“I miss the whole package.”
Jayce popped his head into my bedroom doorway. “Give me a hand carrying my mattress down the stairs?”
I covered the phone. “Yeah. Give me two minutes.”
He nodded and disappeared.
“I’ll call you tonight.”
“Okay. Good luck today.”
“Thanks.”
I tossed my phone on the bed and passed Uncle Joe on the stairs. He lifted the small lamp in his hands. “Wouldn’t let me help him with the mattress. Little shit thinks I’m too old to carry more than five pounds.”
I chuckled. “Don’t worry. When I move out, I’ll put my feet up on the couch, and you can load the entire truck yourself.”
Our cousin Cara’s room was the first door at the top of the stairs. She lay on her belly in the center of her bed, kicking her feet in the air while reading a magazine.
“Don’t worry, Cara,” I called as I passed. “We got it.”
I chuckled and kept going to Jayce’s room at the end of the hall. His door was open, but he wasn’t inside. I looked around the other rooms on the second floor, but he was nowhere to be found. So, I took a seat on his bed and looked at the half-empty room. Even though we were only in the same place for the summers, it would be weird to live here alone. Jayce had been the constant in my life, before and after Mom died.
A noise from within the room surprised me, considering I’d thought I was alone. It sounded like Aunt Elizabeth’s dog had gotten a fur ball caught in his throat again. I looked under the bed—no dog. Then got up and looked on the other side of it. I nearly fell over, finding my brother lying on the floor. He was pale as a ghost and foaming at the mouth while his body twitched.
I screamed out the window for my uncle, and opened my brother’s mouth to see if he was choking on something. There was nothing visible, and I had no idea what to do, so I lifted him from the floor and started running down the stairs with him shaking in my arms.
Luckily, medical care was only a floor away when you lived with a doctor. Uncle Joe sprang into action and had me set Jayce on the couch so he could examine him while I called 9-1-1. By the time I’d hung up, the twitching had stopped, and the color had started to return in my brother’s face.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
Even Cara had gotten up to check out the commotion.
“He had a seizure.” Uncle Joe looked at Jayce. “Just keep still, son. Do you remember if you fell before that happened? Hit your head or anything?”
My brother was disoriented and didn’t respond.
“Why did that happen? What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know, but we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
***
Four days.
Four fucking days.
I was seriously close to losing my patience. What the hell takes so long? Over these four days, they’d wheeled Jayce around for all types of scans, drawn blood, and hooked him up to a bunch of machines. Eight different doctors had asked him the same questions over and over. But no one had said shit.
“Dude. You’re going to be the one sitting in this bed with a breakdown if you don’t relax soon.”
Typical Jayce, more worried about me than himself.
“Plus, you’ve been wearing those clothes for four days. You’re starting to stink up my room.”
I dragged a hand through my hair. “Why didn’t you tell me about the shit you told the doctors? I had no idea you had any other symptoms going on.”
He watched me pace back and forth at the foot of his bed. “This is why. You’re gonna wear a path in the floor if you don’t sit down and stop worrying.”
A few days ago might’ve been his first seizure, but apparently Jayce had had other shit going on for a while and failed to mention it to anyone. Muscle spasms, tremors, weight loss—I’d noticed two of the three and asked him about them.
“Your fucking hand shaking—the first time I noticed it you told me you were hungover. Had you even been drinking the night before? I should’ve made you go to the doctor. Why didn’t you tell me?”
My brother’s face turned serious. “You want the truth? I didn’t want to know.”
“Great.” I shook my head. “Now you’re Mom. Ignore medical care and leave everything to chance.”
“What difference does it make to know? If I have Parkinson’s like Mom, there’s no cure for it anyway.”
“No. But there’s treatment. And then you could know what to look out for.”
“The doctor said seizures aren’t even a common symptom of Parkinson’s. So you’re blowing the entire thing out of proportion.”