“You know, Dr. Chadwick, I was hoping you could tell me. Isn’t that kind of your job?”
“My job is to help you realize why you felt that way.”
“I could ask myself the same questions. Why do I need you, if you’re not gonna give me the answers?”
Dr. Chadwick laughed. “Unfortunately, Sam, I don’t know the answers. We have to unearth them together.”
I rolled my eyes. This guy was talking excavations. “So maybe I need an archeologist or something.”
He laughed again. “Let’s stick to the problem at hand, and dispense with the humor, shall we?”
I shrugged, kicked at the box of tissues I’d stowed at my feet, just in case.
“Now, did anything happen to make you feel unloved?”
I spun in my swivel chair two times, thinking. “My mom didn’t call me ‘baby.’ She always calls me ‘baby,’ but she didn’t last night. And she’s been getting snippier and snippier, and I’m afraid”—I could feel the tears coming—“I’m afraid that she’s just gonna get fed up with me.”
“And what will happen then? Do you think your mother will throw you out into the street?”
“No. I’m just—I want her to like me.” The waterworks were open for business now. I snatched a tissue and swiped it across my face. “I guess I know she loves me, but I want her to like me.” Wow—it feels good, saying that. Letting it out.
“So you think your recent behavior will make her dislike you?”
I nodded.
“Do you think, Sam, that the real problem is you’re afraid that you don’t like you?”
That’s what mom had said last night, kind of. She’d said I needed to learn to love myself. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
“I’m a big fuckup,” I said. “And I can’t … control”—that word really fought to stay put inside—“I can’t control anything.”
“Who can?” asked Dr. Chadwick.
“No one, I guess.” I coughed up a hunk of snot from my throat and spit it into my tissue. “No one can. That’s just it—that’s it exactly.” I stopped to snort out more phlegm. “Mom says I have to find peace with myself.”
Dr. Chadwick smiled. “Your mother’s a smart woman, Sam.” He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. His dark blue sock peeked out between shoe and pants. It was just short of black.
“I think, Sam, that there’re two issues at work here. First, you’re losing your self-respect because you’re shirking your responsibilities. There’s an easy way to remedy that: make up the work this summer. Do you agree?”
I nodded.
“And then there’s the more complicated issue of wanting to take control of your life and of Jesse’s condition. There’s the whole feeling of helplessness, and questioning Jesse’s love is most likely a by-product of that. You’re questioning his emotions because you’re up in the air about everything else. Your subconscious is working to protect you. It’s saying, ‘Better not get too hopeful about this, because everything else has come crashing down.’ You’ll have to override it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“I’m going to teach you a technique to reprogram your subconscious, to make it learn to trust good feelings and happiness. When you come in on Saturday, we’ll work on it. I want you to read this information first.” He got up and handed me a booklet called “How to Tap.”
“You want me to tap dance?”
He laughed again. “No, Sam. Though go ahead if you’d like to. But this tapping is done with your fingers. You tap them on different points on your arms, hands, and face, and recite what it is you wish to change in your life. It’s called EFT, for Emotional Freedom Technique.”
I didn’t know what to say. If it wasn’t a shrink telling me this, I’d say it was off the wall. Hell, it was off the wall anyway.
“Are you serious?” I asked him.
“I am,” he said. “And I want you to listen to a CD also, to boost your self-confidence, give you a more positive outlook and to help with total mind and body healing.”
“What is it, a lecture?”
“No, Sam, it’s subliminal. It just sounds like soothing ocean waves.”
I shrugged again. I did a lot of shrugging at $150 an hour, or whatever it was he charged. “Okay. Can I play it for Jess, too?”
“Sure.” He got the CD off his desk and handed it to me. “Sam, I’m not going to say some trite cliche, like, ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn,’ or ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ ” He came and knelt by my chair and looked into my eyes. “I know life stinks for you right now. But if you want to help yourself feel better, you can. It’s really up to you.”
There sure was a lot riding on me. Me—the one who was reading smoky messages on the ceiling and catching glimpses of my dead father—not that I’d ever shared these little tidbits with Dr. Chadwick. All this was riding on the me who’d gone from honors English to not getting past filling out her name on the Regents. Me, the girl who was feeling threatened by a girl who dressed like a gumball. This was who I had to rely on: me.
What about Superman? Wasn’t he available to swoop in the window with his red cape and boots and make things right?
But there weren’t any superheroes.
There weren’t even any wizards.
The sham who called himself the Wizard of Oz was probably hiding in a broom closet in the Emerald City outside my apartment, quivering in shame.
Maybe I could join him in there.
Chapter Twenty
It was a quarter to seven by the time I got back to the hospital. I should’ve called to let Jess know I’d be late, but part of me was afraid he’d say to not bother coming.
“Hey, you.” Jess smiled at me from his bed. He’d missed me. How could I have doubted that he would? Did I think one stupid Cindy incident would ruin everything?
Yeah, I did.
Jess closed the notebook he’d been writing in, hooked the pen on the cover, and put it on the nightstand. “Feel better now that you’re all shrunk up?”
“How’d you know?”
“I called your mom to see where you were. I got worried.” I was still standing near the door. He patted the spot beside him on the bed. “Will you come over here? You weren’t so shy this morning.”
“I—I—Jess, I’m so sorry… .” I turned away from him as the deluge began.
“Sam, I was just teasing. Come on … please?”
I swiped my face with my arm and shook my head no.
“Sam.” The word was soft, next to me. Then Jess’s arms were around me, holding me tight. Why wasn’t that enough for me to feel safe? “I love you, Sam,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
He held me while I cried. He said nothing, just held space for me. He was in the hospital with cancer, and he was holding space for me.
My tears stopped after a while. I lifted my face from Jess’s soaked hospital gown and looked at him. “I really am sorry, Jess.” I wanted to say more, but I was so, so exhausted. “Can we lie down?”
“Sure.” We moved to the bed, locked arms around each other, and kissed.
“Sam,” he said when we’d stopped, “I love you with every molecule I’m made of. I don’t know what else to say to make you feel more secure. Please don’t be jealous of Cindy.”
“It’s just … if you hadn’t gotten sick, you’d be dating her right now.”
“No. I’d be dating you,” he said. “I swear, Sam, I would. I think, on some level, we were in love from when we were little. We belong together. We would’ve found our way.” He kissed me on the cheek. “It might have taken me a while to catch on, but we would’ve found our way.”
I was about to agree when the dinging came on. “Visiting hours are now over… .”
“Crap,” Jess said with a mock pout. “I guess I miss out on the bathroom again.”
“There’s a lock in there, right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Th
en let’s go.” I climbed out of bed and he followed. “They can kick me out when we’re done.”
“’Atta girl, Cindy. Oops, I mean Sam.”
I swirled around and glared.
He winked.
He was darn lucky he was so cute.
***
The next day I finished my final at noon, so I spent the whole rest of the day with Jess.
He looked really happy when I walked in, and not just to see me.
“Guess what?” he asked.
I shrugged. I hate guessing what. Why can’t people just tell you?
“Dr. Raab is gonna give me medicine so I don’t get sick from the chemo! Can you believe it? He said I should have told him before, that I was heaving so much.” He looked so, so thrilled, and I was, too.
“That’s super, Jess,” I said, hugging him. I curled up next to him, tired from the test taking. Today was social studies; I was pretty sure I’d done okay on this one. Trouble was, my idea of okay had taken a slide lately.
Jess asked what was new, and I told him I’d seen Pete twice, and that he really wanted to visit. Jess said sure. It really was fantastic, his being open to seeing people again, even if that did include preciously pink people.
Then Jess asked how my finals had gone. I said I was reasonably sure I’d passed today’s test, but I’d done badly on the French final, and had messed up royally on the English Regents.
“It’s all right.” He shifted my hair and sucked on my neck. He really knew how to relieve stress. He whispered into my ear, “We’ll study all summer, okay?” The words tickled my eardrum. “I’m gonna make sure you don’t have to repeat eleventh grade.”
“I’ll have to keep my distance, or we’ll never get anything done,” I said as his hands groped all over my T-shirt.
“I missed you, Sam—I missed you last night.”
“Hey, I recall you having your way with me before I left—”
“Yeah.” He nuzzled against my face. “But as glorious as that was, it didn’t make up for being alone last night, and again tonight… . ”
“I’m sorry, Jess.” My gaze hit upon Kitty at the end of the bed. She seemed to be giving me the evil eye.
“Hey, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m trying to make you feel appreciated.” He returned his attentions to my neck.
“It’s okay, Jess. I know you love me. I went into emotional overdrive or something, that’s all.” I turned away from the cat and looked toward Jesse’s cookie bouquet instead. He hadn’t eaten any. I snagged out a smiley face, unwrapped it, and bit off a chunk of where his chin would be. It was passive aggression—poor guy couldn’t fight back.
“Did Dr. Chadwick help?”
“Yeah.” I opened my backpack, showed him the booklet. “He gave me this to read. He’s teaching me tapping on Saturday, to positively reprogram my subconscious.”
“Interesting … ” He looked and sounded skeptical.
“I know—I have my doubts, too. But let’s go with it, for now. And he gave me a subliminal CD: ocean waves. I brought my player so we could listen together.” I dug out the player and CD, then hit Play. The ocean waters thundered and roared.
“Hmm … kind of relaxing,” said Jess.
“Think so?” I listened, feeling tenser and tenser. “It makes me feel like I’m drowning,” I said. “Like my head’s slipping under the foamy waves, going down, down, down.”
Jess turned the volume real low. “I don’t think you have to pay attention for it to work,” he told me. “Especially if it’s having adverse effects.”
“So how was your day?” I asked, crunching; I’d eaten the smile off smiley’s face.
“Same ’ole. Meds go in, blood comes out. They’re already testing it for an increase in stem cell production.”
“Are you feeling stem celly?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m just brimming with them.” The bed creaked as he shifted his position, stretching out his legs. He winced a little.
“You’re not in any pain, are you?”
“Not really. Not more than usual, anyway. I’m used to it.”
I put the cookie down and touched his shoulders, rubbing them. “Jess, they can increase your medicine dose. You don’t have to suffer.” I’d been researching pain management on the Web.
“I don’t want to be some druggie, flying high.” His face was stony now. “Or to veg out into nowhere land. What’s the point of living if you’re not aware of it?”
I knew better than to argue; he needed to make some decisions on his own. “Lie down, Jess. I’ll give you a massage.” It said on the National Cancer Institute website that massage was recommended to relieve cancer pain. After reading that, I’d looked up massage techniques.
He must have been hurting, because he lay down without comment or protest—just a small groan as he turned over.
***
I worked on him for a while, massaging and loosening up his muscles. I ran a nonstop, one-way conversation the whole time. Jess didn’t say anything, and I figured he was getting into the massage. As it turned out, he’d fallen asleep.
I stared at his notebook on the nightstand. I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to look—I just had to. Amazingly, it was filled with poetry. I was surprised and intrigued, and read page after page.
He’d scrawled angry poems, lashing out at cancer, tumor, treatment, pain. And reflective poems, about the flow of life and death and other meditations. I didn’t know Jess wrote poetry.
There were a couple of folded pieces of paper tucked inside the pages of the notebook. I took them out and read them.
The first one was a copy of “The Serenity Prayer”:
God, Grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Whoa. Why would Jess have a prayer in his notebook?
And why this one—it almost seemed like a joke to me, the way it was everywhere, plastered on things wherever you went. Did Jess actually take it seriously?
The other paper was even more bizarre: it was a printout of the “Word of the Day” from some religious website. The topic was “Letting Go and Letting God.” It talked about imagining a river, and putting all your troubles into the current—watching them flow away, toward God.
I couldn’t imagine Jess taking this seriously. I almost wanted to wake him up, to demand some sort of explanation.
But of course I didn’t.
Not only would I never disturb him, but I could never let him know I was reading his private stuff. He’d never told me not to look at it, but it was wrong—I hadn’t asked. I couldn’t tell him—couldn’t take the chance he’d get mad.
I stuck the papers back where I’d found them.
Then I looked at the last poem in the book. It was called “Sam”:
Eternity, evermore
That’s how long your love is for
Angel beside me, saving grace
Sunlight shining on your face
The world, my world is what you are
Guiding me, a shining star
A rainbow reigning over me
Brightening the sky, all I see
Passion and goodness, lover and friend
You hold me when my heart descends
The missing piece to my puzzle
The key to unlock my door
I’ll love you from the heavens
for eternity,
Evermore.
I put the notebook back and grabbed a tissue from Jess’s bedside box.
I held his hand until visiting hours ended. He didn’t wake up, didn’t even flinch the whole time. I left him a note, a drawing, actually: a heart, with another heart inside of it.
My version of a poem.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Ever think about God?” Jess asked me.
Oh yes I do.
I’d been contemplating God often since reading that stuff in Jess’s
notebook—wondering why he had it in there. But I didn’t know how he’d feel about my looking at it, so I didn’t tell him.
“Think about him how?” I returned vaguely.
Jess was sitting with his laptop, on the cancer website again. He’d been on it for hours, ever since coming back from the hospital this morning. “Well, in the universal sense, I guess. I mean, I don’t think there’s a guy in a robe with a long white beard up in the clouds, but it seems like there’s something guiding us and the world, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” I bit my lip. If there was something up there, why was it hurting Jess?
It was like he’d read my mind. “Remember in the park, you asked me if I thought God did this to me? Well, that stayed with me. Then I found a section of posts on the site debating God. I’ve been reading them ever since.”
“Religiously?” I asked. I couldn’t resist.
He laughed, though I wasn’t sure if I’d meant to be funny. “Yeah, you could say that. Anyway, after much consideration, I can honestly say I don’t believe that God—or whatever you want to call what’s out there—has it in for me.”
I didn’t say anything; this was a lot for me to handle at the moment—though I wasn’t sure why. It was like I was teetering on some abyss… .
“Basically, I’ve decided to stop caring,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“But I mean it in a good way, Sam—I’m not trying to control what I can’t—which is pretty much everything. A lot of the people on here call it surrendering.”
“Surrender?” I thought of that message on the hallway ceiling—not a pleasant thought.
“Like in the twelve steps.”
“Aren’t those for alcoholics?”
“Yes, but some of the ideas in them work for people with cancer. Especially step three.”
“What’s that?”
“Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “I cannot believe you know that by heart. You sound like a robot.”
“I’m not a robot, Sam. I just think about this a lot.” He sounded hurt.
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