We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  And then he just walked me out the door. He managed to be casual, waving to the nurses, saying stuff like “That’s great, Lizzie, you can do it,” as he looked at the floor just ahead of his feet, indicating that was about as far as we intended to go. I saw Collette look up and turn her head for a moment, thinking, and then I saw her shake away her thoughts and turn back to her papers. Had she thought someone else had disconnected my lines? Was she just letting me go? Either way, Connor guided me, silently, his hand gentle but also sure at the small of my back, radiating heat, as we moved toward the elevator. It lingered there as we went down down down to the first floor. I was just so caught up in the moment I felt the opposite of pain and fear and sadness. Joy and happiness. Bigger than ever before. Big, big joy and no fear.

  I was all adrenaline then. Or maybe it was just running on fumes. Whatever the case, for the first time ever I was outside in the real world with Connor.

  It was a perfect day, weather-wise I mean, great walking-around weather, as my father would say. Sunny and not too warm, not too cold, not a cloud.

  When we emerged from the lobby, the sun was blinding. Connor still had his hand on my back, still! I got the chills. Like in a shivery good way, not like all the shivering I’d been doing in the hospital. It was like that game Zoe and I once played where she would pretend to crack an egg on my head and make the pretend yolk drip down my neck. Let the yolk drip down, she’d say, her fingers along my scalp and neck, and I felt that same shivery weirdness now.

  “Wait here one sec.” Connor let go of me, and I watched him disappear around the corner.

  I waited and started to feel myself begin to turn back into myself again. Cinderella at the ball, time ticking. A werewolf sprouting hair. I could feel the pouches swishing at the bottom of my pack now. I had like an hour and forty-five minutes left until they were done. I could manage without them—I wouldn’t die or anything—but things would turn seriously . . . negative without them.

  And then there he was, in a blue BMW as shiny as a bowling ball, pulling into the hospital drive.

  He shot out of the driver’s seat. “If I’d known this was happening when I’d parked, I would have paid for the garage.” Connor laughed. He opened the passenger-side door for me, and then he bent down and brought my legs in as if I was suffering from polio or he was tucking me into a pre-pumpkin stagecoach, about to place a blanket over my lap to keep me warm for the cold journey ahead to the next kingdom.

  Then he went back around and got in. He put one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearshift.

  Of course Connor could drive stick.

  Then he winked at me.

  I cannot wink without looking like I’m having a stroke, so I just smiled instead.

  And then we were off.

  “So,” I said. “Where are we going?” I tried to sound, I don’t know, game, up for any adventure, but it came out too soft for that to be believed. I breathed heavily. I was losing my superhero strength, and my fear was swiftly returning, a train pulling into the station. Where were we going? And so where would we be when I went down, when I bent over in pain? Because, I suddenly knew, this would happen for sure.

  Connor put a finger to the side of his mouth to illustrate that he was thinking. “Nothing too special.” He smiled.

  I saw his freckled fingers on the gearshift and I wanted to touch his hand. As if Connor had read my mind, he removed it for a moment and grabbed my pinkie. It felt like he needed my pinkie. His grip was urgent, and he braided his fingers with mine.

  He extricated his fingers from mine to switch gears and then tied himself to me again.

  I brought my free hand to my chest and felt the tubing of the central line. It was still connected, but I could feel the entry point getting irritated from all the jostling and from the weight of my cotton sweater. Connor kept driving, and I don’t remember what we passed or any of it because what was happening for me was our hands.

  That love I had for Michael Lerner? That was not love. That was intense like. That was crushing. But it was not this. It was nothing remotely like this.

  Because Connor was coming to the other side. The side of loving me back. I could feel this then. And I couldn’t say how or why then, but by the time we’d sped beneath a canopy of trees and slid into a dirt parking lot, he was mine. Of course that had been my wish. Always.

  “Here’s good!” Connor stopped the car and cranked the parking brake and got me out of the car—again with the legs as if he were transferring me to a wheelchair—and then he took my hand as if instead of putting me in a wheelchair, he was asking me to dance. Two pouches of medicines in my backpack, two IV lines coming out of my chest, a ticking clock, and I was a girl at the ball. I didn’t need a gown. I thought I did once, but now I know you just need someone you love to take you by the hand.

  Gently, he guided me over to the boathouse. Fletcher’s Cove. It’s part of the C & O Canal, built many, many years ago (how many? I have no idea), with two paths alongside the canal for donkeys to pull boats carrying cargo. This we learned on a school field trip.

  “I sometimes come here on my own with Verlaine.” Connor had his hand at my back as we walked ever so slowly down to the dock. “It’s peaceful.”

  I couldn’t even nod.

  Boats rocked against the old wood, and I could see the trees and also us mirrored in the water. He went in and out of the boathouse briefly, and then we were headed to one of those bobbing rowboats.

  I knew this was misguided as we stepped into the boat, just from the wobble of my footing, but I didn’t care. I wouldn’t have traded it in for not going, even though the truth was I couldn’t and I shouldn’t have and this was about to end and it was about to end badly.

  Connor, the mind reader, said, “We’re going to hug the shore. Just a little ride for a few minutes. To get the hospital off us. Being on a boat used to always make me feel so much better.”

  This one with the sailing, I thought, as I gingerly sat down. I had become a girl who, skinny as a nail, sat down gingerly. Whodathunkit.

  I looked up, trying not to be sick. Why did I look up? I have no idea. I was glad it was happening, that Connor had taken me away and that in that moment of taking me he had started to love me back.

  We pushed off. I turned to watch the sun behind me, shining down in golden rays, when I felt the boat teeter a bit. Connor reached for me then. He turned me toward him and knelt down on the wet, leafy boat bottom, and then his hands were cupping my face, and then he was leaning down toward me and he kissed me. It was long and deep. It was like the movies, the two of us in this red rowboat, Connor’s lips finally on mine. I could feel myself blushing as his hands brought my face closer, I was so happy inside. There is no other way to say it. And I wished that I would never have any other kind of feeling ever again.

  My heart was in my ears. I was in the moment, and I felt all that happiness and newness and there was a terrible ringing in my ears that I refused to answer. It’s not like I hadn’t been kissed before, or hadn’t kissed back, but this was different. I saw stars. It was just us in this small, special world. It was the kiss and it was Connor but it was also sickness and pain. And the world began closing in.

  “I have to go.” I pulled away when I realized the stars were not from happiness. They were not sparkly glitter stars. “We have to get back,” I said. The boat was turning around. The leaves were swaying on either side of the canal and the sky above them was as blue as a robin’s egg. The boathouse became a tiny pinprick. And then it all went completely black.

  When I came to, Connor was carrying me out of the boat. I remember the boat rental person saying we needed an ambulance. “That girl is very sick,” he said, and then I snapped awake and both Connor and I told him “No!” I was just fine. I remember getting into his car and then waiting and waiting, unable to speak, gripping the leather handle as we sped back to the hospital.

  Where did Connor go? All I remember was being alone in the room with Collette. She sto
od over my bed, reconnecting my IV lines.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she said. “I don’t think you understand your situation here.”

  I swallowed. It made me feel nauseated again. As punishment for my five minutes in that boat, I was never going to live another moment without feeling as if I would puke.

  “This could have been so serious. What on earth were you two thinking?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Why was I apologizing to Collette? “Where’s Connor?”

  “I understand,” she said, acknowledging my statement but not my question. “And I won’t tell your parents. Someone else might but I won’t, which is just crazy, but you do need to know that was really, really stupid.” I was all clicked in, all connected, a plug to a socket. I wanted to use my illness superpower, the power that let me say whatever the hell I wanted without consequence, but she was also keeping our secret, so . . . “I mean disconnecting your own lines! You could have had an embolism.”

  I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t ask.

  “Which, just so you know, is a blocked blood vessel. Which kills you. Boom,” she said, smacking the curved part of her palms together. She had dark-purple nails with a layer of blue glitter over them. “Killed.”

  So now I knew.

  That was when I heard the other nurses greeting Connor. Connor, they said with none of their usual enthusiasm. Hello. That’s when I realized Connor wasn’t going to have a job here anymore. Collette might not tell my parents, but everyone else here knew. There would be no more Verlaine and Connor making this place a better, more livable world.

  Soon there was a knock on the door.

  “Hello?” Connor peeked his adorable head in. His face. His freckled face. His face with the lips I had just kissed.

  “Hello, Connor,” Collette said grimly.

  He bowed his head. It was like his whole body was apologizing. When he looked up, he looked at me and his face changed. I couldn’t decode what he was telling me or what he was exactly sorry about.

  “I left my backpack?” Connor said.

  I felt then the familiar fear that getting his backpack was the only reason he’d come to my room, that I’d been wrong and he had not come to the other side at all but had in fact been unmoving on the non-love side of things. Perhaps that kiss had only been a way to tell me good-bye.

  But I smiled meekly. And in my smile I was totally, subversively happy about our day. I hoped he saw that.

  “By all means.” Collette mock ushered him in. “You do know, though, that this girl has a very difficult day ahead of her tomorrow. I expected more from you, Connor. Really.”

  Oh God, the I-expected-more-from-you tack. That was almost as bad as the bad-judgment tack that might have been utilized here were it my mother speaking.

  “I know,” he said. “I was just trying to help. Her mood, I mean.” He looked at me, hopefully, and in that moment I realized Connor really had no idea. And yet I would have followed him anywhere.

  Collette slipped out the door, and then Connor went to stand at the side of my bed. His hands rested on its bars, which were up now, a prison cell. He rocked back and forth, toe to heel, heel to toe.

  “God,” he said. “Can you believe we got you out?”

  Really? I thought. This is the takeaway? But what I said was, “I can’t.” I looked out the window. I was starting to feel the embarrassment of the day move through my body. Shame. My crippling kryptonite.

  He moved to the other side of the bed and crouched down. And then he unzipped his backpack and gingerly removed something from inside.

  It was a Tupperware container filled with liquid.

  “This is only going to get us in more trouble,” he said, standing. I heard his knees creak and crack. “But I brought you something. I had it for you earlier.”

  What was it? I craned my neck to look closer. WHAT HAS CONNOR BROUGHT ME! WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT? I thought. And then I saw it. The little, well, legs I guess, frantically doggy-paddling the water. A tiny head strained from beneath a hard green shell.

  “A turtle!” I gasped. It was so teeny I could have fit it like a quarter in the center of my palm.

  “Shhh.” Connor put a chewed-up finger to his lips. “I got her to keep you company,” he said. “But obviously they’re not allowed in here.”

  Was he crazy? Not even Nora so blatantly broke rules. Or maybe he was just lovely.

  I sat up a little and looked into the container, squinting at the turtle. It was so green, and it looked like it was outlined in gold. With a little snake face, its contoured eyes made it look as if it were wearing a mask, it looked so determined to swim. I stared at it through the cloudy plastic.

  “No, you have to leave it!” I said.

  “I think it’s a she,” Connor said. “And you need to keep the container open. She won’t last long in there, but you’ll be out in a few days, and then you can get a tank for her at home.”

  I slid the top off and looked in at the turtle. The shell had these striations of gold and a tile-like pattern, like the wallpaper of those French kings we read about when studying the French Revolution. “Thank you.” I looked up at Connor. I thought of all he had done for me that day. Or tried to do. I mentally scanned the room for a place to hide the turtle.

  “She’s just hatched,” Connor said. “I was getting Verlaine some pig ears at the pet store and I saw a bunch of these. They reminded me of you.”

  I didn’t know what to think of the fact that I reminded Connor of a reptile. “It could be a he, though.” Why do we always refer to animals as he? Unless it’s like a lioness or a mallard, it’s usually a he.

  “I wonder what’s beneath her shell. I wonder who she’ll grow into. Like I said, she’s just hatched.”

  I could see the turtle’s itty-bitty nails. I imagined peeling back the shell and seeing what was beneath. I’m still not sure how you tell if a turtle is a boy or a girl.

  “I’m going to call her Frog.” Can you dissect what’s under a turtle’s shell? I remember thinking this.

  Connor shrugged. “Sounds good to me,” he said. He didn’t ask why. “She’s yours. To keep you company.”

  “Thanks, Connor.” I wondered then if he liked when I said his name after a sentence as much as I did when he said mine. “I love her,” I said.

  He took the Tupperware and sort of set the blue top over it and then he opened the drawer by my bed. He carefully placed Frog inside it. “I’ll leave her there,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I heard my mother greeting the nurses. “What?” she said. “Did something happen?”

  I braced myself, but nothing happened.

  “Everything’s fine!” I heard one of them say.

  That said, I knew my mother could just open the drawer and find Frog there. But I didn’t want to let her go.

  “Hi!” my mother said, opening the door.

  “One minute, Mom!” I said. Did no one knock? Ever? Suddenly I felt breathless. Connor was leaving. And tomorrow morning I would get wheeled away and into the operating room. Dr. Orlitz would be ready and waiting. I imagined a butcher knife in his fat hands; it would be a horror movie I would never be able to watch, not even the preview.

  My mom disappeared, but I could hear her waiting. You can hear my mother smiling and you can also hear her waiting.

  “I guess I have to go,” Connor said. But he still stood there. “Hey, can I get your number?”

  I had to laugh. I gave him my number, and Connor punched it into his phone.

  “I’m calling you now,” he said.

  “No phone.” There had been a brief moment today in the car with Connor when I’d remembered and, if I’d had it on me, heavy in my hand or my pocket, I could have finally used it, but mostly I loved the emptiness. The way no one could contact me.

  “Well somewhere, wherever it is, it is getting my call,” Connor said.

  “Hello?” he said. “Lizzie.”

  I lo
oked at him talking to a me that wasn’t there.

  “Voice mail,” he mouthed, pointing at the phone.

  “Well, this is Connor,” he said. “The guy from the hospital? The guy with the cute dog? Call me sometime.” He clicked off his phone and grinned at me.

  It felt amazing on this side, this other side of love, and then I felt that horrible aloneness again, like I was in some big, dark void. Is that what it’s like for everyone, even those girls who won’t turn into hideous freaks to the boys they love? What it felt like on this side was: wonderful and terrifying. Breathtaking.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He grabbed my hand. “Let’s pretend we were never here,” he said, and I remembered him telling me that before, when we’d gotten back from our first walk outside the room together, just three days ago. But in hospital days, it was a lifetime. And now, Connor leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.

  It happened so fast. I didn’t get to kiss him back or to thank him, or to even just say how much he’d done for me in that place. Because then he was gone.

  Just gone.

  And then, almost instantly, my mother shot inside my room.

  “You okay?” she asked brightly.

  I couldn’t look at her. I remembered walking outside with Connor, and for a moment, it was just us. That was the reason we left.

  I nodded. “Just a minute, okay?” I said.

  I heard the ocean call of her going back into the hallway, and only then did I bring myself up to sit. Again, that makes it sound easy, but it was not easy. The day had nearly ruined me. I didn’t know it then, but it would be awhile before sitting was easy, before moving in my body was normal again. I thought I knew so much already, but I didn’t know anything then. Nothing.

  I sat up and I leaned over and opened the top drawer of my bedside table. I slid the top off so Frog could breathe. I looked down and watched her struggle, even in the smallest stretch of space.

  Hard shell or soft center. Which is the best way? This I know from biology class last year: a turtle dies without his shell. Her shell. That, I remember.