My throat was closing up. Getting sucked into my chest. “Bone cancer?” I breathed. “Wouldn’t someone have known that by now? Wouldn’t he be sick?”
Mason sighed. “Doc said that most people would’ve known. Patients with bone cancer usually have pain around the tumor. But remember, Ben has spina bifida, and his legs—”
“Aren’t normal,” I murmured.
He nodded and glanced out the window. His frowning reflection stared back at him.
“How bad?” I said shrilly. “How bad is it?”
“They need to amputate his leg,” Mason said without looking at me. He kicked the wall with the toe of his boot a couple times. “But his fracture caused a fatty clot to travel to his lungs, and they can’t take his leg until his lungs are stabilized. It’s too risky. Mom is—Mom is not doing well. She’s in the restroom trying to get herself back together.”
“That doesn’t answer my question, Mason.”
His eyes finally met mine. I stared into them, to where Mason’s emotion was a silent film. Heartbreak. Misery. Guilt. Despair. He whispered, “It doesn’t look good.”
I collapsed into a chair, realization coiling around me, squeezing my throat, stealing my breath. I should have known. It was so goddamn simple that I’d missed it completely. All the signs were right in front of me this entire time, and I’d been too distracted to see them.
I traced my memory back a couple years, to when I was sitting beside Gramps at our kitchen table, the contents of a bag of cookies from Big Dough scattered in front of us. It was as though my favorite aisle of the grocery store had coughed up everything worth a crap, and it had all landed on our table: double chocolate crinkle, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, and brownie crinkle. All of them smelled amazing. But then, cookies are like massages—even the lousy ones are good.
Gramps had just come from some old woman’s funeral, and to my irritation he was describing it in detail—the color of the casket, the ridiculous sushi at the wake, and the brown dress the dead woman had worn. And then he started talking about the woman’s dog.
“Her mutt knew she had cancer,” he told me. “Sniffed it out.”
“C’mon, Gramps. That’s ridiculous. Dogs aren’t that smart,” I said, shoving half a cookie in my mouth.
“Didn’t say they were smart. Said they could smell cancer. Eloise’s dog followed her everywhere. Even to the bathroom. Kept sticking his nose in her hair. Staring at her. Turned out, the old bat had brain cancer. But she didn’t go to the doctor till it was too late.” When I gave him a disbelieving sigh, he said, “Saw a documentary on it once. Science channel. Even a wiener dog has twenty-five times more scent receptors than a human. If something is wrong, they can smell it.”
Now, as I sat on that cold plastic chair in the emergency room, I knew that I should have figured it out long ago. Ever since I’d known Ben, Wally had been following him around, staring at him, his nose always near Ben’s leg—the one that was currently broken. Wally’s behavior had seemed off to me, yet I could never quite put a finger on it.
Correction: I’d never tried to put a finger on it.
A continent’s worth of guilt crushed my chest.
Mason squatted down in front of me, concerned. “Maggie?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t let him see it in me—all my mistakes, all my secrets, all my fears.
He waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t, he unloaded beside me, wrapping an arm over my shoulder and pulling me toward him.
As I walked down the main corridor in the emergency room, I could see a tall male nurse bent over a computer, and I could see the stiff set of Mason’s shoulders as he gestured to Ben’s room and then took off to find his mother, and I could see the sickly yellow color on the walls, and I could see a massive whiteboard scrawled with patients’ last names and bed numbers.
But I wasn’t ready to see Ben.
I hitched to a stop just inside Ben’s room, facing an olive-green curtain that had been yanked closed. The place reeked of medicines, fake clean, and sickness. Behind the curtain, a machine counted off heartbeats in a series of beeps. Twelve of them blared into the room before a passing nurse lightly touched my elbow and said, “Miss? Are you okay?” I swallowed and moved my head in a vague way. She took it as a yes. She was wrong.
Taking in a breath and letting it out slowly through my nose, I stepped forward and pulled the curtain aside.
I swayed on my feet.
Ben’s skinny frame was splayed immodestly upon the bed. He looked broken, his parts slightly askew, as though he’d been dropped onto the bed all the way from the tenth floor.
His skin was shiny and mannequin-like against his pale blue hospital gown, and his mouth was lolled open in a sideways position that advertised complete and utter unconsciousness. He drew air into his lungs in long, rattling gasps.
“Ben,” I whispered. Or at least I’d meant to whisper. The word was just a movement on my lips, a sound that never made it past my throat.
The room was perversely vivid—like I was viewing the scene through a camera lens that emphasized every detail, every fingerprint on the bed railing, every minute skid on the floor, every speck of dust on the window. If Ben weren’t lying in the middle of it all, looking so damaged, it would be desperately, achingly beautiful.
Clamping my hands in my armpits to keep them from shaking, I took a small step forward and said, “Ben? Can you hear me?”
Ben didn’t stir. There was no sound except his labored breathing.
“You were wrong, you know,” I told him. “Swimming isn’t your Thing. It never was. Not really. Your Thing isn’t just one Thing, but a lot of Things—being part of a bigger whole, letting others have the glory, proving you’re capable and strong and intelligent.”
I looked up at the ceiling and blinked several times, trying to clear my vision. “Your Thing is treading carefully through life, refusing to hurt anyone or anything.” My voice cracked horribly. I brushed away a tear that was scuttling down my cheek before going on. “Somewhere inside of you, you notice this is good. And so, you swim. You swim to show everyone that, although you don’t always get to choose your circumstances, you can always choose what you notice in them.”
I’d been doing a lot of thinking about my Thing. What Ben had really been asking me all this time was not What is your Thing? but instead How do you connect with this world? And I hadn’t had an answer for him because I’d been steamrolling through life, moving too hastily and too indignantly and too...well, blindly, to notice anything of value.
Swaying, I collapsed in the chair beside the bed. Ben’s eyes opened and focused on me. “Thera,” he breathed. His voice was weak. Raspy. All wrong. I couldn’t help but compare him to the tiny dog that Mason and I had picked up on the side of the road. Both of them put off the same quiet air of death.
I wiped my hands on my shorts. “Hey, kid,” I said, trying to answer as if things were perfectly normal. But my words sounded as though they had come from someone else’s mouth.
“Come closer,” he said. At first, I thought he was going to ask me to kiss him again, but then I realized he was trying to tell me a secret. “I overheard Mom talking to the doctor. He thinks I might not make it.” Everything inside me collapsed, and I fell back in my chair, unable to speak. Ben’s eyes drifted shut. For a moment, I thought he’d gone to sleep, but then, his eyes still closed, he said, “But I think it’s bullshit.”
“You’re too young to cuss,” I told him, just like I’d been telling him for weeks now. Except now it felt as though I were getting run over by a freight train as I said it.
True to form, he ignored my words. He opened his eyes and pulled his brows together for a long stretch of time. “I don’t feel like I’m dying,” he whispered finally. “I just feel like I’m fading away.”
I started to crumble. My chin was doing that wobbling thing it does right before I totally lose it. “Ben, I—”
Ben breathed out, a hot, sticky breath
that curled around my nose and left me feeling paralyzed in the chair. In a small voice that skirted sleep, he said, “If I die, I’m okay with you and Mason hanging out. I can tell he likes you. His eyes smile whenever you’re around.”
I wiped a solitary tear from my cheek and said, “Well, that’s mighty generous of you.” But he didn’t hear me. He was already slipping away into unconsciousness.
I’d never been a particularly religious person, but if there was ever a time to become an armchair spiritualist, this was it. I was sort of desperate. So I walked purposefully to the front desk and asked for directions to the hospital’s chapel.
I could see every step on the way there, a fact I tried to ignore as I took the stairs up one floor and lumbered down the white-tiled hallway to the chapel. For the past seven and a half months, all I’d wanted was to have my sight back. It had been an itch that I’d scratched and scratched until it bled all over my life. But now, having my eyesight was nothing but a constant reminder of loss, heartache, and crappy decisions. Now, it felt like a curse.
I rested one palm on the chapel door and closed my eyes. Standing in the familiar absence of light, I inhaled slowly, trying to collect myself. Eyes still closed, I pushed open the door and stepped inside. All I could smell was carpet cleaner and candle wax and broken dreams. I brushed the back of my hand over my eyes and then opened them. The place looked like a miniature church, almost too scaled down to be real.
Still, I felt strangely humbled as the door clicked shut behind me and I stood there in the silence. Chewing on the side of my lip, I shifted my weight several times, not sure what I should be doing. Did I really belong here? Seriously? I certainly wasn’t fooling the Big Man Upstairs. By now, He had to be on to me. In fact, I was half-surprised I hadn’t burst into flames the second I’d walked in.
Taking several steps forward, I collapsed in the backmost pew and dropped my head in my hands. My choppy breaths echoed off the walls. I felt as though my past had been chasing me and chasing me, and it had finally caught up.
“Thera, I don’t think church is your Thing” was what Ben would say if he were sitting beside me right now.
A single tear slid down my cheek, all the way to my chin. Swiping it away with the back of my hand, I choked back a sob. I’d experienced pain in my life. Plenty of it. But never anything like this.
Months ago, when Gramps took me to the ER, my head rupturing with a meningitis headache, the nurse asked me whether I needed pain medication. I hadn’t known how to answer her. I was tough, for Pete’s sake. A Sanders. Sanders women got the wind knocked out of them, broke their bones, won games at all costs, and laughed in the face of pain. So my answer had been no, which had been an all-out lie.
But what I’d felt then was nothing. A paper cut. A stomachache after eating too much. A stubbed toe.
Now I was in agony.
Now I was an open wound.
I could not stop seeing Ben’s face. I could not stop thinking that I was to blame for what was happening to him. I could not move. I could not breathe. I felt terrified, like I’d just been yanked into a dark alley and there was a knife at my throat.
Squeezing my eyes together, I started to pray. Plead, actually. I’d been there for probably close to a half hour when the door creaked open and Mason’s loud, heavy-booted footsteps clunked toward me. Neither of us looked at each other as he sat down silently beside me.
It was almost midnight and Ben’s condition hadn’t changed, so Mason dropped me off at home for a couple hours of sleep. As I hauled myself through the front door, where my parents were waiting, Mom gasped, and Dad, his anger louder than his words, said, “Maggie, we were about to call the police. Where have you been?”
I ran an exhausted hand through my hair. I hadn’t thought about my parents the entire day, hadn’t even considered calling them before my phone had died. “I’m sorry,” I said. “A friend of mine came by early this morning and—”
“Do you know how your father spent his day?” Mom said, her voice unsteady. “Driving the streets, looking for you. You could have at least called, Maggie.”
I was too tired for this. “My phone died again, and—”
“Right. Your phone died,” Mom said, not even giving me the chance to explain.
Heat and indignation flared inside of me. “You want to know what I was doing today?” I screeched. “I was at the hospital! Ben Milton is dying. Dying. So, yeah, I was gone all day. And yeah, I forgot to let you guys know where I was.” I knew that I should stop right here, that I was stepping into a place that would hold me hostage, but I went on anyway, my voice loud and accusing. “I’m surprised you two even realized I was gone.”
“Of course we realized you were gone,” Mom sputtered. “We’re always looking out for you.”
“Are you, Mom?” I said shrilly. “Are you really?” I could feel my eyes starting to well up. I didn’t want to start crying, but there was too much hurt and resentment inside me, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore. So I let the tears come, and I said it. I said the thing that had been eating at me for months on end. “What about when I was in that hospital bed? Were you looking out for me then?” I screamed. My breathing was rasping, choppy. I worked hard to get my next words to sound angry and loud and accusing, but they came out as nothing but a whispered, pitiful sob. “What sort of mother does that? What sort of mother just takes off when her kid is half-dead in the hospital?”
For several heartbeats, there was no sound but the hum of the air-conditioning. Then I heard Mom’s voice, barely even a shocked whisper: “How do you know about that?”
“God, Mom, does it really matter?” I said, slapping the tears away from my cheeks. I groped for the wall to steady myself as I yanked off my flip-flops, one at a time, throwing them on the floor. Then I spun on one heel and stalked toward the stairs.
Dad bellowed in protest and my mother snatched my arm. I could sense her outrage filling the room clear to the ceiling. “You are not leaving this room, young lady,” she snapped, and I could tell by her tone that I’d gone too far, that I’d tripped over some invisible line, and now she was furious. Sternly, with terse enunciation, she said, “In fact, you are not leaving this house at all—not tomorrow, not the next day, and not the day after that.”
I twisted my arm free. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re grounding me because I was at the hospital today with a dying ten-year-old?” I laughed without humor. “This is great. You two have finally found something I don’t want to lose, something you can take away from me.”
“Oh, come off it,” Dad scoffed.
I whirled toward him. “No, I won’t come off it. It’s true and you know it. Until now, you’ve had nothing to ground me from.”
“As parents,” my mother cut in, her voice still sharp, “our job is to protect you from yourself. And that is what we are doing. You need to work on yourself. You need to start moving on with your life. You need to deal with your own problems instead of obsessing over a sick child.”
I barked a derisive laugh. “You’re preaching to me about moving on?” I threw my hands up in the air like I was giving up, and in a certain way, I was. And maybe they were as well, because they said nothing to me as I stomped up the stairs and slammed the door to my room.
When I climbed into bed that night I felt dirty, like I’d committed several unspeakable crimes. All I wanted to do was crawl into the shower and scrub myself until my skin was raw, to wash the memories and the hurt and the damage off my body. But I was too exhausted to stand, too exhausted to move, really, so instead I fell into bed, tumbling into a deep, empty sleep—the sort of sleep you have when you need protection from your own thoughts. When I woke the next morning I found myself dressed and sitting in a full bathtub. Apparently, I’d taken up sleepwalking again.
I toweled off and padded downstairs to the laundry room. Leaning against the dryer as my water-heavy clothes flopped around inside it, I debated whether I should go back to b
ed. I wasn’t going back to sleep, so what was the use? I felt as though I’d arrived at a dentist appointment two hours early and I had nothing to do but plant my ass in one of their uncomfortable, fake-leather chairs and wait for my root canal.
I slipped into my room before my parents got up. I didn’t want to run into them, and I didn’t want to listen to their voices, and I didn’t want to think about the things I’d said to them.
I spent the next three days either in my room or in the basement, avoiding my parents, playing my song again and again until my fingers were chafed and sore, and sagging over my cell phone as I waited for Mason to call with updates on Ben.
The first day: Ben’s doctor amputated his leg.
The second day: Ben spiked a fever.
The third day: they were still awaiting the lab results to learn how far Ben’s cancer had spread.
The fourth day: Ben was getting transferred to another hospital.
“Why is he getting transferred?” I asked Mason when he told me, jerking ramrod straight on the edge of my bed.
“I’m not really sure,” Mason said, and I heard his car door slam. “I’m walking in there now, so if I cut out just know that the reception sucks here.” He sighed heavily, not speaking for several long moments. I could hear his boots clunking down a tile floor. “He seems in such terrible shape to be transferred right now. I mean, he’s so weak and sick, barely hanging on, and now they’ve put him—”
The line crackled.
“Mason? Are you there?”
Nothing.
He’d lost reception.
My hand shook as I hit the END button on my phone. All I could think about were the last words he’d said. Ben was in terrible shape. He was weak. Sick. Barely hanging on.
The One Thing Page 22
