The Sweet Dead Life

by Joy Preble

  I stared at her.

  She stared back.

  “Did you take your vitamin today?” I asked her.

  I was so tired I couldn’t remember if I’d handed her one this morning, which I usually did. Her old boss, Dr. Stuart Renfroe, had given us a bunch of free sample bottles, for which I was grateful. (Mom used to be a speech therapist at Oak View Convalescent before she became a convalescent herself and stopped leaving the house.) Some days, it was the only sure nutrition that crossed her lips. Usually she was willing to swallow one every day. Unlike when Casey had recently suggested that maybe she should ask her boss for her old job back.

  “Dr. Renfroe cares about you,” Casey had told her. “He’d give you a few hours. I know he would.” But Mom had just gotten teary and stiff-looking.

  “Casey’s gonna bring you something to eat later,” I said, thinking it a better conversation starter than: Hey, I’m puking green now. “Maybe that salad. You know, the one with the chopped meat and eggs and stuff?”

  She nodded. Her eyes looked watery. She had managed the eye shadow but not mascara and her eyelashes looked almost non-existent.

  “I was thirsty,” I added when she didn’t respond. “You want something to drink?” I gestured with my shoulder to the kitchen in case she needed a context clue.

  “I’m fine,” my mother said.

  I rocked on the heels of my Ariats, took a long drink of my remaining juice, and told myself to stay calm. I hate being lied to about as much as I hate being judged by people like Mr. Collins who think they know all there is to know about me because of my brother. (Although Casey had tidied himself up and changed out of his Mountain Dew shirt into his much dressier Chicks Dig Nerds shirt before he left for work.) Note to self: Casey and I need to have a conversation about the very clear—to me—connection between his fashion sense and his lack of female attention.

  My mother was absolutely not fine. The Samuels family was absolutely not fine. “Really, Mom?”

  She was silent. I didn’t want her to be. Then she opened her mouth. “Your father …” she began.

  I blinked at her, hard. “What about him?”

  “I’ve been calling around,” she said. “I’ve been online. Maybe I think I saw something about him there …?”

  I nearly dropped the glass. “Maybe?” What the—Calling around? Online? Was she serious? She hadn’t mentioned Dad in months, and now, all of a sudden she’s searching for him again? “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “Jenna,” Mom said, fingers knotting around the monarch butterfly in the middle of her T-shirt like she was trying to squash it. “There’s stuff you don’t know.”

  “What stuff? Dad stuff? Other stuff?”

  I think she started to answer. Her mouth was moving again and I think she was forming words.

  “Mom,” I said. “Mom.” The glass dropped from my hand, shattering on the hardwood floor. Sticky juice splattered my ankles. I could see but not hear that my mother was screaming. I started to shake. I was so cold. Unbelievably freezing. What the hell was wrong with me?

  “Mommy,” I whispered. My knees buckled. Even my boots weren’t enough to stop it this time. Everything went black.

  The way my brother tells it, he had just served a family-sized platter of peach cobbler with Blue Bell French Vanilla ice cream when Bryce, BJ’s assistant manager, hurried over from the front register.

  In case anyone is interested, Bryce isn’t exactly in the running for World’s Most Desirable Bachelor. He’s about thirty (although it’s hard to tell), maybe 250 pounds (again hard to tell), lives in a doublewide trailer on his parents’ property in the back of Château Hills—a subdivision that absolutely does not contain French mansions—and collects comic books. Bryce is the kind of guy stores like Spencer’s are made for. If you ever walked by Spencer’s at the mall and wondered, hey, who spends eighty bucks on a six-foot beer pong table or twenty bucks on The Fartinator, Bryce is your answer. Well, so is Casey, actually. But that’s not the point here.

  The point is that Bryce skid to a lumbering stop in front of the vat of cobbler, gave it a brief but longing glance, and then told Casey that his mother was on the phone. As Casey tells it, Bryce insisted that Casey leave immediately, and that Bryce would cover for him, but only just this once.

  I guess my having some sort of potentially fatal seizure just as my mother was about to impart the secret of the century (not that Bryce or Casey knew this) was only good enough for a one-night reprieve from BJ’s. Which is handy to know if I make it to sixteen and am in need of part-time employment.

  After that, things got a little crazy. Even for us.

  Normally, I don’t write stuff down that I haven’t seen with my own eyes, but as mine were mostly rolled to the back of my head, I’m going to have to believe Casey’s version of what came next. And as no one would really believe it anyway, it’s the best I can do.

  So. According to Casey, he ran to the Prius and headed home. I was still shaking and seizing. It’s not like I could have told him that Mom had just admitted that maybe she knew where Dad was. Even if I could, it’s not like he would have stopped to listen.

  What he did know was that maybe I hadn’t kept my promise about not dying while he was at work—and that bills or no bills, money or no money, he had to get me to the hospital. My mother had conveniently freaked out again. Very helpful, per usual. She was crying and screaming and rocking back and forth in a way that was not exactly compatible with squeezing into the back of our beat-up but environmentally friendly vehicle. So when we hit the road toward Houston Memorial Hospital Northside, it was just me and my brother and a car that drove like a drunk who couldn’t walk a straight line.

  “Stay with me, Jenna,” Casey said as if quoting dialogue from some sappy Lifetime movie. He reached over and patted me on the shoulder. The Prius angled right, bouncing over those speed bump thingies and onto the shoulder. Casey yanked the wheel. We barreled back into our lane. I had nothing left inside me to puke up, so I dry-heaved a couple of times instead. The lingering aroma of Dave’s tacos wasn’t helping.

  “Not going anywhere,” I croaked. Unless you bash us into the guardrail. Then all bets are off.

  Casey grunted. I checked my seatbelt. The hospital exit was about half a mile away. My vision was going all wonky. Everything was covered in a cloudy haze. I was freezing again—so cold that my teeth started knocking against each other like a bunch of crazed woodpeckers.

  “Casey.” My voice was so tiny I could barely hear myself. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  Through the haze, I looked down at my Ariats. I wondered if maybe I should pipe up and tell him that I wanted to be buried in them. No sense letting Goodwill have my favorite boots. Not that I’m opposed to charitable contributions. But I loved my Ariats. If I was headed to the afterlife, at least I could go in style. I felt certain that Jesus would agree. Especially since he’d made an extra commission from that leather cleaner. I took one last lingering look at my boots and tried not to dry heave again. Then I blacked out.

  Casey says that we made it to our exit. Apparently we were racing along the feeder road to the hospital about a mile down. (Just to paint the full picture: we passed Wood-haven Cemetery, Houston North Rehab, and a strip center that housed a spinal surgery facility with a prosthesis clinic attached, a Vietnamese noodle house, Café Monterrey Mexican restaurant, and Stacy Carrigan Legal. In the Texas suburbs we like to cover all bases. If the ER or the rehab couldn’t fix you, at least they didn’t have to cart you far. After that, your loved ones could get a bite to eat and chat about who they could sue.)

  “We’re almost there,” I heard Casey say as I lurched into consciousness again.

  And then we drifted to the right. I stared out the window in curious detachment as we clipped the side of a Ford F250 Super Cab coming out of the strip center, lifted into the air, and smacked down into the ditch on the side of the road. Then we began to tumble. Priuses are stout little thi
ngs. They do not tumble well.

  “Shit!” my brother yelled. He slammed his arm into my stomach like this might keep me from hitting the windshield. “Jenna!”

  It felt like we flipped for hours. My air bag released. I know this because it smacked me in the chest. Somehow we’d gone airborne again during the tumbling. I was too dizzy to do anything but squeeze my eyes shut. When I opened them, we were right-side-up in the parking lot, Pho Fun Noodles to our right. Everything in my body felt like it had been smashed or set on fire or both. My left eye felt swollen. With enormous effort, I turned my head.

  In the driver’s seat, my brother was very, very still. His Chicks Dig Nerds T-shirt was covered in blood. So was his face, his hair, his neck. A huge dark gash cut down his cheek. More blood.

  My air bag was smashed against me, its plasticky burning smell assaulting my nostrils. Weren’t air bags supposed to deflate once they’d done their job?

  Casey’s air bag had not deployed.

  “Casey!” I screamed, at least in my head. “Casey!”

  Why wasn’t he moving? Why wasn’t he talking? Why hadn’t the damn air bag done what it was supposed to do? Because Dave had screwed up our car, that’s why. Damn Dave and his marijuana habit and his taco obsession and his inability to drive. Except that wasn’t all of it. This was my Mom’s car. If she’d been driving it rather than hiding in the house from something that didn’t even make sense, then maybe none of this would have happened. Normal Mom wouldn’t have let us loan our car to Dave.

  I have never seen a dead person before except on TV. My expectation had been that the first dead person I would actually encounter would be me. Because that was the other reason this had happened. My brother was driving me to the hospital. And now he wasn’t breathing.

  Somewhere in the distance I heard a siren. The air bag was pinning me to my seat and I was still hollering Casey’s name. I was so weak and so tired and I couldn’t even cry.

  “You can’t be dead,” I whispered, my mouth moving against the stinky air bag. “You just can’t be dead. I haven’t even told you what Mom said. And if you’re dead there won’t be anyone to pick me up from after-school detention.”

  Casey didn’t answer.

  The siren wailed louder. Ambulance, I thought.

  My airway was still being cut off by the huge white bag, but I felt a single tear drip from my swollen eye. I was dying of causes unknown, and my brother looked … If I hadn’t passed out again, I probably would have gotten hysterical.

  A bright light roused me. The ambulance was here. Probably a fire truck, too. Somewhere, I heard music. Instrumental, maybe? Mostly drumming. What kind of ER driver cranks the radio? Maybe they’d sent a helicopter. Why were there searchlights? It seemed awfully bright for a searchlight. Had my eyes been hurt in the accident? I had enough wrong with me already.

  I tried to pull my arm from under the air bag, but I couldn’t. Maybe I had dislocated my shoulder. The brightness of the ambulance light kept pressing right through my eyelids.

  “Casey?” I forced my eyes open, squinting in a strange flickering strobe light. It was like last Christmas when our next-door neighbors, the Gilroys, screwed in so many multi-colored bulbs that they blew the power grid to our cul-de-sac. Their gigantic blow-up Santa had deflated and bent over like an arthritic senior citizen. “Casey?” I managed again.

  Blink. I saw Casey, illuminated in the glare. Blink. He still wasn’t moving. Blink. He was still covered in blood. Oh God. Help me. Please. Don’t let Casey be dead. And while you’re at it—if you’re listening—don’t let me die, either. I didn’t want to be the girl who flipped over in a beat-up Prius that stunk of stale cannabis and then died of scabies.

  I knew I didn’t have scabies, by the way. But this was a crisis. I needed to call it something.

  There was a rushing sound and then something flapping. Was the helicopter going to land on the damn car?

  The light strobed some more—so crazily now that it looked like that last blast of fireworks on the Fourth of July, that moment they send up everything they’ve got and the whole sky is filled with popping sounds and sparklers and trails of smoke and you’ve got this smile on your face a mile wide because it’s just that amazing.

  “Jenna.” I thought I heard my brother. “Jenna …”

  The bright light blinked out, and so did I.

  “Jenna!”

  A vaguely familiar man’s voice echoed somewhere near my forehead. The bright light was still there. I could feel it through my eyelids. A whoosh of warm, minty breath rushed up my nostrils. I wiggled my toes. Someone had taken off my boots.

  “Jenna,” the voice said, “I need you to open your eyes.” The mint breath swirled into my nose again. Whoever he was, he had impeccable dental hygiene.

  With effort—they felt sticky and gluey and like they were filled with sand—I pried open my eyes. In the fuzziness, all I could make out was a tuft of curly black chest hair poking out from the V of green scrubs. Oh, and very white teeth.

  “You’re a lucky girl,” he said as I squinted at him. Someone needed to turn down those lights. Was I dead after all? Was he the greeting committee? Did he know that he could wax that chest hair?

  “Lucky?” My voice sounded like a rusty hinge. I wished he’d turn that damn light off. Why was my head so foggy?

  “You’ve been in a car accident, Jenna. Do you remember?”

  Shit. I sat up. Every inch of my body hollered that this was the wrong thing to do. A pinch of pain shot through my hand. I looked down. An IV was pumping something into my veins. A female voice squawked a code number over the PA system. A cart with various instruments and a couple of bloody cloths sat to my right. An ugly striped curtain rippled as someone walked by outside my little cubicle.

  “You’re in the ER, Jenna. At Houston Northside. I’m Dr. Renfroe. Remember?”

  Dr. Renfroe? Mom’s former boss at Oak View Convalescent? Aside from Bryce in a fit of kindness, he was the only one who seemed to give a crap about our family these days. But he didn’t belong here. Maybe I was seeing things. Maybe I had a head injury. And where was …

  “Casey?” I gasped. “Where’s Casey?”

  I looked around wildly. Where the hell was my brother? What had happened back there in the car? All that flipping. Casey, lying so still. All that blood. And light. There’d been an eyeball-searing strobe. And the air bag that hadn’t—

  “He’s right outside, Jenna.” Doctor Chest Hair smiled. “Now that you’re awake, I’m sure he’s dying to see you.”

  Dying to see me? So I wasn’t hallucinating. Only Dr. Stuart Renfroe made jokes like that. (“Jenna,” he’d said the first time I met him, “When’s a door not a door? When it’s ajar.”) The chest hair had thrown me, that’s all. Until this moment I’d always seen him in a suit and tie. Just like Dr. Renfroe to say “dying to see” while I was sprawled in an ER cubicle possibly still expiring from not-scabies and hollering for my brother. My brain flashed to Casey’s face again, to that huge gash on his cheek.

  Another wave of panic washed over me. What was Dr. Renfroe doing in the ER anyway, in scrubs? Maybe he was lying to me about Casey. Maybe they’d called him in to tell me the bad news. I wanted Casey to be okay, but how could Casey be okay?

  “Are you,” I began. “Why are you—”

  “I work here a couple evenings a week,” Dr. Renfroe said. “My little gift to the community.”

  Whatever. “Casey!”

  The curtain swiped open. My brother walked in.

  Okay. Pause here. Deep breaths. It’s hard to describe how wonderful he looked. Seriously, the cliché is true. Words can’t do this particular image justice.

  Sure, there were some stray flecks of dried blood on his cheeks, but compared to how he’d looked in the car—his face smeared—he was pretty cleaned up. Also, his eyes looked better: no purple sacks underneath, none of the usual redness. They were bone white and sort of sparkly. Even in my weakened condition, I knew this was weird.
Not only had we been in a car wreck, but let’s face it: My brother smoked a lot of weed. His eyes hadn’t been clear in months. Plus there was his posture. As he loped toward me, he looked somehow taller. Or at least not so slouchy. Maybe you stand up a little when you know you haven’t bitten the dust on your sister’s behalf.

  “I could hear you all the way out in the waiting room,” he said. He leaned over and gave me a gentle hug.

  “You’re not dead,” I choked out. I didn’t want to blubber in front of him, but I was close.

  I had no idea how this was possible. But hell, I was all for it. I was alive. Casey was alive. Doctor Chest Hair Renfroe was alive. It was all good things here in the ER. I knew I probably still had not-Ebola. And even that wasn’t acting up right now.

  “Nope, I’m fine,” Casey said. “Doc Renfroe made me wait until you were awake.”

  He stopped hugging me and straightened. There was an odd look on his face, something beyond: Hey I’m really sorry I almost killed you because I forgot to adjust for stoner-induced Prius drift. Had I only imagined that deep cut on his cheek? I must have hit my head during the accident.

  “What happened?” I managed in a rasp. “How come you smell so nice?” My brother smelled of something I couldn’t quite place: something way better than his usual combo of cheap cologne from CVS Pharmacy, barbeque sauce, stale egg rolls and pot.

  “I do?” Casey’s brows shot up.

  “Yeah. And why—”

  “I called a taxi cab for Mom,” he interrupted. “She’s on her way.”

  I tried to give him the stink eye for changing the subject, but my face hurt too much to scrunch it up like that. “Since when do you know how to call a cab?” (Let me note for the record that taxis are rare in the Houston suburbs: like finding endangered whooping cranes or something. Maggie called one about a year ago when we wanted to go shopping at the Galleria and her mom refused to take us. The guy showed up in a raggedy SUV with peeling paint and told us it would be fifty bucks each way. His name was Wayne and he had an artificial right leg. We decided to shop local.)