It was late fall, and Nebraska’s snow season had already begun. Spring and summer had passed—so what are ladybugs doing out of hiding? Seanza wondered. She had seen two in the car on the way to visit her sister in the hospital, and now there were five on the ceiling of Serena’s hospital room.
“I feel like grandpa is here,” Seanza whispered to Sedra as they walked in and stood beside Serena’s bed. Their red polka dots somehow calmed her, gave her a sense of peace. Their grandfather was there with them.
Everything is going to be okay, Seanza insisted to herself, quietly wishing for her sister’s successful recovery. Knowing that the ladybugs surrounding them would eventually fly, she thought, This wish will come true.
After prepping Serena for the surgery, doctors had wheeled her back to the operating room, the blinding lights above blending quickly as she passed beneath.
That’s strange. There’s music playing in here, Serena thought as the gurney jiggled and thumped to the unexpected beat, coming to a halt in the operating room. I never imagined there’d be music in a hospital.
Music always seemed to find her, to follow her.
The chill of the operating room, the smell of it, was unfamiliar, uncomfortable. This is the beginning of the end of my journey, she thought grimly.
Doctors sedated her, but before she fell into a deep sleep, before the room around her dimmed, one last song came through the hospital speakers before her world was silenced—“I Knew I Loved You” by Savage Garden.
Serena closed her eyes before the medicine closed them for her, and as the song reached its chorus, her tight grip on the gurney rails had loosened and the butterflies in her belly rested.
Darren Hayes, the voice of Savage Garden, had found her again. She had listened to this song a million times, gotten lost in its music, inspired by its lyrics. Any song out of thousands, possibly millions, could have drifted into that cold, lonely room at that moment, but it was this one—this very special song that brought hope, peace, and comfort to a young girl facing cancer and surgery. Eyes still closed, Serena smiled, her mind rested, before it left the room.
3
The day after surgery, Serena was home with her family, on the road to recovery. Listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games kept her busy, and most importantly, still. Sleeping in her waterbed risked tearing the stitches in her neck, so her parents pulled a mattress out of the basement and set it up for her in her dad’s office.
The second night after returning home, Serena stayed up late, chatting online with friends from other countries, testing out games on the family’s new Xbox, and surfing the net. When she saw that a preview to Michael Jackson’s upcoming release “Cheater” was available online, she immediately hit “play.”
The song’s slow, playful intro dragged her in, the snapping of fingers enticing her as they led to the heart of the song—a cool, steady drumbeat and the artist’s signature “Oh!” echoing in the background. She closed her eyes and let the power of the lyrics, the strength and familiarity of his voice, seep in.
It was well past midnight and quiet in the house save for the subtle sound of voices coming from the TV in the living room, where Seanza was watching and dozing on the couch. Lost in the words, consumed by the music, Serena tapped her thumb on the desk, oblivious as silent, invisible hands crawled up her back and clung to her neck.
She shot her eyes open and inhaled short, quick breaths. Panic rushed through every limb, into her heart, her mind, to the ends of her fingers, which clutched the arms of her chair as she sat up, fighting the urge to run into the cool, Nebraska night to take in all its air.
Instead, she walked into the living room with a hand clutched to her ribcage and looked at her sister. “What’s the matter, Rena?” Seanza asked, standing immediately.
“I’m …”
Serena paused, closed her eyes. She hunched over her arm, wrapping it even tighter around her ribcage, before taking in another short breath. “I’m having trouble breathing.”
“Oh, God,” Seanza said. “Go sit down in the office and I’ll wake Mom and Dad.”
She came to the office a few minutes later, alone. “How are you doing?” Seanza asked.
“It comes and goes,” Serena said, waiting for the next suffocation. Her lungs seemed to tighten and loosen with every attack. “Where are Mom and Dad?” she asked.
“I can’t wake them up,” Seanza said.
Their father had always been a heavy, comatose-type sleeper, and Sedra was exhausted from a long night at the hospital and taking care of Serena during the days following surgery. Their bodies had moved fluidly beneath Seanza’s fingertips, their ears deaf to her pleas, until she finally gave up.
“I’ll try again in just a little bit.”
For the next several hours, she talked her sister through the panic and into the calm, reminding her with soothing words, “in through your mouth, out your nose.”
During moments when air cleverly maneuvered more freely through its constricted passageway, giving Serena momentary relief, she would nearly whisper, “It’s not working.”
The hours passed—2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m.—and with more failed attempts at waking her parents, Seanza knew it was up to her to keep her sister calm. She knew something was terribly wrong, but, in her seventeen-year-old logic, not bad enough to call an ambulance or use force to get her parents out of bed. She just needed to get her sister through the night.
They talked, played video games, listened to music, anything they could to keep Serena’s mind in the right place—a place of survival, of taking one more breath. It wasn’t like other nights they had spent staying up late together, Serena draped across her sister’s bed, talking and laughing while Seanza created some form of artwork—a painting or drawing—that illustrated her vision, her interpretation, of the world.
Her sister was known as “the artist,” Serena, “the music buff.” They had grown up with music filling the rooms of their home—from Michael Bolton to Green Day, Eddie Money to Motown—and the lyrics had always spoken to Serena, inspired and enticed her.
Serena spent hours as a little girl, tucked away in her bedroom, placing vinyl on her record player—Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson, Madonna—which her mother had given to her. At the age of five, Serena knew words to songs by The Cars, Tina Turner, Rush, and Billy Ocean.
Her grandfather Red worked a laundry route in the 1950s, when Sedra was just a little girl, driving between diners, stores, factories, and service stations throughout Loves Park, Illinois, to collect old towels and dirty dishrags. When owners of those diners updated their jukeboxes, they’d give Red piles of outdated forty-fives, which later ignited a passion for music in Sedra that trickled down to Serena and ran through her blood. Her exposure to it—the old vinyls, her growing collection of CDs, the instruments her father dabbled with here and there—prompted her to sign up for her school’s orchestra in the fourth grade.
Branching out from the guitar and drums her father, Kevin, had introduced her to, she decided to play the violin when Red gave her one that had been passed around his family for more than one hundred years. The violin’s nostalgia, its history, wasn’t enough to keep her playing. After a year, she found the instrument tedious, its sound, monotonous.
In fifth grade, she changed to the drums and immediately connected to the strength of the instrument, the heartbeat of music, but the school band bored her instantly with its setting and structure. Serena stuck with it but decided to further her instruction at home, in the basement, working out rhythms, learning—by ear rather than sheet music—the beats to her favorite songs. The first song she taught herself was Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”
That freedom of song choice, those lyrics crashing in her mind, was liberating, addictive.
Through middle school and into high school, Serena’s CD collection continued to grow, with albums of U2, Prince, Justin Timberlake, and Eminem becoming part of her musical family. Posters of her favorite artists—nam
ely Michael Jackson—began gracing her bedroom walls. Researching music, writing it, absorbing it, became her inspiration, an expression of who she was.
The night Serena became absorbed in the lyrics of “Cheater,” the night that death wrapped its bony fingers around her ribs and up to her neck before squeezing, ended the next day in the emergency room. Seanza had talked her sister through the night, soothed her mind, her spirit, until 6:00 a.m., when Serena decided that a warm bath would calm her panicked, shaking body. She sat in the suds, wrapped in the steam’s threatening embrace. The warmth of it seeped into her lungs, pushing against the relentless wall determined to keep air from its deep, natural motion.
When panic resurfaced, threatened, she crawled slowly from the tub, wrapped her body, her pain, in a towel before opening the bathroom door to find Sedra standing directly on the other side.
“Oh, my God,” her mother said, cupping her mouth. Serena’s skin was the color of clay. “We’re going to the hospital—NOW.”
After hours of tests, CT scans and X-rays, shallow breaths, and moments of panic, doctors finally determined what had kept Serena and her sister up all night—a blood clot in her lungs, a pulmonary embolism. Over the next twenty-four hours, Serena’s inhales finally steadied from calmed panic as her passageway, with the help of clot-dissolving shots in her stomach, expanded, letting tired air through.
She could finally breathe.
4
After three days, Serena was discharged and sent home with her family. Doctors put her on blood thinners for the next six months to keep clots from forming, and placed her on a low-iodine diet before starting her on radiation to kill any remaining cancer cells. To eliminate vitamin K, which helps blood to clot faster, from her diet, she lived on a very strict, mostly fruit diet, and then it was time for radiation.
The threat of radiation would be present at all times; it could seep from her skin and into the bodies of others. It was a medical necessity that Serena enter seclusion, locked away, for days, sometimes a week, at a time. She could spend no more than two hours at a time with family members, three feet of space separating them at all times. No long car rides, no hugs, no good-night kisses.
Her bedroom door felt closed to the world, where she was locked inside with her thoughts and her music. Confined to total solitude other than leaving to eat a meal from paper plates that nobody else would touch or using the restroom—her own—Serena began to feel like a stranger in her home, an outsider looking in.
She spent hours staring out her bedroom window, imagining the endless rows of corn and farmland and green pastures that existed beyond her neighborhood. When the smell of spicy nacho sauce, drenching salty tortilla chips piled with guacamole and sour cream, would creep down the hallway and under her door, reminding her of all the food she was no longer allowed to eat, she’d become angry with her situation, homesick with thoughts of Tucson, thirteen hundred miles away. She resented those yellow rows beyond her window, dancing, teasing, those pastures covered in winter white, those smelly farms.
I hate corn, she thought. I hate snow, I hate train tracks, I hate farms, I hate Nebraska. They had lived there for a year and a half, her old life remaining in Tucson, Arizona, where she was born and raised. Moving at the end of middle school would have been difficult enough for any kid, but being rejected by the town, the people, the culture, had made it even worse.
Seanza was pulled into the assistant principal’s office on her first day of eleventh grade. He carefully studied her clothes, her style, before bluntly asking, “Are you goth?”
Seanza looked down at her jeans and colorful T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing black. Her face was not white. Her eyes were not hidden in the shadows of dark makeup, and she had no spikes around her neck. Her fingernails were not black, her lips not blood red.
“No,” she answered sharply.
It was one of her and Serena’s first experiences with the town’s small-mindedness, its spirit of disapproval for newcomers—especially newcomers who did not go to church, did not play a single sport, and cared nothing about labels on clothes. They didn’t fit the mold.
Serena had never turned a head in Tucson with her brown hair dyed bright blue or red or green—or all colors of the rainbow at the same time. Anything out of the norm, expression of who she was through the colors in her hair, was something to be questioned, laughed at, in this small town they now called “home.”
When Serena entered high school, she remained true to who she was. She sported her “I wish you were a piñata” T-shirt, which she was forced to cover with her hooded sweatshirt, and dyed her hair bright blue with gold tints. Accused of craving attention, the word loner was thrown at her, settling beneath her thickening skin, but she walked through the halls proudly, spoke up in class, and held her own.
One day during speech class, she decided to let her assuming classmates all the way in, to risk total rejection, and to express her love for music. She presented the history of some of her favorite bands and artists—Culture Club, ABBA, Darren Hayes—adding her love for their music, their influence on the world. When she heard a classmate whisper, “freak,” her mind’s volume cranked to high.
She stared long and hard into the eyes of her fellow ninth graders. Some stared back, disgusted; others scribbled in their notebooks, pretending the room’s thick tension was a light, comfortable breeze.
Serena was going to spend the next three years with these students, trying to make this her home, but it was then that she realized she was as much a stranger to them as she was the day she stepped foot on campus as “the new girl” in that small town.
She finished her speech and sat down, deciding in that moment that acceptance, approval, didn’t matter. Remaining true to herself was the only thing that did.
It wasn’t until she approached the end of her junior year that Serena felt an ounce of validation. She signed up for a music lyrics and analysis class, designed to encourage students to analyze music—from death metal to R & B—with no boundaries, no judgment, no right or wrong answer. Her voice was finally heard, finally accepted, and those ninety minutes of freedom, of self-expression, were exactly what she needed to coast into her senior year.
She had made it through isolation, through five iodine radiation treatments, through “faker” and “liar” whispers following her down the school hallways, haunting and tormenting her.
“Your hair didn’t fall out,” her classmates had said when she returned to school at the end of her sophomore year. “You didn’t really have cancer.”
She had missed a quarter of tenth grade, undergoing radiation, keeping distance from her family—from the world—visiting the hospital for body scans, dealing with the pain and misery of being off her thyroid medication.
She had gained thirty pounds in one month, and that cruel, dead weight settled and grabbed at her muscles, pushing, pounding. She nearly buckled every day beneath its relentless strength while climbing the stairs of her school’s campus, those spiteful whispers, real or imagined, pulling back at her.
She pushed ahead, to and from class, restless through lectures, pain at the forefront of her mind. Cancer had become her identity, solitude, her friend, and Darren Hayes, her musical companion. Lyrics to “Affirmation,” the song that had brought peace to her when cancer first entered her life on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, became part of her thoughts, her inner voice. Darren seemed to have a song for her every mood, lessons to teach, music to inspire, and he was there every step of the way.
When the music feels like this,
When you lose control you gotta go with it.
Ten feet high,
Flyin’ above the sky,
Your problems don’t exist,
When music feels like this.*
My problems don’t exist, Serena thought, absorbing the words to his song “Spin.” She had escaped. During all her isolation, he had taken her somewhere else—somewhere outside of that room, beyond the walls of her confinement, to a world whe
re only words mattered.
Before, she had been engulfed with thoughts like What did I do to deserve this? Nobody understands. I am so alone. Why me? But it was words from songs on Darren’s album Spin that had guided Serena for days and weeks, pushing thoughts of why me? from her mind.
Serena had maintained a happy face while hiding these thoughts from her family. Beneath her smiles, she was sinking into the weight of their pull, drowning in their desperate hold. To the world, she remained strong, but facing cancer and living a life that had separated her—emotionally and physically—from that world was something that she, at the age of fifteen, could not deal with on her own. She was reminded in Darren’s song, “What You Like,” that he was with her as he sang about unity between people and starting over, of life’s journey beginning and ending together.
Even just a voice in her speakers, Darren Hayes had become Serena’s comfort, guiding her through her journey.
5
Serena went back to school during the last quarter of her sophomore year, and in the two years between then and graduation, she maintained friendships with others like herself who didn’t quite fit in, played music, and focused on the day she would toss her green and silver cap into the air. With disapproval and accusing whispers still haunting her daily, she kept smiling, but behind that smile was pain, darkness, and a million unanswered questions.
Why did cancer choose me? What did I do to deserve it? Will it ever come back? Why won’t the other kids believe me?
These thoughts and others consumed her, with moments of relief coming only from indulging in her music, those words.
Coz I don’t know which way this road is gonna turn,
But I know it’s gonna be fine
It’s gonna be fine, she told herself as she continued to listen to Darren’s “Good Enough.”
Once Upon a Wish Page 27
