“Interesting.” Drew smiled at me, but before I could ask him what he meant by that, we were turning into the next store, a place that sold rare used books.
Chapter Seventeen
We went to thirteen different stores up and down that block and twelve on the next block before Drew’s balance got so bad he began to walk into people instead of around them. So we stopped.
“I’ll bring the car around,” I said, as he sat down on the stoop of a clothing store. “You stay right here.”
“Oh no, I think I’m going to run away.” I glanced at him to see if he was mad, but he wore a grin about a half mile wide on his face. “Smile, Grayson,” he said. “What’s the point of life if you can’t be a little sarcastic?”
I shook my head and took off for the parking garage.
When I pulled up beside him, Drew started to stand up, wobbled a little, and fell back down. He grabbed on to the stair railing to pull himself up, his jaw hard, face closed off. I put the gearshift into park and ran around the car. People gave him a wide berth as they walked right past where he lay sprawled on the sidewalk, as if they couldn’t see that something was wrong. When they were past him, they turned to gawk.
I put a hand around his bicep and helped him stand, seething at the audacity of the passers-by.
But Drew didn’t seem too bothered by it. “Thanks. Someone took my legs and filled them up with Jell-o.”
He leaned heavily on me as I led him to the car, and I was a little afraid we might both slip on the snow and ice and fall, but we made it. I turned on the heat as we pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
My head felt a little foggy. I blinked hard, then glanced at Drew. “Are you all right?”
He shrugged. I could see how hard he was trying to downplay what I’d seen—the naked, ugly truth in the glaring daylight, the unvarnished part of living with a progressive disease. “All right and upright,” he said, grinning suddenly.
I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to do that. I didn’t need to see him with a mask on, the painted-on overbright twinkle in his eye with a smile to match. I’d worn that mask before, many times. The back of it was contoured to the lines and planes of my face. But I didn’t know how to say any of that. So I said nothing.
We drove in silence for a few minutes. My eyes started to burn.
“You okay?” he asked. I could see him staring at the side of my face. “You’re shivering.”
I knew what was going on. My fever was back now that the ibuprofen had worn off. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, and it was past four o’clock. I tried not to smile in spite of the lightness in my chest, a helium balloon expanding.
“I’m fine.”
“But—”
“Really.” I heard him sigh, a defeated sound. “So. Where to next? Or do you want me to take you home? I can go drop the car off at Zee’s, too.”
Drew got the petition papers out of his bag and looked at them as we drove. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to visit Jack. I think you’ll like him.”
There was a voice of reason in the back of my mind of which I was aware. It said this was crazy, that this couldn’t go anywhere good. Drew and my friendship—or whatever this was, maybe a semi-flirtation—was based on a very obvious lie.
I didn’t have MS. I wouldn’t be getting sicker. There were people he could run into at any time who could tell him the truth. Linda Adams or Shelly at the hospital. My mother or father. Dr. Stone, my therapist.
But if it was the voice of reason that attempted to prod me back in line, there was another, more insidious voice that was much more pleasant to listen to. That voice of madness sang of other, more compelling things. It insisted that the chance of Drew running into any of those people was slim. Its whispers caressed the soft shell of my ear. Don’t you like Drew? it asked. What harm are you doing, really? The man’s funny, and smart, and talented, and he wants to spend time with you. Come on, Saylor. There’s always tomorrow for goodbye.
Maybe I was a hateful person for listening so intently to that second voice. But the pull I felt toward Drew, it was indescribable. The only time I’d experienced anything like it was with my syringe or the laxatives or the myriad other ways I’d made myself sick. I didn’t know what exactly it was about him; maybe just the fact that he had a fuller life than I’d ever had in spite of having FA. Maybe I wanted to know what it was about me that he seemed to like so much. There’s something about you, Grayson, he’d said. I wanted to find out what he meant by that. It couldn’t just be my supposed MS, could it?
“Sure,” I replied. “I’d love to meet Jack.”
My cell phone rang. I fumbled in my pocket and pulled it out: Dr. Stone.
“You can answer it,” Drew said. “I don’t mind.”
“No, that’s okay. Um, they can leave a message, I guess.”
He leaned over and glanced at the screen. “It says Dr. someone, doesn’t it? You should definitely take it. Doctors can rarely ever be reached, believe me. And if he’s calling you on a Saturday, it must be his dedicated day to return patient phone calls.”
I didn’t have time to argue or think the situation through, not without Drew realizing something weird was going on, so I answered. “Hello?”
“Saylor? This is Dr. Stone.”
“Um, hi.”
“How are you?”
“Fine.” I glanced at Drew out the corner of my eye, but he was looking straight ahead.
“I wanted to see how your time volunteering at the hospital’s been. Linda Adams told me she’d met with you and everything seemed to be in order.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s, um, it’s been great. Everything’s working out.”
“That’s heartening to hear. Would you like to make an appointment for Monday to come speak with me? I have an opening at nine o’clock.”
“Yeah, sure. That sounds good.”
“Alright. I’ll see you Monday morning.”
“Bye.”
I hung up and stuck the phone back in my pocket. “Got an appointment.”
“Good. Is that your MS doctor?”
“Yeah.” I tried to think of something smarter or wittier to say, but my heart was still pounding from what Drew might have overheard. He’d say something if he’d heard that part about volunteering at the hospital...right?
It felt like we sat there listening to the car’s monotonous highway humming for way too long. But finally, Drew spoke.
“It gets easier, you know,” he said. “The longer you know your doctors, the less they seem like machines. Eventually you’ll come to see them as the humanoids they are.”
I forced a laugh. “That’s a relief.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Chapter Eighteen
Jack Phillips lived in a middle class neighborhood with Victorian style homes and cheap vinyl siding. I pulled up behind a white Ford Focus in the driveway and turned off Zee’s car. My hands were sweating; I wiped them on my jeans, hoping Drew was too busy getting out of the car to notice. What the hell was I doing here? Was I seriously going into a sick, dying guy’s house under the pretense of being ill like him? I’d done a lot of fucked up things in my life, but I was still sane enough to realize that this was a first, even for me.
Drew waved at me from outside the car, a sort of, “Let’s get going” gesture. It was too late to back out now. It’d raise too many questions. Besides, there was a small part of me that thought, I’m not here to laugh at or belittle them. I was there because I wanted to be like them, because I worshipped the mutation in their genes, the stumble and stutter of their limbs. Wasn’t imitation the highest form of flattery?
I got out of the car. “Sorry. Just had to check something.”
At the door, Drew knocked and stood back. “Jack’s parents take care of him.”
I nodded, not sure why he said that. Later I realized it was because he wanted to prepare me, in some small way. “Jack’s parents take care of him” was code for what I was a
bout to witness. Though Drew didn’t know I was a complete liar, he did know that I was relatively new to the world of terminal illness.
The woman who opened the door was short and fat, her dirty blonde hair greasy and graying at the roots. “Drew, honey. Hi.” Her face broke into a genuine smile, and she reached up to hug him before stepping aside. “Come in, come in. He’ll be so happy to see you.”
She seemed to notice me once I was inside. We smiled at each other tentatively, waiting for Drew to make the introductions, for us to know each other.
“This is Saylor,” Drew said, extending his hand out toward me. “She’s new to TIDD. She actually helped me get our first signatures on the petition today.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.” Jack’s mom came forward, and took my hand between both of hers. “Thank you for doing that. I’m Jeannie, Jack’s mom. You have no idea how much that means to me.”
“Uh, you’re welcome,” I said, that feeling of guilt and self-revulsion bubbling up in my chest like some sort of bile. “You really don’t have to—um, Drew did it all. I was just along for moral support.”
Jeannie stepped away and patted Drew on his lower back. “Well, I know Drew’s a sweetheart. Always has been, since Jack getting diagnosed seven months ago.”
Seven months? That was it? Seven short months since the dude had been diagnosed and already he was sick enough to want to die? And here I was, clinging to the parapet of life, not quite ready to let go, but not quite ready to clamber on and live it, either.
“So where is the big guy?” Drew asked. I had a hard time imagining any man Drew would consider “big,” let alone a sick and dying one. “In his room?”
“Resting,” Jeannie said, the smile slipping off her face. “He’s been resting a lot lately. He’s just so tired.”
By the look on Drew’s face, I could tell this wasn’t good news. Not that I couldn’t guess that on my own.
We made our way down a narrow hallway into a bedroom that wasn’t any more than ten feet by ten feet. It was dominated by a hospital bed that was bordered on the side closest to me by a chair for visitors, and on the others by a wheelchair, a giant tank of oxygen, and some other IV drips and machines that I had no idea what to make of.
The boy lying in the bed was easily as tall as Drew, if not taller, but he couldn’t have weighed more than me—about one hundred and thirty pounds. His skin was the color and consistency of wax, and his bald head reminded me of that kid Carson I’d met at TIDD. I couldn’t see much of his face because it was dominated by what must’ve been an oxygen mask, though it looked different from the ones I’d seen on TV. I had a vague recollection of it being some sort of medicine dispenser, one I’d seen in a medical catalog once.
Jeannie stepped up to him and caressed his cheek. “Hey, Jackie. Look who’s here to see you, son.”
His pale, veined eyelids fluttered open and he looked at his mother’s face blandly. Then his eyes roved over to Drew and I saw a small spark of happiness. He motioned weakly to his face mask, and Jeannie pulled it off, swiftly replacing it in a series of magician-like coordinated moves with a nasal cannula. Once the little buds of the tube were in his nostrils, Jack fumbled for the switch by his bed that’d raise him up to a better level for conversing.
But Drew held up his hand. “Don’t worry about that, man,” he said. “I can talk to you just fine how you are.”
Jack dropped his hand down, apparently grateful. Every movement of his reeked of deep, deep exhaustion, the kind I was keenly aware that I’d never experienced.
“How’s it going?” he asked, his voice raspy.
Drew sank into the chair next to Jack’s bed. At first I was confused about what the chair leg was touching. It looked like a yellow plastic bag. Then, with a whoosh of realization, it came to me. It was a plastic bladder. Jack was catheterized, and his urine was collected in this bag. I looked away.
“Look what I got,” Drew said, handing the petition to Jack. “It’s not much yet, but we’ll have a lot more signatures soon, man. I guarantee you.”
With some effort, Jack held the papers up and looked at them. “Thanks,” he said. Then, looking at me, “Who’s the hot chick?”
I noticed Drew’s brief look of disappointment at Jack’s lack of enthusiasm, though he covered it up so quickly I had to wonder if I’d imagined it. “This is Saylor,” he said. “Saylor Grayson, meet Jack Phillips.”
I waved in a sort of awkward little circle. “Hey. Heard a lot about you.”
“Have you...” Jack began, and then exploded into a series of coughs, dry and crackling. Jeannie came back into the room but he waved off her help. When she was gone, he looked at me as if nothing had happened. “Have you heard my phone number? It’s even better.”
Drew burst out in guffaws that sounded only a little bit forced and I obliged with a small laugh. I wondered if this was really happening.
After some idle chatter, Jack raised up his bed and Drew and he played a video game for a little while. They asked if I’d like to play, but I declined. I’d never been one for video games, and anyway, the longer I stayed in Jack’s house, the guiltier I felt. I wanted to engage with him as little as possible.
Finally, when Jack fell asleep mid-round, Drew looked at me. “We should go,” he said. “Take Zee’s car back.”
Chapter Nineteen
Outside, I watched as Drew’s breath and mine mingled in a misty tangle. It wasn’t actively snowing, but the clouds were brooding and low, and I could smell it in the air.
When we got in the car, I blasted the heat at full. “You know, he doesn’t seem so out of it.”
Drew looked at me askance.
“I mean, Zee said she didn’t like the idea of physician assisted suicide for Jack because the cancer had affected his brain. But he didn’t seem...off to me at all.” I began to back out of the Phillips’s driveway.
“Yeah. He was having a pretty good day today.”
“Really? So that wasn’t normal?”
Drew made a “meh” face. “It’s not like he’s usually a rage machine or anything, but his personality goes through this intense change. At the beginning, when I first met him, he was really easygoing and happy, in spite of his diagnosis. When he has his bad days, you can’t see any of that Jack anymore. I guess that’s what Zee was talking about.” He paused. “But see, when he’s alert and mostly with it like he was today, he still says he wants to have a choice in when he goes and how he goes. That’s what makes me fight for his right to die.”
We were quiet for a moment, and then Drew reached inside the zippered compartment of his messenger bag. “Mind if I put this on?”
I glanced at his hand and saw a Carousel Mayhem CD. Smiling, I waved toward the stereo. “Go for it.”
“I knew you had good taste in there somewhere,” he said. “You know, buried under the Carly Rae Jepsen stuff.”
As I laughed and turned to mock-glare at him, I noticed his fingers reaching to feed the CD into the drive. But instead of lining the disc up with the opening, Drew kept smashing it against the part of the dashboard that held the dials for the heat.
Thinking he was being goofy, I chuckled. “What are you doing?”
But he didn’t answer. When I looked up at him, his eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw hard. He let his hand go limp against the gear shift. “Would you mind doing it for me? Please?” I had to strain to hear his voice; it was barely audible against the whoosh of the heater.
I took the CD. “Um, sure. No problem.” I stuffed it in without incident and the music began to play. When I plucked up the courage to look at Drew again, five minutes later, he was asleep. His head lolled against the headrest, his lips parted as if in a sigh. There was something upsettingly, terribly vulnerable about him in that moment. He reminded me of a five-year-old, spent after pitching a tantrum and not getting what he wanted. Of course, if Drew had pitched a tantrum, it had been internal, a silent raging. No wonder he was exhausted.
When I pulled into Zee’s drivew
ay, I wasn’t feeling well at all. My body hurt all over, and I knew my fever had to be creeping higher. Drew stirred in his seat. I didn’t have the nerve to check on my abscess when he might wake up any moment, though my fingers tingled with the need to pull down the neckline of my sweater. I turned the CD off and his eyes fluttered open.
“Tired?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me, his mood still ruined from what had happened with the CD player earlier.
“We’re here,” I said.
He pushed the eject button on the stereo, and grabbed his CD—this time without any problems—when the thing spit it out. Opening the car door, he used his cane to get out and stretched his legs in the snow-pregnant evening.
I followed him out.
The woman who answered the door was thin and bespectacled, with a head full of crazy dark curls that stuck out every which way. I felt a pang of sympathy. I’d thought my loose curls were bad, but hers were the tightly-wound, kinky kind I’d always been secretly thankful I’d been spared.
She smiled when she saw Drew and me. “Hi. You must be Saylor. Zee’s told me all about you. I’m Lenore, her mom. Thank you for getting her home safely the other night. Come in, you two, get out of the cold.”
We followed her in, Drew dragging behind me. Zee was propped up on the living room couch, watching a re-run of Santa Barbara, a soap opera with dramatic women with big hair I remembered my mum watching when I was much younger.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, though Mom won’t let me so much as go take a leak without badgering me about it.”
“Language,” her mother warned, but without much mettle. “And if you didn’t want me badgering you, you shouldn’t have danced till you almost passed out.”
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