Do something with me tonight?
What?
Surprise. I look over at him and he offers a shy smile. Do acquaintances do surprises? I don’t even particularly like surprises.
We’ll stay in Smiths Falls this time?
Yes.
I agree to his surprise. I have nothing better to do. As we pack up at the end of class Jem says, “I’ll pick you up.”
“When?”
“Five-thirty.” He leaves before I can ask anything else. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he didn’t ask about the photo album again.
*
Jem shifts the car into park and I ask him if he’s serious. I figured he was taking me to his house to hang out, but we’re at the hospital instead. He gives me this sweet smile that I just know is a precursor to one of his attempts at persuasion.
“I was hoping you’d agree to keep me company.”
“So why didn’t you just ask that?”
“I didn’t think you would.” Jem points out that the public library is only a few blocks from the hospital. I can go there and get a ride home from him later if I decide not to keep him company.
“Just ask next time,” I tell him as I step out of the car. “There are worse things than being told no.”
*
The nurse in the Dialysis Clinic is a very petite Asian woman with butterflies on her scrub shirt. She doesn’t say much, other than to give her patient orders: “Lift your arm. We’ll take your blood pressure standing now.” Jem seems very conscious of the fact that I’m watching. He won’t look at me. When the nurse asks him to open his shirt so she can access his Hickman, I see the worried look on his face and duck behind the curtain before he has to ask.
Nurse Butterfly works fast. It only takes her half an hour to set up all the tubing and program the machine after taking Jem’s blood pressure. When I return to the cubicle the machine is humming softly and Jem is lounging with a surgical drape over one shoulder.
“Is that for my benefit?” I point to the drape. “I don’t think it’s gross. It’s not the first Hickman I’ve seen.”
Jem ignores my question completely and offers me an orange from his backpack. Before I can say yes he tosses me one anyway. It’s a fat navel orange, soft and juicy. I pull back the peel and cleave off a piece for each of us. Jem just sucks on his, extracting the juice and taking as little of the pulp as possible. He can’t eat much during dialysis without getting sick, so he leaves most of the orange to me.
“Are you in a talking mood?” he asks. What kind of question is that?
“Uh…”
Jem reaches over to his backpack on the side table and pulls out Tessa's journal, the one I gave him on Sunday. The edges of about a hundred Post-It notes poke out around the pages, and I can’t help but laugh.
“If only you read your English homework so thoroughly.” I move to take the journal and Jem withdraws it from my reach. He opens it to the first Post-It note with the seriousness of a lawyer and asks, “Who is Pat?” He makes it sound like he’s asking for a murder confession.
“Her high school sweetheart.” Tessa kept a diary very sporadically. That one journal lasted her nearly twenty years. The earliest entries were made before I was even born.
“He’s not in here much.”
“They didn’t date for very long.”
Jem flips to his next Post-It. “What language is that?” He turns the book around to show me.
“Dutch. Our Oma is from Soest.” There are occasional chunks of the journal written in Dutch. Oma tried long and hard to teach her grandkids her language—none of our nursery rhymes and Christmas carols were English—but I never caught on. Tessa was always good at that kind of thing, though.
“Do you know it?”
“I can understand it better than I can speak it.” I hold out a hand for the book and he gives it to me this time. I can understand one word in three, so I piece together the sentences as best I can. It’s a description of ‘the baby,’ dated January 18th.
“My parents took their sweet time naming me.” Jem finds that funny. I ask him if his parents inflicted him with an outdated name to honor someone. His cheeks turn a little bit pink.
“Irrelevant.”
“Whatever, Jeremiah.”
He snatches the journal back and turns to the next Post-It. “Why does she use gardenia as an adjective?”
If one thing is clear about Tessa’s journal, it’s that she didn’t write it for others to read. She’s got her own shorthand and acronyms and she leaves out the obvious details simply because they’re obvious. Like the line: Saw that movie I’ve been wanting to see. Satisfying ending. Good music. And that’s it. She knows what she’s referring to. What does it matter that no one else does? It’s her diary. Jem seems to have picked out every one of Tessa's gaps and inconsistencies and he questions them relentlessly.
“Was she flighty?” he asks.
“She was very picky about what was worthy of her attention.” Tessa was obsessed with motorcycles and good TV, but couldn’t have cared less about books. She referred to our local newspaper as The Horseshit Gazette and believed that people who talk to their pets in public are deeply unhappy and unwilling to admit it.
“Who’s Georgie?”
“My mom.” Jem’s eyes widen at my answer and he remarks on how much scathing commentary there is on my mom in the journal.
“They didn’t really get along,” I tell him. “Mom is the easily distracted type. Tessa appreciated a clear sense of direction.”
“Did they fight a lot?”
“Sometimes. They didn’t talk for a few years because everything led to a disagreement.”
“Sucks.” Jem flips to his next Post-It and turns the page around to face me. “Why? Just why?”
Tessa also liked to occasionally amuse herself by sketching little cartoons. The one in question is of a Betty Boop-like pinup girl in a negligee that, for all intents and purposes, is see-through.
“What?” It’s a private journal, after all.
“I kept count,” Jem says. He skims a few pages and pinches a chunk of the binding between two fingers. The chunk represents the space of about five years. “She had six boyfriends that I can count.”
“I wouldn’t call them boyfriends.”
Jem stares at me with unabashed surprise. It’s clear from the diary that my sister had an active sex life, but that doesn’t paint a complete picture of her relationships.
“What? She was in her twenties. She wasn’t looking to settle down.”
“And you knew what she was doing?”
“Well not the mechanics of it. I was only a kid. But I met some of her guys. They were nice people.”
“What, she just casually introduced you to her fuck-friends?”
I laugh without meaning to. “It’s not like sex is bad. It’s natural. So she was getting laid, big deal. She was beautiful.”
“Yeah, but…gross.”
“Your family doesn’t talk about sex? We used to talk about it all the time.”
“In detail?”
“She didn’t go out of her way to tell me, but if I asked a question she’d give me a full and honest answer.” I had a lot of questions around the time the school board decided to supply my class with inadequate and confusing sex ed. I asked Mom and she panicked a little bit at my abrupt inquiry. She tried to convince me that sex is magical and beautiful and that flowers were somehow involved, and that only people who are really in love do it. So I went to Tessa to see what it was really all about, and she gave me the insert-tab-A-into-slot-B info. No flowers, just skin. She made it sound like something a person would actually engage in willingly. We didn’t get into Tessa’s views on sexual politics until a few months before she died, sitting at her kitchen table with coffee that neither of us drank. I’d casually used the word ‘slut’ in conversation and she told me to watch my tongue. “Men think they own sex,” she said. “They demand that a woman be sexy, but condemn her for having sex.”
She made a sound of disgust in the back of her throat and blew on her steaming coffee. “But worst of all,” she said, “are the women who condemn other women for the same reason.”
The drape over Jem’s shoulder starts to slide down as he flips pages. I move it higher and Jem practically slaps my hand away.
“Sorry. Reflex.” He looks so embarrassed over such a small thing.
“Don’t worry about it.” The words don’t really mean anything. He’s going to worry about it anyway. He’s flustered and awkward and fidgeting with the drape.
“I didn’t see anything.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t.”
He looks at me and for a moment I think he’s going to say something, but then he turns back to the book and asks me what ‘pasen’ means.
“Easter eggs.”
*
It’s nine-thirty by the time we leave the Dialysis Clinic. Jem asks if we can make a quick detour on our way out and we end up in Pediatrics. Maybe he’s feeling nostalgic.
Jem approaches the nurse at triage and she reminds him that visiting hours are over.
“I know. I just wanted to see if Meira was discharged yet.”
“Yeah, she was.” Jem smiles without happiness and says that’s great news. The nurse doesn’t look happy. We turn to go and she calls out, “Jem…” That’s a loaded tone. There’s something she wants to say, but probably can’t because of confidentiality law. She settles for trying to communicate with a pressing look, and Jem frowns.
I can’t stand the tension. “Was she discharged via the morgue?”
Jem flinches, but the nurse lets out a sigh. “No.” The unspoken part of her sentence rings loud and clear: Not yet.
It’s a quiet ride down in the elevator. Jem doesn’t say anything as we leave the hospital and cross the lot to his car. I ask him who Meira is and he says, “Just this girl I know.”
“Does she have leukemia too?”
Jem doesn’t answer right away. We get in the car but he doesn’t start the engine. He just sits there and blows out a long sigh.
“No. It’s all through her gut. It’s in her liver and pancreas now.”
She’s doomed. Once it’s in the liver, it’s over in the blink of an eye. Jem knows this, and it upsets him.
“Were you guys a thing? A little romance on the ward?” I smile to show that I’m joking, but I’m not good at making light.
“No. It’s not like that.” Jem looks over at me with a drawn expression. “She’s only sixteen. She’s barely old enough to drive and she’s going to die.”
I reach over and take his hand. His skin is cold, but not unpleasantly so. Jem blows out another sigh and looks out the window, trying to maintain composure. He starts the engine and says we should get going. I turn the car off.
Jem gives me a what the hell? look. I take him by the shoulder of his shirt and pull him toward me, into the hug he obviously needs but won’t ask for. His arms readily wind around my ribs and hold me in a vice grip. His head rests on my shoulder.
“Do you really want to go home?”
Jem shakes his head mournfully. He tightens the hug even further, but I resist the urge to complain about lack of airflow. He needs this.
I scan the dashboard as best I can without moving away from him. It takes me a while, but eventually I find the button I’m looking for. I hold it down and the sunroof begins to slide back.
Jem lifts his head to see what’s going on.
“Why are you opening that?”
“The stars are out. We’ll sit here till you’re ready.” I feel around the side of my seat for a lever or button to move the backrest.
“It’s under the seat,” he tells me, and shifts his own seat back. It’s like watching the night sky on a TV through the square in the ceiling. The stars are out as much as they ever are in spring. Wisps of cloud continually swirl across the sky, blocking some stars and letting others shine through.
“I’ll give your album back tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” he says dully. “You can take your journal back.” I’ll grab it from him later, when he drops me off at home. He asks me why I gave it to him.
“So you’d let me keep the album a little while longer.”
“But why her diary?”
“It seemed fair. We traded personal records.”
“But when I read it—”
I reach over and lay a hand on his shoulder. “Jem, there’s no moral to the story. It’s a diary, not a fairytale. You can’t read too much into it.”
“I thought you wanted me to know something about her.”
I shrug. “I didn’t know what you’d do with it.”
“So it was just collateral? You didn’t care if I read it?”
“Pretty much. It’s sweet that you did read it, though.”
“You looked through my photos.”
“Yeah.” I look at him out the corner of my eye. “Why were you sad when Elise’s donor results came back?”
“I wasn’t sad,” he answers in the same muted tone. His words come slowly. “I was overwhelmed.” He swallows and it sounds loud in the quiet of the car. “I cried like a fucking baby.”
I roll onto my side. Never mind the night sky, I want to watch him. Jem knows I’m doing it, but he doesn’t even glance at me. He looks straight ahead through the sunroof with a passive but unhappy look on his face.
Jem’s hand leaves his side and reaches across the gap between our seats. He grabs the first thing he can find on me—my jacket collar—and pulls. His scrawny arms are stronger than they look. He tows me forward until my head is practically level with his shoulder.
“Jem…?”
He folds me into a hug and sighs mournfully. “How are you the only one who gets it?” he murmurs. “I don’t understand you. How is it you understand me?”
“You understand me better than you think you do.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t get you at all.” He sounds genuinely troubled by this.
“I wouldn’t like you if you didn’t.” I try to lift my head but Jem holds me fast. “Or are you talking about what I did to my sister?”
“All of it.”
“You’re never going to understand all of it. I don’t, and I live with myself.”
“But—”
“Hey.” I pat his shoulder. “You’ve given me things I didn’t even know I needed, okay? Give yourself a little more credit. You’re a good friend.”
His arms tighten a little further around me. It’s difficult in this position, but I try to hug him back just as hard. I think Jem secretly enjoys a good squeeze.
“I should take you home,” he murmurs. It is almost ten o’clock on a school night.
“Where the hell did the evening go?”
Jem loosens his arms but doesn’t push me back to my own chair. “I’m sorry I wasted your time tonight.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Time flies when you’re having fun.”
“You had fun?”
“Yeah.”
“In a dialysis clinic?”
“Yeah.”
“With me?”
“Yes, you were there.”
Jem gives me a sideways look and shakes his head. “You’re so weird.”
He sits up then, shifting his backrest up to driving position, and I move back to the passenger seat. We turn on the radio for the drive home to fill the silence. There’s nothing much to say, now. I switch it off when he turns onto my street. One last opportunity to ask a question, while he’s still in the mood to answer them.
“You spent Christmas in the hospital?”
“Yeah. I was discharged just before New Year’s.” He pulls up in front of my house and parks along the curb. “It freaked my dad out that I was so sick around Christmas.”
“Why?”
“He works in medicine. He’s seen a lot of sick people and old people hang on for just one last family holiday and then give up.”
“He thought you would?”
“Did you write ‘fuck you all’ on the front of it?”
Jem chuckles a little. “I should have.”
I get out of the car while we’re still on a happy note. He thanks me for coming with him and I thank him for caring enough. “See you at school.”
“Yeah.”
I step out of the car and he calls my name before I can shut the door.
“What?” I lean down to look at him. He’s got this puzzled expression, like he’s not sure how to phrase what he wants to say.
“What’s the playlist for tonight?”
I smile, because he still wants to exchange music even after we’ve spent the whole afternoon together.
“‘Call and Answer,’ Barenaked Ladies.”
Jem smirks. “‘Hurts So Good,’ Mellencamp.”
“‘You Let Me Down,’ Joel Plaskett.”
“‘I Go Blind,’ 54-40.”
“Goodnight, Jem.”
“Goodnight.”
*
Frank is in the kitchen when I go inside, making a bag of microwave popcorn. He asks me how work went and I tell him it was fine.
“Someone left a message for you.” He nods to the phone. I dial into the answering machine and wait for the tone.
The message begins: “Hi, um, I got this number from Elise, so if you don’t know who Elise Harper is just hang up and ignore this message.” Silence. “Still there? ‘Kay, well my dumbfuck friend—you probably call him Jem or some other civilized variant—hasn’t been returning my messages, so I don’t know if he screwed things up with you or not—and he’s a total idiot if he did; you sound like a cool chick—but anyway I wanted to invite you to a show in Ottawa. It’s this gig at a place called The Plains; couple bands performing and shit. Let me know if you want to come and I’ll get you in, no cover. I’m…curious about you.”
Holy crap, rambler. I don’t trust the way she says ‘curious.’ What did Jem tell her?
“Oh, my name’s Ava. Should have mentioned that. Call me back whenever, and if you’re still talking to Jem, tell that little bitch that even brain damaged monkeys can answer a text message.”
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