Tell Me Something Real (5 page)

“We saw him,” I say. “How long do they have stay with us?”

“Maybe a month or two. Then he'll be back at the hospital so the doctor can monitor his cells. They might have to adjust therapies. We'll talk if he needs more time by the start of school. Vanessa, you and Adrienne can share a room.”

“But you're sick,” Adrienne's voice sounds sharp. “We can barely take care of you. How can we take care of
more
sick people?”

“It would be nice to feel like I'm doing something for other people. Everyone at the clinic has been so good to us. When I met Barb, I wanted to help. She'll take care of Caleb, and she promised to help with the house. I don't want you
girls to have to do everything. It should be easier with them there. Not harder. Your father agreed. Okay?”

We all nod but Adrienne, who mutters something about the goddamned Von Trapp family meeting the Brady Bunch.Adrienne and Marie curl up next to each other on the spare gurney, napping. I agree with Adrienne—I can't believe we are going to have to share our house, especially with someone as sick as Mom. This boy needs to understand how hard this is going to be for us. That Mom is really sick.
Dying
sick. He can have a room or two, but that's it. I slip out the door and make my way back to the courtyard.

He sits on the picnic table, pale skin baking in the heat. I want to walk over confidently like I've seen Adrienne do a hundred times. But all I can do is comb my hair with my fingers and slide a coat of bubblegum Bonne Bell on my lips. Caleb turns and looks my way.

“So, are we roomies now?” he asks.

“You knew who we were?”

“It's hard to miss three blond girls in Mexico.”

“You should have said something, like, introduced yourself.”

He doesn't apologize. We're feral, but at least we have manners.

“You want to check out the beach?” He starts walking out of the courtyard.

It's less than a quarter of a mile to the ocean, an easy distance if you don't have cancer. It is off limits, forbidden
territory. Patients and their families are discouraged from straying from the clinic grounds. They warn us of armed robberies, kidnappings, unpredictable riptides, and hazardous currents. But Caleb keeps walking without looking back to see if I've made up my mind. I glance around the empty courtyard. It's hot, that unbearable late afternoon hot. I follow.

I catch up with him and we walk down the dirt road to the beach.

“How long have you been coming here?” he asks.

“Don't you know everything about us,
roomie
?”

“Not really. Just what your mom told mine.”

“A few months,” I say.

“Your mom's not any better?” He sounds tense.

“Worse.”

“Where's your dad?”

I shrug and repeat what Mom always says when we ask her the same question. “Someone's got to pay the hospital bills. He comes when he can, but his boss is a jerk.”

“At least he stuck around. Mine bailed right after I got diagnosed.”

Before I can respond, Caleb draws in his breath. We stand a few yards from the water.

“You okay?” I look him over, top to bottom. He seems fine. A little pink, but that's all.

He nods. “The last couple of months have been really hard. Nothing's worse than chemo. I used to surf and play
water polo. You know, before. The best thing about Laetrile is moving closer to the beach.”

When I look at him, I see a mixture of sickness and strength. Something about him makes me want to leave this place, to escape the clinic even just for a little while. Maybe Adrienne is wrong. Maybe it could be okay having them around. I nod. “Let's go this way.” I point north toward Rosarito.

We walk with our feet in the water. We talk about school and how no one understands what it's like to be uprooted by illness. I tell him how I breezed through my final exams with the certainty of passing, of my teachers grading me with pity.

“Until you got sick, did you know anyone with cancer?” I ask.

He gazes at the ocean; the water swells beyond the waves. “My grandma. That's it. Until I started chemo, I thought I was the only kid with cancer in Seattle. But now I see it everywhere.”

“You look good,” I say. “Considering.”

“You sound like my mother.”

Mortified, I stare at my feet. He looks a lot better than Mom. That's all I meant, but this proves I'm completely incapable of having a normal exchange with anyone my own age, cancer or not. I feel stupid and start asking inane questions that adults always ask me. “What grade are you in?”

He stops and sizes me up. No one has looked at me like
that in months, not since Mom and Dad met with the principal and explained our family crisis and increasing absences. I'm not prepared—to answer his question or for the way he makes my heart pound twice as hard. We embark on a staring match. Indisputably, he used to be good-looking. Probably popular.

When I followed him to the beach, he seemed determined to walk away from everything, maybe even his illness. Now he stands statue-still, radiating calm like a steady breath.

He wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, bruised from an IV. “Why don't you ask me something real?”

I kick a washed-up piece of seaweed, slimy on my foot. “Like what?”

“Something that means something. Do you know how many times someone has asked me what grade I'm in or what's wrong with me? Everyone from the phlebotomist to the grocery store clerk.” He gives me a weak smile, and his words sound more like a plea than anger. “Like, what's your favorite book? Answer that one.”

I squint in the sun, nervous about his dare. Sheet music doesn't count. “Agatha Christie, I guess. I like them all.
And Then There Were None
is a good one. Maybe her best. She's easy.”

“Easy? Your favorite author is easy? Your sister, the older one, seems more like the fluff type. Not you.”

I look away with a scowl. “You don't know anything
about her,” I say. “Besides, taking care of my mom doesn't leave much time for serious reading.” I don't defend myself by summarizing
To Kill a Mockingbird
or reciting lines from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. “There's a collection of poems.”

“Does it have a title?”

We stand in the same spot, on the packed sand where, when the tide comes in, as it is beginning to do now, crabs will emerge. Our presence scares away the pelicans. Seagulls caw overhead. When I look at him, I see he is interested in what I have to say. Genuinely interested. He isn't mocking me.

“
Leaves of Grass
.”

“See,” he says. “That's what I meant by
real
.”

“Your turn.” I don't look away from him. With anyone else, I would have. Except for Adrienne and Marie.

His face changes when he smiles, truly smiles, even if it's fleeting. Without hesitation, Caleb says, “
On the Road
. Kerouac. His poems are amazing too. I'll read you some while we're
roomies
.”

Never heard of him. I walk past Caleb and brush his hand with mine. An almost accident. “Come on, let's keep going.”

It takes him a minute to catch up. I remind myself to slow down, that he is sick. His confidence makes me forget. I listen to our feet slap the sand, which fills the spaces between my toes. It doesn't take much for the ocean to claim you. I don't want to turn around and head back to the clinic. I don't regret coming with him, but I learned from Mom that each word is a risk. It takes a certain amount
of courage to converse, especially when one of the primary topics of conversation is terminal illness. I tell him about Whitman's poems, Dad's asshole boss, and about Mom. That is enough for now, unless he is the courageous one. As we walk, I glance over my shoulder, looking at the clinic, now small in the distance.

“To answer your original question, I don't think I have a grade anymore. If I hadn't gotten sick, I'd be starting my senior year. But I missed most of last year, so I guess I'm back to being a junior. If I go back. Nothing freaks people out like sitting next to the walking dead in calculus. They acted like I was contagious.”

“Your friends?”

“Not really. Well, some of them. Mostly the people I saw every day but didn't really know. And my friends couldn't handle it, especially when my hair started falling out. They tried for a while, but things got weird. They couldn't just hang out with me and talk. You know, like how we're talking now. It was like I had to pretend that I wasn't sick to make them feel okay. Then I got too sick to hang out with anyone.”

“Same with us.”

“How come your Mom still has her hair?” he asks.

I stop. “What do you mean?”

“After chemo.”

“She didn't do chemo,” I say. “We came straight here.”

He frowns and runs a hand over his patchy crew cut, confused, but doesn't respond.

As the sun drops from its heights, we wander until we spot a cluster of fishermen huddled over the day's catch, and Caleb says he's getting hungry. He looks pale except for big red blotches spreading across his skin like a rash. Sweat runs down his face, and I realize he probably won't tell me when he needs to take a break. I look at Caleb and then at the group of fishermen. His breathing changes, his exhalations grow louder. I touch his arm and he grabs my hand. There is no way he'll be able to walk back.

“I'll be right back,” I say.

As soon as I let go of him, he drops to the sand.

I rush over to the men and in my limited Spanish ask them if they have some water and if they'd drive us back to the hospital. One man, the oldest, sprints to his truck. Another man lifts a bottle of soda from the sand and hands it to me. It's warm, but I run to Caleb and instruct him to drink it. While he drains the bottle, I try to act calm, talking with the fishermen as they pack up their catch of crab and snapper. My stomach turns at the smell. I'm too scared for Caleb's health and whatever punishment awaits me at the clinic. Mom won't approve of my walking a dying boy closer to death.

“Hey, these guys are going to drive us back, okay? Do you want me to help you up? Their truck is right over there.” I point to the road.

Caleb nods and reaches for my hand. His palm is hot and sweaty and I try to pull him to his feet, but my hand slides
from his and I teeter backward. The man who gave me the Coke and another fisherman walk over and lift Caleb from the ground.

We ride in the back with the rods and bait. Caleb leans against the side of the truck with his eyes closed. I inch toward him, my clothes catching on the tackle. I hear my shorts rip, and my skin burns where hooks dig deep into my legs. It's a quick drive, and when we pull up to the clinic, Caleb's doctor runs out and helps him out of the truck. Guadalupe rushes over to Caleb and checks his pulse. Satisfied, she scolds me first in Spanish and then again in English for not telling anyone where we went. I disappeared with a patient and she was frantic. Our mothers, she says, are furious.

I look past her as Caleb disappears through the door.

Guadalupe scoops my chin in her palm.

I shake free. “He'll be fine. Maybe he just needs some water.”

“
Mija
, you've got to be careful with the sick ones. They're not like you.”

I hang my head as she rushes back inside. I sit on the stairs to inspect my legs, which are covered in sand and torn by tackle and reek of dead fish. Trickles of blood run down my skin, escaping from the many scratches and punctures. At first, I cry for my cuts and shredded clothes, and then for Caleb. I sit until the sun disappears and the Mexican sky brings out its enormous mantle of stars. I'm not sure how
long I'm outside before he offers me a plate of tamales. He looks better, just plain lymphoma sick.

“I never should've let you walk like that. I wasn't thinking of how sick you are. I mean, you're dying. Sorry, I guess I'm not supposed to say that.”

His skin is pink in some places and a horrible white in others. I keep looking at the unevenness of his color to remind me that he is ill, like Lupe said.

He sits down and hands me a fork. “I just got dehydrated, and you should know that I'm not dying.”

“I'm sorry I said that. Really.”

He coughs into his hand and, just like Mom, makes this terrible hacking sound. “I'm not dying.
Really.
”

“Then why are you here? You're sick. Obviously.”

“This isn't a last-ditch thing for me. My mom just wants to cover all of the bases. She's not satisfied with remission. She wants me cured.”

“You're in remission?” I stare into his eyes, startled by how beautiful they are, green and as big as teacups.

“They think so. I just need to finish this course of treatment. I risked my mom's wrath to bring you those tamales, so you'd better eat them.”

“You ate already?”

“Soup and a saline drip.”

I look away and raise a bite to my mouth. He is the first person besides my sisters and the nurses who truly understands. I don't have to explain a thing. Maybe it's because
of my healthy white blood cell count and lack of parental supervision, but this boy seems different. Or maybe it's me who is different. I can talk to him. I can break the rules. I can be a little bit like Adrienne. I sneak a glance at his profile, and for the first time, I feel with my body instead of my brain. I take another bite even though I know the rumbling inside my middle isn't coming from my stomach.

I practically jump when he taps my arm.

“Thanks for being my tour guide.”