We Were Never Here (6 page)

Somehow it happens: I take a shower.

My mother arrives in the morning after the nurses have taken my blood and that technician has come in for the X-ray and after Dr. Malik has come around, marching to the foot of my bed before 6:00 a.m. with a new protocol to try. His students take notes behind him in a long row. Here I am, pinned back and helpless, splayed out on the waxy dissection tray.

“Look at you!” she says. “All clean!”

I don't say anything.

“Ready for a walk! Is Connor coming again today?”

“How should I know?” I say.

My mother sets a picture of our family on the side table—a term I use here only loosely—next to my bed.

Well, I guess we're settling into our new home. We should re-wallpaper too. But when I look at the photo, I have to turn away.

There we all are. Zoe leans on my father and makes a stupid face. I'm looking over at Zoe and my hair blows toward my mother, who's looking just at me. My hair has started to fall out now. I try not to think of Thelma when I find big clumps of hair on my pillow.

“There we are.” My mother stands back from the frame, like
she's trying to hang a picture straight.

There we were, I think.

“So!” she says. “When are we going to try a walk again?”

She barely finishes her sentence when out of the corner of my eye I see the crack of the door widen. My heart freezes. And then a plain old resident in a white coat walks in, clicking her pen. She talks about my red blood cell count, which apparently is dangerously low.

“We've gone and ordered a blood transfusion,” the resident says. She has a British accent. Her words are really just more squawking sounds.

“Can I please talk to you outside?” my mother says to the resident. “Please,” she says like she's giving an order.

And then there is the sound of them leaving the room, and the resident trying to say something to my mother, and then the sound of my mother interrupting the resident, and then the sound of my mother's actual voice, growing loud. “You get me that doctor right now. Right here or on the phone, I don't care. If you don't get me the doctor right now, you have no idea what you are about to see me do,” she says.

And soon there is the sound of Dr. Malik.

It's the strangest, eeriest feeling to watch someone else's blood become your blood. It doesn't
feel
like that, like some kind of alien intervention, but this is what you know is actually happening.

A packet of blood drips in slowly. I had thought it would happen quickly, maybe because the word, “transfuse,” sounds like a word that means “instantly,” but no, it's very slow.

Nana always tells Zoe and me,
Remember, blood is thicker than water
.
Family
, she says,
is what's most important
. I am here to tell you, that is no joke. Blood is
way
thicker than water. And it goes in as slowly as I imagine honey would, and it makes me feel less like I'm being invaded by aliens and more like I'm a vampire, sucking the life out of some poor unsuspecting person to save myself.

So some random person's blood is dripping painfully slowly into my veins via some crazy straw linked up to my heart and I'm watching the Food Network. I can't eat, and here I am watching food get cooked. It's just so wrong. Anyway, this is all happening while my mother's eating in the cafeteria and I'm watching someone make a heinous casserole I wouldn't even eat now.

Thelma says, “Turn it up!” As if she doesn't have her own television.

I do it.

Thelma asks, “Honey, what would you eat if you could eat?”

I shrug, though she can't see me.

“Girl! I know you heard me,” she says.

“I heard you,” I say. The last time she really talked to me was three days ago, when she told me I'd be getting out soon. There's been like hello, good-bye, here comes the nurse to poke at us, but that's all Thelma and I have really said. And it's not like me to be rude, but doesn't being transfused give me some kind of free pass?

“Come on then!” She kicks at the curtain and I see a glimpse of her, just a flash, a wig set on her fist, and she's twirling it like
it's one of those old-fashioned globes of the world. “What would you eat if you could?” Her head's bald and brown and totally smooth, something that might feel good to touch.

“All right.” I let myself think about it. “Pizza. Hot dogs. Macaroni and cheese.” I have to laugh; it's total kid food. “Ice cream sundaes dripping with chocolate sauce.”

“Mm-hmm,” she says.

“Sprinkles. Rainbow ones.”

“That makes sense. Me? I'd eat ribs—dry ribs, now, none of that bottled sauce, and collards, corn bread. Black-eyed peas.” She makes a sound of licking her lips. “Same as you,” she says. “The stuff we ate when we was small. That's what we want. To make us feel better.” Still she's twirling that wig.

On TV, the lady puts more butter on top of butter.

“Yes,” I say, because it's true.

Then we're silent and the blood in my IV stand is tomato-juice red and it goes
drip, drip
into the line that feeds into my blood. Is my blood as red as this other random person's blood?
Thicker than water.
I can see the packet out of the corner of my eye, even when I try not to look, even when I stare straight ahead at the television.

Once in a while a nurse comes in to look at the drip and squeezes the balloon of blood, like she's squeezing someone's heart.

There's a knock on the door just as the butter casserole is ready.

“Hello?” he says, peering around the door.

I look away from the blood and over to the door, and there he is.

There they are.

Connor and Verlaine.

I smile big when Connor walks in.

He shakes his hair out of his face, and I look over at the packet of blood. Oh God, I think. Am I embarrassed? I have no idea. Is getting a transfusion
embarrassin
g
? More embarrassing than falling in front of the nurses' station? More embarrassing than making the campers put down their archery bows? More embarrassing than having to sit in the shower clutching a cord that calls a nurse if I fall down? I think of regular embarrassing things: spinach in my teeth, getting an answer wrong in class, blushing.
Duck soup,
as Nana says. Nothing.

“Can I sit down a minute?” Connor says.

Yes! I think. Then I change my mind. Or not my mind. My body is what's really making most of the decisions. Please don't sit here, my body says. Please! Go away, it says. But what it does instead is shrug.

Verlaine pants at the side of the bed as Connor gently sits down. How can I explain it? Being jostled hurts and then it is the exact opposite of hurt. Then he does this thing: he touches my leg. My knee actually. Very, very softly. How does he know that this is the single place that doesn't hurt? He knows it before I do; I only realize it as he touches me. So softly. Again.

“Hi,” he says.

My heart is a thousand butterflies. My stomach is a sack of them; it counters the pain of it. “Hi there,” I say.

Connor Bryant. He has slender, beautiful fingers. Connor
Bryant. Yes, you could barely call the nails actual nails, and there are some spots of blood along the cuticle. Even if I were in more of a position to be grossed out, I wouldn't be. I wonder what could make a boy like Connor Bryant bite his nails that way. But it's not like I think he's cute despite the bloody stubs; I think he is adorable because of them. “Did I mention when we talked yesterday that Verlaine and I, we're candy stripers?”

I have to laugh. Out loud. I imagine Connor in one of those white aprons the candy stripers are supposed to wear. I've never seen one here, but I imagine Verlaine in a little white apron too.

“Yup. Candy striper.” He brings his hand across his chest, pointing to an invisible sign. “We're out of uniform today,” he says, looking down at Verlaine. “Left our candy canes and lollipops at home.” His smile is dazzling. All white teeth and then the crinkling at the eyes.

“I'm a chocolate eater myself,” I tell him. “But there's not a lot of chocolate eating going on in here.” Connor has his smile, but what have I got? I wasn't much for flirting before, and I can't say this is the place to start. “Me?” I say. I didn't mean it as a question. “Patient.”

“I see that.”

I stop laughing.

“Can Verlaine come up?”

I nod.

“
Up
, up,” he says to his dog, his beautiful dog, and somehow Verlaine gets on the bed as delicately as a cat.

I pet him and look at Connor. He seems pretty strong; I can see his arm muscles through his faded, wrinkled oxford. The
collar is a little frayed, which looks like he's just got better things to do than worry over a new shirt. Like he's worn it so many times it just knows him. “Okay, so now you. Now you tell me everything. Like what are you doing here?” I ask.

He clears his throat.

Don't leave, I think
.
I'm sorry I asked. I take the question back! It doesn't matter why you're here, I think, but I don't say any of those things.

“Let me sit over there,” he says, pointing to my mother's chair. “I don't want to hurt you or anything.”

“Okay,” I say brightly. He probably thinks I'm disgusting. “Sounds good!” I don't want him to leave the bed, but every time he moves I feel a wave of nausea.

“I'll leave Verlaine with you, though,” he says.

I grab Verlaine's scruff. I smell his dog smell.

Connor gets up gingerly and goes to sit in my mother's chair. He crosses his legs, which is actually the cutest thing. It doesn't look girlie on him. It looks old-fashioned. And elegant.

Vans. Black-and-white checkered, with laces. Slayed.

Connor Bryant: slayer of the sick and the weak.

I wait. What will he say? He could have recovered from some terrible illness and wanted to return to help others. Or he could have a sick sister. Or a mean father. Maybe he isn't going to tell me anything. Honestly, I have no idea what he is about to say.

He sighs, then gives the kind of smile that could burn a house down. I never knew that kind of smile before, but I do now. “College apps,” he says. “So brutal, right?”

I feel my face do the thing where half of it mocks the other
half of it. “Okay,” I say. I don't know him at all, but I don't believe him.

He brings his ankle over the other knee, and sort of shakes them both. He fiddles with his laces and shakes his leg harder.

“Okay,” I say again. “Got it.” I can go back to anger easy as pie. I mean cake.

He stops, like freezes, and looks up at me. If nothing else: Connor Bryant is
intense
. He makes me look like I live on a rainbow and drive a unicorn.

“Sorry. No, that's not true. About the apps. Just a thing I say. But this”—he points to me, practically dead here, on the bed—“bodes well for you. Harvard, here you come.”

“Right,” I say.

“Oh, I don't know,” he says. He joggles his ankle again; again with the laces.

“And also, not really thinking about it. About how I got this fantastic fun disease and came to spend all this time in this, I don't know, what would you call it, heaven? So I could, like, get into the Ivy League.”

“Thought so,” he says, pointing a chewed-up finger at me.

For a fleeting second, I don't like Connor. Like 100 percent. But then he smiles and the moment is gone. Like it had never been there at all.

He softens. His whole self. “Sorry.” He shakes his head, like he is shaking back to himself. “I don't know why I said that. Like being sick means you have it made? I really don't know why I said that.”

“It's such a romantic disease that I've got. I couldn't have
planned a better one,” I say, “for college, I mean.”

Connor laughs. Full-on, head thrown back. It's amazing. Verlaine jumps down and goes to sit next to him. That's how good the laugh is.

“Fair enough. Okay, So I guess I have to ask then. What
do
you have? Why are
you
here?”

“You don't know?”

“Me? God, no. There's all kinds of confidentiality here. I know the children's hospital, where I also go, has most of the young people with cancer. And here we are, on the cancer ward. So. Cancer?”

I try not to seem self-conscious about Thelma, who's probably sleeping anyway.

I shake my head. “That was ruled out two days ago.” Was it Day Eight? It seems more like seven years, seven decades, seven centuries. “They put me on this floor because it's safer than the general illness unit with all those infectious diseases. It's kind of surreal, though, being here.” I nod my head in Thelma's direction.

I have turned into my mother in here.

Connor pets Verlaine silently.

“Oh, so I have this disease called ulcerative colitis. It's embarrassing, really.” I could not say anything, I know, but what's the point? It is what it is here, people. But I do realize that part of the pain I've got in here is shame. It hurts me. How ashamed I am, even just when my father enters the room with a teddy bear. It's that kind of a disease.

“Being sick is like that, I think,” Connor says. “I see all kinds of people in here. No matter what they have, everyone seems to
feel ashamed. Bodies,” he says.

I swallow, big. I wait, but that's all he says. I nod. “Bodies.”

I feel like Connor knows everything. And understands.

“Also, not just bodies.”

I wait for an explanation, but one doesn't come. “I'm not sure what's going to happen,” I say.

This is the part I haven't mentioned, not to anyone. If the colon doesn't get saved, I'll have to have a bag attached to me. I can't say it. He will never come near me if I do. If this really happens, no one will. I will be a freak. A freak with an ileostomy bag.