What Remains

by Helene Dunbar

  All of them look dazed, and tired, and like they’d rather be anywhere else.

  Spencer and Lizzie show up with coffee for me, but still I sleepwalk through the rest of the waiting, and the instructions, and then, somehow, the test.

  It’s all over before I know it.

  “Oh come on, Cal, driver picks the music, right?” Lizzie is framed in the rear-view mirror of my car, her dark hair pulled back with a band that has neon flowers protruding off it and an expression of exasperation on her face.

  I rub my eyes and some of the stress leaves my shoulders. I feel like I’ve finally woken up and the day has begun.

  Spencer turns around in the seat next to me and smiles because he loves to torture Lizzie. She’s going nuts, right on the verge of totally losing it in a manic fury. But she’s right. I’m driving, which should give me the right to choose the music, but that’s one of the few areas where the three of us are completely incompatible.

  Lizzie has a mental block with most music that came out after 1975. “What’s the point of popular music?” she always says. “It’s all love, blah, blah, heartbreak, blah, blah, shake your ass. No one writes about anything that matters anymore.”

  Spencer thankfully doesn’t want to listen to show stuff because he says he gets enough of that in theater. Instead his poison is public radio, which is almost worse. All talk and news. He says that it gives him perspectives he can draw on when he’s acting.

  For me, music is music. A beat. Something to fill my head. Something to pass the time. I like the usual—indie rock, a bit of grunge, some old ’80s stuff, anything that doesn’t put me to sleep.

  So it’s like this every time we drive somewhere. This battle of wills. I try, but it’s torture when I’m driving eighty to have to listen to the news or some droning anti-war song that came out before our parents were born.

  Right now Spencer is blaring NPR. The mellow voices discuss a war in some country I’ve never heard of. It’s almost enough to numb my exhausted brain and lull me back to sleep, but for some reason, it makes Lizzie more hyper and she’s drumming her hands on our headrests like a bored toddler. I take my eyes off the road for a minute to silently plead with Spencer to do something, anything, to make her stop.

  He nods and fiddles with the buttons until he finds something country that we all hate. Without missing a beat, Lizzie smacks him on the back of the head. I would have beaten her to it, but I’m holding onto the wheel for dear life as every truck in Michigan seems to be barreling down on my tail and my ten-year-old Corolla shakes each time one passes.

  Lizzie unhooks her seat belt to lean over the console and fiddle with the knobs. Bob Dylan sings about how times are changing in his nasally voice and she leans back with a smug look on her face.

  Spencer rolls his eyes, but I can see him smiling out of the corner of my eye. Before I know it, he twists his body, rolls down his window, and sticks his head out of it like a dog and starts singing. That would be fine. Lizzie and I both love listening to him sing. But for some reason he’s chosen to sing the score of The Sound of Music and between that, which is intended to annoy us as much as possible, and the drone coming out of the speakers, I’m ready to pull over and lock both of my best friends in the trunk.

  I still can’t take my eyes off the road, but I figure that I’m not going to be a better driver if my ears start bleeding. I reach out a hand and grab for whatever fabric I can feel on Spencer, jacket I think, and yank him back inside.

  “Yeats, I swear I’m going to ram this car into a tree if you don’t shut up right now,” I yell at him, but I’m not really angry and he knows it.

  In fact, he keeps singing. Lizzie joins in, making the yodeling and goat sounds to go with that song about a shepherd and I start laughing and can’t stop. I finally give up and kill the stereo all together and let the two of them serenade me.

  Eventually, they stop—they’ve run out of songs that both of them know and Spencer has to save his voice for Wednesday’s show—and the car is blissfully quiet. I don’t turn the radio back on, hoping we can talk instead.

  “So when do we get to find out where we’re heading?” Spencer asks, looking out the window as random bits of highway fly by.

  “Soon,” I say. It’s a thing we do. One of us will pick some place hours from Maple Grove—a farm that sells pick-

  your-own blueberries, a dusty used record store, or an ice cream store that sells bacon-and-egg-flavored ice cream—and we’ll drive there for the hell of it. Just to see something new and to do it together.

  Today, we’re on the way to a place called Mystery Ridge where gravity is supposed to be all messed up. It’s an old shack where you can drop a ball and watch it roll uphill. Brooms there stand on end by themselves. At least that what the web page I found says.

  “I know,” Lizzie pipes up. “Let’s play truth or dare.”

  Her words hit me like a jolt of espresso. “No. Not with you, Lizzie, no way.”

  “Aw, Cal.” She draws out her words in a way that makes my stomach clench. “Why not?”

  I risk moving my eyes to glance at her in the rear-view mirror. “Why not? First, we’re in a car.” I don’t even want to think of the types of dares she could come up with on a freeway. “Second … how about because last time we played you almost got me arrested.”

  Spencer laughs. He’s safe because he doesn’t have anything he really considers a secret from us and always answers all the “truth” questions. I’m always stuck between choosing to talk about things I don’t want to talk about, and doing things that I don’t want to do. Lizzie, of course, always takes the dares, which we can never make challenging enough for her.

  “See, if you’d just answer the questions, it would be so much easier,” she says. She’s right except that the kind of questions Lizzie asks are hard. Really hard. The type of questions that maybe I think about when I’m alone, but certainly not the type that I can answer out loud. Not even to my best friends. Not to Lizzie.

  “Probably,” I admit. “Let’s try this instead. What do you think you’ll be doing in five years? And what about twenty?” Taking the SATs and all this talk about college prep at school has made me think about this kind of stuff lately. And now that I know about Spencer and Lizzie, it feels like everything is changing too quickly.

  “Fine.” Lizzie sulks. “But you go first and you aren’t allowed to say that you want to be married to some girl you can’t even work up the courage to talk to.”

  “I’m totally ignoring that,” I say. But really I’m more than happy to skip the topic of girls in general and Ally in particular. “In five years I want to be playing for the Yankees. Or at least their Triple-A team.”

  “Ha!” Lizzie says. “You are definitely not a bad-ass New Yorker. Doesn’t Florida, or someplace slow like that, have a team? That’s more your speed.” She’s right, but hey, it’s the Yankees and if you’re going to dream, you have to dream big.

  “I hate Florida,” I say and throw out the one thing that will shut her up. “Besides, Yeats is going to be in New York and you can come out and work for a gallery or something and we’ll all be together.”

  “Okay, so in twenty years you’ll be retired on your huge baseball salary with your two World Series rings. What then?” Spencer’s optimism is cool, but my mom would be pissed to hear that no one’s guesses for me include college.

  I’m really getting into the idea of going to college later. In twenty years, I’ll be thirty-six. That’s a whole other life away and it’s kind of like imagining whether we’ll have jetpacks and vacations on Mars by then. I’ve actually been thinking about this, but am almost embarrassed to say what’s on my mind. Then I say it anyhow. “I think I’d like to study meteorology.”

  Neither of them says anything for a minute, presumably because they’re trying to figure out what I’m talk about. Eventually it’s Spencer who gets it first. “
A weatherman?”

  Lizzie starts laughing. “Like on the TV news? The guy who says it will snow and then, when it turns out to be eighty degrees, has to apologize and say that the low pressure system moved or something?”

  I search for words that might win them over. I really want Lizzie, in particular, to get it because otherwise she’s going to ride me mercilessly. “There’s more to it than that. I mean, you can figure out the best flight plans for airplanes or study the chances of hurricanes. There are a lot of options.”

  “You can plan ahead, you mean?” Spencer manages to sum up my entire psyche in under a minute. “Yeah, makes sense.”

  Before they can analyze me any further, I pass the question along. “We all know where Yeats is going, so you’re up, Lizzie.”

  She’s quiet for a minute. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her lean forward and grip onto Spencer’s headrest.

  “Well, in five years … ” she begins. I twist my head as much as I can and still watch the road. I’m eager to know where she wants to go from here. Lizzie rarely talks about the future.

  “I want to be someplace other than this shithole. I want to be able to paint full time. I’m not really sure how to make that happen.”

  “And what about in twenty?” I ask.

  This time there’s no pause. She stares right into my eyes in the mirror, deadly serious. “Come on, Cal, do you really think I’ll still be alive in twenty years?”

  I have to stop myself from jamming on the breaks in the middle of the freeway.

  “Liz,” Spencer says, before I can get a word out. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. I mean, what? You see me settling down and having kids and a normal life? I don’t even know what a normal life is like.” She doesn’t say any of this like she’s upset. Just resigned. It must be hell to go through every day thinking that life is never going to get any better. It makes me think of Alice, the “ghost” from The Cave.

  I glance over at Spencer, who looks like all the air has been forced out of his lungs.

  “Liz. Do you really think that we’d let anything bad happen to you?”

  When he says it I feel a crawling up my back that makes me shiver. That’s the kind of tempting-fate comment that made my grandmother knock on wood and spit on the ground.

  “Seriously, Lizzie,” I say, “you’re going to be a beautiful, artsy, bitchy old lady with equally beautiful, misbehaved kids who are afraid of nothing.”

  That at least brings a smile to her face.

  “You’re up, Yeats,” I say, but we all know his plan. His life stretches ahead of him like the freaking yellow brick road complete with lion and wizard.

  Lizzie jumps in before he gets a chance to answer. “In five years, Spence will be accepting his second Tony award for best male lead on Broadway. In twenty, he’ll be living in California with one of the top movie studio executives and a slew of servants in their gated estate. They’ll throw parties where champagne runs out of the faucets and everyone is beautiful, and creative, and insane. But in a good way.”

  Spencer laughs, but really, she probably isn’t that far off from the truth.

  I blink and then swerve a little. The conversation woke me up, but Lizzie’s bleakness about her future has worn me out.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to drive?” Spencer asks.

  “I’m fine, Yeats. And it’s still better than letting one of you drive.” Spencer drives like my grandmother and Lizzie drives like a demon from hell is chasing her.

  Spencer and Lizzie start their usual tug of war over the radio again and I smile at how comforting and familiar it is. I try to look over at Spencer, but Lizzie is leaning between us and I catch a whiff of patchouli before I glance up and see 3,507 pounds of gray steel flying towards us over the median.

  Despite what I’ve read, my life doesn’t flash before my eyes.

  Time doesn’t slow down.

  I’m not able to process why an SUV is blocking out the clouds.

  I don’t have time to utter a sound before everything goes dark.

  Five

  Everything hurts. I’m screaming so loudly I’m pretty sure I woke myself up. I figure out quickly that the screaming must just be in my mind because there’s a tube jammed down my throat. There’s a machine near me that’s making noises that sound like sucking. I know from watching all those hospital TV shows that it’s a ventilator and it’s breathing for me.

  Which brings up the questions, “why aren’t I breathing for myself?” and “where the hell am I?”

  I try to move, but my arms are pinned down and my chest feels like it’s being stood on by an elephant. Everything in the room seems to be beeping and clanging. I’m drowning in sound, and pain, and fear.

  The only thing that doesn’t hurt is that someone is holding my hand. I move my eyes slowly, and I’m rewarded for the effort by seeing Spencer standing next to me, a blue paper gown over his clothes and a yellow mask over his mouth. He looks bruised, like he’s been in a bad fight.

  But then he tears up and I have to wonder what’s going on that’s so bad it’s making Spencer Yeats cry. A nurse pushes him out of the way and shines a bright light in my eyes. My back arches with a burst of pain that feels like fire surging through my chest. I want the nurse to go away. I want Spencer to come back and tell me what the hell is going on.

  I inhale that horrible antiseptic hospital smell and wonder if someone is playing a joke on me. I don’t remember being sick. I just remember driving.

  And then another memory starts to sneak in, slowly at first like it isn’t sure it wants to be remembered. I can’t quite get my mind to hold onto it. There’s something big—really big —coming closer and closer, and then everything goes black. But there’s also something else that keeps slipping away; something warm and wet, and it’s climbing inside me like a nightmare.

  The nurse fiddles with tubes and bags, and puts a pump with a button in my hand and tells me to push it when the pain gets too bad. I’m not sure how to judge “too bad.” All I know is that I feel worse than I ever have, even after I tore a tendon a couple of years ago sliding into third. I push the button and the memory, or whatever it is, lies back down and goes back to sleep. And so do I.

  The next time I wake up, my parents are here. Both of them. For some reason, that makes me even more worried. My parents are always working. Always. I can’t imagine what could have happened that would possibly drag them away from their jobs when nothing else ever has, including my junior high graduation (Mom had to take a deposition), my Little League championship ceremony (Dad was on a business trip), and parent-teacher conferences (I don’t think they’ve made it to one since third grade).

  My usually well-dressed mom looks tired. Her eyes are rimmed with red and I’m pretty sure she randomly picked her wrinkled clothes out of the laundry basket. She has her hand on my forehead like she used to when I was little and sick and she wasn’t working in court all the time. It would feel good if it wasn’t so unusual. Plus, Dad is standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed and he keeps glancing at the door like he’d bolt if he thought he could get away with it.

  The damned tube is still down my throat so I can’t talk, but I’m not sure what I’d say anyhow. I don’t see Spencer and that makes me wonder where Lizzie is. If something is wrong, she’d be here.

  The nurse scurries back; it’s a different one this time. This one smells like vanilla and it makes me think of Ally, which makes me wince.

  “I know it hurts, honey, but let’s try to stay awake for a little bit if you can,” the nurse says. I’d laugh if I could, but the nurse doesn’t need to know that I’m trapped here in bed aching for a girl I’ve never spoken to.

  My parents are ushered out and a woman I assume is another nurse, or maybe a doctor, positions herself next to me. “We’re going to sit you up and then try to take this tube out of your throa
t, okay?”

  It sounds like a great idea until I hear the mechanism for the bed starting up and more pain goes ripping through me. The bed only tilts up a little bit, but it feels like all of my skin has been pulled too tight across my chest.

  “Okay, Cal … nod your head if you understand what I’m saying … we’re going to wean you off the ventilator to make sure you can breathe on your own.”

  I want to scream more than I want to breathe, but I nod and grip the metal railing on the side of the bed, pretending the cool metal is really my mom’s hand or Spencer’s. In anticipation, I grit my teeth.

  The nurse goes to flip a switch on the machine and says, “I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to turn this off. I’m not going to disconnect you until we’re sure that you’re breathing.”

  I nod again as she starts the countdown and for some reason it makes me think about baseball. About how you only get three strikes before you’re out. About how I have a pretty great on-base percentage. I want to knock this out of the park, but I’m not totally sure what’s expected of me. Breathing, I guess. How hard can that be?

  I hear her get to “three” and the machine clicks off. I take in air, and let it out, and do it a few more times. She watches like she’s waiting for me to do something wrong, but I don’t. I just breathe.

  After a few minutes the nurse pats my leg. “Good boy,” she says, like I’m five or something. “So now we’re going to pull the tube out and this might be a little uncomfortable.”

  Just for the record, I HATE when people use the “royal we.” It’s fine if you’re the Pope or the Queen, but otherwise it really isn’t necessary. I made the mistake of telling Lizzie that once and for two weeks Spencer and I had to put up with her walking around saying “we would like lunch now” and “we are having a thoroughly fucking bad day.”

  The nurse untapes the tube and says, “When I start pulling, I want you to give me a little cough.” She pulls, I cough, and my chest feels like it’s going to explode as the rubber slides out of me.