Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  “I think I was hit by lightning,” I say.

  “No, you weren’t,” says Tig.

  “Definitely not,” says Fish-­boy. “Mars brain. Remember? I’m a doctor.”

  “He is,” says Tig. “Remember? I’m just the tech guy.”

  “What am I?” I say. “I don’t remember. Why do you keep saying ‘Remember?’ I don’t remember anything.” I feel panicky but not too bad, like this is familiar somehow, scary but comfortable. (“You’ll all beat each other up with your Mars supplies,” Mom had said, but I don’t feel like hitting anyone.)

  “Mom was right,” I say.

  “You’re the botanist,” Tig says.

  “Oh, plants,” I say.

  “Right,” he says.

  “Like in the book,” I say. “The one we read when we were kids. I loved that book.”

  “And the movie,” he says. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “The only book that I read when I was a kid was The Velveteen Rabbit,” says Fish-­boy.

  “That can’t be true,” says Tig.

  “I mean it’s the one I remember. Like if you said, ‘What books did you read when you were a kid?’ that’s what I’d say.”

  “I read that,” I say. “It made me cry. That rabbit just wanted to be real.”

  “Everyone just wants to be real,” says Tig.

  “You’re real,” I say.

  “You know who I mean,” he says. “Your parents.”

  “Don’t talk about that,” I say, panicking. Fish-­boy doesn’t know I was adopted. It’s a secret! Tig said he’d never tell.

  “Everyone knows,” Tig says. “Remember?”

  “Stop saying that!” I say.

  The room has canvas floors and walls and the table they are playing chess on is a folding card table. It smells like a tent. It feels like camping. My head aches. They’ve made their chairs out of boxes. The boxes are labeled PROTEIN x 1000. The chess pieces look old, like Grandpa Hoppy’s.

  “Where did you get that?” I start to ask, but then there is a whoosh and a crackle and I’m moving. I’m moving. What’s going on? I try to ask, but my mouth feels taped shut and those stupid pins. Why are mouth-­pins a thing? Who put them there? I blink, hard, tick, tick, tick. I pinch myself. I’m alive. Am I?

  “Where?” I keep saying. “Where?” But the boys are gone. The room is gone. Everything is gone.

  And then I’m panicking, breathing too much and too fast. Beep, beep, beep, beeeeeep.

  Machine! I remind myself. You are a machine!

  The air tunnels and thickens and thins, and then I’m in the hospital and there is the crooked picture and someone is moving my bed, which is really a stretcher. And there are Mom and Dad! They are walking and we’re in a hallway in a hospital and I’m on a bed that is rolling. I tug on Mom’s sleeve and she turns to me, her face opening up a smile that wobbles like Jell-­O, and then she says, “Jay, she’s awake.”

  “We’ve got to get her to MRI, ma’am,” says a voice I don’t know, just as Dad is saying, “Ish, it’s you, you’re here, you’re OK.”

  I can tell he’s lying because his eye twitches. Dad’s eye twitches a lot.

  “Overhydration,” Mom says, usually, but he always corrects her.

  “Stress,” he says. “Just stress.”

  I want to say now, “Your eye is twitching!” but the words fly away on blue butterfly wings. Suddenly I want to tell them something incredibly important that I just realized about being adopted. It’s basically like that kid’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I love them, so they are Real. They are our real parents! I want to tell Elliott so she won’t be so mad anymore. I want them to know that I think they are real. I don’t think they think that I think they are. That sentence has too many thinks. I can’t think. I can think. I can’t.

  “You’re real,” I try to say, but then I’m asleep again. I can’t stay awake. I just can’t. And I want to go back to Mars. Tig’s there, and I have questions. I have a lot of questions! I try and I try but I can’t seem to fall asleep deep enough to get there. It’s behind a wall. I can’t break through it. Or I need to be just a little bit asleep, so that I can’t tell where I am, I can’t see the hospital, but I can find a dream. I need a hammock. I need the cool night sky. I’m just stuck somewhere, in between. Help, I say, but I can’t talk. I’m a machine, I think. I’m just a machine. I’m so dumb. I’m not a machine. I’m a person. I have a headache. It’s the first day of school. I wet my pants.

  What is going on? I don’t know anymore. The sky was green. The butterfly was a moth. I wet my pants at school? Fish! Ish.

  And then I’m gone. Somewhere black this time, a long hole that I’ve fallen down, tumbling and tumbling and I hope I don’t land because that’s going to hurt. It’s not Mars. It’s not anywhere. I’m just gone.

  Chapter 11

  When I wake up, everything has changed.

  Except nothing has changed. It’s just something I feel, inside me. Not the outside. On the outside, it’s still a hospital room. That terrible, sad, tragic flower painting is still on the wall and it’s still crooked. It still stinks in here.

  Mom is asleep in a chair beside my bed. It’s not a regular chair. It’s green and plasticky-­looking, the kind that tips back, like a recliner that is practically a bed. She’s snoring. I lift my hand and look at it and it looks like my regular, almost-­thirteen-­year-­old hand. Is it smaller or bigger than on Mars?

  I think it was real.

  It can’t be, but it was.

  The major difference between my hand there and here is that here there are needles going into the vein on the back of it, dripping me full of who knows what. I almost throw up but I make myself not do it. You can’t faint when you’re lying down, so I guess it’s a good thing that I am. The purple liquid has been replaced with something clear. It looks like water. Dad would like that, I think.

  WWID? I frown. The thing is that I just don’t think that Iris would ever be in this situation.

  “She leads a charmed life,” Grandpa Hoppy used to say about Iris. And I guess that’s true. She does. Charmed people aren’t lying in hospital beds. Charmed people don’t have to worry about fainting when they’re already lying down. Charmed people don’t get struck by lightning during their lunch break at school.

  The curtains on the window are open. I can see the sky. The sun is starting to rise and it’s the same as yesterday except it’s also completely different. It’s orange and fiery and lighting up the hazy, yellow sky with its pinks and brights.

  I blink back tears. I never used to cry! I am not a crier! But now I can’t seem to help it. You think you know how something is going to go, like, say, the first day of school. You think you’ve thought of the worst possible scenarios and the best ones and all the ones in between! And then somehow none of those happen and instead you get hit by lightning, something crackles, a boy calls you Fish, and you wet your pants and wake up in the hospital with a headache that’s so bad, you can feel it in your hair.

  Great. I blink and blink because I’m almost crying again. Still. Blinking sounds different when your eyes are wet. It’s like the tears mute the sound, like how shouting underwater never works. Slish, slosh, slish.

  I move my head from side to side and suddenly, like magic, it stops hurting, which is weird, because now that it’s miraculously not hurting, I realize that it’s been hurting nonstop for a long time. Like around nine months and a week or so, from the time when Tig came over and said, “This is it, we gotta go.”

  And I said, “I’m going to miss you.”

  And he shrugged and looked somewhere beyond me, past my shoulder to the lake, and said, “I’m sure gonna miss that island.”

  And I’d said, “And me?”

  And he laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

  And then he left. He didn’t even hug me or anything. He didn’t touch me at all. Not that I thought he would. Not that I wanted him to do that. But we’d spent our whole lives together! A handshake would
have been nice. Weird, but nice.

  The headaches started the next day.

  My brain makes a small whooshing sound, like there is wind inside me. A breeze. Or someone tiny is blowing down my neck.

  But it doesn’t hurt. It’s light. And I feel nothing.

  Maybe I am nothing.

  I’m airy. I’m air.

  I feel like if you aimed a flashlight at this bed where I am lying, you’d see nothing but rumpled white sheets.

  It’s so weird. I don’t know what else to say, it’s just weird. It’s the weirdest feeling. Everything about it is so much more than weird but there isn’t a word weird enough to describe it.

  “Weird,” I say out loud. Even the word weird is weird when you toy with it enough with your tongue.

  Mom wakes up suddenly and sees me. She sits bolt upright, like she’s been scared out of her mind. “ISH!” she shrieks.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say. My words are a bit too long, like my battery is running out. “Hiiiii, . . . mooooom.” (Q: What does a calf call its mother? A: Moom.)

  “Oh my gosh,” she says. “Ish.” Then she bursts into tears. That’s how I know that something really serious is happening.

  Something really bad.

  “I have to call your dad!” she says. She’s stabbing at her phone, squinting, like in a bad dream when you’re trying to call for help but every number you punch is the wrong one. She must have Dad programmed into her phone. She looks deranged.

  “Mom,” I say. “Your glasses?” I point at her head where her emerald green glasses are nestled in her blonde hair.

  “Yes, yes, right,” she says, sliding them down from her hair onto her nose. They remind me of a bird, perching there for a minute but about to take off.

  She puts the phone on speaker and I can hear the phone ringing and then Dad answering without saying “hello.” “Is she awake?”

  “She’s awake,” says Mom, and she’s sort of crying.

  Was I not supposed to be awake? I am sleepy. I feel like I could fall asleep again pretty easily. I hope they aren’t disappointed if I do.

  “I’m on my way,” says Dad. “I’ll be right there.”

  I close my eyes. That’s nice, I think. Dad’s coming! The trouble is that I’m already dreaming before I realize that I forgot to ask any of the important questions. But the dream has come up over me like a blanket, blocking out all the light, and then I’m on a bed somewhere else. A hard bed, long and narrow. I force my eyes open and look out the window and I see blackness and stars, and in the far western sky, a bright planet. Oh, that’s the Earth, I think. I mean, I know it. That light in the sky is my old planet.

  And just like that, I’m back on Mars, where I’m supposed to be. I close my eyes, inside the dream, and fall asleep for real, not dreaming anything at all.

  It feels normal and right, like I’m a layer inside a layer, that these two things are happening at the same time. The future and the present. Which can happen, you know. Theoretically. You could exist in two places and in two times and in two dimensions at the exact same time. I forget how it works. I just know it does. It’s something about strings. String theory. The physics of things. Physics is like a language I can almost understand, but not. It’s like science in a dream. I just . . .

  “ISH!” I hear, and then I smell my Dad’s clean hands. I smell them before I can pull myself all the way out of the sleep that I’m stuck underneath. I push at it with my hands.

  “Dad!” I say, thickly.

  He hugs me, hard.

  “Don’t squash her!” says Mom.

  They are both staring at me like they’ve never seen me before.

  “What?” I say. “What?”

  They look at each other. It’s one of those long, starey looks that parents give to each other right before they tell you that oh, by the way, you’re adopted, do you still want to go on the Tower of Terror? You can choose a T-­shirt in the shop at the bottom of the ride!

  “Mom,” I say. (“Moooooom,” I moo. Ha-­ha.)

  “Honey,” she says. “I’m just going to say it. OK. Please don’t panic.” She shoots a look at Dad.

  His eye is twitching like crazy. “You have a brain tumor,” Dad blurts.

  Then they both burst into tears.

  I get stuck in the scene, it keeps jerking back and then rolling forward again.

  “You have a brain tumor,” Dad blurts.

  Then they both burst into tears.

  Again:

  “You have a brain tumor,” Dad blurts.

  Then they both burst into tears.

  Again:

  “You have a brain tumor,” Dad blurts.

  Then they both burst into tears.

  “Oh!” I say. I smile kindly and gently, in an Iris-­way. “That’s OK.” I want them to feel better. Then, “I know.” Which turns out to be true. As soon as they said it, I recognized it. Like I’d known all along, I just didn’t want anyone else to know. The brain tumor was a secret that I pinkie swore to myself that I wouldn’t tell about. I used to share all my secrets with Tig. About three months ago, I wrote on a little piece of paper “I think I have a brain tumor” and I took it to his old house and put it under a rock by the front entrance. I bet it’s still there. Sometimes we used to leave each other keys under there. We never left notes, but I wish we had now. It seems like something that would have been fun that we missed out on, doing that.

  Dad starts to explain exactly what kind of brain tumor I have. There are a lot of words with a lot of syllables and the syllables keep falling apart and joining together the wrong way, so I can’t understand them. “Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma,” he repeats. It sounds like the name of a star or a galaxy. I smile. The ancient Babylonians called Mars Nirgal, which meant Death Star. It feels important to tell Dad about that, but I can’t. Did he say the word Nirgal? Or did I imagine it? Dad says the words again, all in a jumble of Intrinsically Pointed Nirgal Aromas. He gestures with his hands and the soap smell wafts around me like something pleasant. I fall asleep again, instantly, without deciding. It just happens. I know that’s not how many people would react to bad news, but it turns out having a tumor—a Nirgal—in your brain is really really really exhausting. Who knew?

  Well, probably everyone, I guess.

  They just hoped it wouldn’t happen to them.

  And lucky them, I guess, because it didn’t. It happened to me instead.

  Chapter 12

  From the hallway, there is the clatter of dinner trays on carts and the chatter of the people who push the carts, collecting the old trays. Hospitals are noisy and, like, raucous. That’s a word I’ve never used before that just came to me. I don’t know why. Maybe the Death Star in my brain is causing strange loop-­de-­loops. Maybe I’ll start speaking Japanese or understanding how to read braille.

  I feel like laughing but I don’t know why. It’s like the laugh is coming before the punch line. What is funny out there in the hall? I can hear laughing! I think about cow jokes. If someone comes in here, maybe I will tell one.

  Q: Why can’t cows keep secrets? A: They just go in one ear and out the udder.

  Udder is a funny word. Udderneath. Udderwear. Udderwise. You get the idea. I’m pretty sure Dad’s right about the cows.

  Someone drops something in the hallway with a huge bang that makes me jump. The paging system comes to life: “Paging Dr. Klein, please report to Three South. Dr. Klein.”

  Come on, Dr. Klein! Hurry! I wonder what is on Three South. The hospital is full of people who are having just as crappy a day as I am, I guess. Maybe not, though. Maybe Three South is the good ward. Maybe it’s the place where people go who are happy. I don’t know why. What would they do there? What good things happen in hospitals anyway? Maybe babies are being born. I don’t know where I was born. Maybe I was born in a hospital. Maybe this one. Maybe Dr. Klein’s face was the first face I ever saw. It’s weird how babies don’t see their moms first. I guess they see the doctor or the nurse. They see a whole cro
wd before their mom swims into view. That’s kind of sad, if you think about it. I was almost a year old when I got adopted. Whose face did I see first? Who did I used to know? I bet Elliott remembers. She was three. Three is pretty old. I think I remember things from being three. I remember a big black dog jumping on me in a park. I was carrying a red umbrella. I was with Grandpa Hoppy. He came hopping over to us and hit that dog with his cane. The dog was just being friendly though. I remember that like it’s a photo in my brain, the dog wagging and Grandpa Hoppy shouting like a madman. He was quite a “character.” Everyone says so.

  I’ve seen real, actual photos of my first day with Mom and Dad, so even though I don’t remember it, I sort of do, because of the pictures. I’m wearing these super-­awful bright green overalls. Who puts a redheaded kid in green overalls? I look like a Christmas elf.

  Mom says there was chocolate cake. She says that Elliott pushed my face into it (by mistake) and I came up crying and they knew they were in for a bumpy ride. Yeah. No kidding. After Iris, we must have been a pretty big shock.

  Someone shouts. I hear running footsteps.

  Things beep and kids cry and nurses open the door and swing it shut and light floods the room and then dims again and someone is always ringing something and talking too loudly and there are footsteps clicking down the hall. It’s weird (again! weird!) how quickly it almost seems sort of normal to me. What should be normal to me right now is to be at home in bed, dreading school tomorrow and hoping the boy who called me Fish has suddenly been chosen to go to school in the Antarctic, where he’ll likely be eaten by polar bears. Unless those are in the Arctic. I get Earth facts mixed up. I read somewhere that we won’t ever really go to Mars because there are places on Earth that are pretty inhospitable (like Mars) and we seem in no rush to live there. I’m pretty sure the article referred to the Antarctic as being especially hostile. Well, I hope that’s where he goes. I hope that’s where he is right now, shivering and wondering, What happened?

  Through the parted curtains, I can see the moon, which is full and bright, and above it, I can see Cassiopeia. I find the Big Dipper, which points at the North Star, which hangs there halfway in between. I wonder if any of those stars are still there or if they are just ghosts. I wonder if I’m going to die and I’ll be a ghost. I wonder which ones of those dumb stars made me, and which ones of them made my tumor, because if you think about it, cancer is also made of dead stars. Everything is. Good and Bad. Fish-­boy and me. Elliott and Iris. Mom and Dad. The people picking up the dinner trays. Everyone. Everything. Dr. Klein. Plastic waste! It’s not just us that are dead stars. That would be too poetic and too pretty! It’s all the bad stuff, too. It’s all the worst stuff. You just don’t see that on posters. You never will. No one will drink their coffee out of a cup that says CANCER IS MADE FROM DEAD STARS super­imposed in pretty calligraphy over a crookedly painted constellation. It just won’t happen.