“Did you like the music? There’s a song on there I wrote for you.”
“I love it. It’ll be better when you can play it for me yourself.”
“It kills onstage. I can’t wait for you to be there.”
The conversation stops, and he starts gearing up to ask me something hard, so I have to keep talking.
“Are you here alone?” I ask.
“Your parents are down in the cafeteria.”
“But you didn’t bring Lucie?” I kind of hoped we’d have a buffer so he couldn’t ask me anything too crazy.
“Oh…,” he starts, looking a little hurt. “No, I thought it could be just us today. I mean, I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“Okay,” I say. “That’ll be nice.”
“Okay,” he says. We stare at each other for a long time, like we used to at the library when we were just kids. I can tell he wants to ask me about the crash, and I watch as he decides not to.
Instead he leans over and kisses me.
He loves honesty. But he’s figuring out the art of secrets.
Maybe he knew how to live with secrets all along.
All of a sudden I have a strange feeling that I don’t know him at all: that there are whole secret worlds inside him, just like I have a universe inside me. Henry has secrets, I realize.
What if they have to do with me?
* * *
Over lunch, we talk about the people we know and what is going on at home. Henry’s been on the road, and he’s brought me all kinds of little things from across the Midwest to prove that he’s been thinking of me. A tiny stuffed buffalo. One of those weird collectible tiny spoons. Stickers and patches and magnets he saved in a Ziploc bag.
“My mom says next year when we go on tour you should come with us. She said I did nothing but whine about you when I called home. She kept saying, ‘Suck it up, soldier,’ and telling me about all these old battles I don’t care about.”
I smile. “That sounds like your mom.”
“Yeah. She thought your parents would be okay with it next year, and anyway, you’ll be almost in college, and then you could share a room with Lucie and it’d all work out.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Does your mom think there’s something wrong with me? Is that why she’s nice to me? Because she feels bad?”
“No,” Henry says, but his face is all dark the way it gets when he lies. He doesn’t do it often or well, so I remember the look. “No, she doesn’t think anything is wrong with you. But she worries,” he admits after a moment.
“About what?” He doesn’t want to say anything but I wait him out.
“Because you’re so different. You’re special,” he lies. “I mean, she’s a teacher and my mom. So she worries.”
“How am I different?”
“Sadie…”
“No, how?”
He sighs.
“Well, you like to be alone.”
“So?”
He rolls his eyes.
“Fine. You really want to know? We used to see you…like, walking around. We’d see you walking around with an old Walkman and a ratty old briefcase. Or on the swings by yourself. We’d drive by in one direction and we’d come back and you’d still be there. And that was a long time ago, before I really knew you. And my mom would wonder if you were okay. But that’s it. She doesn’t think anything is wrong with you. How would she know, anyway?”
“She wouldn’t,” I say, maybe too sharp.
“Except…”
He pauses. He can’t look at me.
“Except what?”
“Once she called your parents and they talked for a long time,” he admits.
“What?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Are you kidding? That is…” I’m just speechless. A betrayal? Mortifying? I can’t imagine anything worse than my boyfriend’s mom calling my parents to talk about all the things wrong with me. How could anything be worse?
“I don’t know what they said,” Henry says, as though this will comfort me.
“When was this?”
“A few months ago. Right before I left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just…”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that?”
“Because I’m the one who asked her to!” he says. And suddenly the whole thing shifts into focus and I understand and it is so bad I can’t even process it. My whole brain shuts down.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Come on, Sadie. Anyone would worry. You seemed so—”
“No one needs to worry about me,” I say.
He sighs and shrugs: as you wish. He looks just like his mom when he does it.
“Are we okay?” he asks. I can hear that he’s sorry. But I am so angry. You know what he is? Controlling. He always has been. He says he’s worried and he wants to take care of me, but I don’t need him to, and…
And what? Why am I so mad?
I try my best to bury my anger deep, but there’s no room left for it. It is a shallow grave, a pit full of the bones of hurts I’ve suffocated inside myself.
“So what’s the damage on your leg?” he asks, changing the subject.
“Nothing!” I say too quickly, my guard up. He looks perplexed and I realize he’s talking about the obvious damage. Not the cut. Not the future scar, the reminder of Eleanor. “It’s broken. But it’ll be fine. It’s already fine. They’re holding me here for some stupid misunderstanding.”
“I want you to get well,” he says, as though wanting it will do anything.
“I want to go home.”
And I realize how true it is. Then the tears are coming and I can’t stop them.
“Baby—”
“No, I want to get out of here. You don’t get it. This place is awful. They think…”
I cover my mouth to stop the secrets.
“What do they think?”
“Nothing, I just need to go home.”
Henry sighs. He stands up and paces the room, looking out the window, out the door.
“Listen, I know this is hard—”
“No, you don’t know anything! You never do. You think I’m crazy, but they’re holding me hostage and trying to…to change me.”
“Change you?”
“Turn me into a different person. They think something is wrong with me, just like everyone else.”
“Maybe…”
“Maybe what? Maybe they’re right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You thought it. I can see it on your face. God, I just want to go home.”
Henry sighs, gears turning, calculations pending.
“Is that what you want?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Come on,” he says, grabbing my wheelchair. “I can get you in the car if we put down the backseat.”
“What?”
“My mom will kill me. But a real hero will face certain demise for the people he loves. That’s what my dad says. Probably not quite what he meant.”
* * *
Henry pushes my wheelchair out into the hall. The nurses at their desk smile at us as we pass by.
“Here’s the young man who’s been calling you, Sadie,” says the nurse whose name I really should remember. I blush.
“Guilty as charged,” Henry says. “We were just going to step out for a second.”
“Uh, no. Nice try, young man,” says the nurse. “I’m afraid that’s not allowed.”
“Miss…it’s only that we haven’t seen each other for so long, and—”
“Then wheel your adorable selves down to th
e community room and watch TV,” she says. “It’s right down the hall.”
“Absolutely,” Henry says, eyeing the door. “Sounds wonderful.”
Henry pushes the wheelchair back toward my room and sighs. We look back at the door but catch the eye of the nurse.
“Well, that’s a bust,” I say.
“We’ve barely started, sugar. Don’t give up yet,” he says. He sniffs the air.
“What is it?”
“Smoke,” he says with a grin. “You can smell it on their clothes. You know nurses.”
George’s cigarettes smell and taste nothing like real cigarettes, so sometimes I forget that the nasty smell he’s talking about is from smoking. The one time Henry and I tried smoking, I found out the hard way how much it sucks.
But he’s right. Even under that weird antiseptic smell, it’s there. You can never get it off. Double gross.
I say: “You don’t think…”
“Yes, I do. I bet there’s a back door somewhere in here.”
We wheel our way through the common room. There, we navigate a maze of girls I haven’t seen before. I haven’t left my room, so I don’t really know who is here. Some of the girls are young, some are older. Some are in bandages, others are rail-thin, others are staring into space. Some are with their parents. Some are laughing and sitting together like they’re in a cafeteria. I can’t help but notice that Eleanor isn’t among them, and I’m so disappointed.
I raged against group therapy because I wasn’t sick. Now I’m horrified at the idea. Are these my peers?
We look down the halls leading out. A nurse is sitting guard over the room, but she is distracted by someone on the floor crying as though her world were ending. Henry shudders. I can feel him behind me.
“I can’t believe they locked you up in here.”
“Me neither,” I say, staring at a girl my own age making friendship bracelets with some string tied around one of her toes. She is smiling and waves at me. She looks tired but normal. What could be wrong with her, that you can’t even see it?
We escape into the hall while the nurse is distracted.
“There!” Henry points to a door propped open with a coffee can. We rush toward it and, before anyone notices, we are out of the cold light of the building and into the warm sun.
* * *
The air is thick. I forgot that it’s July. Hot weather always makes me confused.
It is a fire escape or something. Five stories up. There is no way I am going to make it down on my own. Henry sighs.
“I feel like you usually have a quote by some dead explorer in these situations,” he says.
“I can’t think of one.”
“Really?”
I search my mind, but nothing seems apt, and I still feel cloudy.
“Maybe this is unprecedented,” I say. “I’ve never been on a fire escape in a wheelchair before.”
“We’re pioneers, then,” he says, leaning way too far over the edge.
“If only these wheels were wings,” I say.
“There you go! Perfect. Now you just have to remember it for your memoirs.” It is kind of perfect, actually, for our dilemma. I feel momentarily clever, and a little brighter.
“You two get back in here this instant!” shouts a nurse behind us.
After a long lecture and some very skilled apologizing on Henry’s part, a very pissed-off nurse escorts us back to my room.
“We’ll find a way,” he says as soon as we are alone.
“Where would we even go?” I ask.
“We could stay at that hotel in the Loop and go catch a movie before the jig is up.”
“Henry, listen, we can’t.”
He stops and that glimmer of frustration crosses his forehead.
“It’ll be okay,” he says. “I promise. I’ll say I made you do it. If you can’t stay, then I want to take you home.”
He kneels in front of the wheelchair, his arms resting on my lap.
“Let me do the thinking for the both of us this time, kid. I will take care of you,” he says. “Always.”
“But that’s the problem. If we do this, it’s forever,” I say.
“No,” he says, laughing. “Though it’s probably the rest of the summer grounded for you and probably no more car for either of us.”
He smiles. I love his smile.
“But, Sadie…I do want forever. I want forever with you.”
I can see the crossroads beneath us, one path leaving with Henry, one path back to the hospital room. But it seems, either way, the destination is the same. Not a crossroads, but a highway with different lanes. There are forks in the road for some people, but for me, it’s always been a highway that doesn’t go anywhere but the horizon, never-ending.
My road always ends with Henry. I can never decide if that’s good or bad.
“Let’s do it right. I’ll stay,” I say. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Relief washes over his face.
“It’s only a few more days,” Henry says as he helps me up into the bed. “And I will come back for every one of them if you want.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You’re not a bother,” he snaps. He pulls away. “Why would I be coming here if you were a bother?”
“You think I’m more special than I am.”
“Darling, don’t talk like that,” Henry says. I hate it when he quotes things at me. He tries too hard. He gets it from movies, and sometimes I can even see the scene he’s imitating in my head because we saw it together. And it seems so wrong when those words come out of his mouth, because he’s not Paul Henreid, he’s Henry, and I want him to be Henry and it’s like he doesn’t know that.
“But you do,” I insist. “I’m dragging you down.”
He grits his teeth.
I see it, like a predator in the bush: his secrets. All the things he wants to say and ask. All the things he holds back. The fight we’ve been waiting to have is lurking behind his lips. I watch him let it loose.
“Well, okay. Maybe I do think you’re special. But you think I’m more special than I am too. You remember me being awesome at guitar this whole time. And like, yeah, I was pretty good…for a ninth grader. You remember me being cool when we met. I’ve never felt cool. Even now, who do you think thinks I’m so ‘cool’? You think you felt like a loser spending your days alone in the summer before we started hanging out. Who was there with you? I was there every day too. Alone. People think I’m a suck-up because my mom is a teacher. That I’m a weirdo who only thinks about guitars. Or people don’t think about me at all.
“You do this to Lucie too. You worship her, put her on a pedestal. But you and Lucie are totally the same: you like the same nerdy stuff, you run together, you hang out at school, laugh at the same stuff…so why do you pretend that you’re her sidekick? You know she thinks she’s your sidekick, right? I don’t understand girls. No one is the sidekick.
“So yeah, I think you’re special, and I think you’re smart. And I wish…you didn’t always have to make that into a challenge. Can’t you just be happy that I like you? And you like me? You don’t always think about other people. Their feelings. You think you do, because you see a lot about people. But sometimes I think it’s all about you.”
“That’s a really jerky thing to say,” I snap.
“Yeah? Well, it’s true. You know…ugh…what is that movie you like? Now, Voyager? With the self-pitying, self-obsessed lady?”
“Yeah?” This is very dangerous territory. Also, one hundred percent not how I would describe that movie.
“I know why you love that movie. It’s because you’re just like her.”
Now, Voyager is my favorite movie of all time. We saw it just before Henry went away. It’s a love story. In the movie, Char
lotte Vale (played by Bette Davis) is an old maid and a crazy person, but she falls in love with a man named Jerry, who is played by the ultracool Paul Henreid, who loves her right back from the moment he sees her for who she really is: someone who feels like she is only pretending to be special. In the movie he does this thing where he lights two cigarettes and gives her one. Paul Henreid couldn’t go anywhere in the world without women asking him to light cigarettes for them, according to Wikipedia.
I love this movie. I love everything about it, but maybe what I love best is the last scene.
Spoiler alert: Charlotte and Jerry don’t end up together. They have to forfeit their love so that they can fulfill their obligations in life. That’s just fate. And so Jerry says, “Shall we just have a cigarette on it?” and he lights two cigarettes, and he gives one to Charlotte. And then right at the end he asks her, “Will you be happy, Charlotte?” And Charlotte says, “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
And then there’s this perfect, poetic closing shot that goes up, up, and shows the night sky with only the stars and it is so beautiful. I love that part. And that’s the end.
“I am not just like her. First of all, she’s an old maid,” I say, but then I can’t come up with a lot of other reasons. So instead I snap: “What’s wrong with her, anyway?”
“She’s a brat!” Henry shouts. He glances at the door. The nurses are going to come in here. We quiet down.
“You don’t understand what it’s like to feel bad about yourself,” I say, trying to stay quiet.
“There you go again.”
“I feel like I’m no one,” I tell him weakly. “But it’s not that simple. I can’t explain it. I feel like…like…”
“Like what? Why can’t you just tell me something real, for once? Something true?”
He sits down in the chair in my room so we are looking eye to eye, but he stands up again quickly. He reaches under the seat and pulls out a red notebook. My heart thumps.
“Is this yours?” he asks.
“No, I think someone left it in here,” I say. I snatch it from him and put it on the nightstand. Eleanor has saved me from myself yet again. How did that get in here? I wonder.
The Museum of Us Page 14
