“It’s Mom.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Becky covering her mouth. Only three people outside our family knew about Mom’s illness: Calen, Mr. Rodolfo, and Becky. Calen knew because I had known him forever; Mr. Rodolfo knew because we needed to borrow his car whenever Mom went up to Olsten for her therapy; Becky knew because I was dumb enough to tell her when she agreed to have sex with me. (Afterward, I made her promise she’d never tell anyone or else I’d start a rumor that she gave me chlamydia. She pointed out that, if I did, then everyone would think I had chlamydia too. I told her yeah, that’s how badly I wanted her to keep it to herself.)
I didn’t tell people because that’s what Mom wanted. She was extremely self-conscious about her illness. She doesn’t like anyone knowing about it. Probably because of how weird and rare it is.
“Tell me what happened,” I said to Nomi.
“Mom told me she was taking a nap! She said that’s all it was! Just a nap! But then, I couldn’t wake her up, so … so I … ”
“Take a deep breath.”
My sister tried. She opened her mouth but as soon as she inhaled, she started crying. “I tried to pull her out of bed! I just wanted to wake her up, that’s all! But she was right on the edge and then I pulled too hard and she hit her head and there’s … there’s … Kaz, I’m sorry! There’s blood! ”
I had to steady myself. I have this problem with blood. Hemophobia, they call it. It means the runny red stuff that keeps us alive is basically my kryptonite. When I see blood, I pass out. The sudden image in my head—Mom’s pale face and a red stain soaking into the carpet—made the world turn gray. I shut my eyes tight. I flexed my stomach muscles. I clenched my jaw. (Sometimes that helps.)
When I opened my eyes, Mr. Rodolfo had his phone out, looking annoyed—probably with my lack of action.
“I’ll call the ambulance,” he said.
8
The Swelling of Sleep
You’ve heard of appendicitis, right? That itis part means to get larger, to swell. My mother has something else entirely. Somnitis. It’s a rare neurological disease named after Somnus, the Roman god of sleep.
If appendicitis means the swelling of the appendix, I’m sure you can see what somnitis is. It means sometimes my mom doesn’t wake up. For days. She can have an attack anytime. One moment she’s wide awake, and the next—zzzzzzzzz …
For days.
It’s so rare, most people have never heard of it. Not even doctors. Which is why there aren’t many working on a cure. There are quacks out there who’d like to sell you crystals or incense or some treatment that includes stabbing you with needles, but none of it works. In those cases, the only people getting well are the “practitioners.”
I’ve read everything about her illness (and I do mean everything; there isn’t much out there). I’ve learned that throughout her life, Mom’s attacks will get longer and longer. One day, maybe when she’s old or maybe tomorrow, she’ll fall asleep and never wake up.
9
On Googling
When your mom has somnitis, you can’t help but google. A lot.
(Is it just me, or does the word google, when used as a verb, sound like slang for masturbation? Example: I’ll bet Topher Briggs googles himself, like, ten times a day. See what I mean? This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with googling yourself. To quote Mr. Dearborn, my extremely fired health class teacher: “Boys, it’s perfectly natural. Everybody does it.”) So like I said, I google a lot. (Please note that I’m now using google in the classical sense—i.e., searching the Internet.) You can’t help but type things like, “What is the cure for somnitis?” The first thing you get is pages and pages of bullshit sites trying to convince you to do more yoga, or get hypnotized, or rub eucalyptus cream on your earlobes. Mom tried all of these, by the way. None of it worked. All it did was teach me my mom’s a sucker for miracle cures. It’s hard to blame her. She’s the one who’s sick. When something terrible is happening to you, I guess you’re willing to try anything.
Which is why it was so crazy she wouldn’t try the Sleep Clinic at the Mars-Bowen Health Sciences Complex in New York City. It’s the only Google hit that actually seemed legit. One of the founders is a neurologist who specializes in sleep disorders. These are actual doctors. They do actual research. Using actual science.
On their site, they have a list of everything they have treated, from snoring to insomnia. And guess what? Scroll all the way down to the very bottom and you’ll find eight beautiful little letters you won’t find anywhere else: s-o-m-n-i-t-i-s.
But there’s a catch. Mars-Bowen is one of those all-inclusive private health complexes. You can only book yourself into the place if you’re a member, and membership will cost you. $12,000. Up front.
So now you know what I was saving up for.
10
Big Daddy
In the back of the ambulance, the paramedics had Mom strapped to a gurney. There was a bandage on her head and orange padding stuffed around her face. It pinched her cheeks and pushed her lips into a pair of prunes. But it couldn’t stop her from grinning. That was because she was dreaming of Dad. “Daniel … ” she murmured, breathing deeply. “Daniel … Daniel … ” She whispered his name over and over. Eventually, the words faded away, but the smile stayed.
The paramedic looked from Nomi to me, arching his eyebrows. “She often talk in her sleep?”
“Sometimes.”
I picked up Mom’s hand and stroked it. The paleness of her skin looked even whiter under my brown fingers. She squeezed my hand and the grin on her face went even goofier. I think she thought my hand was actually Dad’s.
Nomi watched Mom’s face, wincing as if in pain. “I shouldn’t have pulled her.”
“She’ll be fine,” I told her. “It’s not your fault.” Of course, my sister didn’t believe me.
At the hospital, they made us sit in an empty hallway while the doctor did his examination. The blue chairs were a gazillion percent plastic and about as comfortable as the crappy bleachers they have around the track at school.
Nomi sat beside me and kicked her legs, staring at one foot and then the other swinging up, then thumping against the chair legs.
My sister is eight years younger than me. I was thirteen when Dad died, but Nomi was only five. She says she remembers him, but she doesn’t really. (I can match all of her memories to photographs we have around the house, all the ones with Dad in them.)
I worry about her. When you grow up with no father and a mom who’s liable to conk out for days at a time, it takes a toll on a kid. Sometimes, I think Nomi’s forehead ought to be stamped with the word FRAGILE. Everything about her—her arms, her legs, even her hair—seems too thin. The most fragile part of her, though, is her eyes. They’re so big and glossy, it’s like she’s always on the verge of tears.
I put one arm around her shoulders and felt the thump-thump-thump as her feet hit the chair. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Just a matter of time before she wakes up again.”
Nomi kept on thumping. “It’s because of me.”
“You just wanted to wake her up.”
“But there was B-L-O-O-D.”
“You don’t have to spell it.”
“But I don’t want it to happen to you too.”
I hugged her close. “I’m not gonna pass out just from hearing the word. I promise.”
“What if it’s not an attack? What if it’s because she hit her head?”
“It’s just an attack,” I told her.
There were televisions bolted into the corners of the room. I thought maybe I could distract Nomi from blaming herself with a TV show. Unfortunately, both sets were tuned in to the latest episode of Big Daddy, the worst reality TV show ever conceived. They take a bunch of twenty-somethings who have never known their parents, and make them humiliate themselves in co
mpetitions to find their biological father.
In the first episode, all of them were exiled on a tropical island (like we’d never seen that one before). They were separated into two groups: orphans who had been abandoned as children and fathers who hadn’t known they’d had a kid. The trick is that none of them knew which father had fathered which orphan.
At the end of each episode, all the fathers voted on which orphan they thought was their kid. The orphan with the fewest votes was booted off the show. At the end of each season, the last remaining orphan won $250,000. This was followed by the big revelation scene of which father had fathered the winner. That lucky dad also won $250,000.
I hated that show.
“That girl has big boobs,” Nomi commented, stating the obvious. On the screen, an orphan in a tank top swung upside down from a tree branch.
“Let’s read a magazine,” I suggested. I started searching the tables for some kid-friendly reading material, but there wasn’t much. Luckily, the doctor came out of the emergency ward. He had a face like a bloodhound, saggy and dull but reliable.
“You’ll be happy to hear your mother’s head injury isn’t serious. Nothing that would keep her unconscious.”
“You see?” I told to Nomi. “It’s not because of you.”
The doctor started asking questions about Mom: How long had she suffered from somnitis? What precisely were the symptoms? Were there any warning signs prior to an attack? At first, I thought he needed this information to treat her properly, but then I realized he was just excited to be treating someone with such a rare condition. To him, Mom was a novelty.
Nomi must have sensed the same thing because she suddenly asked, “Can we go in and see her now?”
11
Some Family History
My mother’s name is Aiko, which means “love child.” (In Japanese, it isn’t quite so hippie sounding. It’s just a normal name, like Jane or Sarah. Even still, my mom definitely has some hippie tendencies, and it’s possible that was where they came from.) Her great-grandparents came over from Kyoto in the sixties, which makes her a yonsei, a term that means “fourth generation.” Nowadays, in my family, yonsei might be the only word of Japanese any of us know.
The generations that came before my mom were pretty strict about keeping the Japanese bloodline as pure as possible. From the way she explains it, everyone before Mom was under tons of pressure to find a nice Japanese person over here, marry as quick as possible, and start popping out little purebred Japanese babies.
That ended with Mom because her parents—my grandparents—both died in a car crash while Mom was studying music at college. As a result, she never had the chance to cave in to parental pressure and hook up with a Japanese guy. Instead, she married my dad. A black guy from Barbados, which is how Nomi and I ended up several shades darker than Mom.
When I was young, the neighborhood where we lived in Rosemount was mostly white, so being the color of a strong latte made you special. Up there, I stood out. In Evandale, on the other hand, just about everybody is some shade of specialty coffee.
When I meet new people, especially adults, I can almost see the wheels turning as they pore over my face, trying to make sense of my puffy lips, my slanted eyes, the freckled blotches that pepper my nose and the tops of my cheeks. Eventually, when they can’t figure it out, they always ask the same thing.
“Sorry, I’m just curious, but … where are you from?”
Ambiguous ethnicity also means you get mistaken for everything you’re not. People come up to me in the street, speaking some language I can’t understand. Sometimes it’s Spanish, sometimes Persian, sometimes something from Southeast Asia. Every time, I apologize politely and explain I have absolutely no idea what they just asked me.
Here’s something that will never happen:
Stranger on the Street: Excuse me, but I was just wondering, would you happen to be some sort of Japanese-Caribbean half-breed mongrel-type-person?
Me: Good guess.
Stranger on the Street: Huzzah! I knew it! (High-fives nearby friend.)
Yep, never gonna happen.
12
One Way to Become Famous
Nomi and I stood by Mom’s bed. Asleep, she looked different. She had been heavier before Dad died. You saw it in the photographs we had around the apartment. Mom had always been small, almost as frail as Nomi, but in those old pictures, she at least had a bit of healthy roundness to her cheeks.
That was gone now. The oval of her face had sunk into something closer to a figure eight, her cheekbones caved in and hollow. The bones of her arms—her elbows, her wrists, her knuckles—they all protruded in a way they never had when I was Nomi’s age. Now, as I looked at her, lying on a shallow mattress in a cold metallic bed, the only puffiness was around her eyes, swollen with sleep.
Nomi went up and stood beside the bed, but she was still looking at me. “Can I tell her I’m sorry?”
“It’s not your fault,” I told her.
She wouldn’t listen. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Mom.
Mom just lay there.
“She can hear us,” Nomi said.
“Maybe. Sometimes.”
She leaned close to Mom’s face. “It’s okay to wake up now.”
“If only that worked.”
Nomi looked at me like I was evil. I was saved from her glare by the buzz of my phone. It was Calen.
“Just calling to check,” he said. “You’re coming tomorrow, right?”
I was so wrapped up in Mom’s attack, I didn’t know what “tomorrow” meant.
“It’s Topher’s party! I’m gonna drive, but I might have a bunch of the team’s shit in my car, so I’m trying to figure out how many people I can take. Probably just you. You’re coming, right?”
I looked at Mom. If she was still asleep tomorrow, it would be difficult to leave Nomi home alone.
“I might not be able to.”
“Dude, no way!” Unlike me, Calen wasn’t good on his own. In everything he did, he always needed at least one accomplice. “This is Toph’s we’re talking about.”
Every year since high school had started, Topher Briggs had thrown the biggest party of the summer.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m at the hospital right now.”
“Oh. Your mom?”
“She had an attack today. If it’s like last time, she’ll be out for at least a couple of days.”
“Dude. Shit.” Calen had a knack for loading a lot of meaning into those two words.
Calen and I had been friends since we were kids, since the time when we were neighbors up in Rosemount. When Dad died and we moved to Evandale, Calen was the only one who remembered I existed. It’s funny how fast people forget you when you’re not right in front of them.
“Anyway,” I said, “I can’t leave my sister alone.”
“What if you bring her?”
“Are you insane? I can’t show up at Toph’s with an eight-year-old.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And,” I pointed out, “isn’t this whole conversation about how you won’t have enough room in your car for anybody else? ’Specially if you gotta drive Alana too.”
“Yeah, but dude, your sister is, like, tiny.”
“Which is exactly why she’s not coming.”
“Babysitter?”
“I’ll have to let you know tomorrow, but I kind of doubt it’ll happen.”
Calen said nothing for a second, which at first I took to be silent acceptance, but in fact it was merely a dramatic pause prior to hitting me with a secret weapon.
“You do know that Christina Muñoz is gonna be there, right?”
Christina Muñoz. I had been quietly crushing on that girl—or at least the back of her head—since she sat in front of me in the seventh grade. But ever since we moved to Evandale, I
only saw her periodically. At Topher’s parties, for instance.
Sadly for me, she was the sort of bright-faced, olive-skinned beauty who emerges from the womb with a boyfriend grafted to the other end of her umbilical cord. Even when we were twelve, she went out with Trevor Greaves for the whole year. Of course, all they ever did was hold hands on the way home from school, but I would’ve happily taken that much.
“So what?” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t care either way. “I think we both know she’s gonna be there with some guy.”
“Raheem from Central Prep, you mean?”
I had never met Raheem, but I recognized his name. Dating Christina Muñoz made you famous. “Yeah, him.”
“Then this is your lucky day. I heard they broke up, like, this week. Which means you have about a three-day window—which means you have to come.”
All this time, Nomi had been listening anxiously to my half of the conversation. I pulled the phone away and held it against my chest, looking down at her.
“Any chance you could sleep over at a friend’s house tomorrow night?”
13
The Second Time I Saw Her
Once Mom was all tucked in at the hospital, Nomi and I left her. She hated it when we waited around, pining for her eyes to open. If she caught us there when she woke up, she’d only be angry.
A streetcar came along just as we got to the stop, and we jumped on. We were coming up Steinway when I spotted her again: the Girl with the Dreads. She was standing out in front of Dave Mizra’s jewelry shop. He had closed for the night and, even though it was early evening, the whole block was deserted. All except for her.
Our stop was still two blocks away, so I only saw her as we rolled past. I knew it was the same girl. The same jean shorts, the same eruption of dreadlocks, the same T-shirt dripping down one arm.
She still had the cross, too, only now it was propped up in front of her (in front of her face, actually, so I still couldn’t make out her features). She had the butt end of the horizontal bar level with her mouth, almost like she was kissing it.
Blues for Zoey Page 2