Breathless (3 page)

It’s late at night when Cooper comes to my room. “Hey, man.”

I’m awake but groggy. “Don’t let the nurses catch you. It’s after visiting hours.”

He taps his closed fist against mine. “I didn’t want to run into the paparazzi.”

I grunt. “Dad’s running interference. Just a few reporters checking in so far.”

“Yeah, I saw it on the news. Big story, along with Mrs. Ford’s dog tearing up the flower beds at City Hall.”

I grin. Alexander’s a small place, and because so many alumni are still around, high school athletics has a big following. Football is king, but my honors in diving have given me supporters. “Not the way I want to be remembered,” I say. “For a failed dive.”

“What’s that?” Cooper points to a machine by my bed.

“Happy juice.” I hold up a button linked by a tube to the machine that runs into a vein on my arm. “A morphine drip. I push this, and I’m happy.”

Cooper nods. “Don’t go liking it too much.”

“Never happen. The stuff makes me loopy. It clogs my brain.”

Cooper doesn’t crack a smile or give a comeback.

I take a deep breath. “Thanks for saving my butt.”

“Would have ruined the picnic if you drowned.”

Better, I think, more like the old Coop. He’s always got my back.

“You get the boat to the house?”

“Yeah. Hosed it down and cleaned it up.”

“I freaked all of you out, didn’t I?”

“Did you freak yourself out?”

“A little,” I admit. “When I couldn’t swim, couldn’t kick … no control. I hate not having control.”

“That’s why we need the buddy system,” he says. “Don’t do that again.”

I grin up at him. “You sound like Emily.”

He looks away when I mention my sister. “They going to let you out of here anytime soon?”

“Don’t know. I have an MRI tomorrow. A kind of whole-body X-ray,” I explain.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night. You can tell me if they discover a functioning brain.”

I don’t want him to leave. “Until then,” I say, and flick the button on my morphine drip. “Just me and my happy juice.”

He grins. He’s the best guy on earth and majorly underappreciated by most people at school. He acts tough and scary, but because of where he lives, it pays to have creeps afraid of you. I’ve always kept his secrets, especially about his mom.

“Thanks, Coop.” The morphine spreads through me, but he’s already gone.

*   *   *

Darla comes to visit twice a day before she hits her summer job at the theater concession stand where she works five nights a week. “The money’s shabby, but it gets me out of the house,” she told me when she first took the job. “Plus, I have another mouth to feed.”

“Your car.” Her grandmother left her some money when she died, and Darla’s mom helped her buy an old car. She works for gas money.

“And clothes,” Darla added. “I need new clothes.”

“What’s wrong with wearing your bikini?”

She makes a face. “Goose bumps.”

She’s my babe. Plus, she’s beautiful and smells like flowers and gives me a high that beats morphine by a mile. Most guys see her rack first, which I’ll admit is impressive. I see her eyes. Big, blue, full of feeling. They look inside me and make me want to be better than I am.

“Things all right at home?” I understand about her wanting to be away from her house. Her old man’s a real piece of work. I think he hits her; I know he hits her mom.

Her pretty smile droops a little. “I just stay out of his way.”

Another reason to be out of this hospital. The two of us should be hanging at the lake or at my house to keep her away from the guy. “Soon as I’m out of here—”

She kisses me. “Just get better, Prince Charming.”

I pull her into my hospital bed—strictly forbidden—and we heat up the sheets before a nurse can find us.

Between CT scans and MRIs and lab-tech bloodlettings, visitors start to hit my room. Coach Davis, my swim coach; guys from the team who aren’t away on vacation; adults and kids from church; two pastors; mere acquaintances; friends of my parents; even a few more reporters pop in. Seeing Coach and the guys is the hardest, and it makes me miss my life even more. “The team needs you,” Coach tells me, “so get better.”

“Diving’s my whole life. I’ll be back.”

He squeezes my shoulder. “It takes a bone around six weeks to knit. Plenty of time for you to heal and get back in the gym and rebuild the muscle before school starts.”

Weight lifting is good conditioning, so Coach
requires his team to spend so many hours a week working out. “I’ll be ready when school starts,” I say.

“You’re the best we have,” he says seriously. “Probably the best in Alabama. Stay healthy.”

My head swells with his praise. “I won’t let you down, Coach. I swear.”

“I
t’s osteosarcoma. Bone cancer.”

Mom’s words hit me like stones. I can’t say a word.

“The tumor just starts growing. Boys are more likely to get it than girls because their bones grow so fast. Random error from DNA gone amok.” Her voice cracks. “No way to predict who’ll get it. It just happens.”

We’re at home in the family room on a sunny summer morning. Light floods through the windows, and the ceiling fan whaps the air with long blades. The smell of bacon from breakfast hangs in the air. She and Dad are on the sofa and I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of them. A
House and Garden
picture of a perfect family. “But …
but Travis isn’t sick.” My feeble protest as the picture begins to shatter.

“The bone in his leg is sick.”

“What are they going to do?”

“Chemo and radiation. And surgery.”

“To cut out the tumor?”

“To cut off his leg.”

I think I’m going to throw up. “But they can’t!”

Dad’s eyes are bloodshot and Mom’s barely holding herself together. “They must.”

“Does he know? Have you told him?”

“We’re meeting his doctor at noon and we’ll tell him together.”

“Me too?”

“No. You’re staying here.”

“But…”

Mom drills me with a look. In truth, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to see the light go out of my brother’s eyes.

E
mily called crying and told me the news. Once we hung up, I went out on the cement pad in back of our trailer and began wailing on my punching bag. Sweat is pouring into my eyes. My arms are heavy and my knuckles sore inside the gloves. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. The doctors are going to cut off Travis’s leg.

A neighbor’s dog is barking, and someone yells, “Shut up!” The dog yelps in pain and I slump to the ground and hang my head. I can’t help the dog. I can’t help Travis. I can’t help Emily. I’m good for nothing.

I get up, turn on the hose, and take a long drink. I douse my head and neck to cool off. I go inside the trailer, where it’s dark and the AC wall
unit and two tabletop fans are barely keeping the place cool. The air stinks. Dishes are piled in the sink and the garbage can is overflowing. I should clean it up. If I don’t, no one else will.

I’m hungry, and I glance at the clock. It’s after two and I haven’t had anything to eat since last night. My summer job at the burger joint starts tomorrow. Until then, I’m on my own. I hear Ma snoring in the back above the racket from the AC. I walk to the bedroom and crack open the door. She’s lying half on, half off the rumpled bed. I go inside, scoop up her feet, and position her better on the bed. She grunts but doesn’t wake. On the nightstand I see a half-empty vodka bottle. She hasn’t worked in weeks, but she still manages to buy her booze.

“Get a job, Ma,” I say quietly. My paycheck won’t stretch far enough to cover rent and electricity, food, gas for my car, and her booze.

I wonder what other guys talk about with their mothers. Wouldn’t they tell them about their best friend having cancer? Mine probably doesn’t remember that I have a best friend.

I pull an old soiled comforter over her, see her purse on the floor and pick it up. Inside
I find a twenty-dollar bill. I know how she came by it.

I should go to the hospital. I can’t. Not today. Travis needs time to think this out for himself.

I leave the bedroom, grab the keys to my old Pontiac off a wall hook, and head out to buy food.

“L
iars.” That’s what I say when the doctors tell me. Mom is teary eyed and Dad’s face is stone. Dr. Madison has come with another doctor, an oncologist, Dr. Wolfsen.

“I know this is a shock—”

“You’re wrong,” I say. “I can’t have cancer. I feel fine.”

“Your leg isn’t fine,” Dr. Madison says. “There’s a tumor in the bone. That’s why it broke.”

Mom reaches out to touch me, but I jerk away.

“We’ll start treatment at once,” Wolfsen says.

“I don’t want you to cut off my leg.” I feel like I’m going to puke. If I do, I want it to get all over him.

“Chemo first,” Wolfsen says, as if I haven’t
spoken. “Then the surgery. Then more chemo. Radiation probably. We’ll run more tests. Sometimes, if the cancer is localized, we can do a bone graft and save the limb. I don’t expect that to be the case for you, though. I’m being honest with you, Travis. I’m always honest with my patients. I won’t give you false hope.”

“You can’t cut off my leg!” I say it louder to make sure he hears me this time.

“And we don’t want you to lose your leg, but if we don’t amputate, and if the cancer spreads—”

“And it will spread unless we amputate,” Dr. Madison says.

Wolfsen keeps looking at me. “—you will die.”

Blunt. To the point. A leg for my life. They consider it a good trade-off. I’m not sure I do.

“There are prosthetics—” Mom starts.

I squash her words with a look. Fake legs. I’ve seen video clips of wounded soldiers with artificial limbs valiantly jogging while a reporter shoves a microphone in their faces and applauds their courage. I’ve watched the Wheelchair Olympics on TV. That’s not who I want to be. No diver ever won medals with a missing body part.

“Go away,” I say.

Before Mom can protest, Dad takes her arm. “Give him space.”

All the space in the world won’t make me feel better about what they want to do to me. Wolfsen says, “I’m starting a chemo infusion immediately. The first protocol will be short and intense. You’ll be an outpatient. You’ll have physical therapy and a physiologist who’ll help you learn to use your prosthesis when the time comes. And you’ll see a psychologist too. You’ll get through this, Travis. You’re young and strong, and if the cancer hasn’t spread beyond the tumor, survival rates are sixty to eighty percent.”

“And if it has?” He’s trying not to scare me, but I stare him down.

“One thing at a time,” he says.

“We’ll fight it,” Mom says.

“It’s not your leg,” I tell her.

“We’ll get through this,” Dad says quietly.

I hear their use of “we,” but this is happening to me. To my body. To my life. To my future.

Cooper knows because Emily’s told him. He looks ready to explode when he comes to visit.

“I keep looking at my leg, trying to imagine it gone,” I tell him.

“How did you get cancer?”

“Don’t know. I just did.” I close my eyes. “I don’t want them to cut off my leg.”

Cooper shoves his fist into the mattress of my hospital bed. The blow is strong enough for me to feel vibrations. “It sucks.”

I can’t get my mind around never walking on my own two legs again. “You should have let me drown.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

I take a deep breath. “Guess it’ll be Lenny Feldman’s time to shine.” Feldman has been my main competition, chasing after the same medals as me. He’s a good diver, but I’ve beaten him out for top honors at every meet. I tell Coop, “I’d been looking forward to kicking his butt at state. Guess he’ll laugh his head off over this turn of events.”

“No one will be laughing,” Cooper says. “You made him a better diver by competing against him. Now he’ll just be ordinary.”

My throat clogs up when I think about not looking down on pool water again with judges and teammates watching. I want to feel the cool water
on my skin so bad I can taste it. I want to plunge beneath shimmering water into the quiet world of blue silence. I feel my eyes get wet. I turn my head so Cooper won’t see my weakness.

“You can still dive,” he says. “You’ll figure it out. I know you. You don’t give up.”

I search for a spark of determination inside me. I come up empty.

Seeing Darla, telling her, is hardest of all. My beautiful girlfriend. Blue eyes crying. I put my arms around her, knowing what I have to do. “It’s okay, babe.”

“But cancer,” she says. “That’s so awful. My grandma had cancer.”

“That’s what this is for.” I hold up my arm with the IV line leading to the bag of chemicals on the stand next to the bed. I’m already feeling a little sick—they said I might—but the cancer diagnosis doesn’t affect me like the leg amputation does.

Darla pulls away, fumbles for a tissue. “My nose is dripping.”

“You’re still pretty.”

She laughs a little. “I love you.”

“Yes. About that.”

“What about it?”

“I’ll understand if you … if you …” I can’t get the words out.

“If I what?” She squints. “Are you dumping me?”

My arm burns where the chemo is going into my vein. “I’m telling you that you can move on. I’ll understand.”

She’s perched on the bed and jumps off. “Is that what you want?”

“No. I—I just think you need to review your options.”

“My options? Do you think I have a Plan B because you’re sick?”

Nothing’s coming out the way I thought it would. “A lot of guys will be interested in you if I’m not in the picture. If you want to—”

“Want to what?” she interrupts me. “Get a new boyfriend? One who doesn’t have cancer?” She’s looking angry.

“It’s the leg too, Darla. No more of a lot of things we used to do together. You should have a choice.”

She’s glaring at me now. “I’m making my
choice. The leg thing doesn’t bother me. So you’ll have one leg. Big deal.”

I get angry. “Well, it’s big deal to me! No more diving. I’ll have a piece of equipment strapped to my
stump.”
I say the word with all the hatred for it that I feel. “I’m losing part of my body, Darla. They’re cutting off my leg. Don’t you know what that means?”