Curiosity ignited somewhere deep inside me. We weren’t going to be at the hospital. Shelly and Linda wouldn’t accidentally run into us.
When Zee turned to me, her smile had faded and her eyes were serious. “Look, I know what it’s like to be newly diagnosed. All your usual friends look at you with that awful mixture of pity and thank-God-it’s-not-me on their faces and you have no one to hang out with. Why don’t you come out? I promise no one’ll make you talk about it unless you want to.”
“All right,” I said, a weird thrill running through me. “I’d love some coffee.”
Chapter Ten
Zee led us to her car, a bright yellow speedy thing that looked ridiculously expensive.
“You’re getting in the back,” she said to Drew. “I need time to get to know my new best friend.”
Drew draped an arm around me, leaning in to mock-whisper a secret in my ear. Even through my heavy jacket, the parts of my back and shoulders he touched seemed to ignite, to be engulfed in the hottest flame. I held my breath and watched his cane support his weight as leaned into me.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “She’s this crazy with everyone. It’s not just you.”
His words curled around my ear. I wanted to close my eyes and take them in, but I pretended to laugh along with the two of them. When Drew moved away to get into the back of the car, I felt a pang, a loss. “Absurd” didn’t even begin to describe what I was doing, what I already felt for this man. It was madness, plain and simple.
The car smelled like fresh leather and lemon cleaner. Zee ran a hand over the dashboard. “Like my new baby? Twenty-second birthday present from my parents.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I wondered who it’d go to when she died. Did Zee think about such things constantly, thoughts about her mortality and looming death eating away at her insides like tiny termites? Was she completely hollow, made up of jokes and laughter and mirth until she was back alone in her room?
I took out my phone and texted Mum to tell her I’d be late.
“You live around here?” Drew asked.
“Yes.” I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. His blue eyes were all I could see, and flushed with the strange intimacy of the moment, I looked away. “My parents have a home in The Mills.”
“Ooh la la, very nice,” Zee said, signaling left at the stoplight. Her car tinkled. “I’m slumming it with my parents in Statestown.”
“You’re slumming it in your four-bedroom house?” Drew laughed. “I don’t even want to know what I’m doing in my downtown studio apartment.”
“You live by yourself?” I glanced at him in the rearview again before glancing away.
“Yeah. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Zee’s over there all the time, bugging me. I can never get a moment’s peace. Maybe now that she has you it’ll be different.”
I looked at the way they laughed together, their easy banter. Was there something more there, just beneath the surface?
I’d only been to Sphinx once, in high school. The casual restaurant/bar had changed in four years. The crowd was less teens looking to get alcohol illegally and more young adult, people in college living alone. When we walked in, several of the patrons looked up and nodded or smiled at Drew and Zee.
“I guess you can tell we come here a lot,” Zee said. “Hey, Ralph!” she called to a waiter. “Usual, please.”
The guy flashed her a thumbs-up sign and looked at me. “And what about you?”
“Um, just a, uh, a coffee, please.” I felt like my social bones were stiff with disuse, popping and creaking awkwardly at my effort to exercise them. I glanced sideways at Drew to see if he was staring, but he was already sprawled on a couch in the lounge area and pulling some papers out of his messenger bag.
I took a seat on a recliner and Zee collapsed melodramatically on the couch next to him, hoisting her feet up so her boots were on his papers. He pushed her legs off impatiently. “Not now, Zee.”
She didn’t seem to mind his tone. Rolling her eyes at me, she said, “He’s on a mission and can’t be disturbed.”
I smiled a little awkwardly. “What mission?”
“It’s always something new,” Zee replied.
“It’s important,” Drew said, moving the sheet of paper on top to the back. He looked up at me. “It’s a petition for a TIDD member.”
“Jack doesn’t come to TIDD anymore, ergo, he is not a member,” Zee said, as Ralph brought us our coffees. “Thanks, hon. Put it on my tab, will ya?”
I took my coffee and tried to pay, but Ralph shook his head, his hoop earrings jangling. “First time no charge,” he said. “Hope you’ll come back.”
“Stop flirting with her and give me my coffee,” Drew said, feigning annoyance. “What do I have to do to get some service around here?”
I watched them, my brain teeming with questions. How could they act like this, like it was any other day? Didn’t they want to go skydiving or setting world records? Why were they wasting their time with me when these were their last days? I felt like this was all just a dream, a surreal, bizarre dream from which I’d wake up at any moment. Maybe Dr. Stone and I’d discuss it at my next appointment—the implications of coffee and a yellow car.
When Ralph went back behind the counter, Drew set his coffee on the table in front of us. “Jack’s too sick to come to TIDD meetings,” he said, as if he and Zee had never been interrupted. “That doesn’t mean he’s not a member anymore. I don’t understand why you’re so against this.”
“It’s just a bad idea for the group to be involved in something so divisive,” Zee said, her eyes going dark in a way I was sure wasn’t common for her. “We depend on the hospital administration for fundraisers and other things.” She looked at me. “They’ve paid for family members’ hotel rooms in the past, when people had to be hospitalized in a different city. They pick up the bill for stuff like that all the time. And they’re totally against this plan.”
I nodded and took a sip of my coffee. It scorched my tongue.
Drew sighed. “It’s Jack’s choice.”
“Jack isn’t...all there anymore. You know that. You’ve got to admit it.”
Drew ran a hand through his hair, a gesture I’d always thought was annoying and pretentious on guys. On him, it looked genuine. I could see frustration in the tightness of his jaw. “That’s not his fault. That’s part of the very thing he wants to stop.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry. We’re probably talking over your head. The thing is we have a TIDD member who’s too sick to come to meetings now. He’s got encephalitis—a brain infection—as a complication of cancer. So he wants to petition the court for physician assisted suicide.”
Physician assisted suicide. I looked at Drew, sitting there with his cane balanced against the arm of the couch. I wanted to crawl inside his brain and see what he felt when he said those words. Was it frightening? Or did he feel like it didn’t apply to him? I knew what I’d be doing that night: researching more about Friedrich’s Ataxia, just how quickly it progressed.
“I...see. That’s, um, euthanasia. Right?”
“Right.” Drew took a deep breath. “I think it should be his choice.”
“Do you think the court will approve something like that?”
“It’s considered a felony in New Hampshire,” Drew replied. “But I’m hoping a petition from the community might change the court’s mind.”
Zee made a noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Are you kidding? Do you live where I live? This little elitist Republican community is never going to approve of something like that. It’d hurt their delicate sensibilities too much. Besides, I’m with them on this one. The nature of Jack’s disease makes it too close to call. How do we know it’s really what he wants and not just what his addled brain is saying?”
Suicide. This guy, Jack, wasn’t exactly talking about offing himself in the usual sense of the word, but he was asking to be able to choose how and when he died. I’d considered it once. It see
med weird that someone like me, someone so used to bedding disease, would’ve only considered it once. But people with fictitious disorders, of which Munchausen is the severest, don’t actually want to die. Many a time we end up dead because we keep making ourselves sicker and sicker, but that’s not the end result we want when we start. What we’re looking for is to establish an identity, to hopefully find sympathy or love or whatever in the eyes of our loved ones.
At least, that’s what the shrinks said.
Me? I’d say they were right.
Once, when I was in the eighth grade, I’d been admitted to the hospital. I had a severely upset stomach and a high fever, and they were working hard to try and find the cause for my infection. I remember it was the middle of the night, and I’d been up and down, alternatively throwing up and thrashing around and even having the occasional fit when Mum came in to the room. She sat with me, took my hand, and asked me very seriously if what I wanted was to die. She asked if that’s what it was all about, my acting out this way, putting them through the wringer. She said she’d watched me suffer so long that she was seriously trying to understand my motivation. Surely it wasn’t just that I liked being sick, right? What kind of fucking weirdo likes being sick? We had billion dollar industries devoted to making people feel better, stronger, faster than they naturally were. Who spent all her time trying to be weak and sickly?
I thought about Mum’s question long and hard, I really did. My thirteen-year-old feverish brain could see that she truthfully wanted to understand me. I thought she deserved my serious consideration of the matter. But then I realized that I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to push through that barrier to the other side. What she didn’t understand, what no one understood, was that I enjoyed that place right there in the damn barrier. I liked feeling powerless and sick and diseased.
When they found out what the cause of my infection was, they discharged me immediately and gave my parents a referral to yet another therapist.
I’d been imbibing fecal matter.
Chapter Eleven
Zee insisted on dropping Drew and me off, even though I told her I’d be happy taking a cab. I watched her out of the corner of my eyes as she drove, her head bobbing in time to the Bob Marley track on her sound system. One of her braids was coming undone, and a strand of wispy red hair stuck out at an odd angle. I had the intense urge to tug on it, see if it would fall out. Her body was likely still radioactive from all the chemo. I remembered reading somewhere that the poison from those toxins remained in a patient’s body long after treatment itself was over.
To me, it seemed an unfathomable luxury to be a cancer patient. The world was made to sympathize with cancer patients. They were heroes of billboards on the interstate, of touching ads with tender music that interrupted our favorite TV shows. We cheered on celebrities who contracted, and fought, cancer, shaving our heads when they lost their hair in a show of moral support.
When we pulled into the gates of The Mills, Drew let out a whistle. “I knew this place was supposed to be ritzy, but I’d never been inside myself.”
I spread my hands out magnanimously. “You’re welcome.”
Zee did that snort-laugh thing.
“Where did you grow up?” I turned slightly so I was half-facing Drew. That was about as much as I could handle right then. It was like he had a superpower, like he could light me on fire simply by looking at me. Even as I thought it, I knew just how cliché it sounded.
“New York City,” he said. He tapped the head of his cane against the open palm of his hand as he talked. I watched, hypnotized. “I loved it, but when it came time for college, I wanted to go somewhere quieter.” A laugh, a rumbling sound deep in his throat. “I know, I know. Most kids want to go somewhere to party when they’re in college. Not me. I’d had enough of that growing up.”
Zee rolled to a four-way stop sign and I directed her.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Were your parents gone a lot or something?”
“Ha. No. The problem was that they were never gone.” His eyes ran over my face, as if he was assessing my willingness—or ability—to hear his story. “Look, I don’t want to lay all this on you the first time we meet. I might scare you off.” He grinned. “Why don’t you come hang out with us Thursday night and I’ll tell you more?”
“Oh, yeah. Come out with us! Pierce’ll be there, too.” Zee bounced slightly in her seat.
“Come out where?”
“Sphinx again. We never go anywhere else.” Drew grinned. “It’ll be fun, though. We’ll chill, drink a couple of beers—”
I shook my head at him. “I can’t. I’m only nineteen, remember?” I felt weird saying that, like I was a child compared to these two with their serious illnesses and legal ages.
“Oh yeah, she’s a young ‘un,” Zee said. “That’s okay, they just won’t stamp your wee hand and you can sit sipping your Diet Coke like a good girl.”
I laughed.
“So?” Drew asked, the cane hitting his palm just a touch more rapidly. “Will you come?”
I pointed, and Zee pulled up in front of my house.
“Sure.” I handed him my cell phone, my heart racing. “Put your number in there so I can text you if anything comes up.” It was, hands-down, the bravest thing I’d ever done in my life.
I stood on the driveway and waved as Zee’s bright yellow car zipped off, a little spot of jaundiced sun on the gloomy street. I clutched my cell phone in my hand, just a tad heavier now with Drew’s number and Zee’s, too. When I couldn’t see them anymore, I keyed in the code for the garage and walked into my waiting house.
My fingers played with the syringe in my pocket as I stuck my boots by the mudroom door and ventured out into Mum’s craft nook. She sat hunched over the roof of her dollhouse doing something to the shingles, her usual cup of tea sitting off to the side.
“I’m back.” I held my arms out to the sides, like I was displaying my body for her to inspect. When I realized that, I let my arms fall back down.
“I hear.” She didn’t look up. The weird scorching smell of the wood glaze she used traveled up my nostrils.
“I ended up volunteering late at the hospital today.” I pulled out a barstool and sat down, hooking my feet on the spindles underneath.
She took a sip of tea, glanced at me, and returned to her work. “All right.”
“What are you doing? To the roof, I mean?” I watched her head, the blue-black of her hair reflecting the recessed lights in the ceiling.
“Glazing the shingles.” Her tiny brush paused and she took a deep breath before looking up at me. “Don’t you have something else to occupy your time, Saylor? You’re making me nervous, staring at me while I work.”
Childish rage bubbled in my chest, white hot. “Well, gee, I wish I could, Mum, but it seems you thought it absolutely necessary that I be pulled out of college to come home. So if I seem a mite cabin feverish, I guess you only have yourself to blame. Jesus Christ.”
“Watch your language.” She sighed, her shoulders rounding out as if she was so tired, she didn’t have the strength to even hold them up.
“Where’s Grandma?” I hadn’t realized the question had even been forming when I spat it out. When she looked up at me, her eyes wide, I felt like my face must’ve reflected the same surprise.
“What?”
“Where is she? Is she even still alive? Why did you make her go away?”
When Mum set her brush down, I noticed with a small measure of spiteful satisfaction that her hand trembled a touch. “I didn’t make her do anything. Why are you bringing this up now? It’s been thirteen years since you last saw her.”
“So? Does that mean I don’t have the right to know where my own grandmother disappeared to? You and Dad won’t tell me anything. It’s like you won’t even acknowledge that she exists. What the hell is wrong with you? How could you kick your own mother out of your house?”
My mother took another sip of tea, and I could see she w
as trying to maintain her composure. Apparently anger won out, though, because she set her tea cup down with a crash, spilling some of the liquid onto the table where it beaded and reflected the light like a pretty piece of glass.
“You don’t know the first thing about my mother. You think you deserve so much, but do you ever think about what you do to deserve it? What have you ever done for me? What do you do for anyone besides yourself?”
Her words cut at me, slashing and ripping, until I was sure my skin was in ribbons. We stared at each other, breathless. A beat pounded in my head.
Selfish.
Unlovable.
Selfish.
Unlovable.
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out.
Just making sure you haven’t changed your mind about Thursday! -Zee
Turning away from my mother, I keyed in, I haven’t.
Chapter Twelve
I took a cab to Sphinx Thursday night. It felt too much like charity, asking Zee to pick me up. The bar was across town, halfway between where the both of us lived.
At that time of night, Sphinx was hopping. The lights had been turned down low and music played loudly, vibrating in my head before I was even inside. At the door, a chick about my age asked for my ID. I handed it over and she scanned for my age.
“Okay, so I can’t stamp you, since you’re not twenty-one yet,” she said, screwing up her little pierced nose as if this was a personal regret.
I nodded, and then I was allowed to roam around the world of legal-aged adults. Drew and Zee were already there, which I’d guessed from seeing her car outside. They sat at a little circular table, sipping beers.
“There she is!” Zee said, holding up her beer bottle to me. “Yay!”
I smiled, tucked a lock of curly hair behind my ear. “Thanks for inviting me. This is nice in the evening.”
Drew laughed. His cane was hooked over his knee. Since the bar stools were high, the end of it didn’t quite reach the floor. “Don’t lie. It’s trashy and they play some awful nineties songs to get people to dance, but we like it.”
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