Wake

by Abria Mattina

  For a few seconds the only sound on the line is his shallow breathing. It slows just slightly before he whispers, “Yes.”

  “And can you feel the soles of your feet? Are they cold or hot?”

  “Cold.”

  “Do you feel your heartbeat there?” This time it takes him longer to answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Feel it in your ankles.”

  His breaths turn long and deep as he moves the sensation from feet to ankles; ankles to calves; calves to knees. He breathes in time with his pulse without realizing it, and it calms him.

  “Can you feel the blood leaving your heart? Picture it flowing through your arteries, directly to your lungs.”

  He pulls in a deep breath.

  “Feel how smoothly your diaphragm moves?”

  “Yeah.” He breathes it so softly I can barely hear him.

  “Feel it pushing the air up and up, into your throat?”

  He makes a hum that sounds like a yes.

  “Can you feel your heartbeat in your nose?”

  “Mmm.”

  “In your gums?”

  “Uh-huh.” He’s gotten quick at locating his heartbeat in remote places. He’s in tune with his body instead of fighting with it.

  “Your eyes are closed, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do the insides of your lids look like?”

  “Dark.” He adds a timid, “I like it,” a moment later.

  “Do you hear blood in your ears?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it say?”

  Jem hesitates over that one. “I…I don’t know.”

  “But it’s a nice sound, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay to fall asleep.”

  “I know.”

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  His breathing is slow, sleepy, and it takes him nearly ten seconds to answer my question. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You’re not. It’s you, your heartbeat, and me. And I’ll be here until you fall asleep.”

  He breathes a little sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

  Jem: April 18 to 22

  Wednesday

  I wake up on my side, dozy and achy, to find Elise sleeping next to me. She must have crawled in sometime after I fell asleep talking to Willa. She’s curled up to save space, tucked in under the afghan from the couch, and cradling the phone close to her chest. She must have pulled it out of my hand while I was passed out.

  Poor Lise. She looks so tired and worried. I softly run a hand across her short hair and she wakes with a start.

  “W’as wrong?” she says sleepily. She isn’t even really awake yet.

  “Nothing. You’re just tired. Go back to sleep.” I open an arm to her and she crawls into the nook of my chest and shoulder. She’s so small and light-boned, like a little bird. It only takes her a few seconds to slip into sleep again, and though I feel guilty for making her worry, I’m too tired to stay awake to dwell on it for long.

  *

  I find Willa first thing when I get to school. She’s got her locker open (it’s a complete mess) and is holding a pen between her teeth and a book under her arm while she rifles through her backpack.

  “What are you digging for this time?”

  “China,” she says around the pen. “Screw it.” She spits out the pen and throws her backpack in her locker.

  I nudge her shoulder to get her to look at me. “Thanks,” I tell her. “For…last night.” I make sure to say it quietly so that people won’t overhear and make assumptions about the new girl and Cancer Boy. Such a rumor would be humiliating for her by default, and humiliating for me when everyone learns that it isn’t true.

  “No problem.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “It’s a useful little survival skill,” she answers vaguely. Willa never can give a straight answer.

  “I have lunch for you today,” she offers. My eyes immediately flit to her locker and she shifts in front of it, blocking me. “No, you can’t have it now.”

  I laugh and tell her that I’ll just break into her locker while she’s in class. Willa rolls her eyes at me.

  “It’s good for aches as well as your stomach.”

  My eyes shift to her locker again, before settling back on her face. She went out of her way this morning to make sure I don’t have a repeat of last night.

  “Thank you.”

  Willa smiles, but she doesn’t look happy. She shuts her locker and says, “See you at lunch.”

  I don’t pay much attention to my first lecture. I’m too busy wondering whether I messed things up by calling Willa last night. Did I stir up some painful memory? Did I hurt her? Did I take too much, again?

  It’s not like I asked her to make me food, either. I mean, of course I’ll still scarf it down at lunch like it’s the last remaining food on earth, but she didn’t have to make it….

  I try to apologize to Willa when she hands over the thermos at lunch, but she won’t hear it.

  “The last thing you need is a guilt complex about food on top of everything else.”

  “So forgive me.”

  Willa sighs tiredly. “Fine. I forgive you for accepting a gift you didn’t ask for.”

  “Now you’re just trying to guilt me.”

  She tries to take the thermos back and I hold it out of her reach. It’s mine, damn it.

  “Please, just eat.”

  It’s a smoothie today: raspberry yogurt, buttermilk, and mint. It tastes like fresh sorbet mated with a cheesecake. I want to bathe in this stuff.

  “Can I have the recipe?”

  “What if I said no?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  I try pouting and she tells me there’s something wrong with my lip.

  “Is it working?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about if I just do this all through lunch and Soc?” I nudge her repeatedly with my boney elbow—not hard enough to hurt, but persistent enough to be really annoying.

  Willa takes a folded piece of notebook paper out of her pocket and holds it up. I snatch it from her fingers before she can change her mind and retract it, and she laughs at my eagerness.

  It isn’t until I get home and unfold the paper that I realize it doesn’t have the recipe on it. It says, You pick the music tonight. I’d be entirely peeved about the recipe rip-off if she didn’t already have me thinking through potential playlists for tonight.

  *

  I call Willa around ten o’clock and immediately forget to give her shit for gypping me out of a recipe—it’s entirely her fault. She distracts me with the way she answers the phone: “Hey. Hang on a second, ok?”

  “Sure. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t expecting you to call yet. I only have half a pair of pajamas on.” And she feels the need to just casually reveal that to me? Like I’m not going to picture it and turn into a drooling, incoherent mess?

  Willa sets aside her phone and I can hear the soft sounds of her pulling on clothes nearby. I wonder if she was missing her pants or shirt….

  “What are we listening to tonight?” she asks.

  “See if you can name them.”

  I play her “Comes a Time,” by Neil Young, because she reminded me of it last weekend. She names that one without trouble, including the album it was released on.

  “Why don’t you play an instrument? You’re so invested in music.”

  “I can sort of play guitar, but not very well. What else you got?”

  I give her “Picking up the Pieces” by Blue October. She’s surprised that I own any of their music. “I didn’t think they were your style.”

  “My tastes are wide and varied.” And the album was a gift, anyway.

  I try to lighten the mood with the cheesy pop song “Every Other Time” by LFO. Willa practically busts a gut
laughing and says she hopes I bought that CD before I hit puberty, because anything else is just sad.

  “Alright, fine, smartass.” I continue in the same vein with “Absolutely” by Nine Days. Willa approves of that one more, but only slightly. We cap off the evening with “Old Habits Die Hard” by Mick Jagger.

  “Tomorrow it’s my turn,” she says before we say goodnight.

  “Make it good.”

  “You doubt me?”

  “Never.”

  “Sweet dreams.” She hangs up without properly saying goodbye. I try not to take offense to that, but the fact that the call ended is enough to bother me either way. I never want to end a call with her.

  Thursday

  The guy staring back at me in the bathroom mirror looks like hell. He looks like he hasn’t slept well and hasn’t had a decent meal in months. Sounds like someone I know.

  I splash cool water over my face in an attempt to wake up. I slept, sure, but I don’t feel rested. I’ve been having nightmares on a regular basis lately, even after dialysis, which usually puts me too far under to dream. Maybe it’s the meds, or the food. It could be a fucking brain tumor for all I know, but my regular blood work would have shown that.

  I’m reluctant to blame it on the meds entirely, because it’s always the same nightmare. If it was creepy dreams in general, sure. But the same one over and over again must mean something.

  I dream of Willa drowning. The first time it happened I was in the public garden Mom that helped design when I was a kid, and I was holding a duck under my arm like a football. The duck just hung there limply and let me carry him around, quacking occasionally. There wasn’t even much point to the dream until Willa showed up. She said the duck was hers and I should give it back, so I did. She took it with her into one of the park ponds, swimming and diving below the murky surface. The duck kept swimming. Willa never came back up.

  The dreams are always different, but she always drowns: a surfing accident; unconscious at the bottom of a swimming pool; as a little kid alone in a bathtub; swept out to sea in a riptide. And every single time I stand there watching her die, unable to do anything about it, or even to reach out and retrieve her body.

  Last night she drowned in a car that had crashed into a creek. I stood on the bridge and watched the air pockets in the car rise to the surface until the water became still, and all I could see was the outline of the bumper beneath the current.

  I suppose I should be glad she hasn’t pulled a Virginia Woolf in my dreams yet. You know, in the spirit of optimism and all.

  Willa takes one look at me when I get to school, before I can even tell her good morning, and says, “You look like you slept under a bus.”

  “I did, actually. I clung to the underside like a bat and dozed.”

  She cracks a smile and today isn’t going to be so bad after all. I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

  *

  I barely have time to close the car door before Elise turns around in the front seat and practically shouts, “I sat with him at lunch today!”

  “Are you deaf, too?” I yell back. Elise grins and flaps her hands like a demented circus monkey.

  “He’s planning to work at Camp Concord this summer. Isn’t that sweet? He said—”

  I don’t care what he said. I hate him already. People work at Camp Concord when they want to put brownie points for their college applications—it’s one of those ‘inclusive’ camps that caters to disabled kids. An admissions committee will eat that shit up faster than if he wrote, I saved a box of puppies from a burning building on his application.

  “Does his girlfriend work there too?” I ask.

  Elise’s face falls just a little at the mention of Nina. “No. She works at the grocery store.”

  “Gotta save for college somehow.”

  “I’ve been thinking of where to apply for summer work.”

  Please—God, Buddha, Allah, Krishna—not Camp Concord.

  “Maybe Dad could put in a good word for you at the hospital cafeteria.”

  Elise makes a face. She’s about as sick of hospitals as I am. “Maybe I’ll end up at the grocery store.”

  What the hell is she playing at?

  *

  I miss the latter half of Willa’s playlist tonight. Her first pick is “Weighty Ghost” by Wintersleep, which is sort of a relaxing song, and I can’t keep my eyes open for most of “Hey Man” by the Eels. I lose consciousness during the opening rift of a song I don’t recognize by a band I’ve never heard before. Tonight I don’t dream.

  Friday

  I am so bored. The homework I brought to the clinic for the three-hour wait has long since been finished, and the volunteer with the book cart had no good magazines to offer. It was a choice between Teen Vogue and Fisherman’s Quarterly. Pass.

  I’m busy counting the ceiling tiles when the curtain around my chair shifts. Willa slips into the cubicle in an oversized grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, like she’s trying not to be seen, and takes up the visitor’s chair.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting.” She adjusts her sweater around her. “Had to borrow this from one of the cafeteria workers. If people see the green vest they ask me to do stuff.”

  “Did you know I’d be here?”

  “Gerald tipped me off that you were still here,” she says of the old man who pushed the book cart down this ward twenty minutes ago. “But your mom was the one who told me you had an appointment tonight.” Willa chuckles to herself. “I think that woman is determined to get you laid. She’ll sell your merits to anyone who will listen.”

  “Kirk,” I complain. She shouldn’t talk about anybody’s mom like that and my (lack of) sex life is no one’s business but my own.

  “We had a nice chat.” Willa pulls a can of pop out of one of the sweater’s oversized pockets, cracks it and takes a sip. She offers it to me but I decline.

  “What did you talk about?” Please, in the name of all that is holy, don’t let Mom have embarrassed me. It’s embarrassing enough to be seen receiving treatment. Willa looks once at the tubes that enter above the collar of my hospital gown, and tries not to look at them again. If I’d known she was coming I would have asked the nurse for a blanket or something to hide this uncomfortable sight.

  “She told me that you used to win awards for music.”

  “It was just a stupid music camp certificate.”

  “So you didn’t win some competition to play with the Ottawa Philharmonic when you were like, fifteen?” Why did Mom have to go and tell her that? She probably bragged about it, too.

  “I don’t play that seriously anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Chemo.”

  “I thought you were done?”

  “No, chemo messed up my hands, like it did my taste buds.” I extend my scarred hand to her in illustration. “Chemo kills a lot of cells that are actually useful. I lost feeling in my fingers and freaked out, so my doctor told me to drink a lot of water. I was chugging something like eight liters a day. Not all the feeling came back, though. I can’t play as well as I used to. And GVH made my hands so sore that I couldn’t play for weeks at a time.”

  “You still play very beautifully.”

  “And you’re such an expert.”

  “Your mom said you used to compose, too.”

  “A little.”

  “Will you show me an original piece sometime?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Harper,” she says severely. Her tone is weird because she’s smiling.

  “Fine. I’ll show you some time.”

  Willa smiles and nods with satisfaction. She takes a long sip of ginger ale and then gives me that devilish smirk that I don’t trust for shit. “So you went to music camp?”

  “So?”

  “Touchy.”

  “It was one summer.”

  “Or five.”

  Damn it, Mom!

  “Are you going this summer?”

  “
I’ll be in summer school, catching up on all the stuff I missed.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  I shrug. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Elise said it used to be the highlight of your year. ‘Bigger than Christmas,’ she said.”

  “You talked to Elise about me too?”

  “You talk to them about me.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re my family.”

  “And they care about you very much—enough to gossip freely, anyway.” She smiles again and swallows more of her pop.

  “Music just isn’t a big part of my life anymore. Did they tell you that?”

  “Jem,” Willa said calmly. Uh-oh. She’s first-naming me. “That is complete and utter bullshit.”

  “Stop acting like you know everything. You know shit about my music.”

  “Were you in a band?” she teases. “Bunch of classical nerds together in a garage—cello, oboe, euphonium—” She knows what a euphonium is? “All you’d need are a couple of bowties and you’re set.”

  “Yeah? Well…” Willa looks at me expectantly while I fish for a riposte. “Damn it, you don’t have any dorky hobbies.”

  “Ha!”

  “But reading Dickens for fun is still nerdy as shit.”

  “So are you not as dexterous anymore or what?” She reaches out and picks up my hand where it sits on the armrest of the recliner. She turns it over in her hand and runs her thumb along my palm.

  “I’ve still got full movement.” I wiggle my fingers to show her. “I just can’t moderate how hard or soft I touch things, sometimes. Music takes that kind of finesse.”

  “So what’s your favorite song to play?”

  “I dunno. It changes to whatever I feel like at the moment, I guess, or whatever piece I’m working on. I used to practice a lot more than I do now. I had a lot of free time on my hands before we started hanging out.”

  Willa smirks. That last sentence reveals too much, and my face betrays me by turning red.

  “I had a lot of superficial friends before I met you,” she says.

  “Are you calling me ugly?”