“Fine.” Hana raises her arms and brings them slapping down against her thighs. The noise is so loud it makes me jump. “Fine. So it’s a bad idea. So it’s risky. You know what? I don’t care.”
For a second there’s silence. We’re glaring at each other, and the air between us feels charged and dangerous, a thin electrical coil, ready to explode.
“What about me?” I say finally, struggling to keep my voice from shaking.
“You’re welcome to come. Ten thirty, Roaring Brook Farms, Stroudwater. Music. Dancing. You know—fun. The stuff we’re supposed to be having, before they cut out half of our brain.”
I ignore the last part of her comment. “I don’t think so, Hana. In case you’ve forgotten, we have other plans for tonight. Have had plans for tonight for, oh, the past fifteen years.”
“Yeah, well, things change.” She turns her back to me, but I feel like she’s reached out and punched me in the stomach.
“Fine.” My throat is squeezing up. This time I know it’s the real deal, and I’m on the verge of crying. I go over to her bed and start gathering up my stuff. Of course my bag has spilled over on its side, and now her comforter is covered with little scraps of paper and gum wrappers and coins and pens. I start stuffing these back into my bag, fighting back the tears. “Go ahead. Do whatever you want tonight. I don’t care.”
Maybe Hana feels bad, because her voice softens a little bit. “Seriously, Lena. You should think about coming. We won’t get in any trouble, I promise.”
“You can’t promise that.” I take a deep breath, wishing my voice would stop quivering. “You don’t know that. You can’t be positive. “
“And you can’t go on being so scared all the time.”
That’s it: That does it. I whirl around, furious, something deep and black and old rising inside of me. “Of course I’m scared. And I’m right to be scared. And if you’re not scared it’s just because you have the perfect little life, and the perfect little family, and for you everything is perfect, perfect, perfect. You don’t see. You don’t know.”
“Perfect? That’s what you think? You think my life is perfect?” Her voice is quiet but full of anger.
I’m tempted to move away from her but force myself to stay put. “Yeah. I do.”
Again she lets out a barking laugh, a quick explosion. “So you think this is it, huh? As good as it gets?” She turns a full circle, arms extended, like she’s embracing the room, the house, everything.
Her question startles me. “What else is there?”
“Everything, Lena.” She shakes her head. “Listen, I’m not going to apologize. I know you have your reasons for being scared. What happened to your mom was terrible—”
“Don’t bring my mom into this.” My body goes tight, electric.
“But you can’t go on blaming her for everything. She died more than ten years ago.”
Anger swallows me, a thick fog. My mind careens wildly like wheels over ice, bumping up against random words: Fear. Blame. Don’t forget. Mom. I love you. And now I see that Hana is a snake—has been waiting a long time to say this to me, has been waiting to squirm her way in, as deep and painful as she can go, and bite.
“Fuck you.” In the end, these are the two words that come.
She holds up both hands. “Listen, Lena, I’m just saying you have to let it go. You’re nothing like her. And you’re not going to end up like her. You don’t have it in you.”
“Fuck you.” She’s trying to be nice, but my mind is closed up and the words come out on their own, cascading over one another, and I wish every single one was a punch so that I could hit her in the face, bambambambam. “You don’t know a single thing about her. And you don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”
“Lena.” She reaches for me.
“Don’t touch me.” I’m stumbling backward, grabbing my bag, bumping against her desk as I move toward the door. My vision is cloudy. I can barely make out the banisters. I’m tripping, half falling down the stairs, finding the front door by touch. I think Hana might be calling to me, but everything is lost to a roaring, rushing in my ears, inside my head. Sunshine, brilliant, brilliant white light—cool biting iron under my fingers, the gate—ocean smells, gasoline. Wailing, growing louder. A punctuated shriek: beep, beep, beep.
My head clears all at once and I jump out of the middle of the street just before I’m squashed by a police car, which barrels past me, horn still blaring, siren whirling, leaving me coughing up dirt and dust. The ache in my throat gets so bad it feels like I’m gagging, and when I finally let the tears come it’s a huge relief, like dropping something heavy after you’ve been carrying it for a long time. Once I start crying I can’t stop, and all the way home I have to keep mashing my palm into my eyes every few seconds, smearing away the tears just so I can see where I’m going. I comfort myself by thinking that in less than two months this will seem like nothing to me. All of it will fall away and I’ll rise up new and free, like a bird winging up into the air.
That’s what Hana doesn’t understand, has never understood. For some of us, it’s about more than the deliria. Some of us, the lucky ones, will get the chance to be reborn: newer, fresher, better. Healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor sharp.
That is all I want—all I have ever wanted. That is the promise of the cure.
Chapter Nine
Lord
Keep our hearts fixed;
As you fixed the planets in their orbits
And cooled the chaos of emerging—
As the gravity of your will keeps star and star from collapsing
Keeps ocean from turning to dust and dust from turning to water
Keeps planets from colliding
And suns from exploding—
So, Lord, keep our hearts fixed
In steady orbit
And help them stay the path.
—Psalm 21
(From “Prayer and Study,” The Book of Shhh)
That night, even after I’m in bed, Hana’s words replay themselves endlessly in my head. You won’t end up like her. You don’t have it in you. She only said it to comfort me, I know—it should be reassuring—but for some reason it isn’t. For some reason it makes me upset; there’s a deep aching in my chest, as though something large and cold and sharp is lodged there.
Here’s another thing Hana doesn’t understand: Thinking about the disease, and worrying about it, and stressing about whether I’ve inherited some predisposition for it—that’s all I have of my mom. The disease is what I know about her. It is the link.
Otherwise, I have nothing.
It’s not that I don’t have memories of her. I do—lots of them, considering how young I was when she died. I remember that when there was fresh snow she would send me outside to pack pans with handfuls of it. Once inside we would drizzle maple syrup into the snow-filled pans, watching it harden into amber candy almost instantly, all loops and fragile, sugared filigree, like edible lace. I remember how much she loved to sing to us as she bounced me in the water at the beach off Eastern Prom. I didn’t know how strange this was at the time. Other mothers teach their children to swim. Other mothers bounce their babies in the water, and apply sunscreen to make sure their babies don’t burn, and do all the things that a mother is supposed to do, as outlined in the Parenting section of The Book of Shhh.
But they don’t sing.