Dear Universe

by Florence Gonsalves

  “It’s just—”

  “Okay, I guess you’re not kidding.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean.” I sigh. “It’s just—” But there are too many things in this world merging into that other world. If they collided fully, they’d crush me between them. “I’m sorry, just, I really need you to go.”

  “Fine, Cham,” he says exasperatedly. He starts to leave, then turns back halfway down the porch stairs. “You’re not like in trouble, are you?”

  “No, no,” I say quickly. I see movement in my peripheral vision—my dad has wheeled himself over to the door and he’s looking out the window. Shit. I wish I could kiss the concern off Gene’s face, but I can’t function in two worlds at the same time.

  “I feel like I can’t trust you right now.” He grimaces. “You’re obviously hiding something from me, but I’m not gonna beg you to tell me.”

  “I know. I promise it’ll all make sense, but you gotta go. I’ll text you.” I turn back to the house and wait to hear his footsteps disappear, then his car door slam. A moment later he’s backing out of the driveway. Another second and he’s out of sight.

  When it’s just me in my dad’s mail carrier coat facing the house, where only one light is on, I let myself get pulled into myself entirely. I want to close up inside my room with the lights off and the projector on until everything is better. Until he is better, but I guess that’d require a cure for the incurable.

  Dear Universe,

  I’m sorry I can’t tell you the truth.

  I’m sorry for littering even though there was a trash can.

  I’m sorry it rained on Saturday.

  I’m sorry for not telling you what’s wrong with him.

  I’m sorry I’d like myself more if I were different.

  I’m sorry about this disease that isn’t hideable.

  I’m sorry clothes aren’t optional.

  I’m sorry the earth has only one follower, and the earth never follows the moon back.

  I’m sorry this is a bad apology.

  Mostly I’m sorry I don’t know the instruction manual about me.

  I don’t know how long I stand outside, but when I get back in, the tips of my ears are numb. It’s warm in the mudroom, and immediately the smell hits me. “Dad?” It’s vomit and it’s everywhere, but I don’t know where exactly. I rush into the kitchen and find the sliding door open. I almost gag in the back of my throat. My dad’s wheelchair is parked outside the bathroom door.

  “Judy, I need a little help,” he says from behind the cracked-open door.

  I breathe through my mouth and falter outside. “It’s me, Dad. Mom won’t be back for a bit.”

  I move his chair out of the way and keep my eyes on everything else in the bathroom that’s above where he’s slumped over the toilet: the smudge-free mirror, the rack with the bright white hand towel.

  “I felt nauseous… dizzy,” he says, leaning his elbows on the toilet and wiping his mouth. “I got sick—” He seems to lose his train of thought.

  “Dad?”

  “Sorry,” he mumbles into the toilet. “I—I couldn’t make it fast enough.”

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.” I crouch down next to him.

  He looks at me for a second. Then something disappears from his eyes and his whole body seizes up. His legs become rigid. Some instinct takes over, and my brain processes the chaos, one detail after another: him in his pajamas on all fours with his legs stiff and shaking, the toilet with the mess around the sides of it, the wheelchair in the doorway watching everything. I try to touch him, but fear is the funniest thing. It’s completely invisible and totally physical, and I’m no match for it at all.

  “Dad,” I say, shaking his shoulder a little. “Dad, are you okay?” He’s stopped seizing, but his eyes are only half-open. “Dad,” I say, trying to pull him up to more of an upright position, but I can’t lift him. A panicky feeling starts to take over, but then his eyes open a little more.

  “Judy, I got so dizzy.”

  “Dad, it’s me, Cham.” My eyes burn like all the onions in the world are being cut open at once.

  “I can’t get my balance.” He continues as if he didn’t hear me, swaying on his knees as he lifts one and then another. His voice is hoarse, but maybe he’ll tell me what to do. If he just tells me what to do, I can do it.

  “I’m gonna call Mom,” I say, taking my phone out of my back pocket.

  “Don’t call my mom.”

  “No, I’m gonna call my mom.”

  I hold the phone to my ear and open the bathroom cabinet for a paper towel or a new roll of toilet paper, but as the phone rings, I realize I have no idea how to start cleaning this up.

  “What’s up, Cham?” my mom answers briskly. “How’s Dad feeling?”

  “Not good, he threw up and kind of collapsed in the bathroom, I don’t know what happened, he just—” I bite the inside of my cheek until I can picture my teeth coming out the other side.

  Then he starts to shake again, not like he usually does, but more violently throughout his whole body.

  “Mom, his eyes are like rolling back in his head and he’s shaking a lot and—”

  “Cham, listen, you should call 9-1-1,” she says calmly. The bones in my hands are rigid, and my muscles are petrified, and words are having a hard time unfreezing themselves from my mouth or my throat or wherever words are formed. “Cham, call 9-1-1,” she repeats. I try to command myself to move, but I’m paralyzed and it’s terrifying. My body is a prison that I am trapped inside. I watch him struggle to get up, his hands shaking and his legs too. Is this what he feels like?

  I reach out my hand to hold his, then I steady my voice.

  “I’m calling right now.”

  Dear Universe,

  I will miss the whole show. I will miss the whole night. I will miss whatever I have to for him to be okay.

  Time and sound and space somersault around one another in many minutes of confusion: sirens, firefighters, the ambulance with the white stretcher. They drop my dad off in the emergency room, and one of the EMTs walks me to the waiting room. My body is here, but that’s just my body.

  Texts sent to Gene while I am someplace unknown entirely:

  Situation got worse C

  Gonna be a bit more than an hour C

  G Is everything okay?

  G I’m kinda pissed

  G and freaked out

  G You really didn’t want me in your house

  I’ll be at school as soon as I can C

  I’m sorry C

  G Can I do something?

  Tell Abigail I’m sorry and I’ll call her ASAP C

  G If you tell me what’s going on maybe I can help

  The text I do not send: I don’t think anything can help.

  Every second waiting outside the ER while my dad is inside with my mom and the doctors is agonizing. Part of me is bummed about tonight, but the other part of me can’t even believe there’s a part of me that’s bummed, as if there’s another world that could even be slightly as important as this one. At first I try to keep on top of what’s going on at Senior Night. People are posting pictures and videos and stories of themselves making their own pizza, bouncing in the inflatable castle, competing in a Ping-Pong tournament.

  Eventually it makes me feel worse, so I play a game in my head where I create stories for people waiting outside the ER with me: The guy with the oxygen tank is Jimmy. He’s made a crash landing from Mars and hasn’t adjusted properly. That other guy with the bloody hand had a fight with a mirror. The mirror won.

  Eventually, around ten, after three hours that felt like three days, my mom comes into the waiting room.

  I jump up and she gives me a hug. “Is he okay? What happened?”

  “He’s okay. Come on.” She pushes the doors to the ER open. As soon as we step in, we’re submerged in the chaos of other people’s emergencies. I block out the sounds of computers and monitors and people in pain and doctors with instructions.


  “What happened?” I repeat, hurrying to keep up with her.

  “They don’t know what happened exactly. It was some sort of neurological episode. He lost consciousness at a bad time and was lucky not to really have hurt himself.”

  “I don’t get it, though.”

  “It’s like a stroke, but not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?” We stop in front of a wing with ten beds, all with their curtains drawn around them.

  “That’s part of what’s so frustrating about his sickness, Cham. They don’t fully understand it. It’s related to his brain degenerating, but they don’t know exactly how.”

  “Well, that’s stupid.” I glare at a nurse wheeling a cart of some unidentifiable red liquid, as if it’s her fault that science doesn’t have all the answers.

  My mom kisses my forehead. “He’s not himself, okay? It was traumatic getting him here. He’s very confused about where he is, and they’ve given him meds, so just…” She trails off.

  When she opens the curtain, the rings scrape the metal rod.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I say. He looks very small under the blankets with his salt-and-pepper hair staticky against the pillow. Either these hospital beds are ginormous or I never realized this particular quality about humans: how utterly tiny we are in the face of everything that happens to us.

  I approach his bed and touch the cool metal railing. “Hi, Dad,” I say again. My voice is too loud or too perky or too high-pitched. Everything is wrong. He turns his head and jolts his arm toward me.

  “They’re keeping me locked up here. I’m a prisoner. You gotta get me out of here, Cham.”

  My eyes widen and nearly fall out of my head. I look at my mom, wishing that she’d warned me better or that she’d fixed this already. She takes his hand in hers.

  “It’s okay, Scott, they’re just doing some tests on you. They’re here to help you.”

  “No, they’re out to get me. Look at them in their uniforms,” he says as a nurse walks by, fumbling with her stethoscope. “I’m gonna sue them. I’m gonna sue them all.”

  A bit of spit flies from his mouth and hits me like acid rain. This isn’t my dad. This isn’t the person who held my hand in the car after I lost the spelling bee because it’s impossible to spell tomato with an E.

  “You’re okay, Dad,” I say in a wobbly voice that couldn’t possibly be convincing.

  “I’m not okay,” he scoffs. “Look at me.” He holds up his arm with the clothespin tracking his blood oxygen. It’s attached to a machine by the wall. “They’re keeping me tied to this bed without food or water.”

  I don’t realize I’ve been backing away from the bed until I hit the boundary of the curtain. “He’s confused,” my mom repeats. “The delirium will wear off soon, I hope. We should let him sleep, but I thought it might help—”

  “You girls want to keep me here, don’t you?” He points his finger at us, and it’s steadier than usual. “Cham, help me get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. You have to stay.”

  The flap of his gown slips down his shoulder, where a bruise is growing down his arm. He shakes his head and makes a tsk sound. When he looks at me again, his face is like a stone sculpture of his face, but the features are slightly off.

  “You’re a disappointment, Cham,” he says, and turns onto his side, the sheets making a terrible starchy noise, his breath getting heavier. “You are such a disappointing daughter.”

  Dear Universe,

  My bones come apart like tectonic plates. What was normal shifts and falls. Everything is moving and changing position and getting kicked out of where it was. How do you survive an earthquake? How do you stay steady when everything everywhere is breaking down? And afterward who comes in to sort through the wreckage?

  11

  Days ’til prom: 50

  A SPLATTERING OF TEXTS RECEIVED LAST NIGHT AND OPENED this morning:

  7:37 PM

  G I hope things are okay

  8:02 PM

  G I know you said it’s a family thing but you were acting so weird at your house

  8:02 PM

  G Like you were lying to me about something

  9:42 PM

  G Do you know when you’ll be back? We should talk in person.

  10:09 PM

  G I guess you’re not gonna make it back to school tonight?

  9:11 PM

  A WHERE ARE YOU?

  9:37 PM

  H Gene’s been wandering around like a lost puppy

  11:10 PM

  G I’m worried

  11:12 PM

  G Can you please answer?

  11:48 PM

  G Guess not.

  7:12 AM

  Gene I’m sorry I never texted C

  7:12 AM

  I know I ruined our special night C

  7:12 AM

  I’ll explain later C

  7:17 AM

  Ugh Abigail C

  7:18 AM

  This family stuff is complicated C

  7:18 AM

  I’ll explain as soon as I can but right now we’re still in the hospital C

  9:12 AM

  A Just got your texts / talked to Gene

  9:12 AM

  A He said you kicked him out of your house?

  9:12 AM

  A Is your family okay?

  9:12 AM

  G So sad you couldn’t come to Senior Night :(

  10:12 AM

  G I don’t really wanna talk right now

  10:12 AM

  G hope everything’s okay with your family

  10:36 AM

  I’m sorry about everything C

  10:36 AM

  Phone’s gonna die C

  10:36 AM

  Ttys C

  Sometime in the middle of the night, they moved my dad to a new room, where they gave him more pills. Here, in between bouts of kind of sleeping and checking texts, I look at people’s feeds for updates from Senior Night: Gene and Doug stuffing pizza in each other’s mouth, Abigail dancing with Helga in the moon bounce, Josie winning the superlative Most Likely to Succeed. In one picture of Hilary’s, I see Gene talking closely with Helga at the drinks table, and it makes me want to throw my phone down. I know it’s stupid to be jealous, but sometimes I’m stupid. Eventually I turn my phone off. Maybe if I don’t see any more pictures or texts or calls, I won’t have missed anything at all.

  “You’re awake,” my mom whispers as she comes into the room holding a disposable cup of sludge. “The doctor will be in soon.”

  “Dad’s been asleep a long time,” I say, looking over at him in the bed.

  “It was the medicine,” my mom says for like the eighth or eighteenth time. I help myself to some of her coffee.

  “He was really agitated. He was saying all these things, that I disappointed him.” I puncture the rim of the cup with my nails, carving out little moons in the material.

  “He didn’t mean it. Just remember, it’s not him, it’s—”

  “I know. The disease.” I try to see my reflection in the dark liquid surface of the coffee, but you know that feeling of looking and looking and still not seeing?

  “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep,” my mom offers, straightening her back to meet the doctor who’s talking to a nurse outside the doorway. “Or maybe text Abigail or go for a run. It’d be good to get out of here for a bit.”

  I shake my head. My bones feel too heavy to run. “I’ll stay. I’m just gonna get some breakfast.”

  “Okay. Give yourself a break, Cham. This stuff always takes a while.”

  I stand and nod. When I’m in the hallway I look back. My mom’s in the seat by my dad’s bed, and he’s sleeping so deeply he’s not even snoring.

  That’s when I realize that this could be it. It it. Up until now I hadn’t thought about there being a real ending to this. Sure, I’d thought about an ending, but an ending is different from the ending. An end is prom and graduation and Nicaragua. But the en
d, the Real End, is a lot more final than that. It’s completely and totally irreversible, and it could be anytime, from now to years from now. I walk toward the stairs. The only real deadline is the final one. It’s not up to any of us and we can’t push it back.

  The cafeteria is lively—not the food, the food is soggy—but there aren’t sick people who get breakfast in bed as the one perk of dying. There are other people between these potato-colored, windowless walls, and I couldn’t be more psyched to see them. “The hash browns are worth waiting for,” the woman in bright yellow scrubs says to me as I get in line. I highly doubt that. As I browse the cooler for a drink, I hear my name from somewhere in the corner of the cafeteria.

  “Cham?” My body freezes. I’m not “Cham” here. “Cham?”

  I turn from the cartons of lemonade and orange juice and spot Brendan, of all people, eating by himself in the corner of the cafeteria.

  “What are you doing here?” he hollers. Approximately everyone in the cafeteria turns in their blue plastic chairs. “Are you okay?”

  I glare at him and select an orange juice. I’m fine, I mouth, then hurry toward the register. When it’s my turn, I hand the woman my mom’s debit card.

  “Sorry, we only take hospital bucks here.” She points to the sign by the computer. It says SORRY WE ONLY TAKE HOSPITAL BUCKS HERE.

  “Oh, um, I don’t have hospital bucks.” I consider putting my food back, but I’m starving. “Are you sure you can’t take a card?”

  She pats down her thinning, orangish-dyed hair and eyes what I imagine is a growing line behind me. “I’ve worked here ten years. I’m sure.”

  I look down at my scrambled eggs, wondering how I’m supposed to divorce them so soon, before we even got married.

  “Hi, Jackie,” Brendan says, appearing beside me. “I can get her.” He’s wearing a maroon vest and a sticker that says I’M SO HAPPY TO VOLUN-CHEER! He holds his hospital ID out, and she takes it with a smile. “You got it, Brendan.”

  Once she swipes his card, we walk toward the dispensers for napkins and plastic ware. I wonder if I should say Thank you or Thank you so much. “Thanks,” I finally say.