by Jodi Picoult
“Gee, I don’t know,” Taylor laughs. “Should we ask your mom?”
She goes plum-red. “Oops.”
“Keep this up,” I warn, “and your next date will be during a bone marrow aspiration.”
“You know the hospital has this dance, right?” Suddenly, Taylor is jittery; his knee bobs up and down. “It’s for kids who are sick. There are doctors and nurses there, in case, and it’s held in one of the conference rooms at the hospital, but for the most part it’s just like a regular prom. You know, lame band, ugly tuxes, punch spiked with platelets.” He swallows. “I’m just kidding about that last part. Well, I went last year, stag, and it was pretty dumb, but I figure since you’re a patient and I’m a patient maybe this year we could, like, go together.”
Kate, with an aplomb I never would have guessed she possesses, considers the offer. “When is it?”
“Saturday.”
“As it turns out, I don’t have plans to kick the bucket that day.” She beams at him. “I’d love to.”
“Cool,” Taylor says, smiling. “Very cool.” He reaches for a fresh basin, careful of Kate’s IV line, which snakes down between them. I wonder if her heart is pumping faster, if it will affect the medication. If she’ll be sicker, sooner rather than later.
Taylor settles Kate into the crook of his arm. Together, they wait for what comes next.
• • •
“It’s too low,” I say, as Kate holds a pale yellow dress up below her neck. From the spot on the boutique floor where she is sitting, Anna offers up her opinion, too: “You’d look like a banana.”
We have been shopping for a prom dress for hours. Kate has only two days to prepare for this dance, and it has become an obsession: what she will wear, how she will do her makeup, if the band is going to play anything remotely decent. Her hair, of course, is not an issue; after chemo she lost it all. She hates wigs—they feel like bugs on her scalp, she says—but she’s too self-conscious to go commando. Today, she has wrapped a batik scarf around her head, like a proud, pale African queen.
The reality of this outing hasn’t matched Kate’s dreams. Dresses that normal girls wear to proms bare the midriff or shoulders, where Kate’s skin is riddled and thickened with scarring. They cling in all the wrong places. They are cut to showcase a healthy, hale body, not to hide the lack of it.
The saleswoman who hovers like a hummingbird takes the dress from Kate. “It’s actually quite modest,” she pushes. “It really does cover up a fair amount of cleavage.”
“Will it cover this?” Kate snaps, popping open the buttons of her peasant blouse to reveal her recently replaced Hickman catheter, which sprouts from the center of her chest.
The saleswoman gasps before she can remember to stop herself. “Oh,” she says faintly.
“Kate!” I scold.
She shakes her head. “Let’s just get out of here.”
As soon as we are on the street in front of the boutique I lace into her. “Just because you’re angry, you don’t have to take it out on the rest of the world.”
“Well, she’s a bitch,” Kate retorts. “Did you see her looking at my scarf?”
“Maybe she just liked the pattern,” I say dryly.
“Yeah, and maybe I’m going to wake up tomorrow and not be sick.” Her words fall like boulders between us, cracking the sidewalk. “I’m not going to find a stupid dress. I don’t know why I even told Taylor I’d go in the first place.”
“Don’t you think every other girl who’s going to that dance is in the same boat? Trying to find gowns that cover up tubes and bruises and wires and colostomy bags and God knows what?”
“I don’t care about anyone else,” Kate says. “I wanted to look good. Really good, you know, for one night.”
“Taylor already thinks you’re beautiful.”
“Well I don’t!” Kate cries. “I don’t, Mom, and maybe I want to just once.”
It is a warm day, one where the ground beneath our feet seems to be breathing. The sun beats down on my head, on the back of my neck. What do I say to that? I have never been Kate. I have prayed and begged and wanted to be the one who’s sick in lieu of her, some devil’s Faustian bargain, but that is not the way it’s happened.
“We’ll sew something,” I suggest. “You can design it.”
“You don’t know how to sew,” Kate sighs.
“I’ll learn.”
“In a day?” She shakes her head. “You can’t fix it every time, Mom. How come I know that, and you don’t?”
She leaves me on the sidewalk and storms off. Anna runs after her, loops her arm through Kate’s elbow, and drags her into a storefront a few feet away from the boutique, while I hurry to catch up.
It is a salon, filled with gum-cracking hairstylists. Kate is struggling to get away from Anna, but Anna, she can be strong when she wants to be. “Hey,” Anna says, getting the attention of the receptionist. “Do you work here?”
“When I’m forced to.”
“You guys do prom hairstyles?”
“Sure,” the stylist says. “Like an updo?”
“Yeah. For my sister.” Anna looks at Kate, who has stopped fighting. A smile glows slowly across her face, like a firefly caught in a jelly jar.
“That’s right. For me,” Kate says mischievously, and she unwinds the scarf from her bald head.
Everyone in the salon stops speaking. Kate stands regally straight. “We were thinking of French braids,” Anna continues.
“A perm,” Kate adds.
Anna giggles. “Maybe a nice chignon.”
The stylist swallows, caught between shock and sympathy and political correctness. “Well, um, we might be able to do something for you.” She clears her throat. “There’s always, you know, extensions.”
“Extensions,” Anna repeats, and Kate bursts out laughing.
The stylist begins to look behind the girls, toward the ceiling. “Is this like a Candid Camera thing?”
At that, my daughters collapse into each other’s arms, hysterical. They laugh until they cannot catch their breath. They laugh until they cry.
• • •
As a chaperone at the Providence Hospital Prom, I am in charge of the punch. Like every other food item provided for the celebrants, it’s neutropenic. The nurses—fairy godmothers for the night—have converted a conference room into a fantasy dance hall, complete with streamers and a disco ball and mood lighting.
Kate is a vine twined around Taylor. They sway to completely different music than the song that is playing. Kate wears her obligatory blue mask. Taylor has given her a corsage made of silk flowers, because real ones can carry diseases that immunocompromised patients can’t fight off. In the end, I did not wind up sewing a dress; I found one online at Bluefly.com: a gold sheath, cut in a V for Kate’s catheter. But over this is a long-sleeved, sheer shirt, one that wraps at the waist and glimmers when she turns this way and that so when you notice the strange triple tubing coming out by her breastbone, you wonder if it was only a trick of the light.
We took a thousand photos before leaving the house. When Kate and Taylor had escaped and were waiting for me in the car, I went to put the camera away and found Brian in the kitchen with his back to me. “Hey,” I said. “You going to wave us off? Throw rice?”
It was only when he turned around that I realized he’d come in here to cry. “I didn’t expect to see this,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d get to have this memory.”
I fitted myself against him, working our bodies so tight it felt as if we’d been carved from the same smooth stone. “Wait up for us,” I whispered, and then I left.
Now, I hand a cup of punch to a boy whose hair is just starting to fall out in small tufts. It sheds on the black lapel of his tuxedo. “Thanks,” he says, and I see he has the most beautiful eyes, dark and still as a panther’s. I glance away and realize that Kate and Taylor are gone.
What if she’s sick? What if he’s sick? I have promised myself I wouldn’t be overprot
ective, but there are too many children here for the staff to really keep track of. I ask another parent to take over my punch station and then I search out the ladies’ room. I check the supply closet. I walk through empty hallways and dark corridors and even the chapel.
Finally I hear Kate’s voice through a cracked doorway. She and Taylor stand under a spotlight moon, holding hands. The courtyard they’ve found is a favorite for the residents during the daytime; many doctors who wouldn’t otherwise see the light of the sun take their lunches out here.
I am about to ask if they’re all right when Kate speaks. “Are you afraid of dying?”
Taylor shakes his head. “Not really. Sometimes, though, I think about my funeral. If people will say good things, you know, about me. If anyone will cry.” He hesitates. “If anyone will even come.”
“I will,” Kate promises.
Taylor dips his head toward Kate’s, and she sways closer, and I realize that this is why I followed them. I knew this was what I would find, and like Brian, I wanted one more picture of my daughter, one that I might worry between my fingers like a piece of sea glass. Taylor lifts up the edges of her blue hygienic mask and I know I should stop him, I know I have to, but I don’t. This much I want her to have.
When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth as statues—an optical illusion, a mirror image that’s folding into itself.
• • •
When Kate goes into the hospital for her stem cell transplant, she’s an emotional wreck. She is far less concerned with the runny fluid being infused into her catheter than she is with the fact that Taylor hasn’t called her in three days, and has in fact not returned her calls either. “Did you have a fight?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “Did he say he was going somewhere? Maybe it was an emergency,” I say. “Maybe this has nothing to do with you at all.”
“Maybe it does,” Kate argues.
“Then the best revenge is getting healthy enough to give him a piece of your mind,” I point out. “I’ll be right back.”
In the hallway, I approach Steph, a nurse who has just come on duty and who’s known Kate for years. The truth is, I am just as surprised about Taylor’s lack of communication as Kate is. He knew she was coming in here.
“Taylor Ambrose,” I ask Steph. “Has he been in today?”
She looks at me and blinks.
“Big kid, sweet. Hung up on my daughter,” I joke.
“Oh, Sara . . . I thought for sure someone would have told you,” Steph says. “He died this morning.”
• • •
I don’t tell Kate, not for a month. Not until the day Dr. Chance says Kate is well enough to leave the hospital, until Kate has already convinced herself she was better off without him. I cannot begin to tell you the words I use; none of them are big enough to bear the weight behind them. I mention how I went to Taylor’s house and spoke to his mother; how she broke down in my arms and said she’d wanted to call me, but there was a part of her that was so jealous it swallowed all her speech. She told me that Taylor, who’d come home from the prom walking on air, had walked into her bedroom in the middle of the night, with a 105 degree fever. How maybe it was viral and maybe it was fungal but he’d gone into respiratory distress and then cardiac arrest and after thirty minutes of trying the doctors had to let him go.
I don’t tell Kate something else Jenna Ambrose said—that afterward, she went inside and stared at her son, who wasn’t her son anymore. That she sat for five whole hours, sure he was going to wake up. That even now she hears noise overhead and thinks Taylor is moving around his room, and that the half-second she is gifted before she remembers the truth is the only reason she gets up each morning.
“Kate,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”
Kate’s face crumples. “But I loved him,” she replies, as if this should be enough.
“I know.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I couldn’t. Not when I thought it might make you stop fighting back, yourself.”
She closes her eyes and turns onto her side on the pillow, crying so hard that the monitors she’s still hooked to begin to beep and bring in the nursing staff.
I reach for her. “Kate, honey, I did what was best for you.”
She refuses to look in my direction. “Don’t talk to me,” she murmurs. “You’re good at that.”
• • •
Kate stops speaking to me for seven days and eleven hours. We come home from the hospital; we go about our business of reverse isolation; we pick through the motions because we have done it before. At night I lie in bed next to Brian and wonder why he can sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that I have lost my daughter before she’s even gone.
Then one day I walk by her bedroom and find her sitting on the floor with photographs all around. There are, as I expect, the ones of her and Taylor that we took before the prom—Kate dressed to the nines with that telltale surgical mask covering her mouth. Taylor has drawn a lipstick smile on it, for the sake of the photos, or so he said.
It had made Kate laugh. It seems impossible that this boy, who was so solid a presence when the flash went off mere weeks ago, simply is not here anymore; a pang goes through me, and immediately on its heels a single word: practice.
But there are other photos, too, from when Kate was younger. One of Kate and Anna on the beach, crouched over a hermit crab. One of Kate dressed up like Mr. Peanut for Halloween. One of Kate with cream cheese all over her face, holding up two halves of a bagel like eyeglasses.
In another pile are her baby pictures—all taken when she was three, or younger. Gap-toothed and grinning, backlit by a sloe-eyed sun, unaware of what was to come. “I don’t remember being her,” Kate says quietly, and these first words make a bridge of glass, one that shifts beneath my feet as I step into the room.
I put my hand beside hers, at the edge of one photo. Bent at a corner, it shows Kate as a toddler being tossed into the air by Brian, her hair flying behind her, her arms and legs starfish-splayed, certain beyond a doubt that when she fell to earth again, there would be a safe landing, sure that she deserved nothing less.
“She was beautiful,” Kate adds, and with her pinky she strokes the glossy vivid cheek of the girl none of us ever got to know.
JESSE
THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M. to do the milking and how much trouble can you really get into? (The answer, if you’re interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.) Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that’s what we called the poor son of a bitch who pulled herding duty with the lambs. I had to follow about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn’t have one goddamned tree to provide even a sliver of shade.
To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an understatement. They get caught in fences. They get lost in four-foot-square pens. They forget where to find their food, although it’s been in the same place for a thousand days straight. And they’re not the little puffy darlings you picture when you go to sleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They’re annoying as hell.
Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I was folding down the pages that came closest to good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, that it wasn’t an animal, because I’d never heard anything like this in my life. I ran toward the sound, sure I was going to find someone thrown from a horse with their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who’d emptied his revolver by accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.
I wasn’t a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any living creature makes a racket like that, things aren’t going according to plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out of her privates. She lay on her side, panting. S
he rolled one flat black eye toward me, then just gave up.
Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis who ran the camp would make me bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbed the knotty slick hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped away from her.
The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife. Over its head was a silver sac that felt like the inside of your cheek when you run your tongue around it. It wasn’t breathing.
I sure as shit wasn’t going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial respiration, but I used my fingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it down from the neck of the lamb. And it turned out, that was all it needed. A minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its mother.
There were, I think, twenty lambs born during that summer session. Every time I passed the pen I could pick mine out from a crowd. He looked like all the others, except that he moved with a little more spring; he always seemed to have the sun shining off the oil in its wool. And if you happened to get him calm enough to look you in the eye, the pupils had gone milky white, a sure sign that he’d walked on the other side long enough to remember what he was missing.
I tell you this now because when Kate finally stirs in that hospital bed, and opens her eyes, I know she’s got one foot on the other side already, too.
• • •
“Oh my God,” Kate says weakly, when she sees me. “I wound up in Hell after all.”
I lean forward in my chair and cross my arms. “Now, sis, you know I’m not that easy to kill.” Getting up, I kiss her on the forehead, letting my lips stay an extra second. How is it that mothers can read fever that way? I can only read imminent loss. “How you doing?”
She smiles at me, but it’s like a cartoon drawing when I’ve seen the real thing hanging in the Louvre. “Peachy,” she says. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”
Because you won’t be here much longer, I think, but I do not tell her this. “I was in the neighborhood. Plus there’s a really hot nurse who works this shift.”