Me and T went to the Denny’s across from the hospital at three in the morning the night Mama tried to kill herself. T ordered a BLT sandwich on sourdough with fries. I got the pancake breakfast with eggs sunny-side up, hash browns, and bacon. The waitress was good. Never asked us how we were doing, just punctuated all of her sentences with “sweetie.” What can I get you, sweetie? Anything to drink, sweetie? Coming right up, sweetie.
“Why didn’t you get the chocolate ones like always?” T asked.
“I’m trying out the blueberry.”
She sat back in the booth like it was really something to think about, the blueberry pancakes versus the chocolate pancakes with the whipped-cream smiley face. Certainly, this was not a time for smiles in our food, and she understood that after I did. Maybe figuring that out late was the problem she had to consider so deeply. We should’ve been covered in blood. We hadn’t been taught the proper signs of death, how it doesn’t lurk in dark robes or burst from a warrior’s chest in battle or appear as the slow-motion spray of brain matter and other vital organs scattered in the wind like dandelion fluff. That would’ve made more sense than looking the way we always look except in the face. T looked old as shit. Maybe we both did. Girls our age usually showed up at diners in the middle of the night coming down off pills and wine coolers after being molested for hours on a dance floor.
“You look like Auntie Tammy,” I told her.
“Fuck you,” she said with a laugh.
It was dark outside and quiet, with a thin fog that made the streetlights fuzzy and jittery. Only two other groups were in the entire restaurant, which was large enough to hold fifty or a hundred, I don’t know. A few tables away a family waited, two women, a youngish man, and a girl with a pink balloon tied to her wrist asleep in one of the women’s laps. The balloon hovered above them all, singular and swaying in the air-conditioning. In the other aisle was a couple, two older men, sad like us but a little different. They ate soup and drank ice water with lemon. All of these people should’ve been covered in blood, dried and full of tissue and matted hair. It should be fresh too, running in places from wounds always recently torn open and from the dead that drip onto them. The droopy men and the heavy women and the little girl with her shoe about to fall off her foot as she drooled on the woman’s lap, all of them should’ve been covered in blood. Then the waitress came over and brought our coffee, she too awash in death, smiling behind the steam from the mugs.
“Here you go, sweeties.”
I imagined the coagulated masses of torn flesh dropping into the cups from her chin like red cubes of sugar.
“Thank you,” we said.
I remember going to the emergency room as a kid after an ant crawled into my ear and wouldn’t come out. Mama held my head under the faucet while I cried, but nothing washed out. “It’s in there!” I yelled over and over, hearing it bang and buzz around inside me like a mad tiny chef cooking stir-fry.
T looked up at me, then she looked out at the street. She held her coffee like a woman who had lived a lifetime and earned every sip.
“In the zombie apocalypse, would you kill me if I got bit?” I asked T.
She sweetened her coffee. Tasted it. Then sweetened it some more.
“Or what?” she asked.
“Or just let me turn?”
“Would you try to eat me?”
“Of course.”
I took a bite of bacon and slit the eggs with my fork so the yolk ran into the hash browns.
T leaned forward with her elbows on the table and looked out into the dark empty streets. No cars passed. No people passed. There was nothing out there.
“How would you want me to kill you, then?”
“I don’t care if it hurts some.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“I’d try to not make it hurt, though.”
“So you would kill me?”
I dropped my fork. She squirted ketchup on her fries and began to eat.
“Is that a problem? You seem like you want it, and a lot of times you deserve it. I would just have to remember how annoying you are and then just boom.”
We had very little practice with death before that year, and then the bitch began outperforming itself all around us. First no one was dead, then everyone seemed to be gone or leaving. Life felt like the mystery. All of the people around us acted as if they were alive when really they were closer to the end than they’d like to think. None of the dead and dying we knew looked like they were supposed to.
“So, you’d shoot me? Your favorite sister?”
“My only sister, and maybe. Do we get guns in this movie?”
“It’s not a movie. I just want to know what to expect.”
“Would you kill me, then?”
“No!”
“What? You’d just let me run around all gross and eat people.”
“Yes!”
“That’s crazy.”
She sipped her supersweet coffee and seemed to begin aging backward a little. I was glad for that. I saw T more in that moment, and maybe I would kill her in the zombie apocalypse if she looked more like T, pretty, her dark eyes cutting deep into whatever she stared at. Maybe I would just let her die like that with that face.
“Right now,” T said. “You have to promise to shoot me in the fucking face if I get bit by a fucking zombie. I do not want to live forever as a rotting chest-bones-out, jaw-swinging corpse.”
I laughed at her imitating a zombie jaw.
“Do that again.”
She did. I laughed harder. The men with the soup got up to pay their bill. The little girl was awake and sipping orange juice from a child’s cup.
“Look,” she said. “Promise. I would kill you, then kill myself, so we wouldn’t have to deal with any of it.”
“But what if there’s a cure? You just popped us both and the next day they announce free cures for everybody recently infected, and we’re all dead and shit.”
T smiled.
“Well, that would be a problem.”
“Yes, a problem!”
“But we’re dead, so it wouldn’t matter. Dead people don’t have problems.”
She reached over with her fork and took a piece of pancake.
“These aren’t as good as the chocolate ones.”
“You just wanted me to get those so you could have some.”
She ate another piece, then another, and quit trying to enjoy her terrible coffee. T liked to eat her sugar rather than drink it. We waited in the car until the sun came up before going back into the hospital. The most frightening things that eat up our lives can’t be seen—simple bacteria, free radicals, cholesterol, time, protein deficiencies, cortisol, vanity, ambition, carcinogens, love, and all the erratic chemicals of grief and abandonment. T had found Mama on the sofa after coming home late. I’d been asleep for a while when I heard T screaming and screaming as if there had been a massacre, blood everywhere and nowhere. Our mother rested the whole day after having a tube inserted into her stomach to siphon the contents. Because she arrived unconscious they gave her a tracheal intubation to make sure she didn’t inhale the poisons during extraction. When I had the ant removed the doctor smiled in my face, and asked if I wanted to keep it. I thought they might bottle up the juices from Mama’s belly and ask if we wanted to take them home, but that didn’t happen. We left with no proof at all.