’m your daddy.”
The baby reached out his arm, unfurling his minuscule fingers towards his father. And Adam held out his own hand, let the baby wrap his fist around Adam’s index finger, let him hold on tightly.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Do we have a name?”
Kris sighed, exasperated. He and Adam had been arguing over names for months now, coming nowhere near an agreement. “No, not yet,” he replied to the nurse.
“That’s fine,” she smiled. “We’ll just call him Baby Boy…um…”
“Lambert,” Kris interjected. Adam glanced up from where he was holding the baby and smiled.
The nurse left, and for a moment Kris simply watched them, the other two people that completed his family. The baby gurgled and reached with one flailing arm for Adam’s face, and Adam smiled incessantly in return.
“You know, I thought of another name,” Adam murmured. “I mean…I didn’t think of it. But it was in the book and I don’t remember talking about it.”
Kris leaned forward, propping his elbows up on his knees. “Okay. Hit me.”
Adam grazed his thumb over the baby’s cheek. “Caden.”
Kris hesitated before standing and crossing the space between them. He held out his arms and let Adam situate the baby in them. Kris juggled the baby’s weight, stared into his pale blue eyes.
“Caden,” he breathed, smiling. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but…I actually really like it. Why’d you pick it?”
Adam shrugged. “He looks like a Caden, right?”
Adam watched as Kris rocked Caden in his arms, a smile consuming his weary and tired face. Adam hadn’t picked Caden simply because he liked the way it sounded. He’d specifically searched for it in the book, thumbing through the index until he came across what he had been looking for:
Name: Caden
Origin: American
Meaning: Fighter.
Two.
The transition from being a couple into being a family was more seamless than Kris had expected.
He and Adam spent most of their time indoors, reclusive, and Kris couldn’t imagine having it any other way. Both he and Adam were on extended breaks from their careers in music, and as much as they loved their professions, it came as a welcomed relief. They slept in most mornings, and would occasionally eat breakfast in bed or take Caden down to the beach. Adam began to take up cooking, experimenting with different home-made meals every night, and even if the food wasn’t the best, the sight of Adam in an apron standing over a stove never failed to make Kris smile.
Once Caden passed the six-month mark, he stopped crying in the middle of the night, and slept soundly most of the time. Which meant Adam and Kris could stay up later, sleep in, spend their mornings lying in bed together as the tawny sunrise arched over the horizon.
“So we should probably start talking about plans for Caden,” Adam said abruptly one morning, absent-mindedly raking his fingers through tufts of Kris’s hair.
Kris rolled over, cocking an eyebrow. “Plans? Like…what?”
“For his birthday,” Adam said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s his first one, Kris. We have to make it memorable.”
“Okay, first of all, Caden’s birthday isn’t for another two months,” Kris retorted, kicking the sheets back and climbing out of bed. He fished around the floor for an old pair of jeans, slipping the denim on over his hips. “Second of all, do we really have to make it memorable if he’s not even going to remember it for himself?”
“I read that children have repressed memories from when they were, like, twelve months old,” Adam replied. “So, yeah, I want to make it memorable. Besides, I want him to be able to look back at the photos someday.”
Kris sighed, but a smile played on his lips. “You and your reading,” he mumbled, sliding his belt through his jeans. “Fine. We’ll have a big first-birthday extravaganza, okay?”
Adam grinned, sat up and grabbed Kris by the loopholes of his jeans, and tugged him forward so he fell onto the bed. Kris laughed into Adam’s collarbone, pressing his cheek against Adam’s skin.
“I love you,” Adam whispered, pressing his lips against the soft spot just underneath Kris’s jaw.
Sometimes it seemed ridiculous that he even needed to say it, but he said it all the time, anyway. Just in case.
“I love you, too.”
Three.
The hardest thing for a parent to do is stand by and watch their child fall.
Maybe not always in the literal sense, but in this case it was. It happened so quickly that the entire scene unfolded in Adam’s mind moments after it actually occurred.
Caden had been playing in the backyard, and Adam was sitting on the patio, too tired to endure his son’s bursts of energy. Instead, he watched from a close distance as Caden hopped on the swing set, kicking himself off the ground, his small legs pumping as he pushed himself higher and higher into the sky.
Adam glanced down at the magazine he was thumbing through, and in that split second, he heard an evident smack, followed by Caden’s screams.
Adam was up in a heartbeat, at Caden’s side as he lay on the ground, the swing still in motion overhead. Adam couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, could barely register the fact that he was moving, turning Caden over onto his back and gently touching the blood that seeped from his head.
Those few moments, hovering over his son’s fragile body, not knowing the extent of the damage or the eventual outcome, were some of the most terrifying Adam had yet experienced. It turned out that Caden had accidentally pitched himself forward on the swing, fallen flat on his stomach, cutting his forehead on the chain of the swing along the way; nothing that an ice pack and a few band-aids couldn’t fix.
But after, the guilt gradually infiltrated Adam’s mind. “I should’ve been watching him the entire time,” Adam murmured later that night in bed. “I should’ve been closer to him. I shouldn’t have let him swing that high.”
“He’s four, Adam,” Kris said, gently pressing his lips to Adam’s jaw. “These things happen. You did nothing wrong.”
Adam had nodded, physically accepting Kris’s words. But internally, he knew that if he really hadn’t done anything wrong, there wouldn’t be a slew of bruises lining his son’s ribcage, or a gash from his forehead to his temple. The kinds of wounds that leave permanent scars.
Four.
Kids were supposed to hate bath time, but for whatever reason, Caden loved it; more importantly, it was a moment Kris had developed with his son, something they always did together.
Caden sat in the tub, making engine noises with his lips as he pushed a tugboat through a mountain of bubbles. Kris hunched over the side, slathering shampoo over his hands and gently massaging Caden’s black hair.
“Hate to break it to you, buddy, but tugboats don’t go that fast in real life,” Kris smiled, wiping bubbles away from his face.
Caden cocked his head, pale eyes fixed on the boat. “Yes, they do,” he said quietly, making the boat do a figure eight. “They go fast.”
Kris washed Caden’s scalp before grabbing a towel and drying his hands. He sat back on his heels, watching Caden absorb himself in the tugboat.
It was when Caden pushed the bubbles away, lifting his arm, that Kris saw them.
His brow furrowed, and he leaned forward, trying to prevent the bubbles from obscuring Caden’s body. Gently, he lifted Caden’s arm, who seemed to be oblivious to attention.
There was a line of bruises, angry shades of purples and blues and blacks, trailing from Caden’s armpit, down his ribs, and to his hips.
Without giving it another second of thought, Kris gingerly lifted Caden from the bathtub. He squealed and fought, outstretching his arms for the tugboat that had been left behind.
“Bathtime’s over,” Kris whispered, his voice rough and unfamiliar even to himself. With shaking hands, he wrapped Caden’s small body in a towel, picked him up and took him into the bedroom. His mind was numb, and as he pulled a shirt over Caden’s head, he forced himself not to look at the bruises.
Kris continued to go through their typical routine. He fed Caden dinner, played a few games with him, took him back upstairs and put him to bed early.
And then he walked into the living room and collapsed on the sofa.
Kris’s mind was flying. Maybe those were bruises from when he fell off the swings. But that was four weeks ago, they would’ve healed by now. And Adam said nothing about him falling on his side. Maybe he just fell when no one was looking, kids do that a lot.
He sat there for a few hours, unable to move. His child was hurt, and there was nothing he could do about it.
When Adam walked through the door, the first thing Kris noticed where the deep lines in the corners of his eyes. He’d been laughing, and a small smile still played on his lips.
“Hey,” Adam sighed, tossing his keys onto the table. He peeled off his jacket before finally turning to Kris, and his smile dissipated. “What’s wrong?”
Kris swallowed. “Caden,” he murmured. “When he fell off the swings, like, a month ago…did he fall on his side?”
Adam frowned. “You mean like his ribcage? No. Flat on his stomach.” He hesitated, still standing by the door. “Why?”
Kris stood, began walking upstairs; Adam followed. Without saying a word, Kris led Adam into Caden’s bedroom, where he was sleeping soundly. Adam watched as Kris reached down, gently tugging up the side of Caden’s shirt and revealing the bruises.
For an instant, a look glazed over Adam’s eyes that made Kris’s heart fall to the pit of his stomach. But Adam shrugged, feigning indifference. “He’s a kid,” Adam whispered. “They fall all the time. I’m sure he just bumped into something.”
Adam turned and walked out of the room, before Kris could object to what they both knew was a lie.
Five.
Adam hated waiting.
More importantly, he hated having to wait when Kris couldn’t be there with him. He cracked his knuckles, thumbed the hem of his shirt, fidgeted and kept his hands busy so he wouldn’t have to think about anything else. He watched as Caden sat on the floor, trying to piece together a puzzle. The resulting image was supposed to be of Elmo and the Cookie Monster, but thus far Caden was nowhere near the end.
“Is he yours?”
Adam snapped his head up-a little too quickly, he realized, as the woman beside him flinched. She looked like a typical mom: neat blonde hair, a polo shirt and plain jeans, a diamond wedding ring that sparkled under the flourescent lights. The polar opposite of Adam, who was wearing a David Bowie t-shirt, enough jewelry to open a small boutique, distressed jeans and black boots.
Adam glanced back to realize that she was gesturing towards Caden. “Yeah,” he nodded, swallowing. “He’s mine.” It felt reassuring, somehow, to have ownership.
She cocked her head. “Three-and-a-half?”
“Four,” Adam smiled.
“Ah,” she nodded. “That’s my daughter. She’s five.” The woman pointed at a little girl sitting by the wall who was combing the hair of a Barbie doll. “Is he getting any shots today?”
Adam cleared his throat. “Just a check-up today,” he murmured. He’d become convinced that if he pretended everything was normal, it would be.
The woman leaned is, as if she were sharing a secret. “Tell him he’s lucky,” she winked. “My daughter has to get two vaccines today. She’s not going to be happy about it.”
Adam turned his gaze towards Caden, who had seemed to give up trying to solve the puzzle and simply sat back and stared. Adam forced himself to nod. “I’ll tell him that,” he whispered.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Adam was leaning over the kitchen sink, head low between his concave shoulder blades, when Kris walked in.
“Hey, buddy,” he heard Kris saying to Caden, who was sitting at the table. “How was the…” His voice trailed off as Adam felt Kris’s gaze burning holes in the back of his head.
“Come on, Caden,” Kris said quietly. Adam closed his eyes. “It’s time for bed.”
“But I’m not tired.”
There was the sound of Caden being lifted into Kris’s arms despite his protests, the sound of Kris’s footsteps leaving the kitchen and walking up the stairs. Five minutes later, the same footsteps retreated, and Adam could feel Kris’s presence in the kitchen.
“What did they say?”
Adam turned, facing Kris for the first time. It was almost painful, the way Kris stood in the threshold of the kitchen, the overhead light illuminating his shining eyes. He looked about as helpless as Adam felt.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “They redirected us.” He walked over, passing Kris the business card that the pediatrician had given him earlier that afternoon.
“Sloan-Kettering. This is a cancer center.”
Adam bit down on his lower lip so hard he could taste blood. “They said his white blood cell count is low,” he whispered, reciting the exact words the doctor had said. “They said it’s just a precaution.”
Kris sank into one of the chairs, still holding the card. After a moment, he tossed the flimsy paper onto the table. “We’re not going.”
“What?”
“We’re not going,” Kris repeated, his voice trembling. “We’re not taking Caden to a fucking cancer center.” Kris balled up his hands into fists, pressing them into the table. “This isn’t supposed to happen to us. Our child isn’t supposed to have fucking cancer, Adam. He’s four. He’s only four.” Kris’s voice began to crack, and he buried his face in his hands.
Adam dragged up a chair next to him, pulled Kris into his arms. After all these years, it seemed like they molded together, like Kris’s imprint had never left him. “We don’t know anything yet,” Adam managed. “They said it’s just a precaution.”
Kris opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something, but the words eluded him and he instead turned his face into Adam’s shoulder. Adam pressed his hand into the back of Kris’s head, silently thankful for the fact that Kris hadn’t spoken, hadn’t voiced the words that they both knew to be true.
No one sends a four-year-old to Sloan just as a precaution.
Six.
As he walked through the whitewashed halls of Sloan-Kettering, Kris realized that he had been here before.
A number of years ago, he’d done some promotional thing, entertaining the sick kids here. All of the children were terminally ill, but Kris had focused his energy on singing, not considering what their situation might be like.
Now, he averted his eyes towards the floor as he felt the penetrating stares of the people they passed. They looked like typical people-fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and grandparents-yet they looked weary, physically and emotionally drained, deep shadows underneath their eyes signifying a universal disposition of defeat.
Kris followed Adam, who was always a few steps ahead of him, down a seemingly never-ending hallway and into a large office. They sat down on one side of a massive oak desk, Kris shifting restlessly, Adam staring blankly out the window. So this is what it’s like on the other side, Kris thought.
Minutes later, the doctor entered. Dr. Frasier was a tall man, gangly and lean, with graying hair and thin glasses. Last week, he’d spent an entire day with them: running tests on Caden, asking Adam and Kris a variety of questions. Kris had tried to read the doctor’s facial expressions during the brief interrogation, hoping for some slight sign or gesture indicating relief; there had been none.
“The results are in,” the doctor said bluntly, as if this weren’t already obvious. “I’m afraid it’s…it’s not good news.”
Adam leaned forward and pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. Kris was suddenly struck down by paralysis, unable to move, unable to breathe. “How…” he swallowed. “How bad?”
Dr. Frasier sat back in his plush leather chair, folding his hands on his lap. “Your son has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. It’s a type of cancer in which a lymphoid progenitor cell becomes genetically altered and metastasizes, thus destroying the-”
“English,” Adam snapped.
The doctor cleared his throat and removed his glasses. “White blood cells, in the human body, normally fight infections-things like colds, fevers, anything that tries to penetrate our immune system. Leukemia cells are abnormal cells that destroy white blood cells, thus weakening the immune system. There also isn’t enough production of platelets, which explains why Caden was bruising so easily.”
“What…what does this mean?” Kris whispered.
“Well,” the doctor sighed, “ALL is one of the most common cancers for young children. Around seventy percent of children diagnosed and treated go into remission, and eighty-five percent of those live beyond five years after being diagnosed. However…ALL is an acute form of cancer, meaning it is extremely rapid spreading. We detected Caden’s relatively early, but it’s hard to say whether or not it was early enough.”
For a moment, Kris felt like he was in a cartoon, like an old-school episode of Tom and Jerry. He felt as though a piano had been dropped on him from overhead, or someone had thrown an anvil on his chest. Except that no one was laughing, and the pain felt all too real.
The doctor kept speaking-handing them several documents, explaining how often and when they needed to come back, when chemotherapy would start, psychologists they could refer to for Caden. His words seemed to flow around Kris, not touching or registering with him, as though he had a magnetic field around him that deferred anything negative.
Finally, the white noise of dialogue tapered off. Dr. Frasier sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I understand how difficult this is for you,” he said quietly. “But take solace in the fact that here at Sloan, we’re going to fight just as hard for Caden as you are.”
It was silent for a moment before Adam, who had not moved in the past ten minutes, sat up slowly, almost as if his spine was unraveling at the seams. “Do you have children, Dr. Frasier?” He asked in a voice so soft, it was barely audible.
The doctor cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. “Yes,” he finally said. “Two daughters and a son.”
“Have you ever had to sit back and let someone else tell you that one of them was dying?”
The doctor swallowed, blinked. The bulging veins that coiled around Adam’s neck twitched.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Actually, I have.”
Adam froze, caught off-guard. He opened his mouth, as if he were going to speak, but no words emanated from his lips.
Dr. Frasier glanced at his hands. “I had to have another doctor-a fellow colleague, actually-tell me that my daughter had a tumor the size of my fist metastasizing in her spinal cord.” He lifted his soft gray eyes towards Adam.
“Don’t assume you’re in a unique situation, Mr. Lambert,” he murmured, standing. “You’re one in a million.”
Seven.
Adam’s hands would not stop trembling.
He’d had to take off all of his rings, because the sound of the metal scraping together between his fingers had become excruciating. He’d tried sitting on his hands, cracking his knuckles, keeping them busy, but the shaking simply would not cease.
He was now washing the dishes for a third time, even though they were already clean. His hands quivered as he held a plate under the stream of tepid water before lifting it out of the sink and transferring it to the counter. Halfway there, his muscles spasmed and the plate went flying, falling to the kitchen floor below and shattering into a million little pieces.
Adam paused, staring at the shards of glass scattered below him. He should have been annoyed, or perhaps upset with himself, but somehow the sight of broken and jagged pieces of ceramic sent chills across his skin.
Before he could stop himself, Adam reached for the counter, his hands finding another plate. He watched as his fingers uncurled from the sides, watched as the plate went into free-fall, watched it smash against the tiled floor. He grabbed another plate, and another; a glass, a coffee mug, a cereal bowl. Each time, he threw them with a little more vigor, harder and harder until the shards of glass began to ricochet in every direction.
When he ran out of plates, Adam knelt down, ignoring the sharp glass that penetrated his jeans, and reached for larger pieces. He threw those against the wall, onto the floor, at the wood cabinets. He tossed them, one after the other, until his arms began to ache, until his head pounded furiously.
Finally, he sat back, his body outlined by a halo of shards of glass. Blood trickled across his knuckles and fingers, flowing from the places he’d been cut.
He hadn’t noticed, until now, until everything around him was broken and bleeding, that his hands had finally stopped shaking.
Eight.
“How does Santa fit down the chimney?”
Caden was on his knees, palms pressed flat against the hearth of the fireplace. The soft glow from the flames flickered shadows across his paled face.
“You want to take this one?” Adam whispered to Kris, half-smiling.
Kris walked over and sat on the edge of the hearth next to Caden, whose pale eyes remained transfixed on the burning wood. “Well,” Kris sighed, “he parks up on the roof, tosses the bag of presents down first, then slides down the chimney.”
Caden ran his tongue over his chapped lips. “But he’s fat,” he said, smiling slightly. “He’s too fat for the chimney.”
Kris cleared his throat. “Um. Well…Santa goes on a crash diet the night before Christmas…”
Adam rolled his eyes and stood up, lifting Caden into his arms and sitting on the hearth next to Kris. “Santa’s got magic powers, buddy,” Adam murmured. “That’s why he’s able to do all these crazy things, like fit down the chimney and give presents to all the children in the world in one night.”
“But how?” Caden whispered, leaning his head against Adam’s shoulder.
Adam swallowed. “Santa can…he can compact himself,” Adam said decisively. “He can make himself shrink down so that he fits through the chimney, and then when he comes out at the end, he expands back to his normal size. Kind of like Jello.”
Caden seemed to be content with this somewhat ludicrous response; he sighed and pressed his cheek against Adam’s sweater. After a moment, his frail voice cut through the silence. “Dad? Is it too late to add something to my Christmas list?”
Adam glanced at Kris. “Well, kind of, bud. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“Oh.”
Kris chewed his lower lip. “Why? What’d you want, Caden?”
Caden shook his head vehemently. “Santa couldn’t get it for me anyway, I’m pretty sure,” he murmured. “I wanted to ask him to make me better.”
Adam closed his eyes, clenched his jaw as he felt his heart tighten against his chest. He leaned forward and found Caden’s smooth head, kissing it gently.
For a moment there was nothing but the fire crackling, the feeling of Caden’s steady heartbeat pounding rhythmically with Adam’s.
“It never hurts to ask,” Kris finally whispered. But by then, Caden had drifted to sleep in Adam’s arms.
Nine.
Caden spent his fifth birthday in the hospital.
He was having what felt like his billionth CSF spinal tap, in which chemotherapy would be injected into his cerebrospinal fluid to kill leukemia cells. This time, Dr. Frasier had told them, they’d added hydrocortisone and cytarabine to the injection-steroids that would leave Caden exhausted and bed-ridden for days.
The way Kris translated this was that the doctors were taking the kitchen-sink route: throwing in everything they had left in order to stop the cancer from spreading to Caden’s brain.
Watching Caden undergo chemo was hard enough in itself. Watching him undergo chemo on his birthday was even more difficult. But what made the situation seemingly impossible was the fact that Adam wasn’t there.
He’d gone out the night before to “get Caden his present”. Kris had begun to worry when Adam wasn’t home by midnight, or by two o’clock in the morning; when he woke up five hours later to a still-empty space next to him in bed, he had begun to panic. He had no option but to take Caden to the hospital by himself, though, and while he waited, he dialed and re-dialed Adam’s cell phone number until he was sure his thumbs were broken.
By about the fifteenth dial, as Caden was still in the radiation room, the ringing ceased after four times and there was crackling static across the line. Kris froze in mid-pace, suddenly alert despite not having slept the night before. “Hello?”
“H-hel…Kris?”
It was not Adam. It couldn’t be-the person’s voice was rough and unfamiliar, not the smooth and calming tone Adam maintained. Their words slurred together like contrasting music notes, not like Adam’s clear intonation. This was a stranger; perhaps Kris had dialed the wrong number.
“Kris? K-kris. It’s Adam.”
Kris swallowed, pressed his forehead against the cool wall of the isolated hallway he’d taken shelter in. “Adam? Where the hell are you?”
“I…l-listen, I w-went out to get Caden’s…his present, right? And I…got lost, for, like…six hours.”
Kris suddenly became aware of how dangerously close he was to a full-fledged breakdown. He closed his eyes, head still leaning against the wall, and pressed the phone so hard into his ear he could feel the keypad leaving imprints against his skin.
“Adam,” he finally whispered, “our son is going through chemotherapy right now. Chemotherapy on his fifth birthday. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you, but…” he hesitated. But what? But I still love you. But I miss you. But I hate the fact that you sleep on the couch sometimes now. But I want things back to the way they were before.
“But you want me to go,” Adam finished, his voice abruptly steady.
The fact that Kris wasn’t able to refute the statement almost immediately, the fact that he wasn’t able to say anything to that, made his stomach twist into knots.
“No,” he finally murmured. “I have to go.”
Kris hung up just as the doctor approached him, telling him that they were moving Caden into recovery.
Nine.
It was well past dinnertime when Kris trudged through the front door, carrying a sleeping Caden against his shoulder. He should have used the wheelchair the hospital had given him, but after a tiring week in and out of the hospital, all he wanted was to hold his son in his arms. He climbed the stairs and found his way in the dark to Caden’s room, nestling him into bed and tucking the blankets around his frail body.
“I’m sorry.”
Kris felt the muscles around the back of his neck tighten instinctively. He turned to see Adam standing in the doorway, the slivers of moonlight outlining his silhouette.
Kris pushed past him, closing the door to their son’s bedroom, and made his way to his room. He could hear Adam entering, sitting on the edge of their bed, as Kris peeled off his jeans and pulled on tattered old sweatpants.
“Kris?” Adam said softly. “I said I’m sorry.”
“Go tell that to Caden,” Kris muttered, unbuttoning his collared shirt. He hesitated for a moment, letting the silence absorb them. “Where were you?”
“What?”
“That night.” Kris turned, facing Adam and staring directly into his bright cerulean eyes. “The night before Caden’s birthday. Where were you?”
“I was getting his-”
“Stop.”
Adam did not move. He sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded in front of him, dark hair falling past his eyes and brushing the edges of his cheekbone.
“Stop lying to me, Adam,” Kris whispered, his voice breaking. “Goddamnit, stop lying to me. Our son is dying, and you’re out there…what? Drinking until you can’t feel anything? Popping pills? For Christ’s sake, Adam, at least tell me what the hell you were doing.”
Adam stared at his feet, planted to the floor below. Sometimes he felt like he was floating, and he had to remind himself that the forces of gravity would always keep him grounded.
“I can’t handle this the way you can, Kris,” Adam murmured. “You…you face everything, all of this, head-on. You let it hit you and you take it and you move forward.” He licked his chapped lips, pressed his palms together. “I can’t. I tried and I can’t anymore.” Adam hesitated. “Nothing happened that night, other than me realizing that any backbone I had before has completely deteriorated.”
Kris stared at him, eyes burning. “Nothing happened? So you calling me the next day, slurring and stuttering…that was nothing?”
Adam nodded.
Kris ran a hand over his tired face. His head was pounding and his body ached in places he’d never felt pain before. “Maybe you should sleep downstairs tonight,” he whispered.
When he opened his eyes again, though, Adam was already gone.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Part Two <
Author: heroes_and_cons
Pairing: Kradam: AU, established couple, parent!fic
Word Count: 10,370
Rating: R for language, mild sex, drug references
Disclaimer: don’t own Adam or Kris. Caden is a figment of my imagination. Title credit to John Mayer
Warnings / Triggers: terminal illness, character death, drug use, divorce. Please do not continue if any of these triggers could be unsettling for you.
Authors’ notes: The story itself jumps around a lot; it’s linear, but told in snapshots, without dates given. Just a heads up : )
Prologue.
At some point or another, Adam genuinely believed that the most difficult feat he would ever have to overcome was being a father.
It was even more daunting than it seemed. Being responsible for the well-being and health of another person, a human, was terrifying in itself. At least, this was what Kris said was his main concern. Adam, on the other hand, worried about happiness.
“You’re freaking out over keeping our kid happy?” Kris asked one night, raising an eyebrow. “Adam, you’re thinking too hard about this nature-versus-nurture thing. You’re going to be an awesome dad,” he’d murmured in Adam’s ear.
Adam had silently vowed to give his child everything it could possibly need. Other than the obvious necessities, this encapsulated the non-materialistic: open-mindedness, acceptance, character, courage. Love.
Ironically enough, in the end, it would be none of these things Adam had to worry about. Nor would it be the responsibility that Kris had been concerned with. It would be something so far out of their reach that it was painful; something so beyond their control it made them ache. Something that would detract from the basic childhood Adam assumed their child would have.
Being a father was not be the hardest obstacle Adam would have to overcome. It was learning how to let go.
One.
The morning that Caden was born, it snowed in Los Angeles.
Not actual snow, but the kind of snow where the flakes flitted down from the ashen sky and melted the moment they touched the ground. The kind that evaporated so quickly that you had to look back up at the clouds and confirm that they were actually there.
“It’s snowing,” Kris had murmured absent-mindedly from the breakfast table.
Adam had ignored him. Snow in Los Angeles was like getting struck by lightening twice in one lifetime. Needless to say, Adam pulled open the window shades in the living room to see the flakes sticking to the panes for a flash of a moment, then dribbling down the glass as they melted into raindrops.
Twenty minutes later, they had gotten the call that Jessica was going into labor.
“I wonder if this is, like, an omen or something,” Kris had smirked, pulling on his jacket. “Our kid is born on the first day it snows in L.A. in over twenty years.”
Adam hadn’t been able to speak as they left the apartment in a hurry, mostly because Kris’s words echoed endlessly in his mind.
Our kid.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Jessica was seventeen years old and aspired to be a lawyer someday. Her boyfriend, a tall, dark-haired hockey player, had accidentally gotten her pregnant; they both wanted to go to college, and decided to give the baby up.
Jessica’s and her boyfriend’s physical features were what intrigued Adam at first, when meeting candidates for closed adoption. He had noticed Jessica’s blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, her boyfriend’s strong build and obsidian hair. Meanwhile, Kris had been taking mental notes on whether or not they said “please” and “thank you”, what kinds of students they were at school.
Jessica’s face lit up when Adam and Kris walked into the examination room, despite the fact that her hair was clinging to her damp forehead and her chest heaved from panting.
“Snow, it’s crazy, isn’t it?” She laughed, arching her head back onto the pillow.
“How is everything?” Kris said, a tinge of concern threading his voice. “How’re you doing?”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Jessica muttered. Her mother glared.
“Nine centimeters dilated,” a nurse smiled. “Almost ready.”
Almost ready. Almost here.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was over relatively quickly.
Jessica’s mother was the only one allowed in the room while the actual birth transpired. Adam and Kris had anxiously paced the waiting room of the maternity ward. After a short fifteen minutes, one of the nurses came through the double doors, pulling her facemask down.
“It’s a boy,” she smiled broadly. “He’s healthy and perfect. Seven pounds, three ounces.”
Adam exhaled, almost as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time. Maybe, on some subconscious level, a part of him had.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The baby felt heavier in Adam’s arms than he’d been expecting.
He was swaddled in blue, eyes like the sea on a clear day, ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and bow-tie lips that parted into a perfect O. He had a head full of hair, dark hair that jarringly contrasted his translucent, porcelain-pale skin. And in the moment his weight became situated in Adam’s arms, he stopped squirming and screaming, cerulean eyes shifting up towards his father’s.
“Hi,” Adam said quietly, almost as though he were talking to anyone else. “I’m your daddy.”
The baby reached out his arm, unfurling his minuscule fingers towards his father. And Adam held out his own hand, let the baby wrap his fist around Adam’s index finger, let him hold on tightly.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Do we have a name?”
Kris sighed, exasperated. He and Adam had been arguing over names for months now, coming nowhere near an agreement. “No, not yet,” he replied to the nurse.
“That’s fine,” she smiled. “We’ll just call him Baby Boy…um…”
“Lambert,” Kris interjected. Adam glanced up from where he was holding the baby and smiled.
The nurse left, and for a moment Kris simply watched them, the other two people that completed his family. The baby gurgled and reached with one flailing arm for Adam’s face, and Adam smiled incessantly in return.
“You know, I thought of another name,” Adam murmured. “I mean…I didn’t think of it. But it was in the book and I don’t remember talking about it.”
Kris leaned forward, propping his elbows up on his knees. “Okay. Hit me.”
Adam grazed his thumb over the baby’s cheek. “Caden.”
Kris hesitated before standing and crossing the space between them. He held out his arms and let Adam situate the baby in them. Kris juggled the baby’s weight, stared into his pale blue eyes.
“Caden,” he breathed, smiling. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but…I actually really like it. Why’d you pick it?”
Adam shrugged. “He looks like a Caden, right?”
Adam watched as Kris rocked Caden in his arms, a smile consuming his weary and tired face. Adam hadn’t picked Caden simply because he liked the way it sounded. He’d specifically searched for it in the book, thumbing through the index until he came across what he had been looking for:
Name: Caden
Origin: American
Meaning: Fighter.
Two.
The transition from being a couple into being a family was more seamless than Kris had expected.
He and Adam spent most of their time indoors, reclusive, and Kris couldn’t imagine having it any other way. Both he and Adam were on extended breaks from their careers in music, and as much as they loved their professions, it came as a welcomed relief. They slept in most mornings, and would occasionally eat breakfast in bed or take Caden down to the beach. Adam began to take up cooking, experimenting with different home-made meals every night, and even if the food wasn’t the best, the sight of Adam in an apron standing over a stove never failed to make Kris smile.
Once Caden passed the six-month mark, he stopped crying in the middle of the night, and slept soundly most of the time. Which meant Adam and Kris could stay up later, sleep in, spend their mornings lying in bed together as the tawny sunrise arched over the horizon.
“So we should probably start talking about plans for Caden,” Adam said abruptly one morning, absent-mindedly raking his fingers through tufts of Kris’s hair.
Kris rolled over, cocking an eyebrow. “Plans? Like…what?”
“For his birthday,” Adam said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s his first one, Kris. We have to make it memorable.”
“Okay, first of all, Caden’s birthday isn’t for another two months,” Kris retorted, kicking the sheets back and climbing out of bed. He fished around the floor for an old pair of jeans, slipping the denim on over his hips. “Second of all, do we really have to make it memorable if he’s not even going to remember it for himself?”
“I read that children have repressed memories from when they were, like, twelve months old,” Adam replied. “So, yeah, I want to make it memorable. Besides, I want him to be able to look back at the photos someday.”
Kris sighed, but a smile played on his lips. “You and your reading,” he mumbled, sliding his belt through his jeans. “Fine. We’ll have a big first-birthday extravaganza, okay?”
Adam grinned, sat up and grabbed Kris by the loopholes of his jeans, and tugged him forward so he fell onto the bed. Kris laughed into Adam’s collarbone, pressing his cheek against Adam’s skin.
“I love you,” Adam whispered, pressing his lips against the soft spot just underneath Kris’s jaw.
Sometimes it seemed ridiculous that he even needed to say it, but he said it all the time, anyway. Just in case.
“I love you, too.”
Three.
The hardest thing for a parent to do is stand by and watch their child fall.
Maybe not always in the literal sense, but in this case it was. It happened so quickly that the entire scene unfolded in Adam’s mind moments after it actually occurred.
Caden had been playing in the backyard, and Adam was sitting on the patio, too tired to endure his son’s bursts of energy. Instead, he watched from a close distance as Caden hopped on the swing set, kicking himself off the ground, his small legs pumping as he pushed himself higher and higher into the sky.
Adam glanced down at the magazine he was thumbing through, and in that split second, he heard an evident smack, followed by Caden’s screams.
Adam was up in a heartbeat, at Caden’s side as he lay on the ground, the swing still in motion overhead. Adam couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, could barely register the fact that he was moving, turning Caden over onto his back and gently touching the blood that seeped from his head.
Those few moments, hovering over his son’s fragile body, not knowing the extent of the damage or the eventual outcome, were some of the most terrifying Adam had yet experienced. It turned out that Caden had accidentally pitched himself forward on the swing, fallen flat on his stomach, cutting his forehead on the chain of the swing along the way; nothing that an ice pack and a few band-aids couldn’t fix.
But after, the guilt gradually infiltrated Adam’s mind. “I should’ve been watching him the entire time,” Adam murmured later that night in bed. “I should’ve been closer to him. I shouldn’t have let him swing that high.”
“He’s four, Adam,” Kris said, gently pressing his lips to Adam’s jaw. “These things happen. You did nothing wrong.”
Adam had nodded, physically accepting Kris’s words. But internally, he knew that if he really hadn’t done anything wrong, there wouldn’t be a slew of bruises lining his son’s ribcage, or a gash from his forehead to his temple. The kinds of wounds that leave permanent scars.
Four.
Kids were supposed to hate bath time, but for whatever reason, Caden loved it; more importantly, it was a moment Kris had developed with his son, something they always did together.
Caden sat in the tub, making engine noises with his lips as he pushed a tugboat through a mountain of bubbles. Kris hunched over the side, slathering shampoo over his hands and gently massaging Caden’s black hair.
“Hate to break it to you, buddy, but tugboats don’t go that fast in real life,” Kris smiled, wiping bubbles away from his face.
Caden cocked his head, pale eyes fixed on the boat. “Yes, they do,” he said quietly, making the boat do a figure eight. “They go fast.”
Kris washed Caden’s scalp before grabbing a towel and drying his hands. He sat back on his heels, watching Caden absorb himself in the tugboat.
It was when Caden pushed the bubbles away, lifting his arm, that Kris saw them.
His brow furrowed, and he leaned forward, trying to prevent the bubbles from obscuring Caden’s body. Gently, he lifted Caden’s arm, who seemed to be oblivious to attention.
There was a line of bruises, angry shades of purples and blues and blacks, trailing from Caden’s armpit, down his ribs, and to his hips.
Without giving it another second of thought, Kris gingerly lifted Caden from the bathtub. He squealed and fought, outstretching his arms for the tugboat that had been left behind.
“Bathtime’s over,” Kris whispered, his voice rough and unfamiliar even to himself. With shaking hands, he wrapped Caden’s small body in a towel, picked him up and took him into the bedroom. His mind was numb, and as he pulled a shirt over Caden’s head, he forced himself not to look at the bruises.
Kris continued to go through their typical routine. He fed Caden dinner, played a few games with him, took him back upstairs and put him to bed early.
And then he walked into the living room and collapsed on the sofa.
Kris’s mind was flying. Maybe those were bruises from when he fell off the swings. But that was four weeks ago, they would’ve healed by now. And Adam said nothing about him falling on his side. Maybe he just fell when no one was looking, kids do that a lot.
He sat there for a few hours, unable to move. His child was hurt, and there was nothing he could do about it.
When Adam walked through the door, the first thing Kris noticed where the deep lines in the corners of his eyes. He’d been laughing, and a small smile still played on his lips.
“Hey,” Adam sighed, tossing his keys onto the table. He peeled off his jacket before finally turning to Kris, and his smile dissipated. “What’s wrong?”
Kris swallowed. “Caden,” he murmured. “When he fell off the swings, like, a month ago…did he fall on his side?”
Adam frowned. “You mean like his ribcage? No. Flat on his stomach.” He hesitated, still standing by the door. “Why?”
Kris stood, began walking upstairs; Adam followed. Without saying a word, Kris led Adam into Caden’s bedroom, where he was sleeping soundly. Adam watched as Kris reached down, gently tugging up the side of Caden’s shirt and revealing the bruises.
For an instant, a look glazed over Adam’s eyes that made Kris’s heart fall to the pit of his stomach. But Adam shrugged, feigning indifference. “He’s a kid,” Adam whispered. “They fall all the time. I’m sure he just bumped into something.”
Adam turned and walked out of the room, before Kris could object to what they both knew was a lie.
Five.
Adam hated waiting.
More importantly, he hated having to wait when Kris couldn’t be there with him. He cracked his knuckles, thumbed the hem of his shirt, fidgeted and kept his hands busy so he wouldn’t have to think about anything else. He watched as Caden sat on the floor, trying to piece together a puzzle. The resulting image was supposed to be of Elmo and the Cookie Monster, but thus far Caden was nowhere near the end.
“Is he yours?”
Adam snapped his head up-a little too quickly, he realized, as the woman beside him flinched. She looked like a typical mom: neat blonde hair, a polo shirt and plain jeans, a diamond wedding ring that sparkled under the flourescent lights. The polar opposite of Adam, who was wearing a David Bowie t-shirt, enough jewelry to open a small boutique, distressed jeans and black boots.
Adam glanced back to realize that she was gesturing towards Caden. “Yeah,” he nodded, swallowing. “He’s mine.” It felt reassuring, somehow, to have ownership.
She cocked her head. “Three-and-a-half?”
“Four,” Adam smiled.
“Ah,” she nodded. “That’s my daughter. She’s five.” The woman pointed at a little girl sitting by the wall who was combing the hair of a Barbie doll. “Is he getting any shots today?”
Adam cleared his throat. “Just a check-up today,” he murmured. He’d become convinced that if he pretended everything was normal, it would be.
The woman leaned is, as if she were sharing a secret. “Tell him he’s lucky,” she winked. “My daughter has to get two vaccines today. She’s not going to be happy about it.”
Adam turned his gaze towards Caden, who had seemed to give up trying to solve the puzzle and simply sat back and stared. Adam forced himself to nod. “I’ll tell him that,” he whispered.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Adam was leaning over the kitchen sink, head low between his concave shoulder blades, when Kris walked in.
“Hey, buddy,” he heard Kris saying to Caden, who was sitting at the table. “How was the…” His voice trailed off as Adam felt Kris’s gaze burning holes in the back of his head.
“Come on, Caden,” Kris said quietly. Adam closed his eyes. “It’s time for bed.”
“But I’m not tired.”
There was the sound of Caden being lifted into Kris’s arms despite his protests, the sound of Kris’s footsteps leaving the kitchen and walking up the stairs. Five minutes later, the same footsteps retreated, and Adam could feel Kris’s presence in the kitchen.
“What did they say?”
Adam turned, facing Kris for the first time. It was almost painful, the way Kris stood in the threshold of the kitchen, the overhead light illuminating his shining eyes. He looked about as helpless as Adam felt.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “They redirected us.” He walked over, passing Kris the business card that the pediatrician had given him earlier that afternoon.
“Sloan-Kettering. This is a cancer center.”
Adam bit down on his lower lip so hard he could taste blood. “They said his white blood cell count is low,” he whispered, reciting the exact words the doctor had said. “They said it’s just a precaution.”
Kris sank into one of the chairs, still holding the card. After a moment, he tossed the flimsy paper onto the table. “We’re not going.”
“What?”
“We’re not going,” Kris repeated, his voice trembling. “We’re not taking Caden to a fucking cancer center.” Kris balled up his hands into fists, pressing them into the table. “This isn’t supposed to happen to us. Our child isn’t supposed to have fucking cancer, Adam. He’s four. He’s only four.” Kris’s voice began to crack, and he buried his face in his hands.
Adam dragged up a chair next to him, pulled Kris into his arms. After all these years, it seemed like they molded together, like Kris’s imprint had never left him. “We don’t know anything yet,” Adam managed. “They said it’s just a precaution.”
Kris opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something, but the words eluded him and he instead turned his face into Adam’s shoulder. Adam pressed his hand into the back of Kris’s head, silently thankful for the fact that Kris hadn’t spoken, hadn’t voiced the words that they both knew to be true.
No one sends a four-year-old to Sloan just as a precaution.
Six.
As he walked through the whitewashed halls of Sloan-Kettering, Kris realized that he had been here before.
A number of years ago, he’d done some promotional thing, entertaining the sick kids here. All of the children were terminally ill, but Kris had focused his energy on singing, not considering what their situation might be like.
Now, he averted his eyes towards the floor as he felt the penetrating stares of the people they passed. They looked like typical people-fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and grandparents-yet they looked weary, physically and emotionally drained, deep shadows underneath their eyes signifying a universal disposition of defeat.
Kris followed Adam, who was always a few steps ahead of him, down a seemingly never-ending hallway and into a large office. They sat down on one side of a massive oak desk, Kris shifting restlessly, Adam staring blankly out the window. So this is what it’s like on the other side, Kris thought.
Minutes later, the doctor entered. Dr. Frasier was a tall man, gangly and lean, with graying hair and thin glasses. Last week, he’d spent an entire day with them: running tests on Caden, asking Adam and Kris a variety of questions. Kris had tried to read the doctor’s facial expressions during the brief interrogation, hoping for some slight sign or gesture indicating relief; there had been none.
“The results are in,” the doctor said bluntly, as if this weren’t already obvious. “I’m afraid it’s…it’s not good news.”
Adam leaned forward and pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. Kris was suddenly struck down by paralysis, unable to move, unable to breathe. “How…” he swallowed. “How bad?”
Dr. Frasier sat back in his plush leather chair, folding his hands on his lap. “Your son has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. It’s a type of cancer in which a lymphoid progenitor cell becomes genetically altered and metastasizes, thus destroying the-”
“English,” Adam snapped.
The doctor cleared his throat and removed his glasses. “White blood cells, in the human body, normally fight infections-things like colds, fevers, anything that tries to penetrate our immune system. Leukemia cells are abnormal cells that destroy white blood cells, thus weakening the immune system. There also isn’t enough production of platelets, which explains why Caden was bruising so easily.”
“What…what does this mean?” Kris whispered.
“Well,” the doctor sighed, “ALL is one of the most common cancers for young children. Around seventy percent of children diagnosed and treated go into remission, and eighty-five percent of those live beyond five years after being diagnosed. However…ALL is an acute form of cancer, meaning it is extremely rapid spreading. We detected Caden’s relatively early, but it’s hard to say whether or not it was early enough.”
For a moment, Kris felt like he was in a cartoon, like an old-school episode of Tom and Jerry. He felt as though a piano had been dropped on him from overhead, or someone had thrown an anvil on his chest. Except that no one was laughing, and the pain felt all too real.
The doctor kept speaking-handing them several documents, explaining how often and when they needed to come back, when chemotherapy would start, psychologists they could refer to for Caden. His words seemed to flow around Kris, not touching or registering with him, as though he had a magnetic field around him that deferred anything negative.
Finally, the white noise of dialogue tapered off. Dr. Frasier sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I understand how difficult this is for you,” he said quietly. “But take solace in the fact that here at Sloan, we’re going to fight just as hard for Caden as you are.”
It was silent for a moment before Adam, who had not moved in the past ten minutes, sat up slowly, almost as if his spine was unraveling at the seams. “Do you have children, Dr. Frasier?” He asked in a voice so soft, it was barely audible.
The doctor cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. “Yes,” he finally said. “Two daughters and a son.”
“Have you ever had to sit back and let someone else tell you that one of them was dying?”
The doctor swallowed, blinked. The bulging veins that coiled around Adam’s neck twitched.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Actually, I have.”
Adam froze, caught off-guard. He opened his mouth, as if he were going to speak, but no words emanated from his lips.
Dr. Frasier glanced at his hands. “I had to have another doctor-a fellow colleague, actually-tell me that my daughter had a tumor the size of my fist metastasizing in her spinal cord.” He lifted his soft gray eyes towards Adam.
“Don’t assume you’re in a unique situation, Mr. Lambert,” he murmured, standing. “You’re one in a million.”
Seven.
Adam’s hands would not stop trembling.
He’d had to take off all of his rings, because the sound of the metal scraping together between his fingers had become excruciating. He’d tried sitting on his hands, cracking his knuckles, keeping them busy, but the shaking simply would not cease.
He was now washing the dishes for a third time, even though they were already clean. His hands quivered as he held a plate under the stream of tepid water before lifting it out of the sink and transferring it to the counter. Halfway there, his muscles spasmed and the plate went flying, falling to the kitchen floor below and shattering into a million little pieces.
Adam paused, staring at the shards of glass scattered below him. He should have been annoyed, or perhaps upset with himself, but somehow the sight of broken and jagged pieces of ceramic sent chills across his skin.
Before he could stop himself, Adam reached for the counter, his hands finding another plate. He watched as his fingers uncurled from the sides, watched as the plate went into free-fall, watched it smash against the tiled floor. He grabbed another plate, and another; a glass, a coffee mug, a cereal bowl. Each time, he threw them with a little more vigor, harder and harder until the shards of glass began to ricochet in every direction.
When he ran out of plates, Adam knelt down, ignoring the sharp glass that penetrated his jeans, and reached for larger pieces. He threw those against the wall, onto the floor, at the wood cabinets. He tossed them, one after the other, until his arms began to ache, until his head pounded furiously.
Finally, he sat back, his body outlined by a halo of shards of glass. Blood trickled across his knuckles and fingers, flowing from the places he’d been cut.
He hadn’t noticed, until now, until everything around him was broken and bleeding, that his hands had finally stopped shaking.
Eight.
“How does Santa fit down the chimney?”
Caden was on his knees, palms pressed flat against the hearth of the fireplace. The soft glow from the flames flickered shadows across his paled face.
“You want to take this one?” Adam whispered to Kris, half-smiling.
Kris walked over and sat on the edge of the hearth next to Caden, whose pale eyes remained transfixed on the burning wood. “Well,” Kris sighed, “he parks up on the roof, tosses the bag of presents down first, then slides down the chimney.”
Caden ran his tongue over his chapped lips. “But he’s fat,” he said, smiling slightly. “He’s too fat for the chimney.”
Kris cleared his throat. “Um. Well…Santa goes on a crash diet the night before Christmas…”
Adam rolled his eyes and stood up, lifting Caden into his arms and sitting on the hearth next to Kris. “Santa’s got magic powers, buddy,” Adam murmured. “That’s why he’s able to do all these crazy things, like fit down the chimney and give presents to all the children in the world in one night.”
“But how?” Caden whispered, leaning his head against Adam’s shoulder.
Adam swallowed. “Santa can…he can compact himself,” Adam said decisively. “He can make himself shrink down so that he fits through the chimney, and then when he comes out at the end, he expands back to his normal size. Kind of like Jello.”
Caden seemed to be content with this somewhat ludicrous response; he sighed and pressed his cheek against Adam’s sweater. After a moment, his frail voice cut through the silence. “Dad? Is it too late to add something to my Christmas list?”
Adam glanced at Kris. “Well, kind of, bud. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“Oh.”
Kris chewed his lower lip. “Why? What’d you want, Caden?”
Caden shook his head vehemently. “Santa couldn’t get it for me anyway, I’m pretty sure,” he murmured. “I wanted to ask him to make me better.”
Adam closed his eyes, clenched his jaw as he felt his heart tighten against his chest. He leaned forward and found Caden’s smooth head, kissing it gently.
For a moment there was nothing but the fire crackling, the feeling of Caden’s steady heartbeat pounding rhythmically with Adam’s.
“It never hurts to ask,” Kris finally whispered. But by then, Caden had drifted to sleep in Adam’s arms.
Nine.
Caden spent his fifth birthday in the hospital.
He was having what felt like his billionth CSF spinal tap, in which chemotherapy would be injected into his cerebrospinal fluid to kill leukemia cells. This time, Dr. Frasier had told them, they’d added hydrocortisone and cytarabine to the injection-steroids that would leave Caden exhausted and bed-ridden for days.
The way Kris translated this was that the doctors were taking the kitchen-sink route: throwing in everything they had left in order to stop the cancer from spreading to Caden’s brain.
Watching Caden undergo chemo was hard enough in itself. Watching him undergo chemo on his birthday was even more difficult. But what made the situation seemingly impossible was the fact that Adam wasn’t there.
He’d gone out the night before to “get Caden his present”. Kris had begun to worry when Adam wasn’t home by midnight, or by two o’clock in the morning; when he woke up five hours later to a still-empty space next to him in bed, he had begun to panic. He had no option but to take Caden to the hospital by himself, though, and while he waited, he dialed and re-dialed Adam’s cell phone number until he was sure his thumbs were broken.
By about the fifteenth dial, as Caden was still in the radiation room, the ringing ceased after four times and there was crackling static across the line. Kris froze in mid-pace, suddenly alert despite not having slept the night before. “Hello?”
“H-hel…Kris?”
It was not Adam. It couldn’t be-the person’s voice was rough and unfamiliar, not the smooth and calming tone Adam maintained. Their words slurred together like contrasting music notes, not like Adam’s clear intonation. This was a stranger; perhaps Kris had dialed the wrong number.
“Kris? K-kris. It’s Adam.”
Kris swallowed, pressed his forehead against the cool wall of the isolated hallway he’d taken shelter in. “Adam? Where the hell are you?”
“I…l-listen, I w-went out to get Caden’s…his present, right? And I…got lost, for, like…six hours.”
Kris suddenly became aware of how dangerously close he was to a full-fledged breakdown. He closed his eyes, head still leaning against the wall, and pressed the phone so hard into his ear he could feel the keypad leaving imprints against his skin.
“Adam,” he finally whispered, “our son is going through chemotherapy right now. Chemotherapy on his fifth birthday. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you, but…” he hesitated. But what? But I still love you. But I miss you. But I hate the fact that you sleep on the couch sometimes now. But I want things back to the way they were before.
“But you want me to go,” Adam finished, his voice abruptly steady.
The fact that Kris wasn’t able to refute the statement almost immediately, the fact that he wasn’t able to say anything to that, made his stomach twist into knots.
“No,” he finally murmured. “I have to go.”
Kris hung up just as the doctor approached him, telling him that they were moving Caden into recovery.
Nine.
It was well past dinnertime when Kris trudged through the front door, carrying a sleeping Caden against his shoulder. He should have used the wheelchair the hospital had given him, but after a tiring week in and out of the hospital, all he wanted was to hold his son in his arms. He climbed the stairs and found his way in the dark to Caden’s room, nestling him into bed and tucking the blankets around his frail body.
“I’m sorry.”
Kris felt the muscles around the back of his neck tighten instinctively. He turned to see Adam standing in the doorway, the slivers of moonlight outlining his silhouette.
Kris pushed past him, closing the door to their son’s bedroom, and made his way to his room. He could hear Adam entering, sitting on the edge of their bed, as Kris peeled off his jeans and pulled on tattered old sweatpants.
“Kris?” Adam said softly. “I said I’m sorry.”
“Go tell that to Caden,” Kris muttered, unbuttoning his collared shirt. He hesitated for a moment, letting the silence absorb them. “Where were you?”
“What?”
“That night.” Kris turned, facing Adam and staring directly into his bright cerulean eyes. “The night before Caden’s birthday. Where were you?”
“I was getting his-”
“Stop.”
Adam did not move. He sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded in front of him, dark hair falling past his eyes and brushing the edges of his cheekbone.
“Stop lying to me, Adam,” Kris whispered, his voice breaking. “Goddamnit, stop lying to me. Our son is dying, and you’re out there…what? Drinking until you can’t feel anything? Popping pills? For Christ’s sake, Adam, at least tell me what the hell you were doing.”
Adam stared at his feet, planted to the floor below. Sometimes he felt like he was floating, and he had to remind himself that the forces of gravity would always keep him grounded.
“I can’t handle this the way you can, Kris,” Adam murmured. “You…you face everything, all of this, head-on. You let it hit you and you take it and you move forward.” He licked his chapped lips, pressed his palms together. “I can’t. I tried and I can’t anymore.” Adam hesitated. “Nothing happened that night, other than me realizing that any backbone I had before has completely deteriorated.”
Kris stared at him, eyes burning. “Nothing happened? So you calling me the next day, slurring and stuttering…that was nothing?”
Adam nodded.
Kris ran a hand over his tired face. His head was pounding and his body ached in places he’d never felt pain before. “Maybe you should sleep downstairs tonight,” he whispered.
When he opened his eyes again, though, Adam was already gone.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Part Two <