What Happened to Lani Garver (6 page)

Macy would come drag me out by the ear if she had any clue I was with a guy who ran away and wouldn't talk about it. I wasn't about to be completely stupid.

"Well ... I don't really like talking about me, either."

He just looked away to the corner. "Do you have friends you can talk to?"

"I have friends."

He looked back again, like I hadn't answered his question. I rolled my eyes. "What I've got is a pretty serious problem. They wouldn't know what to do about it. They're just ...
normal.
"

"There's this charming thing called 'getting a load off,' even if they couldn't help."

"I suppose I could get a load off." I shrugged, uneasy. "I guess I'm afraid of freaking them out. Maybe they'd back off from me. Not to be mean or anything, but ... they're just not used to big problems."

I thought maybe he'd give me a lecture on picking less shallow friends, at which point I would have left no matter how bad I felt. But his eyebrows hooked together like he had some sort of a challenge.

"And you can't talk to your mom."

I shook my head. "She topples pretty easily. Last time I had a serious problem ... she let me go stay with my dad in Philadelphia until ... it was over. Not that she's a bad person or anything. She's just real emotional, and we all decided I needed, you know, someone who wouldn't pace the floor all night and make me all crazy, too."

I was leaving big holes in this story, like
She was a happy, weekend partyer before I got sick.
I was trying to get this kid backed off, not sucked in.

But he wasn't staring, like, to get all the missing details. He just blinked into the darkening corner. "What about your dad?"

"He's a little more together than my mom." Hazy echoes wandered through my head of my dad laying all the cards out a few times:
Your mom is an overgrown child. She drinks because she doesn't cope well with reality. You didn't cause that; it's not your fault.
"He can read my mind sometimes. But it's hard to take seriously people's advice when they never talk unless
you
call
them.
Not that I blame him. He waited until after ... my problem ended ... to get remarried. He's only been remarried a year. He's a musician, so he has to work constantly to keep him and Suhar out of debt. I can't lay anything else on him."

"So, you can't talk to your mom, your dad, or your friends."

I hadn't really thought of myself as being in any sort of a corner until he put it that way. I laughed a little but rolled onto my side, which I knew from experience helps you to not puke. I felt like puking, probably from feeling dizzy.

"There're also counselors, rabbis, pastors," he said with a tiny note of sarcasm, like that was a brilliant idea. It was just a small thing, but I couldn't remember hearing too many kids tell another
kid
to go to a
grown-up
for help. Maybe a dork would. But there was something very not-dorky about him. Dorks are usually very sheltered. He seemed streetwise, older.... I couldn't put my finger on it yet.

I went on. "My dad thought I should get counseling, but ... I just wanted to get back to the island, back to my life. My mom doesn't see the need for stuff like that. She's the type who'll spew anything to anyone and can't see why I'm not like that. She brought the island pastor over a couple times, but it was more like 'Try and find out for me if anything's up with her,' rather than 'See if there isn't something she wants to talk about.' You know."

"So ... even the very religious guy seems like a spy for the enemy."

"Yeah." I let go of a weak giggle. "But I don't really, you know, enjoy talking about it to anyone. I don't need ol' Pastor Stedman. I can talk to God, direct, if I want."

He laughed. "Well, I don't think that's gonna help in this case."

"Why not? You some sort of atheist?"

"No. I talk to God. A lot. But I don't have the type of God in my head who would tell me to be nice to the new kid while I'm trying not to faint."

I thought on that—me staggering into Sydney's on a mission of sainthood. I cracked up weakly. "I'm dumb sometimes. My friends will tell you."

"What else does this God tell you? Not to eat doughnuts?"

"Very funny, ha-ha. But sometimes I feel like..." I tried to figure how to say my thought without sounding even more stupid. "I feel like God has entire, whole control over whether my illness stays away or comes back. And my only bargaining power is to be, like,
super
nice. Only problem is, I've probably got some killer-bitch tendencies."

I realized I'd just said "illness," and yet he hadn't turned to stare. I watched him study the corner, his dark eyebrows knit together like he enjoyed the challenge. The question he asked next didn't make much sense, had nothing to do with illness.

"Do you ever get mad?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, confused. "Mad at who?"

"At anyone. Your friends. Your mom."

"I get mad at my mom pretty regularly," I admitted, though I couldn't figure what this had to do with anything. "If I don't remind her to pay the bills, the electric will go out or something. Yet if I show that I'm mad and remind her too loudly? She doesn't respond well to that."
She's shot in the ass all night, and I'm stuck with my guilt.

"And your friends? You get mad at them?"

"I get ... annoyed sometimes because—" I stopped, Macy's lecture ringing in my head.
You're not only trusting a strange kid who ran away, but you're talking about
us
?

I heard a moan and realized it was mine. I felt worse than when I came here, when I thought there was a chance I could walk home. I started swallowing spit and decided I'd better prepare him for a bedroom version of "The Umbrella Ride." "You ran away, right?"

"Right."

"You've seen a lot, then?"

"Sure."

"Sick people?"

"Tons."

I didn't expect the easiness in his answers but was relieved. "Good. Cuz I'm scared I'm going to puke. Sorry." I shut my eyes, then I snapped them open. Last thing I wanted to do besides puke was have a nightmare in a strange bed. "How'd we get on the subject of my friends? What were we talking about? God or something..."

"Don't really think we were talking about God"—he whizzed a wastepaper basket over by the side of the bed but looked more distracted by his thought than grossed out by me—" ... think we were talking about
control.
"

I didn't know what he meant, but I noticed how his fingers dangled loosely between his knees, like he was not the least bit rattled by me. It was hard to believe I could threaten to hurl, and any kid would be taking this whole scenario so well. "You're not going to call nine-one-one on me, are you?"

"Not unless you want me to."

"No way. I just want—" My gut whirled until I thought my stomach was in my brains. I thought,
I just want some goddamn
control. Probably because he had just babbled that word. "I want to ... to sleep."

"Go ahead."

I watched his hands flip, like he had shrugged.
Yeah, so I can meet some ... Sally who swallows forks and knives right in front of you.
"I can't sleep here."

"I don't bite."

"You're too nice," I said.

"I'm too nice."

I didn't catch the sarcasm in his voice until he started giggling again.
He thinks I'm nice, ha. I'm really selfish ... If I bother people I'll lose them, and I want to keep them, which is not the same as being nice. It would feel pretty great ... to bother just one person ... somebody I didn't care about so much...

"I had cancer in junior high." I gripped the corner of the pillowcase—watching for a twitch, a squirm, a something.

His eyes merely missed a blink as they widened for a second. He said, "Okay..."

I waited, but he had nothing to add. "So ... you ever know anybody with cancer?"

He nodded. "I've had friends with AIDS. There's a certain type of brain cancer associated with that. Couple of friends..."

AIDS.
Gayness, drug abuse, runaways ... the terms
should
put me on edge,
I thought hazily. But talking to someone my own age who knew about anything this serious ... it gave me a rush. I reached out, grabbed hold of his fingers, and squeezed them. I waited for him to pull away, but he kept staring absently at the corner.

He finally asked, "So, you've never had a support group? A counselor? Friends who had the same thing?"

I tried to remember what happened in eighth grade. "My mom kept saying the chances of a recurrence were slim, like, less than one in five. She needed to forget the whole thing—"

"Jesus." He pinched the bridge of his nose with the hand I wasn't turning to sludge and kept his eyes clamped shut. When he opened them, they were full of something—anger, maybe. I guessed he thought I should have been in a support group.

"Yeah, well. I could have talked myself blue in the face to someone, and it wouldn't have helped my
real
problem."

"What's your
real
problem?"

"That I'm afraid it's come back." I just started spewing again—how tiredness had turned to dizzy spells and how I had not felt like fainting since chemo. He looked concerned but not horrified. I had just told him some stuff that would make most of my friends politely freeze in horror.

"How old are you?" I asked suddenly. The feeling rushed through me like maybe he was, somehow, a lot older. Maybe he was really college age but his running away set him back. He listened like a grown-up—like he was expected to do something constructive and not just join in my pity fest.

His mind seemed to stop concentrating, but his eyes looked weary. He rolled them. "How old am I? I'm
ancient.
" His laugh sounded tired.

"What do you mean?" I figured he probably meant something like
It's not the years; it's the mileage.
But he didn't answer. He trudged around the mattress and flopped down on the other side. He blinked at the ceiling a bunch of times.

His hair fell back on the pillow, giving me a chance to look at him more closely than I had dared in school. He had one of those baby noses that blended into his cheeks without a single flaw. His dark brown eyelashes, impossibly long, made me think of a toddler who hadn't grown into his face yet. So much maturity coming through such innocent features—that froze me, reminding me of some sci-fi story I had read of an old man stuck in a child's body.

"'Ancient' ... That's a funny comment." I finally ran a finger down his peachy cheek and came back with equal sarcasm. "Do you even shave yet?"

"No."

"Well, then?"

He took my hand off his face, plopped it down on my own chest, then patted it with too much patience. "Go to sleep, why don't you? Let me think..."

"I'm not asking you to solve my problems." He looked too stirred up. I felt uncomfortable, like I was a pain. "Don't fret. If I'm not in remission anymore, there's nothing we can do."

His hand came down on my head in a "dad" sort of way that gave me another weird twitch. He rubbed my hair and stared off at the ceiling, either like I was three or he was sixty. It left me half annoyed, half hypnotized.

"Claire, I'm not saying you're still in remission or not in remission. I'm saying you've got so many issues, I don't see how you could tell one thing from the other."

"'Issues' ... What do you mean?"

He kept thumping his head lightly against the wall, staring at the ceiling. But his hand came down over my forehead and then my eyes, so I had to shut them.

"I'm not going to sleep on your bed," I informed him.

"Then try to relax so I can think."

I didn't exactly have a choice. I could imagine myself trying to walk home and heaving in the gutter with ten drivers catching the view.

"Sometimes I have nightmares." I tried to warn him.

"Go figure."

I caught more sarcasm but couldn't figure how he would know about my nightmares. "They're bloody. I don't wake up well."

"Do you scream? I can turn up the radio."

My eyes filled up, to my shock. I wanted to think of something awful to say so he would stop being so nice. But I couldn't think of anything. "I don't scream. I'm just not ... in a great mood when I wake up."

"You're in a worse mood than
this
?"

I laughed, sniffing up tears, feeling completely stupid. "Sorry if ... I upset you."

He laced his fingers on his stomach and stared at me with a look of shock that I would have expected when I said I'd had cancer, but I couldn't make sense of it now.

"You're an odd one..." I yawned. "Are you going to tell me how old you are?"

That's the last thing I remember until I was dreaming. It wasn't a bloody nightmare, though it had that same deranged feel to it. I dreamed about Lani's arrival on Hackett. It wasn't by bus or car. I saw him walking toward me out of the mist with something heavy on his back, like a shiny pack or a roll of fluorescent blankets ... coming off the water at the end of Fisherman's Wharf.

I stared into a radio alarm that said 8:10, and I couldn't decide whether it was morning or night. The room was dark ...
night.
My surroundings made sense when I saw the three pinheads of candlelight.

Lani lay flat on his back, on the far side of the bed, fingers laced across his stomach. He didn't use a pillow. I hazily remembered having a dream about him that hadn't upset me too badly. But without any pillow, he looked almost laid out, like a vampire, or a corpse in a funeral home. I flicked at his arm, hoping he would roll over, because I had some tingly, power-nap high I didn't want to lose via freaky thoughts.

His lips were a little opened, but I was surprised when they moved so easily. "You're feeling better."

I couldn't argue.

He inhaled deeply. "Mom made meat loaf. Smell?"

I could smell beef wafting up. It made my mouth water as I stood up.

"Wanna eat before you leave?"

"I hardly ever eat red meat, thanks."

He sat up. After a long exhale he asked, "Now, how did I know you were going to say that? No red meat, no sticky buns..." He stood up and stretched. "No fun..."