My Last Wish novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The First Wish
Callie survives the night with the bottle because Dane forces the pills out of her mouth, Chad promises her one wish for every day she lives, and a thousand days later she walks out of the hospital pickup lane with her son.
The day I caught my husband cheating, I took the bottle down from the kitchen shelf.
It was the ninety-ninth time I had tried to swallow every pill in it.
I had counted.
Teddy was ten months old and screaming in his stroller by the back door.
I had walked him around the block that morning because I couldn't stand the quiet of the house.
I came home early.
Chad's car was in the driveway on a Tuesday.
Upstairs, our bedroom door was open a hand's width.
I saw my husband's bare chest, and across it a woman's wrist with a thin gold bracelet on it.
I never saw her face.
I went back down the stairs without a sound.
Chad didn't know I'd been there.
I stood at the counter with the bottle in my hand and my son wailing behind me.
I wasn't thinking about Teddy.
That is the worst thing I can say about that day, and it is true.
Then the front door banged and someone was running.
Dane Vandervoort, my best friend, lived two doors down and had known me since I was nine.
He'd heard Teddy crying through the open door.
He didn't ask what I was doing.
He got one big hand around my wrist and the other into my mouth, and he forced the pills out onto the floor.
"Callie. Look at me. Look at me."
"Let go."
"No."
He had his knees on the tiles and pills stuck to his jeans.
He was shaking harder than I was.
"Chad!" he shouted up the stairs. "Chad, call 911, now!"
The ambulance came.
I remember a stretcher, and the smell of the tape on my arm.
Then I remember Chad's face over mine in the emergency room, pale and wet.
He had put on his shirt wrong, one button off.
He held my hand in front of the nurse and the doctor and Dane, who stood against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Callie, listen to me."
His voice was warm and steady, the one he used with clients.
"Just make it through one more day.
"For every day you survive, write down one wish.
"When you're well, I'll make every single one of them come true. I swear it."
The nurse had tears in her eyes.
Dane looked at the floor.
I wrote my first wish that night on the back of a hospital menu.
I wish Teddy has a mother who stays.
When I came home, I folded it small and put it in a mason jar on our kitchen windowsill.
I wrote another the next morning.
Then another.
Dane let himself in every morning to take Teddy for a walk.
He always stopped at the windowsill on his way out.
By evening the jar was empty.
Chad said he took the slips to his office to work through them.
I believed him, because believing him was what I had.
That was a thousand days ago.
This morning the doctor at the outpatient clinic closed my file and shook my hand.
"A thousand days, Callie. I'm discharging you. I don't say this often, but I'm proud of you."
I sat in the hospital pickup lane with Teddy's car seat beside me and my last wish in my pocket.
I hadn't written it yet.
Chad pulled up in his silver sedan, smiling, with yellow tulips on the passenger seat.
He was twenty minutes late.
"There she is," he said. "My brave girl."
A woman stood on the curb behind him with a casserole dish in both hands.
Tierney Archer worked at his office and had brought us dinner every Sunday for two years.
Her gold bracelet clinked against the glass as she lifted the lid to show me.
"Chicken and rice, your favorite," she said. "I didn't want you to come home to an empty fridge."
I thanked her, and I meant it.
Then I opened the back door to set Teddy's car seat inside.
On the floor behind the driver's seat was a paper bag from a frame shop on Mill Street.
The corner of a frame stuck out of it.
I pulled it free.
It was a photograph of Chad in the sun with a little girl on his shoulders, both of them laughing.
Behind them stood the pink towers of Disneyland.
The brass plate at the bottom said Our First Trip, Easter.
Wish two hundred and twelve, written two years ago, said Take Teddy to Disneyland.
I had asked about it every spring since.
Every spring Chad had kissed my forehead and said the doctors wanted me home.
The little girl had his chin.
I looked up and he was watching me in the mirror.
He had stopped smiling.
"Callie," he said. "Give me that."
I put the frame back in the bag.
I took the car seat back out, unbuckled Teddy and lifted him onto my hip, and he put his arms around my neck.
Across the lane, Dane's old truck was idling by the curb.
He had been waiting there since morning, in case.
So I carried my son across the lane, past my husband, and I didn't look back.
"Callie, stop. You're not well."
Chad had gotten out of the car.
He wasn't speaking to me anymore.
He was speaking loudly, to the guard at the hospital doors.
"Sir, she stopped taking her medication. She's taking my child. I need help."
The guard looked at me, and he started to walk over.
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