Or maybe not. Maybe she’s just a type-A bitch. But now that I’ve sketched this picture of her for myself, I’m having trouble seeing past it.
“Howie, any troubling symptoms?” she asks, and he says no.
Poor Parker, I think. No wonder you hate me. You brought Howie here so you could cure him, and instead you’re watching him drift away.
“None here, either,” I say, though she doesn’t ask me. But I see her make the note in her chart: 9:45 MS no change.
Dr. Morse goes off shift at eleven, and the nurses take turns filing in and out, checking our vitals, asking if we need anything. The lights stay on overhead. The hands of the clock press on toward two, three in the morning, and we lean back into our pillows but don’t sleep. I’m grainy with exhaustion, but too charged up to relax. Every time my eyes meet Howie’s, something leaps beneath us, an electric plea: Don’t go yet. He says, “Do you know when I gave up on surgeries?”
I shake my head.
He says, “We were driving home from the pre-op for yet another excision, and I looked at the Lump through my shirt, and I was like, ‘Mom? Can we just not anymore?’ The shirt was bright green . . . the Lump looked like a little tree underneath it, like something growing naturally. I just had this sense that the Lump was here for something. Why else wouldn’t it go away? It must have some reason to be on my body; we just hadn’t figured it out yet.”
“It brought you here,” I say.
He looks at me, a strange expression on his face. “Yeah,” he says. “It did.”
An aide comes in, and we fall quiet. She tries to hide the little smile floating on her lips. The nurses all think we’re a couple. I wonder if Howie knows this.
We don’t say anything for a long time after she goes. The air in the room feels crookedly charged. All of the molecules swirling, confused and hungry.
“So, the Merge,” he says hesitantly.
I stare at my feet, protruding from the thin clinic blanket. “Yes?”
He speaks carefully. “You were kind of freaked out about it. In the beginning.”
I think about Handsome Chad grinning at me in the dark, the tentacles of his fingers writhing in my gut.
“Can we actually not talk about it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.” But he sounds a little—hurt? I can’t tell.
“Sorry,” I say.
“You don’t have to be sorry for not telling me things,” he says.
“It’s not because I don’t trust you,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“No,” I say, feeling everything rise to the surface. “I really—”
“Look, snow,” Howie says.
He points. I turn to the window. The air is filled with white flakes spinning off into the blackness, silent on the other side of the glass.
“It can’t be,” I say. But it is. I climb from bed and stand as close as I can to the window, straining at the wires hooking me to the monitors. From the far bed, I hear Howie rustle to do the same.
The flakes glow like fireflies in the streetlights, speeding down into the dark. I have the fleeting sense that the snow is holding still and the earth is rushing upward.
“Let’s go down there,” Howie says.
I turn to look at him, and he is wearing a mischievous smile that glows like the sun. Despite the IV drips, the beeping, the potential cancers spinning through our veins, I feel suddenly, gloriously warm.
We unplug our monitors from the wall, and then from ourselves, to avoid the shriek of a flatlining alarm. We leave the TV on. There’s a low murmur of voices from the break room down the hall, so we pad in the opposite direction on bare feet, with the solemnity of children. The halls are eerily silent, lit with the humming flat daylight of fluorescent bulbs, and it occurs to me that hospitals never sleep. I wonder how much money is being sucked away, reserving this wing just for us. How many dead dinosaurs burning silently up in the fixtures.
We creep from one external door to the next until we find one that’s unlocked and then, clad only in thin hospital gowns and scrubs, push the door open and let ourselves out into the night.
I gasp at the cold. The sound is immediately swallowed by the silent landscape. There’s a dusting of snow on the sidewalk beneath the overhang as fine and thin as sand. A few feet away, the exposed ground disappears into solid white. The snow glows eerily in the spaces between the streetlights, blanketing the empty parking lot and coating the branches of the distant pines. The trees sheltering the spaces, still in autumn splendor, droop heavily. It is too early for snow. We are so far south. And yet somehow, in these last days of October, winter has found us.
Howie drops his head and curses. I look at him in surprise.
“We were going to go see the Angel tomorrow,” he says. “So much for our Tour de Freaks.”
“It’s not over,” I say. “We’ll go next week.”
He sighs fog.
“Will we, though?” he asks. “With your show coming up?”
“Okay, fine. We’ll go after.”
He turns from me so he’s half in profile. The Lump disappears from my sight, and he looks like any normal boy in a white hospital gown, slump-shouldered against a brick wall in the snow.
“It was crazy, anyway,” he says. “We didn’t think it through at all. Who says she’d even want to talk to us? What if we drove five hours just to find out that she’d moved? Or died?”
I wrap my arms around myself. The cold air sits in the Hole like a heavy block, but I try to smile. “You’re seriously going to give up, just like that? No hope, no crazy Howie philosophy? Every cloud has a silver et cetera, the whole world smiles with you?”
“I know the way the world works,” he explodes. “It’s just like this. All the time. Someone thinks they found a cure for you. But oh wait, there’s no funding, but wait, there might be funding, but wait, they just have to clear the paperwork. Or they got the paperwork, but the patent’s not accepted. Or it’s all fine, but the doctor’s cat died, and so they can’t see you after all.” He violently kicks at the snow. “There’s just always fucking something.”
I want to touch him, but I’m afraid of this anger and where it came from. I don’t want it turning on me. I grip my gown to my sides and wonder what the hell I’m doing here, barefoot in the snow, with this broken and breaking boy.
The snow melts silently in his hair, crystals turning into water. “She’s probably just a washed-up circus performer, anyway,” he says. “A glamour girl with strap-on wings.”
I speak lightly. “It’s not like we thought she was really an angel.”
“I did. When I was a kid, I did. And maybe—I don’t know, maybe it’s for the best we don’t go looking for her. Maybe I’m not ready to stop believing.” He laughs, short and harsh. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s late and I’m tired, and cold, and hungry, and gene therapy is mutating me into a jerk. We should head back in.”
“You’re not a jerk,” I say.
He looks at me beneath his damp flop of hair, plainly unhappy.
“I just thought it’d be different this time,” he says. “With you.”
The words hang between us, heavy.
“I’m just some girl,” I say.
“You’re not,” he says.
“Fine. I’m a broken girl.”
It’s the wrong answer. I can see it as soon as I say it. Howie’s face folds neatly: putting himself away again behind his eyes.
“Howie—”
“Let’s just go inside,” he says.
But I don’t. I look out at the snow-blanketed earth stretching away from us, glowing in the light-polluted night. Like an endless white canvas, waiting for my mark.
“Morgan, come on,” he says.
“You know those collage paintings you saw?” I say instead. “Even though
Mother has completely co-opted the whole show, and I should be so angry about it, I still have them hanging up all over the apartment. I can’t stop looking at them. Do you know why?”
“Can you tell me inside?” he asks.
“Because when I did those drawings, I thought they were done. I thought I knew the story they had to tell.” I dip my bare toe into the snow. It bites at first, and then the cold fades into a burning. An almost warmth. “But then I added color, and the story changed. And changed again.” I look up at him. “I never really got that before. The way you can change what you’ve got instead of starting over. One altered shade can change the mood of a whole piece. A few small lines can shift the axis of the earth.”
“That’s great,” Howie says, exhausted. “Can we talk about art in—”
I step out into the snow. The cold seizes my feet immediately, and the nerves shrill in response: my ankles tightening, muscles clenching. Snowflakes fall on my shoulders and back like icy moths. I step, and step again, on frozen soles. I turn to face Howie and smile.
“Our story needs an angel?” I ask. “Let me make you one.”
I plunge backward into the snow. The thin gown is instantly soaked through, cold shrieking through my skin. I fan my arms and legs. I open my mouth to the sky and let the unseasonal whiteness float down to me and turn to water.
When I can’t bear it anymore, I stumble up to survey my work. At the edge of the great white parking lot, in a sketch of white on white, a cartoon angel takes flight.
Howie laughs, despite himself. It is a sad sound.
“That’s adorable,” he says. “Now let’s—”
But then he is paying attention, because I’ve reached behind my back and tugged free the laces on my top, and let it fall, exposing my body.
I dive again. A pillar of snow shoots straight up through the Hole as I fan my arms and legs. Everything is biting, everything is cold, and at my core a fist of ice shoots straight up to Heaven.
I rise, shivering, and study the new angel. Yes.
An angel-girl just my size stretching out her newfound wings. Piercing her middle is an ice-crusted cone of snow: the surface powder melted by the Hole, already beginning to refreeze.
It is smaller than I thought it would be.
I hear a whoop next to me and look, and there’s Howie, shirtless, facedown in the snow, angeling. I laugh, and flop down again, and again, numbness beginning to blunt my freezing skin. I am cold everywhere but my face, which is warm with life, laughing.
I finally feel young. I finally feel not-thinking, laughing, whooping the way I never could, leaping shirtless through the snow with a stranger. One of two lost children making an army of angels, mapping the strange geometry of ourselves over and over onto the unlikely night.
I stumble to my feet and turn toward Howie as he rises from his last angel, beaming at me. Not only like I can fly. But like I lifted him up and took him with me.
“That was amazing,” he murmurs. “You’re amazing.” And he presses his lips to mine.
There is no hallelujah, no explosions. But there’s a warmth, a steadiness, that lifts me. It’s a kiss that sweeps like a current back into the past, lighting up moments with electric fingertips: that time you thought you’d always be alone, the time you cried, the time you thought you might end it because you didn’t know this could be waiting for you. A kiss that is a quiet promise: I will catch you when you fall.
Our faces part. He holds my eyes with his, our features fogged with breath and shadow. He whispers, “Was that okay?”
I think, My whole body is cold except where you are. And then I say it. “My whole body is cold except where you are.”
He folds me to him, his skin on mine, and it’s impossible to tell where his shivering begins and mine ends.
We run back through the hallways, numb feet slapping the linoleum. There’s no one in sight as we slip back into our room, doubling over in silent hysterics. I race for the closet, pulling out blankets and towels. We rub our reddened skin dry, not looking at each other. Howie flips off the light. Outside, street-lit, the snow still swirls.
“I’m freezing,” I whisper.
“Come here,” he whispers.
“To your bed?”
“I won’t try anything.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I whisper-lie. I climb awkwardly underneath his hospital blanket, and we shift around, the paper-coated bed crackling beneath us, a tangle of elbows and knees in the narrow space. At last we settle into a spooning position. The only alternative, sleeping Merged, feels too raw and exciting to mention. When we’re not facing each other, his Lump pokes into the solid part of my back, so I have to be the big spoon. I tuck an arm beneath my head, wrap the other around his body.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
“Yeah. Are you getting warmer?”
I shiver and cuddle closer. “I think so.”
“Good,” he says. The heat of his back soaks slowly into my chest. Gradually, our shivering subsides. I can still feel his heart pounding in my arm. My hands are curled in careful fists.
“You know,” Howie says. “I’ve never slept with anyone else before. I mean, not—I mean, you know, just sleeping.”
“Really?”
He shrugs, a ripple against my chest. “Have you?”
“Yeah. My mom. Caro when we were little.” The Hole is still freezing, feeling the echo of the snow. I press closer to Howie’s back. “Never a guy.”
He murmurs, “Welcome to your first time.”
I laugh and push him a little. “Shut up.”
“Shh,” he says. “Quiet. You’ll get us in trouble.”
My fingers brush across his stomach experimentally, and I feel, rather than hear, the quick intake of Howie’s breath as I graze the Lump. He reaches up and winds his fingers through mine, guiding my hand away. A warm tingling sifts through my fingertips and thrills up my arm. I want to fight it, but I’m so tired; it’s been a lifetime of hoping and disappointment and heartache, but I’m so tired, I’m so tired. Just for once, I want to fall and not have to pick myself up again.
35
We wake the next morning shirtless and dry-mouthed, blinking into a room of angry doctors. We separate and sit on different beds, sleepwalking through the follow-up tests. Dr. Morse presses unnecessarily hard against my ribs with the calipers. Even Taka looks displeased.
“You need to take this seriously,” he says. “Something could have gone extremely wrong in the night. You could have stopped breathing. We don’t monitor you for our health.”
Dr. Morse says nothing, in a fury over the lost data. Nobody congratulates us on surviving.
Amanda winks as she hands me the bundle of my street clothes. I realize belatedly that she must have been the night nurse on the final shift, letting the two of us sleep in peace. I want to thank her but remember Taka’s face and worry she may lose her job.
Outside, the snow has shifted into a dull gray sleet. In the freshness of daylight, Howie and I keep a respectable distance from each other. It doesn’t seem to be a certain thing, what passed between us last night. But then, alone in the elevator, he kisses me, and I feel light flood every pore in my body.
There are no paparazzi awaiting me when Howie drops me home. They’ve been driven away by the terrible weather and the Southern certainty that an inch of snow on the roads means death. I wave goodbye to Howie and shuffle carefully up the icy steps.
Caro jumps when I open the front door. She’s sitting on the sofa in a nest of crumpled tissues, weeping.
We stare at each other a moment. Then she stands, and I go to her, and she cries into my shoulder. We stand and rock a long time, wordlessly. The warmth of her body is a shock against mine for a second, but only a second. And then it’s Caro, of course, it’s Caro. My best friend since I was a
kid. I stroke her hair, breathing in the familiar smell of her lemon shampoo.
She snuffles and catches her breath, then says, “Todd and I are breaking up?” Her voice breaks on the final word. Like she can’t make it into a statement. “I think?”
“Oh, Caro,” I say. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have enough warmth and comfort in myself to be useful to someone else.
I make popcorn. We sit on the couch. She explains. They spent their anniversary camping on the Eno River. Everything was perfect. Marshmallows and campfires, the season’s last fireflies. He asked her about the future. She told him about college. He was delighted.
She told him about college in another state, and everything went cold.
She said, You know you can trust me.
She said, You know I love you.
She said, Todd, I’m not your mom.
But he packed up and took her home again in silence, where she sat alone in our empty apartment, feeling nothing, then empty, as the snow began to fall.
“He said it was a deal-breaker.” She snuffles wetly. “Now he’ll probably get back with Sheila, and they’ll spend the rest of their lives posting happy couple pictures on Instagram with her stupid shiny pants.”
“Sheila’s terrible,” I say.
“She’s the worst,” she bawls.
“I’m sure he doesn’t want to date Sheila,” I say, and then add, awkwardly, “Hey, Todd loves you.” Once I would have choked on those words—would have welcomed her sadness, told her good riddance, looked forward to a glorious Thelma and Louise life. But now all I can see is my best friend crumpling. She shakes her head.
“You were right,” she says miserably.
“No,” I say.
“You were. It’s not love if the other person can’t trust you to cross state lines.”
“You’ll work it out,” I say. “Come on. It’s you and Todd.”
“What if we don’t?” She sniffles.
Hole in the Middle Page 22
