We Were Never Here (9 page)

I wait on Day Thirteen. I wait for the doctors to tell me what's going to happen to me.

And I wait for Connor. I want him to come far more than I want Dr. Orlitz with his cold, fat hands to enter the room and let me know my fate.

My mom hasn't arrived yet when I hear a tentative knock at our door and my tentative heart soars. Connor! Connor. He is back and he will tell me how he had to leave the hospital early yesterday and he would have texted me to apologize but I can't use my phone in here. Also, he doesn't have my number. I will tell him about Thelma. He will sit on my bed and stroke my gross, disgusting hair and he'll tell me that he can still see down, down and into the real me—or, no!, he'll say that he doesn't even have to see to the real me because the
this
me is great just the way she is.

I know this is not a likely scenario, but it could be. It could also be this: what will happen to me is so terribly awful that he will have to love me anyway.

The door opens. And then Collette comes padding in with her damn sneakers, soft as clouds, if clouds could squeak.

“Hi, darlin',” she says softly.

“Hey,” I say, disappointment practically oozing from my pores. “Where's Thelma?” Just for clarity. I want to make them tell me.

She looks at me with a face that says what I know, and then she places some pamphlets on my swingy table and for a split second I remember Thelma spinning her wig, but I try to push it back. Collette fans the pamphlets out, and it looks like they are offering a choice of places I might like to visit. A Caribbean island! The beaches of Nantucket! Three days in beautiful Barcelona! I imagine eating pot after pot of paella, which we made in class once when we were studying the region in elementary school. I imagine sleeping in a castle. But soon enough I see these pamphlets do not offer the prospect of adventure and relaxation. The one on top says
About Your Ileostomy
in a font that makes it look like it's from the turn of the twentieth century. It says,
This booklet includes guidelines to help you care for your new ostomy at home. It's important to know that you're not alone. Thousands of people have ostomy surgery each year.

“Why are you giving me these?” I look away from these pamphlets of doom and also from her.

“Just for you to take a look,” Collette says. “Whenever you're ready. It doesn't hurt to be prepared.”

I am curled up in a ball, just hoping that
How to care for your ostomy at home
will remain as foreign and far away as Spain is.

“Like I said,” Collette says as she turns to leave. “Just whenever you're ready.”

The door swings open—that seashell; the ocean—and then it is quiet again.

While I'm waiting for my parents to come in for the verdict, the phone rings and I can tell by the ring that it's Connor, that he has clearly managed to get the number from the nurses or—and I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier—he just called the regular hospital operator and got transferred here. Like a hotel. This is just a really, really crappy hotel.

“Hello?” I say, trying not to sound as eager and crazy as I am to talk to Connor.

“Hey, doll!” the voice—the girl's voice—says.

“Hey, Nora.” I try to mask my disappointment and gather myself up. I can feel myself, gathering. The last time I talked to Nora was, like, ten days ago, but it feels as if it's been over a century. Like cars had not been invented when I got here.

“How are you?”

So sweet of her to check in on me, I think. I mean, it's only been a century. “I don't know, Nora,” I say. “Not great. I might have to get surgery, like, tomorrow.” I decide right then that I'm still not going to mention Connor. Even though I don't know if I'll ever even see him again, still I have the thought that maybe he could be mine. This is my armor. I want to keep it for myself, this feeling that is almost love and could be love, or what I think love would be if I had just one more minute with him. He could do one little thing. Tell me something true. It would just put me over that invisible line into love.

“Jinkies!” says Nora.

Seriously?

“I'm sorry, Lizzie,” she says.

I nod, but of course she can't see me.

“Well, I was going to tell you some stuff, but it's kind of ridiculous now. I mean, you have real-life stuff. Like this primal life stuff.”

I think I give out a laugh, but it is something different. “No. Tell me. I need something else to think about. Other than this primal life stuff.” Apparently I will never stop wanting to torture myself. There is a word for that, isn't there?

“Okay, well, if you're sure.”

“Yes,” I say. “What's happening?” I want to know and I so don't want to know.

“Well.” And it feels as if she is about to tell me this secret, only for me. This is why I have not turned the lights out on Nora. There is a way she will always have of making me feel like I am the only one. “I started stealing!”

“Stealing!” I say. “Stealing what? Why?”

“Lipstick and, like, different kinds of tights. And bras I try on underneath my clothes in the dressing room. Little things.”

I don't consider myself a sheltered person necessarily, but I find this information both thrilling and shocking. “Why?” I say it very loudly.

“Because I can,” Nora says. Her voice has gone from excited whisper to more like she's
decided
on something. “It's terribly wizard.”

“Wizard.” I have no idea.

“Good stuff,” she says. “But I see it's not really that important right now. I'm gutted for you. Really.”

“Okay then!” I say. I know I won't be in some dressing room
trying on bras to steal or buy. Even so, I don't get the fun of it, and I guess I realize I'm caught up on it being, like,
wrong
. Also? The British crap has got to stop.

“Also Angelo dumped me.”

I guess we're done with the shoplifting talk. “Sorry,” I say. “But I mean, bound to happen, right? Camp is over.” I couldn't imagine Angelo in the real world, dressed in regular clothes. Or maybe board shorts with no shirt and Sanuks is regular clothes for Angelo. But I can picture Connor being absolutely anywhere. I feel I could teleport him to the moon and he would be charming and sweet and appropriately attired.

“Thanks a lot,” says Nora. “I didn't know you were expecting this. Me being dumped.”

“Well, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about it, actually. I mean, sorry not to have called and told you my thoughts on your relationship with a screwed-up camp counselor with no eyebrows.” I realize in this moment the freedom I have. I can say whatever I want. I can relax. No one can turn on an invalid. What would that look like? I realize I can find a way to feel powerful here.

“Of course, of course,” Nora says. “I'm so sorry.”

Ha! Nora is sorry. I take it further. “Yeah, well, maybe you should think about other people for once. In general, I mean. Not just with me.”

Nora waits a beat, like she's not sure what she's hearing or that I've actually
defied
her, and she isn't sure how to react to this new phenomenon. “You're right,” she says. “You're so right.”

Power.

“When do you find out about the surgery?”

“Today,” I say. “I should go, actually. My parents are here. Everyone is waiting for everything.”

“I'm so sorry about what's happening to you,” Nora says, and I know that she means it. I can't blame her. In fact, if it were me, I might do what Dee and Lydia are doing, which is kind of not doing anything. Their mothers sent really nice flowers. At least Nora has had the balls—the
bollocks
?—to call me.

“I'm sending you some music,” she says. “Like on a CD. Old-school. To your house. Where I know you're going to be soon.”

Suddenly I feel bad that I was mean to Nora, because I am filled up with gratitude. She is a hard friend to have, but she is also a real one. We have all these years behind us. Summer years, I think. That is a different kind of time. “Thank you,” I say. “Can't wait to get it,” I say, and I really mean it.

“Tell me what happens,” Nora says. “Okay?”

“I will.” I am getting used to talking about it without wanting to cry. I am hardening. And softening too. You can, it seems, get used to anything.

Nora and I say good-bye, and then I do what I always do here: I wait some more.

My parents are back, pretend-smiling so much I think I will die not from my exploding colon but from just having to look at them while we wait for the surgeon. My mother thinks that Dr. Orlitz just wants to cut everyone open. That he, like, gets some kind of commission or something. Here's what I think: just let him get it out and stick on that hateful bag and then we can all just go home.

Home. Lily pad, I think. Big and wide and floating in the sun.

Just then, the phone rings again.

“Oh, hi!” I say to Connor. It's like I'm home, lying in bed, phone under the covers, volume low, waiting. It almost feels normal.
Everything
is almost. I cup my hand over the receiver like they do in old movies with old phones and I look at my parents,
hard
. For once they get it, and together they stand and together they leave.

“Okay, hi,” I say. I try not to sound as excited as I am that he's called me.

“Hope you don't think it's creepy that I'm calling you,” Connor says.

“Not at all,” I say. I wonder where he is; I wonder about his room. Does he have posters? Are they of soccer players or surfers or bands or girls on sports cars? I'm really hoping it's not girls on sports cars, and I'm pretty sure it isn't.

“They connected me from the big hospital hub.” He laughs. “There's still this whole cloak-and-dagger thing here. Like, I can't know your room number, even though I've hung out in your room.”

“Nice to know I'm protected!” I say. But of course I'm not protected at all. Against anything.

“I was getting reviewed yesterday!” he says. “So they followed me around and made sure Verlaine was cool and that the patients were cool with Verlaine and me.”

“Oh,” I say. “How weird.” I don't add about the
devastation
of hearing him in every room but mine. That would make me seem
crazy, but that's what it was.
Devastating.

“I thought it would be embarrassing to go to your room. Like maybe I haven't been the way I'm supposed to be with you.”

He just said, when I'm
with you
, I think. Or something very close to that. I swallow. I wonder if he has a big room or a small room. What his window looks out onto. What color the walls are.

“Hello?”

“Sorry!” I say. And then I realize something. It's just our voices. He can't see me now, my gross dry skin or the hair that's starting to sprout on my cheeks from the steroids. I look like a hamster. So it's just us talking, the two of us, with only the usual inequality of me wanting him to like me and the possibility—probability—that he will not like me back. “I hope you got a good review.”

“I don't know yet,” he says. “I mean, you probably have bigger things to think about right now, but in case you heard me walking around, I wanted to tell you why I didn't stop by.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Yeah, I did hear you guys.”

“I'm not coming in today. I've got to study, I'm so behind. What's going on in there?”

Without thinking, I blurt it out. “Thelma died!”

“Oh my God,” Connor says. “I thought she was just getting chemo.”

“I don't know. I don't know.” I swing the swingy table back and forth, slowly. The pitcher wobbles. I only wish it was glass and that it would fall and shatter.

“Are you okay? About Thelma, I mean.”

“I have no idea.”

Connor is quiet for a moment, like it's that moment of silence at the Oscars for all the movie people who have died. “What else?” he says.

I tell him about Dr. Orlitz and his hands and I tell him about waiting to know and how sad I am for my parents and how jealous I have always been of Zoe, who is older and has a, umm, I drop the boyfriend part, but she's older and doesn't have a disease, and I tell him how stressed I am to miss school, I mean academically even, because I am into school, and I tell him how nervous I am that I'm going to be so behind. I tell him I'm a walking time bomb.

“I just really need to get the hell out of here,” I say.

“I know. I mean, I like the hospitals now. They're these really safe places for me. They're where I see people I have come to . . . know so well. But I'm not sick or in pain or facing what you're facing.”

He just
gets
it. I want to ask him if he thinks I am disgusting. I want to ask him how he feels in general about me. I almost feel like I could.

But I don't. “Yeah,” I say. “It's kind of safe for me too. People are taking care of me, and my parents are here and not fighting in front of me, barely even bickering. It's nice in some ways, it's true.” Why me, I can't help but think. Why has he chosen me?

“Sometimes I feel like outside of the hospital is the real prison part.”

“But you get to go to school and go on walks with Verlaine and maybe drive to the beach or something. I want to get outside! What I would give to just be free for a minute from all this.”

“I hear you. I don't like to drive,” Connor says. “But yeah, our summer house is on the Eastern Shore. We used to call it the visiting house. It's close to DC, so my parents can go to and from more easily. I used to go sailing all the time there. Not anymore, though.”

Duh, I think. Sailing.

“The only time I feel good is when I'm here. Like when I'm here with you, just for example. I don't have to be this person who's supposed to be all happy. Who I was before that accident.”