Echo's Sister

by Paul Mosier

  I’m tired of wondering about the answers to my own questions, let alone questions from Maisy or anyone else. I’m tired of pretending things are okay, and I don’t want to say how they really are.

  The elevator dings, bringing me back to this moment. The doors open and I wonder how long I’ve been standing here, how many elevators have come and gone while my mind wandered. I get on, the doors close, and tears pour from my eyes. I watch the numbers light as I descend from seven to one, then wipe my eyes before the doors open again.

  While waiting in line to get Mom’s four-shot cappuccino and a blended ice-cream drink for myself, I think about every nightmare scenario of us living on the streets and begging for food while Echo’s tumor grows. I imagine the surgery being performed by a guy with a rusty blade beneath a bridge over the Hudson River. If Dad doesn’t win whatever argument he’s having on his desperate phone calls with the insurance company, I don’t know how it’s going to end up any better than that.

  I order and give the ten to the cashier. The change is less than a dollar. I drop one penny in the tip jar to make some noise and put the rest in my jeans pocket.

  When I get off the elevator back to the seventh floor, my phone buzzes. Another text from Maisy.

  El! Have you been abducted by aliens? Lol. We need to get together!

  I stare at the screen, at her words. I set the drinks on the counter at the nurses’ station and reply.

  Lol! Yes, aliens who like assigning a ton of homework. Mainly rocket science and astrophysics of course. Yes let’s get together soon!

  Back at the room I hear Echo’s voice as I enter.

  “Where’s El?”

  I come in with a drink in each hand. Mom puts down her folio and stands, comes to Echo’s side.

  “She’s here, honey. How do you feel?”

  “I feel like I’ve been in a spaceship. What did the aliens do to me?”

  Mom smiles. “They put the port in, remember?”

  “But not aliens,” Dad says. “The doctors.”

  “Hi, Echo,” I say, and hand Mom’s cappuccino to her. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “I was here yesterday but you were asleep.”

  The nurse comes in, this time a guy with a shaved head. “Hello, Sleeping Beauty. How do you feel?”

  “Good.”

  “Any pain? Does it hurt anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Awesome. I just need to take your vitals.” He puts the blood pressure cuff around her arm.

  “El, tell me what you think of this.” Mom picks up her folio and turns it around to show me. It’s a drawing of a dress. The proportions indicate that it’s for a little girl. Mom points at the drawing with her pencil.

  “This is a flap for accessing the port. So if a girl has to have chemo and she wants to wear a dress, she can. She doesn’t have to take the dress off or lower it off her shoulder while she’s getting treatment.”

  Another feature of our new, grim reality. But Mom is smiling, and the new rule is stay positive, so I smile back. “Cool.”

  “I thought I could make a dress like this for Echo. And if it works, maybe I could make more and try to sell them.”

  “Doesn’t somebody already do that?”

  Mom closes her folio and sets it on the nightstand by Echo’s bed. “Well, they do, but what I’ve seen looks mainly . . . institutional. Like it was issued by a hospital instead of bought at a cute boutique.”

  “Everything looks beautiful,” the nurse says, taking the cuff off Echo’s arm. “Are you ready for a Popsicle?”

  “Yes!” Echo has officially woken up.

  “Great. I’ll be right back.”

  “Anyway,” Mom continues, “remember what it was like when I used to have my own dress studio?”

  “Of course. In our living room.”

  “Yes. Well, Echo is not going to be able to go to school for a while. At least a few months, until after the winter break. So being able to work from home is very appealing right now.”

  “Did Ingrid fire you?”

  She clears her throat. “I told Ingrid I would not be able to meet her demands.”

  Dad stands from the bench by the window. “When one door closes, another door opens.”

  I look to him. He moves his hands upward in a lifting motion while making a face at me.

  “Right,” I say. “That sounds really cool.” Dad gives me a thumbs-up for being positive.

  “Popsicles!” Echo shouts. The nurse has come in holding two. One for Echo and one for me.

  We eat them together, and I watch her. She looks like she can taste the sweet of the Popsicle, but I can only feel the cold.

  6

  SATURDAY MORNING I wake up before Dad. It’s been only one week of school but already I am in the habit of waking up too early. The jackhammer has taken the weekend off, as have all the other noisemakers. But I’m up early anyway.

  Saturday I get to whack balls at the tennis center and destroy my opponent in the Hudson Juniors League, so I get out of bed even though I’m tired. I make myself toast and veggie sausage and a pot of strong tea to split with Dad. He does coffee on weekdays but always tea on weekends, because weekends are supposed to be slower. I’m just finishing up my breakfast when he drags himself into the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” I say through a mouthful of toast. “There’s tea.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then I hoist the tennis racquet that’s been lying across my lap and wave it at him.

  Dad gives a grim smile as he sits at the table. “About that,” he says.

  “What?”

  He fills his teacup from the shiny kettle. Steam rises. “I know how much you love tennis.”

  This isn’t going to end well.

  “And it’s a great thing in every respect.” He bounces his tea bag up and down in the water. “The exercise, the stress relief.”

  “The feeling good about gracefully destroying the girl on the other side of the net.”

  “Yes.” He smiles. “But right now, with Echo in the hospital, and then getting treatment every Thursday—which will probably result in her feeling poorly through Saturdays—and the distance, and the expense . . .”

  “Are you saying I can’t do tennis anymore?”

  “Just temporarily.” He reaches for my arm. “I’m sorry, El.”

  I pull my arm away. If I can’t have tennis, he can’t have my arm.

  “I know how disappointing this is,” he says. “But I was thinking maybe we could throw the Frisbee together. It’s relaxing, the motion is like your backhand in tennis. And we can throw outside on the street so we don’t have to spend half the day going somewhere to do it.”

  “Playing on the street sucks. It always goes down into stairwells.”

  “Then maybe we can play catch with a baseball.”

  “Remember the broken car window?”

  “Oh, I remember all right.” He smiles again. “We could use a tennis ball instead.”

  “Great. That’ll remind me of what I’m missing out on.”

  He takes another sip of tea. “It isn’t the end of tennis, just like it isn’t the end of school for Echo. She’ll be back to school one day, and you’ll be back to playing tennis.”

  He had to frame it in terms of Echo’s cancer to make me feel guilty about moping over not playing tennis. Like he won’t be happy until everyone in the family is suffering in equal measure.

  One for all, all four one.

  The session of throwing the tennis ball isn’t as awful as I’d expected. The ball feels good in my hands as I throw and catch, and I realize my body has been tightly wound with stress. This is why exercise is one of the elements listed on the All Four One board.

  Also, the street is quieter on weekends. And New York City in September can be about as pretty as anyplace.

  Echo drifts in and out of my mind. When Echo is in my mind it’s not happy Echo thoughts. When Echo isn’t in my mind i
t doesn’t matter what it is—

  Trees, wearing their September green.

  Tennis ball traveling back and forth between my Dad and me.

  Old lady walking a tiny dog with an eye patch down the sidewalk.

  Like very short days alternating between the darkness of night and the light of day, my head fills with a few seconds of Echo having cancer, then gives way to a few seconds of anything else.

  Dad carries the All Four One chalkboard as we walk to the subway in the early afternoon. We head to the station south of the Jefferson Market Library, but first Dad wants to stop at a healthy market for a vitality juice with turmeric. By vitality they mean disgusting, and I don’t know how he thinks Echo will be persuaded to drink it. But he means well, so I don’t tell him it’s hopeless.

  I can hear the piano as we descend the stairs to the tracks. My heart sinks. I don’t want to stand listening to the piano guy play so beautifully and not be able to tip him.

  I pause halfway down. “Maybe we should walk? We can save money. It’s a nice day and it’ll be good exercise.”

  Dad shakes his head. “Not this time. I’ve got too much stuff to carry. And it’s a long walk. We’ve got a busy day.”

  I roll my eyes. Then I remember we can’t afford any of us being negative, so I roll them back and continue downstairs toward the trains going north and the trains going south, and the piano on the platform between the tracks.

  We have to walk right by him. He’s playing something a hundred years old by Scott Joplin, way beyond my ability. It’s called “Solace,” and it’s heartbreakingly beautiful, even with the terrible acoustics of the subway station. We have to stand close by, because it wouldn’t make sense to walk away from him.

  I loved taking piano lessons, even though I wasn’t terribly good. Echo picked it up better than me. Of course now there’s no possibility of Mom and Dad paying for lessons. A southbound train comes and overpowers the Joplin song. Then the train stops, and “Solace” returns. I feel guilty that I’m enjoying it and we can’t tip, but it was Dad’s money anyway. And like Dad says, most people don’t tip.

  But maybe most people don’t enjoy it the way I do.

  I glance at the piano guy and he smiles. I smile back and look away. But from the corner of my eye he beckons me over. I look at Dad, then down the track. The train isn’t coming along to force me away, so I walk with guilty feet to the piano guy.

  “Hey!” he says. He finishes the song. “Have you got a request? You guys tip me so often but you never ask for anything.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on. Anything. If you don’t like this old stuff, I also know songs that kids your age typically like.”

  “I liked that last song. It’s just what I needed to hear.”

  “Thanks! That was Scott Joplin.”

  “I know.”

  He brightens. “You do? Do you play?”

  “I used to take lessons. We have a keyboard, but our apartment is so small it’s always put away in a closet.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, my piano fits much better down here and up in Washington Square than it does in my apartment. But I have to drag it back every night anyway. Or earlier in the day if the cops show up and ask if I’ve got a permit.” He bangs on the keys. “But don’t leave your keyboard in the closet. Take it out and let it sing.”

  I fold my hands. “I’m not very good.”

  “Keep at it. You’ll thank yourself later.”

  “I have a hard time with the left hand.”

  He scratches his scruffy chin. “We could play together. Your right hand, my left.”

  I smile. Then I look over my shoulder at the uptown C train as it screeches in. “Maybe next time.”

  “Give me an exit theme.” He looks like he won’t take no for an answer.

  “‘Everything Happens to Me.’”

  He puts his hand to his chest. “Ah! A girl after my own heart. Moments like this give me the strength to drag my piano around every day. See you later, alligator.”

  He begins playing it, sweet and sad, and a little funny. I watch the piano guy over my shoulder as I hurry to Dad, and the piano guy watches me back. Dad and I jump on the train, and the doors close.

  I hear the song in my head as the train enters the tunnel. My fists unclench, my fingers twitch. And then, even though the people on the subway might think I’m weird for doing it, I spread my hands wide to play the tune on an invisible keyboard.

  It sounds perfect.

  When Dad and I arrive at the hospital, they have already begun Echo’s first round of chemo. Dad puts his hand on the IV bag dripping not into her arm but into the port buried beneath the skin on the right side of her chest. Dad’s head tips down, he closes his eyes. He almost looks like he’s praying.

  “Do your thing,” he says quietly to the bag of chemo. “Show no mercy.”

  For some reason this immediately makes tears well up in my eyes.

  But Echo thinks all of this is hilarious. “Look, I’m a robot,” she says, and does a robot dance.

  But she can’t really do a robot dance, since she’s stuck in bed connected to a tube stuck into her chest. So instead she just moves her arms stiffly like robots are expected to do when they dance.

  Mom leaves the hospital for a while, which stinks because I’ve hardly seen her at all this week. But she needs a break from being stuck in the room with Echo. Not so much being stuck in here with Echo, just being stuck here. So she goes home, where she hasn’t been since Monday, and runs a couple of errands.

  Echo isn’t terribly excited about the All Four One chalkboard. But she’s excited that Dad brought the first Harry Potter book to read to her. He sits beside her bed and finds the first page of text.

  “I read this to El starting when she was your age,” he tells her. “It took about eighteen months to get through all of the books, so we should be finishing the series just before your eighth birthday.”

  I know he’s making a point of being optimistic. Underneath any statement like that is the worry that she won’t live to be that age. But staying positive, as he said, is the most important thing.

  “Where was I when you read it to El?” she asks.

  “You were asleep. But now you’re a big kid, so you can handle these books.”

  Echo’s terribly excited to learn she’s following in my footsteps. She gets comfortable, arranging around herself the stuffed animals people have brought or had delivered. I turn off the TV.

  Dad holds the book at arm’s length. In his voice I can hear him get choked up as the first words come to his lips.

  “Chapter One. The Boy . . . Who Lived.”

  First hour on Monday, while waiting for Mr. D’s class to begin, I’m holding my breath and watching the clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick. Every second I can hold my breath is another year of life granted to Echo. If I can hold it a minute and a half it means a pretty long life for her. I realize it’s a ridiculous superstition, but it’s no worse than stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back.

  Thirty seconds. Tick, tick, tick.

  “Hey!” It’s the girl to my left. Sydney. “Your lips look so cute. Is that glitter in your lip gloss?”

  I look at her, then up to the clock on the wall.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Sydney is turned in her seat, facing me. “I have raspberry lip gloss if you ever want to try. Unless you think it’s gross to share.”

  I look at her lips, then up at the clock on the wall.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  “Is that silver glitter in yours?” She looks so eager.

  I touch my lips with my index finger, and hold it away to look at it. Then I glance back up at the clock on the wall. Sixty seconds.

  “It’s so cute.” She searches my face, waiting for a response.

  But I cannot respond, even if she thinks I’m being rude or weird. Not until at least ninety seconds. All I can do is smile weakly, my lips tight to keep my breath in.

&nbs
p; “Anyway. I like Emily Dickinson too. But my favorite poet is—”

  The bell rings, interrupting her. Sydney’s face shows disappointment as she turns away.

  Mr. D walks back and forth at the front of the classroom in short paces. He’s wearing khaki pants and a sweater-vest, holding our assignments in a big folder.

  With a sharp gasp, I take in a new breath. Mr. D stops pacing, smiles at me curiously, then begins addressing the class.

  “Good morning, everyone. Did you all have a nice weekend?”

  A few kids mumble yes or no. I don’t feel like I’ve had a weekend at all. And I was only able to hold my breath for seventy-nine seconds.

  “First I’d like to hand back your writing assignment, ‘Theater of Emotion.’”

  I’m dreading getting the assignment back because I know I did a terrible job on it. Mr. D assigned it on Thursday, and then a few hours later I found out that Echo has cancer. I couldn’t concentrate on the assignment at all, and I had to email it to Mr. D on Friday since I missed school. As a result my work was pretty much a joke. So I sit at my desk pretending to look in my book bag because I don’t want him to see my eyes.

  “It always amazes me to see the variety of work that a class can produce when given a fairly open-ended assignment.” He starts moving up and down the aisles, dropping papers onto desks. “In this case, Write a movie scene where the character is dealing with strong emotions.”

  He drops a paper in front of the girl who sits to the left of me. Sydney. She scowls at her grade.

  “Not only was there great diversity in the subject matter,” Mr. D continues, “and what the characters in your stories experienced, but also the manner in which you executed it.”

  I start biting my nails. Up and down the aisles he goes.

  “There was some excellent work, and some that could have been stronger. But there was one student whose effort showed me bravery, creativity, and an unusual understanding of the subject matter.”

  I am overcome with dread as I realize there is only one paper he hasn’t handed back, and I am the only student who hasn’t been handed a paper. He takes his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, puts them on, and looks to the paper in his hand.