Summer Solstice (Roswell Fanfic)

Summer Solstice (Part One)

PART ONE

It’s hard to stop holding your breath once it’s become second nature. Liz may be healed and well and the leukemia all gone, but I’m not breathing, not yet. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will be again.

“Michael, please stop worrying so much,” she chided last night, as we lay in bed, discussing the doctor’s appointment today. “You’re suffocating me like this,” she said, and I drew her tight against my chest. Memorized the scent of her for the millionth time, always afraid that it might be my last.

Earlier today, at the doctor’s office, I couldn’t sit still. I kept pacing back and forth across the waiting room floor, thumbing through magazines, watching the clock. Watching her. She made a frustrated face at me, begging me to settle down without so much as opening her mouth. I heard her inside my head, telling me to shush, to stop rattling in her head so much with all my nonsensical fears. She was frowning, little lines forming around her dark eyes, and all I could think was how beautiful she looked.

Baby, I said, I’ll relax once I hear what the doctor says.

She smiled, and went back to knitting a blanket or whatever it is this week. Her mother taught her when she first got sick; point eventually came when she didn’t have the strength for it anymore, and then another point came, this past January, when she had the strength to pick it up again. So she sat there this morning, while we waited for the doctor to call her name, needles clicking back and forth and I felt her stillness form inside of me. It swelled right in my center until I felt quiet and patient and able to put up with myself, at peace with how I am, just like she always manages to make me feel.

After that, the nurse called us back, then the prognosis came, and exactly as she predicted, the beast was still in full remission. Her weight was on the low side, but up two pounds from last month and gradually coming back; the doctor seemed encouraged by her progress. Yet somehow all that peace she’d mapped inside of me earlier vanished, replaced instead with roiling anger. Outside, at our car, I shook my head and muttered at her that she better start taking better care of herself. Argued that she needs to get more rest, needs to work less at the café, to sleep longer and harder and stop ignoring the way her body rebels against her impossible schedule. “There’s a lot I want to do,” she explained calmly, but I just stood there, shaking.

“You won’t be able to do any of it if you die,” I snapped. “Will you, huh?”

“Michael, I am fine,” she said, wriggling the keys from my hand and opening the car door while I stood there huffing at her. “Let’s go. It’s way too hot to talk about this out here in the parking lot.”

“Baby, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re gonna get sick again,” I continued, as she slid into the driver’s seat and ignored me standing there on the burning asphalt beside the open door. I ached for that peace she’d given me just thirty minutes before.

“Come on,” she urged, turning the key in the ignition, smiling up at me. “We’ve got a lot of cheesecakes to prepare.”

“You think Max can just keep on fixing you?” I huffed, slouching beside her in the car, staring out the window as we pulled out of the professional complex parking lot. We know the attendant by name after all our time here. Juanita. And Juanita knows Liz as the miracle girl; they all do around here. After Max’s voodoo trick, we weren’t sure what to say, so we just told the doctors we believed in the power of prayer.

If you get sick again, Liz, I warned as we waved a greeting at Juanita, He might not have the cure. He might not even be around.

Michael, please stop it.

I’m not doing anything! I shouted inside of her, and she cut her eyes at me irritably, silent. “What?” I cried aloud, feeling powerless and frightened and like this demon that still haunts her blood is somehow a living part of me.