I stood up, banging my knee hard against the edge of the bed. ‘That’s just some stupid rumor.’
Stella’s lips parted, startled.
‘He would have told me. He wouldn’t have kept something like that a secret. It’s an easy thing to speculate, anyway-girl dies in car accident, my father leaves town-let’s blame it on misguided love, on him feeling responsible, or whatever you said. Let’s blame it on loving the wrong person. They were teenagers. They couldn’t have been in love. That doesn’t come until later.’
Stella looked amused. ‘It doesn’t?’
Her mocking tone of voice scratched against me. I plucked the hedgehog from her chest and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall so hard that it squeaked.
‘I know my father,’ I said in a shaky voice. ‘And that never happened.’ I thought of the picture I’d found all those years ago: Mark Jeffords and Kay Mulvaney, (secret!) engagement, 1970. I thought of Kay’s round, pie-like face, her button nose.
‘I can understand if it’s hard to accept,’ Stella said.
‘There’s nothing to accept. I know my father. It didn’t happen.’
‘Summer…’
‘I know my father.’ As I said it again, a little voice needled me. Do you? The voice sounded like Stella’s, but her face was blank, indicative of nothing.
I slumped back down in the chair and put my head in my hands. When I looked up, Stella’s eyes were closed again, but she wasn’t asleep. I moved to the other side of the room, picked up the hedgehog, and put it back on her chest. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
I answered by letting out a little groan. I pressed my palm onto her bare leg.
‘Your hands are cold,’ she said, her eyes still closed.
Outside, a black van pulled up, a ramp mechanically lowered, and the man in the electric wheelchair motored inside. Far off in the distance, a dog barked. Stella smiled, hearing it too. I was sure she missed her dogs, who were roaming around the house without us, who were swimming in the creek without an audience.
‘So how’s my dad doing?’ I asked quietly.
‘He’s good,’ Stella said, opening her eyes a crack. ‘You know he and Rosemary are living in Brooklyn, right?’
I nodded silently.
‘She sounds like a good person, Summer.’
I swallowed hard. ‘I know.’
I plucked the hedgehog off her chest once more and squeezed it. It made a small, dying wail. I shut my eyes, about to cry, but nothing came out.
Stella pressed her thin, papery fingers against one of the IVs in her hand. ‘So. Tell me straight. It’s in my brain, right?’
I looked over at her. Thankfully, they hadn’t taken her wig off. I could still see the flaking remains of the temporary heart tattoo we affixed to her chest, right under her chemo port. A chill ran through me, and I got a horrible fear that I was either going to pee my pants or throw up. ‘Yes,’ I whispered.
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘So what do we do now?’
I sat down next to her on the bed. She was so small that there was plenty of room. She smelled the same way she had the day I met her-like peanut-butter cookies. It was a scent that emanated from her pores, even when her insides were rotting. We reschedule Cheveyo, I wanted to tell her. We try meditation. We could go to Tibet. We don’t have to stop. So what if I was trying to save her? She deserved saving. I wanted to be able to save someone.
The following day, I would wake in the same hospital waiting room and see a crowd gathered around the television. What they thought was a small plane had crashed into a building in New York City, and I would soon find out which building it was. I would stand there as a jumbo jet hit the building next to it. Someone-many people-would scream. More things would happen, more things would fall down, people would run, and the whole view I remembered from my Brooklyn apartment window would immediately change forever. A minute would morph into a half-hour, but I wouldn’t move. People around me would be slack-jawed in the middle of the hospital hall.
‘Can you believe what they put on TV these days?’ Stella would demand, as soon as I entered her room. ‘It’s for some movie, right? It’s in poor taste, blowing up the World Trade Center…but then I stopped understanding Hollywood after the Fifties.’
And a nurse would turn halfway, looking at me with terror. I don’t have control of this, do you? I would tell Stella that yes, it was for a movie. And that she shouldn’t worry, that television did all kinds of horrible, manipulative things these days, just like War of the Worlds on the radio years ago.