Words and Their Meanings (17 page)

Daily Verse:

I can still taste what it feels like to be sixteen and totally f#$ked up.

38

M
y s
ister is a sponge who reads very well. I had to change the last word of my daily verse because I don't want her dropping the f-bomb while watching the fireworks with her friend Josie's family, or at the hospital tomorrow in front of Gramps, even if he can't hear her say it.

I changed the verse twice today. It started out more innocent. Something about hung-up girls only making mediocre art, and then something about Paul Revere, in honor of Independence Day and all. I was feeling okay about seeing Mateo after an afternoon coffin yoga sesh, but the closer it got to five, the more jittery I got, so I changed my clothes. And my black T-shirt with the neck cut out and my super-short jean cut-offs with the pockets showing required words to match. I finished writing them just as the doorbell rang.

Now we're in the car driving to Nat's, and Mateo keeps glancing at the inside of my arm, then back at me, then at the road. He's nervous. He keeps fidgeting with the radio, not waiting to really see what song is playing before skipping to the next station.

Alex and Nat are waiting outside. Mateo lets out a low whistle when he first catches sight of them. There are showboats, and then there are folks who take that word to a whole new level. Alex's red-and-white striped pants and blue bow tie, combined with Nat's flag dress and blue glitter eyes, makes it looks like they raided the God Bless America superstore in Hell. (Yes, Michigan. Of course I surfed the web to see what “great shopping” Hell boasts. BrightLight's brochure totally broke the “thou shall not lie” commandment.)

“Aren't you glad you get to be seen with us?” I ask. I hug my knees to my chest and stare out the passenger window. Mateo doesn't answer me, but he does tell Nat and Alex they look “totally boss.”

The whole way to the West Side River Park, Nat is singing “Saltpeter, John!” and Alex is laughing and asking where her cloister is.

“Translation,” I say to Mateo, more out of habit than anything else. “She's singing a song from the ever-so-appropriate musical
1776
, which she and Alex starred in last fall at the Community Playhouse, because that theatre troupe can never seem to get their shows to match the appropriate seasons.”

Nat leans forward to say something, but then snatches my arm, pulls it to look at my wrist. She frowns and narrows her eyes a little. She doesn't care about the f-bomb. She cares about the small vertical line going up from the middle of my wrist. In tiny letters:
I never thought I was going to live until thirty.
Her high ponytail swings like a wagging finger behind her.

I lift up my shoulders and turn back around. I don't like the insinuation.

It doesn't mean I'm looking for trouble. It doesn't mean anything. I start to mutter how I was only walking (just walking, with stardust beneath my feet), but think better of it.

By the time we get to the same small square edge of the park where teenagers have gathered on the Fourth of July probably since my parents were kids, everyone is already loosey-goosey hugging and stumbling, falling, breaking into hysterical laughter. Red Solo cups are scattered across the ground. A nameless junior slams the hood of Mateo's Jeep and slurs, “Theredtruckhasakegintheback.”

“This won't get busted?” Mateo asks. “I mean, it's a city park.”

“It'll get busted,” Alex says, “but there are so many MIPs to give out, it's like trying to catch every ant busting out of an anthill. The more-sober survive. Besides, there's, you know, worse stuff for cops to deal with. They don't seem to worry about breaking up this party till after the fireworks.”

Somebody's car stereo is pumping bad '80s music. Nat pulls me over to a group of drama and student council girls who are jumping around and singing.

Alex and Mateo stand aside, chatting like BFFs.

This circle is full of shiny smiles, as if every girl dancing truly believes there will never be a moment as fun as the one they're in right now. As if they are invincible. Unlike the kickball field at Satopia all those years ago, I can't feel it with them.

It's like being stuck inside a glass box, watching the way I'm supposed to be, and the loneliness hits like a sucker punch.

There was a short time at the beginning of junior year when I got wasted. A lot. Every time Nat got invited to a party, we'd show up late and I'd go straight to the stolen booze bottles, cheap beer, or trash can full of jungle juice and not stop until Alex was dragging me out over his shoulder, rag-doll style. This stopped when Nat threatened to go to my parents. To tell them every secret I'd ever spilled. Every secret. I didn't get mad, just stopped going to parties.

Yet here I am. So I channel Patti. Do what needs to be done. I take the 72-ounce Slurpee cup that Betsy, one of Nat's favorite student directors, is offering. Her red lipstick is on the straw. I pull the top off, swig, gag, and swig some more. Coke and something—rum, maybe—set my throat and stomach on fire. I slam the rest of it. Betsy takes the cup back just long enough to fill it up. This time the booze slides down with ease. We repeat this ritual once or maybe twice more.

Mateo is watching. I let the ground sway me in the opposite direction.

Then I just keep letting earth and sky and everything in between move me until I'm like the rest of them, dancing and singing the chorus all wild and free. Nat slows down and snatches the empty-again cup away from me. One whiff and her suspicions are confirmed. She pushes it back into Betsy's hand.

“C'mon, before you end up puking and crying in a Port-a-Potty,” she yells into my ear, dragging me from the dirt dance floor, and adding, “This is why Patti doesn't drink.”

I have no idea what she means.

Mateo is with Alex and a group of guys from soccer. In the last year, I've barely said five words to half these dudes, but Mateo's joking and laughing like a part of their team.

I stop with plenty of space between us.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

The words sit in my mouth, sour and thick. I want to say it. I want to scream NO. I want to curl up on the dirt and rock back and forth and wail, because I am so, so, so sad. There's no other way to put it. I know there are more beautiful, expressive adjectives available—melancholy, lugubrious, dej
ected—and I know sad is simple, overused. But sometimes, big words hide the truth under layers of phonemic fluff.

I'm sad.

I'm here, but I'm a ghost.

I'm here and you're here and I want to …

Instead of saying anything, I walk over and shove my tongue down his throat.

Mateo tries to pull away but I lock my arms around the back of his neck and kiss him so hard it hurts. After two or twenty minutes and a whole lot of “whoas” and laughter, I let go and stare at the ground.

“What the hell was that about?” he says into my ear.

“You don't like kissing me, friend?”

“I don't like getting mauled. I don't understand you—” He pauses like he's tasting my tongue again. “Are you wasted?”

The first whistle-crack-boom echoes into the night, a shower of red falling stars. Mateo tenses against me. His heart thumps.

Between explosions of light, he starts backing up.

“What'syourproblemdude?”

The Slurpee cup might have contained a very uneven ratio of rum to coke.

“Hey, Alex, can you guys get a lift if I get outta here?” Mateo asks over my head. Alex and Nat both snap their heads toward us, frown at me, and nod.

“No prob,” Alex answers. “Fun hanging with you.”

They do a little bro-shake.

“Where are you going?”

An extra-loud firework echoes into my words. White sparks float down, an umbrella of a thousand crackling sparklers.

“I'm done, Anna,” he says, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. The ground is kind of spinning and my stomach feels like lit gasoline, so I shut my eyes tight. When I open them, he's gone.

Daily Verse:

Moments of sorrow or darkness belonged to me.

39

F
or the last week, I haven't talked to anyone but my mom and Bea. And Gramps, if he counts.

I spend my time in the worn brown chair with wooden arms in room 508, watching Gramps go from bad to worse.

Coffin yoga happens everywhere now: in my car, on the kitchen table, in the hospital hallway. I don't care.

I find Bea only three times: under the bathroom sink,
locked in Mom's trunk, and lying flat in the backyard garden.

Mom is worse than me. She barely takes a shower or eats more than five bites, and she keeps saying things like “I'm so tired.”

Lori is eight months along and was admitted overnight for observation after a round of bad contractions. I caught my dad in with Gramps today. He was crying.

I sleep in Joe's room at night. No one stops me.

Daily Verse:

Until the day he died.

40

M
y yoga practice is starting to fail me. Every time I stretch my eyes wide open and hold my breath, a poem floats to the surface.

you took a bus to heaven.

she says, face lighting up.

My words are gone, but hers

match the blue of your eyes.

Dad believed that faded blue

was still tied to whatever's above.

You laughed every time, remember?

Saying

there's nothing, nothing but sky.

Daily Verse:

Nothing that I was doing would have prepared me for this path.

41

L
ooking at Mom's face as she listens to whoever is on the other end of our phone line, I'm pretty sure Gramps decided to go ahead and die despite the machine's best efforts to keep his body from wilting like eight-day-old spinach.

Her mouth cranks into an upside down U. She mumbles a few things like “I see” and “Okay, okay.” Then she is crying and trying not to cry. She's not breathing, which makes it impossible to talk, so she clicks the phone off. Throws it across the kitchen. The battery cover breaks and bounces across the floor. There is a dent in the drywall, which is maybe good. It gives us both something to stare at, since I can't look at her while she's whimpering in that panicked, trying-to-gasp-in-air kind of way.

“That was your father.”

Oh.

“Lori is in labor. She's at the hospital. He'd like you and Bea to go up now.”

I think,
No. No. No. No. No.

I think,
This is bad. This baby's birth equates to a whole different sort of death for us.

I think,
At least this one isn't my fault. Or maybe it is.

But I say: “Dang it. I haven't even bedazzled ‘taking applications for a sugar daddy: eighteen-year waitlist' onto a onesie for it yet.”

“I'm heading up there anyway, to meet with Gramps's doctors. Go get Bea. You can ride with me.”

Just like that, Mom's mask returns. Back straight and strong. Voice not wavering for even a second. But she keeps pulling her curly ponytail out and putting it back in, tighter and tighter each time.

Bea doesn't have time to hide, though she makes a valiant attempt to become one with the back of the toilet when I bound up the stairs to grab her. My sister's eavesdropping skills are almost as impressive as her Houdini apprenticeship.

“I'm calling it Frog Face. Or Ugly Pants. Or Pukerella,” she mutters in the back seat over and over again.

“Bea, be kind. She'll be a little baby. A harmless baby who didn't ask for any of this,” Mom says. She is staring ahead, like a corpse, eyes open.

I want to say, “Do any of us ask for any of this? Isn't that the point?”

But instead I fog up my window and write a line from one of my old poems with my fingertip
:
“
Leaving only traces of our traces
.”

We walk into the hospital. Take the routine deep inhale of sickness and grief. To get acclimated. To prepare. There is no smell of new baby in the lobby because the babies pop into the world on floor four. Which, by the way, is still tinged with illness and last breaths.

My dad is sitting on the floor of the Labor and Delivery hallway. My mom is in the elevator. She starts to step out, going to him on instinct. Instead, she shoves Bea and me forward, hits the door close button a thousand times until the metal shuts, and she beams up, to a place with a different kind of pain.

When he hears our flip-flops shuffle toward him, my father glances up. His face is blotchy, his eyes bloodshot. Crying. He's been crying in the bad way. He's still crying in the bad way.

My brain goes to blank radio station static.

“They just took her. A few seconds ago. She's having an emergency C-section.”

Three feet away from the slumped figure on the hospital's linoleum floor, I stop and stand my ground. Like a hunchbacked old man, my dad's shoulders are rounded, his hands plowing through his thick black hair, head between his knees.

“I … I couldn't go in. I couldn't. She begged me and I stood here like my feet were cement bricks. I told the nurse I'd pass out and be a liability. I can't be there if something—I—”

Bea slinks to his side. She takes his hands. With a puff of air, she blows her long ringlet bangs out of her eyes.

“It will be okay, Dad,” she soothes in a voice no seven-year-old kid ought to be able to muster.

I know I should be sympathetic. I know a good person, a good daughter, puts the past to rest in moments of crisis.

But I'm running in the other direction. My flip-flops echo out, “I can't. I can't. I can't.”

A click and lullaby come on over the loudspeaker, the building-wide signal for a baby being born. When Joe was here, I held my breath for each tiny serenade, the way Nat and I used to do every time we passed a cemetery. Nurses explained the little songs were to keep people smiling, because babies are symbols of happiness and hope. All those lullabies ever did was make me cry, because what if the universe is made of equal and opposite reactions?

There's a mother and baby crying together in the room on my left. A nurse bustles past me. She's got her big bubblegum lips parted in a full-on grin.

“Shove it,” I say and duck into the stairwell.

My mother is packing the origami crane into a black duffle bag when I get to Gramps's room. Eyebrows rise, but she doesn't ask.

“Lori's in surgery,” I say with intentional indifference. “Probably one of those alien babies and they have to rip her stomach open to get it out.”

“Anna!”

Dust settles between us.

“What's going on?” I ask, a little more gentle than a moment ago. Cards from Gramps's old customers, fishing buddies, fellow origami club members, aren't filling the wall anymore. Only two are left. One says, “You're a Last Word Kind of Guy,” which was written on the back of a hospital menu, by me, in red ink. The other one isn't a get-well note. Mom brought it in and taped it up, like there might be magic in it somehow. It has a stick figure computer-drawing on the front with a big, bold type
. “There's always hope when you know where you want to go.”

I open it, even though I remember what it says on the inside because I was sitting next to Joe the day he wrote it.

“G, thanks for helping to get me there. Love you. Joe.”

Mom sighs behind me. It sounds like the word “tired.”

“So, you are pulling the plug.”

A ladybug crawls outside on the window. Every few seconds it stops to open its wings. They remind me of red little-kid scissors. The left wing keeps sticking. I flick the glass.

“No.”

Looking at her confirms my fears. Gramps is brain-dead. She wants to tuck him away in some residential home that reeks of antiseptic and is always bathed in yellow light. In this moment, I know it's true: the watching, holding out hope, waiting for someone to die, it's worse than death itself.

“Mom, no. Please. You can't be serious. Didn't the doctors say—”

She looks at Gramps and back to me. Her eyes are wide, like she can't believe I'd have this conversation here. Once upon a time, Mom held a lot of faith in last-ditch recoveries and people deciding if they want to wake up or not. Still does, apparently.

I follow her into the hallway. We're three rooms away from the central RN station, and a nurse with a narrow, kind face is watching us from behind the Diet Coke she's sipping. Our eyes connect and she quick-drops the can back to her desk. She flips open a chart and pretends to not be listening.

“What if there's the slightest chance? A flicker. A one percent possibility, Anna. How could I let him go? I've already signed the forms. We're moving him to a long-term care facility tomorrow.”

How could she let him go? How could I let him go? Joe. Gramps. Their faces swirl together in my mind. Gone but here. Here but gone.

The long rectangular light above us starts humming. It gets louder and louder, and then, quiet again. Mom rubs her hands like she's washing them. Like she's doing the sixty seconds in scalding hot water it takes for a chef to be germ free in a commercial kitchen.

“Mom—”

“This is not up for discussion, Anna.” She has said my name more in the past fifteen seconds than she has in a year.

“I cannot be responsible for his death,” she adds in strangled whispers.

I look at her. The skin under her eyes puffs like dough starting to rise. She leans against a bulletin board, one with emergency procedures and hospital safety standards tacked in with bright, colored pushpins. I don't think she notices how her words stab me.

The word “responsible” wraps around my neck, constricting.

I nod. Because I understand in ways she can't imagine.

The plan forms before I realize it is a plan and I hear myself saying, “Yes, Mom. Of course not. This is the right thing. Why don't you go to Gramps's house and pack some stuff to move to the care facility. Go home and take a shower. Take Bea to Mrs. G. I will sit here with him.”

When her gaze meets mine I have to look away. Those eyes are grateful. They are Bea's eyes, staring up at me, pleading.

For a moment I want to open my arms and let her fall in, let her go limp and sweaty with the weight of not choosing.

Gramps wouldn't want to live this way. But Mom can't be the one. If Joe was still here, my dad would be too, standing beside Mom. The O'Mally boys. They'd be strong for all of us.

But he's gone. And I know what I have to do. I killed once. I'm already stained and lost and here but gone. If I can do anything for them—for Mom, Bea, Gramps, even Dad—it's this. I can set Gramps free. I can take their hope. Hope is not a thing with feathers. It's an anchor. And it will drown them.