Hummingbird Heart

by Robin Stevenson

  “You better go,” she said. “You don’t want to be late.”

  TWenTY-nIne

  After school, I stood outside beside my bicycle, waiting for Mom. She’d arranged for us to go see Casey. No one had said it, but I had a feeling this was a goodbye visit, in case Casey didn’t make it. There just seemed to be this urgency about it. No one had consulted me or asked if I wanted to go.

  I didn’t.

  Toni was walking toward me and I waved.

  “Hey. What are you doing?”

  “Mom’s picking me up.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “How come? You okay?”

  I never let Mom drive me to or from school, on principle. “We’re going to see Casey,” I said reluctantly. “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Jeez. Is it…serious?”

  “Dunno. I guess it might be.”

  “Huh. That sucks.” She gave me a long look. “I guess you haven’t heard anything yet, about the bone-marrow thing.”

  I shook my head. “It’s so weird. I feel like it’ll be my fault if I’m not a match. You know? If she, you know…”

  “Doesn’t make it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It won’t be your fault.”

  I shrugged irritably. “I know that.”

  There was a long silence. Toni played with a piece of tape on my bicycle handlebars, and Mom’s car came rattling along and pulled to a stop beside us. I didn’t want to go. “Sorry I’m being a bitch,” I muttered. “Um, you know. You’re my best friend. You’re important to me.”

  “I love you too.” She laughed. “Goof.”

  Toni helped me put my bike on the bike rack and waved goodbye as I slid into the passenger seat and buckled my seat belt. I watched her as we drove away, and wished I was still standing there on the sidewalk beside her. Mom drove quickly, trying to get onto the highway before the worst of the rush-hour traffic out of town. I turned on the radio so that we wouldn’t have to talk. I felt trapped and panicky, my heart racing so fast I thought it’d burst right out of my chest. I dug my nails into my palms and clenched my teeth so tightly that my jaw started to ache.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go see her.

  Not if she was dying.

  I couldn’t even stand to think about it. It wasn’t even about Casey, really. It wasn’t about how sad it was that a little kid was sick, or about her being my half sister. I just couldn’t stand thinking about death. Being reminded of it. The certainty of death changed everything. What difference did it make how far off it was? If death was the inevitable outcome, how could anything else really matter?

  “Mom.” I started to cry. “I don’t want to visit.”

  “What? Why not?”

  I just shook my head. “Please don’t make me. I can’t do this.” A blue sign with a big letter H on it flashed past, and I started to cry harder.

  She took her foot off the gas and the car slowed down. “Are you sure, Dylan?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Dylan…” Mom shook her head. “Fine. I’ll take you home and I’ll call Mark on his cell.”

  She was probably disappointed in me. Casey would be disappointed too. But I just couldn’t do it. Not yet. Maybe later—if I found out that I was a match and I could do something to help her—maybe then I’d visit.

  When we got home, I retreated to my room. I didn’t want to look at Mom’s tight lips and wonder when she was going to ask me something. I could tell she was dying to. If she wasn’t so big on respecting privacy, she’d probably already be interrogating me. I figured I’d better stay out of her way and remove the temptation.

  I mucked around on the computer for a while, reading about neutrophils and platelets and leukemia. I couldn’t make sense of a lot of it. After about half an hour, Karma hammered on my door.

  “What?”

  She slipped into my room. “Guess who’s here?”

  I glanced up, saw her wide grin and quickly minimized the window on the computer screen so she wouldn’t see what I was reading. “How the hell would I know? Santa Claus?”

  “Better. Scott.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. And I think they’re back together.” She lowered her voice, even though there was no way Mom could hear. “They’re holding hands.”

  “Huh.”

  “You’re not upset? Because I know you don’t like him as much as I do.”

  “He’s all right,” I said. “As long as I don’t have to see them making out on the couch again.”

  Karma wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. Gross.”

  “Is he staying for dinner?”

  “Looks like it. He’s helping her cook.”

  I didn’t feel like sitting at a table with them all. On the other hand, Mom probably wouldn’t ask me questions if Scott was there.

  I had to admit one thing: Scott sure could cook. Mom’s repertoire was pretty much limited to pizza, frozen lasagna and mac ’n’ cheese, but Scott was turning out to be Mr. Gourmet. I took a tortilla and began piling it with red peppers, mushrooms, onions, and cheese. Beside me, Karma had stuffed hers with so much steak that she couldn’t get it to close.

  “That’s enough protein to feed a small village for a week,” I told her under my breath.

  She crossed her eyes at me and took a messy bite.

  Mom and Scott weren’t paying attention to either of us. They were knocking back shots of tequila and sneaking kisses when they thought we weren’t watching. I pulled a piece of tortilla off my fajita and chewed it slowly.

  Maybe Karma was right and Scott wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t convinced yet—but even I had to admit Mom seemed a whole lot happier when he was around.

  Sunday was a cold, clear blue-sky day, and Karma and I went for a bike ride together. We cycled up to Thetis Lake and sat at a picnic table, watching half a dozen dogs romping on the beach. My heart was beating hard from the last long hill up to the parking lot, and my face felt frozen.

  Karma pulled off her helmet, put it down on the bench and turned to face me. “So. How come you’re not going to see Casey?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Do you think she’s going to…? You know.”

  “How would I know?”

  Karma bent down and picked up a rock. She rolled it in her hand for a minute and then tossed it toward the water. It fell short and landed on the sand, a good ten feet from the lake’s edge. One of the dogs bounded toward it hopefully.

  “Death is weird,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know.” I stared hard at the lake. “I wish there was an alternative.”

  She gave a short laugh, the kind that means nothing is really funny. “Yeah, it’s called living. Duh.” She jumped off the picnic table, walked toward the lake and started throwing stones, trying to skip them along the water’s surface.

  I waited for a moment, watching her; then I followed her across the beach and stood at her side near the water’s edge. Neither of us spoke for a long minute.

  Karma dug in the sand with the toe of her sneaker. “What do you think happens? You know, after?”

  I didn’t think anything happened, but I wasn’t sure I should say that. For all I knew, Karma thought her mother was watching her from heaven. Or believed that she’d turned into a star or been reincarnated as a fish. We’d never talked about it. “I guess there’s really no way to know,” I said at last.

  “No. But I figure that when you die, everything probably just ends.” She looked at me and wrinkled her nose. “It’s strange. I guess it doesn’t really make any difference what happens next. It wouldn’t really change anything.”

  “Sure it would.” I’d be less afraid, I thought, if I could believe in something.

  “Not really. You’d still just have this one life here. You’d still be leaving everything you know.”

  I looked sideways at her. “So you don’t think your mom is still out there somewhere?”

  “Not really. No.”

  I watched her pick up another stone and a gl
impse of something shiny caught my eye. I picked it up and brushed the sand and dirt from it.

  “What’s that?”

  I held it out to her: a tiny, perfect silver cat.

  “Huh.” She looked at it for a moment and handed it back, losing interest. “Some kid must have dropped it.” She crouched low and hurled her stone toward the water, and it skipped across the surface in a series of random bounces. “Five, six, seven!” She gave a loud whoop. “Yes! Got it! A new personal best, Dylan!”

  I studied the little cat. It was curled up, its tail wrapped around its body. All it needed was a little cushion to lie on and it would be perfect for Casey’s dollhouse.

  That night, I had just gotten into bed when Mom knocked on my door.

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted to talk to you.” She sat down on the edge of my bed and studied my face. “About Casey.”

  “Oh.” I dropped my eyes and wished the reading light on my bedside table wasn’t so bright. There was a long silence. Obviously she was waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. Anyway, she was the one who said she wanted to talk.

  “Obviously we’re all hoping that Casey will be okay. But if she isn’t okay…if this really is a relapse…” Her voice trailed off.

  “You think I should see her, don’t you?”

  Mom didn’t answer right away, and when she did, her voice sounded all thick, like she was swallowing the bigger half of what she wanted to say. “I just don’t want you to have regrets.”

  “Mom?”

  She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were suddenly full of tears.

  “You’re not crying about Casey, are you? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Just some regrets of my own, I guess.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, Pickle. Stuff that happened a long, long time ago.”

  “Like what? What stuff?”

  “I feel like I’ve caused this whole mess. Not telling Mark about you, not telling you more about him.” She shook her head. “No point in dragging up the past.” She wiped her fingertips across her eyes. “Sorry. I meant to talk to you about Casey.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What’s bothering you? That she’s…that you guys are related? Or that she’s sick?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just so weird that we’re all going to die.”

  “ ‘To die would be an awfully big adventure,’ ” she said softly. “You know who said that?”

  “No.”

  “Peter Pan.”

  I laughed; then I sighed. “But I don’t want to die.”

  “No.” She was quiet for a moment. “Hang on a sec, okay? I’ve got something I want to read to you, but I have to find it.”

  “Okay.” I flopped back against my pillow. All of a sudden I felt incredibly tired.

  Mom left and came back a couple of minutes later, holding a card in her hand. “It’s a poem I wanted to read to you. It’s short, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Okay, here goes. It’s part of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Do you know her?”

  “No. Well, the name sounds sort of familiar.”

  She cleared her throat. “I feel kind of silly reading poems out loud.”

  “Just read it.”

  “Okay. Um, here goes. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave / Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; / Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. / I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

  I let the silence sit for a moment. A lump was swelling in my throat and I didn’t trust my voice. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said at last.

  “I think it’s how everyone feels.”

  “Where’s the poem from? I mean, what’s the card?”

  Mom looked at me for a long moment. “It’s from my mother’s funeral. My dad read it. I’ve kept it…it was in a box in my closet.”

  The top two buttons on her white shirt were undone, and her chest was getting all red and blotchy, just like mine does when I get upset. “There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t like to remember,” she said. “When you were little, it just seemed easiest to say that Mark was no one special. He wasn’t going to be in our lives anyway.”

  “But it wasn’t true.”

  “No. It wasn’t. But later, when it started to matter to you, I felt like I was sort of stuck with my story. And the more time that went by, the more impossible it seemed to explain how it really was.”

  My mom had to be the only person in the world who would think that telling your kid she was conceived in a one-night stand was preferable to the truth. “Was he… was he your first boyfriend?” I held my breath, scared that she’d suddenly stop talking, that she’d shut me out like she always had before.

  “My first serious boyfriend, yeah. He was a couple of years older than me, and absolutely gorgeous. Dead sexy. I was crazy in love. I quit school, ran away from home, moved in with him.” She gave a short laugh. “In this big old house in the east end of Hamilton, with all these people who came and went.”

  I studied her face and wondered if I’d know whether she was telling me the truth or not. “You guys lived together? For how long?”

  “A year. A year of doing way too many drugs and generally screwing up my life.”

  “But you were together for a whole year?” I hadn’t made it past the one-week mark with Jax.

  “Yup. It wasn’t a big accomplishment, baby. It was a rotten year. I got a crappy job at a convenience store and Mark did some construction work, but some of the time we could barely afford to eat. My parents were furious. I hardly spoke to them for months.”

  “And then your mom died.” I couldn’t imagine it.

  “Yeah. And Mark broke up with me.” Mom gave a short laugh. “Just a month after Mom’s accident. No real reason. He just said he wanted to move on. He felt like I was holding him back.”

  I started to say something, but she shook her head and held up a hand, palm out, telling me to wait. “No, you know what he said? God, I can’t believe I can still remember this. He said, ‘I can’t be with you and still have room to be who I want to be.’” She snorted. “Isn’t that the most pretentious crap you’ve ever heard?”

  I shrugged noncommittally. It actually kind of made sense to me, though dumping someone right after her mother died was pretty harsh. Still, what was freaking me out was the way Mom sounded like all this had just happened last month, not half a lifetime ago.

  “It was bullshit. Having room to be who he wanted to be really just meant being free to have sex with Lisa Fleeting. Which I’m pretty sure he was already doing anyway. I kind of fell apart over it all. Sheri was living with us—Karma’s mom, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “So we both moved out of the house and rented a room in an old dive of a hotel downtown. Sheri was dealing drugs. Not a good scene.” Her eyes looked foggy and faraway. “We both got into some pretty messed-up stuff.”

  “And so…and then…?” I didn’t know what I was asking. I just didn’t want her to stop telling me the truth.

  She gave a soft laugh. “And then I realized I was pregnant. It made me turn my life around, you know? Get my head straightened out, figure out what really mattered.”

  “Did you tell your dad?”

  “Yeah. He wrote me a check and told me he never wanted to see me again.”

  “That’s so awful.” I couldn’t imagine how someone could do that to his own kid. My mom might freak out if I got pregnant, but once she got over the shock, I knew she’d do whatever she could to help. Toni’s mom would be like that too. Supportive.

  She nodded. “Yeah. Well, he had a lot of problems.”

  “Still…”

  Mom looked at me, her head tilted to one side, her gaze thoughtful. “I know, Pickle. But it’s sort of funny, in a way. He thought my pregnancy was this terrible thing, but really, it probably save
d my life. I quit doing drugs—well, the hard stuff anyway—and hitched a lift out west with some friends. Got an apartment, got a waitressing job, tried to make a life that I could imagine bringing a baby into. Being pregnant was the one good thing that came out of the whole mess. It was the one thing worth holding on to.”

  I could taste salty tears in the back of my throat. I wanted to tell my mom I loved her, but I couldn’t quite say it. “I’ll go and see her,” I heard myself say instead. My voice sounded tinny and strange, and I cleared my throat. “I’ll go and see Casey.”

  Mom called Mark on his cell phone first thing the next morning. Eight o’clock. “How is Casey doing?” I asked when she put the phone down.

  “She’s stopped throwing up and her fever is down. So she’s feeling a lot better, but they won’t know whether she’s relapsing until they repeat the bloodwork. That poor kid must be getting so many needles, I can’t imagine it.”

  “They still don’t know?”

  “I think they’re just waiting to hear back from her last tests. Mark said that if her blood counts are still low by the end of this week, they might do a bone marrow biopsy to find out for sure.”

  I winced and tried to focus on the positive. “She’s feeling better. That’s got to be a good sign, right?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Mom said. “That’s all we can do.”

  “I guess.” Maybe, maybe not. There were three more days until we should hear about my test results. Then maybe I’d be able to do more than just hope.

  “Pickle? Do you want…? I can drive you there after school, but perhaps you should go in on your own.”

  I looked at her. “No, it’s okay. You can come in with me.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to intrude. You’re family. I’m not. And Lisa might prefer it if I wasn’t there, you know.”

  “Not really, no. I don’t think they’d care. I’m sure they’re expecting you to come too.” So weird that Mom would be uncomfortable with Lisa after all this time. I wondered what Lisa had been like when they were all teenagers. She seemed so middle-aged compared to my mother. “Mom?”