One Sweet Day

by Elle Tyler

  “No. Right now, it’s more like the flying monkeys of Oz.”

  I half-laughed. “I’m not going to do anything to you, I swear.” I tried to let her go, but I had it all wrong. She captured my hands under the water.

  “If I were any other girl, what would you do right now?”

  “That is a huge ‘if,’ Everly Anne.”

  “What would it be?” she pressed.

  “Oh, let’s see... Beautiful, mermaid-rivaling, naked girl all alone in my father’s pool late at night... I think I’d want to wear flannel pajamas and play Scrabble.”

  She pulled herself closer. “If I were any other girl, I’d want you to act on what you’re feeling. But I’m not. So promise you won’t ever cross that line. Not even on our one free day.”

  I feigned offense. “Then get away from me with all your nakedness, temptress.”

  Everly leaned in and kissed me before she swam to the bottom and found her clothes. The pile sat on the edge of the pool as we swam under the light of moon.

  As night turned into early morning, she rested her arms over a forgotten blue raft and told me about all the people she’d met riding the G-train when she’d sneak out of her house. She told me all the words Merriam-Webster had taught her and how she’d used them against her father. She told me about a guy with scripture tattooed on his arms and chest and rings in his nose and how she’d first learned how to charm a man. She told me about the flowers he’d leave on the train platform each morning where he used to preach to passengers. She told me how she’d never kissed anyone before me.

  She began to tell me her secrets.

  And I was never more quiet.

  ***

  After she crawled into my bed that night, I found my notebook open on my desk. Inside, she had written:

  The sky is falling. The sky is falling.

  And I fear you won’t believe it until you’re covered in stars.

  ***

  It’s was 4:30 a.m. when loud music filtered through the house. I awoke with a start. Everly Anne was gone from my bed.

  Groggily, I crept out to the hallway and found her sitting on the steps, staring through the banister rails. When I sat beside her, I watched my father sway, a bottle of Scotch in hand, down in the living room below.

  “Well.” I sighed, putting my chin on her shoulder. “He’s singing Italian Bocelli love songs. Andrew Trovatto is officially fuckin’ tanked.”

  “You should go to him,” she said quietly.

  I closed my eyes and snuggled up to her. “No way. Drunken Bocelli is some of his finest work.”

  She laughed quietly. “It is a pretty song.”

  “You know what it says?” I asked, kissing her shirt.

  “It’s in Italian.”

  “Right now he’s telling the woman he loves, ‘My sun, you are here with me.’”

  She leaned her head against mine. “Why is he calling her his son?”

  “No,” I smiled. “Like sunshine. That sun.”

  “Where are they?”

  “It’s debatable if she is even really with him. Some people think it’s a sad song about losing someone you love. Some think it’s just stupid a love song.”

  Everly put my arm over her shoulder. “Maybe they don’t know about that evil word.”

  I kissed her through a chorus of devotion... and loss.

  A LOVE CURE

  Part Three

  THE QUIET. THE LOUD.

  17.

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I woke up on Christmas morning, and color might as well have vanished from the world.

  The two things I remembered most about that morning were the quiet and the loud.

  The loud: ambulance sirens stuck in my ears. My feet were too heavy as I climbed down the stairs from my bedroom with hope it was all just a nightmare. The wailing from a grown man’s bedroom.

  The quiet: our kitchen wasn’t brimming with cinnamon pancakes, hot cocoa, coffee. Our Christmas tree sat betrayed by the unopened presents beneath. Nothing rumbled anymore. Nothing made a noteworthy sound that comforted and carried me into its arms.

  The Monday following Fourth of July weekend, I stepped inside room 221 to attend class, and found Christmas morning all over again.

  Everyone was too loud. Where is the sick girl? What do you mean we have to do an extra exam? A surprise test right after holiday? Fucking bastard.

  And the room was earth-shatteringly quiet. No Everly Anne, with all her pseudo-shyness. No chair of questions in the middle of the room. Brighton carried on as if she hadn’t even existed. No explanation, just, just, just, fuckin’ just, “This is my classroom. If you don’t like it, leave.”

  They were given clinic duty, extra rotations, and some lame fuckin’ lab on rabbits with stomach cancer. I was called up to his desk and met with an alien-like cheerfulness.

  “Mr. Trovatto!” He smiled. “How was your weekend? Hope you got plenty of rest.”

  “Um…, thank you, sir.”

  “Very good.” He handed over a slip of paper. “I have some excellent news for you today. Dr. Woodruff has one open slot in his class, and I put in a good word to insure you have a seat. That’s your admission to his class. He has a lab starting promptly in twenty-five minutes. Do not be late.”

  Woodruff.

  My blood ran cold.

  “Sir, I appreciate the gesture—”

  “No need to thank me.” He smiled again. “The pleasure is all mine. After all, what kind of teacher would I be if I let my best student slip by without ever having the honor of performing a cadaver dissection?”

  I stared at his name plaque because I was too enraged to endure his fake smile any longer.

  “Something the matter?” he asked.

  “No, sir.” I almost made it. I almost was able to turn on my heel and keep my damn mouth shut, but the tether around my ribs wanted to face him. It demanded to know where its other half was. “Actually, yeah. Something is very much the matter, Dr. Brighton.”

  His eyes darkened. “Oh?”

  “Oh,” I nodded.

  “Pray tell, Mr. Trovatto.”

  “Where is Everly? Why aren’t we doing a differential today?”

  Still acting too pleasant, he replied, “In the spirit of the differential, I cannot comment on the patient, because that would be doing too much work for my students.”

  My heart thumped painfully. “She’s sick?”

  “Go to your class, Callum.”

  My anger flared. “Can you be human for a single moment? I only want to know if she’s all right.”

  “I’m here,” he said, “entertaining a classroom of flunkies, aren’t I? If my... If Everly was in danger, do you think I’d be here with the likes of you, instead of attending to her?”

  “So who is attending to her?” I begged.

  “I told you to go to class.” He pushed away from his desk and addressed the room as if nothing was wrong.

  With twelve minutes to spare until Dr. Woodruff’s class began, I ran myself to the pediatric wing, and found Truscott’s room.

  “I saw her this morning,” he told me. “She was here for tests.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  “I’m not sure. She never talks to me about that stuff, but her dad found her in here and said, ‘It’s time for your test.’ So that’s how I know why she was here.”

  “Did she say anything about being in trouble?”

  He looked up from his poorly-eaten bowl of oatmeal. “Why would she be in trouble?” He smiled then. “I mean other than the obvious. She’s always getting into some kind of trouble. That’s why I love her so much. She won’t lie down and just accept her fate.”

  I felt horrible about what came out of my mouth next, but it was the truth. “Everly was with me this weekend for the Fourth of July. I wasn’t sure if she got in trouble about something we might have done.”

  He looked down to his bowl. “What did you do?”

  “She burned her hand.”

  His head
shook. “She can’t get in trouble for that. She can’t help it.”

  “I know,” I said, “but maybe Dr. Brighton doesn’t want her around me, since I didn’t keep her safe.”

  Truscott pushed his tray away suddenly. “I think I’m gonna be sick. Sorry.”

  I grabbed the trashcan and held it under his chin as he vomited oatmeal. His mother walked in with an armful of books and other things he must have requested. They went sailing to the floor as she raced to his aid. Then the nurses came. And I was on the outs.

  ***

  It was almost 6 a.m. by the time I got home, never more certain that I was to blame for the canceling of the differential. On top of being assigned cadaver dissection, every ER chart issued to me on my rotation was Worst Case Scenario. I got all the GOMERs (Get Out of My Emergency Room), LOL’s (Little Old Ladies), and pukey kids or kids with the runs. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I was given every chart that had to do with alarming things coming out of asses or my finger needing to go up someone’s ass.

  Meanwhile, imbeciles like Logan were given charts about sore throats or achy backs. He charmed the nurses into doing most of that work, as simple as it was. I actually caught him around midnight in the lounge, kicked back sipping a hot cup of coffee, while I had vomit dried on my shoes and Vick’s Vapo lubed in my nostrils just to tolerate the multitude of bodily fluids I was being tortured with.

  So when I walked inside my house and saw my father awake, rummaging through the kitchen cabinets like a lunatic, I was not in the damn mood.

  “Go to bed, Pop.”

  He turned as if he hadn’t heard me enter. “I had a dream.”

  “Yeah, me, too. Sadly, it’s only a shadow now.”

  “Didn’t we used to have tea in here somewhere?” He closed the cabinet and started poking through another, allowing shit to fall to the counter and making a huge mess.

  “It’s like six in the morning. I’m beyond tired. Go back to bed, Pop.”

  “I was already asleep,” he said. He found the tea and got water boiling. “I told you I had a dream.”

  “Well, I’m going to need more than Earl Gray if you’d like to tell me about this dream. I’ve been up since yesterday around this time.”

  “I gave you your savings account after you graduated high school. There’s more than enough to live well. Drop out of Cornell and become a lifeguard or something.”

  He turned around and, for the first time in a long while, I saw his eyes clearly. They were bright and true. His face was even clean-shaven. My surprise must have shown, because he nervously looked away and then began to clean up the mess he had made.

  I took a seat at the kitchen island. “Why are you so against me becoming a doctor?”

  He sat with me. “Because you’re going to waste your life being miserable and exhausted doing miserable and exhausting things.”

  “When I was little, it seemed to make you happy.”

  He stood to get his cup of tea and then started a pot of coffee for me. “It was strange,” he said, back turned. “Because I’ve had this dream before but it was so much different.” My father didn’t speak again until the coffee was finished brewing. He handed me a cup and sat beside me. “She was only a child in my other dreams.”

  “Who?”

  He looked at me as if I should have known. “Everly.”

  “So you do remember her.”

  “So you know I was once her doctor,” he retorted.

  “She told me,” I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What else did she tell you?” he asked.

  I took a long sip of hot coffee before I told him, “You gave her oven mitts to protect her hands. And that you were kind to her.”

  And for the first time in almost ten years, I think my dad showed a sliver of true happiness. He tried to hide it inside of his tea cup, but I saw his smile before he sipped.

  “So how is the differential going?” he asked.

  “Canceled. I think the weekend in Montauk pissed off Brighton, and he’s putting me through hell as payback. Not that I really blame him—she did burn the shit out of her hand on my watch.”

  “I wanted to say something,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure if that would be fair to either of you. You looked... I watched you together... She has that way, doesn’t she?”

  I already knew. “Way of what?”

  He rested his chin against the butt of his hand. “Making you fall in love with her.”

  I looked to my cup. “If you loved her then, why did you let Brighton take over her treatment?”

  “It was too hard after...” He looked behind him to the cabinet where the bottles of clear, gold, and pain-free were hidden. His hands shook as he gulped more tea. “Everly was this bright little girl who needed to be wrapped in a bubble. I could do that. I wanted to do that. But Timothy thought my methods were too weak. He wanted to turn the intensity of her care up to a notch I was uncomfortable with. She needed to be protected, sure, but his way meant the cost of her emotional wellbeing. Her freedom. Her individuality. I tried to do what I could to curb Timothy’s rules, but he was her father. And then, suddenly, I had my own home to concern myself with, so I did that instead, at the cost of Everly’s well-being.”

  And that pissed me off.

  “Don’t use Noelle and me as an excuse for why you gave up on Everly.”

  He had fire, too. “I didn’t give up on her! I just couldn’t find enough darkness inside of myself to do what was needed to save her. I had been down that road already, and it’d proved true enough. Look at Everly—she was only supposed to have three years of life at best, and she’s alive today because someone was hard-nosed enough to do what was needed to beat that expectancy by sixteen years!”

  My whole body shook with anger. “You didn’t kill my mother. That is not on your shoulders, and she would never blame you for what happened. She was at peace with dying. She held me in the attic and told me so one day.”

  “I may not have killed her, but I was too soft to do what might have saved her.”

  “You mean torture her, just as Brighton has tortured Everly. That’s not a method. It’s pure madness.”

  “She’s alive,” he concluded.

  “Yeah, and out of all the medical milestones she has passed, the one thing that sticks out most in her mind is the doctor who let her sleep with oven mitts on her hands. The one who played pretend and showed her kindness when she felt like she mattered to no one.” I pushed my mug away. “It’s such bullshit, Pop. What’s the point of getting to live if you don’t get a say in how it goes? How it begins is how it goes...? Have you forgotten that?”

  “I could never forget,” he said quietly.

  I sighed in exhaustion. “You have to stop torturing yourself. One thing I know for damn sure is Mom would have never wanted you to be miserable.”

  “I’m not miserable,” he argued. “I’m just missing a really big piece of myself.”

  I tried to joke. “Yeah, well, if you don’t snap out of it, Marta’s gonna divorce you, take all your money, and head for the hills.”

  “She’d never leave,” he said seriously. “It’s why I married her. She just wanted children. I’m merely an afterthought. It’s a perfect match.”

  He picked up his mug, finished off the tea, and then slid my coffee back in front of me. I added another spoonful of sugar from the bowl in the middle of the counter, and he didn’t say anything.

  “So... what was this dream all about?” I asked.

  “I told you—Everly.”

  “But what was she doing?”

  “She’s with a little boy,” he replied. “He looked like you but with blond hair. She used to be the same age as him in my other dreams, but tonight she looked like she did on the Fourth of July. He called her Mom.”

  “Exactly how loose with the Goose were you getting before bed?”

  He smirked. “Clearly not enough.”

  It was quiet as I finished my coffee. My father made me toast and scrambled eggs
. For the briefest moment, it was as if normalcy lived in our home again.

  “Pop,” I called around a bite of toast. “If you could treat Everly today, what would you do?”

  “She’s grown. It’s all different. And I’m a bit out of practice.”

  “You think I should just let it go... right?”

  “I think it’s not up to you anymore. Timothy cancelled the differential, so really there’s nothing left to do. Be glad that he did—it wasn’t fair to give her case to students. None of you would have passed.”

  “She’s the girl who can’t feel pain. I would have passed.”

  He stared narrow-eyed at me. “And stealing your father’s old case file regarding CIPA isn’t an honest way to pass.”

  “Everly told me,” I said. “She asked me to do something for her and then she’d help me pass the differential. We had a deal.”

  “Agreeing to that deal is as dumb as stealing case files, Callum.”

  I laughed. “You don’t even know the details.”

  “Oh, I can imagine. As a child, that little girl was too smart for her own good.” He stared at me. “I watched you with her on the Fourth. You didn’t have a single drink, but you were the drunkest person in attendance. That’s a dangerous thing when mixed with Everly Anne Brighton’s gift of persuasion.”

  “It’s not like that between us,” I lied.

  “It should be.” My father waited for me to look at him. “If you’re plotting something to help Everly, then it should be because you care for her.”

  “I do care for her. That’s not what I meant. But what if caring for her leads to my destruction?”

  He rested his chin on the butt of his hand. “Trust me on one thing—your heart plus a woman will always lead to some kind of destruction.”

  “Ironic you should say that. Part of the deal involves giving Everly’s heart away to someone else.”

  He perked up. “What do you mean?”

  “She wants me to vet her case before a judge so she can donate her organs to a boy who needs a heart.”