“Don’t worry about it.”
We hover by the recycling bins as I wolf down my breakfast. The eggs taste like packing peanuts.
“So is it your dad?” he asks.
I start to shake my head, but then my lip trembles. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
I look out at the gloomy cafeteria and lean against the three bins behind me: compost, recycling, trash. I feel comforted knowing there’s a proper receptacle for everything. “I found him in the bathroom after he had some sort of episode thing and yeah…” Remembering it is like remembering a TV show, a dark one with very good acting, an Emmy-quality nightmare.
“Wow, that must have been awful,” he says.
“And now he’s all confused and thinks the doctors are holding him here against his will, and when I said I couldn’t get him out, he told me I was a disappointment.” My cheeks are hot and my armpits are sweating. “It’s just that this sort of thing happened last year and I completely froze and didn’t call the ambulance and he could’ve died and now this time even though I did—”
These tears in my eyes are giving me salt goggles. Everything is blurry, including signs that hang from the ceiling and the shape of Brendan as he comes closer to me.
“Do you want a hug?” he asks. “Laughter and hugs. Best medicine.”
I hesitate, then nod, even though it’s so cheesy. At this point I’d let an ax murderer hug me, just as long as some 98.6-degree something will grab hold of me and keep me from falling.
“That blows,” he says, and puts his arms around me and gives me a squeeze. He’s a lot taller than I am, which puts my nose a bit beneath his armpit. It smells like he just showered. “Really blows.”
He pulls away from me, and I remind gravity to work its magic on me. Keep my feet on the ground and the hair on my head. Feel free to ignore any remaining tears, though. You can give those the middle finger, and they can fall right back up into my head.
“I’m sleep deprived—I don’t know what I’m saying.” I pull back and make stern eye contact with him. “Tell no one about this.”
Brendan laughs. “If you haven’t noticed, people don’t exactly gather round when I open my mouth.” His smile flickers.
“That must be lonely.”
He nods and clears his throat. “Well, I have to do volun-cheer rounds. Maybe I could stop in and talk to your dad later if—”
“Hell no. I mean, thanks, but hell no.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’re doing anything, but if you’re looking for some time to kill, you could come with me on a round.” He starts to walk away. I pause for a moment, deciding what to do. Finally I run after him.
“Hey, wait! What’s a round?”
In the children’s ward there are large posters covered in brightly colored handprints and trees and suns. Friendly forest creatures wave at me. I don’t wave back. Brendan walks in wheeling a suitcase he grabbed from one of the volunteer lockers, and I trail behind him.
“Are you moving into the children’s wing?” I ask, pressing the button so that the doors open automatically.
“Are you moving toward permanent sarcasm?”
“I thought laughter healed the world,” I grumble to myself, stepping out of the way of anyone in scrubs. We turn into a hallway with a large bin full of toys at the end of it. Midway down the hall, Brendan stops abruptly and knocks on a door. It has a paper plate on it that reads Sal in puffy paint.
“Come in,” says a man’s voice.
Brendan opens the door and I see a middle-aged man holding up a book to a hospital bed full of stuffed animals. He looks a bit old for the children’s ward, in my opinion.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Brendan says. “Should I come back?”
I look back and forth between the two of them.
“Hi, Brendan!” The pile of stuffed animals erupts, and a little girl launches out of bed wearing bright green pajamas. She goes right for his legs and gives them a hug. “Is that the magic suitcase?”
“Shh—not so loud!” Brendan says with mock alarm, “You don’t wanna wake the stuffies!”
Sal looks around with wide eyes. Chuckling, the man gets up from his bedside chair. It’s the hospital kind that is just comfortable enough to coax you into the worst night’s sleep of your life. “How are you today, Brendan?” he asks.
Brendan reaches into his pocket and smooths a fake mustache onto his lip.
“Brendan is good,” Brendan says, putting his suitcase on the bed and opening it up. Now I remember why he’s so annoying. “This is my friend Cham. She’s hanging out today if that’s okay with you.”
The man smiles at me, but Sal frowns skeptically. “Okay, but I can still pick first?”
“I’m gonna grab some coffee,” the man says, heading for the door. Brendan gives him a thumbs-up sign.
“Bye, Daddy,” Sal calls.
I look at Brendan, waiting for him to fill me in. “Uh…”
“Cham doesn’t know how to play, so we have to show her.” Brendan puts the suitcase on the bed and Sal jumps on it. “Go ahead,” he says. “You can pick first.”
She rummages through the items, spilling them onto the bed. There are all kinds of things inside the suitcase, from masks to polka-dot gloves to glasses with big noses attached.
“Sal will take the dragon head.” Sal puts the mask covered in dark green sequins on, and her eyes are visible through the mouth. “What will you pick?” she asks, turning to look at me.
“Um.” Again I look at Brendan for some sort of explanation. When it’s apparent there won’t be one, I walk hesitantly toward the suitcase, then take the first thing I see. The shiny plastic crown is a little small on my head.
“I’ll pick this.”
“Cham will pick the crown,” she corrects me. I look up at Brendan like Are you poisoning the youth of America with third-person speak?
“Cham’s never done this before,” Brendan reminds Sal, stroking his fake mustache. The brown hairs catch the dismal hospital light. “Can you explain it to her?”
Sal giggles and pulls the sequined dragon head up so it doesn’t fall over her eyes. “Sal doesn’t know how to explain it. It’s just fun.”
“Then let’s show her an example.”
Brendan takes a seat on the edge of the bed. Sal and I watch as he makes a pillow with his hands and pretends to sleep on it. When he “wakes up,” he’s looking at me. “Brendan is tired today. He had bad dreams that it rained coconuts.”
Sal laughs and sits up straighter. “Sal is mad today.” She runs her fingers over the green sequins covering her head. “Sal wants to go home and see her kitty, but she can’t leave yet because the rash is still there and no one knows why.”
“That’s poopy,” Brendan says, and Sal giggles. He looks at me. “Your turn, Cham.”
I adjust the crown on my head and try not to feel awkward. “So I just tell you about my day?”
“Cham tells us,” Sal corrects me.
“Uh, okay, well…” I glimpse my reflection in the window. My hair is a frizzy mess, and my eyes are practically swollen shut. Add the crown and I look like I hunt baby animals for fun. “Cham is tired today too,” I say, recalling the restless sleep in the chair by my dad’s bed. “Just like so, so, so tired.” She had a nightmare that turned out to be true. “And Cham is scared,” I hear myself say. I take the plastic crown off, and some of my hair catches in it. “Cham is really, really scared.” Sal looks up at me with a little frown. I get up quickly and wipe my eyes. Why did I have to turn something silly into something depressing as hell? “I should go.”
Sal picks at one of the dark green sequins. “Sal is scared too.” Her voice wavers some but holds. For a moment I’m afraid she’s going to cry, and then I’ll really have done it. Instead she sits up straighter and pulls off one of the dark green sequins. It flutters to the bed. “You know, it’s okay to be scared,” she says with authority.
I turn back toward her and then look at Brendan.
He nods. “Brendan’s scared most minutes of most days. That’s why he carries a spare pair of underwear.”
“Ew!” Sal hoots. “Maybe Brendan needs a diaper!”
I laugh with them and place the crown back in the suitcase, feeling lighter somehow, but also heavier. Like I’ve sunk into a deep part of myself that I’ve been fighting against. After an eternal heartbeat, Brendan says to Sal, “I think it’s time for Sal and Cham and Brendan to rest. How about some checkers?”
“I get red!” Sal is back to the elation that greeted us.
“You guys rest while playing checkers?” I ask, a smile returning despite myself. “How does that work?”
“Well, sometimes it’s a lot to be a Brendan—”
“And a Sal,” she pipes up. “So we give that Brendan and that Sal a break, and this Sal and this Brendan take over for a while. Don’t worry, she’ll come back,” Sal says quickly as I try to keep a nonjudgmental look on my face.
“Brendan’s going to be himself his whole life,” Brendan says to me. “Sometimes I relieve him of that.” They start playing checkers and I think about that. I’m going to be myself for my whole life too.
Brendan beats Sal in about five minutes. “No sick-kid privileges,” he says, hopping over her last piece.
“Aw, man.”
Brendan folds the board up and opens the suitcase. “Brendan and Cham gotta go now,” he says. “Is Sal ready to come back?”
She scrunches her eyes closed and takes the dragon head off. “I’m back,” she says. Brendan pockets his mustache and gives her a high five.
“I’m back too. See you later, Sal,” Brendan says, then to me with a smile, “It’s time for Cham to come back too. Come on.” He holds out his hand to me. Before I know what I’m doing, my hand is in his.
“I don’t think Cham is ready to come back.” Sal giggles, shattering my inner silence.
“Cham?” Brendan squeezes my hand.
“Oh!” I pull my hand back, mortified. I guess that was a strange time for holding hands. I step into the hallway as Sal is following Brendan toward the door. She waves, and he puts his suitcase down to give her a good-bye hug. Strangely enough, I’m actually glad I opened my big fat mouth full of feelings. It seemed to help all of us.
“See Sal soon?” Brendan asks. She nods, then waves again as he and I walk down the hall in silence. The wheels of the suitcase slide against the floor. We’re quiet until we reach the elevator.
“Well, I should go,” I say, pressing the button. “But what was up with that?”
He laughs and plays with the fabric of his tutu. “Wasn’t it obvious?”
I shake my head.
“When my brother was dying, he started putting on this costume every day and telling stories about himself, you know, narrating his life. He put on a mustache and a tutu and he’d say things like ‘Looks like Adam won’t be dying today!’ or, on bad days, ‘Everyone say farewell to Adam! This could be it!’ The therapists thought he wasn’t facing reality, but I think sometimes the only way to know the truth about ourselves is to not be ourselves for a little while. Like, trick ourselves through our suffering.”
He looks at me without blinking or turning away. I study the features of his face and try to piece that together. “Heal with laughter?” I ask.
“That’s the goal.” A curl has fallen out of the little bun on top of his head, and he tucks it behind his ear. “Well, I should snag this,” he says as the elevator doors open.
“Yeah, I should go too.”
“What’s your number?” he asks, holding the doors open with his foot as he takes his phone out.
“Uh, mine?” For some reason it makes me nervous. Not that I think he’s asking for my number like that.
“Just in case you need a distraction,” he adds, looking up at me with thick, dark eyelashes that I’ve somehow only noticed now. “Or want to talk about being scared.”
I swallow a tangled lump of feelings. “Right, uh, here, I’ll put it in.”
When I’m done, he presses the button and removes his foot. “Nice to see you get the feels, Cham,” he teases.
“I love getting the feels,” I call through the crack between the doors that’s getting smaller and smaller as they inevitably move toward each other. I love them so much that I lock them in the basement of my heart like a hostage.
The doors fully close. It’s just me staring at my warped reflection in the metal panels. I snort, then snort again, realizing I needed to take the elevator too.
Dear Universe,
Have you ever been wrong about a person? When you go to school with someone day after day and year after year, it becomes impossible to really know them beyond how you think you know them. Being in high school is essentially being stuck in how everyone sees you and knows you and has seen you and has known you. If there were a way around that, do you think it’d be possible to fall for someone you never even expected to stumble over?
Later that afternoon, the door to my dad’s hospital room is open. He’s looking out the window with a stony expression on his face while my mom and I wait to go in. It’s the calmest I’ve seen him since we got here, but he looks so sick with all the machines keeping track of him. Aren’t you scared? I wonder.
“Oh, he’s awake—let’s go in, Cham,” my mom says, putting away her phone. “I know Dad would like to see you.”
“Would he?” I mumble. “He said—”
My mom has duffel bags under her eyes. “He was confused, Cham. I know it hurt, but he didn’t mean it. You are not a disappointing daughter, so let it go, okay?”
She takes her glasses off, cleans them even though they’re not dirty, then leads me through the door. “Are those fingernail marks on your wrist?” she asks suddenly, taking my arm and pulling my sleeve up.
“No.” I yank my hand back.
She pauses for a minute, the decision playing out on her face, whether or not she’ll believe me. “I know it’s a stressful time, but if you’re not managing your anger okay, I need to know about it.” She lowers her voice so that none of the nurses or patients around us can hear. “Are you scratching yourself? Because if you’re starting to hurt yourself—”
“Mom, I was never hurting myself. Digging my nails into my skin like three times in eighth grade isn’t hurting myself.”
She glares at me. “Don’t downplay self-harm, Cham. Three fingernail marks is still three fingernail marks. If you feel like you might be going down a slippery slope—”
“Mom,” I say too loudly, “I know how to ask for help if I need it.”
“Good.” She sighs, then knocks lightly on my dad’s door, even though it’s open. “Scott?” she says as we walk in. “How are you, honey?”
My dad turns to look at us, his face unsmiling. “I feel lousy. Look at me.”
“Are you in pain anywhere?” my mom asks, touching his forehead gently.
“Everything hurts.”
“Can I get you something, Daddy?” I ask, my voice kind of squeaking. His hospital gown is fresh and it fits him properly now, but the more he looks like he belongs here, the more disconcerting it is.
“I just want to go home,” he says.
“I know, honey.” My mom kisses him on the cheek. “Soon.”
There’s a knock on the door and we all look up. “Hey, Mr. Myles,” a doctor with short hair and a big smile says. “I’m Dr. Bhatti, part of the neurology team here at Beth Israel.”
My dad extends an unusually steady hand to shake hers.
“It’s not really shaking, Dad!” I accidentally shout. I look up at him, expecting his face to register a miracle. It doesn’t.
“See?” the doctor says, smiling. “Didn’t I tell you the medicine would help?”
“It makes me nauseous,” he says flatly.
“Here,” my mom says, offering him a white paper cup from the bedside table. “The nurse said you could take this anti-nausea tablet.”
“I don’t want all these pills,” my dad says, a
nd struggles to get up in bed.
“Mr. Myles.” The doctor looks back and forth between me and my parents. “You have a quickly progressing state of Parkinson’s disease, especially rare for your age. Treating with a high dose of L-dopa could greatly increase your quality of life. You’ve already started seeing the benefits.”
My dad looks out the window and says nothing. The rain is saying plenty.
“I had a motorcycle accident years ago,” he finally says, turning to look the doctor straight in the eye. “Concussion, brain damage, stitches, everything. The doctor I saw then said there might be repercussions later in life, and here we are.”
“I understand that,” Dr. Bhatti says gently. “But your chart shows that you already received a diagnosis a couple of years ago. It never hurts to get a second opinion, but my opinion is also that you have Parkinson’s.”
“No one knows anything,” my dad says angrily. “You people can’t help me. There isn’t even a clear set of symptoms, let alone a cure.” He shakes his head. “Don’t get my hopes up that you can help me with your medicine. I won’t buy it.”
Suddenly I understand. Denial is much more than a fear of facing the truth. It’s a fear of facing hope, of allowing light into a dark place, only to find out later that the flashlight’s out of batteries, the fire’s gone out, the sun is dead. Now the hole you made just lets the rain in. And you’re standing in a dark room that’s filling with water.
I climb over the bedrail and squeeze myself into the space between it and my dad. He puts his arm around me, but his voice is still angry. “When I was young and on a big adventure, I had a motorcycle accident and I got hurt and I’m paying for it now. I took a risk and now I have to live with the consequences, but I wouldn’t take it back. None of it.”
The doctor grimaces and tucks her iPad under her arm. “I don’t know what else to say,” she says. She turns to my mom and hands her a packet of papers and a few bottles. “You have my suggested treatment plan.”
“So I give these to him three times a day?” my mom asks, one hand on her hip, one hand holding the pill bottles. “And those for the nausea and that for the panic?” She keeps talking about my dad like he’s not even there. “What if he has an episode again? Should he be taking anything for the agitation?”
Dear Universe Page 11
