I stare at the ceiling and cough.
Mom took pity on me after Jack left. She didn’t question or push, just hugged me and hung on the edges of my world, making sure small pieces didn’t float too far away. In these moments, our relationship almost feels normal and I can forget about VATERs Like Water.
She’s just my mom.
I lie on my side and cough.
No doctor here at Coffman can attempt to stitch up the wounds that Jack’s visit did to me. What’s worse—they may actually be self-inflicted.
I pull a pillow over my face and still I cough. I’m sure if you opened me up there would be bruises blooming all over my insides from the pummeling this sickness has dealt me.
Brooke’s party. It’s a shred of hope. If I can fix this, if I can get home and show Jack, things can go back to normal— My lungs burn with another cough.
Doesn’t matter what position I’m in, my cough doesn’t stop and my brain won’t turn off. Mom stirs beside me, my illness pulling her out of a deep slumber. Instead of waiting for her to wake, I get up.
Under the harsh bathroom light, I stare at the small bottles of over-the-counter medicine. I could easily take them, but I don’t want drugs that will make my brain foggy tomorrow. I settle for my hoodie and grab a box of DVDs from the shelf just outside the bathroom and head for the living room.
The lights in the hall are on the “nighttime” setting, just a few lights on to make sure we don’t die if we need something outside our room. Kitchen appliances cast long shadows, and I sit on the counter waiting for water to boil. This is a familiar routine for me, even when I’m home: kitchen, tea, family room. Dad is usually the one to find me the next morning asleep on the couch as he’s heading out the door to work.
I pour the hot water into a mug and add a teabag before heading back to my new favorite late-night haunt: the living room. There’s no trace of Caitlin or Luis. Light from the streetlamp spills through the large windows, and cold tries its best to get through the leaded glass.
Curling up on the couch, I check my texts. Caitlin’s left me a few. Your quilt is in my room. Is everything okay? Did your mother completely murder you—do I need to play detective?
All of which I ignore. What am I supposed to tell her—my boyfriend and I had a fight? No. Because then I’d hear about how it’s my fault because I didn’t talk to him. Caitlin is an open book for her boyfriends. She has to have surgery every six to eight weeks, so I understand her reasoning. It’s impossible for her to just blot out the hospital experience from her life. In my lesser moments, I might think she was “lucky,” which is messed up. Except that I see what happens when she shares every detail of our life here—I just spent the evening cleaning up a breakup.
Credits roll and I settle in with Battlestar Galactica. A few mindless hours and maybe my brain will chill out. I set the volume so low that I can hear only about every third word, which is not a problem since I’ve seen it so many times I can tell you what happens in each episode just by being told the number of people left alive on the ships.
My brain quiets as I cough, sip, and repeat until my lungs slowly ease back into clear function.
I am just getting to the part called sleep when I hear a voice.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I curl farther into the couch, trying to stay in my warm spot. There’s a nagging familiarity in the voice, like an intern on five a.m. rounds or a doctor I haven’t seen in years. I know the voice and know for certain I should avoid it.
Ignore him, I tell myself. My mind starts to drift off, but I can’t shake his presence. Even with my eyes closed, I can feel him standing there, glaring at me.
“Tell it to my lungs.” I push myself into a seated position, hiss when my feet hit the cold floor. Even the heaters can’t keep everything warm all the time.
Dressed much like me in a hoodie and sweats is Ryan. His dark hair is hidden under his hoodie and he stands there, arms crossed, decked out in sweats with logos for different soccer events. Perhaps it’s the low light in here or the late hour, but I can see the illness hiding beneath his skin. What seemed hidden before—I’m guessing some sort of invisible illness—now collects in the bags under his eyes and the hollows made by the sharpness of his cheekbones. Still, I can see the boy he was, strength and power tarnished by his illness but not completely defeated.
I’m not sure what earns me more disapproval, that I am here or that I’m in his way. Great. Here to hate on me again. I rub the almost sleep from my eyes. The light from the TV changes as one episode ends and another starts to play.
“Can I help you?”
“Why are you up in the middle of the night?”
“Probably for the same reason you are,” I respond. I’m not exactly at the top of my witty repartee game. Besides, he’s up seemingly for the same reasons I am.
A cough tickles the back of my throat and I reach for my cup of tea, only to find it empty. I suppress the cough as long as I can because I won’t show my illness in front of him.
His dark eyes hold on me.
“Umm,” I say, and struggle to find the remote to pause the show. What am I supposed to do with him? We’re not friends. I’m not sure if he even likes me.
“I couldn’t sleep.” He lets out a breath and it deflates him. This was his last barrier holding off the truth. You can always tell the kids who are new to it. The ones who don’t know how to adapt or regulate their lives to avoid the triggers of exhaustion.
His confession hangs between us. I shift the remote from one hand to the other, just to have something to do. To buy time until he realizes this thing we’re doing here—isn’t going to happen.
“And you chose to come hang out with me?”
“You said you liked action movies.”
“You wanna watch with me?” I ask, because I’m not a total bitch. He looks at the space between us on the couch like it might be contaminated. Which in this house—fair. “I’m not contagious. Promise.”
He raises an eyebrow.
Don’t just stand there staring at me.
This stare is there to strip me bare. It’s entitled. Not just to what’s on the outside but what’s on the inside, my medical file. Questions come with the stare, serving only to further fillet my sense of self into edible pieces. There are so many tactics of dealing with the stare and I usually go with ignore, but that has yet to work on Ryan. Overshare it is.
“My lungs suck. I mean, so do like half of my internal organs. Except my liver. That is in perfect, better-than-normal working condition. This is all to say sit or leave but just…” My voice carries off.
Ryan’s already pushed me to the edge with his insistence that I listen to doctors, and yet he sits down, leans back, and puts his feet up on the coffee table. No words. Nothing. So the overshare didn’t work in scaring him off. Fine. Different tactic.
“You were probably the only person like yourself at your school, but here you’re just one of many kids looking for cures and answers.” It’s easier to be like this with him. To let truths I’ve known my whole life just roll off. I don’t have to worry about him, the way I do about Caitlin or Mom or even Brooke. Who cares if Ryan likes me? We’re just going to spend a week orbiting each other surrounded by rings of mutual loathing. And then poof—he’ll be out of my life forever. At least right now he’s a nice distraction from my problems.
“You come here often?” he asks.
“No, I prefer the couch on two, but I was too exhausted to go down there.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” He was a total normal before this happened to him. Any self-respecting hospital regular knows you don’t ask about what goes on in the hospital—you wait for it to be volunteered. He was probably one of those kids where nothing was wrong and then one day the big bad strikes and now he gets to experience a new way to live. I hold up my right arm and pull back the sleeve of my hoodie as if to demonstrate why I’m here so often. “Only when I can’t sleep, and tonight, I shouldn’t have even tried.”
“It’s a lungs thing again?” Laughter hangs off his words. A silent taunt, begging me to rise to the occasion.
I slant a look at him. The ghost of a smile haunts his lips. First he interrupts my almost sleep and now he’s laughing at me. This is not what I asked for.
Well, if he wants to open the door, then I am not going to hold back. For some reason, I lay it all on him. Darlington and surgery. My mom and her determination to fix me. My friends at home. And the crowning moment—my fight with Jack and how our relationship is on life support. “And now I just need to go home so I can explain everything. I have some time.” I pull out my phone and show him the text Jack sent confirming that we’re not together. And the only way to fix it is at Brooke’s party.
Jack
I just can’t right now.
We’ll talk at Brooke’s party.
I finish and take a big breath, my lungs feeling easier than they have since I first got sick this fall. I sink back into the couch.
“Nothing?” I press when I feel the silence ready to swallow me up.
He turns to me. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“Of course not.” I grab my cup and try to leave.
“What I mean,” he says, holding up a leg to stop me. I glare down at him, but the corners of his mouth quirk up. “Is that it’s obvious, and I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it already.”
“Was there a compliment buried in that line?”
His stare reminds me of a nurse who can’t believe I did something so foolish. The hospital should just hire him to put the shame into incoming patients.
“You want to get back to Jack as fast as possible.” That name zings through me, a million electric shocks to my heart, and tears prick my eyes again.
“Brooke’s party is in two weeks,” I say. I’ve never been one to cry in public, reserving my tears for those moments where the world cannot see. Where they cannot judge. I bite the inside of my cheeks in order to hold on to my composure.
“Well, I’m sure they can get you in before then.”
“Recovery time much?”
“Then don’t do it and you never get back to your boyfriend.”
“You don’t understand.” My breath rattles in my chest as if to prove that I still can’t go home. That this, whatever this is, will always be between us if I stay here.
I don’t have to look at Ryan to feel his eye roll. Or just his general disbelief that I’m being this obtuse.
I’ve had enough surgery. Certainly more than my fair share. Forty plus. It’s not as high as Caitlin’s number—she’s in triple digits—but certainly my number is more than the average human has undergone.
So what’s one more? my mind asks me.
Because it’s one more that no one else has to have.
“I don’t…,” I start, unsure if I can trust these words to the room. “I don’t like surgery.” I test the words for the first time.
“If you did, we’d really have a problem.”
“No.” I close my eyes because here is the thing that just might be too much. I bite my lip and try to keep the deep-seated sense of dread at bay. But I can feel it. The loneliness of the operating theater. Everyone masked and gowned except me. Sheer terror because what I’m about to go through will hurt like hell but will make me better. “It’s … complicated. Every time I think about it I just … I want to run away. When I was six, I used to plan escape routes out of the OR, thinking I could just bring in a big enough teddy bear that they’d mistake it for me and no surgeon would be any the wiser. Because I knew how bad it was going to be.”
“Explains why you like action movies.”
I turn my head to look at him and let out one hard laugh, trying to hide how easily he’s crawled into my mind. “I guess.” I lean back on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Strange how easily he can connect the different parts of my life together. Brooke can’t even do that and I’ve known her for years. Jack’s never even come close.…
“But would it help?”
Just when I thought boy wonder might surprise me, he completely missed the point. I shrug. “Do you moonlight as a psychologist or something?”
“When you get my bill, you’ll know. But don’t worry, I’m giving you a special rate.”
“Oh thanks.” I let out exactly one laugh, hoping it doesn’t set off my lungs. But for once they seem to get the memo and stay silent.
“They can’t force you to have surgery.” His tone shifts, losing the joking feeling and morphing.
“You’d be surprised,” I say under my breath. Not that my parents would. I don’t think. I bring my good hand up to cover my face. Ugh, I hate myself for thinking that. My parents love me. They want the best for me. They’ve done what’s best for me. But sometimes, I just want to be involved—to have a say. To not be made to feel like that is wrong. Mom gets all teary-eyed when I say something that seems to question a decision she’s made, like I’m just supposed to be grateful for all she’s done. And I am … but also … this is my life.
“Which goes back to the original question—surgery and get better, no surgery and don’t.”
“Why do you trust doctors so much?” Normally, I do too, but this Darlington—I just struggle to have faith in him the way I do with others.
Ryan and I lock eyes, both of us ready to defend our positions to the end. He breaks first with an eye roll. It takes two to make a staring match.…
“Or a third option, have the surgery and remain the same. Fourth, have the surgery, get worse. Fifth—”
Ryan cuts me off. “When I had my first attack, it was the doctors who figured it out. They were smart enough to say you need expert care. Top doctors only. They didn’t sit around and try to work stuff out on their own. They want you to get better.”
His words needle me, prick me like an allergy test. I have the urge to correct him, tell him how not all doctors are good. But knowing him, he’d probably come back with And not all doctors are bad.
He’ll figure it out soon enough.
Ryan sighs. “Have you even listened to them? Like actually heard what they had to say?”
I turn my head, the muscles in my neck straining for more extension, reaching for that normal range of motion. Side-to-side movement was never my friend. His words tangle up in my muscles, pushing them just a bit more. But I’m not made like that. And I just want him to understand that. “They say it’s psychosomatic.”
“And?”
“And they think it’s in my head.” For believing everything that comes out of a doctor’s mouth, he needs a vocabulary lesson.
“Well, something’s in your head. Did he list reasons, explain why they think this?” I grab a throw pillow and hit him with it. “Hey,” he says, moving away.
“You can leave anytime.”
“That, right here, is the problem.” He holds a finger right in front of my face. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
“Yes I am.” I shake my head and look away. He’s exactly like them—like Mom and Darlington—well-intentioned but probably gonna hurt me in the end.
“What did I say.” Ryan stays in my space, his finger hovering between us. I want to escape from his strange gravitational pull.
“That I should trust doctors. That there’s something wrong with my head. You’re just like them.” A flash of anger and I pull back, I don’t need him. I don’t need another person telling me how to run my life.
“No, I said that you need to be part of the process—first it was all surgery, then you bring up the psychosomatic thing. But here’s the question: Why suggest surgery if it’s all in your head?”
I open and close my mouth like a fish. He’s caught me. A smile sneaks across his face and he lifts an eyebrow, daring me to agree with him. “Don’t look so happy.” I turn away from him, crossing my arms.
“Hand me your phone,” he says, holding out his hand palm up.
I stare blankly at his outstretched palm, the long, tapered fingers. A surprise even to me, I find myself fishing for my phone in the pocket of my hoodie. I hand it over without asking why.
He types in something and then hands it back.
“What’s this?” I ask, looking at the contact information.
“My phone number. You should have the surgery, but you also need to listen.”
“And this is for…”
“I’m your accountability buddy—a medical coach of sorts.”
“What does a soccer player know about medicine?”
“I know more about coaching than you do. Consider yourself in training.”
I toss my phone onto the space between me and the armrest. “I know the sport I’m playing.”
“You are not ready to go pro.”
“You think I’m not already?”
“I think you’re about to get benched.”
“And you think you can help me?”
He shrugs, way too confident in himself. “Got to get you back to lover boy.”
“Please never say that again.”
“You in?” He offers me a hand. I wonder what brought him here. Is it cancer—one with a Big C? Or something else? But it’s rude to ask.
His eyes widen when I take his hand. I’m just as shocked. His fingers are cold—not just like it’s winter so of course your extremities are cold, but cold like there’s something really wrong.