“I just need some time,” I said, trying to get her on my side.
Truer words were never spoken. If I had to make a list of things I wanted to see right now, old friends who would pity, judge, and gossip about me would be the last things on it. I didn’t want anyone else thinking the things I was thinking. I didn’t want anyone else privy to the specific horrors of my new situation. I did not want to be the topic of anyone’s phone chats, or get-togethers, or status updates. I didn’t want to be the reason other people counted their blessings.
I would see them—might—when and if I could do it of my own accord.
Which left my mother with nothing but decorating. After capitulating at last to the No Visitors policy, she made us both weigh in on whether or not the hospital might let her bring some floor lamps. Her next stop, she said, was Bed, Bath & Beyond for a tension curtain rod and some better window treatments. Maybe a throw pillow.
This was my mother’s method for loving people: through décor. She glared at the mauve-and-gray-swirled curtains as if they actually might try to harm us. “Doesn’t that fabric make you want to cry?”
I tilted my head. “I’m not sure it’s the fabric.”
“That fabric,” she went on, pointing at it now in accusation, “is a crime against humanity.”
My dad and I knew better than to argue. If my mother ruled the world, its prisons would be crammed full of nothing but citizens with bad taste.
*
AFTER THEY LEFT—taking the morning’s sad croissants to donate to the nurses’ station after I declared I’d never eat them—I decided to close my eyes for just a second, and I fell dead asleep. You wouldn’t think being confined to a bed would be so tiring.
I slept until my new occupational therapist, Priya, came in and wanted me to try to wiggle my toes. She also wanted to work on transferring from the bed to the wheelchair, saying the sooner I could get into the chair on my own, the sooner I could wheel myself to the bathroom—and the sooner I could do that, the sooner we could remove my catheter to see if, God willing, I could pee on my own.
We practiced an extra transfer, just for good measure.
I kept expecting to see Chip. All day, every time the door swung open, I expected it to be him—carrying flowers, at least, and full of apologies and encouraging words. But he never did show up. Maybe he was still at his parents’ house, sleeping it all off. For his sake, I hoped so.
All of this bustling busy-ness seemed oddly cheerful on the surface. Every professional I interacted with had a pleasant, just-another-day-at-the-office demeanor, and yet I strongly suspected they were faking. I know for sure that I was. I kept things calm, I stayed pleasant, I took my medicine—but the truth is, I had woken up in a dystopic world, one so different that even all the colors were in a minor key, more like a sour, washed-out old photograph than anything real.
It looked that way, and it felt that way, too.
I couldn’t imagine the future, and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—even think about the past. And by “the past,” I mean ten days earlier. My past hadn’t even had time to fade: It had been severed from me—the whole history of who I’d been, what I did, anything I’d ever dared to hope for—gone.
That kind of thing puts quite a spin on your perception.
By that evening, I was so tired, I had hopes I might actually sleep through the night. Exhaustion is a friend to the grieving. I was the kind of tired where sleep just reaches out and tugs you into its gentle sea without you ever making a choice. Just as I was giving in and closing my eyes, the door opened again.
And it was my sister, Kitty. With a suitcase.
Seven
KITTY HESITATED AT the door. “Hey, Mags,” she said.
When I didn’t respond, she held her hand up in a little wave.
“I know you said you didn’t want me to come,” she said. “But I came anyway. Obviously.”
I just stared.
She didn’t step in. She waited for permission that I wasn’t prepared to give.
Three years. Three years of unanswered emails and phone messages. Three years of nothing, and now here she was.
She looked utterly different from the sister I’d last seen. She had short, spiky hair now, bleached a bright yellow, instead of the shoulder-length brown I’d always known. She had little hoop earrings going up the sides of both ears. She had no makeup except for bright red lipstick. She had a ring in her nose like a cow.
But of course, I knew her at once. Even after all this time.
“Nice nose ring,” I said.
“So—can I come in?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was up for it.
“Just a quick minute,” she promised.
“I’m super tired.”
“I just want to say hi.” There was a nervous energy to the way she stood, as if she were standing on the edge of some tall building’s flat roof rather than just in my doorway.
I felt that same energy—a little bit of that same stomach-dropping feeling. Plus, so many different things all at once—surprised, uncertain, annoyed. She could have called, right? She could have let me know she was coming, at least. Did I really need some weird stealth attack from her right now? She’d had three years to get in touch, and she’d waited until I literally couldn’t escape. It felt like too much. My instinct was to send her away.
But I couldn’t.
Part of me wanted her to stay. A bigger part than I’d realized.
“Fine,” I said, and I kept my eyes on her face as she walked closer.
She set down her bag as she stepped to the side of my bed.
“Hi,” she said.
“Dad said you were in town.”
She nodded.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
She nodded again.
“Have you seen Mom?”
She shook her head.
“Are you going to? Before you go back?”
She gave a half-smile. “I’m gathering up my resolve.”
I didn’t know what to say. I really didn’t even know where to start. It was exactly as bizarre to see her as it was not bizarre at all. Of course she was here. She was my big sister. And yet it was like seeing an afterimage come back to life.
“You look better,” she said.
“That’s not what Mom says.”
“She’s kind of a bitch sometimes, though.”
She wasn’t wrong. “True enough,” I said.
“And a liar,” Kitty added.
I frowned. “Not sure about that.”
Kit went for a subject change: “How are you?”
“I’m not sure there are words in the world that can answer that question.”
She shrugged, like, Fair enough, and tried a new angle. “How do you feel?”
“Physically? Or emotionally?”
“Either. Both.”
But I didn’t want to share any of that with her. Talking about things that tender required a closeness she had forfeited a long time ago. “What’s with the suitcase?” I asked.
“I was thinking I might come stay here in the evenings. With you. You know: when Mom’s not around.”
I eyed the recliner chair. It was supposed to flatten into a bed, but I couldn’t imagine how.
I shook my head. “No.”
“No what?”
“No, you shouldn’t stay here.”
“Don’t you want company?”
“Not yours.”
She frowned a little. “Are you mad at me?”
I looked away. “It’s just weird to see you. My life is weird enough right now.”
“I want to help.”
“Yeah, but you’re not helping. You’re making things worse.”
She didn’t answer. It was clear that hadn’t occurred to her.
“Want to know who I’ve been staying with?” she asked then, brightly, even chattily, and before I could say no, she went on, “Fat Benjamin. From high school. Do you remember him?”
This was a classic Kitty trick: pretending things were fine until everybody forgot they weren’t. She was trying to lure me in.
I didn’t answer.
“Remember how he used to give me rides home in that Jetta with the broken back windows with Hefty bags duct-taped over them?”
“Did you just call this guy ‘Fat Benjamin’?”
“Everybody calls him that.”