“Not if you fail, too,” I said over my shoulder. It was almost scary how I could convert all that love into hate.
OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, I WAS WALKING BY THE TENNIS COURTS when I heard a familiar half cackle/half shriek and turned to see Thea, running back and forth between two different courts and swinging a racket. It was probably forty-five degrees, but she wasn’t wearing tights and the skin between the bottom of her miniskirt and the top of her combat boots looked red and cold. I guess she was taking her fashion tips from Carson Jeffries, perpetual wearer of shorts, who was sprinting between two courts on the other side of the net and yelling at her to “keep it going!” They were playing our game, the one we made up in the summer before sixth grade, where the only rule is to hit the ball no matter where it lands—even if it’s three courts away. I buttoned up the top of Mrs. Browning’s flight jacket and watched them through the chain-link fence until Mr. Glansman, the tennis coach, called to them that the courts were reserved for the team and they would have to leave. Carson was collecting their balls, and Thea had just grabbed her backpack off the ground, when she glanced up at me and kind of gaped and then scowled. I waved but she didn’t wave back, so I walked over to the door in the fence, their only way out.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked, once she and Carson had come through the exit. Thea hesitated and glanced at Carson as if he were her real husband.
“I’ll meet you in the library later,” he said before walking away. A few paces later, he whirled around and asked where their flour baby was.
“In my locker,” Thea said, like, duh.
“As long as our little bundle of joy is safe,” Carson said, and Thea rolled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, once he was gone. Thea and I walked through the grass and away from the courts, where the tennis team was starting to assemble for practice. “I’m sorry I ditched you for the physics bridge. I’m sorry I haven’t called or texted you lately . . .”
“And where the hell have you been at lunch? It’s like you disappeared off the fucking map.”
“I’ve been kind of . . . busy . . .”
“Yeah, I heard. How’s Holden?” she asked, and the sound of his name made my cheeks redden.
“I’m such a tool.”
“No, you’re not,” Thea said with a noisy exhale. “He’s the asshole.”
“Yeah, but . . . I was really into him,” I said.
Thea put her arm around me. We sat on the hill and watched Karina Spencer run across the court. I wished my legs were as long and as perfect. I wished I knew for sure that saying “I’d prefer not to” had been the right thing to do. I wished part of me still didn’t want to be with him, which reminded me of Mom and Dad, loving and hating each other at the same time.
“My parents might be getting a divorce,” I said, realizing all at once that if I said it out loud, I was afraid it might make it come true.
“That sucks. Which one of them cheated?” Thea asked. Ever since her mom moved to California with Rocco, she thinks there’s only one reason people split up.
I hesitated, wondering whether to admit that I’d seen a drug rep’s pen and underwear at Daddy’s apartment. “Neither. It’s . . . complicated,” I said, echoing Daddy.
Thea hugged her knees and stared ahead at the tennis team, making it look so easy to keep all the balls within the lines. Finally, she glanced at me. “Your bridge was fucking insane, dude.”
“My dad has the steadiest hands in the world,” I said, remembering the way he’d just held them there, waiting for each toothpick to dry, whereas I had accidentally ripped down one of the arches when a clump of wet toothpicks had stuck to my thumb. Even then, at four in the morning, he hadn’t gotten mad. “And patience,” I added. We were both quiet for a minute, as Mr. Glansman blew his whistle and told everybody to switch sides. Then Thea stood up and brushed the grass off the back of her skirt. I stood up, too, and slung my backpack over my shoulder again. “I’m sorry I disappeared,” I said. “All this stuff happened. My friend from the writers’ group got her gallbladder out, and my grandma died . . .”
“Oh, no. I’m really sorry,” Thea said.
“Thanks,” I said, as we started to walk toward the parking lot. I was about to ask her if she still hated me, but instead found myself asking her if she still respected me—for wearing skinny jeans, for cutting my hair, for . . .
“—not giving Holden Saunders a blow job?” Thea suggested.
I nodded, slowly. “Everyone’s calling me a prude.”
“People are assholes. Haven’t you heard the rumor that we’re gay for each other, or that Carson Jeffries and I are hooking up?”
I smiled. “I thought the last part was true.”
“Oh, you’re gross,” Thea said, shoving me. “He’s such a spaz.”
“So are you,” I said, and she didn’t argue; instead just asked me what was up with my mock marriage. I told her about my meeting with Mrs. Desmond, how I was going to write a term paper by myself and see if she accepted it.
“Can I ask you a question?” Thea said, and I nodded. “What the hell is a gallbladder?” she asked, and for some reason that made us both crack up.
I DIDN’T MAKE IT BACK TO THE HOSPITAL UNTIL SATURDAY, AND by then, all the doctors making rounds had stopped talking about how quickly they were going to get Mrs. Browning off the ventilator. Dr. Khaira had consulted some hospital experts on “Ethics” to help make the decisions. I repeated the one thing that she’d told me: that if she couldn’t go back to regular life as she knew it, she’d rather not be anywhere at all.
Over the next week, Mrs. Browning looked less and less like Mrs. Browning, and it wasn’t just because her eyes were shut and her top curl was gone. When she was on the ventilator, she looked like the Pillsbury Dough Woman. Her wrists were swollen and her feet were even fatter; they reminded me of bear feet, the kind in cartoons and toilet paper ads. At first she didn’t move at all, but after a while she started to twitch and sometimes her hands would fly up and the lines would get dislodged and alarms would start bonging, so then they tied down her wrists. The doctors making rounds kept acting like she was getting better, though: the cardiologist checked the catheters in her neck and some numbers on the screen above and said they were looking good; the pulmonologist checked the chest X-ray and said it was getting better; the kidney doctors looked at the urine that was hanging in a bag and said urine was a good sign. Everyone kept agreeing that she was making tremendous progress.
Friday night, Mom was in the kitchen pulling dinner out of the oven when I came in through the back door. It was weird—she’d made what I always pick for my birthday dinner: chicken piccata, and rice, and steamed artichokes. In fact, it was kind of bizarre that she was cooking at all, since lately all she’d been doing is lying in bed and telling us to fend for ourselves for dinner. We’d been eating a lot of Velveeta mac-’n’-cheese.
“The boys are at the hockey game tonight with Dad,” Mom said. “It’s just us girls.” When I jammed my hands into the pockets of my leather bomber jacket and told her I’d already eaten at the hospital, she said, “Oh, really? Where do they have you working now?”
“ICU,” I said, without skipping a beat.
“That’s funny.” Mom pulled the rattling lid off the artichoke pot, which let off a plume of steam. “Because when I called the hospital today, they said you’re not a volunteer there. They said you haven’t even applied.”
I glanced at the floor. “I’m not—not really.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Because you really wanted me to, and I thought it would make you happy.”
“It was just a suggestion,” Mom said, her voice baffled, as if she couldn’t imagine why I thought lying about it would’ve made her happy. “Where’d the flight jacket come from?” she added, and I felt myself shrinking inside of it. “What a funny little gremlin,” she added, touching the patch of Fifinella and her blue wings.
“My friend from writers’ group gave
it to me.”
“The writers’ group that Thea’s in?”
Startled, I glanced up. “Thea’s not . . . actually.”
“And where did you sleep the night before your toothpick bridge was due?” Mom asked, folding her arms across her chest. “Because I ran into Gordon Palmer at the grocery store, and he said you didn’t even do the toothpick bridge with Thea.”
“I was at Daddy’s apartment.”
“Oh, really—just like it was Daddy who bought you the tickets to Florida?” Before I could answer, Mom blurted, “I know you have a boyfriend.”
“I-I don’t.”
“Cut the crap, Elyse. You haven’t been volunteering, you’ve been ‘hanging out’ somewhere with your boyfriend. You slept over at his house, and you—”
“Call Daddy and ask him! I was there! We stayed up all night.”
When I thrust my cell phone into Mom’s hands, she seemed startled, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to dial Daddy’s number. But then she looked down and squinted at what I really wanted her to see: my home screen, a picture of the Hulton Bridge made entirely out of toothpicks. It had the same cables tethering the five archways, the same railing halfway up, and you could just imagine the Allegheny River rushing beneath it. I watched Mom staring at the picture of Dad, who was grinning wildly, as he stooped over our masterpiece. “Wow . . . that’s . . . made of toothpicks?” Mom asked, and her blue eyes were shiny with tears.
“And glue. It won ‘Most Aesthetically Pleasing.’ And it held forty pounds.” I took the phone back and slipped it into my pocket. “Daddy was psyched.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t want to answer any questions about his love life.” Mom’s eyes widened, and I expelled a breath of air. “Thank you,” I said. “For not asking me.”
My cell phone beeped: a text from Thea, who was running late to pick me up for the movies. “Almost there,” she’d written.
“Do you want to at least take off your jacket and stay a while?” Mom asked. “I want to hear all about this boy . . .”
“Mom, I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said. “I—he—it’s over.”
“Oh, honey . . .” Mom said, reaching out to touch my sleeve again.
“Don’t,” I snapped, pulling my arm away.
“Why can’t I . . . ?”
“Help? Now? After you wouldn’t let me see my own grandmother for five years because—why? You wanted to punish her for moving far away? After you refused to send me to see her when she was dying? And you wonder why I started making stuff up?”
The cordless phone started ringing, and Mom swiped it off the counter before I had a chance. “Satinder Khaira?” she asked, reading the caller ID aloud.
“That’s for me,” I said, but Mom just shot me a look before pressing the TALK button.
“Jane Strickler,” she said, like she was at the office. “Rich isn’t here, Satinder. You want his cell?”
I looked at my watch and glanced out the kitchen windows for car lights in the driveway. “Does he need to talk to me?” I whispered to Mom, and she furrowed her eyebrows and shook her head.
“Just a moment, please,” Mom said, her voice kind of stern, only she was talking to Dr. Khaira, not me.
“I’m going to the movies with Thea,” I said, and she covered up the receiver.
“Elyse, I—trust you,” Mom said, which was probably meant to be an apology for everything she’d just accused me of, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
THE NEXT MORNING BEFORE MOM GOT UP, I RODE MY BIKE TO the hospital and met Dr. Khaira in the ICU. Mrs. Browning was supposed to get a trach that day, which meant that they were going to cut a hole in her neck so they could suction the crap out of her lungs. Dr. Khaira and I were sitting side by side on the chairs in her private room, and he was explaining why this procedure would get her off the ventilator faster, when Selena Markmann walked in and gasped. I was surprised to see her, too—dressed in black for a change, like we were already at a funeral.
I watched as Selena went up to the bedside and looked at Mrs. Browning with all those tubes going in and out of her and picked up one of her swollen hands and said, “Oh, Mary,” in a small little whisper. That was when I knew I wasn’t imagining it that Mrs. Browning wasn’t Mrs. Browning anymore. Then Selena whirled around and asked us where Dave was.
“Dave’s dead,” I said, and her face kind of collapsed, except for those McDonald’s arched eyebrows, and her hand flew up to cover her mouth. Her fingernail polish was lavender, I saw then, which gave me a weird little hope. “So is her grandson Tyler,” I added. “He died when he was a baby. There’s nobody else.”
“Oh, God. Dave was real? I always thought—he seemed like just a story . . .” Selena glanced at Mrs. Browning again and then back to Dr. Khaira and me. She straightened up. “Gene sent me. He said he couldn’t be here—he couldn’t handle seeing her like this, but he wanted to be sure, she wasn’t . . . suffering . . .” she trailed off. “May I ask who exactly is making her decisions?”
“We have a committee of experts on ethics, who are committed—” Dr. Khaira started.
“Bullshit. ‘Experts on ethics’?” Selena repeated. “She told me herself that she never wanted to be resuscitated. You were there, weren’t you, Elyse? After one of Jean Fester’s godawful stories?”
That was when Mrs. Browning’s neck started to move, sending her head swishing back and forth and back and forth on the pillow. It was almost spooky, like a cadaver coming back to life.
“Mary? It’s Selena,” Selena suddenly called, squeezing one of her fat hands, like a little hug, and I swear it looked like Mrs. Browning’s fingers gripped back. “Do you want us to tell them to stop?” Mrs. Browning’s head went from side to side again. “Do you want us to tell them to keep going?” Her head repeated the same. So, what did it mean?
“We have every hope that she’s going to be fine, as soon as we can get her off the ventilator,” Dr. Khaira said, but Mrs. Markmann just glared at him as she pulled up a chair beside the bed. Dr. Khaira touched my arm and jerked his head toward the nurses’ station, so I followed him outside the room, over to the white counters where all the computers sit, and all the doctors and nurses oversee the patients like operators in an aircraft control tower.
“What if—we’re doing the wrong thing?” I said, choking on the words.
“Kiddo, listen, I promise I wouldn’t . . . oh, no,” he said, looking at my frowning face and the tears starting to drip out of my blinking eyelids. The thing was, I wasn’t quite crying over what we had done, but over what I hadn’t done: I hadn’t held Mrs. Browning’s hand, or spoken her name, or done anything but sit in a chair and read a book and watch the ebb and flow of the Intensive Care Unit.
“Oh, geez . . . come on . . . keep it together . . .” Dr. Khaira added, glancing around like he wished someone would save him, when I started to cry harder. That was when the double doors of the ICU swung open, and Mom walked through them, dressed up in one of her power lawyer suits: pencil skirt, blazer and blouse, heels. She looked better than I’d seen her in weeks, better than before Daddy left, except maybe too thin. When a nurse pointed her my way, I mopped my face on my sleeve. It wasn’t until her face met mine and I saw her exhale with relief that I realized how glad I was that she’d found me. The suit made her look strong and powerful again, and I wanted to fall into her arms and let her take over.
“Jane,” Dr. Khaira said, his voice sounding as relieved as I felt, and I didn’t know if the relief was because now he wouldn’t have to comfort the weeping teenage girl or because she looked like she meant business. It seemed like since this whole thing began, he wanted someone else to tell him what to do.
“Satinder,” Mom said with a sharp nod, all businesslike, and he turned and explained to me that he’d called my mother last night to ask for her opinion on the trach.
“You seemed pretty mad. Unless maybe you didn’t mean to hang up on me?” he added.
“As I told you last night, I’ve never heard anything about this Mary Browning”—Mom narrowed her eyes at me—“which is why I suggested you make her a ward of the state and leave my daughter out of it.”
“Mom!”
“But this morning I woke up and had my coffee and thought a little more about your phone call. I’d like some information about the case,” she said, folding her arms across her chest, and I exhaled.
So, we followed Dr. Khaira into the “family room” off in the corner of the ICU, which is different from the waiting room, because it has just enough chairs for one family at a time, a single phone and no TV. Mom and I sat across from him and listened while he summarized everything about Mrs. Browning’s last week, about her lungs and her kidneys and her heart, and how two days ago they’d stopped the medication to keep her asleep on the ventilator, but Mrs. Browning still hadn’t woken up.
“But she shook her head a little earlier when Selena Markmann asked her if she wanted us to stop,” I said, ignoring the part where she also shook her head when Selena asked if we should keep going.
“We did send her down for a CT scan of her brain, and there is no sign of a stroke,” Dr. Khaira said.
“Well, you shouldn’t keep doing procedures on a woman who has no chance of meaningful recovery,” Mom said.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think she was going to pull through,” Dr. Khaira said. When he added, “I’m not trying to torture her,” he seemed to be pleading with Mom like she was a judge.
“What I can’t understand is, well . . .” I started to say and they both turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. “The heart guy says her heart is fine and that the fluid on her lungs is from the kidneys, and the kidney doctor says the kidneys are okay, but the reason there’s fluid there is from the heart, and the lung specialist says the fluid is from both the kidneys and the heart but that the lungs are okay, and the neurologist says she’s not waking up because of the kidneys and the heart and the lungs but that nothing is actually wrong with her brain.”
“What you have witnessed, my friend, is a pissing war, called Not My Organ System,” Dr. Khaira said. “You want to know what I really think? I think that the anesthetic threw her for a loop, which started a cascade of badness. She is eighty-seven years old.”
The Secrets of Flight Page 26