Happy Birthday to Me

by Brian Rowe

  “Liesel?” I asked.

  It wasn’t Liesel.

  “I love you,” Aaron said and kissed me on the lips.

  Before I could react, my teammates hoisted me into the air. I watched from up top, like Cleopatra on her mighty throne, as Welch ran up to me and shook my right hand, tears in his eyes.

  I looked into the audience to see my family hugging each other and screaming with joy.

  I spotted Liesel again. She was jumping up and down higher than anyone. I blew her a kiss and she blew one right back at me. She started beaming so much I thought I could actually see a yellow radiance emanating from the top of her head.

  The moment was perfect.

  The boys put me back on my feet and continued to run around the gym floor and cheer at the top of their lungs, hugging family and friends.

  I stood in the middle of the auditorium, smiling, thankful, taking everything in. I had never seen my family more excited in my life. I had proven my worth to my teammates. I finally had a girl to care about… who truly cared about me. Even Welch was in an ecstatic mood. I couldn’t believe it.

  But then my smile faded. The joy vanished.

  The panic returned.

  Oh no.

  The pain started in my left arm, and then slowly trickled up to my left shoulder. Then I felt a heavy pressure in my chest.

  What’s happening…

  I tried to walk but couldn’t. I tried to shout for help but to no avail. I just stood there, trying to breathe, clutching my chest with my right hand.

  The cheering started calming down.

  “Oh my God!” somebody shouted.

  “Is he all right!” somebody else added.

  I got down on my knees and wrapped my arms around my waist. An overwhelming feeling of impending doom jolted its way through every cell of my aching body.

  This is it.

  My eyes darted straight to my family. My mom put her hand over her mouth. My dad had a look of utter shock.

  “Son?”

  The last thing I saw was my father starting to move down the bleachers to get to the ground floor.

  The pain swept over my entire body as I fell to my side and blacked out.

  28. Eighty

  I think this is where we started.

  Nurse Tanya fled my vicinity nearly an hour ago. The lights in the hospital hallway were dimmed. I was supposed to be asleep by now. But I was more awake than I’d ever been in my entire shortened life.

  I lay in my hospital bed, my head pressed against two large pillows. The heart attack wasn’t fatal, but it was pretty well understood by all that I would not be making a full recovery. The doctors said they wanted to keep me for a few days for observation, but both they and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger.

  I’m going to stay in this bed until I die.

  At least that’s what they wanted me to think.

  I sat up, moved to the side of the bed, and carefully landed on my own two feet. I pulled off my paper-thin gown and felt a cold breeze flow through my chapped body as I stood in the corner, my saggy underwear barely staying up around my crotch. Slowly but with determination I threw on a shirt, jacket, and long pants. I slipped my feet into some tennis shoes, and I started walking across the room.

  With each painful step, I felt, oddly, more relaxed and at peace, because I knew I had to do this.

  I have to get out of here.

  Just for one night.

  Just for her.

  I peered down the hallway to see a tall nurse in the distance walking with her head buried in a patient’s file. I closed the door softly behind me and started making my way down the hallway as fast as my weak bones would let me.

  I arrived at the end of the hall and turned right to find the elevators. I pushed the button and waited. All it took was a doctor or nurse to walk around the corner and see me out of bed for my little plan to be obliterated.

  But nobody caught me escaping. One of the three elevator doors opened right away and a mere minute later I was stepping out on the ground floor. The plan was actually working.

  I nodded to the young man at the receptionist desk. I felt it would be more incriminatory to try to ignore him, and I was right. He just nodded back at me and let me be on my way.

  I stepped outside. The late May night air was gloriously warm and inviting. That hospital room had been the chilliest place in the world, and I considered myself lucky to encounter the mountain air again, possibly for the final time.

  I walked to the right corner of the hospital in the hopes that there would be a taxi service present, but there wasn’t a shade of yellow to be found anywhere.

  I felt pain in my chest and upper back but ignored it. I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. To my surprise, it still had three percent of its battery life left. I dialed a cab and waited much longer for it to arrive than I anticipated.

  I’m going to be late… I can’t be late…

  The driver rolled down his windows and spoke with a Russian accent. “You not have any bags?”

  “No bags,” I said, schlepping myself over to the cab.

  I opened the back door and scooted down onto the surprisingly comfy seat.

  “Where you go?” the driver asked.

  “Platform Theatre,” I said. “It’s on South Virginia.”

  I tried to relax, looking out the window, admiring the bright lights of downtown Reno like I had just arrived in the city for the first time.

  I looked out at all the tourists heading in and out of casinos. I watched as everyone stopped to take pictures of that famous sign: The Biggest Little City in the World. I had always felt like I needed to get out of Reno to make a life for myself, but in the end, this place wasn’t all bad.

  It was home.

  The cab ride took only ten minutes. I tipped the driver a few bucks and tried to get out. I didn’t want to ask the man for assistance, so I grabbed the roof of the taxi with all my might and slowly pulled myself out, even though with every passing second I thought I was going to collapse from exhaustion against the hard cement sidewalk. I turned around and saw that the driver had dropped me off a block too soon.

  Damn it.

  I sighed and began another long walk. By the time I arrived at the theatre doors, it was 8:45.

  I’ve missed it… Please… No…

  I stepped through a pair of sliding doors and made my way inside. The entrance hallway was abandoned, but I could hear music pulsating from the room to the right. I opened one of four doors to the auditorium to see a packed house of people, two hundred or more, all watching intently as a young man who looked ten years old play the flute up on a darkly lit, mostly barren stage.

  Instead of trying to find my parents, I just took a seat in the back row. I crossed my arms and waited, although my heart began to sink when I realized she could have played at any time in the last forty-five minutes.

  I’ve missed it. I know I have.

  Two more solos followed. One was another young guy on cello. Then a young girl came out to sing. Her song sounded like it promised a finale. I felt hopeless.

  When the girl finished singing, an elderly man, one old enough to look like my twin, walked out to the microphone.

  “Last up tonight we have, on violin, Ms. Kimber Martin.”

  I jerked my head up and breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn’t believe it. There was some polite applause heard throughout the auditorium, but I might have clapped loudest of all.

  She walked out from stage left holding her violin and wearing an adorable pink dress, her hair long and straight. She looked confident as ever—the thirteen-year-old girl who I always thought of as a little kid finally, tonight, seemed all grown up. She took a seat and hoisted up her instrument.

  The room stayed quiet for a moment.

  And then, the heavenly sounds of her violin started sweeping through the auditorium like a cathartic musical score that would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award.

  She was marvelous up on tha
t stage, playing like a trained professional three times her age. She had been practicing non-stop for weeks, and it had paid off in every respect. She was perfect.

  My little sister…

  I started crying and didn’t stop until she finished playing. I was the only person in the room to give her a standing ovation.

  That’s when both she and my parents saw me. Mom and Dad looked stupefied, completely awe-struck that I had made it all the way from the hospital to the theatre on my own. They started making their way over to me, presumably to whisk me quickly and efficiently back to my hospital deathbed.

  But before they could reach me, before I would be sent back to that sad, lonely room, I saw with great delight the expression on my sister’s face. She was looking right at me, a heart-melting smile on her proud, innocent face.

  She was glowing.

  29. Eighty-Five

  Must… keep… breathing.

  Just opening my eyes had become a chore. I tried to move but couldn’t.

  I was dying.

  And there was nothing I or anyone else could do about it.

  “My beautiful boy,” my mom said, both her hands resting on my right palm.

  She kneeled next to my bed, my dad beside her with tears in his eyes. Kimber stood in the back of the room, her eyes as red as the setting sun.

  I was fading in and out of consciousness. I wasn’t feeling any pain anymore. I wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore. I knew this only meant the worst.

  “I love you so much,” my mom said before kissing me on the forehead.

  She turned around and placed her hand over her mouth before walking over to Kimber.

  My dad took my mom’s spot, and I saw, for the first time, the extent of his emotions. He stared into my eyes and gripped my right arm so hard it felt like he might break it in two.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t save you, Son. I’m sorry nobody knew what to do.”

  He wiped a tear from his left cheek and bit down on his lower, trembling lip.

  “You know,” he continued, “I’ve devoted my career to making people perfect. Anybody with flaws, well, they come to me. And there was nobody in the world I wanted to be more flawless than my own flesh and blood. Now look at you, so close to your eighteenth birthday, old, dying, imperfect as ever…”

  He brought his face down next to mine.

  “…And I don’t care. I don’t care what you look like, Cameron. Who you are, what you do, who you want to become. I just want my boy back. Please, Cameron. You can’t die before I do. You just can’t…”

  “Stephen,” my mom said from the other side of my bed.

  “Cameron, can you hear me?” my dad asked, a tear rolling down the center of his nose.

  I could, barely. “Dad, ” I uttered, almost inaudibly.

  “I love you, my son,” he said.

  He stood up, with difficulty, and walked with hesitation over to my mother.

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” my mom said on her way out the door. “Come on, Kimber.”

  As my parents disappeared from view, I had a strong feeling that I would never see them again.

  I moved my head down slightly to see Kimber standing at the end of my bed. She had her arms crossed, like she was upset with me about something. The joy I had seen on her youthful face five nights ago was gone. The girl I saw before me didn’t look like Kimber at all, in fact. She looked pale, like she hadn’t slept in weeks.

  She worked her way over to the right side of the bed and kneeled down.

  I thought she was going to give a speech just like my mother and father, but she didn’t. All she did was kiss me on the cheek.

  She ran out the door before I could say goodbye.

  And just like that, my family was gone.

  I tried to swallow but it hurt, as if tonsillitis had chosen the perfect time to sabotage my aching throat. I licked my lips, which were cracked and felt not like skin but dried-up old glue.

  My body was shutting down. My time was running out.

  I thought I was going to fall asleep when a knock at the door jolted my eyes back open.

  The person at the door didn’t wait for me to let him in. Even though he had seen me in the hospital only once a couple of days ago, he understood the severity of my condition.

  Wesley approached the foot of my bed, his hair looking like he had been terrorizing it for the last two hours with a straightener. He held a disc in his hand.

  “Hi Cameron.”

  “Hi,” I managed.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know you’re in pain, and I know you need to rest. I wasn’t sure if you’d be awake or not, but I just… you know… wanted to stop by.”

  I wanted to nod, but I couldn’t move my head. I attempted a smile, but Wesley probably saw something different. A scowl, perhaps?

  He looked around the room in an awkward fashion, like he had a supervisor outside who demanded he spend a maximum five minutes with me in the stuffy hospital room.

  “It’s pretty sweet,” he said. “You get a room all to yourself. Don’t have to share it with anyone. Imagine that. Some blabbermouth next to you talking to you all day about his problems. You’d have blood coming out of your ears.”

  Wesley chuckled. I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to make me laugh, to just forget for a fleeting moment that I was counting down the minutes until my death.

  He started slapping the disc against his plaid shirt. “So,” he said, taking a few steps closer to me, “I have something to give to you.”

  Wesley sat down next to me and shined the disc into my eyes.

  “Is that—” I tried to utter.

  “It’s the film I made about you, yes.”

  He finished it.

  I took a deep breath and tried to form more words. “A?”

  “What?”

  “Did you? A?”

  I don’t think he understood me at first. “Oh! You’re asking if I got an A?”

  I smiled.

  “Nope,” he said. “Teacher let me pass with a B minus.”

  Come again? I tried to furrow my brow. I wasn’t sure if my forehead was pulling it off.

  “The grade didn’t matter, Cameron. I already got into UCLA. Besides, at the end of the day, I decided on making the kind of movie I cared about. I made the movie for you, and for the people that love you.”

  He took hold of my right hand and turned his face away from me. He stared out the window for a moment.

  “I’m really gonna miss you, Cam,” he said. He looked back at me, tears in his eyes. I had never seen Wesley cry before. “I’m gonna keep your memory alive, you understand me? We all are.”

  He got up on his feet and took a couple of steps toward a table in the right corner.

  “I’ll leave the DVD over here. Maybe you can watch it later with your family or something—”

  He stopped talking when he noticed my right index finger, lifted from my chest, pointing at the television.

  “Now,” I said.

  He glanced over at the small TV hooked against the corner of the ceiling, an archaic DVD player nestled in a built-in ledge below it.

  “Oh? You want me to play it now?”

  I lowered my finger, as if that was the response my friend needed.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll put it on now. It’s only a few minutes long.”

  He settled the disc into the player and turned on the TV. It took him over a minute to get the whole thing configured, what with setting the TV to the right input and making sure the DVD player was plugged in the back. The main menu was just a blank black screen, with the word PLAY featured prominently in the center in white letters.

  “I hope you like it,” he said. “I’m going to head out for now, but it was really good to see you.”

  He pushed the PLAY button on the DVD remote control and smiled at me one last time. “Goodbye, Cameron.”

  I saw a tear fall from his right eye as he turned around and stormed out of the room rather qu
ickly, slamming the door behind him and making his way down the hall.

  I darted my eyes toward the black box at the top right corner of the room. I didn’t see or hear anything, and I worried for a second that the disc had a glitch of some kind.

  But then, an image popped up, and a song began to play. The black-and-white photo was one of me and Wesley at ten years old, sitting on a park bench up near the University of Nevada Reno, our arms wrapped around each other, infectious smiles plastered on our young, innocent faces. The song that played was a recent favorite of mine, the last track on Coldplay’s album Viva La Vida. It was called “Lost?” and it was a more haunting, slower version of the upbeat song heard at the beginning of the album.

  The opening image brought back a hundred and one memories of better times, but I readied myself for what I assumed was going to be a tragic documentary tale of my downfall. I waited for the bad.

  But the bad never came.

  As the first minute moved into the second and third, I watched with awe at what Wesley had composed for his final video project. It wasn’t a video at all. It was a series of pictures of me, between the ages of ten and seventeen, some with Wesley, some without, set to the Coldplay song. Many of these pictures I had never laid eyes on; others I remembered being some of the best Wesley and I ever took together.

  I wanted to get up off the bed, run down the hall, and give my best friend one final hug. Here I was, thinking the worst about what another person was capable of, when at the end of the day the true sign of a person’s character revealed itself. I expected Wesley to make a movie that exploited my unique, fatal condition. Instead he made a short, beautiful tribute to our friendship.

  The montage ended with the same black and white photo of us at the park, before dissolving to black, and finally, gray static.

  I hoped he would come back one more time. I hoped I would get the chance to thank him.

  I glanced to my left in the hopes of seeing him. But he wasn’t standing in the twelfth floor hallway of the hospital.

  Liesel was.

  I tried to smile again, this time thinking I was moving my cheek muscles just enough to pull off a momentary grin.