When it clapped shut, Ana screamed, “Bye, Jed!” She was coming toward me down the hall. She was tying her robe. No, my robe. It was my robe. She plucked a grape from the fruit basket, popped it in her mouth. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “We all have needs.”
She reached for my arm. I pulled away. I blinked at her. Her fat cheeks. Her duck lips. That bullshit thing she did with her eyebrows when she was pretending to look serene. The pink streak alongside her face hooking her chin like a warning.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me you hate me. Tell me why I am the worst person you’ve ever known.” She let her head fall to the side like she was bored. She exhaled like she was fogging up a mirror. She brought her hands to her waist. “This is my favorite part.”
Maybe I had known before, but I hadn’t wanted to know. I said it like I was sad for her, and I was. “You have no one.”
She kept herself looking bored. “We are born alone and we die alone, Nan.”
“But you have no one.”
“I need no one,” she said louder.
“Then why are you here?”
She ate another grape. “I needed a place to crash.”
“A place to crash? Who are you?”
“I,” she bellowed, “am whoever you want me to be. I am the space you need filled. I am your projection.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Yes you do.”
“Ana,” I said.
She answered with her puppet pinkie. “Nan?”
“Take off your wig.”
Her eyes flickered as usual, but this time I saw fear. “Why?”
“Take it off.”
“No.”
It happened in slow motion. I reached for her hair, she grabbed my wrist. I pushed her. She tripped. I didn’t expect her to fall, but she did. She landed on the carpet. Her breathing got shallow, a shallow wheeze. Hyperventilating. I crouched over her. I tore the wig off her head. I rubbed my palm against her scalp, hard so I could feel the bristles. Which wasn’t necessary. The hairs on her head were visible.
Ana hadn’t shaved in a while.
I wanted to smack her. I smacked the floor instead. I screamed her name. “Ana!”
She was quiet. And still. Too still.
“Ana?”
I checked her breath.
“Ana!”
I pressed her eyelids back with my thumbs and saw white.
“Anaaaaa!”
38
I’d been in the waiting room for over two hours when the doctor finally came out and said, “Gersh?”
I set the magazine I hadn’t been reading on the table. I’d told them I was her sister because I knew they wouldn’t tell me anything otherwise. When they’d asked me to sign in, I had written Nancy Gersh.
He was a small Hawaiian man with round glasses and a goatee. “Dr. Maka,” he said. “Hello.”
“Nancy.” I shook his hand.
“Your sister is fine,” he said first. “Her blood pressure was very low. It might be the new medication. Common side effect of antidepressants is low blood pressure. Her stomach pain—I imagine it’s stress. She told me she’s been very stressed recently. We have her on a drip now, but I’d like to keep her overnight, just to be sure.”
Antidepressants? I must have looked shocked because he said, too consolingly, “But don’t worry. She’s in good spirits.”
I thought of all the times I’d googled antidepressants, and what Ana would have said if I had told her. Would she have admitted she was taking them herself?? Or would she have said, “Breathe it out”? I guess I somehow thought we’d taken a silent oath to breathe it out together. Why had I assumed that?
On the loudspeaker: “Dr. Maka, patient in room 348.”
“Is that Ana’s room?”
“No,” he said. “She’s on the second floor.”
I imagined Ana in a hospital bed, depressed, with a needle in her hand.
Kindness. Compassion. No, I hoped she was suffering.
“Do you have any questions?” the polite doctor asked.
“I do,” I said. “I have a big question.”
He perked up. “Yes?”
“What about Ana’s cancer?”
He pushed his glasses higher up his nose. “Cancer?”
“Cancer.”
He looked confused.
I was impatient. “Does Ana have cancer or not?”
“No,” he said. “That would be very serious.”
I sighed. “You’re telling me that Ana does not have pancreatic cancer.”
“Nancy. If that were the case—well, let’s just be happy that is not the case.”
“Does she have breast cancer?”
He couldn’t help but look at me sideways. “No.”
Even as I said the words, I somehow still didn’t believe them. “Ana has never had cancer.”
“That is correct,” he said. “Ana is healthy. She had a mammogram recently. It came back clear.”
I chuckled. It was her chuckle. “Ana is not dying.”
“I hope not anytime soon,” the doctor said.
I chuckled again. Like her or like me, I didn’t know.
Ana did not have cancer.
Ana had never had cancer.
Ana was not dying.
Flash to her writing her bucket list. Her concentrated face, that ridiculous souvenir pencil.
Flash to her saying, “I’m dying, Nan. I don’t have time for longing.”
Flash to the piece of paper she’d shown me: PANCREATIC, 3–6 MONTHS. And its decorative font. Had she typed that up herself??
Flash to the night of Peter: “My dying wish, Nan.”
To Jed: “Her dying wish, Mom.”
Outside the hospital window there was a red bird perched on a palm frond, and it was laughing.
On the loudspeaker: “Dr. Maka, room 348.”
The doctor nestled his iPad under his arm. “I should get going,” he said. “Would you like to go back and see your sister now, Ms. Gersh?”
I said nothing.
For too long.
He tried to hide his disapproval. “Or if you have somewhere to be now, you can pick her up in the morning, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
On the loudspeaker: “Dr. Maka, room 348.”
“You have a good night, Ms. Gersh.” He nodded at me and then walked through the door. It swung back and forth in his wake.
Ana seemed far away. The parking lot seemed far away. Both options felt wrong, so I stayed right where I was, my Tevas planted on the mint-green floor, listening to that red bird laugh.
39
Jed opened the door. “Mom?”
I was in Cam’s bed because there was nowhere else to go. Jed’s bed scared me right now, my bed scared me more, the living room still smelled like Portico’s rotting memorial, and I hadn’t wanted to lie down on the kitchen floor.
“Mom?”
I opened my eyes. The Harry Potter bedspread I’d bought Cam when he was ten and beyond it, Jed.
God, his head. My poor baby. He was standing there like such a kid, with his backpack slung over one shoulder.
“Hi,” he said.
But his deep voice and his broad chest and the way the backpack looked almost like a silly prop. Jed was a man now. It was hard to look at him.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…” He searched for vague language. We couldn’t talk about this directly. He tugged at his shirt. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. I know she’s your friend. She just, like, talked me into it or something. I know that sounds stupid. It’s totally my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said like I was sure, or like I wanted to be.
Jed’s hand on the doorframe, sliding up and down. It reminded me of the first night in this house when Chuck kept saying, “Can you believe we’re here?”
“But it is kinda my fault,” Jed said. “I mean…yeah.”