Mom’s palms are warm on my cheeks. She holds my face and looks me squarely in the eyes. “Lake,” she says. “You know you can only have one.”
“No,” I say. Tears drip from the sides of my nostrils. My chin trembles. “No, Mom, there’s an exception. There has to be an exception.” She tries to lean in to kiss my forehead, but I tear myself away. “Give me my phone. Where’s my phone? Did you bring our tablet? We need to start doing research. Dad, help.”
I feel around the hospital bed, searching for the cold, slick glass of my cell phone. Maybe there is some kind of application. Some seminal court case I’ve never read about. Some instance where, I don’t know, twins died and it was deemed too inhumane to bring back only one.
The bed’s empty. My dad brings my head into his chest and holds the side of my face to him. I can hear his heart beating underneath his shirt. “There aren’t any exceptions, Lake. That’s the law. You can only choose one. Just one. Always.”
“But how do you know?”
My dad sighs. “Trust us, Lake. We know.” And he sounds very sad when he says this, because despite all the strides that science has made, despite the fact that what’s known as the “lifeblood,” injected as part of the vitalis process, can regenerate fully dead cells to health, it has still managed to fail my brother and now the process will fail me too.
He doesn’t let go of me. I try to match my breaths to his. Try and fail. In the background, I recognize the robotic buzz of my brother’s wheelchair and, when my dad releases me, I look over to see that Matt has turned his back to us and is now waiting at the door.
I didn’t know that people could break until Matt was already broken.
The actual breaking, as in the fracture of the bones, happened sometime in the last few weeks. I can’t pinpoint the timeline anymore. The details feel hazy the farther we get from the event, like I’m trying to nail down something small on my calendar and I can’t remember exactly which day I did it on.
It feels as though I’m outside bulletproof glass that’s ten feet thick while the rest of my family is on the inside. For endless days my parents have busied in and out of Matt’s room. Often they’ll gently tell me to stay out of the way. It’s a sensitive time after all. And they treat me like I’m an acquaintance who has brought a tuna casserole to a funeral instead of their daughter and Matt’s only sister.
As a result, the days are long and boring. Mom breaks the news to me that I’ll be on some sort of bereavement leave for the rest of the school year and I’ll have to study independently for my finals. When I tell her I don’t want to take time off school, she says that it’s for the best, and the discussion ends there because I don’t want to be a pain about it.
In regular life, we play along with reruns of Family Feud on Thursday nights. The winners get desserts, the losers have to serve them. This Thursday, we don’t.
Mom always comes to read magazines on my bed in the morning while I take a shower and get dressed. But now she’s never there.
Instead, the three of them talk in Matt’s room for hours, in low murmurs that never crystallize into words. Nobody invites me to this new family of three. Jenny finds a new best friend since I’m not at school anymore and, without my parents to drive me around, we both stop trying to stay in touch.
I scroll through web pages, reading all the articles on quadriplegia that I can find. That’s the diagnosis for Matt since the accident. The specifics are bleak. Total loss of function for all four limbs. Impairment in controlling bowel and bladder movements. Spasticity. Loss of sexual function. I try to gloss over that last one.
The prognosis—that’s the medical term for Matt’s disease forecast—is even worse. Bed sores. Frozen joints. Respiratory complications and infections. Something they’re calling deep vein thrombosis that I don’t quite understand but which sounds terrible.
But none of these things seem real to me because I can’t see Matt.
I don’t know what day of the week it is, only that it’s mid-May, and the humidity has already been gradually creeping indoors, where it leaves a slippery film of sweat on every surface. I get up the guts to knock on the door. The voices behind it stop, but no one answers to let me in. My mom, my dad, and Matt are all in one room and nobody calls for me to join them.
My throat goes tight and my eyes prick with tears. I wait five, ten minutes before retreating.
The house feels extra big with everyone but me living in Matt’s bedroom. I’m alone with an ache in my chest that won’t go away.
Tonight, I lie awake in my bed, idly turning over the inhaler in my hands. I haven’t needed it since I stopped going to soccer practice, a change that happened when I quit going to that school. I’ve been able to breathe deeply and easily even after I’ve been crying for a couple of hours.
I’m waiting for my dad to turn off the television and for my mom to get her last glass of water for the night. When my eyes start to close, I pinch my arms to stay awake.
Eventually, it’s just the sound of the ocean outside. A relentless roar. Mom used to say that what she loved about the ocean is that each morning it brought along a fresh start. Whether you left footprints, a sandcastle, or words printed in the beach, the next day they’d be gone and what you’d be left with was a clean slate, like the beach had scars the water could heal. In science class they taught us that this process was called “erosion.” The water wasn’t healing the beach at all, but tearing bits of it away. I like Mom’s version better, and I listen to the sound of the waves, wishing that they could heal us too.
I crawl out of bed wearing a big sleep shirt that goes down to my knees. The long hallway between my room and Matt’s is spooky. The tile is cold under my feet. Tucked underneath my armpit is a paperback copy of The Chocolate War. The book’s been earmarked at page 176. It’s not that I can’t read it myself. I’m thirteen. I know how to read. But I’ve never been much of a reader. This only changes when Matt chooses a specific book for me and when it’s something we do together. Funny that with my stuffy lungs and asthma, I’m the athletic one and Matt’s the sibling with his nose always in a book. I have a sick thought that I wish instantly to take back. What I think is that maybe the universe knew what it was doing when it made Matt the way he is—an intellectual, as my dad would say. But that would mean that Matt was meant to get paralyzed, and I know that can’t be right.
I’m nervous in a way that I’ve never been to see my brother. I knock softly on his door, three times. There’s no answer. I’m afraid that if I knock again, Mom and Dad will wake up and tell me not to bug him.
So I turn the knob and slip through the dark crack. His room smells unfamiliar, like old rubber and medical equipment.