We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Nora waits a beat, like she’s not sure what she’s hearing or that I’ve actually defied her, and she isn’t sure how to react to this new phenomenon. “You’re right,” she says. “You’re so right.”

  Power.

  “When do you find out about the surgery?”

  “Today,” I say. “I should go, actually. My parents are here. Everyone is waiting for everything.”

  “I’m so sorry about what’s happening to you,” Nora says, and I know that she means it. I can’t blame her. In fact, if it were me, I might do what Dee and Lydia are doing, which is kind of not doing anything. Their mothers sent really nice flowers. At least Nora has had the balls—the bollocks?—to call me.

  “I’m sending you some music,” she says. “Like on a CD. Old-school. To your house. Where I know you’re going to be soon.”

  Suddenly I feel bad that I was mean to Nora, because I am filled up with gratitude. She is a hard friend to have, but she is also a real one. We have all these years behind us. Summer years, I think. That is a different kind of time. “Thank you,” I say. “Can’t wait to get it,” I say, and I really mean it.

  “Tell me what happens,” Nora says. “Okay?”

  “I will.” I am getting used to talking about it without wanting to cry. I am hardening. And softening too. You can, it seems, get used to anything.

  Nora and I say good-bye, and then I do what I always do here: I wait some more.

  My parents are back, pretend-smiling so much I think I will die not from my exploding colon but from just having to look at them while we wait for the surgeon. My mother thinks that Dr. Orlitz just wants to cut everyone open. That he, like, gets some kind of commission or something. Here’s what I think: just let him get it out and stick on that hateful bag and then we can all just go home.

  Home. Lily pad, I think. Big and wide and floating in the sun.

  Just then, the phone rings again.

  “Oh, hi!” I say to Connor. It’s like I’m home, lying in bed, phone under the covers, volume low, waiting. It almost feels normal. Everything is almost. I cup my hand over the receiver like they do in old movies with old phones and I look at my parents, hard. For once they get it, and together they stand and together they leave.

  “Okay, hi,” I say. I try not to sound as excited as I am that he’s called me.

  “Hope you don’t think it’s creepy that I’m calling you,” Connor says.

  “Not at all,” I say. I wonder where he is; I wonder about his room. Does he have posters? Are they of soccer players or surfers or bands or girls on sports cars? I’m really hoping it’s not girls on sports cars, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t.

  “They connected me from the big hospital hub.” He laughs. “There’s still this whole cloak-and-dagger thing here. Like, I can’t know your room number, even though I’ve hung out in your room.”

  “Nice to know I’m protected!” I say. But of course I’m not protected at all. Against anything.

  “I was getting reviewed yesterday!” he says. “So they followed me around and made sure Verlaine was cool and that the patients were cool with Verlaine and me.”

  “Oh,” I say. “How weird.” I don’t add about the devastation of hearing him in every room but mine. That would make me seem crazy, but that’s what it was. Devastating.

  “I thought it would be embarrassing to go to your room. Like maybe I haven’t been the way I’m supposed to be with you.”

  He just said, when I’m with you, I think. Or something very close to that. I swallow. I wonder if he has a big room or a small room. What his window looks out onto. What color the walls are.

  “Hello?”

  “Sorry!” I say. And then I realize something. It’s just our voices. He can’t see me now, my gross dry skin or the hair that’s starting to sprout on my cheeks from the steroids. I look like a hamster. So it’s just us talking, the two of us, with only the usual inequality of me wanting him to like me and the possibility—probability—that he will not like me back. “I hope you got a good review.”

  “I don’t know yet,” he says. “I mean, you probably have bigger things to think about right now, but in case you heard me walking around, I wanted to tell you why I didn’t stop by.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Yeah, I did hear you guys.”

  “I’m not coming in today. I’ve got to study, I’m so behind. What’s going on in there?”

  Without thinking, I blurt it out. “Thelma died!”

  “Oh my God,” Connor says. “I thought she was just getting chemo.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I swing the swingy table back and forth, slowly. The pitcher wobbles. I only wish it was glass and that it would fall and shatter.

  “Are you okay? About Thelma, I mean.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Connor is quiet for a moment, like it’s that moment of silence at the Oscars for all the movie people who have died. “What else?” he says.

  I tell him about Dr. Orlitz and his hands and I tell him about waiting to know and how sad I am for my parents and how jealous I have always been of Zoe, who is older and has a, umm, I drop the boyfriend part, but she’s older and doesn’t have a disease, and I tell him how stressed I am to miss school, I mean academically even, because I am into school, and I tell him how nervous I am that I’m going to be so behind. I tell him I’m a walking time bomb.

  “I just really need to get the hell out of here,” I say.

  “I know. I mean, I like the hospitals now. They’re these really safe places for me. They’re where I see people I have come to . . . know so well. But I’m not sick or in pain or facing what you’re facing.”

  He just gets it. I want to ask him if he thinks I am disgusting. I want to ask him how he feels in general about me. I almost feel like I could.

  But I don’t. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s kind of safe for me too. People are taking care of me, and my parents are here and not fighting in front of me, barely even bickering. It’s nice in some ways, it’s true.” Why me, I can’t help but think. Why has he chosen me?

  “Sometimes I feel like outside of the hospital is the real prison part.”

  “But you get to go to school and go on walks with Verlaine and maybe drive to the beach or something. I want to get outside! What I would give to just be free for a minute from all this.”

  “I hear you. I don’t like to drive,” Connor says. “But yeah, our summer house is on the Eastern Shore. We used to call it the visiting house. It’s close to DC, so my parents can go to and from more easily. I used to go sailing all the time there. Not anymore, though.”

  Duh, I think. Sailing.

  “The only time I feel good is when I’m here. Like when I’m here with you, just for example. I don’t have to be this person who’s supposed to be all happy. Who I was before that accident.”

  “I understand.”

  “So, not sure if I actually said this, but she died,” he says. “The girl.”

  “You did,” I say. “You said.”

  “She was wearing a green dress,” he says. “I never talk about this. I swear. It must seem like it’s so normal for me, but it’s not.”

  “It doesn’t seem normal. I mean, it doesn’t seem like you tell everyone. It seems totally normal, though. In the regular outside world, I mean. To tell people what happened. I’m sorry.”

  “This sounds so cheesy to say, but I feel like you’re sick on the outside and I’m sick on the inside. No one can see mine. But it’s really there,” he says.

  “Sick?” I say. “You don’t seem sick.”

  “But I feel it,” he says. “I don’t know why or how I’m even having this conversation with you. But I guess for me the sick part and the conversation part is why, umm, I like hanging out there so much with you, I mean.”

  I cannot make my breath start again. He is telling me something important.

  “You have this hard shell. Like what you were saying that first time we really talked. The angry part of y
ou. But there’s also this sort of soft inside part of you. It makes a person want to get to that inside part.”

  “What, like I’m an Oreo?” I say. I can’t stop myself.

  Connor is silent for a moment. “No,” he says. “I didn’t say that. But that is what I’m talking about.”

  For some reason I felt that until this moment that I could say and do anything. That everyone but me was unharmable. Like, how could I ever hurt this perfect boy? Before it felt like I was the only one who could get damaged here. Who could be wounded. But I can see now that maybe Connor could be hurt too. Maybe I’m not just his job, or some sick person he has to save, a dead girl he has to bring back to life. Because I’m here. I’m alive.

  I don’t need to be saved.

  “Sorry,” I say. I pick at an invisible stray thread on my gown. “I’m actually kind of sick inside too. I want to hide that.”

  “Me too,” he says. “Blue inside. Guilty.”

  Blue inside. “Guilty?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Also? You have fantastic eyebrows.”

  I laugh and run my finger along them, imagine it’s Connor touching my face. I wonder what is really wrong with Connor, if what he’s saying is true. If he’s that sad.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” Connor says. He sort of whispers it. He sort of coughs it. I think of his chewed-up fingers moving toward his mouth to cover it.

  I want to believe Connor with every cell of me. That he could want me, now, later. But buried deep is also this: why is it always the girl waiting for the boy to tell her she’s beautiful? Connor is lovely everywhere. I imagine even his blood is sun-kissed and windblown. And it seems like he might need to know that too.

  But I don’t say it. Because that’s how it is: the girl waiting for the boy to tell her.

  Connor says, “I do, Lizzie. I really, really do.”

  When my parents come back in, my mother says, “Well, don’t you look like the cat who ate the canary.”

  We all laugh.

  For some reason we are all sort of tinkling and popping and giddy and strange. We don’t know anything bad for sure yet, and we are all exhausted, and I guess because I am light and smiling my parents feel it and they are happy too. They are smiling and holding hands. I’m propped up on my pillows, kind of rubbing my feet together like I used to do at night, right before falling asleep. That’s when they all come in. The team. My team, which of course has nothing to do with hockey sticks and dribbling and making sure you’re not offsides, but I guess there is still a goal.

  Save the colon.

  Dr. Malik and Dr. Orlitz and some others I don’t know and some students I recognize and some I don’t all stand at the foot of my bed in their lab coats, their arms clasped before them. They look like a string of paper dolls.

  My father clears his throat.

  Here we go.

  Part 2

  Day 13: Lite-Brite

  The colon could not be saved. That’s what the surgeon told us. Looking back, I see that moment as a frozen image. The paper dolls. My mother with her hands over her face. My father turning away from us both. I can’t see myself. I can’t remember what I thought or what I knew or who I was about to become. It was just the happiness of Connor’s call and then the horror of this scene. Best and worst. Always, at the exact same time.

  I’m not sure if the hospital gave us a private room, like some kind of frequent-flier or reward-club points for being there for so long and still having to get operated on, or if my parents ponied up the extra money, but finally I had both the window and the aisle. We moved to this room, and Zoe came in after school with a Lite-Brite and a deck of cards and some crappy magazines and she climbed into bed with me and we read about the worst thing that was happening to people, which was cheesy shoes or being photographed in see-through dresses. Zoe held my hand under the covers. I rested my head on her shoulder and slept a little bit, but at the end of that day, like at the end of all twelve of the days before it, everyone went home.

  I watched them all leave. I looked at the Lite-Brite. Sleep well, Zoe had punched in the board before she left. It shone now—in all the colors—through the dark.

  Day 14: The Lone Ranger, Alone

  Did I think I was going to die? Or that my life as I knew it was ending? My life, whole. It makes me sad how scared I was and how hard I tried to pretend that I wasn’t. I didn’t know who I was about to be. I didn’t know any of it, but I thought about it a lot that day, moments when my parents were downstairs in the cafeteria getting coffee, and the nurses were on break or busy or maybe they were just giving me a moment free of their pinpricks and blood pressure cuffs and checking line connections, and techs had just done everything there was to do. Being alone then just felt like everyone had given up on me. Just me and Zoe’s magazines and that novel and crappy TV and the Lite-Brite, whose lights had all gone out.

  Now, though, I know. How great would it be if we just knew the endings? Well, most of the endings. Even if they were awful. I suppose that’s why people go to psychics. There weren’t any setting up shop in the hospital, though you’d think they’d make a decent living visiting the sick and the dying.

  But you can’t know a thing about the future really, and I didn’t know anything at all about mine, not even what would happen that afternoon.

  That afternoon, Connor came. It was the first time I had seen him on his own. It was like the Lone Ranger without Tonto, though yes, I do realize that movie is totally racist.

  “Hi, Connor,” my mother said as he came in. “How are you, honey?” She seemed so tired and, well, resigned.

  “I’m good, Mrs. Stoller, thank you!”

  “Call me Daphne,” she said.

  I mean really? In all this, with all this?

  “I was just going!” my mother said, and because they were in fact just going home for a few hours, it wasn’t terribly mortifying. “We’ll be back in later this afternoon, Liz,” my mother said, turning to me.

  It’s funny how she called me Liz when she was being lighthearted and Lizzie when she was serious. It seemed like it should be the other way around.

  “Okay,” I said. “See you later.” But I wasn’t entirely happy to see them go.

  I was, on the other hand, entirely happy-thrilled-amazed-delighted to see Connor.

  He hovered by my bed and we both watched them leave. When they were gone, their voices fading in the hallway, he gingerly sat down. He set his backpack down carefully on the floor by my bed. He leaned in to me. His body was touching my body. It felt like I was being shocked in all the places our bodies met.

  “So,” I said. And then I told him about the surgery. That the colon could not be saved. The saving was finished. There would be no saving. What is the opposite of saving? This.

  “Lizzie!” Connor said. He clutched my hand.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. But it wasn’t. It was, though, nice to offer comfort to someone else, even if it was comforting him about me.

  I could see him swallowing back tears. I wondered if he was getting ready to book. I mean, who wouldn’t want to run after hearing such a thing?

  But instead of getting up to go, he leaned in closer. “Okay,” he said, like he was now resigned, like he’d decided something. And then he came even closer. “I have an idea.”

  Day 14 Continued: Pumpkinhood

  I estimated that we had about two hours before my antinausea medicine was finished. And the pain medicine too. Before the insane pain, as I called it then, would return.

  The others packets were less important, and so I disconnected them. I had seen it done enough times. It was just a little plastic tubing coming out, and with a twist I was severed.

  I was not thinking that I could barely stand on my own and that I was only good for about twenty minutes before something disgusting happened to me. I was only thinking about getting out of there with Connor.

  I took the pouch of antinausea medicine and the pouch of pain med and placed them next to
me on the bed. They were like water balloons. They didn’t seem serious. And yet without them I basically turned into a pumpkin.

  Considering these logistics made me not think of things like: Would I throw up? Would I need to go to the bathroom? Would I make it to the bathroom? All this fodder for potential humiliation got pushed way down as Connor waited in the hallway. I slipped on my jeans—enormous on me now—and a light sweater because I was always cold by then and I also wanted to hide the IV lines, which sprouted and bloomed out from my chest, evil stems. I carefully pulled the pouch through the arm of my sweater, cautious not to tug too much. My hospital bracelet got caught in the sleeve, but still I brought my hand and arm through it. I can do this, I thought, as I went to the closet and sort of toed my Converses. I kicked them over to the side of the bed near Connor’s backpack, but I couldn’t lean down to get them on, and then I got scared for the IVs and for a moment, I seriously doubted our plan. Connor’s plan.

  I don’t know why I did it. I sat back down on the bed, out of breath. I was so . . . sick. That is just the word for it. And I don’t know why when Connor looked in and asked if I needed anything, I told him yes. But I did tell him this and so he came in and he got down on his knee and put on my sneakers as if he were placing my feet into glass slippers. He held my heel and glided each foot in (which makes it seem as if it were easy, but those damn hospital socks, those plastic grips, they made the whole thing a lot less than graceful). He tied my shoes slowly, his head dipped in concentration as he ever so gently turned my laces into perfect bows.

  Okay, I know why I did it, but I don’t know how I did. I think it was like I became superhero strong, or for this single moment my sickness—my evil kryptonite—disappeared. My pain faded like invisible ink, like magic, and with it my fear. At my instruction, Connor took my L.L.Bean backpack from the closet, the one I’d taken to camp almost an entire lifetime ago, and I placed the balloons of medicine carefully inside. You could barely see the line connecting me to them; just two teeny plastic tubes.