Wake (87 page)

“I hate being here,” he whispers.

“You’ll be home soon.” That doesn’t cheer him up much. I hold him and rub his back and tell him little things about my day. He never would have listened to me ramble like this before he got sick, but now my normalcy is comforting.

“Your favorite nurse is making rounds,” I offer. Jem doesn’t react. He’s too busy having a blue moment.

Not long after we’re joined by said nurse—a petite ball of energy with
Snow White
scrubs and Cheshire Cat stickers on her shoes.

“Hey Kim.”

“Is he awake?” She nods at Jem.

“Yeah. Bad day.”

“I’m right here,” he mutters into my neck.

“still coughing?” Kim makes Jem roll over so she can listen to his breathing. He’s not in a friendly mood today, but I know he likes Kim best. Jem doesn’t click with many people (surprise), but she’s the only nurse that he doesn’t complain about. The others all either smell funny, talk too much, have cold hands, are too rough, or don’t have enough enthusiasm.

“Nice scrubs.” He sounds sarcastic, but she takes it in stride.

“Are you Sneezy?”

“No. Coughy.”

“I’d say Grumpy.” She places her stethoscope and makes him cough. “Like you mean it.” He hacks away for a few minutes. Jem sounds like a chain smoker. It’s like something is trying to crawl back up his throat as noisily as possible.

“You’re sounding better,” she says cheerfull y. Really? That’s
better
? “How’s your appetite?”

“Fine.”

“He ate a fruit cup,” I volunteer. Jem lazily smacks my arm for presuming to speak for him.

“Can I go home yet?”

“Soon, probably. Your fever is coming down steadily. I’ll come check you again later.” She squeezes his shoulder with a reassuring smile and turns to go, on to the next patient. My time here is up as well.

Dad comes in as I go out. He’s on his lunch break too.

“What’s the news?” Jem asks him.

“None. Just came to see how you are.” Dad always gets tense around Jem when he’s in the hospital—

Dad’s hospital, where he spends about eighty percent of his waking hours and should feel right at home.

“I’m sick,” Jem says, in the spirit of pointing out the obvious. There’s an awkward moment while Dad fishes around for something to say. I see him eyeing the half-eaten meal tray like he’s going to comment on it, and I know Jem’s short temper won’t bear that right now.

“I’m gonna head out, Dad.”

“Oh?”

I nod and give him a hug goodbye. He grabs my hand as I let go of the hug and says, “I’ll walk you out.”

A minute and a half is usually how long his visits with Jem last before one of them gets upset.

*

I spend the evening getting things ready for when Jem is discharged. The spare bedroom is closest to Mom’s office, where she could keep an eye on him while she works. I think about making up that room for him, but then he wouldn’t have a private bathroom, and he really needs that.

I pull the sheets off his bed and wash them, and then set about sterilizing the bathroom surfaces. Eric comes in while I’m elbow-deep in bleach and feels the need to remark on the smell . I tell him to take the sheets out of the dryer.

I have little rituals that keep me sane whenever Jem is really sick. After I make the bed and stock the fridge with Jel -O, I take his black photo album into my room. Eric originally took these pictures for Jem’s benefit, but I’ve gotten something out of them, too.

Jem keeps facedown the pictures he can neither bear to look at nor get rid of. Some of these are my favorites. One is of Mom asleep across four waiting room chairs. She looks uncomfortable and completely exhausted. I can see why that shot bothers Jem; he’s very sensitive to others’ pain, and wouldn’t want Mom to suffer unnecessarily on his account.

My favorite picture isn’t even properly arranged in the book. It’s taped facedown to the flyleaf at the back cover. Eric wrote the date on the white tab of the Polaroid. This one was taken twelve days after I went into the hospital to be a donor.

The day of the harvest procedure couldn’t have come fast enough for my liking. I went through testing with Eric to find out if either of us were a match, and when my results came back positive I would have let them harvest that day, if they could. But there was waiting to do; I had to have surplus stem cells in my blood, and Jem had to be in a temporary state of remission for this thing to work, so on came the radiation and chemo.

To prepare my body for the harvest, I had a series of injections over several days so that the stem cell s could be sifted directly from my blood. A few needles is nothing, and I foolishly went into it feeling cocky and self-righteously proud of what I was doing for my brother. I have thoroughly learned my lesson on the subject of pride, because instead of being a walk in the park, I had the week from hell. My body didn’t react so well to the injections. It was like having the flu—my muscles and bones ached. I could barely eat without my stomach getting upset. When I did manage to fall asleep, I woke up drenched in sweat.

I didn’t complain, though, because that would have been totally selfish and wimpy. Jem was in the middle of much harsher treatments, and had been feeling a lot worse than me for months. I could stand a little discomfort without making a fuss. I don’t think I fooled anybody, though. The whole family knew I was miserable.

The cells were col ected over four sessions. I was told I’d just have to sit there for a few hours while a machine did the blood filtering. What I
wasn’t
told was that my small veins—what isn’t small about me?—

weren’t sturdy enough for the procedure. I had to have a catheter inserted into a larger vein at my neck, which was about as pleasant as you can imagine.

I didn’t complain, but I was secretly counting down the hours during that last apheresis treatment. I smiled for the Polaroid shots that Eric was taking to keep Jem informed. He was bored that day and I was agitated, so we played with that camera for a long time, taking crack photos for fun. We accidentally got a snapshot of the exact moment my chest started hurting and I couldn’t get a breath. My left lung col apsed—yet another complication in a parade of total crap. The pain and shortness of breath made me lose consciousness, which I think was a good thing, because when I woke up I had a chest tube hanging out of my side. And up till that point, I’d thought the hardware in my neck was gross. This was just plain creepy, and on top of that, it hurt like hell.

I couldn’t leave the hospital, and the boredom nearly drove me insane. I couldn’t even get out of bed with that awful tube sticking out of me. The only thing I could do was lie there and wait for the hell ish dressing changes. I might have complained, just a little.

Jem needed Mom, so by default I had Dad spending time with me in that stuffy hospital room. I always thought Jem was being too hard on Dad whenever he went into ‘doctor mode,’ but I began to see what my brother was talking about. Dad is insufferable when he’s talking about drainage and oxygen saturation, and touching my shoulder like I’m a stranger.

Dad couldn’t be with me all the time, though. He still had shifts to work, so Eric stayed with me when neither of our parents could be there. Eric was there when things started getting weird. I felt like I was dreaming and regular events were happening out of order. Things Eric said made no sense and every time a nurse came to my bed I couldn’t understand what she was doing, even though they were basic tasks I’d seen done before.

Bacteria had gotten in around that
thing
in my neck. I’d developed sepsis, and the early symptoms looked like a regular response to the pain in my chest, so they didn’t catch it right away. I was pretty disoriented by the time treatment began, so in essence I missed the whole thing. They sedated me and put a tube down my throat to supply oxygen. A lot of liquids got pushed through that
thing
, until my lungs fill ed up with fluid and it was hard to breathe. In Eric’s photos I look totally swollen and red, like a pig with a blotchy sunburn.

But like I said, I missed all that. The following week I left the hospital with IV antibiotics, and I got over it with very few lasting scars. The little marks on my chest and neck are nothing; it’s the scars in my head that annoy me. Sepsis caused capil ary leakage in my brain, which in turn caused seizures. I’ve only had two more since leaving the hospital, but every time I seize I have to restart the waiting period to get my driver’s license back.

I’m at peace with the whole thing now, because it was all worth it for Jem’s survival, but at the time I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. As I was leaving the hospital in my borrowed wheelchair, Mom took me by the ICU to see Jem. We couldn’t go in, of course, but there are windows around all of the isolation rooms. Jem had been in one of these for weeks because he had no immune system left.

It didn’t occur to me until later that Mom and the nurses must have arranged this in advance. Jem was sitting near the window, waiting for me. The nurse, all gowned up in sterile gear to protect my brother, stood behind him like a sentinel the whole time with her hands resting on the handles of the wheelchair she’d used to move him.

It was sort of like communicating with a prison inmate, but without the phone. We both pressed a hand to the glass, lining our fingers up. He mouthed, ‘Are you okay?’ to me and I nodded before asking him the same question. ‘Yes,’ he mouthed. ‘Thank you.’

He didn’t look okay. His eyes were slightly glassy; he was pale and when his mouth moved I could see angry red blisters on the inside of his lips. The skin on his hands and arms had a strange rash. It seemed that in an attempt to make him healthy, both of us had become sicker.

‘I’m okay. Healing.’ I pulled back my col ar to show him the tidy dressing on my neck, and then I uncovered the one on my side where the tube had been. Jem looked at me with worry and pressed both hands up against the glass, like he was trying to reach me.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m okay.’

He kept repeating it: ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…’ He started to cry and the nurse’s hands closed around his upper arms. She pulled him back into his seat and began to wheel him away.

My reaction was purely impulsive. I slammed both fists against the glass and shouted, ‘Hey!’ at her.

Mom grabbed my wrists to keep me from doing it twice. ‘We’re in a hospital,’ she reminded me sternly. I tried to stand up, to get a better look at my brother—he was arguing with the nurse—and Mom sat me right back down. ‘Neither of you should be overexcited right now.’

‘Let me talk to him.’

‘He’s upset, we need to let him rest.’

I pressed my hands and face up against the glass, too stubborn to let Mom take me away until we absolutely had to leave. Whatever Jem said to the nurse worked, and she let him come back to the window. We must have looked like quite the pair, sick as dogs with our hands and faces pressed close to the glass in this strange approximation of a hug. He cried and I wheezed, and when Eric came up from the parking garage to see what was taking Mom and I so long, he snapped a Polaroid. Much later Mom said it was one of the nicest things she’d ever seen, the way Jem and I cared for each other like that.

I grab a pen and compose impulsively on the flyleaf where he keeps that picture:

You are so inconvenient to my existence

That I can’t even stand to look at you

I look at myself in the mirror

And you stare back.

You are me and I am you

This inconvenient mutual existence

One living, the other dying

You subsume my existence

And I let you

’
Cause I love you

Friday, the 9th of June. Foggy.

I put in my money

To buy nuts with honey.

Damn vending machine ate my dollar.

It’s just Eric and I for dinner tonight. Dad is at work and Mom is with Jem. There were a lot of nights like this last fall , when Eric and I ate alone with the unspoken knowledge of why our family was half-missing.

We eat in front of the TV. I know he visited Jem today, but he hasn’t offered and details and I don’t want to pry. Eric doesn’t like talking about sad things. His phone rings during a commercial and he leaves the room to answer it. Why? He usually only does that when Celeste call s. She has her own ringtone so we all know when it’s her. As if anyone believes they’re still just friends.

Eric comes back to the living room and says he’s going out for a while.

“Where?”

“Just a get-together at one of the other player’s houses.” Eric’s whole social life is sports. I wonder if Kipp will be there, if it’s a party attended by jocks, but I don’t want to ask. Eric would rip on me for it, not let me go with him, and probably tell Kipp that I asked. Humiliation with a side order of fries.

With Eric out for the night and me all alone, I cozy up in sweats and park myself in front of the computer. Time to creep a certain someone’s Facebook page.

A little box pops up in the corner of my screen with a chat alert. It’s him.
Him.
Any attention from him turns me into a puddle of goo. And it feels so nice to be goo. I’d never have imagined it would, but it does. I just have to be careful of sewer grates.

S’up?

That’s about as verbose as it gets with Kipp. He’s a man of few words, but he gets his point across.

I type back:
Nothing. Sitting at home.
And I tap my foot impatiently for the whole five seconds it takes him to answer. I wonder if he’s going to the same get-together as Eric…

You should come out tonight.

Damn it. The one night he invites me out, and I don’t have a ride. And Mom and Dad aren’t around to ask permission. I shouldn’t just go out and not tell them. And the thought of leaving makes me nervous.

What if I can’t be reached in an emergency? The little voice in my head argues with me to just take my cell phone and go out, but I still worry. Anything could go wrong with that plan—bad reception, too much distance between wherever I am and the hospital, unreliable means of transportation… Now if Apparition was real, this wouldn’t be a problem, dang it.