“Okay, you can breathe now,” Ray said through the intercom. The machine slowed but didn’t stop.
I took a breath. Something was weird, though. I didn’t feel like I’d been holding my breath. Had I forgotten to hold my breath? If I’d just been in there breathing the whole time. Would Ray even notice? Would that show up on the scan?
“Take a deep breath.”
It might not be exactly right to think about Dr. Harry curing cancer. He’d cured me, and I had cancer. But that didn’t mean Property Five would cure everyone who had cancer, and it certainly didn’t mean that it would cure every kind of cancer. In fact, certain kinds of cancer were already basically curable. Or at least almost curable.
Maybe that was why Dr. Harry wasn’t jumping up and down screaming the good news at the top of his lungs. For one, he wouldn’t know if it was good news for a long, long time. For two, curing cancer had kind of, sort of been done before. We just don’t think of it that way. Since it could come back. Without warning.
And what about Goth? He had cystic fibrosis, which wasn’t any kind of cancer. How was Dr. Harry going to cure that? Which made me wonder, was Goth even real? Or was he part of my dream?
“All right, you can breathe now,” Ray said.
Oh, wow, that was stupid. The same thing happened. I must have gotten distracted and started breathing before he told me to because I didn’t feel like I needed to breathe. I inhaled. It felt the same. Like I was breathing through cotton. It wasn’t all that satisfying, but at the same time I didn’t think about it much.
Then my mother and Nurse Margie were back in the room. Nurse Margie unhooked me from the IV. They helped me off the table. Ray hadn’t come into the room with them. I could tell my mom was angry. The air around her seemed to crackle and pop.
“Is Dr. Harry aware that young man is so unskilled?” my mother asked.
“I’m sure he’s properly trained,” Nurse Margie said. “I can’t imagine Dr. Harry would hire him if he wasn’t.”
“He kept looking at the manual.”
I guess I was right about that.
“He was probably just brushing up. Making sure he was doing everything by the book by, you know, checking the book.”
“But I don’t think he was doing everything right. He barely gave Jake any time to breathe. I can’t imagine how he got through that.”
“I think I fell asleep for some of it,” I said, though I wasn’t sure.
“Well, that can’t be good. If you were sleeping, you were breathing, and if you aren’t supposed to be breathing, what will that do to the images?”
“I’ll talk to Dr. Harry. I promise.”
My mom couldn’t say much to that. I was sure she’d talk to Dr. Harry herself, or at least try. They led me back out into the hallway. None of us looked at Ray as we made our way through the outer office. As we were about to go down the stairs, I leaned in close to my mom and said, “See, that’s what happens when you don’t have enough Walmarts.”
“What? Jake, I don’t understand. Are you feeling confused again?”
“People who should be working at Walmart get jobs somewhere else. Jobs they aren’t qualified for.”
She stared at me for a moment and then burst out laughing.
NINETEEN
The next day, I decided to see if I could find Goth. I’d gotten out of bed, after all. Not completely on my own, but still. So, after they’d taken my blood out and put it back in, I had about an hour before anything else happened. I waited for Nurse Margie to go upstairs, which she did every so often. I had the awful feeling she might be flirting with Ray, a thought which made my skin crawl a little.
I shuffled through the reception area around the stairs to the other ward only to find it empty. It was much smaller than the ward I was in. It only had four beds. The windows on one side faced out into the backyard and there was a door on the far side of the room. One of the beds was clearly occupied, though. The sheets were rumpled, and the pillows beaten into lumpy balls. A half-eaten bag of Golden Oreos sat on the nightstand next to a paperback copy of The Sound and the Fury and a huge box of tissues.
Standing at the foot of his bed, trying to steady myself, I looked out the windows. It was the first time I’d really done that. About a hundred and fifty feet from the main building was a dingy yellow double-wide mobile home. Well beyond that was a stand of trees, some of which were dead and stood gray and ghostly. It was the end of summer. The leaves would turn soon. Everything in front of me would die.
I mean, I suspected it was late August, but when you’re ill, external events stop mattering. Seasons fade away, and the year gets portioned into weeks of chemo, weeks of recovering from chemo, two-week follow-up visits and three-month check-ups. Yeah, that all gets spread out over the same calendar a healthy person uses, but life becomes different. You stop thinking about how hot it was last summer. You think about how you spent most of it shivering under a blanket no matter how warm it got. Winter isn’t about how deep the snow was, it’s about the four bags of Cyclophosphamide they pumped into you over a six-week period and the mouthful of sores it left you with.
Without my illness to guide me, I would have to relearn how to tell time. Now I would notice how pretty the wildflowers were, and how nice it would be to come back next year to really see them. I’d notice the leaves when they turned, the snow when it began to fall, hoping it would stick through Christmas, the only day of the year sane people actually wished for—
Something moved outside, a tiny cloud of smoke crossing one of the windows. I went and looked out the window. By twisting my head and looking through the screen, I could see Goth standing outside smoking a cigarette.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t jump or act surprised, just looked up at me and said, “Hey. You’re walking around.”
“Yeah.”
“That means you’re feeling better.”
“I guess.”
“Come out here. The back door is through the kitchen.”
I guessed the kitchen was through the door on the far side of the room. I went over and opened it. The kitchen was primitive, the appliances older than my mother. I slipped out the back door, down two steps, and then I was walking barefoot in the grass behind the institute.
When I got to Goth, I tried to lean against the building in the same cool way he had, but it didn’t go so well. I regained my balance and just stood there, about two feet from the building watching him. He lit a new cigarette off the old one and tossed the butt out onto the lawn. Something about him reminded me of a boxer about to enter the ring. Determination? Toughness?
“I promised Dr. Harry I’d quit after he gives me Property Five,” he said.
“That’s not going to be easy.”
“It’s also not going to be that hard. I only have two packs left. I mean, I could steal cigarettes out of Nurse Haggerty’s purse, but I’m too young to turn to a life of crime.” He winked at me. “So, Dr. Harry is happy with your progress?”
I thought back to my vision of him telling his feelings to his cell phone. “I think he’s thrilled. He feels like he beat death.”
“Good. I’d like to kick the crap out of death.” He smiled to cover the anger of that. “You want to walk over to the pond?”
“There’s a pond?”
“Don’t you hear the frogs at night?”
In all honestly, I didn’t remember what I heard at night. Crickets certainly, maybe frogs, though as a city boy, I didn’t really know what they sounded like.
“You think it’s a good idea? Walking so far? You don’t seem too well.” I was definitely the pot calling the kettle black.
“Worst case scenario? I fall in and drown. Which wouldn’t be that different than what’s happening to me.”
I wanted to tell him not to worry. Dr. Harry would save him, but that didn’t even make sense. It was weird enough he could cure leukemia. He wasn’t going to be able to cure leukemia and cystic fibrosis. I couldn’t see any way that
was possible. But if it wasn’t possible, what was Goth doing here? I was confusing myself, so I said, “Um. Sure. Why not? Let’s go look at the pond.”
Surrounding the back of The Godwin Institute and the double-wide was a lot of tall grass, like a prairie almost. Goth picked out a path as though he knew right where he was going. I pushed myself to catch up to keep pace with him. My feet felt like heavy barbells. Goth was hardly moving quickly, but it was still difficult to keep up.
“What do you think of Dr. Harry?” he asked.
“He’s okay.”
“You think he’s queer?”
“It’s kind of hard to think about him having any kind of sex.”
“No kidding. He’d probably take notes.” Then he began a pretty good imitation of Dr. Harry’s monotone. “‘I understand from Nurse Margie that you’re feeling aroused. The recommended treatment for that would be giving me oral sex as frequently as possible.’”
I laughed. Too much. I felt like I was betraying Dr. Harry a bit, but Goth was right. Dr. Harry probably would approach sex like an experiment. We walked over to the pond. It was about fifty feet across. The water was murky brown with occasional flashes of bright orange. Someone had filled the pond with giant goldfish.
“There’s goldfish in there,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Koi. They can live to be two hundred years old.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s just the kind of thing I remember. I like animals and plants and shit. Those are called swamp milkweed,” he said, pointing at a tall plant with a purple-pink flower. He dropped his cigarette on the ground and crushed it with a slippered foot.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that we’re walking around out here in our pajamas?” I asked.
“Don’t you think everything’s weird since you got sick?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
About thirty feet from the pond, near the stand of trees at what was probably the back of the property, was a vegetable garden. Goth headed over that way. The garden was made of raised, wooden boxes about a foot deep lined up in two rows of six, filled with dark, rich soil. The first boxes we came to were overgrown with weeds and vegetables gone to seed.
“Are these leftover from when this was a boy’s school?” I wondered.
“I don’t think so. Nurse Margie said a couple from Detroit lived here last year. They wanted to be organic farmers. I guess it didn’t work out. That’s asparagus,” he added, pointing to a box full of four-foot tall feathery green plants. “That’s what happens when you don’t pick it.”
“Do you come from a family of farmers?” I asked. It felt like a strange question. I’d probably never asked anyone that before. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked people in a Chicago suburb.
“Neighbors,” he said, and I had a vision of him smoking behind a sagging barn staring out at his next door neighbor’s field.
The last two raised gardens had recently been turned and were nothing but boxes of deep, moist soil. “You think they’re getting these ready for next year?”
“I seriously doubt Dr. Harry is growing vegetables.”
I shrugged. “Somebody is,”
In my mind, Dr. Harry was weird enough to do something exactly like growing vegetables. He might even need vegetables for his experiments. For all I knew, Property Five was made of parsnips and fennel and artichokes. I stood at the foot of one of the tilled gardens and realized Goth was standing very close to me. Too close. Hovering. I gave him a questioning look.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
“Nowhere. I was just thinking.” A fly began buzzing around my head. I swatted at it.
“So, you know what? We should do it some time,” he said.
I knew what he meant but I played dumb though just give myself a little time. “Do it? You mean have sex?”
“Yeah. Do it.”
“Wow. That wasn’t very romantic.”
I’d given up on ever losing my virginity a long time ago—tried not to think about even—so now that I was getting an offer, it surprised me that I wasn’t all that excited about losing my virginity on such a casual invitation.
“Look, we’re in the middle of nowhere. You may be okay, but I might not last the week. Carpe diem and all that. You know?” He smiled at me. I liked the way the blue edges of his smile turned up. And then, as if recognizing my hesitation, he said, “If things were different, I’d take you to dinner first. Maybe a movie. Get to know you. But that’s not going to happen while we’re here, is it?”
“I guess that makes sense.” He was right. We weren’t going to have anything remotely resembling a romantic date in this place. And he was kind of cute.
Well, more than kind of. Those eyes.
The fly was back. And it had a friend. I swatted at them a couple of times. “Where would we do it?” I asked, dodging a dive-bombing fly. “We can’t do it in the ward.”
“Maybe we can. I’m being moved in with you tomorrow. I guess they’ve got some girls coming in. They’re going to be pretty disappointed with me and you.”
I barely heard him because the two flies had turned into half a dozen. I could feel them trying to land on me, and it gave me the creeps. I waved my hands around, but they seemed unperturbed. Goth tried helping me, swatting around my head.
“I need to go inside,” I said and hurried away, stumbling through the tall grass back to the main building. Goth came with me, hooking his arm in mine and the two of us stumbled and gasped across the yard. The whole way, the number of flies around me seemed to grow. I felt like I was in the middle of a swarm. I couldn’t be, though. A swarm would be bigger. But still, I was being dogged by more flies than I’d ever seen at one time. Maybe country life wasn’t for me.
In just a few minutes, we were back inside the kitchen. I’d managed to get in with only a few flies following me. Goth looked at me and said, “Wow, that was weird.”
Something odd occurred to me. He hadn’t been swatting flies. They weren’t bothering him at all. They’d only bothered me.
TWENTY
I was still kind of freaked by the incident with the flies when my mom got there. She had a large paper cup in one hand and held it out to me as soon as she got to the bed.
“Milkshake. Drink it.” As she forced the drink onto me, our fingers brushed. She got that worried look I hated and grabbed my free hand. “My God, Jake. Your hands are colder than the shake.”
I pulled my hand back. “It’s no big deal.” I didn’t know that for sure, but I certainly didn’t want it to be a big deal. I’d had my share of medical big deals. I pulled the blanket tighter around me.
“I should talk to the doctor again.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“He’s my doctor. I should ask him. I’ll ask him next time I see him. Okay?”
She looked at me with suspicion. I had the feeling she didn’t think I’d bother to ask him why I felt so cold. And, you know, maybe I wouldn’t.
“Drink your milkshake.” She looked unhappy but clearly didn’t want to pursue the issue. “I should have brought you hot chocolate.”
“I don’t think they want you bringing food.” I took a sip of the shake. It didn’t taste like much of anything, and the texture was waxy.
Tension floated in the air, so my mother talked over it like she always did when there was tension. “There’s a nature trail running behind the B&B. I took an hour walk this morning. It’s a ten-mile trail. I think it runs behind the Institute. Next weekend I’m thinking of walking down to see you rather than driving. It’s so restful up here. And beautiful. The wildflowers are amazing. We have to get you out to see them. I’ll talk to Dr. Harry. Maybe I can take you on a field trip.”
“There are wildflowers in the backyard.”
“You don’t want a field trip?”
“I don’t feel much like it.”
“Well, you can’t stay in bed the rest of your life. The village is s
o charming. They have a tiny little movie theater, a couple of women’s boutiques. Nice stuff but very pricey. Several restaurants. And a Polish bakery. I almost bought you a cherry pie.”
“Thank you for not doing that.”
“Well, don’t think you’re getting out of here without having some cherry pie. That’s all I have to say. They grow cherries nearby. They put them in everything. Yesterday I saw cherry hot sauce for sale. Ridiculous, isn’t—”
“So, you talked to Dr. Harry, and I’m going to be here a while?”
“Yes.” She managed to add a layer of defiance onto the little word. “Did you ask him about that?”
I shrugged. “They want to study me. They’re not going to let me go. When are you going home?”
“When I leave here. I’m all packed up and ready to go.”
“Good. Call Dad and tell him I’m okay. And explain the wi-fi situation.”
“I’ve already done that. He doesn’t believe me.”
“Well, call him again.”
“Jake, you know how he is. He’s not going to calm down until he hears from you.”
“Fine. I’ll ask the nurse if I can call him tomorrow. Okay?”
She took the milkshake away from me and took a sip herself. I couldn’t believe it. That was a trick right out of How to Feed an Infant. What did she think? That I was eighteen months old, and I’d want to eat because I saw her doing it?
“All right. I think I know where I’m not wanted. I’m going.” She leaned over the bed and gave me a squeeze. “I’m so happy you’re getting better, and I’m going to miss you so much this week.”
“I love you. I would love you a whole lot more if you didn’t make me feel like I was five years old.”
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