Tell Me Something Real (6 page)

At the clinic, we come and go as we please. Unless Mom is sleeping, we're permitted to visit, sitting by her side as the Laetrile drips into her veins. We scavenge the kitchen. We sunbathe in the courtyard. I'd broken the rules by walking on the beach, but overall, rules are few and far between. We are captive to Mom's leukemia, quarantined in Mexico, but we have the freedom to pass the time as we please.

I never venture to the pediatric floor, avoiding children hooked up to needles and fluids. The morning after our walk, though, I wake wanting to see Caleb. Maybe it's guilt. I need to see that he's well. I want to prove Lupe wrong—that he isn't like the other sick kids. He actually has a chance to survive.

As soon as I climb the stairs to Caleb's floor, a stout nurse, far older than Lupe, shoos me away. I wait an hour and try again, but there she is, darting in and out of rooms. I wonder which is his.

Adrienne sees right through me. She doesn't believe my made-up excuses to go inside: that I'm checking on Mom or using the bathroom or wanting a snack immediately after breakfast. After my second failed attempt to check on Caleb, I walk into the courtyard to her smirk.

“Love at first sight?” she says.

Adrienne laughs when I tell her to shut up. Marie sits with a book in a shaded corner, hiding from the sun, which rose with furious intensity. I want to escape the heat and the nurses. I want to feel like I felt yesterday, when Caleb stood still and had his eyes on nothing but me.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Adrienne asks, squinting at me. She's immune to the fireball in the sky. Adrienne's skin radiates pink for an hour, then turns to honey. She's Alectrona, the Greek sun goddess. Adrienne raises her arms, as if she's summoning solar powers. She makes a simple stretch look divine.

I plop down on an empty chaise. My mind flashes to yesterday, to the beach, to welcoming the waves on my feet. To Caleb. Yes, I want to make sure he's feeling better and that I didn't somehow end his remission with our prison break to the beach. But I also want to walk next to him.

I'm in orchestra—not band. The piano requires the most space, a true centerpiece. I like it that way. I've never understood the giddiness of band, of marching alongside someone, playing the same melodies. With the piano, I don't need anyone else—the music is mine, the orchestra a mere
accompaniment. Yesterday, though, I started to understand the appeal of being in unison.

“Don't be such a coward,” Adrienne says. “Just go up and act like you know what you're doing. Walk like you belong there and no one will stop you. It works all the time at school.”

“I don't even know what room he's in,” I say.

She raises her eyebrow at me. “You can figure it out. Go now, because you're driving me nuts just moping here.”

“I'm not moping.” I sound petulant, which doesn't help my case.

I'm on the receiving end of her dramatic eye roll. She picks up her magazine. A dismissal.

“Fine,” I huff.

I reach the pediatric floor in time to see the nurse disappear into a room. I peek through the open doors. A redheaded boy, a little older than Marie, dozes. An older girl sits on her bed, with slumped shoulders. She glances up and meets my eyes. I've never seen her before. The girl could be an apparition with her pale skin and dark hair, such startling contrast in color. She looks like she's never been outside, never seen the sun. I freeze midstep. It feels wrong to leave her here. I should go into her room and ask her name. She turns away before I find the courage to do so.

“You slumming?” Caleb asks.

He must have been watching me and the girl from his room across the hall. A smile fills his face, and I know that's
what I woke up wanting: to see him smile again. To be on the receiving end.

He sits up, and I'm overcome with the urge to touch his face, to put my finger on the cleft in his chin. I sit a safe distance away and tuck my hands into the pockets of my jeans. Suddenly, I don't trust myself. My boldness is a surprise.

“How did you sleep?” I ask.

He smiles at me again and I dig my hands deeper into my pockets.

“You snuck up here to see how I slept?”

I nod, smiling back at him. He's contagious in all the right ways. “I guess so.”

“I slept, but mostly I'm bored shitless. I want to take another walk.”

“I know,” I say. “I'd love to go to the beach again.”

He shakes his head. “The beach would be nice, but I meant I want to take another walk with you.”

I'm brazen and chickenshit at the same time. I want to join him on the hospital bed and closely examine the freckles on the backs of his hands. I'd like to feel his skin on mine in the same way I can't resist warming my palm over a candle's flame. I don't feel like myself, yet I've never felt more like myself.

Who the hell is this boy?

“Me too,” I say. I look him squarely in the eye and allow myself to be seen.

Yesterday, I thought he would be a nuisance, nothing
but one more thing to manage. A burden. Now, I wonder about the color of his pajamas and if he sleeps with his shirt on or off.

Adrienne is going to give me endless grief.

He leans into the cushions, and then all I can think of is Mom. The same bed and the same pillows. My eyes search for an IV, but Caleb is tube-free. A relief. I focus on his face and try to see him—not his illness.

I hear footsteps, heavy and purposeful, most definitely belonging to the nurse.

I stand before she walks into the room. “I have to go, Caleb.”

He leans forward. “Hey, promise me we'll take a lot of walks when we're roomies.”

“I promise,” I say.

She enters with a scowl. Before she can speak, I slip out of the room.

Caleb's mom has a commanding presence, warm and authoritative at the same time. Her cropped hair emphasizes her deep green eyes and cheekbones as prominent as cliffs over the sea. She wears a long skirt and peasant blouse, which look incongruous, like Roman columns on a modern building. It's easy to picture her as a military general, a sea captain, someone taking charge in perilous situations.

Barb fills my arms with a box of clothes. Our house seems to shrink considerably as the Dunnes move in. We
haul in books, dishes, towels, and toiletries. An entire crate of vitamins.

I guide Caleb to my room. He looks around, and I'm suddenly shy of my lavender quilt and “Hang in There” kitten poster. However, I'm proud of Adrienne's hand-me-down copies of junior English novels:
The Great Gatsby, A Separate Peace, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Crucible
, and
My Antonia
. Nothing fluffy. I returned
Leaves of Grass
to the library when school ended for the summer.

He places his skateboard wheels-up on my bed and sits down while everyone carries boxes into the house. With Caleb its occupant, my room becomes foreign territory. Barb stands outside the front door, inspecting contents and directing. When we finish unloading their massive Suburban, I pick up a stack of Caleb's T-shirts and place them in the dresser. I'm not being polite; I want to see his things rest in my drawers, hang in my closet. I haven't felt this possessive since I had dolls.

I reach into his suitcase and pull out his shorts and jeans, sloppily folded. I smooth them out and fold them again, aligning the hems. Caleb concentrates on a box and tosses a clear produce bag onto the floor. I spot his toothbrush and want to run my fingertip along the bristles simply because it's been inside his mouth. The toothpaste pushes against the bag, poking a hole through it. I finish folding the stack of clothes and fill the rest of the drawer.

In her room, Adrienne blares “You Sexy Thing” by Hot
Chocolate, just one song in a series of taunts: “Boogie Fever,” “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty,” and “That's the Way (I Like It),” which she sings as she dances down the hall. My punishment for falling for one of the sickies.

I glance at the now-empty suitcase and zip it closed. Caleb places a stack of books on the bedside table, obscuring the view of my alarm clock. I scan the titles: a token math textbook among books about the Beat Generation, poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. He throws his pillow onto the bed and kicks the box aside, the hollow cardboard buckling with emptiness.

I don't know what to say. All of my
real
thoughts are inappropriate. Since leaving him at the clinic, I've spent my time remembering the brief moments when his skin touched mine. After our beach excursion, I kept sneaking into the pediatric wing, where we talked in his room until the stout nurse evicted me. He read bits of Kerouac poems, lines about Buddha and meditation and jazz—all things I never considered, and honestly, that bore me a little. I tried to listen but ended up concentrating on inconspicuous parts of his body, parts likely overlooked by anyone else: the curve of his big toe, the rough skin of his elbow, the mole beneath his left earlobe. A scavenger hunt.

“Here,” he says, cradling a shoebox. “I wanted to show you these.” He sits on the floor, cross-legged. Our knees bump, but he doesn't move away. He spills the contents onto the carpet—dozens of slides and a few photos. I pick up a slide
and raise it to the light. A miniature Caleb smiles back at me with a wide grin. He must have been nine or ten, around Marie's age. Healthy looking, almost frenetic, like he'd been doing jumping jacks. He stands on a porch bundled in a hat, scarf, and mittens.

“Let me see it,” he says. He leans toward me to identify the image. “That was a crazy ice storm. They closed all the schools. I was so psyched. Almost everything was closed. My folks didn't go to work; the power was on and off, same with the phones. It lasted for days. Did anything like that ever happen to you?”

Rain, wind, the threat of mudslides. My clothes soaked through.
I'm terminal.
I blink away the memory.

“It doesn't get that cold here.” I sift through the slides, plucking a handful of faded Polaroids and Technicolor snapshots from the bottom of the pile. He describes other storm photos and I gaze at the images of a younger, healthier Caleb, of his beaming smile and broad little-boy face. So this is how he looked before lymphoma turned his blood deadly. His family had cooked on a camp stove and roasted marshmallows in the fireplace. The storm turned their home into a campground. Barb, with a sheet of long, straight, dark hair, looked easy and relaxed, less in charge.

“Why'd you bring these with you?”

“My mom thinks it helps to bring part of home with us. She says it's something to keep me fighting. She's too scared to believe we already won.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

He shakes his head. “Nope, just me.”

I envy his position as an only child, a person all his own, contained and complete. Adrienne and Marie glow at such high wattage. I'm the soft light compared to their ultraviolet. Unlike me, he isn't one of three, a constant comparison, the middle child flanked by far more intriguing sisters.

“You don't talk about your dad much,” I say. “He's not in the pictures.”

“He took them. There's not much to say now that he's gone. My mom says there's nothing keeping us in Seattle anymore. She thinks the sun is good for me. She's thinking of moving us here.”

“Staying for good?” I pull at my powder-blue shag carpet. He could stay, maybe in one of those Easter candy–colored bungalows in Pacific Beach or Del Mar. A little house right on the ocean. Sand instead of a front lawn. He could be permanent, remaining long after summer, after New Year's when the calendar flips to 1977. After Mom.

He gives me that look, like the one on the beach that slows down my heart rate and allows me to take a deep breath. His intense eyes sparkle as he smiles with his lips closed, a serious smile, almost gentle in its power. Cancer strips everything away—hair, energy, laughter—and the only thing left is your true self, diminished but pure. That's what I learned at the clinic.

Caleb is pure. Honest and curious and calm, but more
than that. Lymphoma wipes out high school bullshit. As I meet his eyes, my awkwardness slips away. How could anyone sit so still? Perfect posture with a ramrod straight spine, the kind my ballet teacher demanded, back when I thought I'd rather dance to music than create it. I see his resilience and healing. His determination to outrun this thing, but maybe that's because he's in remission.

He nods his head. “Yeah. Probably.”

Marie peeks in.

“What's up?” I ask.

“Mom's not feeling so good and I need to take care of her and you have to help Barb in the kitchen.”

I feel a twinge of guilt. She should be outside kicking her neglected soccer ball, not in Mom's room—my job. At least Mom reads to her, the two of them nestled under the quilt, turning pages from the thick stack of library books.