Wake

by Abria Mattina

  Willa nudges my shoulder. “You’re going to learn to share.”

  I shake my head and reach for a spoon. “No way. I flunked that shit in preschool and it’s too late to learn now.”

  Willa takes the cup lids from each thermos and pours one-third helpings out for herself. I can’t eat as much as she’s left me in the thermoses. I tell her that and she tells me to just shut up and eat. The soups and shakes aren’t a smooth puree. Willa left chunks in these. She trusts me to handle solids now.

  We eat slowly, languidly, talking about school and family and crap TV. She’s easily amused by stories about Elise and Eric. I tell her about the time Elise crawled into the dishwasher as a toddler, just to explore, and the spring-lock door shut behind her. We didn’t find her for a whole hour.

  “Was she scared?”

  “She didn’t want to come out when we did find her.”

  Then there was the time Eric and I found a dead raccoon in the backyard and carried it inside, swinging it around by the tail.

  “I once gave a cat a haircut,” Willa volunteers.

  “Was your mom mad?”

  She smirks. “It wasn’t our cat.” She tells me the story as she packs up the empty thermoses—how she lured the cat onto her lap with leftover bacon bits and proceeded to cut big patches of hair off its back with her mom’s pruning sheers.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was only five.”

  Willa puts the thermoses away and zips up her backpack. I don’t want to leave yet. I lie back on the blanket and fold my hands behind my head.

  “This would be a great spot to stargaze.”

  “You’re into that?”

  Actually I think it’s dorky and cheesy, but it also has the potential to be a romantic activity. I tug gently on Willa’s shirtsleeve to get her to lie down next to me.

  “We should come here at night sometime.”

  “Maybe this summer.” I can hear the real meaning underneath the words: When you’re well enough to do it.

  “After the grad dance.”

  “What?”

  “We said we’d make plans the night of the grad dance, remember? Let’s come here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  “No, I mean, thanks for not trying to talk me into going to grad with you instead, since we’re…seeing each other now.”

  I’ve never been one for school dances or formal occasions in general. I wouldn’t want to attend prom, but if Willa did, I’m sure I could find the enthusiasm to go with her.

  “I won’t be graduating this year.” I think it’s obvious by this point, but it still warrants saying.

  “Me neither,” Willa says. That surprises me. She’s a good student. How can she be short on credits?

  Willa looks over at me and sits up on her elbow. “You have a beetle on your hat.” She pinches it between her thumb and forefinger and lifts it away. Its little legs flail in the air until she sets it down beyond the edge of the blanket. Cool—a girl who isn’t totally freaked out by bugs.

  Willa brushes the spot on my hat, dislodging a few blades of grass from the black wool. She smirks.

  “You know, before I knew your real hair color I pictured you with black hair, like Elise and Eric.” It’s both pleasing and disheartening to know that she pictured me as being healthy. Pleasing because I’m flattered she cares so much, and disheartening because the mental picture is probably a lot nicer than the reality of my appearance.

  I shake my head. “No. I got all the recessive genes. Eric used to tell people that I was adopted.”

  “It must have been hard on your parents when you were born a ginger,” she teases me. “But at least they had Eric—one normal child.” She laughs and I tell her that Eric can hardly be considered normal.

  “He’s obnoxious at best.”

  “And what are you?”

  “Charming?” I roll onto my side and put an arm over her waist. “Interesting? Witty?”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  Willa rolls over too—away from me. For a moment I think she’s turning cold, but then she takes my wrist and adjusts my arm around her waist. She scoots back until we’re practically spooning. I have to say, snuggling in the open feels damn good. It absolutely tickles me to think of all the guys who only wish they could do this with her.

  “Do you think you’ll ever want to make it official?”

  “Make what official?”

  “You know, do the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing with me.”

  “I’ve never had an exclusive boyfriend,” she muses aloud. I don’t know whose benefit she’s saying that for. I fiddle with one of the buttons on her shirt.

  “I wouldn’t be enough for you?” She deserves someone who doesn’t exist in pieces. I wouldn’t be anyone’s first pick, least of all hers. She can do better than me and she knows it.

  “I didn’t say that. I just said exclusivity would be a new thing for me.”

  “Is there someone else?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “If I wasn’t sick…?”

  “Don’t.” Willa rolls over slowly and sits up on her elbow, studying me. “I care a lot less about the fact that you had cancer than you probably think.”

  “You should care—”

  Willa lays her finger over my lips, cutting me off. “Don’t project your self-loathing onto me. I wouldn’t have called you beautiful if I didn’t mean it.”

  I take her hand away from my mouth. “This isn’t some…I don’t know, fetish, is it? You’re always saying how beautiful your sister was bald. Are you just, like…into cancer patients or something?”

  Willa smirks. She gives a short, unintentional snort, which breaks into a full-blown laugh. I feel ridiculous.

  “I’m into you,” she says. “But you’re not just a cancer patient. And no, it’s not a bald fetish. Empowered people are beautiful.”

  “I’m not empowered.” I’m totally pathetic.

  “You’re stronger than I’ll ever be. You’re close to your demons, and that’s a hard thing to find in a person, especially at our age.” Willa leans forward on her elbow and kisses me softly. When she starts to pull away I lean in for more.

  Willa puts a hand on my collarbone to keep me back. “But I still intend to kill you.”

  I roll my eyes. “Enough with that, okay?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well then get on with it so I can kiss you again.”

  Willa has a little chuckle at that. “I am killing you,” she announces with a kind smile. “You’re bleeding to death and you don’t even realize it.”

  I can’t tell if she’s joking or speaking in metaphors or just delusional, but her words take me back to a cold, frightening place. I really did come close to bleeding to death—twice.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be.” Willa’s hand leaves my collarbone to stroke my cheek. “Where did you go just now? You looked scared.”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Tell me what you meant by that.”

  “Tell me what kind of cancer you had,” she returns. It’s a guaranteed stalemate of things neither of us wants to tell.

  “I told you it doesn’t matter. I don’t have it any more.”

  “It could still kill you faster than I ever could.”

  I move her hand away from me. “You’re a little messed up, you know.” Who says shit like that to someone so lately in remission?

  “Yes.” Willa stands up and shakes her limbs out, dislodging stray blades of grass. “You want to know how messed up?” she says as she stretches her arms over her head.

  “Probably not.”

  She chuckles darkly. “Trust’s a scary thing like that. Not to have it and want it drives you crazy. To have it and not want it will cost you.”

  I’m not entirely sure I understand what she means. I sit up on my elbows and study her face. She looks so relaxed. Happy, even.

  �
��Do you trust me?” she asks.

  “Maybe.”

  “I know you want me to trust you. The surprises. All this give-and-take philosophy. The one-on-one time at lunch, and making me talk to you when I get my head all caught up in thinking.” She shakes her head and smiles. “You sure you want all that? I’ve got weighty baggage.”

  “I do too.”

  “But you don’t trust me with it.”

  Willa crouches down to be eye-level with me again. She grabs me by the side of the neck and holds my head against hers, cheek-to-cheek and temple-to-temple. I put my hand around the side of her neck and hold her just as close.

  “What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” she whispers.

  That I prayed for Elise to die.

  I can’t tell Willa that. I can’t tell anyone that. But I know the secret she really wants to hear—the one she’s been asking about for months. I angle my head just slightly to whisper directly into her ear.

  “Acute myeloid leukemia.”

  “Damn,” she says lowly. “That was my second guess.” The fact that she had a list is annoying as all hell.

  Her turn to put herself out there. “What’s your secret?”

  Willa presses her lips against the spot in front of my ear. “I killed Tessa.”

  Willa: May 3 to 7

  Wednesday

  I pull back from our mutual headlock to find Jem wide-eyed and confused. “Don’t tell me you thought you were the only one who had dark shit hidden away?”

  “You mean you…?” He leaves he question hanging and cocks his head, gaping at me. Then he starts to pull away. “You helped her OD?”

  “Yes.”

  Jem shakes his head stubbornly. “Bullshit. You’d be in jail now if that were true.”

  “You have to get caught to get punished.”

  “You fucking lied about it too?”

  I wonder if he can hear how loud his voice is. Jem stands up and walks around aimlessly, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She asked me for help. You ought to know how little privacy the sick have—I hoarded the spare pills in my room. There was medication all over the house. Every second day I stole one of her painkillers out of the bottle. I had a little bundle of them in one of her antique handkerchiefs, tucked under my bed.”

  Jem starts to slowly shake his head like he knows where this is going.

  “We talked about it a lot beforehand. Mom and Dad didn’t want to talk about the possibility that she could die, but some things have to be said. I used to drive her to appointments whenever she was fighting with our parents and didn’t want them around.”

  Jem is still pacing restlessly. I throw a dirt clod at him. “Will you stand still and listen?”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “You think I care what you want? You think anybody cares what other people want in this world?”

  Jem gives me a dirty look. “If she wanted to die peacefully she should have gone to a hospice, not home. Haven’t you ever heard of snowing a patient?”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I tell him through clenched teeth. “You think I had a vote in this shit? I was sixteen, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Old enough to know better.”

  I smile to keep from biting the inside of my cheek. “You know you’ve considered a contingency plan too. And if Elise was the sick one, you’d have done the same as me had she asked. Tessa had lymphoma, and then it showed up in her liver and small intestine. Would you have taken those odds?”

  Jem stares at me blankly for a few seconds. He turns away very carefully with a pinched look on his face and holds up a hand as if to say ‘quiet.’ Jem vomits on the tall grass. I get up and pass him a bottle of water.

  “Don’t fucking say anything,” he tells me. He rinses his mouth and asks me to go back to the blanket. I just sit there and wait, watching him stand with his hands on his knees, slowly getting a grip on himself.

  When Jem finally stands upright his attitude toward me has gone from hostile to cold. “Did she die quickly? Peacefully? Was she even conscious?”

  “Do you really want to hear this?”

  “Answer the fucking question.”

  I blow out my frustration on a long breath and consider refusing to say any more. I want to say it, though. This is the first time I’ve admitted the true events out loud. My parents always suspected, of course, but I always denied everything.

  “Right before dinnertime she started bleeding in her gut. Mom was in the room with her—there was blood and diarrhea all over the bed.” Jem looks a little green at that and swallows with difficulty. “I stopped making dinner and carried her to the bathroom while Mom stripped the bed. Put her in the bath. Washed her.”

  Jem very carefully sits down on the beach. He looks a little clammy, but he’s still too upset to even share a picnic blanket with me.

  “After I got her clean her stomach was still upset, so I put her on the toilet. She asked for the pills. Mom was going to insist on going back to the hospital because of the bleeding. Tessa didn’t want to go back. She was ready to be done.”

  Jem is slowly shaking his head again.

  “I gave her the bundle of pills and took another bottle out of the bathroom cabinet. There was enough between the two. I gave her water. Helped her swallow. She was in pain and shaking too badly to hold her own cup or put the pills on her tongue.”

  Jem hangs his head in his hands. He knows exactly the kind of pain I’m talking about.

  “Tessa didn’t want me to watch, and she was worried about me getting in trouble. She told me to go back to the kitchen as soon as we said goodbye. It would look like she died from the bleeding.

  “So I left her there. Mom tried to go into the bathroom and I said, ‘Give her a little dignity,’ and suggested calling her doctor.”

  Jem finally interrupts. “You could have let your mother say goodbye.”

  “If she wanted to she could have said it any time in the last year, or when Tessa refused treatment.”

  “You’re cruel,” Jem murmurs.

  “I know. I warned you.”

  We’re silent for a time, and when I tug gently on Jem’s shirtsleeve he startles badly. “Look.” I peel off my left glove. The people who have seen my bare hands are few and far between. I’ve kept them covered in public for years now.

  “What did you do?” Jem whispers—disgusted or awed, I can’t tell. The deep, thick scar on my hand runs from the area between my thumb and forefinger, down the back of my hand and around the side of my wrist. It was a nasty wound to begin with, and infection made the scarring worse. A thin, secondary scar runs parallel to it, where doctors had to cut me open to clear out the necrotic tissue. I came within an inch of losing my left thumb.

  “I went back to the kitchen. Back to making dinner.” I mime holding a knife and carrot in my hands, chopping neatly. “I was distracted already, and when Tessa hit the floor Mom freaked out. She let out this shriek…. The knife slipped and I sliced my hand wide open.” At the time I hadn’t even noticed the bleeding. All that mattered was Mom’s frantic pounding on the locked bathroom door. Dad kicked the door in, and the force of it gave my dead sister a nasty head wound. If she hadn’t already been lifeless on the floor, that blow would have ended it for her.

  I put my glove back on but Jem continues to stare at my left hand. “Any deeper and I would have lost the thumb.”

  He looks up at my face with a probing stare. “How the hell did they not catch you? There must have been a shit-ton of pills in her stomach.”

  “They only did a partial autopsy. The big concern was whether the head wound was a sign of foul play. Everything else just looked like a death from cancer—not worth the time and money to investigate. Besides, she hadn’t eaten in days because of the pain, and an IV kept her hydrated, so no one expected to find anything in her stomach.”

  “You should have let her die naturally.”

  “I did what she wanted.
”

  “You should have said no.” Jem’s voice is steadily rising in volume. Shock and disgust are beginning to lapse into anger. “You don’t take advantage of someone in a vulnerable moment and make a permanent decision like that.”

  “She was clear-headed; it was her decision.”

  “You still should have said no.”

  I stand up and gather the blanket into my backpack. I don’t need a lecture from Jem. “We’re not having this conversation. I took enough shit from my parents; I don’t need it from you too.”

  “So your parents do know?”

  “Mom suspects. I was the last one with Tessa, and the empty pill bottle was still out on the counter. She couldn’t prove that Tessa hadn’t opened it herself, though.” I shoulder my backpack. “She didn’t turn me in. Maybe losing one daughter was enough.”

  When I walk away I don’t care if Jem follows me. He can find his own way home if he doesn’t move his ass back to the car fast enough. I’m almost disappointed when he catches up to me, but then he has to grab my wrist and yank my left glove off. He turns my wrist like he’s inspecting a dead animal. I try to pull my hand back and he says, “If there was any justice you would have lost the thumb.”

  I slap him across the face with my mutilated hand without pausing to think. Jem reels a bit, though I didn’t hit him very hard.

  “You are an asshole,” I tell him slowly. “I accepted all your bullshit and baggage when everyone else just wanted to ignore you. Some fucking friend you are to not even try to do the same for me.”

  “I’ve bent over backwards to accept your bullshit,” he yells back. “But this takes the fucking cake, Kirk.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What do you want me to say?” he demands. “‘Great job, you killed a sick, helpless woman. It all makes sense now.’ Come on!”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve to think that I expect congratulations for killing her.”

  “Well what do you want?”

  “I want you to fucking listen! God damn, Harper, I wasn’t always a heartless shrew.”

  He snorts incredulously. Asshole.

  “I regretted it immediately, alright? I should have found a way let her go more peacefully, or stayed with her. I should have told Mom and Dad what we were up to.” I throw my hands up. “That’s some heavy shit to deal with when you’re sixteen.”