“You’ll be back,” he says.
And for the first time I believe it might be true.
Day 11: Frog, Prince, Fairy Tale
Then it’s back to the torture, back to the night rounds and then the morning rounds. Except after the morning rounds on Day Eleven, Connor and Verlaine come.
Again.
“Hey!” Connor says, peeking in. It’s so, so cute because Verlaine peeks in the same way, just at the bottom of the crack in the door.
I sort of love them. I nod. I can’t wait for Verlaine to jump up onto my bed, sweet as a lemon drop, and for Connor to sit at the end of it and maybe touch my feet through the blanket. Or maybe just sit in my mother’s chair. Whatever.
He glides in. Today he has on a long-sleeved polo shirt and . . . wait for it . . . it’s purple! He has a backpack, and he’s wearing the straps over both shoulders. He’s so preppy, but it’s exactly right for him. He is just so different from me, different from the old me, the me on the inside, but I make a mental note to perhaps make a costume change tomorrow.
He stands at my bed, clutching Verlaine’s leash. Verlaine is smiling, his tongue sort of hanging out of his mouth, waiting and hoping.
I don’t want to say, You guys! Come sit down on my bed, which is basically a hotbed of germs and disgustingness, so I just lie there, waiting.
“What?” I say when no one else says anything.
He taps his toes.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Connor says.
I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I can’t help but think that my mother or the doctors and nurses have sent Connor here to make me get out of my bed, which, while it is a hotbed of germs and disgustingness, is my hotbed. It is mine and I am its. I cross my arms and turn my head.
“Come on, Lizzie,” he says.
I can’t help but note that he has said my name after a sentence. I can’t decide if this is more amazing or less amazing than his sneakers and his purple shirt. Just the sight of those sneakers makes my heart lurch. I try not to think that Connor is probably here in my room saying my name after a sentence because it’s his job to say my name post-sentence. It’s probably in the Candy Striping Handbook, right there along with take patient’s wrist and run fingers along it, ever so softly. He’s just doing what he’s supposed to do, which is to be nice and bring his dog around to make people—sick people—happy. Connor has no feelings for me at all. He wouldn’t when I was healthy, and he certainly wouldn’t now that I’m not.
So I’m trying not to think that, in addition to being here and in pain and recently transfused and about to lose my colon, I could also get my heart broken. Is that irony? Someone somewhere is mocking me.
“Not today, guys!” I say in my most sparkly voice. “I’m tired.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Today. Now, even. I went home for Verlaine and came straight here just to get you up.”
“That’s so nice of you,” I say, but my heart’s not in it. No, my heart is in it, but I don’t want it to be, and I’m trying to make what I say make it not in it. I am his job, I think again. I admit, I am crushed.
“Nice? I’m actually getting paid by the hour. In cotton swabs and alcohol rubs. So take your time.”
Maybe he read my mind. I laugh anyway.
From behind the curtain, Thelma laughs too. “Go, already,” she says.
She has this big, deep laugh I’ve never heard her use. But why would I? Who laughs in here?
“Can you give me a second?” I say, to all of them really. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for one of the orderlies to pull back the blanket to reveal my . . . gowns. And my hospital socks.
“No problem,” Connor says. “I’ll go grab Collette and wait for you outside.”
I smile. “Sounds good.”
Not a moment later the nurse comes in, sneaking up in her sneakers like all the nurses do, which makes me realize why they call them sneakers.
Collette is fleshy and blond with really dark roots, and she’s dunked herself in so much perfume I might crash from the overpowering smell if I don’t stop and drop from weakness. “You’re heading out!” She adjusts my wires. She doesn’t unclip me so much as she untangles me and helps me sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll get those two cuties now,” Collette says when she’s done.
A few moments later—three heartbeats—and Connor is back. “Well, look who’s up and about!” he says. He and Verlaine are, like, bopping together, in tandem. Connor holds out his elbow. “May I?” he asks.
Again I think of gowns, for me a long one, maybe green silk, that ends when I’m all the way across the room. I touch the L of his arm with one hand and lean the other on my little coatrack stand, which glimmers with the pouches of all the stuff that isn’t curing me.
“Where are we going?” The little plastic circles on the bottom of my socks make my feet stick on the linoleum. The elastic digs into my ankles.
“Oh, everywhere.” He walks toward the door. Verlaine practically hops beside him, his nails clicking on the linoleum.
Outside my room is another world inside another world. It’s all like one of those beautiful Russian nesting dolls Nana once gave me. One fits in the other that fits in the other that fits in the other. But where is the end? How does the outside tell me how many are inside?
I guess you just keep walking. I do: I shuffle out into the hallway—the sock rubber seems to make this more difficult—next to Connor but falling a little behind.
“Look at you!” a nurse says.
“Hiya, Marion,” Connor says.
“You got her out!” she says. “You guys heading to the nightclub on six?” She chuckles.
How amusing, I think. The humor bar in here is a little low for my taste.
“How does it feel, honey!!!” she asks me.
I cannot stand the way everyone seems to be speaking in exclamation marks. I drop what I now see is the tight grip I had on Connor’s elbow.
Something small but solid whirls by us, and Connor reaches his hand up and catches it. A frog’s tongue to a fly. Perfect. I can see Connor walking through the world in his own way. With power. He has it.
You know who doesn’t have it? Me. What little I had—the good hair, the field hockey stick—is gone now. I’d say you really don’t know power until you’ve got none, but that’s not really true. The girls I know at school, the evil, cruel ones, they know what they’ve got. Lydia and Dee and I, we were never like that.
He turns the object over in his hand. A rubber chew toy.
“For the sweetest dog in the world,” Marion says, winking.
Connor beams, and the light inside him somehow manages to burn brighter. “Awesome,” he says. “He can’t have toys in here, but I’m keeping it for him.” He wags the rubber bone at Marion and sticks it in his back jeans pocket.
“Come on,” he says, as if now we have the keys to somewhere. To anywhere.
He and Verlaine are just ahead.
All I can do is drag myself and all my IVs and wires along and follow behind.
Wait for me.
We walk the long hallway and then turn the corner, and there are these large orange armchairs set out in front of a big window, which looks out onto a massive construction site. We’re near the elevator bank, and I can hear the ding of arrivals and the closing doors of departures.
I’m exhausted. I sit. I might never be able to get up.
Verlaine lies at Connor’s feet. We both look out the window.
Again with the silence. And then I ask it, again. “So I told you my story, can you please tell me yours now?”
“Like, I’ll show you mine and you show me yours?”
I can’t tell if this is sweet—like flirting—or if it’s incredibly obnoxious. “Kind of,” I say. “But without the showing part.” I drag my socks back and forth, and they hiccup along the linoleum.
“Damn!” He snaps his fingers.
“Trust me,” I say. “Nothing good to see h
ere. Trust.”
“I doubt that, I do. But I joke, I joke. Okay. I get it. It’s my turn for show-and-tell.”
“Just tell,” I say.
Big breath in. And then he goes, “Well, last summer, when I turned sixteen, I was walking home from the movies with my friends.”
“Walking?” I say. Because it’s really hard to walk home from the movies from where I live. You have to drive almost anywhere.
“Yeah, the one in Georgetown. I live just a few blocks behind it. It was afternoon.”
I nod. Oh. Connor is rich. In the real world, he’s all urban and private-school and probably has a summer place at the beach where he takes all his skinny, cool, private-school girlfriends. He probably has a ton of girlfriends. He is so obviously just doing his job here.
In the real world, I would never know Connor. He would never see me. Which, in my weirdo world, makes me like him more.
“Anyway, we had all sort of broken off for home. For some reason we weren’t hanging at my buddy Brad’s that day, which is strange, because we usually did. Or my house, because neither of our parents were ever home. It was kind of great then. Anyway, I was alone, walking home, listening to “Marquee Moon”; you know that Television song?”
I don’t say yes and I don’t say no, but I sort of wave the question away with my hand.
“Out of nowhere I saw this little girl.” He shakes his head. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
I urge him on with my eyes and a little lunge of my head, which I know makes me look like a crazy person. Or a lizard. “Well,” I say. “I’m not hiding much here.” I glance down at myself. I am smaller than I used to be. In every way.
“I know you’re not. That’s why I’m telling you.” He clears his throat. “Anyway,” he says. “Anyway, so I saw her—really cute little girl, and then this car speeding off Wisconsin Avenue, breakneck-like, around the corner. Hits her. I mean hits her. This mean squeak of the brakes and then this massive thud, and she is flying. I mean flying.”
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Yeah. Then there is the sound of her hitting the asphalt. It happens in parts. It’s not one sound. It’s like her bones hit the ground at different times. Anyway, anyway,” he says, shaking away the thought. “That girl was over a year ago, right?” Connor continues. “But I still remember that sound. And then I remember the blood, everywhere, and her mangled body. Blood out of her nose and eyes even. That’s how she was when I ran up to her to help her, because the car drove away. I know I was screaming. Then it is just a big blur.”
“Wow,” I say. I know it’s a stupid thing to say, though.
“Anyway, so people came rushing out of their houses and then her mother ran out, and then there were all these ambulances and police cars. Then everyone, like, turned to me. The paramedics, the neighbors, the police, everyone. They asked me if I’d gotten the license plate number. But I hadn’t gotten the plate number. But they just kept asking me and asking me. I hadn’t even thought to look or take my phone out and take a picture. I just didn’t think of it.”
I swallow, hard. “It’s not your fault you didn’t look at the plates!” I say, with feeling. It isn’t, I think. I mean, what a horrible thing! “And anyway, you ran to help the girl. And also? That wouldn’t have kept the girl from getting hit,” I say. I feel the need to call her the girl, to keep her a stranger.
“She died,” he says. “The girl.”
I don’t say anything.
“Like, right in front of me. I had all this guilt. I still do. It’s hard not to think about it. My mother’s friend, who’s a doctor, suggested I do this.”
“A psychiatrist,” I say.
“Yeah, so he said I should get Verlaine his Canine Good Citizen certificate and take him into hospitals. That was like six months ago.”
“Wow.” I say it again. The situation seems to demand the word.
He’s silent.
“What did he have to do to get the certificate?”
“Crazy stuff,” Connor says. “I had to open umbrellas in his face. Scream at him as he heeled. He was epic. He’s a fantastic dog.”
I pet Verlaine’s head. “I can see that.” I look outside the window and watch a crane dump more dirt on a pile of dirt.
“He thought it would make me feel better to do something positive.”
I nod. “So positive,” I say. My heart, like, spills out. It’s so big for him, big for Connor. All that gratitude again.
“It’s like I get to give joy. Verlaine does anyway.”
“You do too,” I say because I forget to stop myself.
Connor looks me in the eye, and I don’t care that my hair is greasy and flat and that my cheeks are swollen, or that I’m in these hideous powder-blue hospital robes. He’s so close. I can see his soft, light lashes, almost as long as whiskers. They flutter. What else aside from lashes flutters? I think only wings.
I know I need to get back to my room, but I don’t say anything about it. If it were anywhere else, even in the sun, we would kiss. Right now. But in here is a place of sickness and sadness.
I can’t even picture it. I mean, I won’t let myself. I’m trembling, but not from feeling sick or cold or in pain. That—this—is fear and it’s also hope. I try to push it down and make it stop, which makes me swallow a lot of air, which makes me cough. Good to know this dignity of the sick you hear about will never, ever apply to me. But really, take all that away and I am trembling from possibility and panic and wishing.
“So that’s the story. Okay?” Connor asks.
Is it okay about the story or am I okay, I can’t tell which he’s asking, but I do know this: If I don’t move, maybe he won’t realize I’m here and maybe I won’t detonate the future.
“You’re still you, too,” I say.
I can see Connor swallow, his little Adam’s apple bobbing along his neck. “Hard to tell,” he says.
I nod.
“So!” Connor says.
“Anyway,” I say.
“Anyway.”
We look outside and I try to steady myself, waiting for what comes next.
Day 11 Continues! We Were Never Here
Connor and Verlaine and I walk slowly, as slowly as I have ever walked, back to my room. They wait outside while I run to the bathroom in my room, run being the operative term for stagger, lurch, stumble, lunge, and then when I’m sitting on the side of my bed, breathless, trying to untangle all my various wires, I say, “Okay, you guys can come in.”
In they come, the very portraits of good health. It just kills me.
“What do you miss most in here anyway?” Connor sits down in my mother’s chair.
“Well, aside from, like, my life, you mean? Like my freedom?”
Connor smiles, this time with no teeth, which, I gotta say, manages to be just as charming as the smile with all the teeth. “Yes. Aside from that.”
I sigh. “Being outside. Walking with Mabel. Being near water with Mabel.”
He nods.
“Also? Food.”
I know I should have said friends. Or going to see bands. Or sneaking out to drink beer. Something normal.
“What kind of food? Like, what would you eat if you could eat?”
It’s like Thelma!
“Ice cream sandwiches,” I say. “Crab cakes. Milk shakes.” So let’s just say this is all in the Candy Striping Handbook. I will still play along. My heart is already in it.
“Virginia is for crabs!” he says.
“Actually, it’s lovers. Virginia is for lovers,” I say, slightly embarrassed by the word. Lovers. “Maryland is for crabs.” But I get it. The District is for cool kids, and the rest of us are suburban losers. I get it. The girls Connor knows are probably all blond and tan and easy in their skin. Everything slides over them; nothing sticks. Or they wear vintage dresses and have short black bangs and wear nose rings. Or they have big black glasses and speak seven languages and have just moved here from London because their parents are diplomats
.
“Don’t forget hot dogs,” says my roommate.
“Hi, Thelma,” I say.
“Hi, Thelma,” says Connor.
“What kind?” He uncrosses his legs and places his elbows on his knees. He is killing me. Verlaine stretches out, exposing his stomach, and I scratch him. “Of milk shake.”
“Chocolate,” I say. Easy.
“I would miss strawberry,” he says.
“Strawberry!” I giggle. “Very pink.”
Connor laughs and sweeps his hair—it really is strawberry blond—out of his face. His hands. They are crooked and beat-up and eaten and soulful. They have feeling.
“Books? What’s your favorite book? Like, what are you reading now?”
“I can’t read in here. I mean, I just can’t.”
“Okay then, what would you read if you could read, I mean?”
“Hmmm,” I say. Wuthering Heights is on this swingy table over my bed, but I don’t think he can see it. That’s some intense love in that book. Deadly. Haunting. Dark, dark love. I’m not that far in, but I can’t help but note that everything important happens when the characters are young. It’s like all that matters. “I like lots of different stuff. Like Stephen King, and also The Handmaid’s Tale,” is what I tell him.
“Don’t know that,” Connor says,
“It’s about this cult society where this woman has to have sex every month until she gets pregnant.”
“Lovely,” says Connor.
“Yeah, it’s pretty dark. Okay, what else? Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451.”
“Oh my God, I love that book!” Connor says. “I love Ray Bradbury. Stephen King is good. The Stand.”
My heart leaps. I’ve chosen correctly. “Yeah, totally. The Stand.”
“Hey, do you have any music here?” he asks.
I can hear the sound of Thelma fidgeting, as if to say, please, please don’t play music in here. She clears her throat.
“We’ll be quiet!” he says to the curtain as he stands and grabs my iPod off its charger. “Promise!”
Connor knows everything.
I watch in horror as he scans through my iPod. Books are easier than music. To be right about, I mean. I have some pretty lame stuff on there. Like, “Hey There, Delilah,” which I love, by the way. I’ve got Kelly Clarkson! Kind of as a joke; kind of serious. But thankfully, Tim loaded it up with at least some good music before I went to camp, stuff he knows I love. He put on other women singer-songwriters, mostly Brits, and I think it’s because he knows I love Birdy and he must have listened to Birdy Radio on Pandora. Gabrielle Aplin, Emeli Sandé, Jasmine Thompson. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of sweet. I mean for him to do this kind of research for me. Even if it’s more for Zoe. Wouldn’t that be nice? To have someone who wants to impress you so much he listens to Pandora for your little sister? I wonder if they are having sex after all.
We Were Never Here Page 6