Two days later, I’m home from the hospital. Poppy comes down with a fever at dinnertime a few days later. It hits Sequoia the day after. I’m still too weak to get out of bed. I feel only slightly guilty that I can’t help more. Not because I owe it to my parents, but because I know how awful my sister and brother are feeling. It’s my fault they’re sick. They got this from me. I’m the worst big sister ever.
My mom and dad have managed to convince themselves my siblings won’t get as sick as I did, because they know what they’re dealing with this time. My mom douses them in essential oils, while my dad keeps them on a steady diet of shiitake mushrooms and elderberry tea and whatever else he found in his natural healing book.
I bet that makes them feel like barfing, I want to say. You don’t know anything. But I keep my mouth shut.
While my parents go back and forth, up and down the stairs, I try to read a novel my dad assigned for school, but the pages blur and I forget the words by the time I get to the end of each paragraph. I want a TV. Or a laptop. I bet when the kids at the high school across the street get sick, they get to eat Popsicles and watch frothy movies about people going to prom and falling in love.
Sigh.
I close my eyes to make up my own movie in my head. It’s been playing on an endless loop for weeks, actually. It’s about this past summer and the boy who lived next door to Mimi and Bumpa. His name was Noah, and even though I never met him officially, I felt like I knew him. He was tall and tan and graceful, with a tattoo on his arm that I’d see when he was mowing the lawn with his shirt off. I wanted to run my fingers across that tattoo, and I’d think about it when I passed him whenever I was out walking Duke. Mimi told me Noah’s whole story because I asked her. He was home from his first year of college and had an internship at some financial office downtown. His job sounded like a total snoozefest, but he wore a button-down shirt and tie to go there, which I liked because I knew he had that tattoo hidden underneath it all.
I finally dredge up enough energy to go downstairs for a glass of water and settle in the living room for a change of scenery.
There’s a dusty bookshelf in the corner. It’s filled with my grandparents’ books. There are classics and westerns and a whole encyclopedia collection from 1989, two years before my mom graduated from high school. I’m sure she used these for research in the days before the internet. Even though I know the information will be outdated, I pull volume Ma–Me from the shelf and thumb past Maps and Maui until I land on Measles. There are photos of rashes and vivid descriptions of symptoms and risk factors. There are details of death. And then a lifesaving vaccine introduced in 1963.
I put that volume back. Grab volume Po–Pu. I flip to the section about polio. There are pictures of little kids in leg braces. People trapped in iron lungs that look like space-age torture devices. Death rate statistics. And then a lifesaving vaccine introduced in 1955.
I pick at my arm. At the peeling spots of red.
The measles could’ve killed me.
Polio still can.
I’d never thought about it before because I’d never gotten sick. But after this, if it were up to me, I’d choose the shot.
Why can’t it be up to me?
I’m sixteen. I’m the one who has to live in this body for the rest of my life. Why do my parents get to decide what happens to it?
I hear Poppy calling from upstairs. “Mom!” Her voice is ragged and hoarse. “It hurts to touch my skin.”
And then Sequoia: “Mom! My throat!” His words get swallowed by a coughing fit.
They sound miserable and they want my mom to comfort them, even though, when you really think about it, it’s kind of her fault all her kids got sick in the first place.