Remembering Raquel (8 page)

I hand her a tube of the stuff for the rash that's starting, and give her a chewable allergy pill for the other symptoms.

"You must be a Girl Scout," she says.

Raquel and I never made it past Brownie level, and I'm not sure why she's saying this in any case.

Obviously I look as confused as I feel.

"'Be prepared,'" she clarifies.

"Ah," I tell her. "I'm pretty sure it's the Boy Scouts who say that, not the Girl Scouts."

"What do Girl Scouts say?" she asks.

I consider. '"Buy a cookie'?" I theorize.

The girl's face opens up into a smile, and she suddenly looks like a totally different person. I think I could like the person this smile reveals, so I suddenly find myself explaining how I myself am allergic to half the things in this room, then I go on to tell her about me and Raquel and the Brownie troop at Harborview Manor Nursing Home.

"I was never in the Brownies," this girl says. "But in fourth grade I had a civic-minded teacher who took us to the nursing home next door to the school—and we had similar results. Course, we were in the dementia wing, so it was even worse. One guy kept wanting to take his clothes off—luckily the aides kept almost on top of that situation. And there was this sweet-looking little old lady with her white hair in a bun and everything, the typical grandmother type, and she was swearing her head off. I guess Alzheimer's had brought out her inner sailor."

"Must be rough being stuck in a nursing home next to an elementary school," I say, making a mental note to put this in my living will: No incarceration in facilities that are within walking distance of anyone under the age of fourteen. I tell her, "My name is Hayley."

She says, "Vanessa."

"The writer?" I ask.

She gets that suspicious look again.

I say, "Raquel talked about a girl who wrote a funny column in the school paper."

Vanessa considers, then admits, "Well, I'm the only Vanessa, and I
do
write editorials for the paper when somebody is doing something stupid, which I guess means I write them on a pretty regular basis. Not that I was ever sure anybody actually read them. Raquel never said anything to me about them."

"Well, she was a bit shy. Not like me."

Vanessa asks, "You her sister?"

Which pretty much proves Raquel talked to me about Vanessa more than she talked to Vanessa about me.

"No. Raquel was an only child. I'm a friend." I realize I should be saying I
was
a friend. But even the thought of that makes my throat tighten up, and I realize my voice is coming from a teeny-tiny opening that's about to close up entirely. Vanessa and I wait for that to pass. Then I say, "We went to school together through fifth grade. But I'm just beyond the boundary for Maplewood, so I got sent to Governor Nelson Rockefeller Middle School. That was such a harrowing experience, my parents put me in Holy Name of Jesus for high school."

"But you kept in touch," Vanessa observes.

"Absolutely," I tell her. "Just about every weekend, either she would sleep over at my house, or I would sleep at hers. Then, of course, we were also part of the Sword of Mawrth online scene."

"Yeah?" she asks. Then admits, "I have no idea what you just said."

"It's a game. On the Internet. Each person has his or her own persona. There are puzzles to solve, and adventures to share. You get to decide how to react to any given situation. People from all over the country play, and it's kind of neat. There's a real sense of community, even though most of the players never actually meet." Raquel would have said part of the joy of the game is that you can be somebody else, but I don't say this because I always told Raquel it was stupid: You can
look like
somebody else, you can give yourself a sexy name like Gylindrielle, you can provide yourself a background that's exciting or exotic or royal—but it's still you. Your persona can't be smarter than you or funnier than you or kinder than you, because you're the one who has to come up with what to say and do. What Sword of Mawrth did for Raquel was free her to be the person I always saw she was. Well, with a sword and a gold bustier and one incredible bod.

Vanessa, responding to the last thing I said out loud, about the community, says, "Sounds idyllic."

"Well, yeah, except for the brain-sucking demon hordes of Lord Lorenzo de Borgia."

"Hmmm," she says.

I know that if I do any more talking about Raquel, I'm likely to start crying. So I say, "Okay, I've told you a couple memories about Raquel—how about you tell me one?"

She considers. "She sat in front of me in homeroom."

I wait, then realize there's no more to come.

She says, "I hardly knew her."

"But you came here...," I say. Her eyes are no longer watering, and the rash is beginning to calm down, but I can still finish, "...at substantial personal inconvenience."

Vanessa looks off into the distance, and I think she's seen someone she knows and is about to ditch me, but then she makes eye contact again and says, "I didn't think anyone would come. I didn't think she had any friends—she certainly didn't seem to have any at Quail Run—and I thought her parents would be sitting here, just them and her, listening to the clock tick, hearing the front door open and someone coming in, but it's always for the person laid out in the room down the hall." She looks away again and doesn't tell me if this happened to someone she knew, or if she's afraid it will happen to her. She inclines her head toward the girl—it's got to be Mara Ravenell—who's having people sign her petition. "Little did I expect this circus."

"Raquel would have loved it," I tell her.

This girl, Vanessa, reminds me so much of Raquel. When I say, "Raquel would have loved it," I mean only because it's
for
Raquel. Otherwise, she'd be as pissed off at everyone as Vanessa seems to be on Raquel's behalf.

But I've gotten distracted. I figure most of the people I don't know are from Quail Run. Besides the students, I've also picked out a few of the teachers, including Mrs. Bellanca, Raquel's English teacher, who—true to her word at the beginning of the year—always gave Raquel an extra three points on any paper where Raquel drew a picture.

But a member of the Quail Run staff whom I personally know has just come into the room.

I whip my glasses off so I won't have to see her, although in theory that would make me more easily recognizable to her. Not that I believe Mrs. Scarborough would ever remember me just because she made my life wretched in first grade. I duck my head behind the flower arrangement Vanessa tangled with earlier.

"What?" Vanessa asks.

"Mrs. Scarborough."

"Yeah?" Vanessa is giving me that oh-dear-and-here-I-was-thinking-you-were-normal look. "She's the library media assistant."

"Yes, but before that she was a nasty, nasty first-grade teacher," I correct her.

"That," Vanessa says, "would explain a lot."

SATURDAY/07:15PMCDT

WARRIORGUY:
Hey, has anyone heard from Gylindrielle? She hasn't been here, and she hasn't added to her blog in days. Comet Girl, have you heard anything? Anyone?

I recently watched my mother die.

It took a long time. A long, hard time.

I'd asked her to make a living will, or to fill out a do-not-resuscitate order. She said, "Oh, honey, I can't. I'll leave it up to you. You make the right decision for me when the time comes."

But when the time came, I wasn't there. My sister was.

We had talked about it, Rosemary and I. Mom was old-school religion, I'd explained to Rosemary, when she came from Boston to stay with Mom when we saw the end was near. Mom wasn't sure it was right to sign a document saying she did not want to be kept alive by artificial means because she was afraid that might be akin to suicide. She wanted us to choose for her. "This is what she wants," I told Rosemary. "Every time there's something in the news about a case where a family can't decide, Mom always says, 'They should let her go. It's cruel not to let her go.'" I said to Rosemary, "That's what she wants. She just can't come out and say it."

Rosemary cried, but said she understood. Said she agreed.

But when Mom flatlined, Rosemary panicked. She screamed for the doctors and demanded they do something.

"Are you sure?" the floor nurse asked, because we had talked to her, too.

And Rosemary, weeping, said, "Yes."

So they brought in the crash cart and the paddles, and after three shocks to Mom's poor, wisplike body, they got her heart going again.

"They had to intubate her after that, and give her a morphine drip. Mom couldn't talk anymore, but her eyes were terrified.

Rosemary, fragile soul, couldn't take more than a week of it and returned to Boston, back home to her husband and children, leaving me to sit by Mom's side.

So when, at that accident scene on Poscover, while I was working over that poor broken girl—when the police officer shook the contents of her purse out onto the sidewalk in his search for ID, and that DNR order came fluttering out of the notebook she carried, I knew what to do. It wasn't signed. A girl her age—it wouldn't have been legal even if it
was
signed. She must have known that. She must have seen someone close to her go through something like my mother did, and she didn't want the same thing to happen to her.

With her injuries, the most I could have given her was another day, and the best I could have hoped for that day would be that she would spend it unconscious. For an EMT, there's things you can do and Things You Can Do.

I let her slip away.

Father Kevin has just finished telling me that—though the time God has given us on earth is short because we were created to spend eternity with Him in heaven—it is always sad to lose one
so
young.

I appreciate that Father Kevin is trying to console me.

But "
sad"?

I thought when Cleo died my heart had died along with her. But now I see I was wrong.

With my wife dying and then my daughter, it's like my own life has been negated. I suddenly realize I have no purpose. Forty-two years of my taking up space on this earth—for what? To keep my company's books straight? To keep the patch of lawn at 432 Williams Street well tended between the Steinmillers, who lived there before, and whoever will move in after I've gone?

When Cleo died in December, I thought:
I must be strong for Raquel.

There's nobody to be strong for now. There's nobody to
be
for now.

Raquel took her mom's death so hard.

We had been up front with her all along, telling her the numbers for this particular cancer were not good, but Raquel wouldn't believe it.

"You've got to be strong," Raquel would tell her mother. "You've got to fight it."

Like the cancer was a villain from one of those fantasy books she loved. Like there was a way to vanquish it if we just stayed pure of heart and searched hard enough and endured a certain number of hardships on the way. Well, Cleo
was
pure of heart, and the hardships to be endured were the chemo and the radiation—but in the end nothing was enough.

Raquel was a smart girl. She knew the difference between fiction and real life. But she couldn't believe there was nothing we could do—she thought there had to be some alternative medicine or experimental treatment. She became angry with her mother for giving up, when in truth Cleo simply came to accept what was happening.

I remember Cleo asking me to get a do-not-resuscitate order from the nurse. "I've asked her several times," Cleo said. "I know my memory's not good with all these drugs, but I'm sure I have, and she keeps saying she's left one with me, but she never does."

I went and got one from the nurse, and held it while Cleo, barely able to grasp the pen, signed.

Raquel was furious.

We tried to explain that all it meant was that the doctors would not take heroic measures to prolong Cleo's life.

"Why don't we just take her out to the ditch behind our house and shoot her?" Raquel demanded.

Despite her own pain, Cleo recognized that Raquel was speaking from a pain of her own. By then Cleo, who had always been so pink and round and beautiful, was pale and haggard, with her skin-and-bones frame bruised black and purple and yellow from all the different needles. Her voice was thready and hoarse. "Honey," Cleo said, "I'm going to hold on for as long as I can. This just says that they won't jam a feeding tube up my nose when I'm unconscious, or keep my lungs going with a ventilator, or restart my heart if it stops."

"Those kinds of things happen all the time," Raquel said. "And then people recover."

"But this is if I'm not going to recover." Cleo tried to take Raquel's hand, but the IV line gave her limited reach, and Raquel stood and moved to the window, keeping her back to us.

"You never know," Raquel said. "Not for sure. People are always talking about miracle cures. Are you saying you don't believe in God?"

If you don't believe in God at any other time, you have to believe at a time like then, or you would go crazy.

Cleo barely had the strength to keep her eyes open, much less reason with Raquel. So I said, "We all believe."

I thought Cleo had fallen asleep, but then she whispered, "It's just if God wants to cure me, he'd better do it before my heart stops, or before I need a feeding tube."

Raquel said, "That's barbaric."

But by then Cleo truly had fallen asleep.

When I went through Raquel's room yesterday, looking for mementos to bring here to the funeral parlor—photographs, pictures she'd drawn, her certificate from Odyssey of the Mind from fifth grade—when I was going through her things, I came across three do-not-resuscitate orders. There was also the one that was in her notebook that night. As well as the one they found in her locker. Orders that she had taken from the hospital bedside table so that her mother couldn't sign them—couldn't give up.