We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  So I like Birdy, and also old stuff she was inspired by, like Nina Simone. And then I like the classic-rock stuff like Guns N’ Roses and the Rolling Stones, circa Sticky Fingers (David B from camp listened to that album all summer long), some David Bowie, Velvet Underground. I like a lot of different kinds of music, just depending. Being in here has made me think sometimes it’s better to look back. Like what has happened before—music, books, movies, life—maybe it was better, more important, before. Wuthering Heights–style. I think there are people who look forward and people who look back, and I have become a person who looks back. Maybe I always was.

  “Oh!” he says. “Oasis. Bright Eyes? How emo of you.”

  “Well,” I say. “I don’t know.” The music shaming. Here it goes.

  “Britney!” He sort of yelps it.

  Exactly.

  I start to be embarrassed, but then I do the opposite. “Nothing wrong with some Britney!” I say. “Come on, she’s very cool.”

  “And JT too. She is,” he says. “They are.” I can’t help but think of how they met, in the Mickey Mouse Club. Like this total alt-world. It brought them together. It’s all this crazy unreality here too. It’s like deep, deep time and space that you have to write all this complicated code or say some wacky spell and turn around three times to get to.

  “Birdy,” he says. It’s like a breath. It breaks a spell.

  “I love her,” I tell him.

  “Me too. You look a little like her.” He unwinds the earphones wrapped around my iPod and puts the left bud in his ear. A smile creeps over his face.

  Beautiful Birdy, with crazy eyebrows.

  Then he leans in, toward me. He puts the right bud in my ear. The music pours in: “Every time that I see your face I notice all the suffering. Just turn to my embrace, I won’t let you come to nothing.”

  It’s so sad and so beautiful. It makes me ache. I look over at Connor. He’s just on the other end of that short wire. His eyes are closed. Even his eyelids are splashed with freckles. In one ear I can hear the shuffle of the nurses and Thelma’s snoring and the click clack of mothers’ and daughters’ high-heeled shoes and I hear Birdy in the other and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know if my colon will be saved or taken, and I don’t know what life will look like to me either way. And I feel all that, I can’t stop feeling in here, but I am also having one of my favorite moments, ever. I can’t breathe and I don’t want to.

  It’s getting darker, and I imagine we are on a beach watching Verlaine and maybe Mabel, too, run in and out of the waves. We both have jeans on, rolled up at the ankles. I’m wearing cool sunglasses, Wayfarers, not aviators. The sun drops. It’s just like that.

  As if he’s read my mind, Connor says, “Let’s pretend we’re not here.”

  I swallow. Hard.

  “Let’s pretend we were never here.”

  I hear him in one ear and I don’t stop listening in the other: “And I’ll stay here if you prefer. Yes I’ll leave you without a word.”

  I feel like I will cry, and I don’t know if it’s from sadness or happiness. All I think is this: Who would you love if you could love? Please tell me who that person would be.

  Day 12: Window Seat

  Day Twelve is pretty much just awful. For one thing, I wake up and shout my usual hello to Thelma, but there’s no shout back. Her television is quiet. When I cock my head and look in through the crack in the curtain, I can see that the bedding has been changed, and there are new sheets pulled up tight, the IV stand empty just like a coatrack waiting for someone else to hang her jacket and hat.

  Thelma is gone.

  When my parents come in, I can’t look at them.

  “Hi,” my mother says, slowly. “Hello?”

  My father hovers by the door, his hands in his pockets.

  I just gulp and look over at Thelma’s side of the room.

  As usual, they don’t get it. “Are you in pain?” my mother says. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

  I nod, though there are tears streaming down my face. This is a different kind of cry. I’ve never realized before how many different kinds there are. But this one, it is a silent cry, the cry, my cry, for another person, a kind of cry I thought was saved for old people.

  Slowly it registers. I can see the realization take over my mother’s face, first in her eyes and then her twitching nose, then her frowning, trembling mouth. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I let her keep it there.

  I am glad my father looks at the floor, because I will dissolve into one million pieces if he looks at me. I will become air. When I was little, it was always my dad and me. Superman rides, raking leaves, me sitting on his lap, pretending I was the one driving the Volvo. But that was all before. It was before high school and it was before this. I am so far from there now.

  No one says anything and then, to add to this joyous moment, Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, comes in. He stands over my bed and sucks at the inside of his cheek, which makes a crazy-loud tsk tsk sound.

  “It’s going to have to come out.” He flips my folder closed. “If not today, then tomorrow or the day after, but I can tell you, it’s going to have to go.” He touches one pudgy hand to his stomach, which is pudgy too.

  Both my parents straighten, like they’re meeting with my high school principal or some head of state.

  “You can try all this.” Dr. Orlitz points to the IV stand, which has a zillion wires coming off it, all connecting to balloons of medicine and liquid food. “And you should try everything,” Dr. Orlitz says. “Everything. You’re young, after all,” he says.

  “She is,” both my parents say at the exact same time. “She is very young.”

  “Can I have a look?” He waddles over to my bed.

  For anyone who’s curious, when a surgeon says to you, Can I have a look?, what he means is, I am going to touch you right now.

  He places his hands over my stomach and squeezes lightly.

  I scream in pain.

  “That hurt?” he says.

  For real? I don’t think I need to dignify that one with an answer.

  “You see that?” He points at my stomach and looks at my parents. “Her stomach is getting very, very hard.” He shakes his head. “You know what that means?”

  Everyone is silent.

  “It’s not a good sign at all. It means the colon isn’t functioning right. It could be getting toxic. If it explodes in there, it’s going to be a real mess. Your daughter could die.”

  Inadvertently I cover my ears.

  “Well, we don’t think it’s going to come to that, do we, Martin?” my mother says.

  “They are finding new drugs all the time. We just have to hang in there,” my father says, but I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

  “It might be a little beyond that.” Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, that asshole, gives me a look that says, We know what’s up, don’t we?

  Stupidly, I grin back at him, because, after all, he’s the doctor, and I do need him on my side.

  He winks at me. “We’re going to have to make some serious decisions,” he says. “We wait too long and it will explode.”

  My mother sits down, and my father puts his hands on her shoulders.

  “See you tomorrow.” Dr. Orlitz grins my way like the villain mugging at the camera in the movies. “We have some serious decisions to make then.”

  So. Thelma is gone and the surgeon is unbearable and my father leaves and my mother stays, just reading the Washington Post silently, and here’s the other unbearably terrible thing about Day Twelve. Connor doesn’t come. The morning goes by and I can hear the wheels of the lunch carts whir and squeak by, but they don’t stop here. I’m getting a new roommate, I’m told. And then I guess it’s afternoon, after school, and what’s worst about Connor not coming to see me is that I can hear him in the hallways, swooping in to all the rooms with his sunshine and his good cheer, and I hear old people laughing and the nurses greeting him and he doesn’t stop here and ther
e is no sunshine at all in here, just the surgeon telling me my life is about to be pretty much over.

  For a moment I wonder why Connor doesn’t come, but then I know why. It’s that I told him about my gross disease, and he went home and Googled it and decided it was so disgusting, just thinking about it, that he couldn’t even do his volunteering job with me. He is letting himself off the hook now so he doesn’t have to be attached to some freak with an ileostomy bag in the real world.

  My mom looks up from her paper just as I come to this realization. Maybe she can see it on my face, the way it must be crumpling like an old Coke can, ripped and ruined.

  “Honey,” my mom says slowly.

  I nod. My throat is just stitched closed. I can’t swallow or speak.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she says. “The surgery, if it happens, and also after. It’s just temporary, honey.”

  I don’t care if that’s what she thinks it is. I am trying to be me. I am trying to stay me, I mean. And stay funny and also keep my sadness inside away from my mother, who will want to take it and hold it and discuss it with me and also take it away from me. She is my mother.

  I see her come toward me. This one time, the first time since we’ve been here in this horrible place just waiting for people to come in and steal my blood and prick me and prod me and tell me what the matter with me is and also be wrong, for the first time I let all of her come toward me, and I lean my head on her chest and I feel her arms around me, her fingers brushing at my hair, and I can’t help it, I start crying. Weeping really. That kind of cry. I don’t think I will ever be able to stop crying, and I am also thinking about Connor, who will never come back here, and Michael Lerner, who was never going to be more than a friend, and every boy who was supposed to love me back. I am crying for the past and also for what I don’t know about even tomorrow.

  I can feel my mother’s arm. I smell her Yves Saint Laurent perfume, from the bottle with the deep-red top that has sat on her bureau for as long as I can remember.

  “Mommy,” I cry into her chest, and she holds me tighter.

  “Mommy,” I say again, and I realize now I’m saying it and I realize now that in all of this I am just a little girl, not like Thelma’s kid, who I know doesn’t have a mother now, but young, like I have never seen myself before, too young for this thing, and also alone. I am crying and crying and also I am hoping my mother will never let me go.

  Day 13: Not Spain

  I wait on Day Thirteen. I wait for the doctors to tell me what’s going to happen to me.

  And I wait for Connor. I want him to come far more than I want Dr. Orlitz with his cold, fat hands to enter the room and let me know my fate.

  My mom hasn’t arrived yet when I hear a tentative knock at our door and my tentative heart soars. Connor! Connor. He is back and he will tell me how he had to leave the hospital early yesterday and he would have texted me to apologize but I can’t use my phone in here. Also, he doesn’t have my number. I will tell him about Thelma. He will sit on my bed and stroke my gross, disgusting hair and he’ll tell me that he can still see down, down and into the real me—or, no!, he’ll say that he doesn’t even have to see to the real me because the this me is great just the way she is.

  I know this is not a likely scenario, but it could be. It could also be this: what will happen to me is so terribly awful that he will have to love me anyway.

  The door opens. And then Collette comes padding in with her damn sneakers, soft as clouds, if clouds could squeak.

  “Hi, darlin’,” she says softly.

  “Hey,” I say, disappointment practically oozing from my pores. “Where’s Thelma?” Just for clarity. I want to make them tell me.

  She looks at me with a face that says what I know, and then she places some pamphlets on my swingy table and for a split second I remember Thelma spinning her wig, but I try to push it back. Collette fans the pamphlets out, and it looks like they are offering a choice of places I might like to visit. A Caribbean island! The beaches of Nantucket! Three days in beautiful Barcelona! I imagine eating pot after pot of paella, which we made in class once when we were studying the region in elementary school. I imagine sleeping in a castle. But soon enough I see these pamphlets do not offer the prospect of adventure and relaxation. The one on top says About Your Ileostomy in a font that makes it look like it’s from the turn of the twentieth century. It says, This booklet includes guidelines to help you care for your new ostomy at home. It’s important to know that you’re not alone. Thousands of people have ostomy surgery each year.

  “Why are you giving me these?” I look away from these pamphlets of doom and also from her.

  “Just for you to take a look,” Collette says. “Whenever you’re ready. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

  I am curled up in a ball, just hoping that How to care for your ostomy at home will remain as foreign and far away as Spain is.

  “Like I said,” Collette says as she turns to leave. “Just whenever you’re ready.”

  The door swings open—that seashell; the ocean—and then it is quiet again.

  While I’m waiting for my parents to come in for the verdict, the phone rings and I can tell by the ring that it’s Connor, that he has clearly managed to get the number from the nurses or—and I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier—he just called the regular hospital operator and got transferred here. Like a hotel. This is just a really, really crappy hotel.

  “Hello?” I say, trying not to sound as eager and crazy as I am to talk to Connor.

  “Hey, doll!” the voice—the girl’s voice—says.

  “Hey, Nora.” I try to mask my disappointment and gather myself up. I can feel myself, gathering. The last time I talked to Nora was, like, ten days ago, but it feels as if it’s been over a century. Like cars had not been invented when I got here.

  “How are you?”

  So sweet of her to check in on me, I think. I mean, it’s only been a century. “I don’t know, Nora,” I say. “Not great. I might have to get surgery, like, tomorrow.” I decide right then that I’m still not going to mention Connor. Even though I don’t know if I’ll ever even see him again, still I have the thought that maybe he could be mine. This is my armor. I want to keep it for myself, this feeling that is almost love and could be love, or what I think love would be if I had just one more minute with him. He could do one little thing. Tell me something true. It would just put me over that invisible line into love.

  “Jinkies!” says Nora.

  Seriously?

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie,” she says.

  I nod, but of course she can’t see me.

  “Well, I was going to tell you some stuff, but it’s kind of ridiculous now. I mean, you have real-life stuff. Like this primal life stuff.”

  I think I give out a laugh, but it is something different. “No. Tell me. I need something else to think about. Other than this primal life stuff.” Apparently I will never stop wanting to torture myself. There is a word for that, isn’t there?

  “Okay, well, if you’re sure.”

  “Yes,” I say. “What’s happening?” I want to know and I so don’t want to know.

  “Well.” And it feels as if she is about to tell me this secret, only for me. This is why I have not turned the lights out on Nora. There is a way she will always have of making me feel like I am the only one. “I started stealing!”

  “Stealing!” I say. “Stealing what? Why?”

  “Lipstick and, like, different kinds of tights. And bras I try on underneath my clothes in the dressing room. Little things.”

  I don’t consider myself a sheltered person necessarily, but I find this information both thrilling and shocking. “Why?” I say it very loudly.

  “Because I can,” Nora says. Her voice has gone from excited whisper to more like she’s decided on something. “It’s terribly wizard.”

  “Wizard.” I have no idea.

  “Good stuff,” she says. “But I see it’s not really that
important right now. I’m gutted for you. Really.”

  “Okay then!” I say. I know I won’t be in some dressing room trying on bras to steal or buy. Even so, I don’t get the fun of it, and I guess I realize I’m caught up on it being, like, wrong. Also? The British crap has got to stop.

  “Also Angelo dumped me.”

  I guess we’re done with the shoplifting talk. “Sorry,” I say. “But I mean, bound to happen, right? Camp is over.” I couldn’t imagine Angelo in the real world, dressed in regular clothes. Or maybe board shorts with no shirt and Sanuks is regular clothes for Angelo. But I can picture Connor being absolutely anywhere. I feel I could teleport him to the moon and he would be charming and sweet and appropriately attired.

  “Thanks a lot,” says Nora. “I didn’t know you were expecting this. Me being dumped.”

  “Well, I haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about it, actually. I mean, sorry not to have called and told you my thoughts on your relationship with a screwed-up camp counselor with no eyebrows.” I realize in this moment the freedom I have. I can say whatever I want. I can relax. No one can turn on an invalid. What would that look like? I realize I can find a way to feel powerful here.

  “Of course, of course,” Nora says. “I’m so sorry.”

  Ha! Nora is sorry. I take it further. “Yeah, well, maybe you should think about other people for once. In general, I mean. Not just with me.”