I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  To keep from going crazy with worry, I forced myself to study. I memorized five objectives the federal government was trying to achieve during Reconstruction. I read all the way through to the third act of Hamlet. It was then that the phone rang. Lucas would be calling, I knew—I had pulled the phone with the long cord into my room, and as I reached for it, I remember thinking it was later than I’d expected.

  But it wasn’t Lucas. It was Dex.

  “Did anyone tell you yet?” he said. “Lucas passed out. He was breathing and everything, but they couldn’t wake him up.”

  “What?” How can Dex be so wrong? I was thinking. “Lucas didn’t ever lose consciousness,” I insisted. “I saw him just after he fell. He was fine.”

  “I’m not talking about his fall on the ice,” Dex explained. “This was at the dinner tonight. Something happened. He just passed out.”

  I understood the danger Lucas was in in a way I can’t quite explain. I don’t know what I thought it was. I only knew it was bad.

  I was on the stairs almost before I finished listening to Dexter tell me about the ambulance, about how Dex went with Coach O’Reilly to the hospital, about Lucas’s mom’s being tracked down in the ward where she worked.

  “Mom!” I called, running. But the living room was empty. I raced back up the stairs and found my mom in her room, already in bed, her white ruffled nightgown buttoned up to her chin, a novel in her hand, her tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her nose. “Lucas is in the hospital and you have to drive me down there to see him right away!” I said. I was shouting. I was speaking so fast she had to ask me three times to repeat myself. And then she tried to argue that it wasn’t a good idea for me to go down to see him, that this was a time for his family to be alone with him, that she would take me first thing in the morning.

  “You’re wasting time!” I finally interrupted. I told her that if she didn’t take me, I was going to walk. And so she pulled out the black sweatpants that make her ankles look like an old lady’s and told me to pack up my history notes, as if I might be able to study, and we got into the car, not even waiting a few minutes with the engine running in the cold before putting it into drive.

  My town is not big enough for a real hospital. We have emergency medical care, which is where you go if you have a fever and your doctor’s office is closed. For a bona fide hospital, you drive about ten miles to the city.

  My mom and I parked in a pay lot across the street from a neon sign that read EMERGENCY. At the entrance, wide doors yawned open as ambulances unloaded.

  We followed an arrow around a corner. A woman in scrubs and a cardigan sweater checked the computer for Lucas’s name. “He’s here,” she said. She gestured to some chairs. “You can wait over there. I can’t let you in unless you’re family?” The way she said it, as if it were a question, not a statement, encouraged us, I believed, to lie.

  But before I could announce that I was Lucas’s cousin, my mom cut me off at the pass. “We’re just friends,” she said, and for one split second, I had the thought that she was talking about herself and me, as if my hysterical insistence on driving downtown in the middle of the night had finally proven to her that we could not be related.

  The receptionist promised to tell a nurse we were there—she said Lucas would get the message. We sat down next to an old man with a walker and his health aide, who was holding a crocheted afghan. A woman brought a baby in whose cough sounded like a barking dog. “Croup,” my mom said. “You had that when you were one.”

  After about twenty minutes, Mrs. Dunready came through the double doors, spoke to the woman at the desk, and then walked over to us. She didn’t say hello or smile, and I didn’t know if that was a sign of how serious the situation was or just the way she was at work. “He’d like to see you if you want to go in,” she said to me.

  I stood, waiting a second for her to lead the way.

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll wait. There’s no space for more than a single visitor.”

  My mom gave me a significant look. “Don’t stay long,” she said.

  I tried to walk purposefully toward the double doors Mrs. Dunready had come through, but as I approached them, I found myself wondering if my mom hadn’t been right after all. Maybe I wasn’t old enough to be walking into an emergency room, to be visiting my own boyfriend here, to be connected to anything as grown up and real as a serious injury. I’d never even had a broken bone. I hadn’t had my tonsils out. I didn’t belong here, and neither did Lucas. Maybe if I’d stayed home, all this would have gone away.

  Then I caught a glimpse of him on the bed. His arm was in a blood-pressure cuff, and a device I knew from my dad was called a nasal cannula brought oxygen into his nose. The bed didn’t have blankets, just a white sheet pulled tight over the mattress. I found it reassuring that Lucas wasn’t under the sheet. I also found it reassuring that he was wearing the khaki pants and shirt he’d worn that day at school.

  He looked like himself—his blond and blonder hair, his sharp blue eyes, the red patches in his cheeks. His skin was pale, but he was still Lucas. Living, breathing Lucas.

  Seeing me, he pulled down the cannula, and in that gesture of “Screw this,” I saw echoes of Lucas pulling off a baseball cap or his shirt when we were playing pickup basketball, or ripping a page off a legal pad when he was trying to write a paper and it wasn’t going well.

  “Hey,” he said, and I felt tears come into my eyes at the sound of his voice because it was so … him. So not sick or in danger of any kind.

  I sniffed and he gave me a questioning look, then saw that I’d started to cry and said, “Hey, it’s okay. I’m going to be fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” I spat out, crying harder now, though what I’d meant to do was to stop crying, to get control of myself somehow. “Sorry,” I said, sniffing again. “But when Dex said you’d passed out, I thought … I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Did you think I was dead?” Lucas said it like a joke. He course-corrected on seeing my reaction.

  “Maybe?” I admitted. “With your fall, and then what Coach O’Reilly said about your helmet, and your headaches—Lucas?” I didn’t want to say any more. I tried to pull myself together. “What happened?”

  Lucas shrugged. “One second I was out on the deck with Coach—he was grilling burgers and dogs and stuff outside, and we were helping him carry the platters in. And maybe it was the temperature change—it was freezing outside—but when I came in … I guess I don’t even really remember coming in.”

  “Do the doctors have any idea what’s going on?”

  Lucas put a hand up to his temple. “They’re going to do a CAT scan.”

  “You’re having a CAT scan?” That sounded serious.

  “When doctors don’t know what else to do, they order CAT scans,” he said in an attempt to comfort me. “My mom says it happens all the time. And she’s a nurse, remember?”

  Thinking about his mom, I remembered what mine had said about keeping the visit short.

  “Lucas,” I said. He looked at me, his brow furrowed. “I have to ask you something.” He nodded. “Your hockey helmet. When the strap broke. Did you—” This was turning out to be hard for me to say out loud. “Did you cut it?”

  “Come here,” he said. I took a step closer to him and he took my hand. “I thought …”

  “I know what you thought,” I said. “You thought it would be like your car radio, right?”

  He tapped his temple. “Smarty-pants.” Then he shook his head. “I was going to tell you—I was waiting to be sure—but yes, I cut the strap.”

  I gasped. It was one thing to suspect it, another to hear it confirmed.

  “Well, not cut, exactly,” Lucas went on. “I just nicked it. That took the results out of my hands, you know what I mean? I didn’t have to jump off a bridge or drive my car into a wall—it was up to fate.” He looked down, suddenly sheepish. “Or luck or whatever. You probably think I was stupid. Though it did work.”<
br />
  “Define ‘work,’ ” I said. “I assume you’re talking about before you ended up in the hospital?”

  Lucas looked up at me, shrugged, smiled. I could feel his grin tugging at something inside me. And in spite of my fear for him, I was amazed at that tug, the way we were connected. I knelt by the side of his bed, laid my face against his shoulder.

  “It did work,” he began. “After I cracked my head on the ice, I felt amazing. I had the best two nights of sleep I’ve had all year. No dreams. And the headaches? Gone.”

  “The memories?”

  “Also gone. Or at least, I wasn’t stumbling onto new ones. I thought the whole thing was over.”

  “And then tonight?” I prompted. I couldn’t look at him.

  “When I passed out at the dinner, the dream came back. Hard. Like it had stored up energy during the two days I’d managed to dam the flow.”

  “It was the same dream?”

  “Yeah, but there was something new this time. There was a part where I woke up. Or I thought I was waking up. I heard people calling my name, and when I opened my eyes,

  I saw doctors. I think my mom was there. It was a hospital. But not this one. The doctors were asking me questions. Did I know where I was, that kind of thing. But I couldn’t get my mouth to move. And then suddenly, I felt this pain that was so intense I can’t even describe it to you. It was like someone had set fire to my skin.”

  I cringed, as if I could feel the pain too.

  “And somehow—I don’t know how I did this—I willed myself to go back to sleep, to go back into the dream. The pain slowed and I woke up and I was lying on Nunchuck’s kitchen floor with all these paramedics asking me what day it was and the name of my town and could I spell my own name.”

  I sat up and held his cheeks in my hands. “Don’t think about it anymore,” I said. “Just remember, you’re here. You’re with me.”

  “I’m sorry, Jules,” he said. I took his hand in mine and held it to my face, wetting it with my tears.

  “You can fight this,” I said. “I know you can.”

  “I can’t fight something I can’t see and don’t understand.”

  Lucas was right. This thing was like a giant fog, a monster we didn’t know if we were trying to grab by the head or by the tail, or if maybe we had the scale all wrong.

  Back in reception, I didn’t care if Mrs. Dunready and my mom could see that my eyes were red and I was sniffling. My mom asked me if I was ready to go home, and I nodded.

  In the car, she said, “Maureen Dunready thinks this is serious. She thinks there might be some kind of tumor.”

  “Like brain cancer?”

  “She said it’s an outside possibility. But she’s worried. Lucas told her he’s been having headaches for a while. And he’s seemed not quite himself. Apparently changes in personality can be an indication of internal bleeding. The symptoms of a brain tumor can be all over the map, depending upon what part of the brain is affected.”

  “Does she think he’s going to be okay?”

  My mom sighed. “He’s in the hospital,” she said. “He’s got great doctors. I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it in no time.” But she was worried. I could tell because for the first time ever, we were talking about Lucas without her letting me know with a look or a sigh or a word that she wished he weren’t around.

  The next morning, Rosemary picked me up, and instead of turning left, toward school, she turned right and took me to a stop where I could catch the city bus. We waited for it in the car with the heater on.

  “Juliet, is there anything, you know, going on with Lucas?” Rosemary asked, and I looked at her. My longing to go back to the time when she and I still trusted each other, when things between us had last been okay, was so strong.

  I wanted to tell her everything. I had always wanted to, if only to put the confusion and responsibility into someone else’s hands. But I knew I couldn’t. Rosemary wouldn’t have believed me. She’s too practical, too much like me. Or at least, how I used to be.

  I shook my head. An hour later, I was sitting in a chair at the side of Lucas’s bed. He’d been moved into intensive care.

  Maybe it was the fact that he was in the ICU or that he was wearing a hospital gown. Or maybe it was that he hadn’t shaved and the stubble on his face made his skin look gray. Or maybe it was that his skin was gray. He looked worse.

  Mrs. Dunready didn’t look too good either. I don’t think she’d slept much, or brushed her hair. Mr. Dunready had come. He was sitting in the corner, in a chair that was too small for him, red-faced and uncomfortable, his eyes shifting from Lucas on the bed to the curtained opening that was the door, as if hoping for an excuse to walk right through it. When Mrs. Dunready stepped out for a break, Mr. Dunready waited just long enough for her to be gone before he announced, “I guess I’ll go too,” and disappeared.

  Lucas took my hand. There was a window near his bed. I could see a parking garage across the street, the back of a brick hotel, the tower of the museum where my mom worked, the low purplish mountains on the other side of the river.

  “This doesn’t feel real anymore,” he said. “You feel real to me, but the rest of it—the hospital, the fact that my dad came home to take care of my brothers, this window—” He must have seen me looking at it, so I turned back to face him. “They feel like a dream. I feel dizzy all the time.”

  He pinched his skin on the back of his hand, and it held the crease when he took his fingers away. “That’s called tenting,” he explained. “It’s because I’m dehydrated. None of the doctors can figure out why.”

  I smoothed the tented skin down. My hand looked impossibly pink next to his.

  “I had a thought,” I said. “If hitting your head on the ice put some kind of cap on the dreams, there might be some other physical intervention that can get at the problem. More subtle than breaking your skull open on the ice. Maybe the doctors can actually help you.”

  Lucas rubbed his temple. “I’m dreaming so much more now,” he said. “I think I’m going to get to the end. I—”

  “Lucas, please!” I didn’t want to listen. But I could see that he was in pain. If talking helped, I had to let him. “Okay,” I said, to let him know he could go on.

  “It was a bomb,” he announced. “A homemade bomb. Nothing special. It was in the kitchen. The fourth apartment we checked. Inside a radio.” He’d spoken in bursts, and I couldn’t tell if he was short of breath because he was weak or because he was afraid of what he was saying. “This kid was holding the radio. He was young. Maybe eleven?” Lucas closed his eyes. “I can see him. Fat cheeks. Skinny arms. Blue eyes—weird for Iraq. He peed himself. That was how I knew the radio was a bomb. Juliet, they blow up their kids. Little kids.” Lucas let out a dry laugh. “The radio was on too. Playing music. I don’t know what the song was, but I can hear it.” He rubbed his hairline near the bandage he still wore from hurting his head on the ice. “It’s the song I hear every time I dream.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “That’s it. I see the kid. The radio. I get that it’s a bomb. I think, So this is how I’m going to die. And I wake up.”

  Just then, a nurse in puppy-emblazoned scrubs and red clogs wheeled in a pole with a hook on top. Lucas nodded a greeting in her direction, and she cheerfully asked him questions as she checked the label on the bag, attached it to a piece of tubing, flicked the tubing with one finger, then hooked its other end to a port that emerged from a bandage taped to his elbow. I couldn’t take it in—the cheery nurse, her scrubs and clogs. What Lucas had just told me.

  “Like my IV?” he said.

  I shook my head. I was trying not to cry.

  “It’s just fluids and antibiotics. It’s the same stuff you take if you have strep throat.”

  “You have strep throat?”

  “I wish,” he said. “I have this fever no one understands because there’s no source of infection.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, hon
ey,” said the nurse. “These docs know what they’re doing. No one’s that much of a mystery.”

  Lucas smiled, but as soon as the nurse was gone, his smile faded.

  “The pain I told you about yesterday,” Lucas said. “The burning. I felt it again. When I was asleep. I’m guessing it’s how I’m dying. In the future.”

  “Lucas …,” I said. He looked up at me hopefully, like I was going to be able to help him, like I could make the pain go away.

  But then Mrs. Dunready returned from her walk. “Oh, Juliet,” she said, as if she were just seeing me for the first time. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Free period,” I mumbled. I picked up my backpack from the chair where I’d tossed it down. “But I guess I should get back.”

  I was headed for the bus stop outside the hospital when I spotted Rosemary’s car parked behind the taxi line. She had her left elbow balanced on the car door, her head propped in her hand. She didn’t look busy or thoughtful or otherwise occupied with an agenda. She was just … there. And even now, when I think of what the word “friend” means, I remember Rosemary waiting for me that day. Her knowing to come, even when I hadn’t asked. Even when things between us were strained.

  “Aren’t you going to get in trouble, skipping school?” I asked once I was buckled into the passenger seat.

  She smiled ruefully, that I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know smile that makes it possible to like someone as beautiful as she is. “Aren’t you?” she said.

  Somehow, I got through the rest of the day. I remember sitting with Rosemary at lunch, my tray filled with food I couldn’t imagine eating. I remember standing at my locker, trying to recall which class was next and not being able to.

  After school, I went back to the hospital. Dexter came too, and we sat side by side at the foot of Lucas’s bed, watching him sleep. For the most part, he slept peacefully, but once, he started thrashing. I put my hand on his leg and shook him, hoping Mrs. Dunready wouldn’t see. It was enough of a disturbance that Lucas half woke, then resettled.