Tears of Lemonade
Tears of Lemonade; A Short Story. Genre: tragedy
Growing up, my favorite drink was lemonade. At a birthday party, the parents would ask me “What do you want to drink? We have soda and water” and I would always ask “Do you have lemonade?”
I think I like lemonade so much because of three reasons.
The sweet tastes like it's kissing my tongue. No matter how gross that sounds, it's always true.
The sour reminds me that life will always get better as it fades into the sweet.
My mother always made it for me. Not the store bought kind, or the bottles that you can get at a Quickchek, she made the real, fresh squeezed lemons and carefully added sugar kind.
It always tasted the best.
I will never taste it again
*****
Here’s a small recap: my father died when I was seven years old, two months before my eighth birthday, of lung cancer. My mother suffered from depression and anxiety for years. She wouldn’t sit on cold benches because she’d heard a rumor that they can give you bladder cancer. She never had her phone on her for more than five minutes at a time because scientists think the radiation can give you cancer. She was paranoid. And so was I.
It became so bad that my aunt and uncle took me in by the time I turned eleven. I had been living with that for more than three years. I always thought that I had it bad. Sure, I wasn’t living in Africa suffering for water and food, and I wasn’t homeless. My mother wasn’t drunk, she just was never complete. It was like the happy, fun side of her was swept under a rug and the rest of her was left to bite her fingernails and try to stay healthy.
My mother loved and cared for me. She made sure I was fed and woke up on time and had a ride to school. She made sure I did my homework and took a shower and even that I got dessert. My mother loved me. And I loved her.
But my mother did not love this world. She did not love the world of torment and pain that caused her husband to suffer or the one that caused her to think thoughts that she often would not be worried with. My mom once told me: “The world is a cruel place, Abigail. It is a cruel place.”
Abigail. That is my name, chosen by my mother. It means a father’s joy. And I was a joy to my father, he told me so down to his very last breath. He told me that he loved me more than anything else, and that one day we would meet in the stars. He said that this was like the lemonade that mom makes, sour now but it will get sweet later.
It didn’t. My mother was never home, she was trying to support us and the never-resting companies claiming that they need this bill and that one. My mom worked extra shifts and saw therapists and then tried to make me happy, all while she was worrying. Worrying that she would one day get cancer and die like her husband, but also worrying about me. The doctors found that my dad’s cancer was genetic. And I can get it.
My mom didn’t make lemonade after that. It was my dad’s favorite drink and the memory was too painful. My mother succumbed to grief, and I stumbled into the same trap that she had. I would worry, nothing like her, but I still did. That’s when my aunt and uncle took me in. I moved to a different town, and the hospital sent nurses to my old house to take care of my mom. They gave her medicine to try to calm her, but she wouldn’t take it. She refused. She threw fits and would scream and yell in the middle of the night. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. My mother, my loving, lemonade making mother, decided to leave me.
She decided to join dad in the stars.
Every night I cry, in my new room, in my new house, in my new world, with everyone else letting the sour turn to sweet, except me. I am forever stuck in the sour. I go to therapists and sometimes take my medicine for my anxiety. My aunt and uncle care for and love me. But still I cry.
I cry out tears of lemonade. I cry out the sweet and the sour that haunted me that day. It all washes me away and leaves me with only the sour. Still only the sour, nothing else. Little bits of sweet, like getting a homework pass or petting a puppy only make the sour seem sourer. I can’t escape this lemonade world. I won’t go out like my mother, because I just can’t.
Every time I get close to thinking about it, I realize that I can’t. I will have to live my life until the stars call my name, and they are not calling yet. So every night I cry lemonade tears.
*****
Back to the present: Every night I still cry my lemonade tears, even though I am now fifteen years old. I cry my lemonade tears and look at the hospital ceiling, moving around my IV. Yes, the hospital. I, Abigail, am at the hospital, and will be staying here. Eight months ago I felt a lot of pain in my back and lungs for weeks, getting so bad it was unbearable, so I told my aunt and we went to the doctor. They said it was just a really bad chest cold and that it would go away.
They were wrong. A month passed and every day the pain got worse. I went to the doctor again, and this time they had me do a CAT scan. The doctors were right. My father’s cancer was genetic.
I’ve been living in the hospital for three months. Every night I still cry my lemonade tears. Even though the doctors haven’t told me, I heard them tell my aunt and uncle. I won’t survive. This I know is true, I know it from the bottom of my heart, as I look at the ceiling. But the feeling from the bottom of my heart is not the only way I know.
Every night, as I cry my lemonade tears, I hear the stars calling me. And every night they get a little bit louder. For so many nights now, the sound has been deafening. The once-quiet tinkering pulls me closer to it every day. I hear it now, louder than it was yesterday.
I hear it every night. But tonight it is louder, the loudest it can be. The stars are all that I can hear. Then they stop for just a moment, and I hear the IV stop and many urgent beeps from the countless machines surrounding me. I lift from this awful lemonade world, to meet my parents in the stars.
Goodbye lemonade world. Goodbye, tears of lemonade.
