“So how’s my dad doing?” I asked quietly.
“He’s good,” Stella said, opening her eyes a crack. “You know he and Rosemary are living in Brooklyn, right?”
I nodded silently.
“She sounds like a good person, Summer.”
I swallowed hard. “I know.”
I plucked the hedgehog off her chest once more and squeezed it. It made a small, dying wail. I shut my eyes, about to cry, but nothing came out.
Stella pressed her thin, papery fingers against one of the IVs in her hand. “So. Tell me straight. It’s in my brain, right?”
I looked over at her. Thankfully, they hadn’t taken her wig off. I could still see the flaking remains of the temporary heart tattoo we’d affixed to her chest, right under her chemo port. A chill ran through me, and I got a horrible fear that I was either going to pee my pants or throw up. “Yes,” I whispered.
“I thought so,” she said. “So what do we do now?”
I sat down next to her on the bed. She was so small that there was plenty of room. She smelled the same way she had the day I met her—like peanut butter cookies. It was a scent that emanated from her pores, even when her insides were rotting. We reschedule Cheveyo, I wanted to tell her. We try meditation. We could go to Tibet. We don’t have to stop. So what if I was trying to save her? She deserved saving. I wanted to be able to save someone.
The following day, I would wake in the same hospital waiting room and see a crowd gathered around the television. What they thought was a small plane had crashed into a building in New York City, and I would soon find out which building it was. I would stand there as a jumbo jet hit the building next to it. Someone—many people—would scream. More things would happen, more things would fall down, people would run, and the whole view I remembered from my Brooklyn apartment window would immediately change forever. A minute would morph into a half hour, but I wouldn’t move. People around me would be slack-jawed in the middle of the hospital hall.
“Can you believe what they put on TV these days?” Stella would demand, as soon as I entered her room. “It’s for some movie, right? It’s in poor taste, blowing up the World Trade Center. But then, I stopped understanding Hollywood after the fifties.”
And a nurse would turn halfway, looking at me with terror. I don’t have control of this, do you? I would tell Stella that yes, it was for a movie. And that she shouldn’t worry, that television did all kinds of horrible, manipulative things these days, just like War of the Worlds on the radio years ago.
Samantha would show up that day, too, her face pale, her lipstick in need of reapplication. At that point, her arrival wouldn’t even seem shocking. “Do you know anyone…?” she’d whisper. And, “Didn’t your mom…?” and I’d tell her that probably not, almost definitely not, but I didn’t know.
Later, Samantha and I would drive back and pick up Stella’s car from the parking lot of the general store. The people inside would run out and ask how Stella was doing. I’d tell them fine, and they’d give us candy, silly things like Now and Laters and Reese’s Pieces, and Blow Pops, their eyes big and round, full of charity. The physical world would be surreal, bursting with blueness and late-summer leaves and chirping birds and a cloudless sky. Samantha and I would return to our own separate cars, on our way back to the hospital, listening to the endless radio broadcasts. We’d crane our necks out the windows, searching for falling planes, a falling sky. Instead, we’d see a little wooden shack on the side of the road. Samantha would pull over into the parking lot and roll down her window. “Is that…?” She’d point a carefully painted nail at the sign.
The words would be inky black, striking against the gray-blue weathered sign. Come on in to see the World-Famous Jackalope.
The door would swing open easily, as if hanging by one rusty hinge. The room would be dark and cool, and there’d be an old woman sitting behind a makeshift counter that bore a few pamphlets, some magnets that said Jackalope, and a picture of something unidentifiable, on sale for $1.50. She’d be watching the news, too, like everyone else. The turquoise sky, the burning buildings, falling again, one floor then the next then the next, collapsing into dust. People running, screaming.
“Excuse me,” Samantha would say very softly to the woman at the desk. “Can you tell us where the jackalope is?”
The woman would look up and study us for a moment, as if she couldn’t understand why we were there and what we wanted. Then she’d point and say, “There. Right there.”
There would be a glass case across the room. Behind the glass, we would make out something stuffed: a large fat brown and gray rabbit standing on its hindquarters, its head turned jauntily to the side. On the base of its skull would be two large antlers, almost as big as the rabbit itself, the ends of each tapering into two sharp, curving points that almost touched one another. There would be an old sign underneath, printed in small, dated sixties font, that said, The Jackalope (Leptus-temperamentalus) is one of the rarest animals in the world. A cross between a now-extinct pygmy-deer and a species of killer-rabbit, they are extremely shy unless approached. It is written that you can extract the jackalope’s milk as it sleeps belly-up at night. The milk is believed to be medicinal and can be used to treat a variety of afflictions. Many do not believe in the jackalope’s existence, but do not be swayed! It will kill you if you aren’t looking! These dangerous creatures ARE REAL!
Samantha and I would stand there for a while, not saying anything, admiring the jackalope like we were looking at an artifact in the Smithsonian. The jackalope’s eyes would be glassy, and I’d see the clear lines of glue where the horns had been attached, the piece of fur on its back that was torn back, as if a dog had recently been playing with it. But despite this, I would grapple for something magical. I would want to believe it was real, that everything was real—Cheveyo, miracle cures, loving someone I’d met seven years ago and had only briefly kissed. But believing that the jackalope was real would mean I had to believe what was going on behind me on television—the planes, people screaming—was real, too. And that cancer was real. And that my father truly loved a girl that died, desperately loved someone before he desperately loved my mother, and that perhaps he desperately loved Rosemary, too. That he had changed, leaving me behind, and that it was probably the best, healthiest thing he could have done.
My fingers would graze my phone in my pocket. I knew I would call him, at least to see if he was all right.
There would be nothing else in the shack, except for the jackalope and a few books of jackalope lore and a few suspicious photos of the jackalope in the wild. After a while, Samantha would begin to talk. “I’m selling the most wonderful houses in Northglenn right now.” Her voice would be low, shaky. “All empty. You walk through the rooms and they echo. They smell like new carpet and fresh paint. The garage is so clean, the closets don’t have dust in them. There’s enough room for a big refrigerator in the kitchen and a sectional in the living room. There are rooms for nurseries and for kids’ bunk beds. The master bedrooms are gorgeous, too. Vaulted ceilings. Whirlpool tubs.”
She’d stop, then, for a moment, and glance at me. Her lips would quiver, and I would notice that for whatever reason, she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. But I wouldn’t ask.
“Tell me about the backyard,” I’d goad her.
She’d exhale and relax. “The backyard is beautiful.”
All that was going to happen the very next day. In just twenty-four hours, what we were going to do and what we would worry about would change, and the distance between us would change, too. But in the hospital, sitting on the edge of Stella’s bed, that all seemed impossible, unimaginable. We were still, for the most part, innocent and okay.
“What do we do now?” Stella asked again, hugging the hedgehog to her chest.
I touched her hand. “We have fun, just like you said. We go get you some pie. And that martini, too.”
She smiled. “With three olives?”
“With four, if you
want. We’ll have a martini-drinking contest.”
She sighed decadently, already imagining it. “Sounds like a plan.”
The first time I saw you, you were wearing a flowered smock and pink cotton pants. Terrible shoes: those white nurse things. Orthopedic. I didn’t think much about you the first time I saw you. You were a new aide, one of the many aides that cycled through the place. The aides didn’t do much, just tried to keep us comfortable and entertain us and do all of the things that the nurses didn’t have time for. Some of the aides volunteered, in fact, and weren’t even making money at it. They were just doing it because…I don’t know, I guess they saw it as charity. Maybe it made them feel less crazy.
You were younger than most of the aides. You didn’t have that cropped-short, old-woman hair helmet, but shoulder-length, wavy hair, wavier in some spots than in others. You had delicate hands, red-raw skin, sensitive to cold dry temperatures, a long, sloped nose with a little bulb on the end, and a wide smile, although you withheld your smiles most of the time, almost as if you worried smiling too much might upset us. When the other aides and nurses went out to smoke, you read all of the pamphlets near the meds room, the ones that were titled What Is Anxiety? as if any of us didn’t know. Perhaps you read them simply to look busy, to pose as if you were perfectly fine with not being included. I liked you for that, because the other aides acted like bitchy hens out there, smoking together. It’s obvious they were talking about us, the patients.
Then there was the morning I had the episode. According to some, I started screaming. I pulled the couch cushions off the floor in the TV room, and I kicked Thatcher in the shin and upturned Ursula’s and Kevin’s chess game. They don’t even play chess, they just sit there staring at the pieces and talk about how indecisive they both are, so I didn’t feel bad about messing up their game. I don’t remember any of it, though. All I remember is waking up and seeing Kay hovering above me. Her wavy hair hung around her face, her gray eyes slanted down with concern, and she kept pressing her full lips together, just like she always did when something worried her. I was certain we were in the back room of Dairy Queen, just waking up from a nap.
I said Kay’s name. Kay smiled tentatively. She put her hand to my forehead and then glanced somewhere I couldn’t see. Then Bev came into the picture. “Just lie there,” Bev said.
I looked around to see where Kay had gone. I didn’t understand what Big Bev the nurse was doing at Dairy Queen. “Bring Kay back,” I said.
“Shhh,” Bev answered. “How about you have some water?”
“Don’t let Kay leave!” I said, frantic. “I haven’t seen her in so long. I want to talk to her.”
Bev put the pitcher back down on my nightstand. “You’ve had a confusing morning.”
I tried to sit up, but Bev wouldn’t let me. “I just saw her here,” I said. “She was looking at me. You said something to her.”
“The only other person in here was Rosemary,” Bev answered.
Then I heard your voice in the hallway. “Bev? What? Do you need something?”
“No, Rosemary, it’s fine.”
You walked into the room anyway. And it was you, Rosemary, not Kay, with your stubby blond ponytail and your—I’d never realized it, until right then—haunting gray eyes. I stared at you hard. I didn’t quite believe it. “How are you feeling, Richard?” you asked.
Bev settled me back down and looked over her shoulder. “Can you watch him for a second?” she asked. “Make sure he doesn’t try and get up again.” I knew she wanted a cigarette.
“Of course,” you said.
Bev shut the door. You immediately started straightening my sheets. “Feeling better?”
“What happened?” I asked, so groggy.
“You…got up. Ran around a bit.” You looked at me curiously. “You don’t remember?”
I shook my head. I looked at you and told you that, a few seconds ago, I swore you were my girlfriend from high school. You still looked like her, if I squinted.
You looked embarrassed, but then said, “Well. That’s nice.”
You pulled a chair over and sat by my bed. “Do you want to talk about this girlfriend?” you asked. You probably weren’t supposed to ask, being just an aide. “What was she like?”
“It was so long ago,” I said. “And we hadn’t told anyone we were together. It was wrong, really. She was with someone else. My best friend. They were engaged.” I glanced at you out of the corner of my eye. Your Kay essence hadn’t fully worn off yet.
“Where is she now?”
I took a deep breath. “She was in a car accident,” I said. “She broke her neck, and was in a coma for four weeks, on life support. Then she died.”
“Oh, gosh,” you said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
My mouth felt electrified. There was a strange humming in my stomach. For the first time, I felt I could keep going. I felt I could talk about it and not stop.
We had been at a party. I had something to tell her, she had something to tell me. The thing that I had to tell her was that I had been awarded a college scholarship, a full ride. I would be leaving Cobalt, where we both lived.
I found Kay in the hallway. I knew she’d be happy for me—she was always so encouraging, saying I was so smart and that I had an amazing mother, for it was my mom who’d found out about the scholarship in the first place. But when I told her, Kay’s face fell. She looked like I’d just punched her.
“I’m pregnant,” Kay blurted out.
I didn’t mean to burst out laughing, it just happened. “It’s not a joke,” Kay said. “I’m really six months pregnant.”
“Are you sure? How the hell can you be six months pregnant?” I stared at her stomach. At her boobs. At everything that changes in a pregnant woman’s body. She was wearing a gauzy, flowing top, the same sort all her girlfriends wore. It hid a lot—only, I knew what her body felt like, and I hadn’t felt anything. It was inconceivable.
“I’ve gained twelve pounds,” Kay said. “It’s low, but the doctor says I’m okay. He says that sometimes women gain a bunch of weight at the very end.”
I felt tricked. Bamboozled. I kept staring at her body and trying to figure it out. Where were the twelve pounds? “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“Because I only just found out,” she whispered. “I didn’t get my period for a while, but I often skip a few months, so…I don’t know. I thought it was normal. But then I went to the doctor.” She gave me this look that said, Please don’t kill me. Please be happy.
“Are you sure it’s mine?” I asked.
Her mouth got very small. “I know how to read a calendar, Richard.”
People streamed around us, not paying any attention to what we were talking about. “It’s an honest question,” I said quietly. “Six months ago—”
“We were together,” she answered quickly. “One of the first times.”
“You’ve been with Mark, too.”
She smashed her mouth together. Her eyes began to water. I looked around fretfully for Mark, for Andy or Jeanie, someone who might notice. “I knew this would happen,” she whispered. “I knew I would tell you this and you would want to leave.”
“Wait, did you plan this?” I asked.
“Of course not!” Her eyes flickered back and forth, trying to meet mine. Have you ever noticed that, though, that your eyes can’t completely meet someone else’s? You have to look at one pupil or the other. We’re never truly looking at one another at all. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know!” I blurted out. “Why do you think I would know?” I was getting angry now. This was my day, my big news. And I wanted to be having this conversation anywhere but the hallway of Jeff’s parents’ house—the sounds of Leonard Cohen drifted out of the stoner room, and people were dissecting “Suzanne” for its sexual implications. I wasn’t ready for this to be real. I wasn’t ready to have to deal with things like this.
“I’m so scared,” Kay said. “You’re
going to go away. You’re going to abandon me.”
“I’m not going to abandon you,” I said. “But we have to think rationally. You’re going to finish your senior year here. Break off your engagement. And then you’re going to join me at Penn State. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to rethink that.”
I let out a small whimper. “Those are our plans.”
She widened her wet, already-round eyes. “What are you saying?”
“I’m just saying…I want things to be the way they were, ten minutes ago.”
“Well, they’re not!”
More people rushed by. A few looked at us warily. Someone in the stoner room turned up “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” “I want this scholarship,” I whispered.
“I can’t believe you,” Kay said quietly. It annoyed me. And it hurt. I didn’t know what to say to her. This was how it happened to plenty of guys around here: they were bound for better things, but then they knocked someone up and did what was honorable. They married her. They got some job, any job, and they raised the kid that neither of them particularly wanted. When I thought about our future together, I had never factored in this. It had never entered my list of possibilities.
Kay turned away then, pressing her back along the wall. The pot smoke formed a thick blue halo around her. “Maybe she’s Mark’s,” Kay said. She had given the baby a gender already—I never got to tell her, later, that she had guessed right.
Mark came up. “What are you two talking about?” he asked, clapping a hand on my shoulder and the other on Kay’s. He touched Kay’s boob and squeezed. She let him. Her eyes were on me the whole time, as if to say, See, your chance is gone.
Jimi Hendrix came on the stereo. I stormed across the room into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I felt Kay’s hand on my arm. “Mark wants to go,” she said. “But he’s…”
We both watched as Mark tripped over the edge of a round braided rug. Beer sloshed over his cup. “Give me the keys,” I said, cruelly sober. I hadn’t even made it to the keg yet.