Red Daisies

The hospital had a nice little chapel tucked away in a side hall on the lobby floor. They seemed to have put it in the place where they thought it would be noticed least. Even the signs telling its location were small and half hidden, be it behind other signs or in corners. It was almost like they thought it would offend people to know St. John’s Hospital had a chapel within it.

I had found it by wondering the hospital at nights and following the signs, avoiding doctors and nurses by ducking into side halls like the one where it lay. I’d memorized where it was when I had to ask directions back to an elevator. The only time I spent there was at night, when Toby had fallen into his deepest sleep helped by the double dose of morphine they gave him at ten every night, or around ten if they forgot. It was always bad when they were late; the pain didn’t take its time coming on any more. One minute he would be in a nice daze from his last dose, talking softly to me or nibbling at what I fetched him as a nighttime snack from the cafeteria and the next he would be whimpering into his hands and begging me with his eyes to fix it.

He was asleep now. If we were lucky he’d get in a nice four hours before he woke up again. It was the longest amount he’d managed since his cancer had begun to fight the treatment with a vengeance three weeks ago.

Sitting in the front pew I closed my eyes. Not to pray. It had been years since I really prayed, since I said more than “Please, God” or “God help us”. I hadn’t really said any of those lately. Not since the doctor’s had first found the tumor in his brain when it was already too late to operate. I had tried pleading back then. It hadn’t done any good.

The wood of the pew was smooth, polished. Fake. My fingers slipped over it as I tried to grip it, the sweat on my palms only made it an impossible feat. I sighed and opened my eyes. The chapel had one little stained glass window, placed over the podium. The man in it held a book on his knee. St. Mark himself I guess. I’d never paid attention to the glass pictures back at my parent’s church. I hadn’t paid attention to much back then, I’d hated being preached at or talked down to because of my “sins”.

Yet this was the only place in the hospital that didn’t feel like Death was waiting. The only place that didn’t feel permeated by sickness even though I knew that patients probably made there way down here during the day or for the small Sunday services some of the signs had advertised.

My eyes slid closed again. It was exhausting being in the hospital, day in and day out, though I knew it was worse for Toby stuck in his bed. He hadn’t seen home in the three weeks we had been here when I was able to go back every few days to grab a new bag of clothes for us and check that my brother had been feeding our dog.

There were times when it might have been nice to be able to escape the house for this long together. To go on vacation somewhere, a luxury I had never really been able to take enough time off of work for. The only thing letting me stay by his side now was a pitying boss and the charity of Toby’s dad.

We’d had a few days here and there. Those we had mostly spent at home and mostly in bed or working on Toby’s dream garden that never seemed to get enough attention. The times we spent in bed together on those days were always my favorite. They could be spent teasing with each other or trying out something that Toby had read about. Sometimes we would play again with one of his favorite “experiments”.

Once we had mixed a day of gardening and sex. Hushing each other and laughing while we rolled in the dirt. Somehow enough dirt had worked its way into his hair to turn the blonde strands into a dusty black. He’d kept painting streaks onto my face like war paint. That had been before the radiation therapy.

I wanted another day like that. Or even the chance to have another day like that.

He was awake when I went back to his room, smiling foggily at the ceiling. We were lucky he had a single room. His head tipped down onto his shoulder and his smile widened and I could see the chipped tooth standing out near the front. He’d gotten it playing hockey as a kid and never bothered to have it fixed.

“Joel, where were you?” I grabbed the hand he held out to me. The skin was dry; I kept forgetting to grab the lotion he loved when I visited the house that always made him smell like almonds and vanilla.

“Sorry, baby. I was down in the chapel,” I didn’t like him knowing I had left him. I shouldn’t have left his side.

“They have a chapel?” Toby tugged weakly at my hand till I put the bars down and sat on the bed beside him. The bed was small and I always felt like I was crowding him.

“Yeah.”

“I want to see it,” his eyes fluttered. He’d be back asleep in a minute. The morphine hadn’t worn off yet.

I remember when we first met almost eight years ago. Neither of us had been good at flirting. I had tried to use cliché lines that I had picked up from people. Toby had kept trying to flutter his lashes at me like a girl from a romance novel. It looked the same as when he did it then as when he fought sleep now. We’d ended up laughing at each other.

“I’ll take you down there tomorrow,” I offered.

“Okay,” he pulled my hand to his cheek, nuzzling at my fingers.

He had let his eyes close and I wiped quickly at mine. I couldn’t watch him for long without crying. It annoyed him when I cried. It annoyed me. I had to be strong or at least pretend to be. Belief was the key was what the New Age group he liked told us. We had to believe in the results we wanted.

I would believe that I would get to take him home with me. I would believe that the doctors were lying.

“Joel?” he murmured against my palm.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Lay down with me,” Toby scooted till he was pressed to the bars still raised on the other side.

Wrapping my arms around him, I laid my head on his. He smelled like the pear shampoo he had made me bring from home. He knotted one thin hand in my hair and settled the other on my shoulder.

“Toby?” he nuzzled into my neck. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

He’d always liked the most obscure and exotic flowers. It was what he liked to try and grow in his garden but they always took more care attention than he gave them. Yet his favorite though had always been the one he refused to plant. Gerbera Daisies. If he had to choose a color for his favorite he would always pick the brightest red ones.

When we first started dating and he told me his favorite flower I’d tried to buy them for him on almost every date. I had thought I was being charming. Toby had gotten exasperated quick with that, according to him he didn’t have a place for any more after about the seventh bouquet and I was being a pest to bring him so many. After that I cut back on the flowers. I’d surprise him with them every couple of weeks, and then every couple of months.

It had been almost six months since I brought the last bouquet home and it had been his birthday then.

I looked at the red daisies and ran a finger over one of the petals before tapping the middle. He used to yell at me for it. He’d always carefully hover over them to smell them or look at them while I preferred to touch them. The feel of flowers always mesmerized me, distracted me. Today it didn’t.

My eyes still found what lay in front of me.

Tobias Green

A wonderful son and a caring man.

May 17, 1979 - November 22, 2008

Mr. Green had been the one to pay for his gravestone. It had just been a little over a week ago that the funeral had happened but other than that day this was my first time to his grave. I hadn’t wanted to see it bare.

The flowers fit nicely into the small vase that I had asked Mr. Green to have made with the gravestone. It was empty except for a small bit of water that had formed at the bottom of the stone vase. The red looked bright against the grey backdrop and made the still barren dirt look worse.

Rocking back on my heels, I reached out to brush my finger along the letters of his name. I hadn’t been able to convince Mr. Green to change his mind on the one thing that might have mattered to Toby. It had been three years since he’d introduced himself as Toby Green. No, it had been “Hi, my name is Toby Battle” for those three years. He had never changed it legally but to us that part hadn’t mattered.

I remembered the first time he had done that. It had surprised me. We’d been at my boss’s Halloween party, the first time he had met them. My boss had been thrown by it and his wife had looked between us in confusion before asking, “But you’re not brothers?” Toby had laughed and said no and she hadn’t asked anything else.

The next day I had brought him red daisies.

His dad wouldn’t compromise on the name. No Green-Battle, no Battle at all. He thought it was my selfishness or a way to claim his son even in death. Maybe I hadn’t put up enough of a fight for it. Or maybe he had been right.

I leaned my head against the stone and bit my lip. We had never really admitted this might happen; that I would be left without him. We had listened to the group and believed he would get better; we had worked with the doctors to make it happen. Everything we thought we could do, we did.

For awhile I had never wondered if things might have been different if we had paid attention to the symptoms earlier. Then the thoughts had begun to take hold whenever he wasn’t with me. If I hadn’t just ignored his stumbling and smiled with him when he laughingly put it off to clumsiness when he barely ever lost his balance before, would they have caught it sooner? Or what if we hadn’t blamed the constant headaches and dizziness on late nights of overworking himself and a bad diet? When had it become too late?

“I’m sorry Toby,” I rubbed at my eyes. I’d cry when I was home, where I could play the child and hide under our blankets.

He had never cried in front of me. It never bothered me before. But had he cried when he found out about the tumor? Had he hid while he cried?

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I love you Toby.”

I ran my thumb over the edges of the petals as I stood. I’d be back with more.

A/N: It is full of emo, mushy, fluff stuff. I hope it isn't too terrible.