“It would be normal to be feeling some anxiety. An upswing in anxiety, even. On a scale of one to ten . . .”
On a scale of one to ten, how tired am I of being asked to rate multiple factors—my pain, my level of effort, my sense of well-being, my ability to determine when I need to evacuate my bowels?
“. . . how would you rate your current anxiety level? Now that you are in the final stages of your time here?”
There are three people who have to sign off on my discharge from the hospital. Dr. Monzales is one. Mum is the second. The third is, at this moment, sitting in the easy chair across from mine.
Dr. Bailey is bald-headed and gentle-eyed. Like Dr. Monzales, he favors crisp, white shirts, open at the neck. The fact that I’ll need his clearance to be discharged isn’t my only reason for seeing him. Or at least, it didn’t used to be. He has helped me.
I shrug. “Honestly, I don’t feel that anxious at all.”
Right now, it’s true.
He frowns. “What’s that on your arm? That mark?”
My gaze drops. It’s a grass stain, I realize, from when I fell in the park. By the time I got back inside with Elliot, I had only five minutes before my meeting with Dr. Bailey, and I told Jane that if she had a problem, would she please speak to Dr. Monzales? (Yes, to my shame, I said “please.”) So I’m still in my exercise gear, and I haven’t had time to clean myself up.
“I don’t know,” I say, rubbing at it. “Maybe it’s from the gym.”
He looks unconvinced. But he doesn’t press it.
“Well, Rosa, let’s talk, then, about what’s on your mind . . .”
But I’m not sure what to say. Because all I’m thinking about is what it felt like to be outside.
Dr. Bailey’s office is bland. Neutral-colored and silent, apart from the bubbling of the aerator in a tank of tiny iridescent fish in the far corner.
I glance up at the high window, and at the light that’s pouring in between the slats of the blinds. I realize I’m wondering if he’s still out there, that guy who materialized, quoted the bench plaque, kind of defended my integrity, made me smile, and vanished.
Dr. Bailey clears his throat. “The life you left will not be the one you’ll go back to, Rosa. But it’s getting close now—that release. Into the unknown.”
I force my mind into focus. “Not really the unknown,” I say. “Mum’s shown me all these pictures—”
“I’m not talking about your parents’ apartment.”
Oh, he’s so literal, so oblivious to subtle sarcasm.
“Perhaps you’d like to talk more about how you’ll manage interactions with friends that you had before the surgery?”
“There isn’t actually that much to manage,” I tell him. My illness and withdrawal from everything that was part of my life before it have seen to that.
Three days after my tenth birthday, two and a half years after my first symptoms, Mum and Dad got a letter from school saying that “with great regret” it could “no longer meet my needs.” Mum hired a tutor, a retired headmistress with a dust mite allergy, who came to our home armed with textbooks and antihistamines four days a week.
It wasn’t that long before my school friends dropped away. My fault, as well as theirs. Mum’s fault, as well as mine.
I remember one afternoon—I must have been eleven—Elliot walked Bea, my onetime best friend, home with him from school to our house.
“I saw Bea’s mum,” he told me, poking his head around my bedroom door, looking pleased with himself. “She’ll pick her up at five.”
But it was one of those days when the fatigue felt crushing.
Bea talked about how mean the new PE teacher was, and how they were going to the Algarve in summer, and how Bea had won an art competition with a picture of a horse that looked more like a dog, and she was going to have a karaoke party, and did I want to come, because everyone would be there . . . And I said she could go.
Later, I heard Elliot and Mum in the kitchen.
Elliot was saying, in a kind of hushed shout: “She has to see her friends.”
“It has to be her call, Elliot! You can’t force it on her!”
“She’s a kid. She doesn’t know what’s best. You have to help her see her old friends.”
“What are you?” Mum half shouted back. “And why do I have to? So she can hear exactly what she’s missing out on and they can watch her die, too?”
The few friends I have now, I found online.
The girl I exchange messages with most often lives in Tokyo. She has a Tumblr mostly about cats (it was her blog that introduced me to cat sushi—which does not involve any harm to a cat), and after we started swapping kitsch cat pictures with our own captions, I guess we kind of became friends. But if I ever meet her, AikaA, in real life, will she think, “Rosa doesn’t look like how she writes”?
Hardly. I’ve never even mentioned the disease. As far as she knows, I’m just a regular girl who has a thing about cats and likes old epic movies (really old, like Gone with the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia) and macabre Victorian novels.
This is all true. But I’ve also told her other things . . .
Like, a couple of years ago, after a spell in the hospital for an experimental treatment had laid me up, I told her I’d fractured my wrist on a mountain biking trip in Majorca. Who knew they put the brakes on the other side in Europe? (Me, thanks to a Sussex cyclist’s blog.) I also told her about all these bands I’ve allegedly seen in Berlin and Amsterdam, as well as in London. (I took all the details from Elliot’s accounts.)
Yes, I’ve made up stories about myself. Don’t we all, to some degree?
“If I remember rightly, you told your online friends that a car accident was the reason you were unable to communicate for months,” Dr. Bailey says.
“Yeah.”
“And so now?” he asks. “What do you tell them?”
“I’m making a really amazing recovery.”
He nods. “You know, I wonder if, as part of your amazing recovery, you find yourself focusing on how it may feel to have a boyfriend.”
First Elliot. Now my psychologist. What is with males? Dr. Bailey has broached this topic before, but not so explicitly. How it may feel? Surely he doesn’t mean . . . “You mean . . . ?”
“Do you feel any remaining concern about having a relationship that would, naturally, to some extent, include an element of physical attraction?”
“You mean, will it bother me that someone will fancy the dead girl, not me?”
To Bailey’s credit, he doesn’t cringe. “That’s not exactly what I meant. But it’s close enough.”
I think of how it was to feel that sunlight in the park. That light that touched the doctor and the bench and the guy with the tattoo, and touched me. I half hear myself saying, “I am her and she is me. We are indivisible, like the father, son, and holy ghost.”
To his discredit, his expression hardens. I’ve just offended him.
And I feel . . . I do feel a little bad. I know Bailey’s religious. There’s a fish symbol magnet on his desk lamp. According to Jess, he met his wife on ChristianMingle.com.
The offense quickly fades from his face. But he says, “I wonder why you put it like that.”
“It’s not that I’m not grateful,” I tell him. I sigh. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been a patient so long now . . .”
He nods. “You’re impatient to get on with life in the wider world. It’s understandable you would feel that way.”
I think, not for the first time: He’s religious—and he accepts me. At least, he’s never looked at me as though I’m anything remotely resembling an unholy freak.
But that night, something happens to make me think maybe it’s impossible to tell what someone’s actually thinking unless they tell you.
And then when they do, it can come as a total shock.