Willa studies that frame for a long time. “How’d he handle it?”
“Eric…” How do I describe my brother’s reaction? “He was angry at first. He took off to Ottawa and stayed with Celeste’s family for a few days. When he came back he was sort of resentful—sometimes of me, or our parents, or because we were all pretty much helpless.” I shrug. “He came around during my second round of chemo. I had all kinds of bleeding problems at the time—nosebleeds so bad they required a trip to the ER, bruises all over, you name it. I couldn’t clot properly and I had low iron so I was weak all the time. Most days I couldn’t even walk down the stairs or cross the room without feeling tired. So…he carried me. I’d put an arm over his shoulders and shuffle along beside him. On Mom’s birthday I was too weak and dizzy to do stairs, so he picked me up and brought me down to the kitchen so we could celebrate as a family.”
“That’s really nice of him.”
I smile for effect and tell her I agree. It’s convenient to leave out the part of that story where I passed out at the breakfast table, landed on my nose hard enough to make it bleed, and ruined Mom’s birthday with a trip to the ER.
Willa continues to flip pages, studying the Polaroids with a look of frank interest. She snorts at the picture of Elise with her hand stuck in the second floor vending machine. “Her pretzels got caught.”
When Willa gets to the picture of Mom hugging one of the doctors she pauses. Eric took this picture while standing behind the doctor, so all that’s visible is Mom’s face over his shoulder and her arms around the doctor’s neck. She’s grinning and crying all at once in this picture.
“Good news,” Willa notes. I tell her that that was the day Elise’s tests came back with a positive match for donation. Willa actually smiles.
I take the book from her then and close it. Might as well end on a happy note, and I know that most of the other pictures in that book are sad ones. I put the album in my bag and Willa quietly offers not to talk about her sister with me anymore.
“It upsets you, and we can’t really relate on that subject anyway.”
I want to say yes. “Are you sure?”
“I’m not used to talking about her. I don’t know how to do it in a non-creepy way.”
“You talked to your shrinks about her.”
“I lied,” she whispers. “All the time. I lied in Group, too, but everybody did. I never told anybody the real thing. I would just make up stories until they were satisfied that I’d said enough.”
“Why would you do that? They were there to help you.”
Willa raises her chin a little. “I didn’t trust them not to judge me for it. Come on, sixteen-year-old kid kills her sister—everyone has an opinion about it. So I told them what they wanted to hear and nothing else.”
She didn’t say it outright, but her accusation swims just under the surface: I didn’t trust them not to judge me for it. She trusted me with her secrets, and I judged her for them.
“I shouldn’t have snapped on you. If I had walked away and cooled off—”
“Jem,” Willa interrupts. “I didn’t expect you to be happy about it.”
“I know, but I shouldn’t have said that stuff you. I meant some of the things I said, but it was still rude to say them.”
Willa rolls her eyes at me and lies back on the bed. She curls away from me, facing the wall with her knees drawn up. “Don’t you ever get tired of feeling guilty?” she says. “I’ll forgive you for what you said because I’m tired of feeling awful about it, just like I’m tired of talking about my sister. I shouldn’t have told you about it. The whole point of moving back to Smiths Falls was so that my mistake would no longer define me to others. It was stupid to tell you, really.”
Willa doesn’t move when I lay a hand on her back. It’s a strange thing, looking at her in this position. It’s usually the other way around. I rub small circles between her shoulder blades and she doesn’t tell me to stop.
You can’t do stuff like that and expect a clean break.
My hand stays. It just feels right.
You’re an idiot.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Tell you?”
“Kill her.”
“Don’t ask me that. Mom used to ask me that.”
“Was it mercy or resentment?” I want to know if Elise is right—if she did it out of some twisted form of love, or out of selfish desire to end the nightmare.
“I don’t remember,” Willa murmurs.
“Okay. Now tell me the truth.”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“You don’t trust me.”
Would you if you were her?
Willa rolls over to face me. That deadly calm look comes over her face. Willa looks like that when she’s on the verge of shutting down.
“She wanted to die at home. She said there was no need to sign a DNR because no one was going to dare call an ambulance if something happened to her at home. She and Mom had a huge fight over it.
“Tessa quit her Oxy—refused pain relief for weeks. She knew her body would give out faster if she was allowed to feel the strain, and she didn’t want to hang around too long. Death was inevitable, but that made it imminent.”
Willa pauses, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say something. But she just takes a few seconds to collect herself. When she speaks again her voice isn’t as flat and smooth as before.
“She had all kinds of surgeries. By the end she couldn’t eat or drink anymore, except what they could give her intravenously. They wanted to give her a trach and ventilator too, but she said no. It was all crap to prolong a painful life. She didn’t want to live like that.”
I open my mouth to argue—just because Thomasina wanted something at one point in time doesn’t mean she wanted the same thing when it came down to the moment of suicide. Maybe she underestimated the pain and would have liked to die with dignity, under proper sedation, in the hands of trained professionals; not naked on the bathroom floor, shitting blood and afraid of her family’s intervention.
Willa claps a hand over my mouth before I can say any of that.
“She wanted to die. She saw the opportunity and I helped her take it. Mom actually blamed herself before she blamed me. She thought if she had just gone into the bathroom to check on her…”
“Did she ever forgive you?”
“We don’t talk about it.” Willa sits back against the wall. “We used to get into screaming matches because I wouldn’t admit what I’d done. Owning up to it meant legal trouble. But she knew. I didn’t tell her why I did it. I didn’t want her to feel like my bad decision was any reflection on her bad decisions—she wanted the ventilator for Tessa.” Willa shrugs. “Forgiveness is sort of irrelevant, all things considered. Can’t bring back the dead.”
Willa looks away from me. She stares at the floor with utter apathy. Shut down again. She can’t feel broken if she doesn’t feel anything.
How could I have known Willa and not realized she was carrying all this around? How could she have kept this from so many different people—her counselors and parents and friends? From me?
“I’m sorry,” I tell her quietly, “that I freaked. I should have heard you out. I should have really listened.”
Willa still doesn’t look at me. “I don’t blame you.” The words are so quiet I almost miss them. “I’ve never told anyone before,” she continues equally quietly. “I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to help you see…” She cuts herself off with a painful gulp. Her cheeks turn warm and her eyes are glassy under her lowered lids. “It’s funny, but I never really believed that she was going to die until I saw her lying there.”
It’s painful to watch her not cry, holding in sobs between shaky breaths. I put a tentative arm around her shoulders and Willa slowly leans toward me, like a tall tree falling. She sniffles a little between deep, calming breaths, unwilling to fall to pieces.
“So why’d you tell me?” I ask lowly.
It takes Willa a few sec
onds to answer. She takes a few shaky breaths, testing the smoothness of her voice. “Because we liked each other. I didn’t know where it was going. We might have learned to love each other. You can’t love someone if you don’t really know them. And if you can’t love them at their darkest moments…you just can’t love them, period.” Willa swipes the cuff of her sleeve across her eyes, mopping away tears before they have the chance to escape her lids.
“You think we could have had that?” The images, the lunatic fantasies, of Willa as my girlfriend seem so far away. They star a girl who was merely bereaved, not shattered and abandoned and technically a criminal. I don’t know what to do with this new Willa.
“Doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head. “Everything’s different now.”
“Friends?” I offer. “I didn’t ask Hudson to switch us. We’re still project partners. But…” I don’t want her to slip out of my life completely. It’s boring and lonely without her. She’s become a part of my life in Smiths Falls. I sort of need her, and I’d like to think she needs me, whether she’d admit it or not.
“Let’s start over,” Willa says. “Back to just…whatever we were before.”
I lay my cheek atop her head and squeeze her to my side. “Okay. We’ll be… well, we’ll try again.”
Willa sighs. “I’m tired.”
“Do you want me to go?”
Please say no.
Willa shakes her head. We sit there for a little while, saying nothing. I move my hand slowly against her arm, rubbing a small length in what I hope is a comforting manner. Eventually Willa sits up without a word and turns away from me to lie down. She faces the wall again and pulls her knees up. It feels like she’s pulling away.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go?”
Willa tucks her pillow under her chin and murmurs, “Please stay.” It’s unbelievable that two little words should give me such a sense of relief—it’s making this whole idea of cutting ties infinitely more complicated. But I don’t question it now, because it feels good and Willa looks…well, she looks like she needs something.
You? Please.
Yeah, me.
There are no words left and so much yet to say. I take her iPod off the nightstand and lay down behind her. She’s so small, curled up as she is. I nestle my front against her back and fit a bud into her ear.
“Can I pick?” she says quietly, and holds out her hand for the iPod. I pass it to her and Willa chooses “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. It’s gentle and passionate—the very reason I chose this song for our bedtime exchange a few weeks ago. It’s a tone that Willa needs right now, but I don’t think that’s what she had in mind when she chose it. The chorus seems more poignant than ever.
I wrap an arm around her middle and hold her close. Willa adjusts her position slightly, straightening her back so it’s easy to spoon her. The bridge of my nose rests against the curve at the back of her skull, breathing in the scent of her hair. I used to imagine this—cuddling with Willa in her narrow bed. I never imagined it quite under these circumstances.
“Iris” comes to a close, and it’s my turn to pick. I scroll through Willa’s list of songs, looking for her Great Big Sea collection. We need something upbeat, something to remind us of how our weird friendship began, and I have a particular song in mind: “Bad As I Am.” Willa is mildly amused by this selection. She can’t help but tap her toe to the beat.
When it’s her turn to pick she takes us back down again with “Mad World” sung by Gary Jules. I hold Willa a little tighter, stroking circles on her wrists. It’s a simple piano melody and the words are slow and measured, like something in a dream. The lyrics could have been written about Willa.
“You dream about dying?” I whisper.
“You do too.” It’s not a question. I both love and hate how she just knows me like that.
“Never of cancer,” I tell her.
“Of course not. That’s too obvious.” She sighs. “You always die by falling.”
“How’d you know?”
Willa shrugs. There’s a sort of finality to it, like she isn’t going to tell me now or ever. “I always lie down alone, like a wild animal in the woods, and it all just slips away.”
“Willa…was it really the meds?” I hope she’ll know what I mean without me having to really say it. I don’t like to think of her trying to kill herself.
Willa shrugs. “You can’t tell that you’re fucked in the head when you’re fucked in the head.”
“Was that the only time you thought of…?”
“No.” Willa turns down the volume on her iPod so we can hear each other better. “And yes. I experimented with cutting, but that didn’t last long. I just wanted to try it ‘cause some of the other kids in Group were doing it.”
“You harmed yourself to fit in?”
“I wanted to see if it was really a satisfying release. They were just little nicks. I used the blade from a pencil sharpener—can’t do much damage with that. It didn’t make me feel any different, so I stopped.”
Willa turns the volume back up, effectively cutting off this line of conversation. The song ends and she passes the iPod over her shoulder to me.
I want to suggest “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind. “Too much?” I ask.
Willa rolls her eyes and mutters something that I probably don’t want to hear. The only word I catch is ‘dumbass.’ I opt for “Lightning Crashes” by Live instead.
“I’m kind of glad I told you when I did,” Willa says suddenly. “It saved us a lot of wasted effort.”
“What?”
“The way you reacted, the way we can barely be friends now—it just proves that we didn’t feel that strongly about each other. A crush crumbles easily like that.”
“I don’t not like you.”
“I don’t not like you either.” Willa looks over her shoulder at me. “But an ‘us’ wouldn’t work. There’s no trust. We can barely manage respect.”
I want to say ‘give it time,’ but I don’t want to make a promise that I might not be able to keep.
“Did you think about an ‘us,’ before?”
“I wondered.”
“About what?”
“A lot of things,” she answers vaguely. “It doesn’t matter now. The failure of it all hinges on the fact that, once again, I am my mistake. I can’t undo that; just have to live with it.” If I didn’t know her I might have missed the undertone of pain in her voice. It saddens me to know she thinks of herself that way, bogged down and isolated by guilt.
I tighten my arm around her middle, holding her securely. “You’re not your mistake.”
“But you still don’t forgive me.”
“No, I don’t.” I don’t think I can. It will color how I look at Willa from now on, but…but I’m not done looking at her.
“That’s okay,” she says softly. “You’re not alone.”
It’s a strange sort of truce, this. We don’t hate each other. We don’t exactly like each other. We’re friends in the most intimate sense of the word. We’ve apologized, but not forgiven. We’ve trusted and sacrificed for a payoff that isn’t clear yet. It feels…right. I’m content with the arrangement. I ask Willa if she is and she answers in a tone of surprise: “Yeah. I am.” Her warm little hand laces its fingers with mine. “This was really…honest.”
“That’s new for us.”
Willa snorts with wry amusement. She takes the iPod and announces that we need something relaxing. “Something that sounds like a lullaby.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“I’m coasting.” She puts on “Possibility” by Sierra Noble and tells me it’s her go-to on nights she can’t sleep. My go-to on sleepless nights is the sound of Willa’s voice. I don’t tell her that.
Willa falls asleep first. I stay awake to watch her, enjoying the slow cadence of her breathing and the simple fact that she’s comfortable enough to fall asleep next to me. I can’t stay awake for long, though. It’s the first peaceful sleep I’ve had al
l week.
*
A hand on my shoulder roughly tugs me back to consciousness. Frank Kirk has quite a firm grip. My eyelids flutter and he turns my shoulder so I’m lying on my back. He looks pissed off, but I guess I would be too if I found some guy in my sister’s bed.
“What are you doing here?”
The sound and movement makes Willa stir.
“I, uh…”
“Downstairs.” I don’t hesitate to obey. I know the man has at least two firearms in the house and I’m already on his shit list.
Willa’s bedroom door shuts behind me. I head for the stairs, but I can still hear the conversation through the door.
“What’s this all about?” I feel bad that Willa is the one being grilled for something we share equal responsibility for. I stop to listen on the upper landing, but I can’t hear Willa’s reply.
“You don’t know?” His tone pisses me off, even if he is her guardian. He asks her if ‘things’ are ‘serious’ with ‘that boy.’ Whatever the hell that means, in the most condescending terms.
Willa answers no and Frank demands to know why I was in her bedroom.
“We were just hanging out. We fell asleep.”
He tells her not to piss on his head and tell him it’s raining. “You were just hanging out, all wrapped around each other, and fell asleep?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Maybe I should reopen the question of Willa’s sanity if she’s willing to be cheeky at a time like this.
“You’re grounded.”
Willa laughs—actually laughs out loud—and says that grounding is moot in a sleepy town like Smiths Falls. She should have kept her mouth shut, because the next thing she loses are her phone privileges for talking back.
“So where were you last night?” What a strange question to ask. Her tone is light and genuinely interested, like she’s not in the middle of being punished.
“You’re going to sit up here and think about what you’ve done,” Frank says. Willa’s bedroom door opens and I hurry down the stairs. “What are you still doing here?” he calls after me. “Go home.”
I head out the door as quickly as I can. I check my watch and realize that Willa and I were asleep for over an hour.
Wake Page 44