I shake my head.
And here it comes, the elaborate goodbye routine. When Mom isn’t threatening me with death and holding my sickness over my head, she occasionally tries to shelter me from the ugliness of my fate. I don’t know why she bothers. It’s hard to forget I’m dying when she does this all the time—says goodbye like it might be the last time.
She crosses the room and pulls me into a hug, kissing the top of my head and breathing in the scent of my hair. “I love you so much,” she whispers.
“I love you too.”
“So much.”
“I know, Mom. I love you too.”
“You mean the world to me.” She presses me into her chest.
I let her do her thing. There’s no use complaining. It’d just hurt her feelings.
She gives me one last kiss on the temple, and then she’s finally gone.
When I hear the engine rumble to life in the parking lot, I push the computer off my lap and emerge from my bedroom.
The apartment is quiet, dust floating lazily in the streams of light beaming across the Berber carpet.
I’ve spent countless hours, days, weeks holed up in this apartment, but for some reason I see it now with new eyes. The tower of bills stacked on the chipped Formica countertop. The water stains on the ceiling from the storm last summer. The brown plaid couch with the gum stain, where I’ll spend my morning watching annoying talk shows in which middle-aged women compete to yell the loudest about hot topics. The small square window with the broken venetian blinds and a view of the parking lot full of overflowing Dumpsters.
If it isn’t hell, it’s at least purgatory.
I suddenly can’t be in my house for a second longer. I cross quickly to the front door and step outside, sitting on the creaky metal stairs and breathing in the hot, cottony air. My chest feels immediately lighter, as if a heavy weight has been lifted and I can suddenly breathe again.
I tip my head back to the sky, so perfectly blue it looks Photoshopped. Did Jenny notice that? Does anyone who isn’t closing in on their expiration date understand how beautiful this world is, that they have it all at the tips of their fingers if they would just look up from their phones and notice?
I wonder what Jenny would think about the invitation….
I give my head a shake. I’m not thinking about that anymore.
A bird soars into the whipped-cream clouds; I track its trajectory as it sails high, then dives low, wings spread wide, like a piece of performance art. What would it feel like to slice through dewy clouds, to feel the wind on my face like that?
My peace shatters as our downstairs neighbor emerges from her apartment. She’s simultaneously bitching into her cell about her boyfriend and smoking a cigarette. I catch a whiff of smoke and feel my chest tighten. But that’s impossible. She’s too far away, the smoke’s too thin. I’m being paranoid.
If Mom were here, she’d whisk me inside, mutter about the smoke, and then urge me not to come out here again. If Mom knew I was considering a midnight rendezvous at an old, abandoned warehouse, she’d put a padlock on my door. She’d say if a little smoke is enough to make me reach for my inhaler, imagine what’s waiting for me at 291 Schilling Road: dust, chemicals, mold. Or, put another way: death, death, death.
The sad thing is, Mom’s usually right.
I aim a wistful glance at the bird, then tuck my clipped wings and go back into my cage.
By the time the morning talk shows are over, the heavy feeling in my chest is back, worse than before. I’m twitchy, uncomfortable, completely unable to sit still.
I can’t get the invitation off my mind.
It wouldn’t be so hard to get there, to 291 Schilling Road. Mom’s always asleep by ten p.m., Jenny by eleven. The car keys will be by the door, and even if I don’t drive often, I know how. I could just go and see…exactly what a murderer looks like in the dark.
Feeling infinitely stupid and embarrassed, I get out my computer and bring up the address again. The warehouse looks somehow more decrepit than it did this morning. Even Google Earth thinks this is a bad idea.
If I could just figure out who’s behind this. I find an unused spiral notebook in my desk drawer, crack it open to the first page, and write SUSPECTS at the top in glittery blue gel pen, underlining it twice. I stare at the blank page, racking my brain for a clue—any clue—about who could have sent the invite, but I come up with nothing. I suppose that to have suspects, I’d have to have a life. I snap the notebook shut.
Mom comes home at noon, as always.
She gives me my chest physio, as always.
I dutifully eat my specially prepared high-salt, high-calorie meal, slurp back the meal-replacement shake, and pop the twenty-hundred pills—antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, enzymes, you name it—that I need to make my body work.
As always.
That’s my life. Routines, day in and day out. As little variation as possible. Everything I come into contact with planned, measured, sterilized.