We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “She’s up!” the nurse says as she walks briskly by.

  “She sure is!” my mother says. “Isn’t she doing great?”

  I roll my eyes, but I don’t mean it. Because it is true! I’m up. I can both see and feel my knuckles go white as I lift the other hand to wave to Connor. I instantly regret this—how embarrassing can I be?

  Connor and Verlaine are moving toward me, and I can hear my mother smiling—you can do that, by the way, hear my mother smiling—and then, quick as a mugging, I’m down. Down down. Like on the floor, pain chomping a chunk from my side. I know it’s no good in there. All I can wish for is that I will lose consciousness, but I don’t and so I can tell that, as the nurse runs toward me and as Connor lets go of Verlaine’s leash and comes flying to help me up, I’m crying. It’s like a movie how much I’m crying, and my mom is crouching down on my other side, and she and Connor carefully pick me up. They handle me like I’m glass and bring me back to my bed, where I dry-heave into my little lima-bean, sad-smile metal bowl, only now I turn it around to make it frown.

  Connor bows his head like he’s the one who is ashamed.

  “Thank you, Connor,” my mother says grimly.

  He nods. He isn’t smiling. I can see the lines of his mouth, turned down.

  At first I think, thank God he’s leaving, so I can experience the pain and humiliation of this moment alone with a roommate and her entire immediate family and a mother and a bunch of nurses and techs and students and doctors wandering in and out of here. As in: privately. As private as it gets here.

  A nurse hooks me back up to my tubes that lead into my heart, and she clicks open her pen and says, “It’s okay, honey, we’ll try again tomorrow!”

  “I’ll be here,” Connor says, turning to go. He raises his free hand in a way that seems to shield his face.

  I look at my mother when he goes, but she won’t catch my eye.

  Then she turns toward me. “I’ll give you a minute, honey,” she says, and I watch her follow Connor out the door.

  I lie back. It’s not relaxing in any way, but it’s the most relaxed I’ve been. And for just this one moment, everyone leaves me alone.

  Day 7 Still

  But the moment of being left alone ends pretty quickly. I’m not sure about it, but I think I hear just the faintest knock. I don’t say anything.

  Then there is that sliver of light. The sound of outside. And Connor’s sweet face.

  “Hey,” he says.

  I clear my throat.

  “Hi. Can I come in? Just for a second?”

  I’m silent, which I suppose in this place means yes.

  “I wanted to check and make sure you’re okay,” Connor says.

  I look down at Verlaine, and his head is cocked to the side and he seems to be asking the same question.

  I just cross my arms. I can’t look either of them in the eye.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re all right. But I also just wanted you to know it’s okay.”

  “What’s okay? This?” I hold out my hand to the wide expanse of my luxurious room. I shake my head. “It’s just not.”

  “No, I get that. I do. But please don’t feel strange about it. About the fall.”

  “Thanks,” I tell him, even though I feel 100 percent the opposite of okay about keeling over in front of Connor.

  “You comfortable with dogs?” He comes to the side of my bed. Briefly I forget how ashamed I am and I feel this: crazy lucky. How lucky am I, I think, that this guy works here, now? The crazy unlucky part comes back quickly, though, because here he is standing up and I am lying here, a mess, a mess who fell on her face in front of him.

  Who is Connor? He is incredibly cute, but I can see he also bites his nails really, really short. Like he hardly has any nails. That is never a good quality in a boy, I think, as if a girl who just fell on her face is in any place to judge. A girl with a rat’s nest for hair and a gray face that, due to the steroids, is as round as a moon. Make the actual moon full and I might just turn into a werewolf.

  I nod. “I have a dog,” I say, managing to do so without crying. “Mabel. A springer.”

  I love animals. I love all animals so much, even birds, even fish. That’s why I want to be a vet, though I gather there is a good deal of math involved in becoming one. I have no idea why this could be, but it could be problematic for me.

  “Can Verlaine hop on your bed? He’s super careful.”

  I close my eyes for a second. I am not the kind of person who closes her eyes while she’s talking. I can’t stand that. In fact, it repulses me, but again, it’s not like I’m exactly in a position to be repelled. This time it’s more like a way to keep everything down. So I do it; I close my eyes and nod.

  And then Verlaine is sitting next to me, so careful not to hit my body, his paw up as if in greeting. How on earth did Connor train this dog to be so perfect? I imagine Verlaine at the circus, walking the tightrope with Connor. I picture Mabel, who just jumps up on everyone and tries to steal food and licks faces without asking. It makes me smile. And Verlaine’s smiling too. That dog is a serious smiler. I take his paw. The soft scratchy bottom, I feel it. Feel his nestells. When we were little, that’s what Zoe and I started calling those pads on the bottom of dog paws, cat paws too, for that matter, but we are dog people. I feel the smooth nails.

  “Hi, Verlaine,” I say. I want to hug him and hug him and never let him go.

  I look over at Connor. “I love him,” I say.

  Connor crosses his arms. He cocks his head. He smiles.

  He’s so perfect I almost forget how embarrassed I am. His perfectness takes over. But I feel absolutely terrible.

  Both Connor and Verlaine seem to know this at the exact same time.

  “I just wanted to come back in and make sure you were okay,” Connor says as Verlaine hops down from my bed. “And to say I’ll see you again soon. We will.”

  I nod.

  “So see you soon!” he says brightly.

  “See you,” I say. “Bye, Verlaine!” I say with much more enthusiasm, because it is so easy to love on an animal. There is no shame in it.

  Bye, you two, I think, as I watch them move out of my room and into the busy hallway.

  Day 8: Well, Now We Know

  Who knows what time it is when an X-ray tech guy comes into my room with a portable machine, covering my chest with something that resembles a bulletproof vest—if I close my eyes, I can imagine I’m a cop, with a gun I’m not afraid to use, bang, bang! Maybe, I think as he takes a picture—poof!—from outside of the room, I have some special baffling disease that no one has ever seen before? This pleases me, like maybe they’ll write up my case in a special journal. They could name the disease after the doctor who has cured me.

  I’m listening to Velvet Underground when my parents walk in with their looks, and then the surgeon too, and I take the buds out of my ears before I turn the music off. I can hear Nico singing, all throaty and drugged: I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don’t know . . . while I wait for them to tell me about my incurable disease.

  Here it is: it is not cholera or consumption or any of those unnameable illnesses in old novels, those diseases that can, like, take you. I have: ulcerative colitis.

  Bleh.

  They’re talking, but I’m not listening. Okay, so I won’t be possessed or consumed, though my colon, which they are saying is one of the few vital organs a person can live without, might be taken. I might have to have surgery to get it out of there. Out of me.

  “The colon is getting bigger and bigger,” Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, says, moving his hands farther and farther apart. His hands are pudgy, and I think of them dissecting me, pulling back my skin to expose muscle and fat. “If it grows too large, it could explode. Do you know what happens when a colon explodes inside a little girl?”

  Am I the little girl in this scenario? What happens to her? I would lie if I said I’m not totally alarmed.

  My parents nod.
<
br />   “It’s very dangerous,” the surgeon says.

  “We need to save the colon,” my father says. He says it to the surgeon; he says it to my mother; he says it to the nurse, who smiles away from him. He says it to me now as he sits on the very, very end of my bed. “Surgery!” he says, head in his hands. “Whatever we have to do,” he says to my mother when the surgeon leaves. And then to me. “Lizzie,” he says. “My Lizzie, my poor Lizzie,” he says.

  And then he has to turn away.

  After my parents leave, I call Zoe. From the landline. The novelty has worn off; I’m getting sick of this no-cell-phone policy. I know that phones can interfere with pacemakers and that, a nurse told me, it can short-circuit a ventilator (what the hell? I don’t even know what people are saying in here anymore), and while I have not seen a cell phone in use, it’s true, I’m not exactly trolling the communal bathrooms and lounges for people using them in secret. Besides, I feel like my mother has just taken mine and made up all these rules. I feel like she has done this so I will not have access to the web, so I will not be able to understand what’s really happening to me. Surprisingly, I feel a little relieved. I don’t want to go into the dark tunnel of the internet, where I can find all these stories about people with this disease. It is a dark, lonely hole in there, I know that it is.

  It’s a dark hole outside too. I am missing everything. I am missing the beginning. Junior year. I am missing discovering all the newness. I don’t want to know who else is starting during preseason. I don’t want to know who’s Frenchie. I already know Dee-Dee got the part of Rizzo. I am a horrible person, but I cannot stand everyone’s good news.

  So instead I just call Zoe to tell me the truth and deliver me more crappy news.

  “Okay!” she says when I tell her the name of this thing I now have, and I can tell she’s psyched to just have a task, like a concrete thing she can do to help. “It’s diseased. The colon,” she says. And then, like it’s friggin’ show-and-tell, she recites, “‘The colon is a six-foot-long vital organ where all the water is taken out of the food you digest before it leaves the body. It connects to the small intestine, which sucks out the nutrients before the digested food hits the colon, where it sits and waits to be eliminated.’”

  Vital. That word again.

  There is a pause, and then I hear the rapid-fire sound of my sister typing. “Okay, this site is more clinical,” she says. “‘Ulcerative colitis is the result of an abnormal response by your body’s immune system,’” she reads. Blah, blah, blah, is what I hear; just squawking. My ears hurt from the sounds.

  Then more artillery fire at the keyboard. “So you’ve just had a super-serious flare-up. You can be throwing up, and obviously there can be blood in the stools.” Now she giggles. Giggles!

  “Really?” I say. But it comes out teeny.

  “Sorry,” Zoe tells me. “So it says that some people have this for a long time and go in and out of remission and flare-ups. I think your colon is just giving out,” she says. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie.”

  Fantastic. Why, then, does everyone want to save it?

  “Do you want to know the rest?” Zoe asks. “I mean, what happens if they have to remove it?”

  “Is it bad?” I ask her. Zoe. For some reason I remember the two of us flying a rainbow kite on the longest string. I know my father is behind us, steering, but I don’t see him.

  Zoe clears her throat. “Yes,” she says.

  I’m silent. I listen and I don’t listen. I still can’t make myself think about it. Apparently you can’t just get your colon taken out and walk back into your old beautiful life. I can’t let myself think about it. I see the blue of the sky, the soft white clouds; I see the rainbow kite soaring. And then I see him: there’s my father letting go.

  Day 9: Life Time

  Now the new thing is not what is wrong with me but the thing is to: Save the colon! So how will we know when we’ve saved it? Is a bill passed? Does a school stay open? Does an innocent man walk free?

  There are, apparently, a million and one ways. Several types of new medications in many kinds of combinations. Massage. Herbs.

  “What about a fecal transplant?” I hear my mother say to a doctor or a resident outside. Did I hear her correctly?

  Save the Colon. It’s like a cheer at a football game, which, for the record, I’m also about to miss. I can picture the bleachers filled up with everyone, the weather turning. I can hear that stupid marching band. I used to feel bad for the kids in marching band, their tall hats always off-kilter, their heavy tubas and trombones marked with greasy fingerprints. But then, when I thought more about it, I was in awe of them. Can you imagine? Making that kind of music while walking? Marching? Well.

  I wonder now if I’ll be out by homecoming, but part of me knows that even if I am, I won’t be there. At the game. I can’t imagine caring. I never cared, for the record, about football, though sitting on the bleachers up from the field, hanging out with my friends, that was something that was once fun. But king and queen? It was not even a concern. Other things I’m about to miss: all the parties the seniors weren’t going to let me and my friends into anyway. Preseason. Sitting at a desk with Wuthering Heights, raising my hand. The future. It’s happening without me.

  I’m having these lovely thoughts when my mother comes in with her coffee.

  “Okay, lover,” she says. “Up, up, up.”

  I have secretly always loved it when my mother called me that. “But don’t you think it’s best for me to save my strength?” I try. Honestly, though. Shouldn’t my colon be resting too?

  She sips her coffee. “When,” she asks, her mouth around the lip of the paper cup, “is best for your schedule?”

  My mother. And her coffee. I don’t drink it, but still it taunts me.

  “Later,” I say. “God, Mom, later.”

  She sips.

  My food goes in through an IV from the bag of TPN, a kind of milky, liquid food that’s supposed to provide nutrients. Even though I know I’m losing weight, I’m convinced it’s going to make me gain thirty pounds. If I get out of here, I won’t even get to leave skinny.

  I take a breath, but it’s like I can’t catch it. I am so weak. I am so small. I am just about to give in to trying to get up when there’s another knock at the door, and I see the little snout again.

  “Verlaine!” my mother says. “Come on in, you guys! You’re here early, Connor.”

  I feel my face get hot with embarrassment, and I tilt my head and look at my mother with the biggest eyes I can muster, which she also chooses to ignore.

  “Thanks!” Connor says.

  I mean, the wrinkled oxford shirt, the perfect-fitting jeans. And the long, light eyelashes? The gray-blue eyes? Come on.

  Verlaine’s dog mouth is smiling, and his big tail is wagging. It would be nice to pet him again, it’s true, but now I’ve got this whole, like, layer cake made of shame—the diagnosis layer and then the falling-on-my-face layer and then the layer that is me lying here practically naked—and I can’t deal at all. “We’re talking.” I nod to my mother, who I hope will have my back.

  “Oh, sorry,” Connor says, pulling back on the red leash. I swear Verlaine stops smiling. “I’m just doing a quick hello before school. I like to check in and see who is up for a real visit later. But usually everyone’s around in the morning for checking in.”

  You got that right, I think. That’s for sure. We’re all around.

  “Also just checking in. After our talk and all.”

  “Talk?” says my mother, and I feel my face get even hotter, and so I know it’s even more red.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m totally fine. Thank you.”

  Why isn’t this boy out playing lacrosse or sailing, knee bent on the bow of a boat on the Chesapeake? That is where he belongs, not here in the land of darkness and doom. If he were in here, though, as a patient, I bet his mother would just sit by his bed, quietly holding his hand. There would always be fresh flowers on the si
de table and cold filtered water on the swingy table.

  “Come on in!” my mother says. “Hi, sweetie,” she says to the dog, who wags his way over to her. “I was just going to get some coffee,” she says, and then she, like, hides her coffee! Mortifying. I touch my head, feel the dreadlocks forming on my scalp. No, dreads would be more fashion-forward, though totally wrong for me, deeply wrong. Wrong on so many levels. But I haven’t washed my hair since camp! I am a monster. Revision: I am a monster who has not bathed.

  My mother is out the door before I can convince her not to go, using my extreme illness, my new superpower, for good.

  Connor scrapes what I have come to think of as my mother’s chair over to the side of my bed.

  Verlaine sits next to him.

  Thelma stirs.

  “Perhaps I should properly introduce myself,” he says.

  I blush. Again. Can he see it on my sick, gray face? “Yes?” I say.

  “I’m Connor.” He holds out his hand. “Connor Bryant.”

  His hair sort of swishes to the side, as if it’s forever being blown in the wind. His lips are the slightest bit chapped.

  “Lizzie Stoller,” I say, sort of sticking my hand out and letting him shake it.

  “So,” says Connor. “Tell me everything.”

  Maybe it’s because my mother isn’t here to watch me. Maybe it’s that I can’t eat this cake of shame anyway. Or that I’ve really got nothing left to lose here. Whatever the reason, I consider the question.

  “Okay,” I say slowly. But what have I got to tell him?

  “It doesn’t have to be a thing. It can be a feeling.”

  I look at him, and I know my face says what the hell. “A feeling?”

  “Yes.” He reaches down and pets Verlaine.

  Who is this person? What is he doing in here, precisely? I wonder. But I don’t ask him. Who cares really? I am in a jar. I’m like a firefly in here, bumping up against the glass, frantic, the holes my father has punched into the metal cap the only way air gets in. My blinking light just might go out in here.