Keep Me in Your Heart (41 page)

Her hands were icy cold, and she warmed them around the cup. He wanted explanations, and she was loathe to give them. Her opportunity to cut and run had passed and she knew it. “I’ll tell you everything.”
Her voice held the raspy sound of weeping. “Just not right now. I—I need some time to pull it all together in my head.”

He was disappointed, but he sensed a change in her, a difference that he hoped wouldn’t disappear. He told himself to be patient. “Tell me when and where,” he said.

“Come to my apartment later. Mom’s playing bingo tonight and Charlie will be out with some of his friends.”

“What time?”

“After seven.”

“And you promise to be there?”

“I’ll be there.”

“And you’ll let me in?”

A tiny smile crept into her heart over his distrust. She knew he was already
in
. “I’ll let you in.”

Nathan was cheerful at dinner that night, making conversation without his parents’ having to pry things out of him. He offered snippets from his day, omitting his ditching adventure without even a qualm of conscience. All he could focus on was getting out of the house and going to be with Lisa. He cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher quickly, and as soon as his mother reappeared from bathing the twins, he announced that he and Skeet were headed to the mall and a movie.

He had been on rocky ground with his mother for a week, their discussion about Lisa standing like a wall
between them. Nathan was glad she didn’t give him her usual third degree when he went out—he could recite her line of questions from memory—and he was grateful for the break. He was also grateful that his father had been working long hours at his office and hadn’t been sucked into the mother-son conflict.

Nathan drove to Lisa’s, parked in front of her building, went to her door and knocked. He felt great relief when she opened the door.

“I made us popcorn,” she said. “You want a cola?”

He did. The place was lit by two lamps, and from the back hall he heard the television. “Um—how are you feeling?”

She gave him a funny look. “I feel fine, Malone.”

For a minute he thought she might have reverted to her old ways. “Me too,” he said.

That made her smile. “Want to see my room?”

“Seems fair. I showed you mine.”

Lisa’s room was especially large, with a bathroom on one end and a wall of closet doors on the other. He realized it was really the apartment’s master bedroom, which made him wonder why she’d gotten it instead of her mother and Charlie. “Nice,” he said, panning the room, taking in everything at once.

His gaze rested on the room’s focal point, a photographic mural of treetops filled with fiery red blossoms. It ran the length of the room’s longest wall, across from a quilt-covered queen-size bed, which was under a window and heaped with decorative pillows. There was a desk, no computer, floor pillows, and a short bookcase
stuffed with books and CDs. He walked to the mural, touched the paper and its crimson flowers. “Looks real.”

“It’s the tops of royal poincianas—flame trees,” Lisa said from behind him. “When we lived in Miami, there was one in our backyard, and every spring it put out these incredible red-orange flowers. I loved it. I used to have tea parties under it. The tree’s leaves are very tiny, so when I stood under it and there was any kind of breeze, the shadow patterns looked like lace on my skin, and I felt like a princess. The branches grow up really high and form a canopy, like an umbrella. When I was a kid, I thought it would one day touch the sky, and then I planned to climb up it and touch the sky too.” Lisa ran her palm along the mural, caressing the paper flowers as she talked.

“It’s a pretty tree,” he said, more fascinated by Lisa’s descriptions and revelations than by the mural. “I’ve never seen one before.”

“They don’t grow this far north. I wish they did.” She cast a longing look at the photograph.

Nathan didn’t get her attachment, but then he didn’t understand his mother’s obsessive interest in their backyard either. “I’ve got to admit, it’s kind of a different look for a bedroom.”

“What did you expect to see? Posters of rock stars?”

“I’ve learned not to have expectations when it comes to you, Lisa.”

She arched an eyebrow, thrust the bowl of popcorn at him. He took a handful, went to her bed and began to
sort through pillows. “Quite a collection.” They were in all sizes and shapes. Some looked like animals, others were richly decorated with tassels, braids and beads. One was shaped and decorated like a motorcycle.

“My mother gives them to me. She likes to shop and add to my stash. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them when I—”

She stopped so abruptly, Nathan was caught off guard. Her face looked flushed. “When you what?”

“Leave. You know, move on.”

He wasn’t sure that was what she’d meant to say.

“Give them away, I suppose,” she said.

“Talk to me, Lisa.” Nathan was growing impatient for her to move into the real reason he’d come over.

She tossed him a floor pillow and settled cross-legged onto another, then put the popcorn bowl between them. She looked nervous, not at all like her usual in-control self. “What do you want to know?”

“Duh. The hospital.”

“It’s a boring story.”

“I’ve got all night.”

“What, no curfew?”

“You’re procrastinating.”

“Yes, I am. On purpose. It’s something I hate to talk about.”

He sat perfectly still, watching the light play on her hair and cheekbones. He wanted to lay her down and kiss her.

“When I was eleven, almost twelve, I started having
bad headaches. I began seeing double, staggering and falling down for no reason. We lived in Miami then. Me and Mom and Charlie.” She stared over Nathan’s head as she spoke.

“Your real dad?”

“Not part of the picture. He was long gone.”

“Go on.”

“We had a little house in North Miami. There was a yard and my tree. I had school and friends.”

“And headaches,” Nathan said, reminding her of the original tack.

“I was put in a hospital. I had all kinds of tests—lots of needles and big scary-looking machines aimed at me. God, I hated it so much.” She shuddered. “In the end, they told us I had a brain stem glioma.” She paused.
“Glioma
. It’s a pretty word, don’t you think?”

His heart pounded with increasing dread. “If you say so.”

“But it’s not a pretty thing, Malone. No, glioma isn’t pretty at all.” She looked at the mural of the trees. “It’s a kind of brain tumor. Most are malignant, and so was mine. It was growing in my upper cerebellum.” She clamped a hand to the base of her neck. “You remember what the cerebellum does from biology class, don’t you?”

He tried to nod.

“Refresher course.” She held up a finger. “It coordinates body movements and lies next to the brain stem, which controls breathing and heartbeats and swallowing.
My little glioma cells were slow growing—a good thing, but also very stubborn … as in hard to kill.” She plucked at the fringe on her floor pillow while she talked. “They couldn’t do surgery: the tumor was too close to the brain stem. Chemo doesn’t affect the type of cancer I had. That left radiation. So, they mapped out a field on my neck, marked it with small permanent blue dots.”

She lifted her hair, turned so that he could see the dots. He’d seen them before and recalled thinking they might have been part of a tattoo she’d decided against. Now he saw that they were laid out in a grid pattern, and more marks had been added. Her hair had been cut too, shaved up the back of her neck and into the base of her skull. The outer layer of hair had been left alone, and it covered the marks and the shaved area when it hung loose. He wanted to touch her neck, trace his fingers along the path. “I see them.”

She let go and her hair fell like a curtain over the telltale grid. “I went for treatments five days a week, for many weeks. Radiation doesn’t hurt; it makes you tired, though. I was pretty scared. I had to lie really still with this monster machine aimed at my neck and the grid. The room had a large glass window and I could see my radiologist, Dr. Glickman, and Charlie from the table. Charlie called the machine a zapper because it was going to zap and destroy the bad cells. He said it was like a video game, and I understood that because he and I would play Nintendo for hours and every
time either of us made a kill, Charlie said that was just like the radiation treatments killing my cancer cells.”

“It must have worked,” Nathan said. “You’re here.”

“It worked. To a degree. They never said I would be cured. Just that the best we could hope for was halting the growth for a time. Most people with brain cancer live two to five years after treatments, if they’re lucky. I’ve made it six.”

Nathan’s heart was pounding so hard, he thought it would pop from his chest. He tasted bile. “Meaning?”

“It’s growing again.”

N
athan was reeling. Lisa had a brain tumor. The look on her face was open and guileless, her violet eyes, clear and pure. How could such a terrible thing be happening to someone so young and beautiful? “What are the doctors doing for you now?”

“Radiation again. I go five days a week.”

That explained her leaving school early and the hospital visits. “Haven’t they figured out some other way to treat this thing by now?”

“Not yet.”

Her answer upset him. What had medical science been doing for all this time? What about all the cancer research he’d heard about, even read about? Why couldn’t any of it help Lisa? “What about in other cities? Other countries?”

“Atlanta has a renowned cancer treatment center. Some of the best doctors in the world are here.”

“And they still only use
radiation
?”

“I won’t do experimental treatments.”

“But why not? If it will help?”

“I don’t know if they will help. Most don’t, according to research. Gliomas are … well, just a bitch to deal with. And … and it’s not the way I want to spend what’s left of my life, hopping from one experiment to another. In and out of hospitals. Feeling like crap.” She smiled ruefully. “I’d rather live like I was dying, not die without ever living.”

“And your mom and Charlie are letting you
do
this?” Nathan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His mother would have tied him down and made him try every medical hope out there if the same thing were happening to him.

“I’m eighteen, Malone. I can do what I want. And they let me have control. I don’t
have
to finish high school, you know. It’s kind of silly in a way. But I want to graduate. For some dumb reason, I really do.”

Subdued, he asked, “Is the radiation working? Is the tumor shrinking like last time?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“But it probably will. I mean, the radiation worked before.”

She tossed a kernel of popcorn at him. “Hey, Malone, don’t freak out on me. It is what it is.”

He jumped up, started pacing. “Well, it sucks! Big-time.” Lisa stood up too. “Now listen to me. There are
some rules for you that go along with this information I just dumped on you.”

“What rules?”

“You can’t tell anyone about this. Not Skeet, not anyone. You hear me?”

“Why?”

“Because I won’t have that whole school staring at me and whispering about me every time I walk down the hall.”

“But—”

“Would
you
want Roddy and his little friends making fun of you?”

“They wouldn’t—”

“Oh please! Grow up. I went through it before. At my other school, kids acted like I had the plague. Half the middle school wouldn’t come near me. Some even did gimp imitations … you know, dragging their leg and scrunching up their faces like a Frankenstein monster.”

“They made
fun
of you? That’s sick.”

“The shrink I saw at the time said—and now I’m quoting: ‘It’s how they cope with their own fears about getting cancer themselves.’ So what? It didn’t make it hurt any less.”

“But this is high school. Don’t you think people might have matured by now?”

She crossed her arms. “Do you? Some of the ‘mature ones’ make oinking sounds whenever Jodie walks past. You saw for yourself how they go after Skeet for no known reason. I don’t want them to know one thing about me. You got that?”

Of course, he understood, but he still couldn’t get over it. Apparently homeschooling had shielded him from a lot of things. “So no one but me knows about you?”

“Fuller knows.”

Nathan said, “And Charlie and your mother.”

“They’ve lived with it for a long time. I’m almost glad the waiting is over. It was like waiting for the other shoe to fall because—” Her voice caught and she looked away. His heart squeezed, but he waited for her to finish. “Because we always knew it would come back. And now it has.”

It explained a lot to Nathan. Her recklessness and in-your-face attitude. Her disdain of school cliques and rules she didn’t like. Her refusal to let anyone get close to her. Lisa had chosen
not
to care because it protected her from hurtful things she thought were far worse than cancer. Nathan got something else too. By allowing Lisa to handle what was happening to her, and by giving her the freedom to come and go as she pleased, her mother and Charlie kept her with them. “I’ll keep your secret,” he said.