This is my 2013 Holiday contest entry. I hope you enjoy it, and don't forget to vote! A special thank you goes to Kitty9Tail for editing.
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Brylyn Hawthorne was determined to make Christmas the best one ever. It would definitely be a tall order, but it had to be done. She would plaster a fake smile on her face even if she did not feel very festive. Her plan was to decorate a real tree, bake sugar cookies, and hang so many Christmas lights that the place could be seen for a mile. She thought she had done a good job of following that plan, too. Here it was Christmas Eve, and she had finished all her goals.
She stood on a stepstool and hung a string of lights across the window valance, lowering sections of the lights to create a scalloped effect. Brylyn stepped down and looked at it while biting her lip. She couldn't tell if it was decent enough.
"It's crooked." Ryan, her boyfriend, commented from behind her.
She looked at him where he lay and stuck her tongue out at him playfully. "I'm aware."
"I'm just teasing you." He said with a slight twinkle in his golden brown eyes. "They look nice, but the scenery is much nicer."
Brylyn smiled at him and rolled her eyes. She climbed back up onto the stool to fix the section of lights that hung too low. After it was all level, she folded the stool up and put it in the small closet in the room.
"There. What do you think?" She swiped her hands across her blue jeans to clean off the dust that was clinging to them.
"It looks like a Christmas catalogue threw up in here."
The room was decorated from ceiling to floor. Colored strip lights ran around the room, drawing festive shapes like bells and candy canes. She had hung giant paper ornaments on the remaining bare walls. She even managed to get a small two foot tall pine tree and had that all decorated too.
Brylyn watched Ryan's eyes as they moved from decoration to decoration. Maybe he was right and she had overdone it. Her brow knit together at the thought. Perhaps the lights were a little too excessive.
"I love it." He smiled up at her. "Thank you."
She walked over to his bed and kissed him atop his head. "You're welcome."
It was hard to believe that it had almost been a year since their life had been turned upside down. It seemed like it had been much longer than that. Brylyn could remember each detail, like it had been some sort of slow nightmare she couldn't escape from.
She had been lying on the couch idly flipping through TV stations trying to find something to watch. Her phone rang with a number she didn't recognize. It was Ryan's mother, Anna. She was so distraught it was hard to understand her at first. Then the words 'motorcycle' and 'accident' hit her like a ton of bricks.
"I told him not to take it this morning!" She wailed to Anna. "I said it was not a good idea. He told me that the roads were clear and not to worry so much."
At the time, she blamed herself for not being more insistent on him taking her car. It wasn't until Ryan was able to talk that they got all the facts. He had been wearing a helmet, a saving grace. Brylyn had been firm with him and said if he didn't wear it she would slash his bike tires. It had only taken three replacement tires for him to figure out she was serious.
He had not hit ice like they had originally thought. The doctors learned that he had been dizzy, barely able to see through a sea of darkness fogging his vision. His balance was altered, he leaned too far to the left and the motorcycle dropped to the ground on its side. He was doing thirty miles per hour and was torn up from sliding across the asphalt.
Less than a week later, doctors discovered the cause of his spell on a CT scan. He had a massive tumor in his brain. His doctors ordered him to take an aggressive round of treatment to try to prevent it from growing farther. The doctor delivered the second blow to them; it was located in a spot in his brain that was inoperable.
Brylyn stood by him as the months passed by. She was there when the last of his curly brown hair disappeared. She was there when he was in so much pain that he could not move without making horrible, heart-wrenching sounds. She sat with him and wiped his face off with a cool rag as he lay on the bathroom floor night after night.
One night after a hard afternoon of reactions to the chemotherapy, Brylyn helped Ryan climb into bed. He told her he was cold and she set about piling blankets on him. She tucked him in gently and then crawled in beside him. She turned off the lights and snuggled close to him to share her body heat.
"You should find someone else."
Brylyn snapped up and turned the light on, blinding them both. "No!"
"You don't deserve this. You deserve someone healthy who isn't depending on you twenty-four seven and making your life miserable." His sad eyes looked up at her. "Someone who isn't going to di-"
"Don't you even say that. You are not going to die!" She cut him off, nearly yelling at him. "I won't let you."
He let out a short depressed laugh. "There isn't anything you can do to stop it, Bry. We both know it. I'm trying to help make it easier for you. You shouldn't be stuck with cancer-boy weighing you down."
"Do you think I could easily forget about you, just like that?" She fumed. He'd struck a nerve. "Do you think it would be so easy to leave you to fend for yourself? If you think I am going to walk out the door, you have another thing coming. I am not going anywhere."
Ryan's pale skin took on a rose-tinted glow. Perhaps he thought she'd just quietly do as he asked. She had never yelled at him in the six years they had been dating. He fell silent at a loss for words.
Brylyn lay back down and turned the lights off. Tears stung her eyes and silently streamed down her face and on to her pillow. How could he think she would leave like that?
"Bry," Ryan hesitated before continuing. "I saw you crying in the car when you left this morning. You should be happy with your partner, not sad. You want a family. I can't give you that family. I can't even say I would be there if by some chance we did have a family. It isn't fair to you to have to live wondering when you'll wake up and be alone."
She rolled to face him, her own brown eyes locking on to his in the dark. "None of that matters. I am not going anywhere. I am not walking away from you."
To his credit, he never talked like that to her again.
The second worst day of their life was the day that the doctors found that the treatment was not working. They began trying all sorts of alternative treatment methods, but nothing seemed to help. The balding physician wrung his hands and, as gently as he could, told them to enjoy what time they had left together. There was no reason to cause Ryan to be sick anymore in hopes of a cure; there wasn't going to be one.
Without the harsh toxins in his body, for a while Ryan felt almost normal. He had more energy and some days even had quite an appetite. His skin had more color to it and his hair started to fuzz. Brylyn kidded with him the day she saw one teeny tiny bit of fuzz where his eyebrows used to be. She rubbed it, but it didn't come off. They celebrated the one eyebrow hair that night like Ryan had won a medal in hair growing.
Brylyn started to notice things shortly after. His speech was slurred sometimes, his balance was off, he slept a lot and he often forgot things. At first he forgot silly little things like where he set his phone or the TV remote. Then one day she walked in from her job as a grocery clerk and he flipped out, demanding to know who she was. They had told them eventually he might have memory problems, but not that he'd completely forget her. It was always scary and unpredictable when it happened. Even though he had lost a lot of weight and strength, he was still stronger than her.
Over the past couple months, Ryan's health had deteriorated. The hospital suggested a hospice care provider and with their help, the apartment bedroom was turned into a 'death chamber' as Ryan put it. It had all of the medical equipment for the hospice nurse to check in on him daily. The nurse was specially trained to help care for dying people who wish to live the remaining days of their lives at home rather than a hospital.
Unfortunately, he had recently fallen down a flight of stairs and bashed his head into a concrete wall. The doctor wanted to keep an eye on him for a while to be sure there was no swelling in his brain. It meant that Christmas was being spent in a hospital bed.
"Earth to Bry!" Ryan snapped her out of her trance. "What goes on in that head of yours?"
"Just was thinking." She smiled at him. "I'm glad you like the room."
