“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You know how you are.”
“How am I?” Cam asked, opening the little pot of Burt’s Bees and sliding the goop across her pursed lips.
“You know, that thing where you’re brutally honest and truthful and always right even when you’re sick and tired of always being right because you know it makes you seem obnoxious. I thought that would get in your way.”
“I heard some bad news today, Lil.”
“We’ve heard bad news before.”
Cam was silent. She unstuck the suction cup of her dashboard hula doll and waved her back and forth so that her eyelids opened and shut.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lily went on. There was a pause. No one said anything. And then: “Nothing matters but getting that flamingo.”
“’Kay,” said Cam, and she hung up. She sucked in some breath, which buoyed her for a moment. But after she exhaled she felt everything inside her—her stomach, her solar plexus, her throat—getting wrung out by an imaginary pair of cruel and strangling fists.
Cam drove past the pink and aquamarine–canopied strip malls until she found the one with the Family Dollar. No one dressed in black shopped in Family Dollar. That was pretty much a rule. She would not blend.
Cam donned her grandmother’s old straw beach hat with the yellow ribbon for a splash of color. She put on her big red sunglasses. And, luckily, while she was crossing the parking lot, she was able to catch a Family Dollar plastic bag that was swirling away in a miniature tornado.
She walked up to the sidewalk sale and pretended to peruse the plastic, lead-painted offerings made in China. The flamingos were stuck pole-first into a big cardboard box, where they butted up against one another and stared with their black spray-painted eyes at the tiki torches, kiddie pools, water wings, and plastic margarita glasses that were all half-price for summer.
Cam examined one closely, as if one needed to inspect the quality of one’s plastic flamingo. Then she dumped it headfirst into her Family Dollar bag, suffocating it, and made it all the way back to her car. She was searching for her key when someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“You going to pay for that flamingo?”
Rats, thought Cam, but before she could say, “What flamingo?” she felt it happening. It felt like fear, only stronger. She could feel a cold breeze; her left arm began shaking. Her head seemed to fill up with air like a head balloon. An electric shock shot through her spine, and then she got dizzy and lost her balance. It was like being struck by lightning.
And then it was black.
THREE
WHEN SHE CAME TO, DRENCHED IN SWEAT AND WITH A POUNDING headache, she struggled to remember where she was and who in God’s name this mustachioed man, staring at her through inch-thick glasses could be. His name tag read HELLO, MY NAME IS DARREN.
“Hello. My name is Cam,” said Cam. “Where am I?”
“Dollar store parking lot. You stole a flamingo.”
“I don’t think we formally established that,” she said, still fully reclined on the blacktop. It was so hot that the asphalt beneath her was beginning to melt. She felt a little tar bubble beneath her fingers and pierced it with her fingernail.
“Well, it’s in the bag, and you don’t have a receipt.”
“Did you call 911?”
“Yes. They’re on their way.”
“All righty, then, cowboy, I’ll need to motor on out of here.” Cam could hear the siren approaching in the distance, and she winced in pain as she slowly lifted herself from the pavement. These would be city paramedics and not the pretend Disney ones that she could shoo away with a doctor’s note.
“Wait,” said the Family Dollar manager. “You can’t just leave. You can’t drive like this. You were flipping around like a fish, foaming at the mouth.”
“Yup. That happens. Next time you see that, grab a tongue depressor so a person doesn’t swallow her tongue. Mind if I take the flamingo?”
“It’s $2.89.”
“Whoa, Darren, you drive a hard bargain. How about I’m just going to take it?”
Cam grabbed the flamingo and threw it into the backseat, started the Beetle, and peeled out of the parking lot. She was slowly regaining control of her limbs, but they felt heavy. Darren was right; she probably shouldn’t be driving.
Cam looked into her rearview mirror. Darren was still in too much shock to really do anything about her getaway. Hopefully he hadn’t taken down her license plate number.
Before she drove home, she decided on a perfect home for the flamingo, whom she’d named after Darren. She would take a picture of Darren the flamingo in front of Celebration, Disney’s planned community. Most of Disney’s top executives lived in Celebration, where they had rules about what you could wear and what you could drive and how many kids you should have (three) and whether you could have a pet.
“Performers” like Cam and pink flamingos like Darren were definitely not part of the plan. Cam took a photo of Darren in front of the Celebration gates. Then she drove through the community, where everything looked eerily telegenic. It was like living on the soundstage for Leave It to Beaver. She found Alexa Stanton’s house in the federalist section of the town, where each home was designed to look like the abode of a founding father, complete with yellow paint, black shutters, and stately white columns.
Alexa was the head cheerleader; she used to hate Cam because Cam was smart and could talk to Alexa’s brainiac boyfriend about politics. She used to tease Cam about her weight.
Cam threw the flamingo onto Alexa’s perfectly manicured lawn, just to let her puzzle over that. A plastic flamingo. Was it a sign? Like the horse’s head in The Godfather? Was someone after her? Alexa would never think this way, Cam knew. She would just ignore Darren and let the gardener deal with him. She would never think of the Godfather reference. Not everyone was a film buff like Cam. A consequence of sitting for hours with platinum dripping into the shunt in your chest. There was nothing else to do during chemo but watch films.
Darren hated it here, she could tell. He looked scared and alone lying on his side in the perfect square of green sod. His black eye seemed to widen and plead, “Don’t leave me!”
He should be frightened, thought Cam. He had good instincts. This land of make-believe wanted nothing to do with him and what he represented: beer in cans; bad teeth; immigrants; minimum wage; the uninsured; blood, sweat, and tears; hard rock; the real world; death.
It all came back to that, didn’t it? People were afraid to die. So they lived in Celebration.
On second thought, Cam would keep Darren.
Cam lived far away from Celebration, on Ronald Reagan Drive in a crumbling three-bedroom ranch with beige shag carpet from the seventies, spackled ceilings, and walls so thin that Cam had to sleep with headphones on so she could drown out the sounds of her mom’s lovemaking.
Cam understood that in most people’s universes the words mom and lovemaking never appeared in the same sentence. But unfortunately Cam had to live in reality, with a real mother who brought home real men from the fake countries of Epcot. Her current and yearlong conquest was Izanagi, a chef from the Benihana-style grill in “Japan.”
He was the last person Cam wanted to see when she walked through the door, exhausted from her doctor’s appointment and having had a seizure in the dollar store parking lot. He wore a pink kimono as he chopped vegetables for an omelet, juggling his knife before flipping a piece of red pepper into Perry’s mouth. Perry applauded like a trained seal.
Cam tried to sneak right into her bedroom for a nap, which should have been easy in their cave of a home. The stalactites of the spackle and the stalagmites of the shag carpet should have muffled the sounds of her entrance, but the funny thing about her mother was that she had supersonic bat hearing, appropriate for their cavelike existence. People adapt. Natural selection. Darwin. Evolution.
“Campbell!” her mom screamed from the bedroom. “Eat something. Izanagi is ma
king an omelet.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. He’s so subtle about it.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m not hungry.”
“Cam. Please.”
She was turning into a little bit of a cancerexic. A small part of her enjoyed the fact that she could now wear skinny clothes, and she was a little afraid to eat. Another part of her couldn’t believe that healthy girls would starve themselves to look like her—a size zero, a nothing, a sick person. At least her old fleshy self would have lived to see eighteen.
Cam heard chop, chop, scrape, and then she used her fire-juggling reflexes to catch the shrimp that was flying toward her face.
“You need protein,” said Izanagi.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
Cam bit a tiny piece of the shrimp, and it actually didn’t make her gag. Maybe if she covered her omelet with ketchup, she could eat. “I’ll take mine by the pool,” she said, and she wasn’t joking. They really did have a pool. It was the only reason their mom stayed in this house, and the only thing she seemed able to maintain. The rest of the house was crumbling and mildewed, but the kidney-shaped pool sparkled. When Cam’s mother was twenty-five, she had vowed never to live in a house without a pool, and so Cam’s dad had bought her this one.
He’d enjoyed it, too, inviting the whole cast of “Aloha” over for parties when the weather dropped below fifty degrees. That was the only time Disney would cancel the outdoor show.
Cam missed that, and so many other things about her dad.
“Hi, sweetie,” said her mom, her wavy, waist-length hair glistening in the sun as she came out to the deck to deliver Cam’s omelet. Alicia was a stomach sleeper, which says a lot about a person. Only 7 percent of people on the planet sleep on their stomachs, and stomach sleepers are vain, gregarious, and overly sensitive. Also small-breasted, apparently, because that position couldn’t be comfortable with big boobs.
When she was pregnant with Cam, she’d had trouble sleeping on her side, so Cam’s dad had driven Alicia all the way to Clearwater, where he could dig a hole in the sand for her belly. Alicia would flop down like a beached whale and finally get to nap. Cam began her life like a baby turtle, buried in the beach. Her dad had called her Turtle sometimes, though it hadn’t really stuck.
He was thoughtful, her dad, and yet after all that—the driving to the beach, the digging of the hole, the buying of the pool, the fathering of the child—her mom still hadn’t even cried at his funeral. It was the final proof for Cam, as if she needed it, that true love did not exist. Connections between people were temporary. Selfish. Opportunistic. Designed to perpetuate the species. “Love”—romantic love, anyway—was a fantasy people indulged in because otherwise, life was just too boring to tolerate.
“Will you cry at my funeral, I wonder?” Cam asked as she sliced through her omelet with the side of her fork. The neat pillow of egg leaked its juices into the ketchup, creating a pink watery puddle on her plate. So much for her appetite.
“What? Campbell, I’ll be dead at your funeral. This thing will kill you over my dead body. I told you. Which is why I need you to apply to those schools. You need a plan for September.” Alicia had been collecting community-college brochures filled with bright photos of happy multicultural coeds, and they had been sliding around on top of one another, dry humping on the kitchen counter for months. Stomach sleepers are also prone to passive-aggressive tactics, like secretly hoarding college brochures and finding ways to beat around the bush when they really just wanted to ask how their daughter’s doctor’s appointment went.
“I’m not going to any of those schools, Mom.”
“Yes, you are. And if you hadn’t spent that money on that car, you could have had more money for books. I’m going to kill that Gus for taking your money. I swear to God.”
“Why don’t you get someone from Jersey to do it?”
“I could, you know.” Her mom took a sip of coffee and got a mischievous, nostalgic look in her eye. Old people always exaggerate the danger and lawlessness of their youth, thought Cam, because their adult lives have become so boring.
“You don’t really know anyone in the mob, do you?”
“Just a friend of a friend’s cousin.”
Her mom often glorified her Jersey roots. People from New Jersey were tough; they were cool. Jersey had the best bagels and the best pizza and the best corn and the best tomatoes, and on and on. Cam thought they should open a section of Disney called JerseyLand for all those hopeless Jersey romantics who wanted to simplify themselves. Because that was what Disney did. It provided a simulacrum of your life that looked better than the murky one you lived in and convinced you that your life was okay. Baudrillard described this concept, and Cam had written about it in her essay to Harvard. And she’d gotten accepted. Which she would never tell anyone. It was her final secret triumph, but she wasn’t stupid enough to get her hopes up.
Plus they’d only accepted her because of her extraordinary story. Being almost dead made her special, like the Olympic athletes, movie stars, eighteen-year-old venture capitalists, published authors, and children-who-were-raised-on-a-sailboat that made up the rest of the freshman roster.
“So,” her mom finally said.
“So what?”
“The PET scan, Cam. What did they say about the PET scan?”
“You’re supposed to call them. They’re not supposed to tell me anything. I’m a minor.” This was true, but Cam still would not let her mom come with her to the Children’s Hospital anymore. It was already torture to sit in a waiting room with a bunch of bald, sick three-year-olds. She wasn’t going to sit there with her mother.
“But I know you got it out of them.”
“I did,” Cam admitted.
“So.”
“Sew buttons.” That phrase always made Cam laugh. Her grandmother was the only one who still used it because she was probably the only person who still actually sewed buttons.
“Campbell.”
Cam pushed a piece of her omelet through the ketchup on her plate and then just covered the whole thing with a napkin. “So the cancer is everywhere. Pretty much. Nothing’s changed. Oh, except for some new growth around the kidneys.”
The PET scan had showed Cam’s skeleton shimmering like a Christmas tree with glowing nodules of cancer draped around her center like a garland of lights. The cross-section view of her torso looked otherworldly, like a view from the Hubble telescope or from a place deep underwater, aqueous and murky, except, again, for the bright glowing ember of cancer, which Dr. Handsome did not like to see.
Dr. Handsome—that was really his name, and it led to endless jokes about whether he was a doctor or just played one on TV—held his silver pen above the computer screen and used it as a pointer to trace an imaginary circle around the bright orange glow surrounding her kidneys. He used the same silver pen every visit. Which says a lot about him, Cam thought. The pen was probably a gift, which meant he had people who loved him and were proud of his doctor-dom. And he was sentimental if he cared enough not to lose it. It was either that or he was a little obsessive. Detail-oriented. Which is a good trait for doctors to have, Cam thought. You didn’t want them slipping up. The longest Cam had ever kept a pen was probably five days, max. She and Dr. Handsome were very different.
“This is not what we were hoping to see,” he said as he swirled the pen in a little loop-de-loop and then just let it droop between his finger and thumb. He dropped his head into his free hand and combed his fingers through his black hair and sighed.
This was the first time Cam had seen him show any negativity. He had always been so positive. His posture today seemed so defeated.
“Maybe that”—Cam took the pen from his hand and traced it around the orange—“is my second chakra, you know? I think that’s about where it’s supposed to be. The second chakra is the orange chakra. The seat of power and change. Can that machine pick up chakras and auras and whatnot?”
Dr. Handsom
e tried to speak, and then something caught in the back of his throat. Is he about to cry? Cam wondered. He was.
“Cam . . .” He composed himself. “I’m sorry. I’m just very, very tired. . . . Cam, there is nothing we can do.”
Cam had been coming here for five years, and she thought she’d seen all of his moods. He could be goofy and giddy when he was tired, and he was great with the little ones. He had a rubber blow-up punching clown in his office, so the kids could blow off some steam before their appointments. Cam gave the clown a little jab now and he rocked back and forth. “But you’re Dr. Handsome,” she said. She knew what really centered him was when he focused on the medicine. “Put away those emotions and pull out some of that doctorspeak. You need to talk cold, hard science. Say ‘malignancy’ or ‘subcutaneous’ or something. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Science is just not enough this time, Campbell Soup. What you need is a miracle.”
Cam’s mom sat on her favorite deck chair and leafed through an InStyle magazine. She put her coffee down on the glass patio table and without looking up asked, “And so is there a new trial we can get into?” She was pretending to be nonchalant, but Cam could see that telltale crease between her eyebrows change from fine line to deep-set wrinkle.
“There’s nothing left.”
“There’s always something left,” she said, turning another page of her magazine, to an article that showed you how to wear the latest trend (black lace) in your twenties (stockings), thirties (little black dress), forties and beyond (never!).
“They’ve run out of trials, Mom. Anything else they try will kill me before the cancer does. My counts were not good.”
“I’ll call them today, Cam. I’ll get you into something. They can at least give you some more cisplatin,” she said, finally looking Cam straight in the eye.
“Mom. You’re not listening. There’s nothing left.”
“We’ll just go to St. Jude’s or Hopkins or something.”