by Paul Mosier
Also on the list are things like Meowzers has squandered his ninth and final life or Grandma has passed into the next dimension. Meowzers and Grandma are both really old, so either of those could happen any time. One of the things that was on the list was Grandpa has kicked the bucket, but it’s crossed off because it actually happened. There are some things you can worry about that can happen more than once, but a particular person kicking the bucket is not one of them.
That was incredibly sad, Grandpa dying, and it proved to me that things you worry about sometimes do happen.
I slip the journal back into my front pocket as Dad comes to join me at the table. As we wait for the garlic naan to arrive, I sip water and worry about which one of the things on the list of bad news I’m expecting to hear is going to be sprung on me.
“This place has been here since my school days,” Dad says. “It’s where I stole your mom’s heart, between bites of vegetable korma.”
I smile, but I can’t picture the scene. I’m too preoccupied.
“So, how was your first day?” he asks.
“Fine. What did you bring me here to tell me?” I just kinda blurt it out.
Dad takes a sip of water, noisily slurping from his glass. I look at him and smile, then raise my glass and do the same. Every now and then we do this for fun. We’re always talking about how we’ll go to an ice-cream place or restaurant but only order water and then sit there and do this obnoxious slurping.
Having lightened the mood, he’s now ready to give me some kind of bad news. He pushes his water away and begins.
“Remember last week when we took Echo to the orthodontist?”
“Yes, I remember.” I feel relief. He’s probably gonna tell me she’ll need braces. I already have braces, and they’re really expensive. Hopefully it won’t cut into next summer’s vacation funds too much.
“We saw her front teeth were starting to stick out. And get crooked.”
“I know,” I say.
One of the restaurant’s employees—an Indian man in a long shirt—comes out with the naan. He recognizes Dad and lights up.
“Tate! It’s good to see you. This beautiful young woman must have gotten her good looks from Grace, yes?”
“Ha! It’s good to see you, Hari. This is El, our older daughter. El, this is Hari.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
Hari smiles and does a little bow. “Nice to see you again, El. I remember when you were just a babe in your parents’ arms. But it’s been too long! And I hope we see more of you.”
Dad gestures to me. “I’m sure she’ll be a regular, just like her mom and dad.”
Before withdrawing he sets the naan down in front of us. It smells heavenly.
Dad clears his throat. “So, back to Echo’s front teeth sticking out. The orthodontist seemed like the right place to take her for that.”
I nod, tearing a bite-size strip from the Indian bread.
“But the orthodontist sent us to an oral surgeon.”
“Oh?” I say through a delicious mouthful.
“And she sent us to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, which is where we took Echo this morning.”
“If they’re specialists, shouldn’t they pick one of the three? ‘Ear, nose, and throat’ sounds like Neapolitan ice cream, which is exactly what you pick when you can’t decide.”
He doesn’t smile. “And then the ENT sent us to the ER.”
“The what?”
“The emergency room.”
“For an overbite?” I’m about to take another bite of naan, but I set it down on the plate. “Why?”
Dad clears his throat. “Her teeth were being pushed forward by something growing in her mouth.”
“What do you mean, something?”
“A tumor.”
“A tumor?”
“Yes.” He tears off a piece of naan and stuffs it into his mouth. I can tell he’s trying to play it down, like you can just say tumor and then enjoy a bite of naan. “So she’s been admitted to the hospital.”
“Why?”
He swallows and washes it down with a sip of water. “To do tests. There are all sorts of tumors. So, they just want to figure out what it is and then decide what they want to do with it.”
I watch him tear off another bite. He watches me back.
“Don’t worry.” He smiles a totally fake smile. “Everything is gonna be all right.”
I nod.
There’s no way I’m adding this, or any future possible consequences of this, to my list of bad news I’m waiting to hear. Echo is only six. She can sometimes be annoying, but when I think about it, she is pretty much the best little sister I could hope for. I’m not even going to think about what kinds of bad news I might wait for, because it isn’t gonna be anything like that. Echo is gonna be fine.
She’s only six.
“So, tell me about your first day at school.”
I think Dad asks me about school again on the walk home because he doesn’t want me asking about Echo any more. But I suppose he’d ask about school anyway, especially on the first day.
“It was good.” It had been great, but I’m downgrading it.
“Did you make any new friends?”
“Tons.” Maybe one, really, but he’d rather hear tons.
“How was art class?”
“Fine. Miss Numero Uno is beyond strange. She’s always striking poses. She strikes poses between the instructions she gives. And she strikes long poses while we work. Like this.” I stop on the sidewalk and bend my body, twist my neck, put the back of my hand against my forehead.
He chuckles. “Same old Miss Numero Uno.”
“How do you know her, again?”
He kicks a pebble down the sidewalk. “I used to know her from the art world. She’s a painter, I was a painter.”
“You’re still a painter.”
He shrugs. “If you say so. But I’m not painting at the moment.”
“Does she know I’m your daughter? I felt like she was looking at me funny. Like she was deciding whether she wanted to paint me.”
“Well, she is a painter. I haven’t been in contact with her. She might have guessed by your last name.” He spots another pebble ahead and stutters his steps to line up another kick. “And because you look like your mother, whom she also knew. It’s also possible that you’d feel like she was looking at you funny without my having known her.”
I turn to him. “Because I’m the sort of girl who thinks people are looking at me funny?”
He smiles and starts up the front steps of our brownstone apartment. “Maybe because she’s inclined to give people funny looks.”
He punches the code into the keypad and I push the door open. We head up the two flights of stairs to our two-bedroom apartment. “Miss Numero Uno is known in the art world for her eccentricity,” he says. “The school puts up with a lot of strangeness from her because it looks good to have her as part of the art staff.” We arrive at our door, one of two on the third floor. He pulls the key from his pocket and unlocks it.
We are met by the white and green light of our living room. It’s white from the walls and green from the tree filling the window, growing up from the sidewalk planter outside.
My list of attractive features of our apartment, somewhere near the beginning of my current tiny journal, goes something like this:
One: Almost located in the Village. (Practically. I was barely exaggerating when I said we lived in Greenwich Village.)
Two: Tree-lined street. (Also lined with parked cars on both sides.)
Three: Almost never find people sleeping at the top of the steps outside, because there isn’t much of a landing.
Four: Small size encourages close-knit family.
Five: Small size makes for quick cleaning.
Six: Small size means everything is within reach at all times.
Seven: Neighborhood is colorful and interesting. And not just the negative sort of colorful and interesting.
The apartment really is kinda pretty in spite of being tiny and ancient and falling apart, but at the moment it’s mostly too quiet. Echo is conspicuously absent.
Outside they’re tearing up the street with scraping machines and the town house next door is being gutted so that rich people can make it fabulous and then move in, so there’s plenty of noise. But there’s no Echo talking to herself while she plays. There isn’t the sound of her practicing the keyboard while forgetting to use the headphones so we get to hear the same twenty notes of music over and over again. Nor is she reading aloud like she does, which always drives me crazy. I’ve been so looking forward to the day she will read silently. But I wouldn’t mind hearing it right now.
Echo and I share a room, which is the quietest of all at this moment. I should just enjoy having it to myself, ’cause soon enough it’ll get crowded and noisy again. But, to be honest, it’s making me sad.
I remember when Echo was born and she came home from the hospital. At first she was in Mom and Dad’s room, but before she turned one, when she could sleep through the night, she moved into my room. First in a crib, and then Dad put together a bunk bed for us to share. I didn’t think I’d like sharing a room with her, but I kinda got used to her and the little noises she makes in her sleep, babbling and then talking to herself as she got older. She’s always sort of hid behind me whenever we’re in public. So naturally she’d be happy to have me near enough to be in my shadow, even when we sleep. And she does sleep right beneath me, in the lower bunk of our bunk bed.
Mom and Dad say it’s perfectly normal, but everything I do, she wants to do. If I draw a unicorn, she draws a unicorn. She doesn’t have any original ideas, and I think Mom and Dad ought to encourage her to do her own thing instead of mimicking me. But right now I wouldn’t mind having her around, doing exactly whatever I’m doing. And if she was around I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing, which is standing in the middle of the room feeling sad.
I turn on the radio to quiet the emptiness. My dad has glued the dial so it’s stuck on the public radio classical station. He thinks it’s going to make me and Echo grow up to be geniuses or something, but I’ve kind of gotten used to it by now. I actually like it, though I didn’t talk about liking it with any of the kids at my old school, except the ones in band.
I climb into my bed and open my English textbook to the Emily Dickinson section. It includes only five of her poems, which isn’t nearly enough, and it doesn’t include any of my favorites. But that’s okay.
I begin reading one of them. It’s about a fly buzzing on a window in a room where everyone is waiting for the narrator to die.
I read it, and I look to the window expecting to see a fly. There isn’t one, but the room seems suddenly darker.
I slam the book shut.
I can read Emily Dickinson later.
Dad picks up Chinese food for the two of us for dinner, since Mom is still at the hospital with Echo. Sometimes it’s fun when it’s just Dad and me for dinner—eating takeout at the table—but it doesn’t feel fun tonight. I put on the classical station to try to brighten things, but they’re playing some gloomy nineteenth-century funeral march.
Opening fortune cookies is always fun, so I crack mine open before I’m even done eating to try to change the mood.
“What’s it say?” Dad asks.
I unfold it, then turn it over. It’s blank on both sides.
“This can’t be good.” I show it to Dad.
“No news is good news.” He’s always trying to see the bright side of things.
“Good news is good news,” I say, correcting him. “Can I have yours?”
“Sure.” He slides his cookie across the table to me. I crack it open, but his fortune says Having a party? Ask about our catering!
That’s the worst—when your fortune cookie tries to sell you something or impart some ancient wisdom instead of telling you what to expect. Really what I’d hoped is that it would say Echo is going to be fine. But no fortune cookie ever said that.
After dinner I do the dishes and we head out to the hospital. It’s a pretty evening, the late summer light draining from the sky over the apartments and town houses, but it doesn’t seem right. I know the neighborhood perfectly well, but walking to the subway station it seems different. The trees smell like trees, the bodega smells like bodega, but everything is just a little bit off.
On the subway I make a list of things that are possibly wrong with Echo. Dad is used to seeing me with a pencil in one hand and my tiny journal in the other, and if I don’t offer to show him what I’m working on, he doesn’t ask to see. As the subway rolls uptown I come up with these:
Possible Diagnoses for Echo
Thorn in Paw
Ice-Cream Allergy
Hoof and Mouth Disease
Scrivener’s Palsy (Writer’s Cramp)
Stink Eye
Abdominal Abomination
Crazy Face
It’s a good list but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make me smile and it doesn’t distract me.
Dad reaches for my hand as we walk down the sidewalk on the few blocks between the subway and the hospital.
“I love my first-period teacher,” I say. “Mr. D.” I’m saying this to change the subject in my head from how much I hate hospitals, how scared I am of them.
“What does he teach?”
“English.” I’m not thinking of the time Grandpa went to the hospital and died.
“English is always your favorite.”
“Yeah. But I can tell Mr. D is gonna be especially great. We’re already reading Emily Dickinson.” I’m not thinking about the moaning in the corridors or the assorted unpleasant smells, like mop buckets that the cleaning crews roll around to soak up everything dreadful that’s supposed to be inside someone’s body that somehow ends up on the floor. I’m not thinking about how every time I walk into a hospital every part of my body that has ever hurt starts hurting again.
We walk through the entrance, and in spite of the colorful paintings of zoo animals on the walls meant to make the sick children happy, my arm hurts from memories of vaccinations. We stand at the reception desk and I feel my wrist broken from falling off my skateboard three years ago. Walking to the elevators my toe aches from when I broke it on the dresser leg last year. The elevator door opens on the seventh floor and I feel every headache I’ve ever had, all piled up as one.
We step off. Having been here earlier today, Dad knows the way to Echo’s room.
“Remember, honey—stay positive.”
“Why wouldn’t I be positive?”
“Exactly. Everything’s going to be fine. But be super nice.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He smiles. “Do you feel okay?”
“Of course.” I start to feel dizzy.
The young nurse at the desk stands up. She’s wearing polar bear scrubs that look like pajamas. “Are you breathing, sweetheart?”
“Why wouldn’t I be breathing?” Because, as I realize, I’ve just forgotten to. So I take a big gulp of air as Dad grabs my arm to steady me.
The nurse comes to my side. “Nice deep breaths. In through your nose, then out through your mouth. Nice and slow.”
I nod.
“You okay?” the nurse asks.
I nod again.
“Are you Echo’s sister?”
“Yes.”
She smiles. “She looks like a miniature version of you. She’s very spirited.”
My mouth smiles, and Dad holds my hand as we walk down the hall.
Everyone always says that. That she’s my mini-me. She was named Echo because she looked just like I did when I was born, and my dad started laughing and crying simultaneously and uncontrollably exactly the way he did when he saw me being born. I was the Laughter; she was the Echo.
I think she got the better end of that deal.
We enter room 726 and move inside.
“Hello!” we say.
“Hi!” Echo looks hap
py.
“Hello, El,” Mom says. “Please wash your hands before you go near Echo. We need to get in the habit of doing that. Okay, honey?”
I nod and join Dad, who is already at the sink lathering his hands. Echo is in a big bed with wheels and metal rails on the sides, the kind that keep you from falling out. She’s hooked up to an IV that’s dripping some sort of clear liquid into her arm. She’s wearing a blue gown with dolphins and sailboats all over it. A Disney movie plays on a TV up high on the wall opposite her bed. All of it makes me feel sick, and mad, like they’re trying to trick Echo into thinking this is a happy place.
Dad stands beside her bed. “How you feeling, kiddo?”
“Good.” She says it like she means it. Like she doesn’t have a care in the world, like this is a vacation spot and not a place people come to have body parts removed.
I look to Mom, who’s smiling, but it’s kind of a grim smile. She’s as pretty and elegant as ever, with her freckles and sharply cut brown hair, but there’s a shadow of worry across her face.
Down the hall a baby cries.
“They’re bringing me a Popsicle!” Echo says.
“Lucky.” I move to the bench by the window and sit. I remember to breathe. A big breath in, then hold it, and let it out. Echo is going to be okay.
A kid on a bed is rolled past our door. He’s breathing through a tube.
“They have movies all the time,” Echo says. Dad turns to the TV to see what she’s watching. They’re both smiling.
A sound at the window spins my head around. It’s a big fly, bumping up against the glass, trying to get out of here. Like the Emily Dickinson poem, where the people are gathered waiting for someone to die.
It knocks me from the bench.
“El?” Mom rises from her chair. “What happened?”
I’m on the floor, trying to rise from the cold tiles with my palms. “I heard a fly buzz.”
Then I get dizzier, and everything goes black.
When I come around I’ve been lifted onto the cushiony bench by the window. Mom and Dad and a nurse are hovering over me.
“How do you feel?” The nurse has two fingers against my wrist, checking my pulse.