Dear HS,
The best thing that’s ever happened to me? You know, it’s hard to remember good things. My sister is all I can think of these days. Anyway, I would say my favorite moment was this time around a campfire when we pictured our own personal dioramas. She sat there cross-legged and serious—I’ve never felt closer to her.
I have never dabbled in taxidermy. A sister who likes to skin animals is unusual enough. Pretty sure there are at least three frozen rats in our freezer still. But HS fanfic does sound pretty fun. I know she’d want her dioramas to come to life. I’ll start.
As I sneak toward Minnie’s room, I realize that what I said is true—I have never had any interest in taxidermy. It’s not what I do. That’s refreshing. Now her art will be the subject of my art.
After my dad trudges back down the hall, I tiptoe after him and duck into Minnie’s room. The musty smell and the stream of sunlight igniting the whorls of dust motes remind me so much of Minnie, as if she’s still here. Maybe she is.
I consider the massive diorama on the wall and soon realize that maybe Minnie was way ahead of me. Maybe this is a story already. It has the ingredients, the different planes of the sky, the city life and the underworld. I start typing.
Once upon a time, there was a little
I glance around for inspiration. I spot a mouse smaller than the others.
vole named Ivan. Like most voles, Ivan couldn’t see worth a damn, but he had found himself a pair of magical glasses that allowed him to see things others could not. For instance, there was a skunk that regularly dove from the clouds.
I scan the diorama for more of the story.
But what the town feared the most was a five-headed monster rumored to live in the sewers. Kids were disappearing left and right from where they sailed on a lake and from the Walnut parking lot. Ivan suspected the rumors were the skunk’s propaganda and set out to prove them fake and the skunk real.
Okay, your turn. Let’s see if chaperone Martha will allow a photo.
I take a picture of the scene and attach it to my email reply. Outside the bedroom a door shuts. I duck out. From down the hall my father glowers at me in a don’t-let-your-mother-see-you way but says nothing.
“How’s Mom?” I ask.
“Eating. Drinking.”
I nod. This is the starting line. I’ll finish my video. That will sustain her.
Before hitting send, I go back to the email. I need my heart sister right now.
Thanks for calling me a friend. I thought I shared friends with my sister, but their going AWOL means that they weren’t really my friends. I have a few I grew up with and then apart from. And others online that I have my art in common with, but really I have more in common with you than anyone. I mean, we don’t know each other.
(That’s a different thing to have in common.) We both share my sister. We both need someone to talk to about it all.
Here’s your question. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? You know mine.
Write soon.
I pause to decide how to sign off. I feel so close to her—not brotherly—but I’m confused as well. Becca is only my friend because of Minnie too. The walls of my blank room seem to press in. It’s an email. I don’t need to sign off at all. I hit send.
TWENTY–SEVEN
Before I’m allowed to deliver the wish list to the PICU, Fatima says I need to visit pediatrics. Despite being anxious to film Becca, I’m okay with the side trip because I’ve found something special for Joy.
I high-five the penguin and enter a nearly empty common room. I’d half expected the place to be clamoring with kids wanting to play video games. Only Isaac sits at his little homework desk. The crayons are out, and there is plenty of blank paper, but he hasn’t drawn anything. I wonder about what Becca said, that technology is replacing social interaction and maybe other things. Isaac here used to scribble on any old piece of paper but can’t anymore after drawing with starlight.
“Hey, Isaac, what do you say we draw together? You draw something, and then I’ll add to it.”
This feels like another collaborative story like that of Ivan the Vole.
“With the…?” He mimics putting on the headset.
“How about with paper? But I’ll try to find a second headset, and maybe we can draw together another time.” He sticks out his tongue and stares at his stomach. That’s not good. I’m dressed as a clown, not a classroom teacher. “VR drawing it is!”
Isaac brightens and scrambles for the couch and TV.
“Where’s Luke?” I ask.
“Surgery,” Isaac offers before Jeannie can say anything.
“And Joy?”
“MIA,” Jeannie responds.
I pause in my setup, the cord between the headset and console dangling from my grip. “Can you ask her a riddle for me?”
Jeannie raises an eyebrow but gives a grudging nod.
“What has six sides, can be opened with the mind, but means death in an hour?”
After I’m done with the setup, Isaac dons the headset and then grabs the hand controllers from the sack like he’s done this a million times. I sit back and watch him paint a magical, impossible garden filled with sentient flowers, rocket-ship tubers and floating fruit pocked with doors and windows.
Fifteen minutes later Joy darkens the hallway.
“An escape room,” she says. “That’s the answer to your riddle. You need your mind to open it, but if you don’t do it in time, you’re dead.”
In one hand she grips a green plastic basin. She starts to turn away.
“Wait!” Her step hitches but then continues. I call after her, “What makes a bow when cut off and runs white, blue and brown?”
She retches once into the bowl, doubled over. “A river…oxbow lakes form as the water cuts new channels,” she croaks and shuffles farther down the hall.
“I have another—”
“Let me die in peace,” she says, but she’s half laughing. “I’m already cursed.”
“Then what do you have to lose?” I’m guessing she cannot resist a puzzle. “It’s okay. I bet you can’t solve it anyway.”
Joy groans and stares up at the ceiling.
“Isaac, give Joy a turn, buddy.”
Isaac pulls off the headset and blinks around in disappointment at the distinctly unmagical setting.
“I want you to try this,” I say. “It’s an impossible mystery for the average human, but not for you. Come on.”
“Two minutes.” Joy squints at me but shuffles over and slumps onto the couch. I slide the headset over her bandanna. “Take this—and be ready,” she says, handing me the basin.
There’s vomit in it. It sloshes around, and I gag, holding it out with my arms fully extended. Jeannie swaps it out for a fresh basin.
The television screen shows Joy exploring an ancient Egyptian tomb.
“Okay, so I’m in some dead guy’s house—keep that barf bucket handy. Just saying.”
A granite slab slams down where the exit had been, and Joy jumps up off the couch, steadying herself with her arms out. “What just happened?”
A voice thunders, “You are doomed!” On the screen the room quakes, and sand sifts through the seams of blocks above. “You have until the glass is empty.”
“Glass, what glass?” Joy pants, swinging left and right. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”
“Check your pockets,” I say.
She reaches down with the hand controllers and checks her imaginary pockets, pulling out a whip, a revolver and an hourglass. She turns it over, and a thread of sand begins to form a pile at the bottom. “What have you done to me?” Joy whispers.
The voice continues. “I am the Pharaoh Akhenaten, and I swear by my pointy chin that you have until the glass is empty to return the pieces of my mummy to the sarcophagus or face a painful death in the underworld.”
“You know who will join me? Dappy the Clown. I’m superstitious about this stuff.”
“You’d better hu
rry then,” I say.
“Two minutes,” she scoffs. Joy begins a search of the tomb, looking for clues. Over the next half hour, without asking for a single hint, Joy solves hieroglyphic riddles, shoots a grave robber, learns how to compute Egyptian math and theorizes on how the Great Pyramid was built. She crawls on the hospital floor, rolls to dodge a bullet, clutches her head as she concentrates.
In the final seconds, the ceiling slowly drops to crush her. Joy kneels, sliding the lid of the coffin closed as the last grains of sand fall to the bottom of the hourglass.
The voice of Akhenaten reverberates as the crushing ceiling stops and then retracts. “Thank you, child. May Horus ever have you under his watchful eye.”
Joy lifts an arm in triumph and pushes up the headset, smiling right at me.
“You have another?” she asks. “’Cause bring it on.”
She never asked for the basin.
TWENTY–EIGHT
My success with Joy renews my sense of purpose. I hustle over to PICU and try to convince Becca of VR’s power. “I swear, VR can heal,” I say.
“Really now,” Becca replies.
“Not heal heal. Actually, maybe. Maybe temporarily. Definitely a positive distraction.”
“That’s conclusive. I’ll try it again, but only if you have my wish.”
“So which dream location were you? Ancient Egypt?”
“View from my rooftop.”
Of course. The only one I couldn’t really do.
“How passive-aggressive of you.”
“It was my truth.”
“Well, I think I can do better.”
“I doubt that.”
“Give it a try. If you don’t like it, I’ll never bother you with it again.”
Her face turns serious, and she nods.
I set her up before she can change her mind. My heart beats a little faster as I touch her head to adjust the straps. To me, her skin has a bit of a yellowish tinge today. A bandage plasters her neck. Her hair smells of basil. I get goose bumps on my forearms when I brush against her hand. I watch as her arms prickle as well.
“Ready?” I ask, and she waves the controllers.
Although Becca is sitting in bed with my VR headset pulled down tight over her eyes, she stands virtually at the same spot Dr. Lebow did yesterday. It’s not the rooftop Becca requested—it’s the roof of the world.
Becca sighs and uses the hand controller to scratch at her forearm’s IV line.
“It’s nice, right,” she says, a little louder than she needs to, calling over the harsh wind blowing in her ears. Her father isn’t here, at least, so I feel we can speak more freely.
“Nice? The view from the top of Mount Everest is nice?”
“I didn’t earn it. I think that’s 90 percent of the beauty from a mountaintop.”
“People don’t earn their view of rainbows,” I say.
“I’d wager that the view of the last rainbow you saw didn’t change your life.”
“But the view from Everest would, if you climbed it.”
“If I’d accomplished something big like that, if I cared about that sort of thing, then yeah.”
“So what do you care about like that?”
Her lips twist, as if wrestling with my question. Her hand creeps to the incision site on her chest.
“How was the biopsy?” I ask.
She takes off the headset and stares. “It’s like having a hose shoved down your neck, that’s how.”
“Not bad then.”
She snorts. “Yeah. Funny clown.”
VR was a bust. I take back the headset and mull the silence as I repack the bag. “What do you want to do instead?”
“I dunno. Maybe talk?”
“I’m going into eleventh grade. Are you planning on being back in school this September?”
“We’ll see. I try not to make plans.”
“What’s the first thing you want to do when you break out of here?”
Becca sighs. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m too tired for conversation.”
“I can do the talking. I already know I have a school project, a film. I’d love for you to be in it if—”
“No thanks,” she says.
“What?”
“No. I really don’t want to be some kid in a movie who everyone pities. And don’t start a funding campaign for me either. One of my friends did that. It was awful. I don’t know why people feel the need to share everything. She put my life up on a fund-me campaign. I need a heart that works for me—not money, not sympathy.”
I want to explain the reason for my film. That it’s not for the public. It’s for her heart sister. For my mom. Maybe for me too. But I can’t.
“Sorry,” she continues. “I’m in a bit of a mood. Too many steroids. Do you mind?” She nods to the doorway. “I want to work on something.”
She pulls a laptop from under her blankets and sets it on a table that swings in to sit just beneath her rib cage. I stand for a stunned moment before recovering.
“Your art?” I ask.
“Something like that.”
As I finish packing my gear, she doesn’t even look up. But she’s grinning from ear to ear as she types.
I hesitate at the door, trying not to think about how I’ve failed. Her fingers tap at the keys. I’d give anything to have her grinning that way at me. I pull up the zipper on my bag and haul it over my shoulder, moving on to my next customer.
It’s Nina. She’s about eleven or twelve, and she wants the Egyptian tomb too. Bright-eyed and smiling with expectation, she doesn’t seem long for the PICU. I’m about to ask why she’s here, but then I see how the nub of her thigh lifts the sheet as she repositions herself. She’s missing half of her left leg. I load the scenario.
Her head can barely hold up the gear as I lock it in place.
“I visited the King’s Chamber last year,” she says, turning her head this way and that. “I climbed into the sarcophagus and lay down like a pharaoh, like Tutankhamun.” She giggles. “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that, but my dad lets me do anything.”
“That’s pretty cool,” I say.
“It was amazing. It was like everything else disappeared. Sounds became all wonky. My dad’s words got hard to understand. And I started to hum.”
She hums now. Judging by her ethereal tone, she’s far away.
“My voice went up into these secret chambers above the ceiling and echoed back even louder. It’s not working with this thing, but I really did. I’ll never forget.”
It’s funny to me that someone’s dream destination is a place they’ve already been, but the same is true for Rungha, who comes next—a skinny South Asian boy who wants to inspect an iceberg up close. Again it’s as if he wants to share it with me.
In my search, I found icebergs as large as islands, vast shelves of ice, but the one I picked is a small one, weathered and full of small holes, shining in the bright sunlight.
“Sapphire,” Rungha says. “That’s what I remember the most. The color of pure ice.”
Water laps at the side of the rubber Zodiac where the camera must have been perched. The ice seems to glow, as if carved by a surrealist sculptor, all hollows and sharp edges. Rungha chortles when three penguins leap out of the water, one after the other, to skim onto a shelf of the iceberg before sliding back into the frigid water.
“That looks so fun,” he says and laughs as more penguins follow. “Chinstraps!”
He begins to take the headset off. “Not yet,” I say, placing a restraining hand on Rungha’s arm. He continues.
Quite suddenly the iceberg in the scene flips. At first it seems that it’s rising, as if on the back of a great whale, but then the bottom, having melted to the point that the top is heavier, inverts in a massive crash of water. The Zodiac engine roars.
“Whoa!” A wave sends Rungha bouncing away. As the iceberg settles, light shines in a glorious blue tunnel. “That was so worth the wait. It is like the path home.”
&n
bsp; I swallow, pretty sure he’s talking about death.
“Thank you,” he says.
My bag vibrates.
“Your girlfriend?” he asks and smiles.
“Nah.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend either.”
I don’t know how to respond. He’s probably fourteen or fifteen. Will he ever have a girlfriend? His skin is wan, and he’s punctured by a half dozen tubes. I wonder what would be on everyone’s wish list if they didn’t have to choose a place. Would it be places to visit or experiences like flying? Or would it be to meet people? To experience having a girlfriend? To see someone one last time? I guess that’s what I’m trying to do for my parents—to bring back the one person they most need to talk to.
It’s getting late when I’m through. I don’t want my mom to be home alone when my dad leaves for work. I rush to pack up. Going back past Becca’s room, I see her with her fingers in her hair.
But I have nothing to say, no reason to enter. So I duck past and pull out my phone. Sure enough, there’s an email forwarded on by Martha. The subject reads Poor Ivan, I want to find out what happens next! Martha has left the time stamp showing when Becca sent the email to her. It was just after my visit. I was Becca’s project! If only she liked clown me as much as she does heart-brother me.
HB,
Oh, you ARE a storyteller. I’m happy-crying all over the place. LOL. Obviously, the angel-skunk is picking off mice and squirrel babies one by one. Okay, so Ivan wants to save these kid mice, and he’s the only one who sees what’s really happening. So he creates a map of all the crimes and triangulates them to figure out the hot spots where the angel-skunk is likely to land. It’s all very vole-CSI.
After staking out the hot zone, Ivan watches the angel-skunk steal an unsuspecting mouse. He tries to save her, but he’s just too small, right? And when he tells everyone about the angel-skunk, they just laugh him off. Who would believe in an angel-skunk? Obviously, it’s a five-headed cat demon doing it. Over to you…
Clown’s back. BTW, he actually asked me to be in a movie. That’s a bit presumptuous, huh? I have to give the guy credit though. I heard people on the ward breaking out in laughter. You don’t hear that much around here. I’ve been in a terrible mood. He hooked me up with a view from Mount Everest, and I’m all, like, whatever.
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