When they come back, my mother stands beside the examination table and slips my right hand into hers. Her hand is warm; my hands are always cold and her hands will always feel warm to me. I look up at her, but she turns away. She gives my hand a squeeze.
Lyme disease is new then, barely known. The doctor hasn’t tested me for it. We can see only what we have a name for. Now he crouches in front of the table. His eyes are ice blue, too bright. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he says, and his voice is artificially high, like he is talking to a child. “Not physically. Sometimes, when a person’s very sad…”
Something inside me rings. I hate him. I hate him instantly.
Outside, in the parking lot, my parents walk brusquely ahead. I am aswirl with rage and grief, trying not to cry. What did he see when he looked at me? “My knees hurt!” I say. “That’s not in my head!” My eyes are hot and stinging by the time we reach the car. I fight to keep the tears from escaping. “You don’t believe him, do you?”
My father starts the car up, eases the wheel. It falls to my mother to answer me. For a minute there’s only silence and my father’s driving. Then my mother twists back in the seat. She still won’t look me in the eyes. “Sweetie,” she says, “we can’t rule anything out.”
To try to remember that year now is to slip from image to image, all with the faraway quality of a dream. The bustling sounds of my siblings’ leaving for school in the morning, my mother’s lips on my forehead kissing me goodbye, the hours of sleep with the sun warm through the window. Dragging the pink wool afghan my grandmother crocheted at my birth down to the living room couch, where I spend my day with its scratchy itchiness spread over me. The glass stein I fill with cinnamon tea I brew strong, so I can sip in the warmth. On that gray couch I slip-slide between wakefulness and sleep, between a blissful kind of nothingness and the cold bone boredom that I am still in this house, that time is not moving quickly enough. Even when I sleep it away.
My parents find a new specialist, who diagnoses the Lyme and prescribes intravenous antibiotics. Now, in the afternoon after school lets out, there’s almost always a visitor on the doorstep, a classmate the school has sent with a thick manila envelope stuffed with mimeographed assignments from my classes. The front door my parents have put on the house is thick oak with stained glass lilies at its center, and my first glimpse of one of these girls always comes through the lily, its leaves fragmenting her face like a Picasso. I open the door. She’s in tights, her skirt from school, her hair pulled back into a neat brush-gleaming ponytail. She smiles and thrusts the envelope at me. “These are for you,” she says.
I glimpse myself as if from the outside. The dark sweatpants and oversize sweatshirt I live in, once kept for cool summer nights on the beach in Nantucket, but now what I want to disappear into. The hair I haven’t washed for days, which sticks out from my head in fins of frizz. Plastic lines from my home IV crawl from the veins in my hand and coil taped around my arm. Do I see the awkwardness in her eyes, the way even a child can sense who’s sick and has stopped fighting? I feel it. I feel exposed.
But strangely, I am all right. The world I belong to now is the one in the books I read. When I am awake, I am reading. My English textbook has an early Fitzgerald story in it, and I read that and then his others and only then Gatsby, tracing the development of Fitzgerald’s spun-out dream. My mother, I know, loved Zelda, and the books let me imagine my mother as a younger woman in her studio apartment in New York, the sparkling brunch parties she’s told me of. On my father’s shelf I find Michener, and in those thousands of pages the wider world of exploration he hungered for. Both my parents I come to know better and differently through their books. In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life. My days are webbed and sticky with the cotton of sleep.
*
When summer comes again, my father decides he’s sick of going only to Nantucket. They’ve taken us to France—an idyllic month spent in a stone cottage on a mountain road just down from the cottage that still bears my maternal grandmother’s maiden name over the door, ZANNE—but we have not seen, my father declares, America. He is in love again, with the West again, and Garth Brooks is back on our speakers and my father’s jeans flare out over his boots again. For months, he spreads atlases across the Formica kitchen table and gathers the two-and-a-half-by-four-inch perforated cards that for my entire childhood he keeps in his shirt pocket with a fountain pen for notes, cards that will never run out and I’ll never see him buy and I won’t know to miss until suddenly, when he is an old man and his shirt style changes, they are gone.
On these cards, he sketches his plans. We will fly west and rent an RV. We will pick up my cousins in Arizona, drive to the Grand Canyon and up through Utah, then the edge of California, to see the national parks. My mother and he compromise: one night in a hotel, the night at the Grand Canyon. Otherwise, yes, the RV. Night after night, my father plans.
*
The trip is beautiful, and the trip is a disaster. Looking back now, imagining him in the high pilot-seat window of the cab, the woman he loves beside him and the four children they have made together in the back, I can feel the rush that summer must have been to him. What a triumph that this world was his. That he, who had no father, whose mother struggled always, had America to give us. He’ll show us the brilliant rust colors of Bryce Canyon, the way the sun hits the high red rock at midday, the shadows cast by the cliffs and overhangs. He’ll show us how vast the Grand Canyon is, and the Native trails etched into the rock at its bottom. His wife born of French and Italian immigrants, his own family Polish and Russian, this is his to claim. America. His enthusiasm is boundless.
But as a child I am curled in the back on a thin mattress on the metal frame of the RV, and I watch the country pass by through a dim foot-square window. I am up over twenty aspirin a day now, doctor’s orders, to try to cut the swelling in my joints. The pain that sets in from the air-conditioning starts as a kind of burn in my knees and fingers and spreads into a prickling, nauseating ache. My father keeps the air-conditioning up high, and though I complain to him and to my mother, he either won’t listen or can’t believe me. And what he says makes sense: He is hot and I am hurting, but why should I think that my hurting should outweigh his hot?