Sick Kids In Love

by Hannah Moskowitz

  “She must really like you,” Maura says.

  Why do people have friends, whose idea were friends.

  Ashley moves Josh onto her lap so she can sit down next to Sasha. He immediately squirms away and joins Nick to eat my fries, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Are you two gonna go to the Snow Ball?” she says.

  Sasha turns to me. “The what?”

  “It’s kind of like winter prom,” I say.

  “Isn’t that homecoming?”

  “What? No, that’s fall prom. Who raised you?”

  Maura says, “You haven’t invited him?”

  “I don’t even know if I’m going,” I say.

  Ashley leans into Sasha like she’s going to tell him a secret, but she talks loud enough for all of us. “Ibby has these rules about dating. Or not dating.”

  “That I know,” he says.

  “Well, if you don’t go with her, I still need a date,” Ashley says.

  He’s trying not to laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  A new song starts playing, and Luna squeals and says this is her song, and they all hurry, or as much as you can in skates, over to the rink. Sasha watches them go. “Y’know, that’s kind of how you look when you walk,” he says.

  I laugh. “Shut up.”

  “So. Snow Ball?”

  I shrug and take the fries away from the boys. “All right, you two, you’re gonna turn into fries at this rate.”

  “I want to turn into a fry,” Josh says.

  Sasha says, “Why don’t you guys go back to the play place?” Nick hauls himself up on the table to squeeze Sasha’s head and kiss him on the cheek. I bite my lips to keep from smiling.

  I watch them run over to the play place, mostly for the excuse not to look at Sasha.

  He talks to me anyway. “You don’t know if you’re going?”

  “I’m not much fun at dances,” I say.

  “Nobody dances at dances anyway.”

  “Not at my school.” I lean against him a little, just enough to tap my shoulder against his.

  He rolls a french fry between his fingers and watches it like it’s fascinating. “There isn’t anyone you’d want to go with?”

  “C’mon, don’t do the whole…thing. If I was going with someone, it would obviously be you.”

  He smiles a little. “Sometimes I need to check to make sure this isn’t all in my head.”

  “It’s not all in your head, it’s just…”

  Maura stops in the middle of a loop and leans over the little half wall closest to us. “Ibby!” she calls.

  “Yeah?”

  “You should totally come and do one round.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Just like one! We all want to do one together. You can do one, right?”

  I hesitate because yeah, of course I could do one. I could do a hundred. I wouldn’t die. So I’d be sore tomorrow. People do things that make them sore. That’s something that people do.

  But nobody in Sasha’s family is trying to guilt him into skating, and it’s his sister’s party, and he wouldn’t die, either, and I’m frustrated and pressured, and I don’t know if I’m about to yell at Maura or go put on some damn skates when Sasha takes my hand.

  He says, “She can’t, we actually need to go talk about something.”

  Maura raises her eyebrows.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Sasha leads me back to the play area to quickly check his brothers, then down a few hallways until we find a spot with fewer people. He leans against a water fountain. “You okay?”

  “Do you ever just…” I pick up my hands and then drop them. “I don’t know. Do you ever just get really fucking mad at healthy people for doing nothing but…living their lives, and it’s not their fault, and you love them, but you just fucking hate them?”

  “I don’t really hang out much with healthy people,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I push my hair off my face. “I’m beginning to think you’re onto something there.”

  “Plus I don’t really get mad,” he says.

  “Come on. Everyone gets mad.”

  He shrugs.

  “You know, that’s not really healthy,” I say. “Not getting mad.”

  He grins. “Good thing you don’t like healthy people.”

  I point at him. “You got pissed at me the other day. When I called you from the bathroom at school.”

  “Okay, I’m not saying I was pissed, but…can we talk about what that was?”

  I sigh. “I guess I walked into that.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “I wasn’t saying what you thought I was saying. I just don’t think that it… That it’s fooling anyone if we act like you and I are on the same…”

  He watches me.

  “I mean, look! You have doctors telling you to be on oxygen; I have doctors telling me that my blood tests look great and I can do whatever I want. Before I got diagnosed, they told me it was nothing, that I was making it up or it was growing pains or something. Before you got diagnosed, they thought you had leukemia. I mean, nothing versus cancer, here, what does that tell you?”

  “Well, it tells me I’m better at complaining than you are, which we knew already,” he says. “And also that doctors are sexist and ignore girls, as you rightfully pointed out last time we talked about this, so we knew that already, too.”

  “It doesn’t just mean that.”

  “You know I looked it up,” he says. “And RA is the tenth most debilitating illness there is. Mine wasn’t even on there.”

  “Yeah, because it was probably a list of common illnesses, right?”

  “I mean…”

  “I’m sure fatal familial insomnia wasn’t on there, either, and nobody’s acting like they don’t have it harder than we do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s how it sounds—you can’t sleep and then you die.”

  “Damn,” he says. “Well, at least that’s one we don’t have to worry about. We sleep all the time.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “I don’t know why it’s important for us to establish some hierarchy of who’s sicker than who,” he says. “Can’t we both just be the same?”

  “I know you don’t,” I say quietly.

  He waits for me to say more, and when I don’t, he says, “Well…okay, regardless, I wasn’t pissed at you.”

  “Okay, well, hey, you’re always pissed at your dad. How about that?”

  “That’s different,” he says. “I just… The kids deserve to have him around the way that I did.”

  “Okay, but I’ve been at your house basically every day for the past week and a half, and he’s been gone like, what, four of those nights? And he was always there for Hanukkah first.”

  “He used to be there every night.”

  “He just threw a huge party for your sister!”

  “I’m not saying he’s a bad father,” Sasha says. “But he could be doing more, and he’s not. I love the kids, but I can’t be all that they need. They need him around.”

  “He is around,” I say.

  “All right, well…I don’t see it that way.”

  “I don’t know how you don’t get mad,” I say. I’m walking around in tiny circles like some kind of caged animal. “You know people talk about how being sick gives them some good perspective and makes them better people or whatever?”

  “That’s bullshit,” he says.

  “I know it’s bullshit, but I thought it was bullshit because I was going to stay the same person I always was. But I’m not. I think it’s changed me. I think it’s made me just a mean, angry, worse person. And like…what is the upside there?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I force myself to stand still. “I th
ink I’m just going to spend my whole life being mad at people who aren’t doing anything wrong. And that’s… I’m just going to fuck people up. I can’t be in a relationship or have friends. I’m just going to resent them. Maybe this is what happened with Frida Kahlo.”

  “Okay, but honey,” he says. His voice is so gentle. “You’re not Frida Kahlo. You’re some white girl from Queens.”

  I laugh a little, mostly in frustration, partly at his voice. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  “Yeah, you picked the wrong guy for being serious.” His phone buzzes, and he checks it. “All right, Dad says we’re leaving soon. We’re just taking a few of them back to the house to open presents. I guess my dad’s sticking around tonight.”

  For some reason that’s the last straw. “Can we make a detour?” I say.

  “What?”

  “You and me. I want to show you something.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, let’s just grab our coats and go.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “Fuck my friends,” I say. “Come on.”

  …

  “We’re going to your house?” Sasha says when we get off at the 46th Street subway station.

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I meeting your dad? I want to fix my hair if I’m meeting your dad.”

  “My dad’s not going to be there,” I say. “That’s the point.”

  I lead him up the front steps of my house and unlock the door. I leave the kitchen lights off, but there’s enough light coming from the neighbor’s house and the streetlamps and the snowflake lights on the street that we can still see pretty well. Sasha wipes his boots on the mat.

  “Dad?” I call, just to make sure. He’s not here. “All right,” I say. “You see this?”

  “It’s nice,” Sasha says. “What I can see of it, anyway.”

  “It’s perfect,” I say. “It’s neat, and dark, and empty, and perfect—because nobody lives here! This is what a house without a dad looks like. Not your place. Not home-cooked meals and science projects in the living room and sports equipment from games that he probably goes to, right? Not birthday parties. You think my parents had time to throw me a birthday party?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “No, I’m not… I’m not trying to get you to feel sorry for me. This is what it’s like for most people. This is how most people live.”

  “So…I’m not feeling blessed enough?” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice. “In my charmed childhood?”

  “Honestly, when it comes to this? Yeah.”

  “Not a lot of people would tell me that. I like that.”

  I sit down at the kitchen table. “We can go in a minute.”

  “Take your time.”

  I just sit there in the dark, listening to the clock ticking above the microwave. It’s so loud. We’ve had it since I was a little kid. When my parents used to fight over dinner, I would close my eyes and try to hear every click of the clock instead.

  Sasha sits down. In Mom’s chair, but how would he know. He has this knit cap pulled down low over his head and a couple of curls escaping underneath. His lips have a little color from the cold, for once. I can see it even in the dark.

  I take a deep breath.

  “I don’t want to… He’s a great guy,” I say. “My dad. He saves people. And he loves me. He never… I’ve never felt like he doesn’t love me.”

  “Of course,” Sasha says. “I mean, he’s a doctor, he’s gonna be busy. And at least, y’know. At least you had a doctor in the house, so that must have been good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Although they still didn’t believe you when something was wrong, so I guess maybe not.”

  I scratch the surface of the table with one nail. “I…fuck. Okay. I need to tell you something. And it’s not like it’s some huge secret, I just like… I’ve never talked to anyone about it before, and I don’t know how you’re going to take it.”

  He taps his fingernail against mine. “Okay.”

  “So I was… You were diagnosed when you were four, right?”

  “Four, yeah.”

  “But you were sick.”

  “Since I was born, yeah. They just didn’t know what it was.”

  “Okay.” I need to do something. “Do you want some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  I take the box out of the cabinet and put the kettle on the stove. “So I wasn’t…it took me like a year to get diagnosed, but until I was eight I was fine.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I always…” I stay facing away from him. “I always felt this…connection. With sick people. Mostly with, like, fictional characters, not actual people, but I mean, I didn’t have Claire yet, but I always had some sick imaginary friend. And I was always reading books about kids with cancer and shit. And I used to…” I sort the tea bags in the box. “I would hide them, like, I’d read the books behind other books, because deep down I felt like I was doing something bad. After my parents went to sleep, I would sometimes…I would sit down here, and I would make Shirley Temples and drink them and pretend they were medicine. I was always… I was reaching for something.”

  He says, “So then when you got sick you felt like you’d made it happen?”

  “No, it was…”

  “You thought you were faking.”

  I shrug a little.

  “You still think you’re faking,” he says quietly.

  I’m losing him. I can feel him slipping away from me like it’s something physical, and it hurts so much more than I ever would have guessed.

  “It’s not that I think I am,” I say. “I just… I’m worried that I am. I’m sick, and I used to pretend to myself that I was sick. That’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it? And the doctors, you know, they spent ages telling me everything looks fine before they figured it out, and now they tell me my test results look good, so I should be feeling okay… And it’s not like this is something I’ve stopped doing, this reaching thing. A couple of months ago, I had this dream that I was in the hospital and people were just taking care of me and no one thought I didn’t deserve to be there, and now that’s what I think about before I go to sleep. That’s like my happy place. Being in a hospital. That’s not what I’m supposed to want, but I do. There’s something wrong with me. So when I say that I’m not like you, it’s not because I think there’s something wrong with being like you. It’s because I am so afraid that someone’s going to accuse me of exaggerating to be like you. Because I don’t think… If someone thought that, I couldn’t handle it. If you thought that…”

  “Ibby,” he says.

  I force myself to turn around. “Yeah.”

  “Is this… I know this isn’t the point, but is this why you’re like, you know. Why you’re hesitating?”

  “Hesitating on what?” I say, just automatically.

  “Don’t,” he says softly. “Don’t do the thing.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t date. It’s a policy.”

  “Right, and…I would like to know why, please.”

  I’m actually not sure anyone’s ever gone right out and asked me before.

  I don’t know if I’ve been waiting to tell someone or if I’ve been waiting to tell him.

  I swallow. “It’s because of my mom.”

  His eyebrows come together under the hat. “I thought your mom only left a few months ago.”

  “She did only leave a few months ago, and before that she was already horrible. They had a great marriage, for a while, my parents, and then all of a sudden she just… She was biting his head off about everything. She couldn’t stand his job, she wouldn’t accept his choices, and she was just mean about it. And I figured, okay, my parents are just going to have a shitty marriage where they hate each other, or maybe they’ll get divorced,
and those things suck, but people live with it. But instead they kept on doing that for years. And then one day I get home from school and there’s a two-line letter, to my dad, saying she’s gone, and nothing for me and no way for me to get in touch with her. I have no idea where she is. I’m her daughter.”

  “Fuck,” Sasha whispers.

  “And you know what? It shouldn’t have been a surprise, because she was a horrible person. And it’s not just her. You want to know why I don’t date?” He doesn’t say anything. I keep talking anyway. “Because the women in my family are horrible people. Every single one of them. My mom left us. My grandmother cheated on my grandfather and stole all his money. My mom’s sister had her kids taken away because she got two DUIs with them in the car. My half sister, Alyssa, my mom’s daughter, she’s in prison for credit card fraud.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” he says.

  “Yes, I don’t talk to her, because she’s terrible. They’re all terrible. So I’m the girl who’s got a lot of odds stacked against her here that she’s not going to be a good person, and then we’ve got my history of feeling like a sick person, and now I’m sick, and it really doesn’t look like I’m going to be the one to break the pattern and head down the path of righteousness or whatever. I am a public health hazard. Your buddy John Rockefeller would shoot me in the street before I go around and ‘black widow’ a bunch of guys, so…okay? That’s what it is. That’s all my shit, and if you and I are gonna keep doing whatever this thing is that we’re doing, you have to know these things about me, okay?”

  His lips part as he watches me. “You’re not saying no,” he says.

  “No, I’m not saying no, I’m just saying…”

  “Okay.” He stands up as the kettle starts to whistle. “Okay.”

  He comes over and takes the kettle off the stove and pours us two cups of tea. I stand there, leaning against the counter, feeling like the whole world’s sitting at some angle and I’m just trying not to fall off. Or throw up.

  “Do you like honey in yours?” he says softly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. Okay. Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know that you’re Jewish?”

  I look at him. “What?”

  He’s not looking at me. He’s concentrating on the tea like it’s so important, but his voice is casual. “Do you know that you’re Jewish,” he says again. “Like…deep down. In your soul or whatever. Do you just feel it?”