Stella woke up early on Monday morning, just as the sun cracked over the horizon. I was slumped just outside her hospital room, reading a Cosmopolitan someone had left behind. There was an article inside that read, Daddy’s Girl: Is it true that we go after men who resemble our fathers?
I heard Stella cough and went into her room. For the first time, her eyes were open and she was looking around as if she understood where she was. She saw me, smiled, and then shrugged at the tubes running out of her arm and the IV bags alongside her bed.
‘You weren’t feeling so great.’ I sat down in the little orange chair next to her bed. ‘How do you feel now?’
Stella cast her eyes off to the side. ‘If I had a martini I’d probably be great. You think you could sneak me one?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Come on.’ Stella hit me weakly on my arm. ‘I bet you could.’
I played with the hem of my t-shirt. ‘I got you this.’ I held out a little stuffed hedgehog I’d found in the gift shop last night. When I squeezed it, the hedgehog squeaked. It was either a dog toy or a baby toy. Stella grinned and reached for it, pressing it to her nose and then to her chest.
‘They did some more scans, didn’t they?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘A few.’
‘So is the needle not working for me? Do we need another kind of needle?’ She called the IV chemo treatments ‘the needle’, as if she was a rock-and-roll heroin addict.
I looked away. It was always more chemo after her setbacks -it meant the cancer had advanced somewhere else, and they were going to try the drugs again to hold it back for as long as possible. Except this time. I wasn’t sure what would be worse-if I told Stella the truth, or if I let the doctor do it. The doctor was from Haiti-dark-skinned, with lovely eyes, thick, black hair and a funny last name that I couldn’t remember but knew it sounded like a magic word. If I left it up to the doctor to tell her, Stella might slap him and say something terrible, like that people from Haiti couldn’t be doctors because they were uncivilized voodoo-worshippers. Instead of treating her with normal medicine, the Haitian doctor would probably want to sacrifice a chicken and spurt its blood over her forehead. We’d watched a PBS report about voodoo in Haiti the week before.
‘What were you doing, going to the bathroom in a place like that?’ I asked.
‘I had to pee. But then I fell, I guess. I don’t know. Is that what happened?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone into that place, though. It was scary.’
‘Oh, nonsense. It was fine. The woman behind the counter was very nice. I didn’t get a chance to ask where the jackalope was, though. Had to go so badly, I felt dizzy.’
‘I thought it was scary in there,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m not afraid of anything anymore.’ Stella held up her thin arms, marred with needle tracks.
‘You were afraid of Cheveyo,’ I said quietly.
Stella eyed me. I looked back at her, then stared down at my lap. ‘Sorry. But I mean…’ Something caught in my throat; I had to look into the rectangular overhead light and wait for it to pass. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t have an agenda, trying and trying to save her. That I wasn’t using her as an excuse. But I wasn’t sure I should lie to her, if she was right.
‘I said that for your own good,’ Stella said gently, understanding without me having to say a word. ‘I’m not angry. I’m just saying. We’d have a much better time if we just, I don’t know…Smoked grass just for the hell of it, not because it might be some miracle cure.’
I balled up my fists and pressed them into my knees. ‘Who’s going to save you, if not me?’
‘No one.’
‘Well, then, I’ll save you.’
She let out a laugh. After a while, she took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t tell you everything about Ruth. You were right-of course I was angry at her. So angry, in fact, I told her husband what I saw.’
I widened my eyes. ‘What did he say?’
‘He just got really quiet, nodded his head, and said, I see. I knew what I’d done. But I wanted to ruin Ruth’s life-I thought she’d ruined mine. The thing was, she hadn’t ruined mine. We got over it, Skip and me. We talked about it. Who talked back then? But we did, as best we could. But Ruth and Gerald…’ She pulled at her bedsheets. ‘What’s done is done. You make mistakes and you learn from them. Everyone does. It’s just what happens. You probably wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t. The thing is, I have a feeling that if either of us would have just broken down and apologized, Ruth and I would’ve been okay. But it’s so hard to start, isn’t it? To say it. You carry this anger around about someone, and they carry different anger around about you, and everybody’s secretly so angry at everyone else, and we’re all hurting one another. It’s not like anyone’s innocent.’
‘Maybe,’ I said.