The Ocean Inside

by Janna McMahan

  “I don’t imagine the rest of us will be going for a while,” he’d said.

  Sloan was crosshatching to represent the scales on the bottom of the alligator’s body when she heard laughter. Usually Sloan could sketch here for hours and not be bothered, but occasionally people wandered near. She heard a giggle, and then a group of six stepped from behind a hedge into sight.

  “Wow, this is cool,” one of the guys said.

  “I’m bored. Let’s go,” a girl whined.

  The guys sported khakis and pop-collared Lacoste shirts. The girls each wore pink sweatshirts emblazoned with the College of Charleston and short cotton shorts with Greek letters across their butts.

  He was the sort of boy she immediately disliked. Shiny bangs, polo shirt, sports legs like ropes. As he drew near, she recognized him. He was from real money, new money, Lafayette Isle money, where everyone was a perpetually tanned, logoed, CrackBerry’d drone. He’d graduated the year before, although he’d spent his younger years in private school. Calhoun Wannamaker. The list in the year-book beside his name showed letters in golf, tennis, baseball, and track. Sloan was appalled that she remembered this information, that she could even see his photo’s position on the page. But such was the curse of the artist’s photographic memory. His hair was much shorter in that photo. Today his bangs hung down over one eye, and he whipped them to the side every few minutes. He moved fluidly, like an athlete. He was quickly beside her, leaning over her shoulder toward her drawing.

  She hesitated, slightly irritated at the intrusion, but also flattered by the attention. She held up her work.

  “Shit. That’s really good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You come here and draw a lot?”

  “It’s kind of my space, my time to be alone.”

  “Oh, hey.” He threw up his hands and made a show of backing away. “If you’re running me off.”

  “No.”

  “No, you’re not running me off?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well, like, I’ve seen you around school. I mean last year I did.”

  She simply looked at him.

  The whiny girl appeared from nowhere and laid perfectly polished nails on his arm.

  “Come on, Cal.”

  “In a minute. Y’all head on back. I’ll catch up.”

  The girl gave Sloan a hateful glance. “Whatever,” she snapped. When she was some distance away her voice carried across the surface of the black fountain. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “So anyway,” he continued, rolling his eyes, “you’re Sloan Sullivan, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So if I asked you to go out sometime, what would you say?”

  “Out with you.”

  “Sure. Dinner or something.”

  “Dinner or something.”

  “Damn, do you always repeat everything?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so give me your digits.” He pulled a slim phone from his pocket.

  She hadn’t said she would go out with him. She watched him program her name and wait patiently for her number. She considered him for a moment, let him sweat just a little. He was used to having his way, and just briefly she thought of telling him no, but just as quickly she rattled off her numbers, which he punched in. Her phone rang in her pocket.

  “Now, I know you have my number,” he said.

  “Are you always so aggressive?”

  “What if I never saw you again?” He smiled a perfect smile. “I gotta run and catch up with my friends, but…I’ll call you.”

  “Sure.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “You never told me your name.”

  He seemed slightly amused by her.

  “Oh, sorry. I just thought you knew me.”

  “Not really.”

  He grinned. Did he know she was lying?

  “Cal Wannamaker.”

  “Okay, Cal.” She drew out his name in a mocking tone. He grinned in a crooked way.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Sloan watched him go, then she lowered her head to draw again but her fingers were frozen. Her pulse fluttered and her mind was blank. Unable to concentrate, she suddenly decided she needed caffeine to help her focus. It was a habit she had recently developed. Since there were so few good coffee places in their vest-pocket town, she often treated herself to a cappuccino at the garden’s café. It was this habit that had introduced her to LaShonda Washington, a girl she had always gone to school with but had never really known. Once Sloan started hanging at the café at off-hours finishing sketches, she had found LaShonda amusing and easy to talk to.

  “Hey,” LaShonda said when her friend walked in.

  “You totally won’t believe what just happened.”

  “What?” She continued to count dollars into the cash register. The café was empty except for two people conversing excitedly in German.

  “Germans always talk so loud,” LaShonda mumbled.

  “Do you remember Cal Wannamaker from school last year?”

  LaShonda raised her eyebrows. “Sure. Rich, preppy, jock. Good-looking, though. Why?”

  “I just ran into him outside and he asked me out.”

  “You lie.”

  “I swear.” Sloan held up her hand as scout’s honor.

  “Girrrrl.” LaShonda seemed unconvinced. “What’d you say?”

  “I gave him my number. Maybe he just wanted to prove he could get my number.”

  “Be careful. Isle boys make for the quick hookup and even quicker breakup.” LaShonda slammed the register’s drawer shut.

  “That’s with summer girls. They don’t try to pull that crap on locals.” Sloan knew her friend had never been out with a boy from Lafayette Isle. Blacks weren’t even able to own real estate there. Although it was supposed to be a secret, everybody knew the private island would never be integrated. The Lafayette Isle charter stated that two residents had to recommend a potential buyer before a sale could take place, and nobody wanted to be the leper responsible for lowering property values.

  “Maybe. But you know how those rich boys think. They got entitlement issues. Like everything in the world’s supposed to come easy. You want a cappuccino?”

  “Sure. Are you saying I should play hard to get?”

  LaShonda frothed milk. She raised her voice to be heard over the screech of the steamer. “I don’t know. Seems like boyfriends always turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Who said anything about a boyfriend? I’d just like to go on a real date. Somewhere nice, like Al’s by the Creek. Not hooking up at the mall or parking at the beach.”

  LaShonda set two foamy mugs on the table and slid into a seat across from Sloan.

  “He called me so I’d have his number.”

  “Don’t you dare call him. Make him work for it.”

  “I wasn’t drooling all over myself if that’s what you’re thinking. I was cool.”

  “I’m just saying don’t make it too easy. Guys like him are used to getting what they want, when they want it.”

  “True.”

  “I can’t believe you’d go out with him anyway. I thought you hated those fake people on Lafayette Isle.” She sipped coffee. “You know, come to think of it, ain’t his dad that developer dude, always finding some island to mow down or some swamp to drain so he can throw up mansions?”

  “I don’t know. You sound like my dad. Can’t you be at least a little happy for me? He’s hot.”

  “Yeah, he’s hot all right. Just be careful or you’ll end up burned.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Side Effects

  Adults were secretive. Her parents and the doctors and nurses whispered in the hall outside her door. While that might have worked with some kids, Ainslie’s hearing was sharp, and she strained to make out their conversations. Sometimes she would lie in bed and pick certain sounds out of the hospital noise, slip
pers soft in the hall, the call button at the nurses’ station, a cry from down the corridor. And she could smell better, too, which usually wasn’t a good thing in a hospital—alcohol and urine and that too sweet hand lotion all the nurses seemed to like. Ainslie could even smell the brownish antiseptic still lingering on her skin from the surgery.

  And the pain. If she lay perfectly still it was like nothing was wrong with her, but if she twisted left or right her back hurt. So she stayed still, the pain medication swimming in her mind. All the details of the humming hospital, the smells and sounds, made Ainslie wish for the calm of waves and the scent of tea olive that drifted through her bedroom window at home. But the hospital windows were shut tight, and even though she was in Charleston at the Children’s Hospital at the Medical University of South Carolina, she could have been anywhere in the world. Sometimes she imagined she was in India where sleepy-eyed camels pulled carts below her window, or she imagined she was in the Arctic where polar bears prowled outside and Eskimo children slept in other hospital beds.

  When she was first diagnosed, Ainslie hadn’t tried to understand what was happening to her. She’d just done what was asked, submitted to whatever tests. But then they removed one of her kidneys and the things they did to her hurt more. She was tired and cranky from the meds and all she wanted to do was run away, to rip the tubes out of her arm and run out of the hospital into fresh air and sunshine. Instead, she got a parade of kids in pajamas dragging IV poles past her door. Sometimes they would look in and see Ainslie, and they would wave or smile. Other times they just stared like they didn’t really see her there, and then they would just walk on down the hall.

  The longer Ainslie stayed in the hospital the more things began to hurt. They took blood and started IVs, and each time a nurse stuck a needle into the top of her hand or the tender part inside her elbow, Ainslie imagined she was being burned, that a tiny flame was shooting into her arm. Of course, they put numbing cream where they stuck in the needles, but that didn’t really help much. The doctors had promised her something called a port, some thing they put inside your chest, just under your skin. They said they could stick the needles in the port and it wouldn’t hurt so much, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted some creepy thing inside of her. This was when she started to tune in to adult conversations instead of watching cartoons.

  Once she tuned in to what was being said, things started to make sense and they started to scare her. She’d learned about chemotherapy. Everybody knew chemotherapy was medicine to kill cancer, but she found out that chemotherapy killed good cells along with bad ones and that was what caused you to be grossed out and to vomit. She’d been scared when she’d overheard the hall-lurking adults talking about the possible weird things that chemo could cause to happen to your body later. They called these side effects.

  Ainslie wanted to know what these side effects were, but she didn’t ask her mother. The hospital staff had made a book where they kept all her medical information. They called this the roadmap, and it had all her medicines and all the reactions she could expect, but her mother never wanted her to look at the roadmap book. She told Ainslie not to worry, that the doctors would take care of everything. Ainslie suspected that her mother never told her the whole truth. And her father wasn’t an option. He didn’t know much of anything about medical stuff.

  When her mother wasn’t looking, Sloan helped Ainslie decipher the roadmap book. Sloan brought her laptop and they got online. It didn’t take long before they found a link and had document after document off the Internet about Wilms’ tumor cancer. The deal was usually that a kidney got removed, the kid got radiated, sometimes they got chemo, other times not. Most kids survived and were never bothered with it again.

  “Piece of cake,” Sloan said. “You’re tough.”

  She also said that they probably shouldn’t read a bunch of the stories of other sick kids, that it might be too depressing. Ainslie had agreed. All the research was enough for her to think about without being sad over some other kid with worse luck.

  They were in bed together, looking up her chemo cocktail on the Internet. They had both become good at medical lingo.

  “I can’t find this drug anywhere. I wonder why.”

  “Go ask Miss Vivian. She’s my favorite nurse.”

  At the nurses’ station Sloan asked for Miss Vivian and a few minutes later the woman arrived in Ainslie’s room. Vivian flipped through her own reference materials and then said, “It must be new.”

  “Is it experimental?” Sloan asked.

  “Honey, I didn’t say experimental. I said new.” Vivian flipped her book closed with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t have much info here on that, but I’ll see what I can find out. Sure you want to know all this? It can be scary.”

  “It won’t scare me,” Ainslie said.

  “We won’t tell anybody you helped us,” Sloan said. “Especially not our mother. She thinks she needs to shield us from all of this.”

  “Sure, I understand,” Vivian said. “A lot of parents feel that way.”

  Ainslie nodded. “It’s okay. I want to know.”

  But that hadn’t been the case when Vivian brought them a printout the next day.

  “You didn’t get this from me,” she had said. “I could get fired for this.” Sloan promised to destroy the paper as soon as they were finished.

  “What does it say?” Ainslie asked.

  “Just a bunch of doctor stuff I can’t understand. A few side effects you know about. Nausea, hair loss, blah, blah, blah.”

  She stopped her finger on a line. She reread the passage, then moved on quickly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, I said.”

  “You can tell me. What does it say?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. It says this drug here can cause sterility.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means…it means that you may not be able to have babies when you grow up. Sterility, you know, like sterile.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Well, it is if you want to have kids, but hey, you don’t need to think about that right now. Look, that’s the worst thing listed here. Your chemo won’t like, make you deaf or blind or anything awful like that.”

  But from then on, every time Ainslie arrived at the oncology clinic for another round of chemo, she thought about that word—sterility. She had to push it down and try to focus her thoughts in a positive direction. They told her to imagine chemo moving through her body like a video game character blasting away cancer cells. One time, she had asked to see what her cancer looked like. Her pathologist had been thrilled to show her, had adjusted the microscope eyepieces until the cells were large and like gobs of purple Jell-O stuck together. It was hard to hold her head still enough to keep the focus, but she’d stared through that microscope for a really long time. The cells didn’t move like she had expected because they were dead. The pathologist gave her color printouts of the strange river of cells and she always tried to focus on those cells and mentally blast them away with her imaginary chemo weapons. It helped to know what the enemy looked like.

  Once when it was her father’s turn to take her for her chemo clinic visit, her father had put aside his sports magazine and stared at her.

  Lying back in a lounger sipping a grape soda, Ainslie had met his gaze and said, “What?”

  “You know, baby,” he said, “we’ll always wonder, your mother and I, whether we did or didn’t do something that caused this to happen to you. I mean, we’re sorry if we did. We didn’t know. We still don’t.”

  “It’s not your fault, Daddy,” she told him. “It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just a stupid thing that happened.”

  His face shifted in a strange way when Ainslie told him her disease was developed before she was even born, that it wasn’t anything they’d done.

  “How do you know this
?” he asked her.

  She’d shrugged as if it was something everybody knew.

  All he’d said after that was, “Does your mother know?”

  Ainslie said, “Yeah. But she doesn’t believe it.”

  She was always sick for a couple of days after a chemo treatment, then she’d buck up and things would be good for a while before she had to go back and do it all over again. Her parents tried to keep everything as normal as possible. Her dad went to work and Sloan went to school. Her home-school teacher brought homework and Ainslie tried to keep up with the rest of the third grade. Afternoons were all about television and video games. Late in the day the mail would come, and there would be a few cool cards or another package from her grandparents in New Jersey.

  It was in these lonely afternoons, before Sloan came home from school, that Ainslie felt sad. She would look at where her animal tanks had been and miss her little pets. The stupid doctors had made her parents get rid of all of her animals because of germs. That had been the worst part of being sick. Ainslie loved her hermit crab. She’d had Mr. Crabs for more than three years, and he had moved shells so many times that she finally lost count. Ainslie had watched his pink, squishy body trying out new shells. He was shy when he was naked, and he’d creep out, his eye stalks searching for safety, then he’d streak to another shell. Ainslie’s mother said Mr. Crabs was modest. It was a good thing her crab didn’t have cancer because you couldn’t be modest if you had to have your butt stuck up in the air for all the nurses and doctors and student doctors at the hospital to see. She had cried and begged to keep her old crab, so her parents had moved him into Sloan’s room until Ainslie could have him back.

  A couple of times during her alone time, Ainslie had considered actually writing in the journal the counselor had given her. He’d said it would help her deal with her feelings to write down her thoughts or draw pictures about how she felt. But Ainslie didn’t like to write, and she couldn’t draw nearly as well as Sloan. She’d scribbled a few things down, but something told her that if she wrote anything too personal, her mother would surely peek. So Ainslie just shared her problems with Sloan when she was around. Sloan always seemed to know how to make things better somehow. She wasn’t like adults.