by Wendy Mills
“What? Wait. No.” His face turns red. “It is about Trina though. She’s bummed the two of you aren’t friends anymore. I mean, she cries about it.” His face squinches up. The thought of Trina in distress is that bad for him.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really don’t want her to feel bad.”
His face clears. “Yeah? That’s great. You’ll talk to her?”
“What? No. I mean …” I trail off. What on earth can I say to Trina?
She cries about it …
Because of me?
“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t want to talk to Trina. I don’t know what I’d say.
“Awesome!” Chaz begins backing away. Our conversation is over, and he wants to make sure I don’t grab him from behind.
“Chaz,” I say, figuring I’ll start with him and see how it goes.
“Yeah?” He turns, halfway, so he’s in a position to make a quick escape if necessary.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am.”
He nods and darts off.
Jason is shaking his head as I turn back toward him. “Is there always this much drama in Erin’s world?” he asks.
“You caught me on a good day,” I say.
Chapter Forty
In December, I’m late to Creative Writing, but I stop by the restroom to fix my hair, which has escaped its scrunchie and is bouncing enthusiastically into my face. I’m in a good mood, because it’s the last day of school before winter break and I’m making all A’s except one freaking B in calculus, which I’m pretty sure I can pull up. Things have settled down to almost normal over the past couple of months. Well, as normal as things can be when my best friend and I are still not talking, I’m still not allowed to fly, and I’m a walking cancer case waiting to happen. But normal in that Mom’s feeling like her old self and school is school and there’s no trips to the chemo or radiation wards in our future. When I was in the middle of all that, it was like I was in a little dark box with no way out, but now that I’m past it, well, it was only six months of our lives. Mom has told me that we’re in a wait-and-see mode, but I know, I just know that the cancer is gone and that everything is finally going to be okay.
Perspective. I guess that’s what Jason’s been telling me; it’s how you look at things.
I hear something, and I stop in the middle of putting my hair back into a ponytail.
I hear it again, and it’s a toilet flushing on the other side of the big restroom, hidden from where I’m standing in front of the mirror.
Okay, someone flushed the toilet. No big deal.
But as I finish taming my hair into the scrunchie, I hear the toilet flush five more times. Then six. Then seven.
Something must be wrong with it.
I grab my backpack and hear the noises. Animal sounds, like something’s in pain.
I’m late but somehow I can’t leave it alone. Curiosity and the stupid cat and all that.
Moving quietly, I walk around the bank of sinks and poke my head past the tile wall. One of the stall doors is closed, and I see feet underneath. As I stand there, the toilet flushes two more times. Now I can hear someone crying. And talking.
“You want to text? Try texting me now,” I hear someone say, the words thick with tears.
I recognize the voice. I need to leave, I need to get out of here, but somehow I can’t move.
The toilet flushes again, and then two more times in quick succession. Then the door jerks open and Faith comes out. She doesn’t see me at first. She stands at the sink and takes deep breaths, staring at herself in the mirror. She’s stopped crying, but her face is a mess, swollen and red, and she has raccoon eyes from her smeared mascara.
The door to the stall swings back and forth, and I see a smartphone in a pink case in the toilet.
Her phone. That’s what Faith was trying to flush.
I wonder if she and Michael are fighting. But as far as the school grapevine goes, they broke up spectacularly at Dino’s the night I saw them there with Jason. I’ve seen Michael in the halls, and he’s always alone. He’s been a loner for a while now, but this year he seems more aggressively alone. Like he’s on a mission to be alone. He hasn’t said a word to me, but a couple of times I’ve felt his gaze on me, dark and tingly.
Faith takes a deep, trembling breath, pulls a makeup bag out of her purse, and starts applying cover-up in quick, deft strokes.
I take a step backward, with every intention of making a break for the door, but Faith looks up and sees me. Her face twists, and for once she doesn’t look cute. She looks like a little girl who just found out her puppy died. We stare at each other for a moment without speaking.
“Do you need me to …” I trail off. What, am I going to ask if she needs a hug?
“Just go away,” she says, “you stupid dork. Go away.”
Okay, fine.
I leave, but I feel unsettled the rest of the day.
After school, I’m parked at the airport again, surfing the BRCA websites. Stew comes out and gives me an indecipherable look, and then I watch him go back inside, my heart breaking a little. I still haven’t heard from the FAA; I’m still grounded; Tweety Bird still sits broken and alone beside the hangar. Mom says that the FAA is dragging their feet with Stew as well, and that he still doesn’t know if he will be able to keep his instructor certificate.
My phone rings and Jason says, “I’m watching the Godzilla of the heron family high-stepping his way through the shallows. I wish you could be here to see it.”
“Are you on the island?”
“Yeah. I dropped off a charter and decided to come for a little while. Then I started thinking about you. What are you doing?”
“Wallowing,” I say. “It’s cloudy and nasty here.”
“It’s beautiful and sunny here,” he says, his voice full of laughter. “Aren’t you glad you’re coming to visit?”
“Yes,” I say, and my voice vibrates with my need to be away from here, to be anywhere else but here.
“Bad day?”
“Uh … It’s hard to explain. I caught Faith crying in the bathroom today, and seeing her like that … it made me realize that I have no idea what is going on with Trina. I’m such a coward, but I just haven’t been able to talk to her. And I need to.”
“What’s stopping you?” I hear something in the background, the sound of splashing water, and my heart smiles a little when I realize I know what it is: a fish jumping high and crashing down into the water in a spectacular belly flop.
I hesitate. “I guess … I’m afraid we’ll end up hurting each other more. I don’t want that.” It’s the easiest thing in the world to hurt the ones we love. “I wish I had a time machine to go back to before, when everything was still okay.”
“But then you wouldn’t have met me,” Jason says. “I don’t mean that in an aren’t-I-great way or anything. I just mean that bad things happen, and sometimes they make way for good things. Change isn’t always bad, you know?”
“As a rule it is,” I say, staring at Tweety Bird, solitary and broken.
“There’s my glass-half-empty girl,” Jason says.
We hang up a few minutes later and I stare at the browning leaves dancing across the parking lot. They’re already dead and don’t even know it.
I pull up in Trina’s driveway and sit in my car for a while. I know she’s home. Retro, her old green Saab, sits in the driveway.
I need to get out.
I need to go talk to her.
But somehow I can’t.
Eventually, she comes out to me. She’s barefoot, even though it’s about sixty degrees, and she’s wearing a T-shirt and sweats with Big Bird on the butt. She dresses almost normal now, and I realize I miss her outfits. For the longest time I was embarrassed about the extravagant costumes she would wear to school, to the mall, everywhere. She looks like everyone else now. Maybe that’s what she really wanted all along. To feel normal, to feel like everybody else.
She comes up to the passe
nger window and I roll it down.
“You scoping the joint?” she asks.
“Don’t have to. I figure if I wait here long enough Chipper will bring me all your valuables.” Their dog Chipper is notoriously friendly.
We don’t speak for a long moment, and then she opens the door and gets in, wrapping her arms around herself. I turn up the heat.
“What’s up?” She looks at me and I force myself to look back at her. Her hair is its actual color for once and is smoothed back into a blond ponytail. She’s got a tattoo on her upper bicep, Chaz, all loopy and flowery. Goofy girl. What is she going to do if they break up? But she’s talked about getting a tattoo for the longest time, and I always swore I’d go with her and hold her hand. Dorkster Twins activate.
I wonder if Chaz held her hand while she got it done.
“I wanted to say … I wanted to say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry for kissing Chaz. I’m sorry for yelling at you last year. I’m sorry for us not being friends.”
She looks away, out the front windshield. “I’m sorry too,” she says. “I should never have told everybody about your mom. And I’m sorry we’re not friends.”
We don’t say anything for a while.
Then, “How is she?” she asks, looking at me.
“She’s done with treatment. Things are good. She’s thinking about getting her breast reconstructed, but she’s not really all that into it. She says she’s fine going uni-tit.”
We both smile, and then it fades away.
She puts her hand on the door handle. “I’m glad. So … see you around?”
“Sure. I’ll see you around.”
She gets out and goes inside without looking back.
I sit for a moment longer and then back out of her driveway.
The bridge isn’t there yet, but the tiniest spiderweb of tentative hope spans the abyss.
Maybe it will be strong enough.
Chapter Forty-One
Aunt Jill arrives the next day with four-year-old Malcolm to spend a few days with us before Christmas. Malcolm, whom I haven’t seen since he was two, is an unstoppable ball of energy, bouncing from room to room. I babysit him Saturday night, to let Mom and Jill go out by themselves, and the only way I can get him to sleep is to lie with him in the big guest bed.
After I tell him story after story, he finally lies quietly. He blinks owlishly at me and purses his lips, blowing imaginary bubbles in my direction. He pats my hand and I realize I’m absentmindedly rubbing my breasts. They are black and blue. I can’t seem to stop pinching and probing at them, searching for a lump. The thought that something alien and malignant could be growing inside of me feels like fingernails scratching down the blackboard surface of my brain. I can’t stop thinking about it.
“Boo-boo?” Malcolm asks, patting my breast.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
Do I really want to live the rest of my life waiting for a lump to show up?
No.
No, I don’t.
The day after Christmas, Mom drives with me to Florida. Our Christmas was quiet, but nice. I gave her a new sweater. She gave me a new tablet.
On Interstate 75, I check my phone to see if I have a text from Jason or Trina. Trina and I have slowly begun talking again the past week but it feels tentative, uncertain. We’re making progress, though. The foundation is still there.
“Erin, please don’t text while you’re driving.”
“I’m not texting.” I put my phone down. “I’m checking to see if I have a text.”
She sighs and shifts in her seat, putting her hand to her back. She pulled a muscle or something, and it’s been bugging her. I feel bad, her having to spend so much time in a car when her back hurts. Of course, she could have let me drive by myself, but that wasn’t happening. I’m not complaining, though, because it was a feat in itself to convince her to let me go visit Jason at all.
“Erin, I’ve wanted to talk with you about something.”
Buzz, buzz, buzz. Awkward-conversation alert.
“Hmmm?” I check the gas, but we still have plenty. If this gets too bad, I might have to dive for an exit on the pretext of a pee stop. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye but she looks determined. It’s still hard for me to get used to her with white hair, but that’s how it grew back in.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Jason. You know, I thought long and hard about whether to let you go to Florida to stay with his family. It’s just … Look. You’ll have plenty of time to … expand your relationship with Jason as you get older.”
Oh God, she picks now to have the sex talk?
“You’re still my little girl,” she says softly. “I know Jason was a great source of strength to you during my illness, and I know he still is. But … don’t confuse love and gratitude.”
Love? Who said anything about love?
“You don’t have anything to worry about. Jason and I are just friends.” And he has every intention of us just staying friends forever. More and more, this whole let’s-be-best-buds thing is beginning to bug me.
“Just … be careful, okay? Sex is such an important part of an adult’s life, but I just don’t think you’re ready for it. There are so many confusing, adult emotions involved in that type of relationship. I don’t want you jumping into the pool without knowing how cold the water is.”
Seriously, this is about as awkward as my first-period talk.
“Jason and I are not going to have sex.”
We drive in silence for a little bit. My face is burning.
“I met your dad in college,” she says and stops. I can tell she’s embarrassed too, which doesn’t help at all.
I wait. I never realized how little I knew about my dad before. It sounds strange, but until recently I thought I knew everything there was to know about him. High tosses into the air (“Watch the ceiling fan, Justin!”), bedtime poems, and his laughter as I tried to walk in his cowboy boots. But my six-year-old self’s memories aren’t enough anymore, and I will never get the chance to know him any better.
“It took a while,” she continues, “but then I realized I was madly in love with him. It scared me, honestly. We dated for quite a while before we … you know.”
“Sure.” I squirm, halfway wishing for a tractor-trailer to overturn or something, just so she’ll stop.
“You don’t want to regret anything.”
“Okay.”
After a while, I say, “You and Dad were madly in love?”
“Well, yes, of course.” She shifts again in her seat, wincing.
That seems odd to me. She and Dad were once just like Trina and Chaz? The way I want to be with a boy one day?
“How did you know you were in love?”
She looks out the window. “I don’t know how to explain it. I’m not sure anybody can. It’s like trying to explain pain. You can tell someone you hurt, but you can’t really make them understand the pain. Love is like that. I suppose if I was going to try to explain it, I’d say love is something you can live without, but when you have it the world seems brighter, a happier place. It’s easier to smile and to laugh.”
“And Dad? He felt the same way about you?”
“Your dad was so much braver than me. He said he knew the first time he saw me he was going to marry me. It took a long time for me to admit how I felt. Ever since this happened,” Mom touches her prosthetic breast, “I’ve been thinking about how I’ve lived my life. I … have regrets. I regret I wasn’t strong enough to stay with your dad. I never stopped loving him. I just couldn’t handle the worrying all the time when he was up in the air. But if I’d known he only had two more years to live, I never would have divorced him. I would have spent every minute of it with him, right up to the end. You just never know. You never know what’s going to happen.”
“I wish I was brave like Dad,” I say.
“So do I,” Mom says. “Every day I wish I was as brave as he was.”
We drive for a while, and finally I say, “Mom, there’s something I need to tell you.”
She looks at me sharply. I’m guessing her Mommy Alarm is now going buzz, buzz, buzz.
“I got tested for the breast cancer gene,” I say. “I have it. I didn’t want to tell you while you were sick, but now … I wanted to tell you.”
There is an awful silence, and I sneak a glance to see Mom blinking rapidly, her throat working.
“Oh, Erin,” she says, when she can talk. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Her voice steadies. “I don’t understand … How did you get tested? I didn’t think you could get tested until you were eighteen. Why did you keep it a secret?”
“I did it online. You can get tested for a bunch of genetic stuff like that. And … I didn’t want to worry you.”
She shakes her head, and then sighs. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You kids are so much more savvy than we were at your age. I never would have thought … Okay. Well.” Her eyes are glazed with unshed tears. “We need to get you in to talk to a genetic counselor. That way you know all your options, what you’ll need to be thinking about. I wish you had waited … and talked to a counselor. That must have been so terrible finding out on your own. I can’t even imagine.”
“Everyone said that the counselor would just tell me to wait. Mom … I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t. I had to know.” But carrying that knowledge around by myself almost killed me, I don’t say. And, Now I’m not sure I really wanted to know.
Mom takes a deep breath. “I suppose as they do more and more of this kind of testing we’re all going to have to think about how it affects you kids. I suppose … what’s done is done.” She looks real sad, though.
I take a deep breath. “I’ve been wondering … You chose not to take off your other breast, even though you knew you had the BRCA gene and that you may get cancer again. Why?”
She looks out the window and for a minute I think she is not going to answer. Then, “It’s a very personal decision. Nobody can tell you what’s right for you. For me, at the time, just taking the one seemed like the right thing to do. They also told me I need to take out my ovaries, but it seemed like too much. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking more about it. Maybe I will do the surgeries.”