Robin des Bois ✓

twenty-one. Safe Haven

I nodded. "We could all just stay here for now. If —I mean when your mom gets better, we can start thinking about moving."

Tyler hugged me again, but he didn't linger this time. Instead, he busied himself with making toasts and brewing coffee, while I went back to the sizzling bacon, just in time to save it from burning to a cinder.

Tina emerged from her bedroom next, drawn out by the smell of bacon, eggs and coffee, and her reaction to seeing me standing there in the middle of their kitchen was comically similar to her brother's. She froze in the doorway, her eyes wide and her lips parted, but she didn't remain still for long. She threw herself into my open arms and we clung to each other as though we were adrift on a rocky sea —and in a sense, I guess we were.

Even though there was a stone at the pit of my stomach dragging me down, I felt steely and resolved. Tina still had her arm around my waist when I returned to the pan and she rested her temple on my shoulder, uncharacteristically silent and solemn.

For now, I realized, I needed to take care of one thing at a time —and the first matter in line was breakfast.

Not fifteen minutes later everyone was in the kitchen, settled around the minuscule round wooden table on mismatched chairs —the set only had three, not enough to seat all five of us and so two more chairs had been gathered from around the house. We sat crammed together and the conversation ran smoothly, unhindered by the elephant in the room, punctuated by laughter and the scraping of forks against plates. Strangely, there was a lightness in the air and I thought it was because the heavy curtain of secrecy surrounding our parents had been lifted. And right then, as I watched the people I loved most in the whole world eat breakfast, I savored this moment, the togetherness and rightness of it all. It was a bittersweet sort of happiness, honey with an aftertaste of vinegar, the looming possibility of everything coming undone at any second looming over the horizon.

The easiness didn't last for long. Over the days, the stone of hopelessness at the pit of my stomach grew, until it felt more like a mountain forming inside me, menacing to split me open from the inside out.

I felt so very helpless. I did everything I could —cooking, cleaning, getting groceries, preparing lunches —there wasn't a minute of the day when I wasn't trying to do something, anything to help. And yet it wasn't enough. It still felt as though I was trying to patch a gaping wound with a band aid.

I was filled with a restless sort of energy, and it was hard for me to sit through my classes without fidgeting. I doodled in the margins of my notebooks, thought of recipes to make for supper and whenever I tried to take notes, my concentration would elude me.

It became increasingly difficult to think of anything other than the silent killer that waged a war on Amanda Carter from the inside. As much as I tried to preoccupy myself with other things—my semester project, the never-ending chores, the upcoming finals –everything always boiled down to this : T&T's mom had cancer and there was nothing I could do about it.

It was at night that the thought became downright maddening. As I lay on the inflatable mattress next to Tina's bed with no distraction other than my thoughts, the doubt, hopelessness and despair that I managed to shove into a dusty corner of my mind during the day came back full force. There was no hiding from them, not until I fell into a restless sleep exhausted by the busy day I'd had.

I desperately needed to find a remedy, something to help me get my mind off of things, to get away from it all —it had only been three days since T&T's mother had made the big announcement and I was already on the brink of madness, worrying myself sick into the wee hours of the night.