Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  I pick up The Martian where Gavriel, The Itchy Poodle, left it, face down on the page he was on. He didn’t get very far. He must be a slow reader. (Big shock.) I start it at the beginning. I guess I’m going to have lots of time for reading in here. Anyway, reading about an astronaut who gets left behind on Mars is much closer to my dream than lying in a hospital bed, slowly realizing that this brain tumor isn’t going to have a punch line and it’s not going to turn out OK and somehow, suddenly, this brain tumor has just taken my whole life—my Mars future—away, blanked it out like it was never there, leaving nothing but an empty space behind.

  Chapter 14

  I fall asleep reading, which is good, because right away, I’m in the biome. This time, I’m not working, I’m sitting. It’s dark outside and I’m not alone. Someone is sitting next to me, but I can’t quite see who it is. I can hear him breathing, though. Or her. I guess it could be a woman, I really don’t know. We are watching the moons rising outside the glass. It’s amazing. You know how sometimes, on Earth, the moon looks really huge, way bigger than normal? In this case, both moons are enormous. They also move more quickly than on Earth, so it feels sped up, like a show on fast-­forward. The person next to me clears his/her throat. I keep trying to turn my head to see who it is. It’s a dream, I tell myself. Just turn your head! But I can’t. The dream slips away from me before I get a good grip on it. When I open my eyes, the book is still in my hand. I read until my eyes hurt and my head is aching so bad that I want to puke (again) and then the door opens to my room, the hallway sounds leaking in like a wave. I look up.

  And it’s the last person who I would ever have expected to see.

  It’s Elliott.

  “Hey, Red,” she goes. “Getting enough attention?”

  “Funny,” I say, uneasily. Is she allowed to come in here and bully me? Where are Mom and Dad, anyway?

  “Mom and Dad are coming,” she says. “They’re just in this big boring meeting with a bunch of doctors downstairs.” She shrugs. “I stayed for a while, but I couldn’t stand it. Blah, blah, blah, you know?” She rolls her eyes.

  “I’m sorry my brain tumor is boring,” I go. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Cheer up,” she says. “I’m here to make you feel better.”

  “Oh,” I say. I mean, I have a lot of possible responses, such as, “Have you ever cheered anyone up?” or “Do you even know what that means?” She throws her long legs over the arm of the chair. She’s wearing bright pink Converse. Mom must be thrilled. Maybe bright pink Converse are the Official Shoes of Cheering Up People Who Have Brain Tumors.

  I want to say something, but I can’t figure out how to say it. But what I’m thinking is, Oh, great, now you’re going to be the daughter that Mom wishes I could be? But it doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense. I open my mouth to try to say something like that, but nothing comes out.

  “I’m missing cross-­country practice for this,” she says.

  Elliott loves running. I do, too! We actually have lots in common, the more I think about it! But it’s like she has no idea that I like running, she has no idea who I am, she’s so busy being her.

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” I point out. “Sorry for your terrible loss, I guess.” My head is throbbing, like the brain tumor is having a party in there and invited a bunch of its friends. I picture brain tumors blossoming all over the place like Brussels sprouts on a stalk. That’s how they grow, you know.

  I let the silence fill up the space. Silence is better than mean stuff, at least, even if she doesn’t mean to be mean. Sometimes I can’t tell. She leans so far back in the chair, it nearly tips over. Her hair is starting to grow out, so even though it’s mostly gray, it’s this really pretty golden blonde at the roots. I wish I had blonde hair. Maybe I just hate Elliott because she’s everything that I’m not. I mean, Iris got all the good genes (obviously not the same gene pool at all), but Elliott kind of did OK, too. She’s pretty, athletic, shimmery blonde, and totally OK with being herself even when she’s awful. I think that last thing is the thing I envy the most. I mean, who likes themselves all the time? I sure don’t. It seems really unfair that she got “self-­confident” and I got “brain tumor.”

  I hate myself for thinking that, but only a little.

  After what seems like forever, while I watch saline drip from the IV bag into the tube above my bed and then run down into my arm, Mom and Dad show up. It’s the longest Elliott has ever gone without hurting my feelings, but that’s mostly because she wasn’t saying anything. Still, maybe we should call Guinness and enter it into their famous book of records! Is Guinness an actual person?

  I guess even Elliott feels really bad that I’m sick, that I have cancer, that I might die. I wonder if she’ll cry if I do. I am, after all, her only “real” relative. My eyes start to well up again. Lame.

  “Hi, honey,” says Dad, kissing me, and putting a stuffed toy under my arm.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say. “Thanks.” I pull the toy out and look at it. It looks like a worm or an amoeba. It’s brown. “What is it?”

  “Oh,” he goes. “It’s an Ebola virus.”

  “You bought me an Ebola virus?” I say. “What? Why?”

  “Worse than a brain tumor!” he says. “Think about it.”

  “Um,” I say. “OK. Ha-­ha.” I stick the Ebola under the back of my neck. It feels nice there, soft and pretty supportive. “Thanks.”

  “Well, I tried,” he says. “They didn’t have brain tumors, anyway. I think there’s some kind of disease-­ism going on. I’ll try to find someone to sue. Now I’ve got to get this one to school.”

  The way he says “this one,” that’s what a real dad would say. Elliott is so blind. She can’t see love even when it’s being directed right at her! I’ve been thinking a lot about love, I guess, while I’ve been lying here. I’ve been thinking about how people think that love is something to do with your heart when obviously it’s all in your brain. Maybe my tumor is a love tumor. It’s made me deficient in knowing how to love people or something, especially in that “OMG I LOVE YOU!” way that most girls my age can do. Maybe I do it wrong.

  Maybe Elliott does, too, but her wrong is different from my wrong. It’s another thing we have in common. I should make a list and email it to her. I don’t know if she’d read it, but I want her to know that maybe we aren’t so different, after all.

  “I love you,” I say now. I don’t know if I’m talking to Elliott or to myself. Both, I guess.

  “What?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “OK,” says Elliott. “Whatever. Later, Red.”

  I hold my hand up in a wave, but she’s already halfway out the door.

  “I’ll be back!” calls Dad.

  “Bye, Daddy,” I say. I never call him Daddy anymore. I don’t know why that slipped out.

  Mom takes Elliott’s place in the green chair. She slides it closer to the bed and it makes a terrible screeeeeeech, screeeeech sound. I shiver. She smells like coffee and Cinnabon.

  “Mom,” I go. “Did you have Cinnabon?”

  She smiles. “No!” she says. “I swear I didn’t! Oh, OK. You caught me. I had a cinnamon bun. But it wasn’t even good. Definitely not a Cinnabon. Just some cheap copy from the cafeteria.” She leans forward. “It was stale,” she says, like she’s telling me a state secret. I nod, seriously.

  “Good information, Mom,” I say. “But that stuff is still terrible for you.”

  I yawn. Sleep is always lurking around me now, waiting for me to fall into it.

  I’m drifting, but she talks to me anyway. She tells me that Iris is coming home in a few weeks. Iris! I’m so happy! See what I mean about Iris? Just knowing she is coming home has made everything suddenly lighter. She’s helium and we are all balloons just waiting to be filled by her Irisness.

  Mom says she’s going to make her famous chocolate zucchini loaf and freeze some. She talks about how the weatherman said maybe it was going to rain soon and how som
eone must have got tired of seeing the long grass at the Diazes’ old house because when they drove by this morning, it was mowed. She talks and she talks and she talks. She doesn’t say anything about what the doctors said. I want to ask, but I can’t. My tongue is too tired. I fall asleep and wake up and then the orderly comes into the room and says, “It’s time, honey!” And I’m wheeled down to a different room for chemotherapy. I don’t know what I thought chemotherapy was like but this definitely isn’t it. There is a row of La-­Z-­Boy recliners and kids in two of them. One of them is playing an Xbox. One is watching a movie, but he has headphones on and his eyes are shut.

  “You might get sleepy,” the nurse says. “Most people do the first time. We put lots of Benadryl in there.”

  I nod. I squeeze Mom’s hand and hug my Ebola tightly.

  Mom smiles at me, but I can see the tears shimmering in her eyes, wanting to spill over. Her voice is as crumbly as the dry leaves at home when she says, “Want to play Monopoly?”

  Monopoly stopped being my favorite game after the Great Nostril Incident of 2012, but I don’t want to explain or even tell her why it makes me sad that she doesn’t remember that, so I just say, “No thanks.” I just want to be here and to feel this, but at the exact same time I don’t want to be here. I want to be anywhere but here! I feel like inside me there is all this stuff going on: me vs. cancer; life vs. death; happy vs. sad. Sad is winning, just FYI.

  “OK,” she says. “We can just sit and talk if you feel like it. Or I can read to you out loud.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know yet, Mom.”

  The nurse attaches the bag to the port on the back of my hand, and almost right away, there’s a hot rush of something into my veins. It feels like the start of an unstoppable mistake, like leaning just a tiny bit too far off a cliff. I can sense my whole body going, “Stop! It’s poison!” I can practically feel my cells recoiling.

  “Sorry, cells,” I say out loud.

  They have to almost die so that the cancer dies. That’s the game. The doctors see how close they can get to killing the patient without killing the patient. At least, that’s what I heard when I read between the lines of what the doctor actually said. He’s a nice man. When he smiles, wrinkles flow outward from his eyes like the cracks that formed around the beaches of the lake.

  What he actually said was, “We annihilate the cancer. It’s like a video game, but with your cells. Do you play Astrosmash?” Then he’d laughed and said, “I guess not, unless you also time travel back to the 1980s! I should figure out what today’s equivalent is to that.”

  “Angry Birds?” I offered, even though I don’t play it. Tig used to like it, though.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Do the Angry Birds blast the enemy clear out of the sky?”

  I thought about it. “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, think about it as Angry Birds attacking the enemy and shrinking it down until it’s nothing, until it’s smaller than birdseed, and then . . . eating it.”

  “Eating it? You’re going to eat my brain tumor? Poor Nirgal!”

  He’d laughed, bending over at his stomach, like it was the funniest thing he ever heard. “Nope,” he said. Then, “Who is Nirgal?”

  “Never mind,” I said. The idea of trying to explain Nirgal seemed too big to try to take on just then.

  “OK,” he’d said, simply, and left it at that.

  Anyway, I figured out what he meant. The medicine is an angry bird. The tumor is going to get attacked, midflight, and they’ll take it down. But the tumor is part of me, so I guess I just have to hope that I keep flying. Maybe that’s where the whole metaphor falls apart. There’s no ‘me’ in Angry Birds. There are just the birds and the pigs and that’s it.

  I wriggle around in my chair. Mom is flipping through a magazine and the pages shimmer in the light. They look like wings. Butterfly wings. My head aches. I don’t want to cry but it’s sneaking up on me again. I squish my eyes shut.

  I’m itchy, but not on my skin, below that, somewhere inside. Like I’m an onion and it’s not the papery outer layer that’s the problem, but one or two below that. There’s a taste in my mouth that’s like sweet pennies. Even my eyes feel weird and wrong. I try to imagine all that hot, itchy medicine as birds. I try to picture the medicine-­birds flocking to the Brussels sprout and surrounding it, pecking it smaller and smaller until, eventually, it’s just gone, it vanishes in the hot soup of me.

  “Iris says that she’s got a chance to enter a competition for her designs,” Mom says. “She says that she’ll bring her book and show you what she’s done so far. She said to tell you that it’s Martian chic or Mars-­influenced or, well, something Marsish.”

  I smile a little bit. I don’t know what that means, not really. EVA suits? Purple somethings, like in Dad’s movie? Rust-­colored everything?

  “How do you feel?” she asks. She looks worried.

  My face must look funny or something. I nod. I can’t really talk. I don’t know how the medicine feels. Not exactly. I do, but I can’t say. It feels weird, I want to say. It feels wrong. It’s nothing like Angry Birds, it’s more like a flood, a wave, a whoosh of wrongness. But I just nod and smile, my best gentle Iris smile.

  Here’s what it feels like: Like my body is Lake Ochoa, dried out and too hot, sloshing in an earthquake, and everything is too dry and itchy and the sun won’t quit. I feel like water on fire. We are made of water, you know. Like cucumbers. Like everything.

  “If you’re not OK, you should say,” she says. “Can you talk?”

  “I’m OK,” I croak. “Iris is coming. S’nice.” I don’t know why my words are thick like gravy, but the Brussels sprout is hurting so bad. The chair is vibrating. It’s a massage chair. I look around until I find the button that turns it off. It’s better without the sloshing. The hands on the clock are moving in slow motion, like at school, but worse. I feel a tiny bit panicky. How long does this go on for? I forgot to ask. But I can’t quite form the words because I’m already mostly asleep. “Bye Mom,” I want to say, but it comes out in a white cloud. I think maybe I raise my fingers and wave, but maybe not.

  “One comma two exclamation point One comma two exclamation point And through and through carriage return The vorpal blade went snicker hyphen snack,” Mom says.

  I’m being pulled into a vacuum, there’s something slamming into me, what is it? The vorpal blade! Wind, sand. I can’t see. It’s everywhere. I’m flattened against something solid. I think it’s a vehicle that I’m trying to get into, so I feel around until there is a handle and I pull and slide in. Inside, it’s dark. I know it’s a dream, but it doesn’t feel like a dream, so what’s the difference, anyway?

  I’m really cold. The air has hard edges, there’s a smell of ice. I start up the vehicle, I don’t know how I know how, but I know that if I question stuff, I’ll get confused, so I let myself drive to a building. Outside the building, there is a keypad and somehow I get out of the vehicle and punch in the code. A door lifts up and I drive the vehicle through it, as though it’s a Martian car wash. My heart is beating fast. I know what I’m doing! But I don’t. I want to go home. I’ve never thought that before. I mean, home to my house in Lake Ochoa. I start to cry. This isn’t a dream, because I’m crying. Snicker-­snack.

  I push open the airlock door. There they are, Tig and Gavriel and some other people who I know but I don’t know.

  “SURPRISE!” they yell.

  It’s my birthday. Is it? It’s my birthday! And they are hugging me and kissing me and there’s a cake or something that looks sort of like a cake and I cut the cake and I make a wish and my wish is to go home and just after I blow out the candles, Tig leans over and kisses me. He kisses me!

  Gavriel the Fish-­boy says, “Here, this is your present. It’s about what really matters. It’s about what’s real.” He passes me a book. It’s The Velveteen Rabbit. An old copy. He definitely brought it from Earth.

  I hug him. I’m acting like a normal person who knows how t
o love people back! It’s a miracle. I like this version of me, even though I’m not quite sure it’s me. “OMG, I LOVE YOU,” I say. “I mean, I love it. This. Thank you.”

  He laughs. “Don’t worry about it. Happy twenty-­first!”

  I’m twenty-­one? The mission must have left a year before schedule. How did I get picked? I really want to know!

  A girl who I don’t recognize gives me a hug. “Love you, Ish!” she says, like this is a normal thing to say, that people would say to each other.

  “Me, too,” I say. I have this feeling of incredible warmth and belonging. Like this is where I’m meant to be, always, where I’ve always been meant to be, like I’m home.

  I’m blushing and happy and my face is hot from the candles and the blushing and then with a whoosh, I’m awake again. It’s like that, like being thrown through space and time and I’m freezing and shivering and I’m in a chair and a few seats away, a kid is building a spaceship on Minecraft and my mom is deeply engrossed in something on her iPhone (probably Facebook, she’s always on Facebook) and a nurse walks by and winks at me and says, “Not much longer now, sweetheart. You’re doing great. In the home stretch!”

  I give her a half ­nod, half ­yawn. The clock has sped up. It’s almost over. And I feel OK! I feel almost fine. Well, not fine. Groggy. But nothing terrible is happening. Nothing big, like what I’d expected. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, actually. I guess I mostly expected never to be having chemo in Lake Ochoa Children’s Hospital. I never expected this. Not any of this.