Phoenix Rising (2 page)

I was ashamed of the way I was thinking.

Helen was such an unlikely statistic. Being sick wasn't her idea. Next to her picture in the high school yearbook, it doesn't say:
Plans to be a cancer victim
. In the picture her hair is still shiny and thick, her eyes are smiling, her cheeks are round.…

At the end, she was so thin. Helen had to die; she was so ill there was nowhere else to go.

She didn't talk about the cancer much. Neither did we; it wasn't a dinner table topic. When she did bring it up, I'd skirt the subject; like this time she and I were picnicking at Foothill Park last spring. The meadow by the lake was orange with poppies, and the air was so sweet you tasted flowers.

Helen said, “I'm so sick of being sick. I wish I'd get better or just die.”

“You won't die,” I replied automatically. “You're just tired.”

“I'm tired of being tired,” she said. “This girl at the clinic died last week and she—”

“You won't die! Get morbid about it!” I shouted, and ran down to the lake.

I thought we had all the time in the world. I thought the cancer was a big mistake that would get straightened out any second.

It was hard to tell what was going on sometimes. The doctors were vague. And Mom and Dad didn't ask a lot of tough questions. Maybe they knew they'd hate the answers. If there were answers. Doctors aren't psychics. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Dr. Yee said it was important to remain optimistic, that a positive attitude is part of any cure. So we all kept pretending that everything was fine—

One second Daddy's carrying Helen out to the car. The next thing you know, it's the following morning and he and Mom are walking in the door. They didn't say anything, but Lucas and I knew. The moment is frozen in my mind: all of us standing there, looking at each other.

Helen slipped through our fingers like a sunny day. We'd thought it would be summer forever.

Why didn't God take me instead? I am such a
creep
compared to Helen.

Answer: because that big, blue sky is as empty as a promise. We're all down here on our own, alone, trying not to bump into the furniture.

My attitude stinks. This is not a new development. Helen claimed I was a wise guy from birth; more like a midget than a kid. Where she saw rainbows, I saw puddles. Look on the bright side, Jess!

Where's the bright side now, Helen? You took it with you when you left.

I'm supposed to sit for these kids she used to watch. Helen played games with them and read them stories. I keep them from killing each other and watch TV. The little girl asks me, “When's Helen coming back?” Sara Rose is six and she doesn't get death; she's only seen it in the cartoons on TV. The steam-rollered cat springs back to life. “Where's Helen?” Sara Rose asks, and it makes me want to scream. I shouldn't baby-sit; I'm no good with kids, but I can use the money.

What for? I can't think of anything I want anymore. Not clothes or makeup or tapes. It's all so much blahblah. Including school. I have
got
to start paying attention in class or I'll never graduate in June. It's all so pointless. Who cares about math? All you need to know is how to subtract. Take away one from five equals none.

My family is going down the drain.

Dr. Shubert has suggested a new way for the four of us to talk to each other so we can be sure we understand what's being said. She calls it the “playback” technique. This method is guaranteed to cut down on arguments and make any conversation take twice as long.

Old, unimproved dinner table conversation:

Mom: Eat more broccoli, honey.

Me: I'm not hungry.

Mom: I'm sorry. Did I overcook it?

Me: No! It's fine. I'm just not hungry.

Lucas: Can I use the car tonight?

Dad: Again?

Lucas: What do you mean, again?

Dad: You borrowed it last night.

Lucas: So? The Impala's on the fritz. I need to borrow it again.

Dad: Not if you take that attitude.

Mom: Bill—

Lucas: What's wrong with my attitude?

Mom: Lucas—

Dad: I might like to know where you're going.

Lucas: I'm not a baby! I'm twenty years old!

Mom: Can we all please lower our voices, please? Your father is just—

Lucas: (exiting) Forget it!

Dad: Come back here and apologize to your mother!

New, improved dialogue, using Dr. Shubert's “playback” technique:

Mom: Eat some more broccoli, honey.

Me: No thanks. I'm not hungry.

Mom: You're not hungry.

Me: No.

Mom: Oh.

Lucas: Can I use the car tonight?

Dad: You want to borrow the car.

Lucas: Yes. My car isn't working.

Dad: You borrowed it last night and you need to borrow it again.

Lucas: That's right. I need to go someplace.

Dad: Where?

Lucas: Out.

Dad: You need to go out.

Lucas: Yes.

Dad: Can you be more specific?

Lucas: You're saying that you want to know where I'm going.

Dad: That's correct. Can you be more specific?

Lucas: I'm not a baby! I'm twenty years old!

Mom: Lucas! Bill—

Dad: Don't take that tone with me!

Lucas: Don't you talk to my mother like that!

Dad: I was talking to you!

Mom: Will everybody please—

She's always in the middle, like a referee. No matter who wins, she loses.

Mom wants me to help her sort through Helen's things. Her blouses are still in the ironing basket. Her black boots are under the bed. I can wear some of her clothes but our styles are different. Helen is a V-necked-sweater type of person. I haven't worn a skirt since I was six.

We could've had our own rooms years ago, but I acted like a baby whenever Helen brought it up. It made me feel safe, when I woke up in the night, to hear Helen's soft breathing in the dark.

I've found her last diary. She always kept diaries. There's millions of them, at the top of her closet, and this one, started almost a year ago and kept in the nightstand by her bed.

I don't know if I should read it. I've never read her diaries—except for that one time Bambi and I sneaked a peek, years back. Helen was raving about this guy who sat in front of her in English. Mr. Wonderful, she called him. “So, how's Mr. Wonderful?” Bambi asked her, and Helen threw a fit.

But I'm tempted. Why was she writing stuff down on paper if she didn't want it to be read? She was always writing something; poems or stories. Her words are all I have left. I want to know what Helen was thinking, deep inside herself.

Sometimes when Lucas and the folks are gone, I go through the photograph albums, or I get out the projector and screen the family movies of us at home or on trips.

The movies are weird. Not much is happening. Mom and Dad are smiling and waving, or talking to the camera even though there's no sound. Lucas is usually scowling and straining to edge out of the frame, as if he's been kidnapped by an alien family and doesn't care for life on Mars. There's Helen as a baby, with fat pink arms, and later as a Brownie, her dark bangs clipped short.

Then there's me, Miss Spaghetti Legs. I look like a stick figure with hair, a tangled mass of long blond curls. I'm peering out of it as if it were a thicket. Lucas used to call me Cousin It.

Bambi says I should cut my hair. She says it makes me look like a kid.

I liked being a kid. I hate being like this. Nothing is familiar anymore. Mom and Dad aren't smiling. Lucas has escaped. My body's different, getting big and fat. (Dr. Shubert says I have a distorted self-image. I'm five feet eight and weigh a hundred and ten pounds.) I'm going to a shrink. This is my last year of high school.

Helen is gone and I'm alone.

I want her diary to talk to me, to say:
Don't worry, Jess. I'm still your big sister and I still love you the best. You can't see me anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm dead. It means
—

“Jessie? Jessie Castle?”

“Yes, Mrs. Smith?”

Startled, I lift my head, realizing that I'm supposed to have been reading the textbook on my desk.

Everyone in class is smiling at me. I'm the resident comedian. Poor Jessie, they say, she's had it pretty tough, but it's amazing how she's pulled her act together.

“Jessie, would you please tell us what you consider to be the gravest threat to public health?”

“Life,” I say promptly. “Closely followed by death.”

Everybody laughs. Then the bell rings and we all file out.

3

January 3

The beginning of a brand new journal. The beginning of a brand new year. All those days and pages to fill
!

I wonder who I'm writing to when I write in here
.

When I was a kid I wrote KEEP OUT! in the front of all those little, fat diaries; the ones with a key you lose right away. Now I write ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK, which is more like saying: Come In If You Must, But Watch Your Step
.

Who is the You I'm speaking to? Me, I guess, so that later on I'll be able to remember what I was thinking about now; and to help me figure stuff out. That's partly it. I know what I'm thinking when I see it in print. But I must believe that someone else will read it, too; otherwise, why would I say Enter? (Years from now, when I'm a famous author, my biographer will say: “Helen Castle ate an ice-cream cone and washed her hair that day.”)

Dream on
.

Today Ms. Tormey read “The End” to the class; my story about the world blowing up in a nuclear blast. It's sappy but I love the last paragraph: “A quick flash and the sky was filled with orange light. It was almost like the sunset. Then it reached out its long, fiery fingers and stroked the fur of the kitten he held in his lap.”

Nobody said a word when she was done. At times like that I can tell (dare I say it) that I'm a real writer; by the way the people listen and the way their faces change; as if the words had carried them to another, realer world inside their heads
.

I really want to be published someday. Because when you write a story it's like talking to someone with your mind, and when somebody reads it, the two of you connect. Otherwise, it's like talking to yourself, or throwing a ball that nobody catches
.

Blah blah blah. I'm so profound
.

The other day Bambi told me the most amazing thing. When she was thirteen she got really depressed one night when her parents were out and she was all by herself. Totally down, like life was too awful to bear, and like she couldn't do anything right and never would
.

So she rode her bike to the drugstore and bought a box of SleepEze and went home and took all of them, then lay down on her bed
.

After awhile she got scared and she didn't want to die anymore, but she didn't know what to do. Her parents came home and she was afraid to tell them because she knew they'd hit the roof. So she just went to sleep and hoped for the best
.

I'm the first person she's ever told, she said, because it sounds so stupid
.

No it doesn't. It sounds sad
.

Bloomfield came by tonight
.

After he left, Mom said: “Doesn't Richard ever smile?”

At first I didn't know who she meant. Everybody except the teachers calls him by his last name
.

Yeah, he smiles sometimes, I said. Usually when something's not funny. He's not the kind of guy who goes around grinning. Mostly he just smirks
.

I don't know why I like him. We argue all the time. It's stupid, but we keep on doing it, like it's some kind of game we have to keep playing
.

I don't know. He's not even good-looking. Well, yes he is, in a way. He has a good face (when he's not sneering) and all that curly hair. Too bad he's such a jerk
.

Tonight he said: “Want to go out on Friday?”

Me: (surprised) “With you?”

Him: “No, with my father. Mom's out of town.”

Why can't he just be nice? He's so sarcastic I end up being that way too, in self-defense. We've always got our dukes up
.

I think I love him
.

But I'm not sure because I don't know what that kind of love feels like. If it feels like wanting to kiss and sock him, wanting to hug him and push him down the stairs, sweet and prickly and happy and sad
—

Then I love him
.

He'd sure be thrilled to hear that
.

Lucas keeps practicing the same song in his room, but it sounds like he's under this bed. It's a Beatles' song; I forget which one. He'd flip if I said that
.

Too bad he wasn't a teenager in the sixties. That's when it was all happening, he says. It's like he got to the party after the band left. In my opinion, he'll never be happy. He's a perfectionist and the world is too screwed up. Nobody he knows takes music as seriously as he does. He's so good at it, he's always alone; he's out on the edge by himself. Maybe someday he'll find people who share that special place. Unless Dad kills him first. He'd better turn down that amp
.

Jessie thinks Lucas is smoking dope, but he always acts so strange it's hard to tell
.

I really like that big orange cat at the clinic. His name is Chemo and he's such a ham! The patients and staff stuff him with goodies so he's enormous, though lots of it is fluff. He's some kind of exotic breed; part pig, according to Dr. Yee
.

I was telling Jess how much I like that cat, and she said, “Oh, they just have him there so the patients will forget what kind of place it is.”

So? Anyway, that's not Chemo's fault. Jessie's in a bad mood lately. I try to talk with her, but she won't talk. Things get so tense around this house sometimes, it's crazy
.