Something Right Behind Her (24 page)

“Mom,” I said.

“Yes
sweetheart?”

But I didn’t
know what to tell her, how to summon the energy to explain how I thought
somehow I wasn’t actually sick, that it wasn’t the flu at all, but my whole
fucked up life I was puking out. I wanted to tell her about the dream I’d had,
but I knew I was mostly mumbling, too exhausted to get the words out.

“I think you
need some rest, Andy,” she said. “You feel like you have a bit of a fever.”

After that I
must have crashed out for about four hours, because when I woke up, the house
was empty, and Mom had left me a note and some chicken soup in the kitchen, since
she had to go down to the center for a couple of tutoring sessions.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I was feeling
pretty wretched, heating up the soup on the stove, shivering in my sweater and
a pair of fleecy pajama pants, when the phone rang. Naturally, I had no
intention of answering it.

Then I saw that
the caller was “O’Meara.”

“Hello,” I said,
not sure which O’Meara to expect on the other end.

“Andy?” It was
Douglas and he didn’t sound good. His voice was kind of muffled, and then I
realized that he seemed to be crying and my heart began to race.

I suppose in
some part of my mind I knew it was coming. The night before, in between bouts
of nausea and chills, I’d had one extreme dream after another, but there was
only one I could remember in detail, the one I’d tried to tell Mom about before
she left.

Eve was wearing
all white, like in the beach dream, only this time she was coming to visit me,
and I was the one in bed. She was leaning over me, her hair falling into my
face. Her face was normal, healthy, with no dead side. At first, I was pleased,
happy for her, but then I had the horrible realization that it had been me all
along who had been sick, that everything I thought had been happening to her,
was actually happening to me.

I felt short of
breath, and I thought that I was starting to die, that the ALS was suffocating
me. But then the dream changed, it was like a new scene in a movie, and there
was a strange glowing light coming from under the door to my room. I realized
that I wasn’t the sick one after all, but that I was struggling to breathe
because Eve was there, and she was pressing on my neck with both hands. Her
hands were so pale they glowed.

At first, I
thought she was trying to help me wake up, help me realize I was dreaming and
that I wasn’t sick, and neither was she, that it was all a dream from the
beginning, and that our lives were back to normal. But then she tightened her
grip around my neck, not shaking me awake at all, but choking me. She was
deliberately choking me.

I started to
cry, telling her to stop, but she laughed. She was playing with me, tossing her
head around so that her hair became almost a halo. Her teeth flashed
super-white, and large, like the teeth of a horse.

She stopped
shaking her head suddenly, and stared right into my eyes, her hands on either
side of my face. I could see that it wasn’t actually that her teeth were too
large, but that the skin had been pulled away from them, her face almost just a
skull, except the eyes, which were blue, just Eve’s normal eyes, with the slightest
hint of panic in them, like she was a child, caught doing something she
shouldn’t be doing.

That’s when I
realized she was dead.

She was playing
around with me, and this was how the dead played.

“Andy?” Doug
said. “It’s Eve. You need to come soon. You need to come and say goodbye.”

Douglas was too
broken up to notice that I had completely shut down on the phone. Or maybe he
had become accustomed to the sounds of grief, that peculiar, wordless language.

I moved like a
zombie through the house. Between being wobbly from the flu, and the news about
Eve, I could hardly put the receiver back on the phone stand. When I walked
back in my room, it was as if some invisible force had preceded me and changed
everything in some really small, but significant way - things seemed to shimmer
with a harsh, sourceless light. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my
mouth was hanging wide open. My eyes looked small and greener than usual. I was
clutching the right side of my head, although I hadn’t realized I was doing
anything with my hands.

Then I did
something on instinct, without thinking at all - I just had the thought and
flew right into action. I knew somehow I was doing the only thing I could do
under the circumstances - the only right thing. I was calling Mom.

I told her about
the pregnancy test first, and Eve second because that’s the way it tumbled out,
in my weird fevered state. I knew I had to be sick, that it was just the flu,
but somehow all the events - the nausea, my nightmare, Eve dying, the pregnancy
scare, became one mega-event in my mind. I didn’t give her a chance to speak, I
just sobbed into the phone until she half-whispered, half-shouted, “Did you
hear me, Andy, I’m coming home!”

It seemed like
just a few minutes later that she was standing in the doorway to my room,
although it must have been more like a half an hour. She had her sunglasses on
top of her head, and they were kind of crooked. She was still holding the red
canvas bag she brings back and forth to work with her. She hadn’t taken off her
jacket.

Then she put all
of her stuff down and came and sat next to me on my bed and took me in her arms
and let me cry. Finally, after I’d sobbed for like ten minutes, and got the
sleeve of her jacket all snotty and wet, she held me by the shoulders and
looked at me.

“What happened,
sweetheart? Tell me what happened from the beginning.” So I told her how I’d
been feeling bad, and I took the test the night before, and it was negative,
and then I’d started puking - and then how Douglas called, and it all became
too much. I no longer felt any panic, just relief at the flood of words. Then
she looked down at me and stroked my hair. She looked kind of confused and she
said “George?”

And I said, “You
know, George the Dirtbag.” And her eyes grew wider.

She put her hand
on the side of my face. “It’s ok, Andy. It’s ok,” and I just sat there, holding
onto her, crying on her shoulder, like a little girl. “It’s ok, baby, it’s ok.
It’s just all the stress, honey. It’s all the stress.”

I finally looked
up at her, all snotfaced.

“I know what I’m
saying is going to sound crazy, Mom. But I’ve had these dreams all along, ever
since Eve got sick. It’s like you kind line them up, play a tape, and there’d
be some bizarre story to it.”

“I don’t find it
strange that you would be dreaming of Eve all along. Being scared or even
terrified of dying or of watching someone die is human nature. Act like you’re
immune to it, and it’ll pop up somewhere. Then added to that, you had this
thing with George. So your stress level has been through the roof.”

I wanted to
convince her these events were somehow linked, that I was sick
because
of the dream,
that Eve had come to me
because
I was afraid of her, and I wasn’t brave - and the pregnancy
scare was my fault too, and it was all because of Doug, and how I was a crap
best friend. If I’d had the energy, in my fevered state, I might have told Mom
everything then, right from the beginning, from the day at the beach, how it
was all linked, and I deserved to feel like shit, I deserved far worse.

But instead I
tried to listen to what Mom was saying. Maybe the fever was subsiding, but some
part of me knew I was losing it, and needed to let someone else take over my
thoughts. “Maybe my dreams just come from knowing that all those stories about
friends sacrificing their lives for each other are about people other than me,”
I said finally.

Mom kissed my
head, and took my face in her hands. “You’ve had a hell of a twenty four hours,
and the next few days aren’t going to be much better. You have to give yourself
a break.”

“I wish I could
rewind the last six months,” I said.

“I wish you’d
been more open with me about what was going on,” Mom said.

“I know.” I knew
she would feel that way, like she could have talked me down from my ledge, and
kept me from doing a lot of the stupid stuff I’d done. But I wasn’t sure it
would have helped as much as she’d like to think. Funny thing about moms is
they’re probably better at protecting you from the evil outer forces, than the
dark inner ones. “At least you know everything now,” I lied.

“I don’t have to
know everything, Andy, to be there when you need me,” she said.

“Thanks,” I
said. It was a good thing to get cleared up, since I figured a secret-free
existence was probably not in my foreseeable future, though I knew I’d try to
keep things a lot simpler.

What to Do if
Your Best Friend is Dying

The first thing
you should do if your best friend is dying – and I mean
dying
, not eventually
either, but today or tomorrow, so soon there’s no longer any time to
think
, is to deal
with whatever absolutely needs dealing with (and in my case that was quite a
lot), and then you should put on something soft and warm - some awesome
sweatshirt or tank that feels nice against the skin. As the
Manual of
Productive Contentment
says:
in times of crisis, make yourself as comfortable as possible.
You should stick
your hair up on top of your head so it’s out of your eyes. Then you should have
your Mom drive you to see your friend (also from the MPC, #3 on the crisis
management list:
involve those you trust
). You should enter her room and
sit down on her bed. No, you should actually lie down next to her so your
cheeks are touching. You should tell her how beautiful she is. You should let
the tears roll down your cheeks. You should thank her for being such a good
friend, and you should lay there for a while, listening to your own heart beat.
You should leave her a picture of the two of you doing something stupid and
fun. You should tell her that all her secrets are safe with you. All of that
stuff, stroking her hair, kissing her cheek, saying you love her, all of that
is the easy part. The difficult part is when you get up to leave. So, first,
you should put one foot on the floor, and be sure that leg will hold you, that
it is planted strong and firmly beneath you, then put the other foot down,
because you really do not want to faint in this situation, which is what I
almost did. When you almost faint at the bedside of your dying best friend, the
nurse and her older brother may have to charge into the room, to pull you up
from the floor, and then, on the saddest fucking day of your life, you will not
only feel like puking your guts out, but you will also feel ridiculous. I wish
someone had given me this advice – about the strong leg on the floor
– the rest, I think I did perfectly.

When You Lie
Down, You Will Be Unafraid

Eve died two
days after I last saw her, just as Douglas said she would. The family let it
happen. They took her off the breathing machine. The doctor had told them that
soon, little by little, even with the sort of breathing machine she was on, her
brain would inevitably be flooded with carbon dioxide and she’d get brain
damage and then die. That was something they didn’t want to have happen, so
they let her die while she was still herself.

The day of the
funeral, I was so nervous, my teeth chattered. The night before had been the
wake, and that was just a crazy weep-fest. All the girls and even the guys from
school were walking around the funeral home bawling their eyes out. Jacob was
there and he looked like he’d been run over by a lawn mower. His hair was
sticking out all crazy and his eyes were bloodshot. I actually walked right
over to him and hugged him, and he held onto me for a real long time. It was
like we’d both been taken over by aliens. Neither of us said a word.

It was weird
seeing everyone from school, and at first I was surprised to see people I knew,
outside of the O’Meara’s, as if the wake were supposed to be just for me and
them. Sharon and Gayle were there wearing big dark glasses, like it was an
opportunity to sport some new fashion. I was kind of touched to see Tom and
Jill there looking pretty shaken up. I knew they were there for me.

I couldn’t stick
around at the wake for too long because it was too crowded and crazy, and I
started to feel weak. I shook hands with Eve’s parents and Doug and I hugged,
but I didn’t feel any attachment to him. His hands felt strangely light and
small against my back as he patted me. In fact, all of Eve’s family was in a
weird zone. They all had these big fake smiles on their faces, and they were
wearing bright colors, not black like everyone else. They kept saying how her
suffering was over and how “it was time.” Doug even asked me how I was ‘holding
up” as if I was going through something in that moment that he had passed
through some time in the past. Which, in fairness, I suppose he had. I just
shook my head. I wasn’t sure, if I opened my mouth, what kind of sound might
come out.