Dear Universe

by Florence Gonsalves

  When I look up, Brendan’s looking at me, and he could be looking at me. His eyes are all You’re a person with a heart and I have a heart too. I become very interested in my computer. Maybe he’s not feeling any of those things. I’m just saying he could be. Hypothetically.

  “Keep going,” he says. “What are the ‘unsolved stars’ in your heart?”

  “I think of them as alien familiars,” I say, blushing.

  He pretends to type vigorously. “That clears everything up.”

  I laugh and feel myself retreating into myself. “Never mind, okay? I don’t know what it means. It’s just what came out after a run one day, so I wrote it down. It doesn’t like mean anything.”

  “What if it does? No one uses a term like alien familiars randomly.”

  I put my head between my knees, and my hair falls around me like an unruly curtain. “They’re things we like rampage the universe to find, only to realize we’ve known them all along.”

  “That’s beautiful,” he says softly.

  “It’s a hypothesis entirely backed up without facts.”

  “What does—”

  I clear my throat loudly. “Nope, enough about me. What’d you write about?”

  Brendan laughs, and I pull my head up only so I can shake it vigorously as he talks. “Wait, don’t change the subject, there’s something there.”

  I sigh. “Writing about running isn’t even half as good as running. And anything I say about my dad getting sick isn’t half as bad as him being sick, so really I don’t see the point in trying to write an essay after all.”

  He cocks his head. “You just shut down sometimes.”

  “Surprise, I’m a robot! So what did you write about?” I ask again. “Enlighten me with your college essay. It must have been pretty good if you get to tutor people now.”

  He looks down at his computer and laughs. “Oh, just wrote about how all my friends are dead people. You know, the usual.”

  “You’re joking right?”

  “Nope.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He smiles and shrugs. “I read a lot. Actually, I read a lot of quotes because I hate reading books, but the quotes I like are usually by people who died a long time ago, and I know it’s kinda cheap just to collect the good stuff, but I guess that’s where I am right now.”

  I let go of the strand of hair I’ve been stroking for the last ten minutes. “I don’t really get what you mean.”

  “I have favorite writers and stuff,” he says, drawing the computer into his lap, “but I’ve never read their books. I’ve just read quotes from their books online. And it feels like these people are keeping me company.”

  He becomes fascinated by a speck of dirt on his screen. I think he’s embarrassed, which makes me want to scoot closer to him. “What’s one of the quotes?” I ask.

  He taps the keyboard, then reads aloud. “‘Do not feel lonely. The entire universe is inside you.’”

  “Wow,” I say, feeling something stir inside me. It could be the universe or it could be the breakfast I forgot to eat. “Who said that?”

  “Dead poet friend named Rumi.”

  “Rumi, huh?” We share a brief look punctuated by a tiny smile.

  “Okay, back to your essay,” he says. I groan.

  “High school is a torture chamber. It’s unbearable! I must have the moon or something.”

  He laughs. “Okay, Caligula. Keep talking. What have the last four years been like?” he asks, fingers poised over the keys. Now that he’s told me the status of his BFFs, I can’t just blow his question off. I try not to think too much and let the truth come out.

  “The last four years have been hard,” I say slowly. “Really hard.”

  I close my eyes, and my mouth takes on a mind of its own. “It’s been sad and awkward, like really awkward sometimes, and annoying, which I know is bad to say, but in a way I feel like I’ve been asleep for most of it, like I kind of shut down because it was too much or something.” I keep going, feeling safe behind my closed eyelids. “And other days it’s totally fine and I think we all kind of forget that no one can predict this disease. He could live with it for years or he could deteriorate and die in the next couple of months and, I don’t know, everything is so up in the air.”

  I wipe my eyes. The more things I say, the more things I have to say, as if all the words have been strung together like pearls and I am throwing them up one bead at a time. “Sometimes I just want to be the one being taken care of because it’s stressful. And I know that’s selfish, but like I never know what I’m doing, and I just want a normal relationship with my parents where I can hate them sometimes without worrying that they’re gonna croak the next minute.”

  I trail off and open my eyes. He’s typing furiously. When I clear my throat, it makes no sound, given that it’s rivaling the Kalahari in humidity. “I need a break,” I decide. When I go to stand, my feet are pins and needles. I plop back down and fall against my bed.

  “Do you need help?” he asks gently.

  “Sure.”

  “There’s so much stuff here, Cham,” he says, closing his laptop, then standing in front of me. He holds his hands out awkwardly and I reach for him. Our fingers touch the way toes touch the water when it’s freezing—that is, like trying not to touch at all.

  “Um, here,” he says, holding his arm out to me instead. I grab it quickly and stand, launching forward, and he has to grab onto me.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, good, thanks.” His hands are big around my shoulders, and I become most parts electricity. It’s not a personal reaction, it’s a dermatological reaction. “You can let go,” I say, and I’m a little disappointed when he does.

  As we come down the stairs, I hear a voice that doesn’t belong to my mom or my dad or any of the aides. An elevator drops into my pelvis. By the last step I can see the kitchen, and everyone in the kitchen can see me.

  “Hey, Abigail,” I say as nonchalantly as I can muster. She’s sitting across from my mom at the table, and my mom has the sanitary wipes out. God help us.

  “Hey, Cham—and… Brendan?” Abigail says.

  “Hey.” The four of us orbit each other’s awkwardness until finally Abigail takes over the situation, which is what Abigail is best at. She stands up and clacks her fingernails together. The acrylics sound like music, but less melodious and more anxiety-inducing.

  “I was just gonna see if I could help with anything on your essay.” She watches my mom take another wipe from the container. “You sounded weird on the phone, and I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “Oh, right, sorry.”

  “How sweet,” my mom says, covering every surface of the table and leaving behind a sluglike trail of Kills 99.9 Percent of Bacteria! “Maybe the three of you could work together? You tutor as well, right, Brendan?”

  “Yeah, we’ve actually made some good progress with Cham’s essay,” he says, before I can stop him. I’d like to belong to the freezer now.

  “Wait, Brendan is helping you?” Abigail glares at him. “I offered so many times,” she says in the voice of a soldier suffering wounds from the war of senior year. I’m supposed to be your best friend, her eyes say. I stare back. But you and Hilary won that award.

  Abigail’s face is reddening. My mom is biting her lip as she holds the wipe up, as if she could disinfect the air between us.

  “We could all work on it,” Brendan offers, echoing my mom in sentiment but not in hopefulness. Abigail looks at me and I look at the lamp. “Uh, or we could take a break, since we were gonna do that anyway, and then work on it tonight in Google Docs? When’s it due?”

  “Midnight,” I mumble. I look back and forth between Brendan and the door, hoping he’ll catch on. “I’ll text you. Thanks for the help.”

  “Sounds good. Thanks, Mrs. Myles,” he calls, not bothering to untie his sneakers before he stuffs them back on his feet and opens the door. “See you guys later.”

&
nbsp; Once he slams the door, it’s just me, Abigail, and my mom waiting to see who’ll talk first.

  “I’ll let you two girls hang out,” my mom says quickly. She heads toward the sliding door and closes it behind her, taking one last swipe of the handle as she goes.

  “What was up with that?” Abigail asks, looking behind her as if Brendan might be coming back. “Cham, what the hell is happening?”

  A tear wiggles out of my emotional grasp, but how am I supposed to say anything? I cross my arms and shake my head.

  “Fine,” she says. “I’m not going to beg you to let me in. I get why Gene got fed up with you being so secretive.”

  She stands up and goes to the front door, but an aide comes through at the same time Abigail’s trying to get out. The aide is pushing my dad, who still looks gaunt and exhausted, but his eyes are clear and his hair is neatly combed.

  “Hi, Cham,” he says, locking his wheelchair and sounding surprisingly lucid. “Who’s your friend?”

  Abigail steps toward him quickly. “I’m Abigail,” she says, smiling as she extends her hand. “Are you Cham’s grandfather?”

  My dad cracks a smile. “No, just her old man.”

  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Abigail stutters.

  “I’ve been gray since my twenties,” my dad says, his smile widening. “I’m used to it.”

  The aide laughs and pushes him forward. “You’ve been a little over twenty for thirty years, Scott.”

  Dad chuckles at that, and the laughter breaks the tension. It’s the happiest I’ve seen him since the hospital. He pats his hair down in the mirror by the door, his hand jerking in the new way that’s replaced the near-constant trembling.

  “Well, I’m going to walk my friend out,” I say, heading for the door and hoping Abigail follows. “Be right back.”

  I lean down and kiss my dad on the cheek. The aide missed a spot while shaving him, and the overlooked bit of stubble scrapes me, like it used to when I was a kid and I jumped into my parents’ bed in the morning.

  “Nice to meet you,” my dad says to Abigail as I open the door.

  “You too!” she says, then follows me onto the porch. The door closes behind us and we’re silent as we look out at the yard.

  The sunlight isn’t strong enough to be classified as warm, but green things are coming up in my mom’s garden. I picture them under the soil just struggling to break through the newly-thawed surface, and what it must feel like to be in so much darkness, then suddenly light.

  “What does he have?” Abigail asks, quietly breaking the silence as we head for her car. I shake my head and stuff my hands into the pockets of my jeans.

  “What is it, Cham?” Abigail puts her arms around me. I like her hugs more than anyone else’s. She always smells like baby powder, and it’s not creepy because I know she wasn’t rubbing up on any babies.

  “It wasn’t a heart attack or heart stuff,” I say into her soft hair. “He has Parkinson’s.” The word bounces off the car and then the nearest tree and punctures my eardrum as slowly as the disease ruins a body. “He has Parkinson’s,” I repeat, and look up at the sky only to discover that the world has not ended. “He’s had it for a few years.”

  Abigail takes a deep breath, her green eyes so green they need a new word for green. “I’m sorry, Cham. I’m so sorry.”

  “We thought something was wrong for a while, but then when I was in eighth grade, he was chaperoning our field trip to the aquarium, and this little smarty-pants bitch was like, My nana had Parkinson’s, blah blah blah, I think he has that.”

  Abigail’s face crumples into a weird smile. “Oof, and then you punched the bus window at her?”

  I grimace. “Yeah.”

  She laughs. “You’re a badass.”

  “Something like that.”

  I pick up a fat green caterpillar on some soul-searching journey from one end of the driveway to the other. Now that I’ve started talking, it’s easier to keep going. And you know what? It feels better. “We obviously would’ve had to face things eventually, but she said it in front of the whole class and… yeah.” Abigail hugs me again, then bends down to tie my combat boot. I guess it came undone with all this fighting my heart’s been doing. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s just not something my family talks about.” I place the caterpillar down, feeling I’ve imposed on its destiny long enough. “You know when someone is embarrassed about something and you feel embarrassed for them because they’re embarrassed? Not because the thing is actually embarrassing, but because it’s so goddamn hard to watch someone try to hide something they can’t hide.…”

  Abigail nods. “I get it. You just wanted to keep him safe.”

  I nod as I realize Yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

  Her eyes are marbles of concern, which is another reason why I don’t tell anyone anything. Pity is the lowliest of human emotions. “It makes sense to try to hide what he wants to hide, but… that’s not your job, Cham, okay? You have to tell this to Gene,” she urges. “If you explain everything to him, he’ll understand why you wouldn’t let him into your house, and he’ll realize what a star you are and what a not-star Helga is.”

  I shake my head. “It’s too late. I think launching potatoes at his face sorta sealed the deal.”

  “I’m sorry.” She hugs me so hard she squeezes a tear out. “That really sucks. All of it.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a college essay out of it! Title: ‘Girl’s Dad Gets Sick and Then She Learns Things.’”

  “Um, yes, can we talk about that, please?” She pokes me with a bright pink egg-shaped fingernail. “You asked Brendan, which at first I was like mega-bitch-mode about, but then I saw how you were looking at him in the kitchen—” She clasps her hands together and bats her eyelashes.

  “Oh my god, I was not.” I laugh—a combination of nervous laughter and happy laughter and relieved laughter and Wow, I’m experiencing a lot of emotions.

  “Come on, Cham, high school is almost over,” she says, pulling at one of my frizzy curls. “Maybe besides graduating twelfth grade, we could graduate from our own shitty self-consciousness.”

  “You’re never self-conscious.”

  “I know.” She does this ass-shaking move as she walks toward her car and opens the driver’s-side door. A mischievous smile creeps across her face. “But you are.”

  “Dick!”

  “Hey, with graduation comes big things.”

  “Or just things.”

  “Big things,” she says, nodding knowingly and turning her car on. The music blasting from her speakers fills me with the urge to dance. I squash it ’cause like we’re in public. “See you at the Breast Cancer Polar Plunge tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I lie, because I can’t think of something better to say.

  “Repeat after me, Cham,” Abigail says, lowering her window as she backs out of my driveway. “Big fucking serendipitous things.”

  16

  Days ’til graduation: 30

  Dear Universe,

  I know you’re having a ball up there at my expense, but cut it out, okay? The deadline for Nicaragua is coming up and I have to do something, decide things, determine which course of action to take, which I guess is going to lay the foundation for my summer and also my whole life. How can I possibly choose which world to stay in while the other world moves forward without me? No pressure, though! Definitely don’t panic!

  What better way to spend a Sunday morning than picking up neon-orange T-shirts with my mom so we can walk in circles around each other in the name of brain degeneration?

  “I am not going to this,” my dad says as I’m doodling on the refrigerator whiteboard. (A lopsided heart with squiggly arms dons a pair of swimmies as a big wave comes.) He has one arm through his shirt and the other defiantly at his side. “You are not going to push me around a track with a bunch of sick people while other people watch.”

  “Scott, your sister got us the tickets, and the doctor highly rec
ommended we connect with people who understand. We’ve been doing this alone for four years. It’s time we start taking suggestions.” My mom yanks his arm through his jacket sleeve while going on and on about the importance of community. “I got the ladies at work involved, because what we’re doing hasn’t been working. The sickness, whatever you want to call it, is progressing. We can’t just not go. ”

  “Oh, yes, we can.” My dad whips his head around and squints out the window. I hold my breath. He doesn’t say anything about the tree, which makes me hopeful that today is a good day. Or would be, if mom weren’t a dictator.

  “We are doing this as a family,” she says, and shuttles us into the car as quickly as she can. It’s one of those days in spring when all the birds come out of the cracks of winter and suddenly there’s hope again that we’re not going to have to wear long johns forever.

  For the whole ride, my dad sits in stony silence. I never used to be afraid of him, but sometimes the disease replaces his gentleness with harshness. It’s freaking scary. Unlike the monsters under my bed that he used to shoo away, this is petrifying because it’s real.

  By the time we get to the track at school, my level of dread is up over my ponytail. The chorus of cheerful voices belonging to the women my mom works with threatens to smother me—death by upbeat pillow. Why do we have to be amped about something so terrible? It’s disingenuous, and I look hideous in this shade of orange.

  We pass streamers and posters and clusters of people in matching T-shirts with corny things on the front. The turf is saturated with water; mud is threatening to do a global takeover.

  “Hey!” one of the women calls to my mom, and before I know it, we are jammed under a tent with this woman my mom works with and eight other ladies who probably all go by Donna.

  “Over here,” one of the Donnas says, setting my dad up next to a woman in a wheelchair.

  “THIS… IS… MY… MOTHER… VIVIAN,” Donna says to my dad. “She has Alzheimer’s,” Donna whispers to my mom.