through my brain to check?”
He made a shushing noise. Then he whispered, “If you have nothing to hide, why be worried?”
It was then that Jeanette came running out with a trash bag bursting full of clothes. She threw it over the couch and wrapped her arms around Milton, mumbling, her face tucked into his neck.
“Did you guys make up?” she asked. Her eyes met Joey.
“Yeah,” Joey said. “We’re cool. I’m sorry for how cunty I was being.”
Jeanette ran her palm up Milton’s arm and cinched it at his bicep. “It’s alright, I understand…I just want you to feel better, you know.”
On the couch, the bag was spilling over. Old sweatshirts and tangled masses of shoes poked out the top, along with ceramic knick knacks and scraps of used notebooks. Joey recognized most of the items from her apartment.
32.
The room was dim. There was a buzzing from the fluorescents, or from the refrigerated vending machine to Jeanette’s right. She stabbed at the floor with oily fingers, seeking her purse, only to find it several seconds later, already slumped in her lap.
She stuffed a crumpled piece of gum from the bottom of the purse into her mouth. It disintegrated in a rush of saliva, then congealed and lost its flavor. She drifted off and nearly slept. There was a rattling sound and she bolted awake. She could hear their father’s voice, warning in its chiding way: don’t go to sleep with chewing gum in, Jean Bean. You’ll choke to death.
Jeanette adjusted her posture and forced the gob of gum down her throat. It quieted her stomach’s rumbles without satisfying her. Now it would turn to cement and block her insides, yet another of their father’s many concerns. Their father worried seriously about many things. He was leery of crosswalks, even alley ways and cul-de-sacs. When he turned the corner in a parking garage, he tooted the horn to warn imagined oncoming traffic. He was never angry, when they were teenagers, if they came home late; he was too busy being relieved that they were safe.
Jeanette peered into the bright but dingy fluorescents and thought, no. Not their father, not anymore. Her father.
Her phone had been hanging limply in her hand all night. She finally noticed and stuffed it away. The screen was covered in text messages and missed calls, questions and oblivious well-wishes. Her coworker Louis was offering to come by the hospital with chocolates and flowers. As if Jeanette’s sister was giving birth. Her boss wanted to know how long she would be missing in action. Jeanette didn’t want to say, didn’t even want to estimate— depending on how it went, she thought, she might never go back to work again. She’d been looking for an excuse to leave for a long time.
There was a young man in pressed scrubs sitting in the corner of the room by the nurse’s station, a clipboard bouncing on his knee. His hair was delicately mussed and he eyed Jeanette like a dessert cart he couldn’t afford to order from. She didn’t have the energy to be mad. For a while she was so lost in thought she stared right back at him, unblinking, unseeing, until an ashen-faced body was pushed past them in a gurney, surrounded by a half-dozen surgical staff members clad in mint.
When the crowd and the body passed, the young man in blue was still staring at her. His eyes crinkled and softened. He was dressed like hospital staff but he wasn’t working. The injustice made her chest hot. All hands should have been on deck.
Jeanette looked at the swinging doors and tried to will them open. Then she thought better of it. News that came sooner wouldn’t necessarily be better. A new magazine was pulled into her lap. Fit Grrl. She read yogurt advertisements (“now with myelanting fibers!”). Marathon training tips. An article on the science of the runner’s high. Sunburn treatments. Jeanette squinted so hard her temples twisted.
She tried not to think of it, tried not to think of how Joey smelled, how she looked, how she sounded, how hot she felt, what the nurses said, what the chart said, what was going on in the other room. There was varnish from the waiting room chairs stuck under Jeanette’s nails. She commanded her mind to stop. Not to think of Joey’s condition. The fire had been on the news when she got there, so she’d turned the TV to the wall and draped her coat over it.
The man in the blue scrubs disappeared through the doors, his pants (too big for him) swishing, his ass only hinted at by the draw waist. It meant nothing, Jeanette told herself. All flesh was born to be lost and purged in fire or soil; there was no point in enjoying it.
The magazine ended and she read the side effect warnings in the prescription drug ads several times over. The periphery of her view went hazy and she tasted candy cigarettes. Candy sticks they were called, now. Their father had despised them, told them never to smoke. But Joey had a hookah she kept in pieces under her bed.
Jeanette had kept her sister’s secrets. She wondered what she’d have to cover up now. What embarrassments lurked in her sister’s closets and in her dying, oxygen-starved brain. There would be so much to do. So much clean-up and memorializing and memory-honoring and not a whit of it would bring her any solace. Jeanette let hunger pull her into sleep.
The double doors squeaked and a woman in a purple blazer with a helmet of hair stepped out, hard-heeled shoes clacking and scuffing the hospital tile. Jeanette regarded her—the woman’s face was triangular and downward-looking, wearying from perpetually delivering bad news— and looked away with a sputter. The woman hummed with sad contemplation.
It was over, Jeanette could tell that before the woman sat down and pulled a pack of tissues from her blazer’s pocket. But still, Jeanette had to sit and politely listen to the death rattle. The woman had to rationalize the hospital’s failure to save, to do the impossible. This meant Jeanette had to accept their narrative. It meant she had to wait and act surprised when the woman finally announced Joey was dead.
The room was a grey-green blur after that. Jeanette shivered with sadness and curled into her chair. This was acceptable. Other doctors were coming, she was told, and people with paperwork.
“You just cry it out, you just wait right here and have a good cry,” the woman said, as if it was a generosity.
Jeanette scrunched up and wailed into her sleeve, and though her stomach had been empty for a day by then, fluid gurgled up into her mouth and nose, and tears rolled down her face and trickled into her ears and hair. Her body felt stuffed full of stones, like the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. She let herself be pulled down, down into the chair, down into the ground.
The words came calm and soft, like from a radio. Jeanette listened to them like a child, her body all limp, until she was ready to lift her head and peek out. The man was in the chair next to her. Cheeks high, mouth small and sweet, scrubs blue. She opened her eyes and mouth wide as they would go and asked him what he meant.
“I mean, your sister can be saved,” he said.
“I’ll do anything,” she said back. She said, “Put me in the box. Give her my body. Anything.”
He tilted his head and explained why that wasn’t possible. But Jeanette didn’t listen to that either, she was too drunk off his first words. She pulled the forms and the LifeMedia folder from his offering hands, sat up and began scrawling. She took her checkbook out and began to pay even as he spoke.
He was still prattling on like an infomercial when she thrust the forms back, delirious, saying, “Take them, take them, I want her alive, I’ll do anything, here.”
And so the man quieted, said, “Okay,” and left to bring her sister back to life.
For hours after the exchange, all Jeanette could do was stare across the waiting room and think, Joey’s alive, Joey’s alive, Joey’s alive. After the transfer began, after the Box had been selected, the payments made, and the equipment set up, her mind quieted and she began to wonder how it all worked. What life would be like for her sister now. She grabbed a magazine. Flipped through it. She considered reading the LifeMedia FAQ in the folder the cute young man had given her, but decided she should save it for last. There was a lot of time to kill before the upload was done.
33.
Jeanette was ducked under the table with a Swiffer HandPad strapped to her arm, her ass pointed in the air, fumbling against the floor’s dust and accumulation of crumbs. Joey half-watched her, perched on the television, which had been pushed aside to make room for the guests. Folded chairs lined the wall, unopened. Coffee was growing stale in a massive urn that Jeanette had lifted from her company’s storage closet.
“A few more folks are coming this time,” Jeanette called, her ass bouncing awkwardly. She clambered out from under the table and reached under the couch. Dust bunnies clung to her shirt and her forearms.
“Where from?” Joey asked.
“I don’t know…upstate. Some from Urbana-Champagne. Maybe Wisconsin, even. Why?” Jeanette poked her head up. “You probably know them already, don’t you.”
“No,” Joey said, and it was mostly true. It was Lily who messaged the newbies. She knew everyone, it seemed.
Jeanette sat on her knees and blew hair from her face. She’d gotten a haircut. It was beginning to get curly and soft again, and she hadn’t yet learned how to carry its volume.
“You look cute,” Joey said.
She looked down skeptically at her dust-covered clothes. “Thanks.”
Jeanette didn’t rise for a long time. Her face appeared to Joey as a blank clay mask. Joey wondered what could be passing through