This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  “No.” I jut my jaw out and speak through gritted teeth. “Will and Penny. Are they here too?” I push the heel of my left hand between my eyebrows and close my eyes, mimicking one of Penny’s deep, cleansing breaths. Maybe I got the worst of it and they didn’t have to come to the hospital at all. I’d heard of that happening. People walking away from car wrecks without much more than a scrape and a couple of bruises.

  I feel a wave of nausea. My pulse rams into my temples and nasal cavity. I try to shake it away. Is there a call button? A nurse? Someone to bring pain medication?

  Matt watches, observing me. I catch a hint of an expression that is unknowable to me and has been for years now. I have no way of perceiving what would make him happy or sad anymore since everything just makes him angry. Faster than I can memorize it, that brief, very human expression disappears.

  “Seriously?” He scoffs and looks off to the side, like, Can you believe this girl? “You do realize you hit a car dead-on, right? I mean you were there. Doctor What’s-His-Face said you were probably conscious through most of it. I figured you already knew.”

  “Knew what?” My tone comes out snappy and peeved. I regret it instantly. It’s an unwritten rule in my family: when it comes to Matt, we don’t retaliate, we tolerate.

  A quick frown that I might have missed if I hadn’t known him for almost eighteen years crosses his face. Then the creases at the corners of his eyes flatten as I hear his familiar, sarcastic laugh. His brown eyes turn hard beneath the shadow of his cap. “They’re dead,” he says, and it’s as if a fist has punched through a brown paper bag, and with it my chest crumples.

  “You’re lying,” I tell him. “You are so lying.”

  He doesn’t argue. Instead he sips and puffs at the sippy straw, moving the wheels of his chair backward and forward in tiny measured increments.

  The handle on the door turns. Mom comes in first, a muffin in one hand and a to-go cup of coffee in the other.

  Her hands are full, but she uses the one with the muffin to cover her mouth anyway. Crumbs scatter to the floor. “You’re awake. Oh, honey.” Every familiar wrinkle on her face cuts deeper, becomes more pronounced. My mom wears her hair pulled into a ponytail with a large barrette made of shiny white shells. “We’re so sorry we weren’t here.”

  All the while there’s a pressure building in my chest like a teakettle and I know she must misread my expression, because she looks so happy—weepy, maybe—but genuinely joyous and I sense that this is wrong. All wrong.

  Before my dad can shut the door, I reach my boiling point. “Dead?” I shriek. “They’re dead?”

  Their faces freeze in matching masks of horror. Mom’s hand begins to shake and coffee burbles out from under the lid of the cup. There’s a flash of disgust when she peers down her nose at my brother, but it’s gone too, before I can take a mental snapshot. “Why, Matthew,” she says, flatly.

  My dad isn’t a tall man. In fact, he’s the same height as my mother, slight and sinewy from miles of flat-road biking on the weekends, but he draws himself up to his full stature. “Lake,” he says, his voice deeper than normal. But he doesn’t need to finish. It only takes that one syllable to know it’s true. They’re gone.

  I fold my body in half. The needles buried in my skin tug at the veins in my arms when I sink my head into my hands.

  “Lake, listen,” Dad says. There’s a weight on the mattress beside me, and the smell of sandalwood aftershave. “They did everything they could.”

  And all of a sudden it’s there. A fully formed snapshot. Penny thrown from the car. Her leg splayed at an unnatural angle. Will pinned by the waist underneath the side of the Jeep, a sickly red creeping out from his back that I tried hard to mistake for the flashing red lights of the ambulance.

  Mom rubs my back. “The paramedics brought Will back to the hospital, sweetie, but there was too much damage. There was nothing they could do.” Her tone is soft and soothing, like she’s singing me a lullaby, and I wonder if that’s the thing that will haunt me forever. That delicate singsong voice that crooned to me my worst nightmares.

  My chin snaps up. “Will’s here?” This means that Penny had died on the scene, but Will still might be near.

  My parents look through me to each other as if I’m a little kid. “Yes, but—” my dad begins.

  “Where? Where is he?” Now I do sound like a child, a petulant, naughty child, and I slam my fists into the mattress so that both my parents bobble for balance. Pain shoots through my right elbow.

  Dad clears his throat, trying to assume his position as head of the household. “He passed away, Lake. He’s gone.”

  “I want to see him,” I say. “Get me out of these.” I pick at the tape holding the IVs in place. My dad flattens his hand over mine to stop me and I feel the familiar bits of sticky residue left over from the grip tape of his handlebars. I glare down, tears blurring my vision. Droplets fall from my nose, leaving splashes of salt water on my paper gown.

  Mom’s hand is on my shoulder. I flinch. The need to see Will is overwhelming. The fact that he’s dead is somehow beside the point, but to explain this to my parents would require more words than I have in me.

  What I need is to hold his hand, to press my cheek to his, to lean down and smell salt water and coconut. The moments of Will in his perfect Will-ness are slipping and I don’t know where he’ll go. He’s the only rope left to latch onto.

  “Just let me go.” I hurl my body to either side. Both my parents grunt on impact before Dad grabs hold of me in a tight hug.

  “Will’s family needs to…they need to be alone right now.” There’s a hitch in my dad’s voice that makes my entire body go limp. But I’m part of his family, I want to say. Me.

  But my muscles are sandbag heavy and I slump into his arms instead. The fight drains out of me as I snot and sob into his shirt. The machine attached to me continues to beep incessantly, which is the only way I can convince myself this isn’t a horrible dream.

  A hiccup racks my chest. I wipe the slug trail coming from my nose with the back of my hand. “I’m going to bring them back,” I say. “They’re going to come back and it’ll be okay,” I continue while rocking in place. “I’m almost eighteen.” I glance toward the window, through the angled blinds. Slivers of thin light X-ray the morning clouds, and I count the days until my birthday.

  Mom’s palms are warm on my cheeks. She holds my face and looks me squarely in the eyes. “Lake,” she says. “You know you can only have one.”

  “No,” I say. Tears drip from the sides of my nostrils. My chin trembles. “No, Mom, there’s an exception. There has to be an exception.” She tries to lean in to kiss my forehead, but I tear myself away. “Give me my phone. Where’s my phone? Did you bring our tablet? We need to start doing research. Dad, help.”

  I feel around the hospital bed, searching for the cold, slick glass of my cell phone. Maybe there is some kind of application. Some seminal court case I’ve never read about. Some instance where, I don’t know, twins died and it was deemed too inhumane to bring back only one.

  The bed’s empty. My dad brings my head into his chest and holds the side of my face to him. I can hear his heart beating underneath his shirt. “There aren’t any exceptions, Lake. That’s the law. You can only choose one. Just one. Always.”

  “But how do you know?”

  My dad sighs. “Trust us, Lake. We know.” And he sounds very sad when he says this, because despite all the strides that science has made, despite the fact that what’s known as the “lifeblood,” injected as part of the vitalis process, can regenerate fully dead cells to health, it has still managed to fail my brother and now the process will fail me too.

  He doesn’t let go of me. I try to match my breaths to his. Try and fail. In the background, I recognize the robotic buzz of my brother’s wheelchair and, when my dad releases me, I look over to see that Matt has turned his back to us and is now waiting at the door.

  I didn’t know that people could b
reak until Matt was already broken.

  The actual breaking, as in the fracture of the bones, happened sometime in the last few weeks. I can’t pinpoint the timeline anymore. The details feel hazy the farther we get from the event, like I’m trying to nail down something small on my calendar and I can’t remember exactly which day I did it on.

  It feels as though I’m outside bulletproof glass that’s ten feet thick while the rest of my family is on the inside. For endless days my parents have busied in and out of Matt’s room. Often they’ll gently tell me to stay out of the way. It’s a sensitive time after all. And they treat me like I’m an acquaintance who has brought a tuna casserole to a funeral instead of their daughter and Matt’s only sister.

  As a result, the days are long and boring. Mom breaks the news to me that I’ll be on some sort of bereavement leave for the rest of the school year and I’ll have to study independently for my finals. When I tell her I don’t want to take time off school, she says that it’s for the best, and the discussion ends there because I don’t want to be a pain about it.

  In regular life, we play along with reruns of Family Feud on Thursday nights. The winners get desserts, the losers have to serve them. This Thursday, we don’t.

  Mom always comes to read magazines on my bed in the morning while I take a shower and get dressed. But now she’s never there.

  Instead, the three of them talk in Matt’s room for hours, in low murmurs that never crystallize into words. Nobody invites me to this new family of three. Jenny finds a new best friend since I’m not at school anymore and, without my parents to drive me around, we both stop trying to stay in touch.

  I scroll through web pages, reading all the articles on quadriplegia that I can find. That’s the diagnosis for Matt since the accident. The specifics are bleak. Total loss of function for all four limbs. Impairment in controlling bowel and bladder movements. Spasticity. Loss of sexual function. I try to gloss over that last one.

  The prognosis—that’s the medical term for Matt’s disease forecast—is even worse. Bed sores. Frozen joints. Respiratory complications and infections. Something they’re calling deep vein thrombosis that I don’t quite understand but which sounds terrible.

  But none of these things seem real to me because I can’t see Matt.

  I don’t know what day of the week it is, only that it’s mid-May, and the humidity has already been gradually creeping indoors, where it leaves a slippery film of sweat on every surface. I get up the guts to knock on the door. The voices behind it stop, but no one answers to let me in. My mom, my dad, and Matt are all in one room and nobody calls for me to join them.

  My throat goes tight and my eyes prick with tears. I wait five, ten minutes before retreating.

  The house feels extra big with everyone but me living in Matt’s bedroom. I’m alone with an ache in my chest that won’t go away.

  Tonight, I lie awake in my bed, idly turning over the inhaler in my hands. I haven’t needed it since I stopped going to soccer practice, a change that happened when I quit going to that school. I’ve been able to breathe deeply and easily even after I’ve been crying for a couple of hours.

  I’m waiting for my dad to turn off the television and for my mom to get her last glass of water for the night. When my eyes start to close, I pinch my arms to stay awake.

  Eventually, it’s just the sound of the ocean outside. A relentless roar. Mom used to say that what she loved about the ocean is that each morning it brought along a fresh start. Whether you left footprints, a sandcastle, or words printed in the beach, the next day they’d be gone and what you’d be left with was a clean slate, like the beach had scars the water could heal. In science class they taught us that this process was called “erosion.” The water wasn’t healing the beach at all, but tearing bits of it away. I like Mom’s version better, and I listen to the sound of the waves, wishing that they could heal us too.

  I crawl out of bed wearing a big sleep shirt that goes down to my knees. The long hallway between my room and Matt’s is spooky. The tile is cold under my feet. Tucked underneath my armpit is a paperback copy of The Chocolate War. The book’s been earmarked at page 176. It’s not that I can’t read it myself. I’m thirteen. I know how to read. But I’ve never been much of a reader. This only changes when Matt chooses a specific book for me and when it’s something we do together. Funny that with my stuffy lungs and asthma, I’m the athletic one and Matt’s the sibling with his nose always in a book. I have a sick thought that I wish instantly to take back. What I think is that maybe the universe knew what it was doing when it made Matt the way he is—an intellectual, as my dad would say. But that would mean that Matt was meant to get paralyzed, and I know that can’t be right.

  I’m nervous in a way that I’ve never been to see my brother. I knock softly on his door, three times. There’s no answer. I’m afraid that if I knock again, Mom and Dad will wake up and tell me not to bug him.

  So I turn the knob and slip through the dark crack. His room smells unfamiliar, like old rubber and medical equipment.

  In the corner, I can make out the bulky outline of the new robo-technology wheelchair, creepy in its emptiness. It even has a robotic arm that Matt is eventually supposed to be able to use to pick up basic items, but he hasn’t learned how yet.

  “Matt?” I hiss through the darkness, careful of where I step. No answer. “Matt?” I tiptoe to the far side of his bed, where the open curtains allow a trickle of moonlight to paint swatches of his bed sheets silver. It’s still quiet. The lumpy form under the covers doesn’t move. I place my hands gently on his chest and shake him. Matt still doesn’t move. “Matt, wake up.”

  “What, Lake?” I can’t tell whether his voice sounds groggy or not.

  I draw back my hand and clam up. I remember a time when I was only five or six and Matt had the flu. Mom didn’t want me catching it, so she kept shooing me from his room, but I had painted him a picture that I wanted him to have. So I snuck in when she was doing laundry, only for some reason when I got there, I became deathly shy all of a sudden and dropped the picture on his lap and ran. I glance at it still pinned to the wall behind Matt’s desk and try to be brave. This time I can’t catch what Matt has, but it’s so much worse.

  “It’s me. Lake,” I say, when saying something becomes preferable to saying nothing at all.

  A small laugh.

  “I had to come see you,” I say.

  “Oh.” His voice is a whisper in the dark.

  “I’m going to crawl up. Hang on.” I have to push past the awkwardness before literally pushing him to the side. The bed is taller than I’m used to. He has a mattress that mechanically raises and lowers now, the same as the ones in hospitals. His legs and arms are floppy when I move them, but after some grunts and groans on my part I’ve made enough room to nestle in beside him.

  We both just lie there for I don’t know how long. For some reason I thought his body would feel cold and dead and am relieved to find that it’s warm next to mine.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask at last.

  He grunts. “Sometimes.”

  “Like…where?”

  A pause. “Like, everywhere.”

  “Matt.” I turn onto my side. The mattress creaks beneath my weight. “Nobody will tell me what happened. Mom and Dad keep treating me like a little kid or something.”

  He sighs an impatient Why are you here? sigh. “What do you think happened, Lake?”

  “You had an accident.” This is the only thing I know. Matt’s paralyzed. He won’t recover. We have to take care of him now. That’s all my parents told me. End of story.

  “I…fell.”

  “Doing what?” I ask.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighs again. Why is he so annoyed with me already? “Out of a tree, Lake. I fell from a tree.”

  I swallow so hard, I know that we can both hear it. Matt must feel dumb for falling out of a tree and that must be the reason he sounds so irrita
ted, not because of me, I tell myself.

  “It’s going to be okay.” I put my hand on his hand, but I’m not sure whether he can feel it. I hadn’t thought to look that part up.

  “Easy for you to say.” He lets out an angry laugh I haven’t heard before.

  I’m hurt, wounded, but I try to think of the stupid tree, not myself. Matt will be okay. Maybe not in the way he wants to, but he will be. He has me. I push closer to him until it feels like our sides are sewn together and we could be one person.

  “You know they were trying to cure paralysis?” Matt says out loud, even though I’m not sure he’s really talking to me. But then again, who else would he be talking to?

  I hadn’t considered this possibility. “They will!” I say excitedly. “Of course they will.”

  “No. When they discovered the vitalis process. It was an accident. They were trying to cure paralysis. How fucked up is that?” I’ve never heard my brother say the F-word. “They thought, ‘Hey, if we can just regenerate the cells in the disabled nerves, then whoop-dee-doo, we’ll be able to get a body working again.’”

  We don’t get to study resurrections until eighth grade, and everyone has a different opinion about them, so my parents say it’s not something I should bring up in polite conversation, like politics and religion. “But…doesn’t it regenerate dead cells?” I venture, confused.

  “Sure.” There’s the angry laugh again. “But it doesn’t stop there, it spreads and regenerates every fucking cell it touches until it’s wiped the whole body. Kills the live ones, cures the dead ones. Hooray for science.”

  I don’t know what to say. I think what Matt needs is time. And hope. And probably me. I shimmy to a sitting position, excited that I came equipped with my very own distraction. “Guess what? We’re not finished with The Chocolate War,” I interject.

  “Lake, I can’t read it to you.”

  “Sure you can.” I reach over and flip on the lamp. I hear Matt wince. He squeezes his eyes shut. Without meaning to, I let out a small gasp. A catheter bag filled with Matt’s urine is sitting on the other side of the bed from me. There’s no way Matt can cover it himself. More than that, he looks pale, with deep grooves cut into the hollows of his eyes. His hair is greasy. My voice rasps. “Nothing’s wrong with your eyes, Matt.”