We Were Never Here (8 page)

“Anyway.”

We look outside and I try to steady myself, waiting for what comes next.

Connor and Verlaine and I walk slowly, as slowly as I have ever walked, back to my room. They wait outside while I run to the bathroom in my room, run being the operative term for stagger, lurch, stumble, lunge, and then when I'm sitting on the side of my bed, breathless, trying to untangle all my various wires, I say, “Okay, you guys can come in.”

In they come, the very portraits of good health. It just kills me.

“What do you miss most in here anyway?” Connor sits down in my mother's chair.

“Well, aside from, like, my life, you mean? Like my freedom?”

Connor smiles, this time with no teeth, which, I gotta say, manages to be just as charming as the smile with all the teeth. “Yes. Aside from that.”

I sigh. “Being outside. Walking with Mabel. Being near water with Mabel.”

He nods.

“Also? Food.”

I know I should have said friends. Or going to see bands. Or sneaking out to drink beer. Something normal.

“What kind of food? Like, what would you eat if you could eat?”

It's like Thelma!

“Ice cream sandwiches,” I say. “Crab cakes. Milk shakes.” So let's just say this is all in the Candy Striping Handbook. I will still play along. My heart is already in it.

“Virginia is for crabs!” he says.

“Actually, it's lovers. Virginia is for lovers,” I say, slightly embarrassed by the word.
Lovers.
“Maryland is for crabs.” But I get it. The District is for cool kids, and the rest of us are suburban losers. I get it. The girls Connor knows are probably all blond and tan and easy in their skin. Everything slides over them; nothing sticks. Or they wear vintage dresses and have short black bangs and wear nose rings. Or they have big black glasses and speak seven languages and have just moved here from London because their parents are diplomats.

“Don't forget hot dogs,” says my roommate.

“Hi, Thelma,” I say.

“Hi, Thelma,” says Connor.

“What kind?” He uncrosses his legs and places his elbows on his knees. He is killing me. Verlaine stretches out, exposing his stomach, and I scratch him. “Of milk shake.”

“Chocolate,” I say. Easy.

“I would miss strawberry,” he says.

“Strawberry!” I giggle. “Very pink.”

Connor laughs and sweeps his hair—it really is strawberry blond—out of his face. His hands. They are crooked and beat-up and eaten and soulful. They have feeling.

“Books? What's your favorite book? Like, what are you reading now?”

“I can't read in here. I mean, I just can't.”

“Okay then, what would you read if you could read, I mean?”

“Hmmm,” I say.
Wuthering Heights
is on this swingy table over my bed, but I don't think he can see it. That's some intense love in that book. Deadly. Haunting. Dark, dark love. I'm not that far in, but I can't help but note that everything important happens when the characters are young. It's like all that matters. “I like lots of different stuff. Like Stephen King, and also
The Handmaid's Tale
,” is what I tell him.

“Don't know that,” Connor says,

“It's about this cult society where this woman has to have sex every month until she gets pregnant.”

“Lovely,” says Connor.

“Yeah, it's pretty dark. Okay, what else? Ray Bradbury.
Fahrenheit 451
.”

“Oh my God, I love that book!” Connor says. “I love Ray Bradbury. Stephen King is good.
The Stand.
”

My heart leaps. I've chosen correctly. “Yeah, totally.
The Stand.
”

“Hey, do you have any music here?” he asks.

I can hear the sound of Thelma fidgeting, as if to say, please, please don't play music in here. She clears her throat.

“We'll be quiet!” he says to the curtain as he stands and grabs my iPod off its charger. “Promise!”

Connor knows everything.

I watch in horror as he scans through my iPod. Books are easier than music. To be right about, I mean. I have some pretty lame stuff on there. Like, “Hey There, Delilah,” which I love, by the
way. I've got Kelly Clarkson! Kind of as a joke; kind of serious. But thankfully, Tim loaded it up with at least some good music before I went to camp, stuff he knows I love. He put on other women singer-songwriters, mostly Brits, and I think it's because he knows I love Birdy and he must have listened to Birdy Radio on Pandora. Gabrielle Aplin, Emeli Sandé, Jasmine Thompson. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of sweet. I mean for him to do this kind of research for me. Even if it's more for Zoe. Wouldn't that be nice? To have someone who wants to impress you so much he listens to Pandora for your little sister? I wonder if they are having sex after all.

So I like Birdy, and also old stuff she was inspired by, like Nina Simone. And then I like the classic-rock stuff like Guns N' Roses and the Rolling Stones, circa
Sticky Fingers
(David B from camp listened to that album all summer long), some David Bowie, Velvet Underground. I like a lot of different kinds of music, just depending. Being in here has made me think sometimes it's better to look back. Like what has happened before—music, books, movies,
life
—maybe it was better, more important, before.
Wuthering Heights
–style. I think there are people who look forward and people who look back, and I have become a person who looks back. Maybe I always was.

“Oh!” he says. “Oasis. Bright Eyes? How emo of you.”

“Well,” I say. “I don't know.” The music shaming. Here it goes.

“Britney!” He sort of yelps it.

Exactly.

I start to be embarrassed, but then I do the opposite. “Nothing wrong with some Britney!” I say. “Come on, she's very cool.”

“And JT too. She is,” he says. “They are.” I can't help but think of how they met, in the Mickey Mouse Club. Like this total alt-world. It brought them together. It's all this crazy unreality here too. It's like deep, deep time and space that you have to write all this complicated code or say some wacky spell and turn around three times to get to.

“Birdy,” he says. It's like a breath. It breaks a spell.

“I love her,” I tell him.

“Me too. You look a little like her.” He unwinds the earphones wrapped around my iPod and puts the left bud in his ear. A smile creeps over his face.

Beautiful Birdy, with crazy eyebrows.

Then he leans in, toward me. He puts the right bud in my ear. The music pours in
:
“Every time that I see your face I notice all the suffering. Just turn to my embrace, I won't let you come to nothing.”

It's so sad and so beautiful. It makes me ache. I look over at Connor. He's just on the other end of that short wire. His eyes are closed. Even his eyelids are splashed with freckles. In one ear I can hear the shuffle of the nurses and Thelma's snoring and the
click clack
of mothers' and daughters' high-heeled shoes and I hear Birdy in the other and I don't know what's going to happen to me. I don't know if my colon will be saved or taken, and I don't know what life will look like to me either way. And I feel all that, I can't stop
feeling
in here, but I am also having one of my favorite moments, ever. I can't breathe and I don't want to.

It's getting darker, and I imagine we are on a beach watching Verlaine and maybe Mabel, too, run in and out of the waves. We
both have jeans on, rolled up at the ankles. I'm wearing cool sunglasses, Wayfarers, not aviators. The sun drops. It's just like that.

As if he's read my mind, Connor says, “Let's pretend we're not here.”

I swallow. Hard.

“Let's pretend we were never here.”

I hear him in one ear and I don't stop listening in the other: “And I'll stay here if you prefer. Yes I'll leave you without a word.”

I feel like I will cry, and I don't know if it's from sadness or happiness. All I think is this: Who would you love if you could love? Please tell me who that person would be.

Day Twelve is pretty much just awful. For one thing, I wake up and shout my usual hello to Thelma, but there's no shout back. Her television is quiet. When I cock my head and look in through the crack in the curtain, I can see that the bedding has been changed, and there are new sheets pulled up tight, the IV stand empty just like a coatrack waiting for someone else to hang her jacket and hat.

Thelma is gone.

When my parents come in, I can't look at them.

“Hi,” my mother says, slowly. “Hello?”

My father hovers by the door, his hands in his pockets.

I just gulp and look over at Thelma's side of the room.

As usual, they don't get it. “Are you in pain?” my mother says. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

I nod, though there are tears streaming down my face. This is a different kind of cry. I've never realized before how many different kinds there are. But this one, it is a silent cry, the cry, my cry, for another person, a kind of cry I thought was saved for old people.

Slowly it registers. I can see the realization take over my
mother's face, first in her eyes and then her twitching nose, then her frowning, trembling mouth. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I let her keep it there.

I am glad my father looks at the floor, because I will dissolve into one million pieces if he looks at me. I will become air. When I was little, it was always my dad and me. Superman rides, raking leaves, me sitting on his lap, pretending I was the one driving the Volvo. But that was all before. It was before high school and it was before this. I am so far from there now.

No one says anything and then, to add to this joyous moment, Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, comes in. He stands over my bed and sucks at the inside of his cheek, which makes a crazy-loud
tsk tsk
sound.

“It's going to have to come out.” He flips my folder closed. “If not today, then tomorrow or the day after, but I can tell you, it's going to have to go.” He touches one pudgy hand to his stomach, which is pudgy too.

Both my parents straighten, like they're meeting with my high school principal or some head of state.

“You can try all this.” Dr. Orlitz points to the IV stand, which has a zillion wires coming off it, all connecting to balloons of medicine and liquid food. “And you
should
try everything,” Dr. Orlitz says. “Everything. You're young, after all,” he says.

“She is,” both my parents say at the exact same time. “She is very young.”

“Can I have a look?” He waddles over to my bed.

For anyone who's curious, when a surgeon says to you,
Can I have a look?,
what he means is,
I am going to touch you right now
.

He places his hands over my stomach and squeezes lightly.

I scream in pain.

“That hurt?” he says.

For real? I don't think I need to dignify that one with an answer.

“You see that?” He points at my stomach and looks at my parents. “Her stomach is getting very, very hard.” He shakes his head. “You know what that means?”

Everyone is silent.

“It's not a good sign at all. It means the colon isn't functioning right. It could be getting toxic. If it explodes in there, it's going to be a real mess. Your daughter could die.”

Inadvertently I cover my ears.

“Well, we don't think it's going to come to that, do we, Martin?” my mother says.

“They are finding new drugs all the time. We just have to hang in there,” my father says, but I can tell he doesn't believe it.

“It might be a little beyond that.” Dr. Orlitz, the
surgeon
, that
asshole
, gives me a look that says, We
know what's up, don't we?

Stupidly, I grin back at him, because, after all, he's the doctor, and I do need him on my side.

He winks at me. “We're going to have to make some serious decisions,” he says. “We wait too long and it
will
explode.”

My mother sits down, and my father puts his hands on her shoulders.

“See you tomorrow.” Dr. Orlitz grins my way like the villain mugging at the camera in the movies. “We have some serious decisions to make then.”

So. Thelma is gone and the surgeon is unbearable and my father leaves and my mother stays, just reading the
Washington Post
silently, and here's the other unbearably terrible thing about Day Twelve. Connor doesn't come. The morning goes by and I can hear the wheels of the lunch carts whir and squeak by, but they don't stop here. I'm getting a new roommate, I'm told. And then I guess it's afternoon, after school, and what's worst about Connor not coming to see me is that I can hear him in the hallways, swooping in to all the rooms with his sunshine and his good cheer, and I hear old people laughing and the nurses greeting him and he doesn't stop here and there is no sunshine at all in here, just the surgeon telling me my life is about to be pretty much over.

For a moment I wonder why Connor doesn't come, but then I know why. It's that I told him about my gross disease, and he went home and Googled it and decided it was so disgusting, just thinking about it, that he couldn't even do his volunteering job with me. He is letting himself off the hook now so he doesn't have to be attached to some freak with an ileostomy bag in the real world.

My mom looks up from her paper just as I come to this realization. Maybe she can see it on my face, the way it must be crumpling like an old Coke can, ripped and ruined.

“Honey,” my mom says slowly.

I nod. My throat is just stitched closed. I can't swallow or speak.

“It's going to be okay,” she says. “The surgery, if it happens,
and also after. It's just temporary, honey.”

I don't care if that's what she thinks it is. I am trying to be me. I am trying to stay me, I mean. And stay funny and also keep my sadness inside away from my mother, who will want to take it and hold it and discuss it with me and also take it away from me. She is my mother.

I see her come toward me. This one time, the first time since we've been here in this horrible place just waiting for people to come in and steal my blood and prick me and prod me and tell me what the matter with me is and also be wrong, for the first time I let all of her come toward me, and I lean my head on her chest and I feel her arms around me, her fingers brushing at my hair, and I can't help it, I start crying. Weeping really. That kind of cry. I don't think I will ever be able to stop crying, and I am also thinking about Connor, who will never come back here, and Michael Lerner, who was never going to be more than a friend, and every boy who was supposed to love me back. I am crying for the past and also for what I don't know about even tomorrow.

I can feel my mother's arm. I smell her Yves Saint Laurent perfume, from the bottle with the deep-red top that has sat on her bureau for as long as I can remember.

“Mommy,” I cry into her chest, and she holds me tighter.

“Mommy,” I say again, and I realize now I'm saying it and I realize now that in all of this I am just a little girl, not like Thelma's kid, who I know doesn't have a mother now, but young, like I have never seen myself before, too young for this thing, and also alone. I am crying and crying and also I am hoping my mother will never let me go.