by Liara Tamani
Astonishment helps me break my silence. “Really?” I say, but I want to be like, Seriously, Daddy? Have you seen my walls? Candace Parker can ball and all, but I don’t have a single picture of a basketball player in my room. My walls are full of random things I love.
Maybe they haven’t told me what I want to do with my life yet. But one thing’s for certain: staring at a life-sized basketball player will tell me zero things about my future. I don’t know how I’m going to take it down without hurting Daddy’s feelings, but best believe it’s coming down.
As I approach the elevator, Mom says, “The gastrointestinal surgery department is on the sixteenth floor and you’re sixteen!” Guess my feelings about that poster were still all over my face becase Mom only points out potential signs when she catches me with a sad or sideways look. It usually perks me up, but today it makes my mood worse.
You see, Mom doesn’t believe in all my sign stuff. She’s never said so, but she’s not exactly big on believing in general. Well, believing in yourself, in your dreams, in love—those types of things—sure. But with everything else, she’s always preached that questioning and studying is more important that believing. And every time she’s asked me how my signs work, I’ve never had a good answer for her.
All I know is that I can’t afford to miss them. What if the one time they clearly point me in the direction of what I’m meant to do with my life, I’m not even paying attention? What then?
I step onto the elevator, she pushes the circle with the sixteen, and it lights up. Sixteen years and the signs still haven’t told me what I need to know most. I finally have the chance to quit basketball, but I still don’t have a clue what to replace it with.
Mom’s always telling me to be patient, to keep listening to myself and it will come. Yeah, easy for her to say. She’s known she wanted to be an interior designer since she was a little girl, like Cole has known he wants to be a photographer or Jordan has known she wants to play basketball.
Sometimes I think about being a magazine editor, but then I think being a poet or writer would be cool, or maybe some type of visual artist, or a historian, or even an astrologist or a thrift shop owner. But I could also see myself as a professor. Or even an astronomer. It would be amazing studying stars, moons, planets . . . the whole universe. I don’t know. At any given moment, I could have a million ideas about who I’m meant to be floating through my head. So what exactly am I supposed to be listening to?
Cole must see the angst on my face because he reaches for one of his hugs. I let him pull me in, and watch Daddy walk past us to the back corner of the elevator, as far away as he can get from Mom.
REX
I turn off the car. Check my phone again. Cole’s posted a new pic of Carli walking into her hospital room with the caption “The strongest girl I know.” She’s looking back over her shoulder, scared.
“You’re okay,” I whisper, tracing the curve of her face with my finger. But her expression doesn’t change.
My heart slumps and I’m out of my truck, hitting the lock button. I have a plan. I’m going to move as fast as I can. So fast I can’t think about where I am.
Full-speed through the parking lot. I mean, my legs are moving so fast in these stiff jeans, I’m sweating. I swear February doesn’t mean shit in Houston.
A minute later my red-and-black Air Jordan 1s hit the curb to the hospital entrance (like what!), and I’m walking toward the doors. Almost there. So close that the sliding glass doors part for me.
Then bam! Here comes the world’s fat ass—thirteen million billion billion pounds—trying to sit down on my chest.
I turn around, walk away from the doors, and slide my right hand down the back of my neck, trying to get rid of the weight. But this hospital is extra heavy. Air is ripping in and out of the very top of my lungs—in-and-out and in-and-out and in-and-out so fast it burns. Feels worse than the final minute of a game I’ve played all thirty-two minutes of, when I’m sure my lungs are about to say, I’m done.
Come on, Rex. Hands interlaced on the top of my head, I place one foot in front of the other until I make a wide circle around the porte cochère. Two wide circles and I’m breathing a little easier.
Turning back toward the doors, I nearly bump into a tall, brown-skinned man wearing a white coat over scrubs. My insides jump. He looks about ten years younger than my father, though. False alarm.
Back to the plan. Let’s go!
This time I run (damn near fly!) through the doors and down the waxy hospital floors toward the elevators. Shoes squeaking, I pass a man walking in Wranglers and a cowboy hat like he’s standing still.
In the elevator I close my eyes and see Carli’s face in front of 1604. I push sixteen and it lights up. I can’t believe I’m about to see her again. A mixture of ease and excitement wash over me. Then the metal doors slide closed, and I’m staring at my reflection.
My chest tightens.
I swear anytime I catch my reflection, it’s looking at me funny. Thick brows (like my father’s) tense like they wish I would step to them. Big lips (like my father’s) perfectly still like they have nothing to say to me and never will. All my moles like tiny unforgiveable sins.
See, this is exactly why I don’t keep a mirror in my bathroom. Instead I keep a sticky note that says You’re good. The only time I intentionally look in the mirror is once a week in the chair at the barbershop. Gotta make sure the high-top fade is on point.
And it is. Sponged the top this morning. Don’t need to do much else but let the barber keep the lineup fresh. And I went yesterday, so I’m cool. With my fingertips, I brush the edge where my hair meets my forehead and tell myself, You’re good.
But my reflection tells me that’s a lie. Dude, what are you doing? I don’t remember anybody inviting you.
And he’s right. The only reason I know about Carli’s surgery is because I’ve been stalking her brother’s IG. What if she thinks I’m crazy when I show up? The red number above the elevator doors blinks to eleven, and I push buttons twelve through fifteen to buy more time.
When the doors open on twelve, two buff-looking dudes in blue scrubs walk on. “Thirteen plea—” the blond one starts before he sees it’s already lit up. The dark-haired one stands behind him, talking about a lady over-waxing his eyebrows. Then a man rolling a pregnant lady in a wheelchair gets on and stands right beside me.
Really? I close my eyes and brace myself for the weight.
But it doesn’t come.
We all start rising, and I actually feel the opposite of weight. It’s the feeling I get sometimes when I’m sitting under the trees, when the wind is blowing just right and the sun is glinting down through the leaves. Like everything is okay. Like I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
CARLI
In the pre-op room, when I get Mom alone (Cole and Dad went to get a snack from the vending machine. Yes, they actually announced it in front of me like I’m not lying here starving), I try to take my mind off the surgery by asking her the same question for the millionth time:
What happened between you and Dad?
She’s sitting beside me in a puke-pink pleather chair. Her sunglasses are off, and her eyes are definitely looking better than they did this morning. They’ve been in a perpetual state of red puffiness since last Saturday, but first thing in the morning, they’re always the worst.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, looking up from a design budget. I guess she felt me eyeing her. She’s had I’ll be fine on repeat all week, mostly for Cole. She doesn’t need to say it to me. I believe her. Mom always finds her way back to happy.
Found her way back after her first design business failed and she had to close her studio and start working from home again. We were in elementary school. Found her way back after her mom died from breast cancer four years ago. Grandma Rosemary was cool.
And it’s not that fake, always smiling kind of happy. With Mom, it’s like no matter what happens, big or small, she finds her way back to enjo
ying her work, her family (well, that’s obviously complicated right now), her music, her books, her art, her random dance sessions, her tea, her candles, her long baths, her wine, her million trinkets around the house—her life. It’s a kind of enjoyment that gets all up in your face, but in a good way. I swear if she didn’t enjoy her life so damn much, I’d probably still be planning to ball. But I see her happiness and want it for myself.
“I know,” I say, voice cracking. Wait, where did that come from? I’m not worried about Mom. I’m really not. But she has been crying a lot. The most I’ve seen since her mom died.
“Carli,” Mom says, and puts her paperwork down. She has a look of concern in her big, Diana Ross–looking eyes. “Sometimes life hits you with things, but you have to keep going, you know.”
Wait, what? I see what she’s doing. She’s trying to flip this conversation from her sadness to mine. But you know what, if she wants to do that, I’m going to use it. I reach down (don’t have to reach very far) and pull out the sadness I’ve been feeling all week—about our family, Daddy, this whole situation—and I say, “It would help if I knew what happened.” Tears pool at the base of my throat, and I gently guide them up behind my eyes and let them fall.
“Carli,” Mom says, and picks up the Styrofoam cup from the nightstand. She takes a sip. There’s a Lipton tea tag hanging by a string on the outside of the cup. Mom is bougie about her tea. No way she’s enjoying that Lipton. “You want me to get you some ice chips?” she asks.
“Are you serious? I cry and all you offer me are ice chips?” I sit up in the bed and feel the chill from the cold room hit my bare back through the sparse ties of the hospital gown. “Forget ice chips! I want to know what happened between you and Daddy,” I say, tears gone. Pretending gone. Patience gone.
I swear all fifty-two million times I’ve asked her about why she and Daddy are getting divorced, she acts shady, which is not like her at all. She never shies away from the truth. It’s one of my favorite things about her. My whole life, I’ve always been able to ask her about anything. And I mean anything—sex, drama at school, drugs, alcohol, religion, masturbation. Yes, masturbation! But she can’t talk about what happened between her and Daddy? Makes no freaking sense.
“You’ll have to ask your dad, Carli.”
“Seriously?” It’s so irritating the way she keeps suggesting this like it’s possible. I mean, I can ask Daddy about impersonal stuff, like how to craft the best arguments for my teachers to give me extra credit for all the random things I read. Or what I should use to get all my hair out of the drain. Or why we don’t have one-person-one-vote if we live in a democracy.
But whenever I try to talk to Daddy about life outside the very practical or intellectual—basically anything dealing with feelings—he always gets that look in his eyes, that look that makes me stop pressing. After twenty years together, she might be immune to the look, but I’m not.
“Well, I can’t talk about it, Carli. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“You’re the one always talking about questioning everything! And now I’m asking something that you have all the answers to, but you refuse to give them to me?”
“Look, Carli,” she says. “I wish I could. I really do. But your dad has to be ready to talk to you about it, you know, or it won’t do you any good.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“No, Carli.”
“Seriously, if it doesn’t do me any good, it’ll be on me. I asked for it.”
“I said no.”
Cole and Daddy walk back in before I can get an answer out of Mom.
Dr. Williams is with them. “It’s time,” she says, two nurses right behind her. One comes over and releases the brakes on my bed, and the two of them together begin to steer me out of the room. Daddy, Mom, and Cole are right behind them.
I guess this is it. It all seems to be happening so fast. The nurses are wheeling me to a room where the doctors are about to take out a part of me . . . a part I’ve lived with my whole life . . . a part I might miss. What if I never wake up?
My bed clears the room and I’m moving down the hall, staring up at harsh, fluorescent lights.
When we come to a set of double doors, Dr. Williams presses a large red button on the wall, they swing open, and we all pass through, Daddy ducking. “The waiting room is just up there to the left,” Dr. Williams says, and points to a space ahead with more puke-pink chairs arranged in a square.
The nurses turn me toward a long hall with more double doors.
Let my family come with me! I want to beg.
Cole grabs my hand.
“We’ll be close, Angel-face,” Daddy says, standing on my right.
Mom puts her hand on my left leg and says, “Just down the hall.”
I look up at my family, all together, wanting so much I can’t have. Wanting to wail like a baby, but instead I close my eyes.
REX
I make it just in time to catch Carli in the hall upstairs. When I see her, my heart starts floating in my chest. At least that’s how it feels. Like there’s nothing attached to it, like it might just go overboard and decide to float off somewhere. And that’s without even seeing her face. Through the large glass windows on the double doors in the hallway, all I can see is her big red hair peeking up over the back of the hospital bed.
On one side of her, a beautiful tall woman with short natural hair is patting her leg. Must be her mom. And on her other side, her brother is holding her hand. Her dad (clearly where Cole and Carli get most of their height from) reaches down to give her a kiss on the forehead. Damn, she’s lucky! Makes me want to push the red button and rush through the doors so I can join in on the love, too.
The nurses start to wheel Carli off, and I see her face. Hold up, she’s scared. Her eyes are wide open, and her small, round nostrils are flared. Carli pushes up onto her elbow and turns back to look at her family. But walking away, her dad is looking down, her mom is gazing out a window, and Cole is busy with his phone.
Two fat tears fall down Carli’s cheeks, and I’m sick. I hate seeing her like this. I wish I could rush in and hold her hand . . . rush in and tell her everything will be okay.
I press my forehead to the window of the door and mouth:
You’re okay.
You’re okay.
You’re okay.
Over and over again. And before the nurses wheel her out of view, our eyes meet, her face rearranges itself to resemble something like peace, and I feel like I’m back in the gym, catching her again.
Very Important Things
CARLI
It’s four thirty p.m. on Monday. Cole’s at his game. Mom’s back at work after taking the weekend off. And I’m sitting on the orange velvet sofa in the living room with my legs stretched out. I’m alternating between cutting very important things out of magazines and staring at a blank page in my notebook.
No more boys in my notebooks.
And definitely no more boys on my walls.
Instituted those rules after I kissed my first boy (Patrick) behind the bathroom stalls at basketball camp when I was twelve. After I got home, I must’ve written his name down in every color marker, crayon, and ink pen I owned. Then I waited for him to call, waited for him to ask me to be his girl, waited to put bursts of colors—bright, intoxicating colors—all over my walls.
None of it happened.
After Patrick, I might’ve been tempted to write a few more boys’ names down, thinking they were true. But between side chicks, ego-tripping, dudes trying to get all big and bad, dudes thinking they could tell me what to wear or how to do my hair, dudes not doing what they said they would do, dudes being all sweet one second and not even texting me back the next, dudes trying to pressure me into sex, or dudes plain working my nerves, they were all false alarms.
But nothing about Rex feels false. I know this is going to sound crazy, but in the hospital, he came to me in a vision. There he was, on the other side of my operating room doors, sa
me face drenched with the same tenderness.
It felt like déjà vu, as if it was the same moment I first saw him on the basketball court wrapped in different skin. Instead of burning up, I was freezing cold. Instead of catching me with his arms, he caught me with his words.
And now all I want to do is write down his name. And around and in between his name, I want to paste the things I just cut out of my magazine: a tree with blush-pink leaves, a luna moth with lime-green wings, a boy standing on a double helix reaching for purple stars. Signs I’m hoping will somehow find him in his dreams and let him know my heart.
But my rules.
Feel so small compared to what I feel for Rex. The smallest specks of dust in a gleaming stain-glassed cathedral.
I sit down in a pew, allow my long, skinny fingers to pull the royal blue Pigma pen from the crevice between open pages and write:
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Rex Carrington
Over and over again until I’m beaming with a thousand colors. Then I scribble tiny hearts around his names in the shape of a giant heart. Does it look like the work of a first grader? Sure, but ask me if I care.
Outside, the yellow school bus stops in front of our house. Through the window above the sofa, I see Cole hop off.
“Let’s go!” Cole shouts as soon as he’s in the house. A few fast and squeaky footsteps across the wooden floor, and now he’s standing in the entrance of the living room in his basketball warm-ups, out of breath. He’s not supposed to be here. His game starts at five. His team is shooting around, like, right now.
“Go where?” I ask, alarmed, my mind sprinting off to the worst fear it can find. Car accident. Mom and Daddy. I quickly lift my legs and turn around so that my feet are on the ground. Ouch!