Wake

by Abria Mattina

  Frank hangs up the phone with a slam and I cringe. He’s probably going to storm up here next and give me hell. I curl up on my side facing the wall and drop my pillow over my head. It’s cowardly, but I can’t deal with this crap right now.

  My door opens without a warning knock and Frank steps in.

  “You awake?” he barks at me.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m going down to Doug’s. I’ll be back in an hour.” He says the last part with emphasis, like he’s warning me not to try anything because he’ll be back in time to catch me.

  “Fine.”

  I don’t breathe easy until he’s gone. Frank was a hell of a lot easier to live with before I knew Jem.

  Sunday

  “Frank?” I knock on my brother’s bedroom door. He doesn’t answer, so I knock again. When I open his door I find his bed undisturbed. Upon inspection, his toothbrush is dry and his toiletries untouched. He didn’t come home last night.

  I’m not exactly worried. Likely he had a beer at Doug’s, and then another, and then a few more, and decided to spend the night in Port Elmsley. Frank isn’t a heavy drinker, but when he’s stressed he’s been known to binge a little. He and I have that in common—must be in the Irish genes. I suppose I should feel guilty for being the cause of his stress, but apathy is about all I can manage right now.

  When Frank does come home he’s going to be sore at me and hung over to boot. I decide having hangover-friendly food waiting for him might help my case. It’s time for an old stand-by: Oma’s chicken soup. Simple, easy, and comforting. The pot will need tending to over a period of hours, but for the most part it just has to sit and shiver. I set an alarm to remind me to add more water later, and go lay down on the couch. I turn the TV on, but that’s just for show. Soon I’m more asleep than awake.

  It’s almost eleven when I hear the back door open. Frank is home. I throw off my blanket and scramble to my feet, eager to make an impression of usefulness. If he catches me lazing around he’ll get on my case about depression again. I hurry into the kitchen to offer him a cup of soup.

  It’s not Frank at the back door.

  Jem stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable.

  “I destroyed your CD. You can fuck off now.”

  The corner of his mouth twitches. “That’s a shame. I was gonna let you keep it.” I suppose it’s good that I was lying, then.

  “Um, can we talk?”

  “I thought we’d already said it all.” I go over to the stove to stir the soup. Jem tells me it smells good, like trite compliments will make me more amenable to conversation. I ignore him, but he steps further into my house and touches the back of my sweatshirt.

  “You don’t look well.”

  “Neither do you.”

  He drops his hand. I’ve hurt his feelings—again. I can’t justify why I still care about that. I look over my shoulder at him, with his pursed lips and slanted brows as he struggles to think of the right thing to say. The blood vessels in the corners of his eyes are a little inflamed. How sad is it that I notice such a subtle difference?

  “You need carrots. And protein. What the hell have you been doing with yourself?” I tiredly reach down a bowl from the cupboard and retrieve a ladle from the drawer. I give Jem a bowl of hot broth with as many carrots as I can scoop out.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Eat,” I tell him. “I’m not giving it to you to be friendly, so don’t waste your time feeling guilty. Just eat it.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  I hand Jem a spoon. “Talking doesn’t work out so hot for us. Just eat.” I gesture to the table and offer him a seat.

  “I said stuff I shouldn’t have.”

  “No shit. Let’s not beat a dead horse by discussing it, okay?”

  “I came here to apologize. Some of those things I said…I really didn’t mean them.”

  I drop the ladle into the sink with a clatter. “Well that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Which words did you mean?”

  Jem starts to squirm. “I was mad, okay?”

  “Don’t get defensive. I know you were upset. There’s only one thing you said that I really care about anyway.”

  That makes Jem distinctly nervous.

  “You know the one.”

  “Maybe I did mean it,” he says quietly. “I’m not sure.”

  I point to the door. “Get out of my house.” He doesn’t move.

  “I didn’t mean that you haven’t suffered,” he says quickly. “But…it’s different. You haven’t lived in fear for your own life. You wouldn’t think like that—you wouldn’t take your life so lightly—if you had, I mean…uh…” He fiddles with the edge of his pocket. He does that when he’s flustered. Bites his nails, too.

  “Is that what you came over here to say?”

  “I came to say a lot of things.”

  I point to the table yet again. “Eat first.” I turn to head down the hall and Jem calls me back.

  “Willa?”

  “I’m just going to get dressed. Eat your damn soup already.”

  I would be irritated that Jem’s presence necessitates changing out of sweats, but I’ve been wearing these since yesterday so it’s a good idea to change, regardless.

  When I come back downstairs Jem’s bowl is empty. I put on the kettle for mint tea, because if he ate that fast he probably didn’t chew properly. Jem still looks hungry—he’s eyeing the pot on the stove—so I fill his bowl up again and he smiles shyly.

  “Thanks. I wasn’t sure if I should just take seconds without asking.”

  I toss him a yogurt pop for dessert. It’s a simple gesture, but it gives him cause to stop and study me.

  “Are we okay now?”

  I sigh. “We’re talking again.”

  Jem: May 3 to 7

  Wednesday

  I march through the front hall, straight upstairs to my room. Mom hears me come home and calls out an offer for reheated soup. I decline, and the words come out sharper than I intended. I’m still on edge. I’m still pissed off. I still want to take Willa by the shoulders and shake some sense into her.

  Knowing she’d come so close to throwing her life away over fixable problems makes me so deeply angry I don’t even know how to articulate it. Her problems had workable solutions—solutions that didn’t involve putting her body through hell on a gamble. She didn’t have to go up to the top floor of a building and jump.

  Unless she was lying, and it really was the meds acting for her. I wouldn’t put it past Willa to lie about that; she doesn’t like to feel weak or out of control. I end up Googling her list of drugs. I almost feel guilty about doing it, but then I think of how she’s probably running a search on AML, and decide Fuck it. Looking at the info for her latest drug, Elavil, I wonder if she lied about being med-free, too. Apparently it can cause irritability, hostility, and impulsivity. Sounds like someone I know.

  I need to get out of here. Maybe ‘here’ isn’t really a place; maybe it’s my own head I need to get out of, but I go downstairs and ask to borrow the car anyway.

  “Where are you going?”

  I have absolutely no idea. But I can’t tell Mom that. “I want to see if the clinic can take a walk-in; get my treatment over this week.” It’s a good enough reason for her, so she lets me take the car.

  I have every intention of trying to find a calming place—maybe the park?—or perhaps just a place where I can vent and rage without being heard. But I don’t end up anywhere near the park. I miss the turnoff and end up near the hospital, even though it was supposed to be a cover story. Maybe I should see if the clinic can take a walk-in. But then I think of having to sit still for three hours at a time like this, and I know I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

  I’m about to pass the hospital entrance when I spot a car parked in the north corner of the lot. It’s a lime green Volkswagen beetle—it stands out without trying. The sight of it brings nothing but dread. I pull in and park the car.

/>   *

  The nurse at triage in Pediatrics is Laura. She smiles when she sees me and even remembers my name, even though I haven’t been here in a few months.

  “I thought I told you not to come back here?” she jokes.

  “Just visiting.” Laura gives me the clipboard to sign in as a visitor and gives me one of the guest badges. She asks me who I’m here to see. “Meira.”

  “Room 303.” Is it by nostalgia or chance that she’s still in the same room?

  The door of room 303 is ajar when I approach. I poke my head in and smell the stale odors of sanitizer and vomit. She’s back for more napalm.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Whatever.” She’s got the curtain drawn around the bed. I step over to her side of it and try not to look surprised that she’s much worse than I anticipated. Meira was never a sizable person in the time I knew her. She was already on the ward when I got here, and she left just before I went into isolation. Last fall she was small and thin, but now she’s absolutely emaciated. Her skin is faintly yellow and her eyes are bloodshot.

  “Take that off,” she says, and reaches a boney arm up to snatch my hat. “It’s like wearing a burqa in a strip club.” Meira isn’t the vain type. She wears her scars with a sense of morbid pride.

  “What happened to never coming back here?” I pull up the visitor’s chair and sit beside her.

  “I’d be home if I could be.”

  “Same diagnosis?” Last time Meira graced this ward with her scathing presence, she was being treated for masses in her upper intestine and stomach. Meira starts to shake her head and then thinks better of it. She must be fresh off a treatment.

  “Stomach’s clear. It’s just my liver and pancreas that are boned.” She says it so casually. I can feel my face go pale. She’s got a double-stamped death warrant.

  “Are you here for maintenance chemo?” The likelihood of surviving either of those cancers, never mind both, is slim. Chances are she’s here to keep the problem from growing too big too fast, and thereby buy herself a little time.

  “What are you here for?”

  “To visit you.”

  “That’s sweet.” She says it with a wry smile. Meira doesn’t do ‘sweet.’ Her pretty face and short stature belie an acerbic wit and cruel sense of justice. Meira doesn’t take anybody’s bullshit, a trait that has made her infamous on the ward.

  She and I used to hang out with the other teens in the common lounge at the end of the hall. It’s a room with couches, tables, a TV and glass walls all around. Through the one wall we could see into the pediatric psychiatry department, right next to the ward specifically for kids with eating disorders. I don’t know why they thought putting the cancer kids and the anorexics together was a good idea, but we were stuck with them. We all hated them, but Meira took it more personally than most.

  Our lounge shared a corner with their therapy room. Every day we would see the counselors file in the patients, and they would sit around the table before perfectly measured, nutritionist-designed meals. And they wouldn’t eat. They’d sit there as a group and read the ingredients on every fucking item out loud, going through little mantras about how it was good for them to consume X amount of vitamin C and so many grams of carbohydrates, while ten feet away, a dozen or more of us were willing but unable to eat the same things.

  All they had to do was eat, and they’d live. They didn’t need strong drugs and harsh medicines, or surgeries or radiation treatments that burn the skin, or whole new organs—they just needed to fucking swallow.

  Meira snapped one day in October when one of the girls burst into tears over a cup of applesauce. Meira was in rough shape at the time, but she still felt it was worth it to haul her wrecked body and IV pole all the way around to the other side of the wing, into the room where lunch was being eaten. We all just stared, too stunned to believe that she’d actually mess with these people.

  “No one invited me,” she said, playing on her sweet appearance. Meira welcomed herself to a seat and said, “You’re not gonna eat that?” She snatched the tray from the crying girl and began to eat, making all kinds of appreciative sounds and remarks about how good it tasted.

  After that Meira was confined to her room. She set six kids a few months back in treatment and spent the rest of the afternoon throwing up applesauce, but she refused to apologize.

  “You gonna come to my funeral?” Meira asks. She says it like she’s inviting me to her birthday party.

  “Sure.”

  “I get discharged in two days if all goes well. I’m going casket shopping.”

  “Are you scared?” She seems to be at peace with the fact that she’s going to die. Maybe she’s known for a while now and has already crawled through the five steps to acceptance. I never could get there, even when the odds were stacked against me. I only got as far as bargaining.

  “Yeah,” Meira admits. “But it’s sort of…easy. I don’t have to worry about the future. I don’t have to stress over picking a college or save for retirement…. I can do what I want. I’ll miss out on a lot of stuff, and sometimes that really pisses me off, but this whole dying thing is sort of liberating.” I’m not sure if I should believe her. Meira tends to deadpan a lot, even when she’s being ironic or sarcastic, so it’s hard to tell.

  I blurt out, “My friend just told me she tried to commit suicide,” and immediately feel like a jerk for saying it. Meira doesn’t need to hear about my issues when she’s drowning in her own.

  “Did she have a good reason?”

  “No.”

  “Well that’s a kick in the teeth.” Meira pats my hand. “Try not to hold it against her. Not everyone knows what life is worth.”

  “I’ll try.” Will I? Or am I agreeing with Meira because I feel guilty that she’s dying?

  Gillian, the redheaded nurse who corks on her break, comes in with an IV bag in her hands. Meira smiles like it’s Christmas and Gillian tells her it’s the good stuff. She takes an empty bag off the pole and hangs the new one—it’s morphine.

  “Can you make it a fast drip?”

  *

  I hang around the hospital until Meira’s medication makes her fall asleep, and then I slip my hat back on and make a quiet exit. The next time I see her, she probably won’t be breathing.

  It takes me ages to fall asleep, and when I do I have nightmares. I see Elise, weak and pale and shriveled, like something out of a concentration camp. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘It’s you or me.’ She presses a withered hand to my chest. Her little shove topples me over, back over the edge of a very tall building, and I jolt awake with the sensation of falling.

  “Shit…” I get out of bed to splash cold water on my face. I haven’t had pulling-the-plug dreams since I last checked out of the hospital. Fuck Willa for disturbing my sleep like that. Fuck her for killing a woman who could have died with a little dignity.

  As I wipe my face I consider the frightening idea that Willa might have been mentally unsound before the shrinks ever got to her. Maybe that’s why she decided to go out of her way to make sure Thomasina died—Willa said she asked her to hoard pills, but what if that was a lie? Maybe that poor woman was abused in her most vulnerable state, and no one came in time to save her from her insane sister.

  Of course, even more disturbing is the idea that Willa killed Thomasina with an entirely clear head; that she had it in her to be so cruel and cold and calculating, slipping pills into Thomasina’s mouth one by one and forcing her to swallow. Not everyone has it in them to end a love one’s suffering. Willa did. So what kind of person does that make her?

  I feel like I didn’t even know her before now. All the nice things she did, all the encouragement she gave me, was just cover for the twisted creature underneath. Her blunt way of speaking, her refusal to take anybody’s bullshit—those are things she probably picked up during her time amongst the rough crowds of the mental hospital and therapy group. That’s not the real her; it’s who she became when she killed her own sister.<
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  Who she was before that doesn’t really matter. If Willa was ever a nice person, that girl died with Thomasina.

  Before I fall asleep, I consider the third disturbing thought of the night: maybe she really should have jumped.

  Thursday

  My bad night of sleep makes me dozy all through my morning classes. I can hardly stand to keep my head up, much less pay attention. I fully intend to crash in the nurse’s office at lunch, after I get something to eat.

  It’s out of habit that I notice where Willa is sitting. She looks up at me and offers a pained sort of smile. I turn away and head for Elise’s table. I can’t even look at her.

  “Are you okay?” Elise asks me. A few months ago it wasn’t weird for me to give up eating after only half a Jell-O cup, but now my lack of appetite is notable.

  I can literally feel Willa’s eyes boring into the back of my head. It makes my skin crawl.

  “Will you leave me alone?” I grouch. Elise lets me be—after stealing the remainder of my Jell-O.

  Social Studies is hell. I can’t look at Willa without feeling the intense urge to yell at her, so I don’t. Civility is a challenge. I carelessly pass the assignment form to her and Willa rounds on me.

  “Stop being such a moody little bitch,” she says seriously. “If you have something to say to me, just say it.”

  “What is there to say?” There are no words for how completely repulsed I am by her behavior—the parts I can riddle out, anyway. I’m still convinced she’s a liar and I have no interest in talking to her anymore. I turn back to my work, away from Willa.

  “I hate you,” she whispers. How very much like her.

  “I don’t care.”

  *

  After dinner Mom and I spend some time cooking. We do four kinds of soup so we can freeze the leftovers and I have food for a week. I try to ignore the fact that the recipes are all written in Willa’s slanted, messy penmanship. Eric keeps coming through the kitchen to steal pieces of chopped vegetables off the cutting boards. Mom and I chat a little about her work, but when it comes time to tell her about how my day went, we hit a stall. She senses that I’m not in much of a talking mood and starts singing lowly. If it weren’t for her extensive knowledge of Alison Krauss music, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Saskatchewan.