I thought of the frog heart, the way it jumped beneath my hands during our dissection, and I didn’t know what the next morning would bring, or what would come after, or after that, but I did know now that somehow my heart would miraculously keep beating.
Cutting
I remember Collette cutting off my hospital bracelet four days after the surgery. What would that have been? Day Twenty? Day Twenty. I was like a dog freed from her leash. But it was also like I didn’t need the leash. Like I was going to be fine on my own. I left it there on the swingy table, along with that horrid plastic pitcher and the plastic blue box with these three Ping-Pong-like balls I was supposed to raise up by sucking in air ten times an hour to keep the fluid out of my lungs. I didn’t look at my IVs, the connections dangling from the stand like alien tentacles.
Zoe had taken Frog home, and I left everything else. Pulled back my thin, unwashed hair in an elastic band, tugged on my way-too-big jeans, tied my Converses, walked into the hallway, and waved good-bye.
I was so weak and stooped over from all the incisions, but I was so strong.
I could feel the bag pulling at my stomach, a mysterious tug as I stepped into the elevator with my mother. I had been on the twelfth floor. Who knew? I don’t recall ever noticing, I thought, as I walked out of the hospital and into the sun. My father was waiting there, the car idling in the circular drive, like he was picking us up from a hotel. I wanted to drive, and I did have my learner’s permit after all. It was the oddest thing how much I wanted to drive, but even I knew I was too weak, that if anything happened, I didn’t have the reflexes to prevent an accident.
“Can you imagine?” my mother said when I brought up the idea. “After all this?”
Yes, that made me think of Connor. Every time I got into a car after leaving the hospital, I thought of Connor watching a car crash, over and over again. It was good, I thought, to think of someone else for once. So: I tried to be in Connor’s head for a moment, seeing the world as he saw it, watching that girl die like that. And then, as my mother helped me into the front seat where she thought I’d be most comfortable, I tried to see me through Connor’s eyes. Here he is watching me put on my seat belt, here he watches me buckle it, so carefully, my stomach still stapled. It’s all I can do to sit up straight. So what does he see? Someone who is leaving way different than when she arrived. It’s like I was in transition, not yet hatched, waiting to be this new fixed and damaged me.
I thought of Connor watching me pull up to my house. My house! I had left it before camp, in July. It was almost mid-September, already fall, and my father’s rhododendron had already flowered, petals fallen, and waxy leaves flanked the house, along with the flowerless little branches of the azalea bushes. Zoe came outside, pulling the door shut behind her, just after Mabel ran out barking wildly in the front yard. I got out of the car, slow as an old person. After the surgery, my stomach hurt differently. It was like a wound now, something healing, becoming a scab that is becoming a scar. I ignored the crinkling of the bag and the fear I would always carry that it could come undone.
I focused on the healing part, on being out of that hospital with its smells and its sounds and the needles and thermometers and the heart monitor I was hooked up to after the surgery. I focused on the surgery being over, not on the pain of waking up from it. I focused on Mabel, moving toward me, her ears swinging, her dog smile and dog sounds.
“Mabel!” I bent down with considerable discomfort and let her lick my face. “Mwah!” I said. “Mabel!” I could still be a vet, I was thinking. If I got super into physics (this year) and dissecting the fetal pigs, which were next year’s victims, maybe I could do it.
That’s when I saw him, his red-blond hair catching the afternoon light, as if a halo hovered above him. He had on his wrinkled jeans, a frayed blue-and-white-striped oxford, unbuttoned, a Sunshine House T-shirt peeking out beneath. My jeans were so loose on me, and I pulled them up as I placed my hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun.
Bright, glowing Connor. In a surf shirt.
“Welcome home,” he said, helping me to my feet.
My mother got out of the backseat and gave a hard look to Zoe.
“What?” she said. “He just showed up here.”
Everyone looked at Connor, including my dad, who, feigning exhaustion, sort of threw himself across the car hood that ticked with heat.
Connor smiled. How can I describe it? Cockeyed, charming, devilish, mocking, sweet. Cocky. All in one boy’s crooked smile. “Hi.”
My mother inhaled deeply. “Connor,” she said. “Darling. We have to get Lizzie settled in. We’ve just arrived, as you can see. You have to give us some time.”
He nodded quickly, swallowing. “Can I just take a minute with Lizzie? I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry to barge in like this.”
I saw my mother go from really hard to really soft in one moment. “Of course,” she said. “We’ll just be inside.”
My family walked up the steps and into the house. I sat down on the steps and scratched Mabel’s soft scruff. Connor said, “Why, hello, Mabel!” and then he sat down next to me and I felt like I’d known him forever.
“I wanted to see you outside of that place.”
I nodded. It felt like we were now equal. I was dressed, for one, and upright, but also I felt different. I leaned my head on his shoulder. Because I wanted to. It was as natural as breathing. I breathed.
He shook me off him. “Hey, so, I just wanted to see you, okay? I’m just saying.”
I looked at him. His eyes were so blue, but they were very far away. It was almost like I could see clouds passing across them. “Okay.” I righted my head.
“I have to go now,” he said. “Anyway, your family is waiting.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “They understand.”
“I have to go,” Connor said. That’s what Connor Bryant, on my front steps, said.
“Go where?” I looked straight ahead at the Dominicos’ house across the street. They had painted their shutters green while I’d been gone.
Connor kissed my cheek and got up. “I’m going. I just have to go.”
I could hear his keys jingling, the key chain twirling around his finger, as he walked down the drive.
I touched my cheek. I did! Wait for me, I thought, my heart in my throat.
Before I’d even said hello, Connor was telling me good-bye.
Girl Groups
Everything changed then. All my good feelings. All my power. Who was I to say I didn’t need my bracelet, a leash? Okay, the colon was gone, but who was going to save me now? Save me save me save me, was all I thought as I struggled up the stairs to my bedroom. Well, save me and why me. Why me why me why me? I felt that power drain out of me, like I was an old car leaking oil onto the road.
I heard my father at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew he was looking up to me, both hands on the banister. I was sixteen years old and I was winded when I reached the top.
I went into my bedroom and shut the door.
My room. That hideous blue, those purple venetian blinds. Zip. I opened them. The sound like the Velcro of the blood pressure cuff. Dust motes in the light. A Moonrise Kingdom poster hung lopsidedly on the wall across from my bed. My Velvet Underground banana poster.
Two twin beds. One I slept on, a headboard slapped with stickers I couldn’t remove. Hello Kitty. Butterflies. Orphan Annie. Also the Beatles and Wonder Woman and dancing bears. The string of dusty lights I hadn’t yet turned back on. The other bed, covered in old teddy bears and ugly dolls I couldn’t, for some reason, throw away. Because I’d once loved them? Perhaps. I threw the new one from the hospital on the heap as well.
My little bag from the hospital had been unpacked. David B’s God’s eye was on my desk, laid there sweetly by my mom. She had also fanned out the pamphlets from the hospital on my bed.
About Your Ileostomy: Guidelines to Help You Care for Your New Ostomy at Home. So there won’t be paella or nights
asleep in Spanish castles, I thought.
Frog was there too. Zoe had taken good care of her, and she had this big tank on my desk, and a heat lamp, and I could see her hiding beneath one of the fake ferns.
“Hi,” I said, peering in.
She slammed into her shell.
“Okay then, bye.” I backed away to get a better view.
My phone! Someone had taken it out of my camp stuff where I’d been storing it, uncharged, and I plugged it into my computer. I felt that almost long-ago buzz of it charging, which instead of making me happy and relieved, made me anxious. How many messages? How many ways would I have to tell people what had happened to me? This was also why Connor was so important. He had been on the moon with me. Why hadn’t he just left me there?
I heard a soft knock at the door. “Honey?” my mother said. “Are you okay in there? Do you need . . . help?”
I closed my eyes. For a while, but again, not like I was going to speak and close my eyes. I will always despise that. “I’m good, thanks,” I said.
“Is it okay?” she asked.
I knew she meant the bag. I think she wanted to see it. But that was never going to happen.
“It is, Mom,” I said. “I am.”
I could still hear her hovering.
“I’m just getting settled here,” I said. “I’ll be downstairs soon.” I’m not going to lie: the thought of walking down those stairs was daunting.
I heard my mother pad away and then I opened my Mac. As I turned it on, I took a moment to praise myself for having it password protected, and made my way in. (Mabel 1/2/05—anyone could have figured it out.) There I was. There we were: Dee, Lydia, and me on a class skiing trip last year. It was the last time we’d do a thing like that; we were too old now. I think we were too old then, too, but I still remember the hum of the bus wheels beneath us while we sat on the bus together, me across the aisle from them. In the back row two couples were making out, and someone was passing around a bottle of Coke that was also half rum, but we were only listening to music and braiding one another’s hair and talking shit about Nelly R, who had hooked up with someone’s boyfriend that weekend. We were so stupid then. And Lydia still had her braces. My hat had a pom-pom on top.
While I waited for all the news of the real world to pummel me, I shuffled through the mail on my desk. There wasn’t much; my mom brought most of the stuff I’d be into to the hospital, but she’d left the brown envelope from Nora that said: Do Not Open Until Home blazoned in red across the back. I opened it. For the strongest girl, Nora had written with a silver metallic Sharpie on the plastic of the old-school CD case. She’d pasted a picture of a woman cut from a magazine, overly tanned, with pumped-up muscles in muscle-woman position on the song list folded inside.
Nora.
I slipped it into my computer, which sucked it in like it was starving. And then: “Close your eyes, give me your hand, darlin’. Do you feel my heart beating.” I had to smile. Girl bands. We listened to them at camp when we were campers, hairbrushes and pretend beehives, jumping from bed to bed.
Girl bands.
I unfolded Nora’s handwritten song list. The Supremes, 7 Year Bitch, Sleater-Kinney, Spice Girls, the Go-Go’s, TLC, Sister Sledge, the Bangles, Le Tigre, Say Lou Lou.
Nora.
I turned the song list over: Girl Groups: Because no one can do it alone, Nora had stenciled. She’d drawn these really delicate birds and butterflies and also these skull and crossbones, a string of dancing bears.
This was what I thought then: there are different ways to be saved. There are the doctors and the nurses and the parents and there is the boy who comes and sweeps you off your feet and then there is the girl who comes and lies on your bed with you and tells you everything, makes it seem all her secrets are only for you. Who cares if they actually are? You can’t do it without the girl. Without a girl. So I ask you: How could I ever turn off the lights here?
Downstairs I could hear the clank and crash of my parents making dinner together, crab cakes and baked potatoes, my favorites. I had just started eating solid foods—it had begun with broth and Jell-O and then rice and then a vegetable or two. It all seemed to be working. It. It seemed to be okay.
But Connor was gone. He had left.
I opened my closet, to face the mirror hanging on the door. How many hours had I spent in front of this mirror? Leaning in, learning how to put on eyeliner. Backing up to see if a skirt was too short because before all this starvation stuff, my thighs were never an asset. How many times had I changed and changed and changed? I wanted different clothes and better clothes and cooler clothes, and I wanted to be thin and easy in my skin and casual in everything, but I was not that. Now I could see the faint smudge that had once been Dee’s lip gloss kiss.
I stood back. I could see all of me and I was tiny. My jeans folded over at the zipper, so much extra fabric. I’m not going to lie: I liked being that small. I liked feeling like I had slipped into these jeans, a delicate, pedicured foot into a glass slipper, as opposed to the way I had to force myself into them at camp, like a rag-wool-socked foot being shoved into an old muddy duck boot.
Who wouldn’t rather wear a glass slipper? If you were going to the right place, anyway.
But it was the first time. The first time there was a full-length mirror with me alone in front of it.
I did it: I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall to my ankles. My hip bones jutted out and my stomach sank in. But that’s not what I saw. What I saw—all I could see—was the bag, which hung just to the right of my belly button. It was just a regular plastic bag, stuck to me. One end of it was tucked into the Gap boy shorts my mom had brought to the hospital. When I lifted up my T-shirt, I could see the top of it, to where the small intestine came out of my stomach—the stoma—and into the bag. There were so many powders and tapes and creams and flanges I would need to change it and make sure it didn’t get irritated or open unexpectedly, but I’d had to deal with none of that then. All I had was the visual, and it looked so not a part of me. Of myself.
Sleater-Kinney screamed out from my computer. “Why do good things never wanna stay? Some things you lose, some things you give away.”
I dropped my T-shirt and the fabric covered it. It was almost, for a moment, like the bag was gone. I pulled up my jeans, buttoning them carefully so as not to jostle anything. I felt the staples of my incision against the rough denim.
“Lizzie?” my mother called up, like I had been here every night, my mom calling me down to set the table or peel these carrots or grate this cheese. “Lizzie!”
I opened the door and Mabel was seated outside, quietly, waiting.
“I’m so sorry!” I said, bending down with considerable effort to pet Mabel. I’d had no idea she’d been waiting for me. “I’m coming,” I called down, shutting my door and picking my way slowly, gingerly down the stairs.
The smell of alcohol and urine and starched sheets, the scent of the hospital I only now realized I’d been smelling for just about three weeks, was gone. Here was garlic and butter and chives and vinegar.
“Okay!” I said, walking into the warm kitchen. “Here I am.”
Peel Back the Skin . . .
That first night I woke up all night expecting fluorescent lights and thermometer probes, and I was met instead by Mabel on my legs, snoring. That morning a plant arrived from Dee’s mother, who had driven me to and from soccer practice for all of fifth grade when my mother was at work, that said, We are all wishing you well!
Really? I thought. Another plant? I had no idea what I wanted, but I did not want another plant.
“This looks nice,” my father said, rubbing the waxy leaves between his fingers.
“Take it.” I shoved it in his direction.
He looked up at me then, pausing. “Okay, Liz,” he said. “I’ll plant it in the garden.”
Dee texted me all day that first day I was home. How are you when can we see you do you want to go to the movies to see some music? I want
ed to do none of those things. Family time, I wrote back. Family, family.
But there was nothing from Connor. Not the first day or the second or the one after, on all the days where I sat in my room and did my homework and got caught up and watched Party of Five reruns in my parents’ room and just listened to music. I binged on Animal Planet and Teen Wolf and Friday Night Lights. Also Gilmore Girls and Daria. Old stuff like that made me feel so old and ahead of my time. My mother, who had taken time off work to be home with me, brought me lunch upstairs that whole first week.
It was maybe my fourth day back and she came upstairs, a plate of scalloped potatoes and chicken left over from dinner the night before wobbling on a wicker tray. But truth was, the onions from the potatoes didn’t agree with me—which meant they didn’t agree with it—and so I had gotten scared to eat. Also, just putting these four days of solid food in me was already making me gain weight. I needed to, but I’m just saying, it was happening.
“What?” she said as I dragged my fork through the food. She rubbed my legs and I let her. “No good?” she asked.
“It’s good. I just can’t eat all this stuff yet.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just trying to make up for all that time without real food in the hospital. But maybe we should just go back to beef broth and Jell-O. What do you think?”
I gagged at the thought.
“Hey,” she said. “I hate to do this again, but we have to talk about getting you out. We have to talk about you seeing your friends again and getting back to school. And walking, Liz. You need to be walking now.”
“My friends?” This was what I chose to focus on. “I don’t know, Mom,” I said. I wanted her to ask about Connor, and also I really didn’t want her to ask. Before all this, she might not have even known about some guy I liked. She had no idea about Michael L for instance, though there was a period in ninth grade where I talked to him every night for hours. Literally. Half the time he talked about Rachel P and Tracey B, and all the things he wanted to do to them, but this was how it was. Friends. I had come in as a friend and I was going out as one, if that. Friends. Say it enough out loud and it sounds so awkward on your tongue.
We Were Never Here Page 10