Wake (84 page)

Signs of liver failure are obvious. Her pupils are unfocused by painkillers and even though she was sitting up and at home, she had a nasal cannula fitted under her nose. Occasionally there are short blips in the film that suggest it had to be shot as a series of several takes, giving her time to rest in between.

Meira thanks everyone who helped her in some way when she was sick—her nurses and doctors and the friends who stuck by her through the shit times.

“Don’t waste your life. You never know when, or by whom, it could be changed forever or snatched away.” She deadpans after that punch to the gut, and after a long pause she winks. The video cuts out, and it’s over. After a short blessing, the pal bearers get up from the pew to take her out to the cemetery.

Meira is carried out to the warbling tune of “Make Me A Channel of Your Peace.” Either she designed the music program for her funeral during a sudden fit of repentance, or she was trying to be ironic.

I drift out to the cemetery, caught up in the flow of the crowd and towed along by Willa and Elise. My sister leans on my arm, crying softly. Willa holds my hand, and therefore holds me together, observing everything and everyone with her keen eye. I wonder what she’s thinking.

“Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” The minister sprinkles dirt and holy water on the casket. Meira’s family place white roses atop the scarlet wood, and then the funeral director lowers her down.

“Look,” Elise whispers, and points to the headstone.
In a hundred years, they’ll say she could have

been cured.
Lord, I hope so. I wish it could have come in time for her.

*

I try to nap when I get home, tired as I am, but I can’t sleep. I feel restless and slightly exposed, like I’ve forgotten to do something important but can’t remember what it is. I play Willa’s music suggestion and it relaxes me some, but I still can’t fall asleep, and the minute I know class lets out I send her a text.

Can’t sleep. Need music ideas.

Don’t sleep,
she sends back.
Your head’s too full. Get up and do something to tire yourself out.

Great load of help she is.

Sweatpants on, Jel -O out, TV on. Watching TV can be tiring, right? At least it’ll keep me out of my all egedly full head. Elise comes home and curls up under the couch blanket with me to watch a
Band of

Brothers
marathon. Elise is totally the wrong person to watch this with, but at the moment I really don’t care. After squealing “Ohmigod Ross!” when Captain Sobel comes on screen, I’m implored upon to close caption the entire episode for her.

“Who’s that?” She asks that question every time a guy in uniform comes on screen. Apparently she can’t keep track of faces.

“I don’t get it.” She says that a lot, along with other inane questions. “Is this set in World War I or I? So they’re in the Air Force? Why are they jumping out of planes if they aren’t in the Air Force?” Elise sticks it out for two episodes before her ADHD gets the best of her and she quits. I spread out into her body-

warmed part of the couch after she leaves, and not long after Mom reminds me to take my meds. My head hurts, so I put off weaning and take a full dose of Oxy. Turns out this show is even better when I’m high.

Two episodes go by before the buzz wears off and I trust myself to stand up. I get up for another cup of Jel -O, only to find Elise in the kitchen with the cupboard open, trying to reach a box of crackers down from the top shelf. There’s a logical flaw in her methodology, however, because the shelf is about seven feet off the ground and Elise isn’t even five feet tall —and she’s jumping up and down, trying to reach the crackers. I refuse to believe that I share DNA with a creature too dumb to use a step stool.

I reach up and grab the crackers.

“Thanks,” she says, and quits hopping. I put the box on top of the fridge instead and walk away.

“Jem!” She pouts. “You’re a jerk.” Elise goes up on her toes, trying to reach the box. Her little hand barely grazes the top of the freezer.

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” I push the box farther back from the edge.

Elise slaps my arm and declares a moratorium on milkshakes.

“I’m motivating you to grow,” I argue.

She climbs onto the counter—using her head for the first time today—and goes for the crackers.

“Mom! Elise has her feet on the counter!”

“Jem’s being mean to me!” Elise counters.

The office door opens and Mom pokes her head out. There are four pencils in her hair—not a good sign. “Is anybody bleeding?” she asks gravely.

“No.”

“Good.” She shuts her office door firmly. Best tread lightly until she starts singing at work again.

*

I try to nap again after dinner, hoping a stomach full of soup will help me sleep. It doesn’t. My brain won’t shut up and that niggling feeling is back. I run through mental lists, looking for something I may have forgotten. Medication? Homework? Promises?

Elise comes into my room and crawls onto the bed. She fits herself in close behind me, trying to spoon with her much smaller body. It feels comfortable to have someone else close by, and the way she gently strokes my upper arm for warmth. I get the feeling that she’s lulling me into a false sense of security before exacting her revenge for the cracker incident.

“You okay?” I hedge. I shouldn’t assume the worst of my sister. Maybe she needs to talk. About life, or about Meira and death.

“Fine,” she murmurs. “I just don’t want you to have more nightmares.” She hugs me and I mutter an apology for picking on her shortness.

“Just wait until I hit my growth spurt,” she says indignantly. I stifle a yawn and she encourages me to sleep. “I’ll stay while you do.” I want to tell her not to bother, but Elise might have a point—some company would be nice, if I’m going to dream about Meira, cold and still and underground. It pinches the ol’ ego some, needing another person to fall asleep. Maybe I’m just one big lump of need. What have I given back to anyone lately?

“Do you need anything?” I ask Elise. She hums and pretends to ponder.

“A fake ID?” She’s trying to get on my nerves.

“Fat load of good it’d do you. You couldn’t pass for nineteen at a hundred yards on a dark night.”

“still .”

“You don’t need a fake ID. You’re a good girl.” Who will never get as wasted as her bad-influence older brothers or let any guy touch her below the neck.

“You have one,” she says slyly.

“Why were you going through my wallet?”

“You don’t keep it in your wallet.” Damn it.

So I change the subject. “I can’t sleep.”

Elise hums a little, testing out melodies in her throat. Mom comes in to check on me and finds us curled together. Lucky for me, she doesn’t tell Elise to leave me alone.

“Do you guys remember taking naps together when you were little?” she says. I don’t know why she asks such questions; as if Elise or I could possibly remember anything that happened to us when we were toddlers.

“No, Mom.”

“Terrible Twos,” she says with a serious nod. “You guys wouldn’t go down for a nap unless I tucked you in together, and there’d always be a fight over whose blankie was whose. Ten minutes later you’d be snuggling like best buddies.” I vaguely remember that. Elise was terribly jealous of my Batman blanket.

Mom gives us kisses and says she’ll be just down the hall , researching in the library. Elise’s breath is soft on the back of my neck, and there’s something about being held that makes it easier to slip into sleep.

Elise’s theory about company as the cure for nightmares goes bust. My first awareness of the dream is a bed I didn’t fall asleep in, with the creepy hospital smell and guardrails on both sides of the mattress.

The room’s familiar lack of color and natural light make me feel cold and exposed. I’m tied down with tubes and wires that burrow under my skin, choking me, tethering me. I try to push them away and end up even more hopelessly tangled. Somewhere out of sight machines—the anchors of the tubes that tie me down—whir and beep and wheeze in gruesome compensation for my broken body.

I try to push some of the tubes away and they burrow
deeper
into my skin like live snakes.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

I look up to find Meira at the end of the hospital bed. She leans over the footboard and smirks at me with her black-painted lips. Her gothic eyes leer at me.

“That’s all that’s keeping you alive.” She points to the tubes, and her hand is all bones. She’s wasting away in front of me.

“You’re living on poison.” Meira laughs at me. “Which poison is gonna kill you first, huh?”

She crawls onto the bed, wading through the sea of tubes and heedlessly stepping on my limbs. I’m invisible between the weight of the machines that simultaneously live for and kill me.

“Don’t even bother breathing.” She steals the nasal cannula from under my nose. Other tubes replace it, gagging me. Meira reaches for the port in my chest.

“No!”

Meira tears it out at the root and I jerk awake with the cold taste of fear in my mouth. Elise has her arms around me, frantically murmuring, “It was only a dream. It wasn’t real.”

It felt real. My hands are shaking and I think that whimpering, gasping sound is coming from me. I roll away from Elise and pull my shirt up. For once I’m happy to see and touch the central line in my chest.

“Lower your head,” Elise says. “You’ve got to calm down.” She makes me kneel forward and put my head down. I try to breathe evenly with her, but I have no control. My body is in the hands of someone else; someone who wants to fuck with me—God or Meira or someone else, but not me.

Elise gets off the bed and when I call her back to me my voice breaks on a sob. I can’t be alone right now.

“Mom!” Elise call s, and wraps her arms around me. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Too many times I’ve done this—buried my face against my sister and cried like a fucking baby. Mom’s arms wrap around me from behind, encircling both Elise and I.

“What’s the matter?” she murmurs in her gentle, mothering tone; the one she used when we came to her with cuts and scrapes as kids.

“Bad dream,” Elise says.

Mom kisses my head and shoulders. “You’re safe, hon.”

It could have just as easily been me.

*

Insomnia keeps both Mom and I awake well into the night. We can’t sleep for the same reasons, but we don’t talk about them. We sit in the kitchen with green tea and talk about inconsequential stuff like school and work.

“Willa does well in school, right?” Mom asks.

“Mid-to-high range marks,” I agree.

“Does she want to be a chef?” she says with a knowing smile. The passion Willa has for food is obvious even to the casual observer. There’s real love in it, for the craft and for the people she feeds.

“I’m so happy she got you to eat soup,” Mom says, and squeezes my hand.

“She used to cook for her sister, you know.”

“Oh?” I fill Mom in on the story of Thomasina, how I’m not the first cancer patient Willa has been close to. I leave out the part about assisted suicide, the psych detainment and the suicide attempt, because that’s stuff Mom doesn’t need to know. She has worried enough for one lifetime, and I want her to think well of Willa.

“She’s a very strong young woman,” Mom says lowly. Her eyes are fixed on something distant as she traces the lip of her mug. “I had wondered.”

“About what?”

“Most teenage girls are shal ow,” she says, and takes a sip of tea. “I wondered why she was so at ease with the fact that you’re still recovering.”

I want to tell Mom that she’s more than at ease. Willa thinks I’m beautiful. Isn’t that something?

Dude, there’s a whole herd of flying pigs out back.

The clock on the stove beeps at midnight and Mom says, “You should try to get some rest, sweetie.”

I shake my head. I’m too scared to fall asleep again, knowing that haunted dreams will ruin a perfectly peaceful night.

“Do you want some warm milk?” she offers. “A sleeping pill ?”

“No, thanks.” I tried one of her pills before, out of curiosity. The sudden, overpowering crash reminded me of the health lecture on date rape drugs. I’m not keen to repeat that experience.

“I’ll walk you upstairs.” She puts an arm around my shoulders and steers me out of the kitchen. I don’t have a choice in the matter.

Twice during the night I wake up with the feeling of eyes on me. I want to roll over and tell Mom to take her own advice and swallow a sedative, or apologize for upsetting her, but I do neither. I lie there and pretend to sleep until I slip under again, and when I wake for the third time with vague shadows of indecipherable nightmares still clinging to my lids, I’m alone. I hope Dad is taking care of her.

Wednesday Day three of my suspension. I get to go back to school tomorrow and see Willa. That seems so far away right now, since time has a way of crawling when I wake up with a splitting headache. Several nights of lousy sleep are catching up with me in full force. I roll over and dig through my nightstand drawer for a spare bottle of Oxy—that’s right, I have ‘spare’ narcotics. I try to swallow the pill but it sticks in my throat. My tongue is a little swollen and it hurts to swallow.

“Crap.” That voice is too high to be mine. I poke around under my jaw and find my lymph nodes without effort. They’re swollen. I’m sick.

“Shit, shit, shit.” I get out of bed and tell myself that the achiness is no worse than it is on a normal day. I try to swallow more water and it only makes the pain in my throat worse. According to the clock it’s seven a.m. My family is just waking up, but I don’t have anywhere to be; if my headache hadn’t woken me I’d have slept in till ten.

I head down the hall to Mom and Dad’s room. Mom is in the shower, but luckily Dad is available. He looks up from buttoning his shirt and asks if I’m okay.

“My throat hurts.” It’s scary how fast he goes into doctor mode. He loses the expression of a concerned parent and adopts the look of a calculating clinician as he feels under my jaw and makes me show him the back of my throat.