I told Danny’s parents about the Somerset Clinic over dinner last night, and they said it didn’t sound like a very official place. They said all that travel might make Danny sicker. They said it seemed very expensive and experimental and that our job was to trust the doctors.
Sometimes all adults sound exactly the same, and I wonder if they are all taking some How to Be an Adult class together, where they learn how to say frustrating things and how to stop listening while pretending to keep listening.
“You don’t look stupid,” I say. I try to be a little like Mom—direct and honest, even though it might not be what Danny wants to hear. “But I think everyone will know you’re in a wheelchair. It’s sort of hard to hide.”
Danny grimaces.
“I can walk fine,” he says.
“I know.”
“I can probably walk better than you. You walk so slow.”
“You’re right.” Right now Danny looks so sick that I want to agree with everything he says, just to try to make him feel better.
“Maybe I shouldn’t go,” he says. Danny’s never scared, but lately he’s always scared, and that means the whole world feels off-kilter. Ms. Mendez says we are all part of a huge ecosystem and that there’s a balance. She says that’s why we have to worry about the environment. “The world is really amazing. It’s all very delicate and balanced, and when we hurt one part of the world—the atmosphere, the animals, the trees—it hurts all the other parts. It throws off the balance.”
I think I understand about the ecosystem and the special balance of the world now more than ever. Danny and I are part of the ecosystem too, and if something changes between us, everything starts to fall apart.
Danny’s in a wheelchair. He’s coughing, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him, and worst of all, he’s scared. We have upset the balance of the universe and the special ecosystem of our friendship, and that is very dangerous indeed.
“You’re coming to the aquarium,” I say. “I want to see all the symbiosis.”
“And all the fish,” Danny says with a smile that says some things are the same. I am serious and Danny is goofy and together we are absolutely perfect.
Everyone is happy to see Danny at the aquarium.
“Are you coming back to school?” Marco asks. He gets too close, and normally Danny would take a big step back to get some space, but in the wheelchair it’s a little harder, so he mostly scrunches his face and looks over his shoulder.
“No,” Helen answers for him. “Not anytime soon.”
My heart squeezes. That wasn’t the right answer.
“Danny! Can I take a ride in your wheelchair?” Paloma asks. Danny squirms.
“No, he has to stay in the chair,” Helen answers for him again.
“What’s wrong with you anyway?” Brandy asks. She has a pursed mouth and always asks questions that sound mean, even though I don’t think she wants them to sound mean.
“I’m sick,” Danny says, finally answering for himself. “I’m really, really sick.”
He coughs again, but the cough isn’t quite so bad as it was a few minutes ago. It sounds a little more like a normal cough and a little less like a broken garbage disposal.
When the cough is over, he smiles a little.
“My throat’s all cleared up,” he says. “I think my cough is gone.”
“That’s not how coughs work,” Helen says, but I know Danny’s right. He can get better. He can.
Ms. Mendez has a clipboard and a big smile. “There’s a lot to see,” she says. “But today we’re focusing on symbiosis, okay? Who remembers what that is?”
We should all remember what that is. We’ve been talking about it since the day Danny got sick, which was approximately a trillion years ago.
Still, only a few of us raise our hands. I guess a lot of people forget to pay attention in science class. It’s too bad for them. They are missing out on so many beautiful science-y things.
I raise my hand higher than everyone else and wave it a little bit. I bounce up and down on my toes.
“Clover, why don’t you remind us all?” Ms. Mendez says. I think she picks me because she knows how much it means to me. Ms. Mendez is the best teacher in the world.
“Symbiosis is when two organisms help each other and survive together. They each do something special for the other one, and they basically keep each other alive by helping in these funny little ways.” I take a deep breath. I’m getting excited just thinking about it.
“That’s exactly right,” Ms. Mendez says. “And today we’re going to see symbiosis in action, and maybe it will inspire us to think about symbiosis in our own lives.”
“Maybe!” Brandy says, because she likes to get the last word in, even when she wasn’t really involved with the conversation in the first place.
Danny doesn’t say anything.
“Off we go!” Ms. Mendez says.
We walk past colorful creatures that I wish I could stare at all day and floating algae and schools of the tiniest fish I’ve ever seen.
I’m in charge of Danny’s wheelchair. He begged Helen not to walk around with us.
“Clover’s got it!” he said.
“I don’t want to make Clover do all that work.”
“Oh, I don’t mind! It will be fun!” I said, and we both made puppy-dog eyes and fluttered our eyelashes. Helen eventually agreed that she would sit in the lobby but we had to run and get her if Danny’s cough started up again or if he complained about feeling faint or his stomach was acting up.
“Just because he’s okay right this second doesn’t mean he’s not sick,” Helen said to me. She had a serious look on her face, and I wished I could unhear her words.
In the first long hallway we catch sight of starfish, and Ms. Mendez promises us we can go by later and touch one.
“There’s a whole interactive pool,” she says. “We’ll get our hands wet, pet a few different sea creatures. How’s that sound?”
There’s a clamoring of excitement.
“Not yet, though,” she says, trying to quiet everyone down. “Not quite yet. First: eels and shrimp!”
The aquarium focuses on animals interacting naturally with their environments instead of just being pretty or identifiable. We get to see something happen.
When we get to the electric eels, even Marco and Brandy are quiet. The eels look like snakes, but with a neon tint and this perfect way of moving around the water. Everyone else seems to like dolphins or sea horses best, but now that I’m here, I think maybe I actually am in love with electric eels most of all. They look like they’re part of the water, not simply swimming through it. And when Ms. Mendez explains that they’re able to deliver big electric shocks, I get a shiver along my spine. Being near them at all gives me a little shock, to be honest.
“Yes,” I say under my breath. I step close to the glass and try not to blink as they pass by.
“They’re okay,” Danny says. “Do you think we’ll see any sharks?”
“These are better than sharks!”
“No way. Dolphins are the best. Then sharks,” he says. I notice he isn’t coughing at all and he’s actually arguing with me, which means he’s got more energy than usual. I look at his face. It’s downright rosy.
“You’re fighting with me!” I say, and he gets it. He grins and nods and scoots forward in his wheelchair, like he’s about ready to pop himself out.
“I feel kind of great,” he says.
“I bet it’s the eel,” I say, smiling.
“I don’t know what it is, but I’ll take it.” Danny watches the eel too, not as bored as he usually is by science class. “Yeah,” he says at last, like he really had to give it a lot of thought. “They’re pretty good, I guess.”
“Here comes one,” Ms. Mendez says. “I want you to look at his mouth.”
All twenty of us step toward the glass, our breath fogging it up a little. I want everyone to be quiet and still so I can focus.
“What do you see
?” Ms. Mendez asks.
“The snake’s eating a gross bug!” Cornell says.
“It’s not a snake, it’s an eel,” I say.
“And that’s not a bug in his mouth. There aren’t bugs in the water,” Gloria says. She rolls her eyes at Cornell. Gloria is the second best in science, after me. “I think the thing in his mouth is a shrimp.”
“That’s right, Gloria!” Ms. Mendez says, getting more excited by the minute. That’s one more thing I love about Ms. Mendez. Sometimes she gets so excited I think she might explode in front of us. Ms. Fitch is the same way. When she’s excited, it shows. She was even excited about our going to the aquarium. In art class next week, we’re going to focus on drawing and painting and sculpting the fish we saw today.
I smile because even when some things are hard and sad, the world is always full of fish and science and art.
“That’s gross,” Brandy says, turning away from the eel.
“Not gross!” Ms. Mendez says. “Because guess what? That eel isn’t actually eating the shrimp!”
“Yes, it is,” Danny says. He’s even arguing with Ms. Mendez now, a really great sign. I squeeze the handle of his wheelchair. I take out my notebook and make some notes about how Danny’s doing. Cheeks like strawberry frozen yogurt, I write. Little coughing. Good energy.
“I promise you it’s not, Danny,” Ms. Mendez says. “Look closely.” We all try to look closer. If we could, we’d jump right in that pool, I think. “The shrimp is cleaning the eel’s teeth! And in return, the shrimp is finding some food to eat in there.”
“That is disgusting,” Brandy says.
“Ew, that’s so cool!” Cornell says.
“That’s symbiosis,” Gloria says.
“That is exactly right,” Ms. Mendez says. “How amazing is that! The shrimp is getting food, and in exchange the eel gets a nice clean mouth, and they exist together like that, helping each other along the way. It’s pretty magnificent, really.”
I think Ms. Mendez might cry from how much she likes symbiosis, but instead she brings us around to see symbiosis with crabs and anemones and clown fish and angelfish and gobies and more shrimp, all with special symbiotic relationships.
Sometime around the clown fish, Danny stands up out of his wheelchair. I would worry, but he looks so strong I don’t even think about it. Ms. Mendez asks us to take a break and draw our favorite fish so that we’ll have something to work from in art class next week, and Danny lets me sit in his chair to do mine.
Instead of drawing fish, though, I try to take in every single thing around us to figure out why Danny is feeling so much better. It’s like he’s not even sick.
Maybe he’s not sick! Maybe he just needs fish around him! I write that down in my hypothesis column and ponder whether that’s possible.
I’m pretty sure it’s not.
I try to think about what else is different today. Maybe the temperature of the aquarium—very cold from air-conditioning—helps his lungs somehow? Maybe he needs to be in a wheelchair for a little while every day, to give his lungs a rest? Maybe the treatments they tried at the hospital last week are finally working, and it just took a little more time than they thought it would? None of those solutions feels right, so I keep trying to stretch my mind every which way to figure out what it could be that’s making Danny feel better today.
I look back over my old notes to look at other times Danny was doing well. I’m looking for a common denominator.
I flip back and forth between the pages.
I’m starting to see something.
I flip some more.
I look at Danny again. He’s laughing with Marco like a maniac. He’s laughing so hard it would normally make him bend over in a fit of coughing. He’s laughing so hard he looks exactly the way he always used to: vibrant and silly and raucous and healthy.
I think I see the common denominator.
I think I have a new hypothesis for how to make Danny feel better.
It’s me.
When I’m around, Danny gets better.
I look at the eel and the shrimp in its mouth and the way the two creatures exist perfectly together.
“What happens if the eel doesn’t have the shrimp, or the shrimp doesn’t have the eel?” I ask, forgetting to raise my hand. Ms. Mendez doesn’t seem to mind.
“That can’t happen, Clover,” she says. “They need each other to survive.”
“Right,” I say, because I already knew that. “Symbiosis.”
I look at Danny and think the word again in my head. Symbiosis. When you need each other to survive.
The class starts to move on, but I stare at the way the eel never clamps down on the shrimp’s little body, the way the shrimp is fearless in the eel’s terrifying mouth.
I get it.
15
That night Jake decides he’s no longer eating any food that isn’t white.
“Rice,” he says, when Mom tries to give him spinach.
“Yogurt,” he says, when Mom tries to give him an orange.
“Mashed potatoes,” he says, when Mom tries to give him asparagus.
And when Mom brings out the pasta with meat sauce—her specialty—Jake grabs a spoon and starts scooping the sauce off the pasta and dropping it on the center of the table.
It’s one of Jake’s tantrums, and it’s a bad one, a messy one. With Dad back on the road, Mom and I have to take care of it together, and Mom’s out of sorts today. I think she’s missing Dad as much as I am. We all are, I guess.
Jake uses his hands to strip even more of the sauce from the noodles, and Mom turns red and I think she might cry. Her eyes go glassy and she keeps her mouth shut really tight like she doesn’t want anything to escape.
If it were me throwing a fit, I’d have to clean up, but Jake is in no shape to be told to do anything at all, so Mom takes charge. While Mom sponges and paper-towels and mumbles under her breath, I calm Jake down.
“There’s plain pasta left in the pot,” I say, and I get him a bowl with some butter, which is almost white. “But you can’t eat only white food every day. Let’s have a red day tomorrow and eat tomatoes and strawberries. And a yellow lemonade and banana day the day after that.”
“But then we have to have an all-green day,” Jake says. Jake and I agree about green vegetables—we do not like them, even though we know they are good for us and Mom does a celebratory dance when we eat them.
“Yes,” I say, using my dramatic-sad voice that Jake loves. “We will have to have a green day. It will be tragic. But after that we will do a BROWN day and eat chocolate and burgers for every meal!”
“BROWN FOOD DAY!” Jake yelps, his hands in the air, cheering us on.
“BROWN FOOD DAY!” I call back, because I know Jake loves it when I repeat whatever he’s doing. He then likes to repeat me, and we can go in circles like that forever. It’s annoying for me and Mom, but it makes Jake so happy that it ends up making us happy too.
Mom smiles at me and mouths thank you.
I think we are a little symbiotic family. It’s not perfect symbiosis—I think Mom has to work hardest of all, and Dad being gone makes the whole equation a little crooked sometimes, but we all work together and give things up and make things work so that everyone can survive.
Mom sits back down and the table’s clean and she doesn’t even yell at Jake, and for once it doesn’t make me mad—it’s okay that Jake can get away with some things that I can’t get away with. We’re different. We have different roles in our symbiotic family.
“Tell me about the aquarium today,” Mom says while she and I start eating our pasta, meat sauce still intact.
“It was perfect. Especially because Danny came. He made everything even better.”
Mom looks up at the ceiling and at Jake slurping on his noodles and at her own plate of spaghetti. She brings her whole mostly uneaten meal to the kitchen.
I hear her sniffle.
I think for a second maybe she’s still upset about Jake’
s tantrum, but that’s not it. We all were just fine about that a few minutes ago. We fixed it.
“Jake, can you play in your room?” she says before we’re actually done eating.
“Yes,” Jake says. And for as many strange and impossible rules as Jake has, he also will sometimes be so easy and clear and no-nonsense. He can play just fine in his room, so he will.
Once he’s gone, I start helping with the dishes. I wonder if I should try again to explain about Danny. There’s still this well of misunderstanding in the room with us.
“You don’t always have to help, Clover,” Mom says. I’m confused, because she’s always, always bugging me about helping with the dishes and the trash and the dirty bathroom.
“Yes, I do,” I say, and gather up the glasses.
“You don’t have to always help everyone else. You can just take care of you.”
I look at her like she’s an alien speaking pig Latin.
“Are you talking about the dishes?”
“I’m talking about the dishes and Jake. But mostly I’m talking about Danny.”
When she says his name, it sounds like an accusation. I almost drop the glasses.
“Never mind. I don’t want to talk any more about Danny,” I say, even though if I’m honest, all I want to do is talk about Danny—how I figured everything out at the aquarium, how to make him better, how to get to Vermont.
“You need to get used to doing things without him,” Mom says. She says it all in one breath, like a gust of wind. And I know from the way it swooshed out of her that she didn’t really want to say it but felt like she had to.
It doesn’t help.
It doesn’t make me less mad at her.
It doesn’t make me less scared.
I want to throw a Jake-style tantrum in her direction, hearing those words.
I think I could, too. I feel a push and pull and burn and chill inside me all at once.
“I’ll never get used to doing things without Danny,” I say, as calm as I possibly can, which isn’t very calm at all.
“He’s very sick, Clover,” Mom says in a whisper. She clears her throat, shakes her head, pulls back her shoulders, and tries again. She wants me to know she means it. “Danny is very, very sick. And when someone’s sick and we can’t figure out why, some things change. I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m saying this because I want you to be prepared.”
The Someday Suitcase Page 9
