But after the first appointment, I refused to go back. It was clear there wasn’t going to be some magic cure, and besides, I didn’t like the way Dr. Zhang was looking at me, that glint in her eye. She wanted to study me, like I was some kind of alien species. I wasn’t interested in being her guinea pig. Mom encouraged me to give her another chance, but she didn’t—couldn’t—force me to go.
I’m still not interested in being a lab rat, but I know Houschka’s right about one thing—I don’t want to end up in the hospital again any more than he wants to see me there. And I can’t exactly stay holed up in my house. I have a job now. A job that I need. And what if he’s right about the rest of it? What if they do know a lot more about allergies now? Whoever they are. What if there is something that can be done?
I get out of bed and creep downstairs, not wanting to interrupt the silence with the creaking of the hardwoods. In the study, I slide into the desk chair and shake the mouse of the computer. The screen glows to life and nearly blinds me. When my eyes adjust, I type “Dr. Mei Zhang” into Google. Her picture immediately pops up under the heading George Watkins University Allergy & Immunology. I shudder, remembering the way I felt underneath her gaze. As if I were a frog in science class and she was gleefully holding a scalpel. But maybe that was just an irrational childhood fear, like imagining monsters under the bed. I click the link, grab a pen and piece of scrap paper from where they lie on the desk, and jot down the phone number and email correlated with Zhang’s name. I stare at it, by the glow of my monitor, and a feeling washes over me. An emotion so foreign, I can’t immediately identify it.
Possibility.
It feels so naive, the hope I used to carry around like Linus’s blanket, imagining a new life—a life without this debilitating allergy—was waiting just ahead. But there it is, blossoming in my belly, and I can’t dampen it. Not immediately. I mean, I don’t plan on running around giving CPR to strangers all the time, but what if I could work at the library without my gloves, or shake hands with people—or I don’t know, take a business card from someone and let my fingers graze his, like a normal person? Or maybe that isn’t normal—to think about touching a near stranger’s fingers with your own.
In the dark, I peer down at the Wharton sweatshirt I’m still wearing—that I just didn’t really want to take off—and wonder if maybe that’s not normal either.
Anyway, I remind myself, Dr. Houschka said “under control”; he didn’t say “cured.” That’s because there is no cure. There is no cure. I say it aloud so that it sinks in. I will always wear gloves. There is no new life waiting just around the corner.
I stare at the phone number on the piece of paper one last time, before I crumple it up, drop it in the wastebasket beside the desk, and go back upstairs to bed.
IN THE MORNING, I wake with a start, my hair sticking to my face, my pillow damp with sweat. I was having a nightmare. About Eric’s hands. His fingers were swollen, cartoonishly large, and they were touching mine—engulfing them, really—the pads of his bulging thumbs rubbing my knuckles. I was trying to tell him to stop, that I can’t be touched, but I felt as though I were underwater, that my mouth wouldn’t obey my brain, that my words were being stolen right out of the air, unable to fulfill their duty of being heard. The harder it was to move my mouth, the harder I tried, until I was paralyzed in fear and panic consumed every nerve in my body.
I sit up, trying to slow my galloping heart. But as I take deep breaths, replaying the scene in my mind, I can almost feel the rough warmth of his fingers on my skin. Or what I imagine it would feel like—I haven’t been touched in so long. Not since right before Dr. Benefield put me in that plastic isolation room when I was six. Right before he diagnosed me and my entire world shifted. For months and years afterward, I tried so hard to remember that last interaction with my mother. The last time she touched me. Did she clasp my face? Kiss the top of my head? Wrap her arms around my tiny frame and squeeze me tight? I’m sure she said something soothing like, “It’s only a week. I’ll be right out here, baby.” But the words don’t matter. If only I had known it was the last time I would be touched, the last time that I would feel the palm of her hand on my arm, her breath on my face, I would have held on a little longer. Imprinted the feeling of her fingertips on my skin. I would have made sure to remember.
But I didn’t. And now, sitting in my bed, trying to recall the touch of Eric in my dream—to really feel it on my skin—it’s the same fruitless effort I expended for years trying to recall my mother’s last touch. And then, as my heartbeat slows, I begin to wonder if it really was a nightmare. I wonder if my heart’s racing because I was terrified—or because it was so wonderful.
“DID YOU HAVE a good weekend, dear?” Louise asks when I walk behind the circulation desk Monday morning. She turns to look at me and gasps.
“Oh, dear,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand. The rash around my mouth had lessened when I looked in the mirror this morning, but some red splotches were lingering and my lips were still a bit bruised and swollen. I found a tube of lipstick in my mom’s dresser, but it only accentuated the problem, so I wiped it off.
“What happened?” Louise asks.
My shoulders tense and I silently chastise myself for not preparing a response. I was hoping no one would notice. “Allergic reaction,” I say. When that doesn’t seem to satisfy her, I add: “New lipstick,” because it’s the first thing that pops in my mind.
“What brand? Remind me never to get that one.”
“I don’t remember,” I say feebly as Roger approaches the circulation desk, holding a coffee mug.
“Morning, ladi— Whoa,” he says, staring at me.
“It’s just an allergic reaction,” Louise says, waving him off. “And it’s no wonder, really. You know what they put in lipstick? Crushed-up bugs. Bugs! And lead, I think, if I’m remembering right. Read some article about it a few weeks ago.”
I eye a pile of returns on the desk and start scanning them back in, as Louise and Roger’s conversation is devolving into a discussion of weird things in food, like yoga mat particles in sandwich bread. I tune them out, so I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly when about five minutes later, Louise says: “It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to be fired anyway.”
My head snaps toward her. “What?”
She looks at me. “Oh, you didn’t hear? Maryann’s in another big fight with the city, trying to keep them from cutting our funding again. We used to have four circulation assistants—can you believe it? But that idiot Frank Stafford, city council’s finance chair, keeps funneling money to the rec center, because his son plays peewee football and he’s convinced he’s going to be the next Ted Brady—that’s a quarterback, right?”
“I think it’s Tom,” Roger says.
“Ted, Tom,” she says, waving her hand. “Anyway, she’s been trying to prove how needed we are in the community, but the circ numbers are down and the few programs we do have are so poorly attended—”
“Could we really be fired?” I cut her off.
“Oh dear,” she says, and reaches out to pat my gloved hand. I move it away from her. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.” She sighs. “But I don’t really know how we’ll even keep the doors open and lights on if they cut the budget any more. It’s bare-bones as it is.”
I stare at her, my mind reeling. This job essentially fell into my lap and I can’t lose it. I need the money. And against all odds, I’m mostly comfortable here. I can’t imagine looking for something else, going into all those strange buildings, talking to new people. At just the thought of it, a vise threatens to clamp down on my heart and stop it once and for all.
WHEN I COME out of the break room at four, I’m surprised to see Madison H. standing there, baby on her hip. I wonder why she’s at the library so often when she never seems to check out any books. Maybe it has something to do with being on the board.
“Jubilee!” she says when she sees me, her eyes betraying her horror. I lift my
gloved hand to my mouth, willing the redness to just disappear already. “What happened?”
“Long story,” I say, sliding into my chair.
She shifts the baby to her other hip and looks at me pointedly. I sigh and glance behind me, making sure Maryann and Louise are still in the back room. Then I give her the abridged version of the weekend, ending with Dr. Houschka’s visit.
She stares at me openmouthed. “Jesus, I leave you alone for two days and you go and almost kill yourself.”
“That’s dramatic,” I say.
“Well have you made an appointment?”
“With who?”
“An allergist. To get that bracelet thing. And EpiPens. You should be carrying EpiPens! My nephew has a peanut butter allergy and doesn’t leave the house without one.”
“I don’t need an EpiPen. Or a bracelet. It’s not like I’m going around giving people CPR left and right,” I say, reiterating my inner thoughts from last night.
“Well what if there was another kind of emergency?”
“Like what?”
She thinks for a minute and glances down at her baby. “What if a kid drooled on you?”
“I’d get a rash,” I say, trying to make it sound like no big deal. But I shudder at the possibility, thinking of the girl who almost died from a drop of milk on her skin. And then my stomach starts to tingle and itch right near my belly button as if I’ve conjured a rash just by saying the word aloud. The mind is a funny and powerful thing. I start to scratch it through the material of my shirt. “And then I’d stay away from that kid.”
“What if he bit you?”
My eyes grow wide. “Why would a kid bite me?”
She shrugs. “Why do kids do anything? Hannah found a jar of honey and smeared it all over Molly’s face and hair last week when I was in the bathroom. Looked like she had a spa mask on. Do you know how hard that was to clean up?”
I stare at her, trying to decide if I should continue her little game. “I don’t think a kid is going to bite me.”
She sighs. “Look, I’m not taking you out until you get an EpiPen, OK?”
I look up at her, confused. “Take me out where?”
“On an adventure,” she says, a self-assured smile on her face. Although, I’m not sure that she has any other kind of smile. I think Madison H. came crawling out of her mother’s womb annoyingly confident. “That’s what I came to tell you. I’m going to be your official guide to all of the things you’ve missed the past nine years.”
I stare at her openly now, my mouth an oval of disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not,” she says, shifting the baby again to her other hip. “It’ll be fun.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Oh, c’mon,” she says, pushing out her bottom lip in a pretend pout. “You do. You want to. At least give me one night. If you have a terrible time, we’ll never do it again. Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Girl Scout?” I ask, itching my stomach again. I must have gotten a bug bite or something.
“No,” she says. “Is that what that means?”
I snort and shake my head. Then I change the subject. “Hey, has the library board met this month?”
She squawks: “Ha!” The baby jumps in her arms, startled. “No,” she says, calmer. “We meet like once a year. Why?”
“There’s a problem with funding. The city wants to cut it.”
“What else is new?”
“Oh. Well is there something that you guys can do about it?”
“Not really,” she says. “The board’s kind of a joke. We mostly get together to gossip and eat Enid’s rum cake. We don’t really have any power. Not like the city council.”
“Huh,” I say, while my heart revs underneath my blouse. Somebody must be able to do something. I can’t lose this job. I won’t. I need the money.
She jostles the baby back to the original hip. “So you’ll go?”
I give her one last hard stare and then throw my hands up in a gesture of defeat. “Why not?” I say, pushing down the real question burning deep inside my gut: why? Why does Madison H., the most popular girl from school, suddenly want to be my friend? Doesn’t she have better things to do with her time? Why does she care so much?
But later, as I’m arranging a display on books about Native Americans to correlate with Thanksgiving, I chide myself for such childish thoughts. I’m not in high school anymore. We’re adults. She’s being kind. I should stop questioning her so much and just accept it for what it is. Besides, I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to have a friend.
I stand up the final book, Black Elk Speaks, on the end of the row, and absentmindedly scratch my belly again. It’s burning a little now, and I wonder if all my scratching over my phantom rash has somehow irritated the skin. I yank up my blouse to examine it, an audible gasp escaping my lips when I see my bare skin—angry boils and red bumps are burning a path from my belly button down toward my hip. But I don’t understand—why would a rash spring up on my stomach? No one has touched me there. I take a deep breath. It’s probably just a . . . just a . . . rash. From something else. Laundry detergent—isn’t that what people always say? But I haven’t changed my laundry detergent. And I’ve seen this reaction enough in my life to know exactly what it is.
What terrifies me is I have no idea how it got there.
thirteen
ERIC
SEVEN VOICE MAILS. One hundred forty-two emails. Twenty-three text messages. (None from Ellie.) This is the shitstorm I’m trying to weed through as I sit at my kitchen table at 5:30 Wednesday evening, while a boxful of spiral pasta boils on the stove.
Little-known fact—if your child is thought to have possibly attempted suicide, they won’t let him return to school until he’s been deemed by a professional to no longer be a risk to himself or others. And that professional may not have an opening until Thursday. And since he must be supervised at all times, and I had no way of finding a babysitter on such short notice, here we are.
But it’s not Aja’s fault I have so much to catch up on. Instead of working from home all week, as I told my boss I would do, I’ve spent all three days with my nose stuck in a book. All of Monday morning and most of the afternoon was dedicated to rereading The Virgin Suicides. It was like some light had clicked on, and I know it was Jubilee that threw the switch. Sentences started to jump out at me, as if they were written just for me.
Like: At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
And I wondered if this Jeffrey Eugenides really is a genius. Or maybe just a dad. After Stephanie’s news, I tried to call Ellie a few times to talk about her suspension, but she never picked up. I contemplated sending her a text about it but was afraid I would push her further away. Instead, I texted her another one of my favorite lines from the book. The response of Cecilia, who, when asked by her doctor why she attempted suicide when she’s too young to know how bad life gets, said: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Ha! I wrote after the quote. Zinger! Love, Dad.
Now I’m in the middle of The Bell Jar. Ellie wrote in her journal that she wanted to be a magazine editor in New York, which surprised me. I didn’t even know she liked to write. Or read magazines. But the thing that’s concerned me the most is how she said she “totally relates” to Esther, the main character, who’s clearly going through some kind of manic depression.
I click off my email and find myself thinking about Jubilee. What she would say about the book. About Esther. About Ellie.
“Pot’s boiling over.” I look up and see Aja standing at the door. Then I glance back at the stove.
“Damn it!” I jump up and grab the pot handle to move it off the burner without thinking. The shock of the heat in my palm mixed with my dumb clumsiness somehow ends up with the e
ntire pot crashing to the floor, a cascade of boiling water and pasta dispersing all over the linoleum. Miraculously, I’ve stayed out of the spray, but my shoes are already soaking up the hot starchy liquid and my feet start burning.
“You all right?” I ask over my shoulder.
Aja just stands there, arms crossed. “Pasta’s ruined.”
I sigh. “Yep.” I slosh toward where he stands so I can get out of my waterlogged socks and shoes. “Want pizza?”
“Chili dogs.” No one delivers chili dogs and I open my mouth to say this, but we’ve been shut in this house all day, and I think it might be nice to get out for a little bit.
“Great,” I say. “Let me get this mess cleaned up and we’ll go.”
AS WE’RE PULLING out of the drive-through twenty minutes later, I should turn left to go home, but I turn right instead.
I want to see her. Jubilee.
It’s the courteous thing to do. Check in on her. Make sure she’s doing OK.
I wolf down a hot dog on the way and when we pull into the parking lot, I glance in the rearview mirror to see if I have any lingering bread stuck in my teeth.
“What are we doing here?” Aja asks between bites.
I look over at him. “I’ve got to renew my books.”
“You don’t have any books.”
Shit. He’s right. “I think they can just do it on the computers.”
He pulls a crinkle fry from the bag on his lap. “Can I stay in the car?”
I hesitate. I don’t really want to leave him alone, after everything that’s happened, but it’s a library parking lot, I reason, and I’ll be able to see him through the window. “I guess,” I say, and then: “But just eat. No telekinetic stuff or destruction or anything, got it?”
He nods, and I wonder how many other people need to give that directive to their children before leaving them alone for five minutes.
I avert my gaze from Aja and direct it through the front windshield of the car. From my vantage point in the parking lot, I have a direct line of sight to the brightly lit innards of the library. And Jubilee. She’s standing at the checkout counter, her face partially obscured by the wild vines of her hair. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to her. She’s beautiful, yes, but it’s more than that. There’s something different about her—how she’s guarded yet completely vulnerable at the same time. She’s like a Rubik’s Cube that I find myself eager to sort into a pattern that makes sense. Or maybe I’m eager to sort out why I keep thinking of her. I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. And I was never good at Rubik’s Cubes.
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