The Ocean Inside

by Janna McMahan

  “I want Miss Vivian!” Ainslie cried and jerked her hand away.

  “Vivian?” the nurse said, a look of relief washing her face. “She comes on right about now. I’ll go get her.”

  Her vein stick had been red and burning for hours. Her mother had insisted that a new location for the IV be found, but Ainslie was so thin her veins were rolling. Nurses had tried to flush Ainslie’s chest port numerous times and finally concluded that it needed to be replaced. The nurse had stuck her three times before Ainslie finally lost her patience and cried for Miss Vivian.

  “What are you doing back here?” Vivian said from the doorway. “I’m off for a couple of days and I come back to find my favorite girl’s come to see me.”

  Ainslie was pressed into the pillow, her head swathed in gauze. She touched her bandaged head and tried to smile.

  “That is not a good look for you,” Vivian said. “Oh hey, I got me some new Crocs.” She walked beside Ainslie’s bed, kicked off a shoe, and held up her psychedelic Mary Janes.

  “Cool,” Ainslie whispered.

  “Yeah, so why are you back here?” She raised an eyebrow to Ainslie’s mother.

  “You want the long version or the short version?” her mother said in an odd tone that implied no answer would be a good answer.

  “How about the happy version?” Vivian said.

  “You sound funny,” Ainslie whispered.

  Vivian smiled wide and her mouth flashed silver.

  “I got braces!”

  “Do they hurt?”

  “Nah, nothing I can’t handle. We’re tough girls, right? Give me your arm, I want to find a good vein.” She walked cautious fingers over on Ainslie’s hand and inside her elbows searching for a place not bruised. “You’re too skinny. You need to eat something. After I get this thing in you, how about an ice cream sandwich?”

  “Okay.”

  Vivian wrapped the rubber tourniquet around Ainslie’s arm and handed her a red stress ball.

  “You know the routine,” she said.

  Ainslie squeezed and Vivian slid the needle in with the softest touch.

  They both sighed relief.

  “I’m on tonight.” Vivian moved smoothly, hooking up a new bag, adjusting the flow. “You need to rest, so I’ll try to make sure you get some sleep, okay? I’ll try not to wake you up any more than I have to.”

  It was nearly impossible to sleep in the hospital. Nurses woke her up all night long to check her temperature and take her blood pressure and give her meds. Most of them were quiet and efficient, not fun like Vivian. Sometimes, Ainslie would pretend to be asleep, hoping the parade of white lab coats would just leave her alone. She slept with the covers over her head so nurses would leave instead of getting her vital signs. But Vivian protected her, and she slept better those nights Vivian was on. She was the only one who always pulled the drape around her bed before she gave an injection, just in case people were passing in the halls. She seemed to know what Ainslie needed before she did.

  Vivian’s husband was in the National Guard and she talked about the Iraq War. How her husband was over there building bridges and just as soon as they built one it would get blown up. Ainslie started thinking about Vivian’s husband as the cartoon character who was blasting away cancer cells, a little guy in camo with a big gun mowing down unwanted cells.

  Days in the hospital dragged by. After the shunt surgery, there had been more tests and then, when she was strong enough, they had operated on her to remove the spinal tumor that had been making her legs tingle. She’d come out of that surgery with more scars and a new port in her chest so they could draw blood and give fluids without having to stick her every time.

  Ainslie had declined to talk with the hospital chaplain or therapist, but she had found a good use for the journal the counselor left her. She’d had Vivian roll her wheelchair down to the lobby where they catalogued all the tropical fish in the lobby tanks. A book from the hospital library helped them identify every fish and crustacean in the colorful underwater world.

  “That one’s a trigger fish.” Ainslie pointed to fish the color of one of her sister’s graphite sticks. The dark gray fish looked as if he had been spray-painted with thin strips of blue, yellow, and black. He slowly opened and closed pursed lips. “He eats other fish, so they have to be careful what fish they put into the tank with him.”

  Vivian leaned down on the back of Ainslie’s wheelchair to take a closer look.

  “But he’s so pretty. How could he be so mean?”

  “That’s just nature. He’s a hunter. He can’t help it. It’s just natural.”

  “He sure is a good-looking son-of-a-gun.”

  Ainslie sighed and pressed her finger to the glass. Fish darted away from her, except for the trigger fish, which stood his ground.

  “I didn’t tell Mommy my butt hurt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before I had to go to the emergency room. Before they flew me here in the helicopter. My butt hurt really bad.”

  “And you didn’t tell anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t want to come back here.”

  “I understand.”

  “I just want it all to be over.”

  “I guess you know now it’s not a good idea to keep secrets like that, right?”

  Ainslie shrugged.

  “When do I get to go home?”

  “Soon.”

  Vivian wheeled Ainslie back to her room and eased her into bed.

  “Can I have a blanket?” Ainslie asked.

  “Sure. I’ll get you a warm one.”

  Since the last surgery, Ainslie couldn’t stay warm. Her body weight had dropped so low she was getting supplements, but she still shivered most of the time. Vivian came back with a heated blanket and tucked it all around her until Ainslie was snug.

  “There, like a butterfly in a cocoon.”

  “Moth.”

  “What?”

  “Butterflies have a chrysalis. Moths have cocoons.”

  “Aren’t you just the smartest girl I’ve ever met? Do you want some TV?”

  “No. I want to sleep.”

  “Okay, hon.”

  Vivian put on an ocean wave sound machine Sloan had brought and Ainslie closed her eyes and tried to relax. But her mind kept wandering back to what Vivian said about not keeping secrets. Ainslie hadn’t told about the shooting pain in her tailbone because every time she mentioned anything new, her mother rushed her off to the doctor again. So she thought, just maybe, if she didn’t say anything the pain would stop on its own.

  And her headaches. She’d had those since the first time she did chemo, so she hadn’t thought it was anything new to mention. She had wanted it all to be over, but everything had just gotten worse.

  Ainslie touched the bulging place on her skull where the shunt was inserted and traced its path that snaked down the back of her neck. It was still sensitive, but at least now her headaches were gone.

  She rolled onto her side and touched the incision on her back where they had taken her kidney out in her first surgery. It was healing over, a scar with ruffled edges and a smooth center right above her left hip. She had thought it would make a huge scar, but it was only about four inches long, not nearly as scary as she had thought it would be.

  She reached closer to her spine and felt the pads where the surgery incision lived. She’d have to wait and see how bad that scar would be. She knew it had been much larger than the first incision. It really hurt. She wished it was like a jellyfish sting where her mother could rub meat tenderizer on it and make it go away. No, this was a throbbing that made her eyes water, but some days she’d rather have the pain than be drunk on meds. At least the ache let her know she was alive.

  Tomorrow would be painful. She hated physical therapy and they would be taking her to physical therapy instead of the therapist coming to her room. So far he’d massaged her arms and legs and had her squeeze a ball,
but tomorrow she would probably have to lift some weights or walk for a while. Ainslie’s right hand didn’t want to cooperate with her. Her doctor said some kids had to learn how to write with their left hands, but he thought she would recover if she tried. She was supposed to write in her journal, but her hand was so weak that Vivian had to help her catalog the fish. They would probably make her write in therapy the next day. Their theory was the more you used it, the faster it would come back. They said it was probably only a matter of time. When you’re sick, everything is always a matter of time.

  There was a plain round clock on her bedside table and she watched the hands move, ticking off the seconds and minutes in her head. Telling time wasn’t so hard after all. She played games with herself to see how long she could hold her breath, if she could guess when a nurse would walk in. She always let her visitors know when they were a few minutes late.

  Sloan seemed to always be late. She was supposed to come today but called to say she couldn’t make it. She’d gone to Charleston to see her boyfriend. She said he wasn’t her boyfriend, but that was just because he’d never asked. Sloan liked him so much it was scary. Ainslie wanted to be with Sloan every day, since she was leaving for college in August. But with Cal around, that wasn’t going to happen. As soon as school was out they would be together all the time. Sloan would be driving to Charleston if he stayed down there.

  Cal was always nice to her, but still Ainslie wanted to poke him in the eye. He came to see her in the hospital and brought her a manicure kit. A weird reaction to the chemo caused Ainslie’s fingernails to grow incredibly strong. Sloan had shaped and polished them for her, alternating pink and blue. Ainslie had to admit the manicure kit was an awesome gift, but that didn’t make her like Cal any better.

  Ainslie lay back and gazed past the window clings of cartoon characters at the black night sky. The best part about mornings was that the sky was such a pretty blue. It made you feel good to look at it. She reached for the bed controls, lowered herself flat, and closed her eyes. She needed to sleep while she could. They always came to get you early in the morning for tests, and she was not a morning person.

  Ainslie turned onto her side and shoved a pillow under her chin. Her eyes immediately fell on her bedside table and her sea monkey habitat. Luckily, since they were in a contained environment, the doctor had let her have them. Ainslie watched the scrawny little brine shrimp jerking aimlessly through the clear, plastic tank. They were a simple, dumb animal, but she thought that just somehow, in their tiny little brains, that they knew she was there.

  “Somebody named you wrong,” she said. “You don’t look like monkeys to me.”

  One bounced against the side of the tank again and again. Ainslie sighed as she watched him.

  “You poor thing,” she whispered. “I know just how you feel.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Wings

  “Hey, Mom,” Sloan said as she walked past her mother into the kitchen to get a glass of tea.

  Her mother raised red-rimmed eyes and gave her a weak smile. She had the phone pressed to her ear. She seemed to be on hold. She was constantly on the phone. Sloan couldn’t imagine all the people she must be talking to, reeling off long names of medicines and procedures. She had her notebook beside her, her security blanket where she scribbled every minor medical thing ever uttered about Ainslie. Sloan worried that her mother had been on overdrive for so long that she might have a mental breakdown. If that happened, what would they do? Who would hold them all together?

  Apparently their father had been worried about the same thing because he arranged for them to go to a counselor, something so unlike him. He always balked at the idea that any of them needed emotional help. He cracked jokes about therapists and counselors, but he must have felt they were at the breaking point because yesterday her parents had solemnly left the house and come home two hours later in one of their most agitated states yet. They continued their heated therapy session and for once they didn’t hide behind bedroom doors or walk to the end of their dock out of earshot.

  Sloan had been instructed to “Go upstairs!” but their parents’ argument traveled up the staircase. Sloan had tried to distract her sister with video games, but Ainslie refused to play and finally muted the sound, and they had lain in bed listening to the argument raging below.

  “What if I make a mistake?” their mother had hissed. “I need more participation from you.”

  “I try to participate, but no matter what I think, you tell me I’m wrong and you ultimately make the decision. What’s the point?”

  “See, we didn’t get anywhere. I don’t want to go back to counseling anymore. All we do is dredge up more things that distract from what’s most important, taking care of Ainslie.”

  “Fine. I didn’t want to go in the first place. But we can’t go on like this. You’re agitated all the time. Is there no happiness in you at all anymore?”

  “Happiness? How am I supposed to be happy when everything is falling down around us? You want me to take care of everything, and, by God, be happy while I’m doing it so you don’t have to be inconvenienced by my emotions.”

  “You’re unreasonable.”

  “Why is it always about me? It’s not my attitude that’s the problem here. Let’s talk about you, you’re distracted and disconnected from everything going on here.”

  “I am not! I’m working as hard as I can to resolve this. You have no faith in me at all. I’m just your whipping boy now. Oh, let’s blame Emmett for everything!”

  “This whole fiasco isn’t my fault!”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Well, that’s not good enough.”

  “That’s the real issue. I’ve never been good enough for you, have I? You’ve always thought we should have a different life. Drive nicer cars. Belong to the country club.”

  “I don’t want to belong to the fucking country club! Now you’re projecting your own feelings of inadequacy onto me. Deal with your own problems.”

  There was a lull in the argument, an impasse. Then a door slammed and there was silence.

  “Mom said the F-word,” Ainslie whispered slowly.

  Sloan said, “They’re just scared.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re all scared.”

  “Don’t they love each other anymore?”

  Sloan sighed. “I read somewhere that we’re the most cruel to people we love, people we know love us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because other people, like friends, can go away.”

  “I know about that.”

  “Right. But family, we stick it out. We put up with all the bad parts of each other, the frustrating things and the things that hurt. I just hope Mom and Dad don’t say anything they can’t take back.”

  Sloan heard her mother’s slow footsteps on the stairs, so she silently pushed Ainslie’s bedroom door closed, hoping she would pass on by. Their mother stopped on the other side and they anticipated her knock but none came. She moved on to her own bedroom and closed the door, and the girls breathed a sigh of relief.

  Sloan hoped they wouldn’t go back to counseling. If therapy exposed so many pent up feelings, then she hoped they never went back. Denial seemed a less painful route.

  Sloan passed her mother, who had her head down, pencil behind her ear, notebook open in front of her. With two plastic glasses of lemonade, Sloan headed to the porch to sit with her sister. Outside, the salty breeze was smooth and soft on her arms. Sloan set the lemonade down on an end table where her sister could reach it from her rocker, but Ainslie made no move to drink.

  Miraculously, Ainslie had come home less than two weeks after her operations. They had inserted the shunt in her head and removed the tumor from her spine and she had been rebounding at a decent rate. But this last medical disaster had fueled their parents’ fight. Their bickering had escalated after their last visit to the hospital’s financial office, where they had signed away the rest of their lives, promising to
do everything they could to repay the medical expenses that kept accumulating.

  The front door opened and their mother stepped out.

  “I’m making supper. What do you feel like eating?” she asked Ainslie, then waited patiently for a reply. The doctors had said to engage Ainslie in conversation, and seeing her mother wasn’t going to leave without an answer, Ainslie finally said, “Pizza maybe.” Her speech was deliberate, something doctors said might come and go as her brain adjusted.

  “Okay,” their mother said. “Um, look girls.” She squatted down and took Ainslie’s hand in hers. “I’m real sorry you girls had to hear that last night. Your father and I…well…we’re trying to work things out. It’s all going to be okay. I promise we’ll get through this and everything will be fine.”

  Ainslie had no expression. There was a moment of hesitation between Ainslie and their mother, a second when Sloan thought her sister might turn away. Sloan was ready to step in, to comfort her, when Ainslie raised her frail arms and her mother melted into her fragile embrace.

  When they finally moved apart, their mother wiped her eyes and said, “Okay. Pizza.” She headed back inside.

  Sloan lowered herself down on the top step at Ainslie’s feet. Her sister stared out at the ocean, the day’s last light settling on the surface. Ainslie hadn’t said much, but there had been wisdom and compassion in her fragile embrace. She was so young and yet so weary and wise. It was all too serious for somebody only nine. Ainslie’s head was wrapped with gauze like a monster in a cheesy movie and Sloan thought to lighten the mood. The doctors all said she didn’t need gauze anymore, but Ainslie insisted on this bit of drama. The counselor said it couldn’t hurt to indulge this quirk. Besides, Sloan found it amusing.

  “Hey, mummy head,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe we can get a bunch of rolls of that gauze the next time you’re at the hospital and I can wrap you up like a real mummy for Halloween. Wouldn’t that be cool?”