Playing Tyler

by T L Costa

  She takes the second box and carefully undoes the wrapping. “Zombie Ninja Dojo 2.” She turns it over, studying the back cover. “I’ve been hearing a lot about this.”

  Is that good? I walk over to the desk. Get her a Styrofoam bowl of soup and a spoon from the bag. Smells good. Salty and warm and like… chicken soup. “Here. Eat. Then we play.”

  “Tyler MacCandless,” she says as she puts the game aside and grabs the bowl full of soup, “I swear you’re the best boyfriend ever.”

  My face gets hot. Like real hot, and I look down at her comforter. A mess of pinks and purples. Then I look up at her face, her eyes shining. At me. My breath gets quick and my heart sort of does this little leap. Happy. Think I’m happy. No. I know that I’m happy. I kiss her. On her forehead, which is sweet and salty all at once. I say, “Eat.”

  Ani

  How can I hurt him? He’s asleep, arms wrapped around my waist, their weight wonderful and frightening all at the same time. Sleep washes away all the fear and the worry from his face, and he looks beautiful. Maybe I shouldn’t think of him as beautiful, but that’s how he looks: innocent, delicate, sweet as he dreams.

  Sitting up, I shuffle out of bed and down the hall to use the bathroom. The threadbare carpet scratches the bottom of my feet and I swear that I’m sneezing loud enough to wake the whole dorm. I splash some water on my face as I wash my hands after I’m done, and as I walk back out of the bathroom I hear someone call my name. Christy’s sitting at the far end of the hall, chatting with one of the other girls on our floor. She waves me over and I wrap my robe tight around my shoulders against the cold as I make my way down there.

  Christy and her friend are crouched around newspapers placed flat on the floor and a few different bottles of nail polish and emery boards. “Hey Ani, come sit.” Christy pats a space on the floor next to her, careful not to mess up the new polish. “Saw the guy. He’s totally cute.”

  Oh. “Yeah, sorry about that, I guess I should have–”

  “Not a problem, Monica’s roommate is off visiting her boyfriend in Boston this weekend so I’m crashing with her.” Christy pushes the bottles towards me. “Pick your poison. I think the blue for you.”

  I nod at Monica and she gives me the briefest of smiles before she goes back to holding her tongue steady between her lips as she paints color on her nails.

  “I don’t think I could paint my nails right now without sneezing and messing everything up,” I say.

  “Here” – Christy grabs my hand in hers – “I’ll do it for you, then.”

  “But–”

  “Your guy is sleeping, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what else do you have to do?” She smiles as she reaches for the bottle of blue, knowing that she’s already won the argument. It is a pretty color, dark with a nice sheen. If I were a character in a videogame, I would want that color hair.

  I let her paint my nails, and she tells me all about her latest boyfriend, who she thinks she is going to dump for this other guy in her biology lab. But she feels bad, of course, because the first guy really is sweet. I don’t really have anything to add, so I just smile and try not to sneeze.

  Monica, once she finishes painting her own nails black with neon-pink tips, says, “I left my boyfriend back home, but I’m probably going to run into him at this year’s NARAM.”

  Christy and I look at each other. “Can you put that in English, please?” Christy asks.

  “Oh, the National Association of Rocketry’s Annual Meet.” Monica blows on her nails. “We’re both into building model rockets, it’s how we met.”

  “Is this something that’s going to happen soon, or do we have some time to find you someone new?” Christy asks, her eyes not leaving my fingertips.

  “I don’t know if I want someone else, really.” Monica launches into her history with both the boyfriend and model rockets, and my mind wanders in and out, wanting to get my nails good and painted so I can go back to sleep, but then Monica says, “So we had to try and get into the base to get our rocket back.”

  “Wait, I’m sorry, what? You flew a rocket over some kind of base?” I ask, heart fluttering as I remember Mr Anderson sitting at my table, telling me that flying my little SkyPet over a military base was a federal offense.

  “Yeah, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, it’s right near where we lived in Dayton. You should have seen him, he offered to climb the fence to get it back for me. I told him not to be stupid and we walked around front and begged the guys at the entrance to let us in. No big deal.”

  “Should have just cut your losses and left. It was just a model, wasn’t it?” Christy asks.

  “Wait, but isn’t it restricted airspace? Flying anything over a base is a federal offense, right? Did you get in trouble?”

  Christy and Monica both stare at me, their eyes wide and round. Christy backs away a bit from my nails. She says, “Ani, it was clearly an accident. And they were in high school. No one’s going to slap a federal charge on some kids whose toy went off-course.”

  Blood sears through my veins, skin stretching tight over my skull. I’m an idiot: a complete, total and utter moron. Christy and Monica move along with the conversation, like they’re sailing along downriver without me, leaving me stuck in the mud by the shore. “Monica,” I say as I stand. “Did the model rocket you flew over the base have a camera?” Is that it? Is that the difference, is there any way that Mr Anderson wasn’t–

  “Yeah, all of our models have cameras. We even had a channel on YouTube, if you want to check it out,” she says and holds her nails up in front of her face.

  Mr Anderson lied. He was lying to me in the sales pitch for this job. Played on the fact that I was young and would be terrified of being sent to jail like my dad. I reach out and touch the wall to hold myself steady. “Goodnight, guys. I have to go.”

  Every word Mr Anderson said to me that day, every word he said to Mom, selling us this job like it was the best, most noble thing in the world, plays over and over again in my head, until my mouth sours and ears ache with the memory.

  Careful not to wake up Tyler as he sleeps, I grab the tissue box and crawl onto the far side of the bed. I tuck the laptop close into my body, looking for a solution that I know is there, waiting for me to find it. I type, writing the first lines of a virus.

  CHAPTER 25

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 29

  TYLER

  The call comes at dawn. I’m in bed, arms draped around Ani. Can’t mess around when she’s feeling sick, but I held her. Held her all night. Just stayed there and slept. Slept well, even though she snored.

  I’ve been expecting the call. So when my phone rings in the morning and I hear the sterile voice on the other end of the line I’m not surprised. I don’t feel anything. I whisper to Ani that I have to leave, kiss her on the top of her head, and go.

  As I walk over I send Mom a quick text to let her know what’s up and make my way to Yale-New Haven hospital. Wonder if I should text Rick, too. Not sure what I think about him and Mom becoming friends. But if he could help me convince her to come down to the hospital, it would be great. I send him a quick message.

  The hall is long and dark and warm and reeks of Lysol and cardboard-like hospital food. I don’t know how I manage to speak, feels like a tennis ball lodged itself in my throat. The nurse guides me back, pushing apart the swinging doors. Metal on the bottom. Metal on the faces of the people who work here. Doctors and nurses and orderlies immune to the people like me. To the people in the beds. The nurse points me to the door.

  His door.

  Visions of B at Little League and soccer. Staying up in each other’s beds at night. Playing Hot Wheels. My stomach and heart leap up and tangle together and the heavy air hits me. Can’t take this feeling of everything rising and then freefalling back down into the base of my throat.

  I walk past the other rooms. The hall seems really long, other people, people like me, not-sick people stand around, grief and disbelief a
nd pain shocking all humanity right out of them. Standing, like me, in a hall, looking like a zombie. Like a boy who used to be Tyler MacCandless.

  Please God, let it not be now. Let it not be now. Give him another chance please God let it not be now he’s only twenty-three he can’t die now please not now.

  I don’t think I’m man enough to go in. I stand at the door. Frozen. Adrenaline icing my veins and terror weighing a ton in my belly and my throat and burning up to my eyes and maybe if I just stand here it won’t be true. He won’t be dying. If I don’t see it then it can’t be real.

  Fuck. I can’t. If he’s dying then he’s not doing it alone. He’ll do it with me. I just have to take two steps more and he’s not alone.

  My eyes are burning. Like on fire. But I open the door. I feel like somebody took a baseball bat and pounded me straight in the gut. I can’t. Can’t see him like this again he’s so far gone I’ll never get him back. Not ever. So thin.

  B’s stick-thin, a speck of color in an ocean of white sheets and blue tubing and God knows what else. Slowly, like a trek through to another universe, I walk to the side of his bed. The heart-rate monitor is steady, his blood oxygen level is OK because if it wasn’t the little thing would be beeping, but he does have a mask, so that’s probably why. I take his chart off the side of the bed. And there it is. Naloxone. The drug for an OD. It’s what they gave him last time. And the time before that. A tickling, slimy thread of grief squeezes me tighter. How does he do this? Every time I hope. Every time it only gets worse.

  It hits me, comes up to the top of my head. The thought that now goes off like a revolver in my brain. He’s not getting better. No matter how much I want him to, no matter how much I love him it’s just not enough. Will never be enough. I look over the list of the billions of drugs it seems like they gave him. He’s got a fever, I guess. Lots of vancomycin.

  I push the chart back into the slot on the bed, dragging a chair next to B and sit. The sounds of the hospital seem strange, distant all at the same time. He’s sleeping. But not even sleep can wash the life he’s lived off his face. Every inch of him looks hollow, stained. Doesn’t look real, even, anymore, with all these tubes and gadgets he looks like something else and not like the boy who used to be my brother. Everybody used to say that we looked so much alike, and now, like this, he barely looks human.

  Running my hands over my scalp, I rub, try to erase this, erase everything from my head but I can’t. Just can’t. A voice, tired, stretched thin, says, “Are you the next of kin?”

  “Yeah, Tyler MacCandless. Brandon’s brother.” My head clears. Have to get sharp. Stay together.

  “Hi, I’m Dr Feinburg. I’m the one who called.” Dr Feinburg’s white coat falls over crumpled khakis, and that together with his balding head and thin wire glasses gives him the look of a guy who works really hard. I hope he has a nice life to go home to. This job’s gotta suck.

  I nod. Then look down at the bed.

  He waits. I know he wants to ask about Mom, but I can’t go there right now so he’s just gonna have to talk to me. He says, “Your brother’s very sick.”

  “No shit.” Leaves my mouth before I want it to and I cringe. Great. Pissing the doctor off really isn’t what I want to do. “Sorry. I–”

  “It’s OK.” He moves to the side of the bed, so he can talk to me across Brandon and still check the machines. “Are you aware of your brother’s drug abuse?”

  The laugh rockets out of my mouth. Short and bitter. “You could say that. He overdosed again, right?”

  “He’s done this before.”

  “Yeah, but last time the ambulance brought him to St Raphe’s.” I shrug. “They might have his records there if you call.”

  “His information is in our system. He had you listed as his next of kin.” Me. Always me. Mom should be here, should be hearing this, not me, not alone, not again. The doctor’s eyes come together slightly as they look at me. Not in a mean way, more like he feels bad but doesn’t want to look like he feels bad. Probably a good guy, Dr Feinburg. He holds my gaze, voice steady and says, “Your brother, aside from his drug abuse, is suffering from a very serious heart condition called endocarditis.”

  My heart balls up, hard like stone, rises up into my neck then crashes, washing away everything.

  “Endocarditis is an infection of the heart lining and valves. It’s not uncommon in people with a history of drug use. We’re treating it now intravenously, but he will have to continue the treatments when he leaves or it will be fatal.”

  I nod. Fatal. Everything is fatal. Driving a car or walking down the street or playing ball: all roads lead to the end, eventually. But this, this disease, looks like it’s hurried up and stamped an expiration date on B’s forehead. Does he even know? Does he know what he’s doing or that his card is up? Every time he gives me this talk about how life is worth fighting for and he wants to live so he’s going to rehab and blah freaking blah blah blah but now it’s up. Does he want this? He has to if he keeps coming back here. If he beats this, it’ll just be something else. That chick he’s banging will give him AIDS or that guy’s needle he borrowed will give him Hep C and it will never end it will only get worse if he keeps this up but I don’t see him stopping. Not now. Not after he tried and couldn’t… again.

  “Drug addiction is a disease. He can get better.” He reaches his hand out, touches my shoulder.

  Again, that laugh. That short sound that I don’t even recognize as being mine leaves my mouth and words singe my tongue as I say, “I don’t buy that line anymore, doc. But thanks.”

  The doctor pauses, like he wants to say something else, then takes his hand back, and moves over to the other side of the curtained room to check on the other patient. I look down at B, all fucked-up. All skinny and weak with a bad heart. And I know, deep in some pit inside me, that he’s not going to get better. Not ever. And I’m too chickenshit to even kick him awake. To talk to him now while there’s still time.

  Have to walk, have to get out of here. I stand, pushing my feet hard into the tile of the floor, and stomp down the hall, down the stairs. Pace the food court. Pace and wait until the doctor’s words enter my head and can stay there without hurting so much.

  The cafeteria’s closed, but I walk over to the vending machine, buy some crackers and a Powerade, the noise from the machine echoing in the darkened room. I grab the food and pull out my cell.

  “Mom?” I say as she picks up.

  “Tyler? Where are you? Aren’t you home?”

  Can’t she fucking function? I need her, dammit. Swallow it, swallow it, Ty. You love your mom. “No, Mom. I’m at the hospital. With Brandon. He OD’d again.”

  A cleaning cart making its way down the hall outside the cafeteria is the only sound I can hear. “What can you do about it? You should come home.”

  “He’s sick, Mom. Has some heart condition, disease, I don’t know. They say he’s…” Can’t say it can’t think it saying it makes it real. “He’s dying.”

  The cart clanks and then a boom and then a vacuum starts up, sucking up grime. “Come home, baby.”

  Fuck. I end the call. Fine. What did I expect? I sit at an empty table, head heavy, aching. So tired. If I just close my eyes maybe all this bullshit will go away.

  I wake up with a jump as some lady kicks the back of my chair.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles and wipes her eyes with the sleeve on her sweater. Damn, did I fall asleep? How long have I been down here? Got to get back to his room, I can sleep up there. Those chairs at least are padded.

  Grinding my hands into my head, I get up. I pound my way up the stairs, hitting each step hard. Maybe by now it’ll just be the nurses on duty and I can spend the rest of the day without having anyone else come in the room and talk to me about B. I want the quiet.

  Making my way down his hall as I open the jar of Powerade, I swing into his room.

  But it’s empty.

  CHAPTER 26

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31

&
nbsp; TYLER

  The car outside is honking. What time is it? I roll over. Hate it when people honk at dawn. It’s rude. Sore eyes looking over to the clock. 8am. Great. That gives me what, like, three hours of sleep last night? Honk again.

  Dammit. Throwing my legs over the side of the bed, I rub my hands over my face. Hard. Get up, walk down the hall. “Mom,” I call. Suitcases lying around her feet, cup of coffee in her hand. She yanks a bungee around her two carry-ons. She’s leaving. My head tries to keep up with my eyes. “Where are you going?”

  She looks up. “Oh, Tyler. On that business trip to Los Angeles, remember?”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going on a trip.”

  “I thought I mentioned it.”

  “You didn’t.” I grit my teeth. “You can go to California on business, but you can’t bother to call B. He’s really sick and-”

  “I have to go. The car is outside.” She locks the cord around her suitcase and opens the door for the driver, lips pressed tight together, eyes down. Why do I even ask? Just pisses me off. Should know better. Should stop being pissed that she’s too burned to care.

  “You have to help me. We have to get Brandon back into the hospital, he’s says he’s taking the antibiotics as pills but Dr Feinburg said that he needs to get them intravenously and–”

  “I have to go, Tyler.” She kisses me on the cheek. Light kiss. Like she didn’t even hear what I just said. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe every time I say B’s name she goes someplace else. Someplace where he can’t hurt her anymore. My hands ache to reach out and shake her, wake her up, make her help me, make her fight for B, but I don’t. I can’t.

  At least she’s telling me she’s leaving. Last time I only found out she was away on business when I called her office at like eleven at night to find out why she wasn’t home. “How long?”

  “A week.”

  “Can you text me the name of your hotel?” Sounds reasonable. Like something family is supposed to ask.

  “Sure.” I walk up to her, kiss her on the forehead and she wipes her blond hair back behind her ear as she looks up at me. “My car keys are on the counter, OK? Love you.”