Wake (55 page)

I hand her the album. She doesn’t take it.

“If you don’t trust me enough to show me you shouldn’t have brought it here.”

I hate it when she’s right.

Bite the bullet.

I balance the book on its spine and let it fall open. We’re starting from the middle of the book, then, at the shots Eric took around Christmastime. The shots on this particular page are of Elise and I. We’re lying side by side in the same hospital bed, even though that’s against the rules. We’re both wearing red and green toques and Elise has a surgical mask over her nose and mouth. Eric drew a smile on her mask for the photo and put an ornament on my IV pole.

“That was a week or so after they let me out of isolation, from the transplant.”

“It looks like Elise bounced back pretty well.”

I swallow and refrain from answering. Just a few weeks before that photo was taken, Elise suffered life-threatening complications. My baby sister almost died trying to save me. I couldn’t even visit her; my immune system was too diminished. I relied on Polaroids from Eric as proof that she was still alive and on the mend. Maybe ‘relied’ isn’t the right word—I practically demanded photo updates several times a day. I had to burn those pictures, afterwards. I couldn’t stand to look at them.

Willa flips back to the beginning of the book and new set of photos. I still had hair when Eric began taking pictures. In these I’m curled up in the fetal position, green in the face and sweating from the pain.

Mom is holding a cold cloth against my neck. I remember that photo. I puked all over myself just a few minutes after it was taken.

Willa flips the page, to the pictures of Elise and I after she knit me that first hat. I look morose underneath my affected smile as she perches with her chin on my shoulder, next to her new creation. The next photos are of my second round of chemo, where I had to have injections put directly into my spine.

Willa pauses on those for a long time.

“It didn’t hurt,” I say. “They numbed me. I just had a bit of a headache after.”

She touches my dad’s image in the photo. He was with me for that treatment. While I was curled up for a jab in the spine he sat facing me and we talked about music. I remember asking him if he’d ever done an injection like that on a patient. He said he had, and he looked so uncomfortable that I quickly changed the subject.

“Were they drawing fluid or injecting you?”

“Injecting.”

“And Elise gave you marrow? Or was it something to do with your kidneys?”

“Marrow.” I snort at the memory. “You want to know something? We had the transplant scheduled for early October. I had chemo and full -body radiation to prepare for it; ended up feeling like shit. And then she got an ear infection. We had to put off the transplant until she was well again. I went through hell for a procedure that got delayed.”

Willa chuckles with dark amusement. “Is that irony? Or just bad luck?”

“Bad luck, but it could have been worse. My good luck was that she was a match and willing to donate.”

Willa flips a few more pages. She remarks that Eric isn’t in any of these photos.

“He was behind the camera.” I skim ahead a few pages to the solitary photo of Eric in the whole album. It was taken by accident, and his face is only visible in the corner of the frame because the lens was pointing toward a mirror. Eric had a rare serious expression on at the time.

Willa studies that frame for a long time. “How’d he handle it?”

“Eric…” How do I describe my brother’s reaction? “He was angry at first. He took off to Ottawa and stayed with Celeste’s family for a few days. When he came back he was sort of resentful—sometimes of me, or our parents, or because we were all pretty much helpless.” I shrug. “He came around during my second round of chemo. I had all kinds of bleeding problems at the time—nosebleeds so bad they required a trip to the ER, bruises all over, you name it. I couldn’t clot properly and I had low iron so I was weak all the time. Most days I couldn’t even walk down the stairs or cross the room without feeling tired.

So…he carried me. I’d put an arm over his shoulders and shuffle along beside him. On Mom’s birthday I was too weak and dizzy to do stairs, so he picked me up and brought me down to the kitchen so we could celebrate as a family.”

“That’s really nice of him.”

I smile for effect and tell her I agree. It’s convenient to leave out the part of that story where I passed out at the breakfast table, landed on my nose hard enough to make it bleed, and ruined Mom’s birthday with a trip to the ER.

Willa continues to flip pages, studying the Polaroids with a look of frank interest. She snorts at the picture of Elise with her hand stuck in the second floor vending machine. “Her pretzels got caught.”

When Willa gets to the picture of Mom hugging one of the doctors she pauses. Eric took this picture while standing behind the doctor, so all that’s visible is Mom’s face over his shoulder and her arms around the doctor’s neck. She’s grinning and crying all at once in this picture.

“Good news,” Willa notes. I tell her that that was the day Elise’s tests came back with a positive match for donation. Willa actually smiles.

I take the book from her then and close it. Might as well end on a happy note, and I know that most of the other pictures in that book are sad ones. I put the album in my bag and Willa quietly offers not to talk about her sister with me anymore.

“It upsets you, and we can’t really relate on that subject anyway.”

I want to say yes. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not used to talking about her. I don’t know how to do it in a non-creepy way.”

“You talked to your shrinks about her.”

“I lied,” she whispers. “Al the time. I lied in Group, too, but everybody did. I never told anybody the real thing. I would just make up stories until they were satisfied that I’d said enough.”

“Why would you do that? They were there to help you.”

Willa raises her chin a little. “I didn’t trust them not to judge me for it. Come on, sixteen-year-old kid kill s her sister—everyone has an opinion about it. So I told them what they wanted to hear and nothing else.”

She didn’t say it outright, but her accusation swims just under the surface:
I didn’t trust them not to

judge me for it.
She trusted me with her secrets, and I judged her for them.

“I shouldn’t have snapped on you. If I had walked away and cooled off—”

“Jem,” Willa interrupts. “I didn’t expect you to be happy about it.”

“I know, but I shouldn’t have said that stuff you. I meant some of the things I said, but it was still rude to say them.”

Willa rolls her eyes at me and lies back on the bed. She curls away from me, facing the wall with her knees drawn up. “Don’t you ever get tired of feeling guilty?” she says. “I’ll forgive you for what you said because I’m tired of feeling awful about it, just like I’m tired of talking about my sister. I shouldn’t have told you about it. The whole point of moving back to Smiths Falls was so that my mistake would no longer define me to others. It was stupid to tell you, really.”

Willa doesn’t move when I lay a hand on her back. It’s a strange thing, looking at her in this position. It’s usually the other way around. I rub small circles between her shoulder blades and she doesn’t tell me to stop.

You can’t do stuff like that and expect a clean break.

My hand stays. It just feels right.

You’re an idiot.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Tell you?”

“Kil her.”

“Don’t ask me that. Mom used to ask me that.”

“Was it mercy or resentment?” I want to know if Elise is right—if she did it out of some twisted form of love, or out of selfish desire to end the nightmare.

“I don’t remember,” Willa murmurs.

“Okay. Now tell me the truth.”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“You don’t trust me.”

Would you if you were her?

Willa rolls over to face me. That deadly calm look comes over her face. Willa looks like that when she’s on the verge of shutting down.

“She wanted to die at home. She said there was no need to sign a DNR because no one was going to dare call an ambulance if something happened to her at home. She and Mom had a huge fight over it.

“Tessa quit her Oxy—refused pain relief for weeks. She knew her body would give out faster if she was all owed to feel the strain, and she didn’t want to hang around too long. Death was inevitable, but that made it imminent.”

Willa pauses, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say something. But she just takes a few seconds to col ect herself. When she speaks again her voice isn’t as flat and smooth as before.

“She had all kinds of surgeries. By the end she couldn’t eat or drink anymore, except what they could give her intravenously. They wanted to give her a trach and ventilator too, but she said no. It was all crap to prolong a painful life. She didn’t want to live like that.”

I open my mouth to argue—just because Thomasina wanted something at one point in time doesn’t mean she wanted the same thing when it came down to the moment of suicide. Maybe she underestimated the pain and would have liked to die with dignity, under proper sedation, in the hands of trained professionals; not naked on the bathroom floor, shitting blood and afraid of her family’s intervention.

Willa claps a hand over my mouth before I can say any of that.

“She wanted to die. She saw the opportunity and I helped her take it. Mom actually blamed herself before she blamed me. She thought if she had just gone into the bathroom to check on her…”

“Did she ever forgive you?”

“We don’t talk about it.” Willa sits back against the wall. “We used to get into screaming matches because I wouldn’t admit what I’d done. Owning up to it meant legal trouble. But she knew. I didn’t tell her why I did it. I didn’t want her to feel like my bad decision was any reflection on her bad decisions—she wanted the ventilator for Tessa.” Willa shrugs. “Forgiveness is sort of irrelevant, all things considered.

Can’t bring back the dead.”

Willa looks away from me. She stares at the floor with utter apathy. Shut down again. She can’t feel broken if she doesn’t feel anything.

How could I have known Willa and not realized she was carrying all this around? How could she have kept this from so many different people—her counselors and parents and friends? From me?

“I’m sorry,” I tell her quietly, “that I freaked. I should have heard you out. I should have really listened.”

Willa still doesn’t look at me. “I don’t blame you.” The words are so quiet I almost miss them. “I’ve never told anyone before,” she continues equally quietly. “I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to help you see…” She cuts herself off with a painful gulp. Her cheeks turn warm and her eyes are glassy under her lowered lids. “It’s funny, but I never
really
believed that she was going to die until I saw her lying there.”

It’s painful to watch her
not
cry, holding in sobs between shaky breaths. I put a tentative arm around her shoulders and Willa slowly leans toward me, like a tall tree falling. She sniffles a little between deep, calming breaths, unwilling to fall to pieces.

“So why’d you tell me?” I ask lowly.

It takes Willa a few seconds to answer. She takes a few shaky breaths, testing the smoothness of her voice. “Because we liked each other. I didn’t know where it was going. We might have learned to love each other. You can’t love someone if you don’t really know them. And if you can’t love them at their darkest moments…you just can’t love them, period.” Willa swipes the cuff of her sleeve across her eyes, mopping away tears before they have the chance to escape her lids.

“You think we could have had that?” The images, the lunatic fantasies, of Willa as my girlfriend seem so far away. They star a girl who was merely bereaved, not shattered and abandoned and technically a criminal. I don’t know what to do with this new Willa.

“Doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head. “Everything’s different now.”

“Friends?” I offer. “I didn’t ask Hudson to switch us. We’re still project partners. But…” I don’t want her to slip out of my life completely. It’s boring and lonely without her. She’s become a part of my life in Smiths Falls. I sort of need her, and I’d like to think she needs me, whether she’d admit it or not.

“Let’s start over,” Willa says. “Back to just…whatever we were before.”

I lay my cheek atop her head and squeeze her to my side. “Okay. We’ll be… well , we’ll try again.”

Willa sighs. “I’m tired.”

“Do you want me to go?”

Please say no.

Willa shakes her head. We sit there for a little while, saying nothing. I move my hand slowly against her arm, rubbing a small length in what I hope is a comforting manner. Eventually Willa sits up without a word and turns away from me to lie down. She faces the wall again and pulls her knees up. It feels like she’s pull ing away.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go?”

Willa tucks her pillow under her chin and murmurs, “Please stay.” It’s unbelievable that two little words should give me such a sense of relief—it’s making this whole idea of cutting ties infinitely more complicated. But I don’t question it now, because it feels good and Willa looks…well , she looks like she needs something.

You? Please.

Yeah, me.

There are no words left and so much yet to say. I take her iPod off the nightstand and lay down behind her. She’s so small , curled up as she is. I nestle my front against her back and fit a bud into her ear.

“Can I pick?” she says quietly, and holds out her hand for the iPod. I pass it to her and Willa chooses “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dol s. It’s gentle and passionate—the very reason I chose this song for our bedtime exchange a few weeks ago. It’s a tone that Willa needs right now, but I don’t think that’s what she had in mind when she chose it. The chorus seems more poignant than ever.

I wrap an arm around her middle and hold her close. Willa adjusts her position slightly, straightening her back so it’s easy to spoon her. The bridge of my nose rests against the curve at the back of her skul , breathing in the scent of her hair. I used to imagine this—cuddling with Willa in her narrow bed. I never imagined it quite under these circumstances.