Wake

by Abria Mattina

Jem clears his throat and tries to speak again. “Invite her here.”

  “Are you sure you want to see her now?”

  “Yes.”

  He looks like absolute hell. His lips are dry and cracked from harsh breathing; he’s pale and the bags under his eyes haven’t been so dark since last winter. Does my vain brother really want to be seen like this?

  “I’ll call her.” I shouldn’t, but I know Willa is good for him in her own way.

  Jem’s face stretches into a beatific smile. “Thank you.” He reaches for my hand as I adjust the edge of his hat and squeezes it. “You’re so good to me. Thank you, for everything. You’re so special to me.”

  What the heck is that about? It’s been four hours since his last painkiller, not counting the one he took five minutes ago, so I can’t write that last statement off as loopiness. Jem never says sentimental stuff like that. He laughs at me when I say it.

  “I’m gonna go call her now.”

  He softly calls, “I love you, Lise,” after me as I leave. I shut the bedroom door behind me as worry writhes in my gut like a live snake. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was saying goodbye.

  Eric: June 8 to 10

  Today

  I sit in my car outside the entrance to the Rideau Trail, too tired to hike. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

  I only started coming to the trails here after Jem got sick. It’s remote and peaceful, and if I want to I can sit and think, or hurl rocks at trees and scream at the top of my lungs. Celeste has even met me here a few times, when things were really rough. She told me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed of being angry with God. Understanding words, especially from an atheist.

  I’m not angry with God anymore. I’m disappointed.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. I have to get back. My turn at the hospital starts in two hours. I need time to go home and take a shower and pull myself together before going to be with Jem.

  I answer the call as I pull out of the parking lot. “Yeah?”

  It’s Mom. “Take your time getting over here, okay? I’m going to stay a bit later tonight.”

  I don’t think she’s slept for more than an hour at a time these past two days. She’s going to burn out, like she did when both Jem and Elise were in the hospital together.

  “You need to get out of there for a bit, Mom. Sleep in a real bed, not a crappy plastic chair.”

  “You know I won’t sleep.”

  “Try. You’re no good to us if you’re exhausted.”

  I don’t go home. I go straight to the hospital, even though my turn doesn’t start for another hour. Mom needs to go take care of herself.

  I have a little ritual I do whenever I go see Jem in the hospital. On my way down the ward to his room, I recite the Serenity Prayer in my head. It’s familiar and simple, and calms the nerves, because it’s hard to see him so ill. I never get over the shock of it.

  When I step past the curtain that divides Jem’s bed from the rest of the room, he’s facing away from me. Mom is holding an emesis basin under his chin as he coughs up bloody phlegm.

  I used to wonder if all this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been nicer to him; if I’d shared my toys more as a kid, or if I hadn’t told him that Santa isn’t real, or if I hadn’t made sport of him so often. Maybe it’s payback for that time I snuck a cigarette behind the garage, or cheated on a test. But I know it’s not. There’s no reason to it all. So I gave up wondering.

  “Here, bro.” I help him rinse the taste of phlegm out of his mouth while Mom empties the emesis basin. There are bruises on his throat. From coughing so hard? Is that where the blood in the phlegm is from, or are his lungs bleeding slowly? I ask and he simply touches his throat. He’s too sore to talk.

  I make a mental note to bring his phrase card next time I come here. He’s in no shape to be miming his needs.

  “You should go,” I tell Mom. “Recharge and come back tonight.”

  She hums and haws, reluctant to leave, until Jem rolls his eyes tiredly and points to the door.

  “Honey, don’t feel you have to send me away,” she says. He jabs a finger at the door.

  I hand her the keys to the car. She takes her sweet time leaving, waiting for Jem to change his mind and tell her to stay, or to medically require her presence, but he doesn’t. So she kisses him goodbye, grabs her bag, and leaves.

  No sooner as the door closed behind her than an epic coughing fit explodes from his chest. He must have been holding that in the whole time she was dawdling.

  There’s more blood in his phlegm. His eyes are bloodshot from the pressure of coughing for so long. They’re glassy with fever and watery with infection. He doesn’t look like he’s really here, but I know he is.

  “Fuck,” he mouths, and slumps back against the pillow. It’s a wonder that such a thin person can have so much mucus inside him. I adjust the oxygen tube under Jem’s nose and his eyes flutter and close.

  “Can’t catch a break, huh?”

  He shakes his head. He drinks a little more water to soothe his throat, and after awhile I help him out of bed and across the short stretch of tile between the bed and the washroom. They’re hydrating him with intravenous saline. That stuff makes a person piss like mad, and of course Jem is too proud to just use the plastic urinal by his bed.

  “Look at the bright side,” I tell him as I tuck him back into bed. The short trip to the bathroom and back has winded him, even with extra oxygen. “If your kidneys still worked completely, you’d be getting up a lot more often.”

  Jem smirks and gives me the finger. Atta’boy.

  The Next Day

  As I heat frozen pasta up in the microwave, I wish I could invite Willa over to cook. It would give Elise something to do, helping with the meal, and we could have something real to eat. And Willa is good at being…normal. But I can’t invite her over because she would ask questions about Jem, and I don’t feel like talking about it.

  Elise doesn’t ask about Jem, thank God. I know she knows I was at the hospital today. She saw me leave the house. She doesn’t need to worry. She doesn’t need to know that Jem passed out on the bathroom floor this afternoon and pissed himself, and that there was blood in his urine. They think he was bleeding lightly before he fell—that he ruptured a vessel around his own kidney by coughing too hard. Poor kid.

  And I feel like shit because I shouldn’t have left him alone when he was ready to faint. But short of standing over him while he took a piss, what could I have done?

  They’ll make him stay in bed and use a plastic urinal or bedpan now. He hates that. As long as he doesn’t fall again, I don’t care what he wants. He’s lucky he didn’t hit his head on the side of the sink when he passed out.

  Maybe I’ll go over to the hospital again tonight. Give Mom a break so she can go eat dinner, and I can check on Jem. My cell rings in the middle of dinner and I take it into the other room to keep from disturbing Elise while she watches TV. It’s just the bank calling to offer their balance protection program on my account, but it’s an excuse.

  When I come back into the living room I tell Elise I’m going out.

  “Where?”

  “Just a get-together at one of the other player’s houses.” Keep it vague. Elise nods, but she seems a little put out at being left alone. I’d take her with me, but then she’d know I’m lying and seeing Jem would worry her.

  “Bye, Lise.”

  “Drive safe.”

  *

  Jem is asleep when I get to the hospital. Mom and Dad are conversing quietly with a doctor by the door. I try not to hear whatever news it is and focus on Jem. His breathing sounds marginally better than it did this afternoon.

  Then I notice there’s a small splash of blood on the corner of his speech card that Mom forgot to wipe off, and I wonder if he’s really getting better. We beat this, damn it. Cancer didn’t kill him, and he was getting so much better. He can’t die of the common cold now and ruin it all.

  Jem cracks an ey
elid at me.

  “Winning or losing?” I ask. He mouths ‘winning,’ but I’m not sure if he’s just telling me what I want to hear.

  Jem taps his ear and points to our parents. He’s telling me to listen, like he knows I’m purposely blocking out their conversation.

  They’re talking about bringing him home. To recover, or to die? I can’t tell. But Jem always said he didn’t want to burden anyone by dying at home for sentiment’s sake.

  I vividly remember the day Jem asked me to bring him a notebook and a pen at the hospital, because that simple request lead to so many harder ones. He had his composition books at the hospital to work on creating music when he couldn’t actually play, but he wanted regular notepad paper and a pen. A pencil wouldn’t cut it anymore.

  I think he got the idea from his roommate Evan, or at the very least the information, because when I brought the paper and pen to him that evening he told me to shut the door, and then promptly proceeded to dump a ton of bricks on my chest. He wanted me to help him plan his own funeral.

  I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since he got sick, but that just about snapped me. Seventeen years old, and he wanted to plan his funeral.

  “I asked you for a reason,” he said when I tried to back down. “It would upset Mom and Dad, and Elise would throw a fit.” He was right about that. Elise was putting herself through hell at the time, trying to get ready to make her marrow donation. There was a chance that the transplant wouldn’t work, though, or that the pretreatment would kill Jem before the transplant could even be done. He wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.

  I still don’t really understand the concept of planning one’s own funeral. You can’t really ‘attend’ it, after all. He said he wanted to take the burden of planning off of Mom and Dad, but I think planning a funeral gives people something to do in the wake of loss. It keeps them busy for a little while.

  Jem knew how to do it properly, too, which makes me think that he talked to someone about it. He had to have a witness to his living will and funeral plans. It had to be hand-written, in ink, and we both had to sign it. If he wanted to make changes, he had to cross out the words and initial beside the change. He had clearly put some thought into this before I showed up—from what music to play to what readings Dad would like best to hear. He wanted a closed casket, because ‘gawking at a corpse is weird’ and said to bury him in something he might actually wear. ‘It’s my own funeral, fuck if I’m wearing a tie.’ I brought up the funeral of a kid we went to school with in Ottawa, killed by a drunk driver, whose casket had been white and mourners had been invited to sign it like a yearbook. Jem wasn’t keen on that idea. ‘It’s a fucking funeral, not homecoming.’

  It was at that point I realized I would probably have to get up and say something at his funeral. I’m not eloquent by any means, but who on God’s green earth has the right words to say in front of a crowd when their little brother dies at seventeen? That he lived a good life? That he’s partying up with Jesus now? At least he isn’t in pain anymore?

  Jem can deal with a lot of shit, but sappy eulogies were his limit. “None of that garbage,” he said. ‘I don’t care that we’re Anglican, we’re doing this Catholic style: the priest does his bit and everyone else can bugger off.’

  ‘What if someone wants to say something?’

  ‘They can do it at the visitation. Fuck up the sound check, not the concert.’

  He was even less willing to negotiate on the subject of music. Jem knew what he wanted and what he didn’t, and what he did not want were hokey hymns. His list of songs included Chopin’s “Nocturne in C Sharp Minor,” Tracy Chapman’s “Change,” and Mom’s favorite: “I’ll Fly Away” by Alison Krauss. Always the thoughtful one in the family, Jem.

  ‘Don’t you dare let them play cheesy shit like ‘Amazing Grace.’’

  ‘What’s wrong with ‘Amazing Grace’?’

  ‘I don’t know how people got the impression that it’s good for funerals. It was written by a slave trader.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t play it.’

  I still think it’s good for funerals. It’s a nice song about how we all sin, we all die, and some find their way back to God.

  The curtain moves aside and Mom and Dad come up to the bedside. “Good news, sweetie,” Mom says. “Your fever has been coming down steadily. You’ll be able to come home soon.”

  “When?”

  Mom’s answer is vague—a day or two, depending on how fast the blood in his phlegm disappears. I ask Dad if they’ll really send Jem home when he’s so weak, but Dad says now that the fever is almost gone it’s all right. The mucus is the body’s natural way of expelling the last of the virus and defending against new germs in the meantime.

  “A few more days will also help to make sure his kidneys can take the hit,” Dad adds in the same pitch. I hope they can, because if Jem needs spare parts from Elise there’s a chance she’ll have more complications. I can’t stand it again. All the bad stuff happened to her on my watch—the collapsed lung, the seizures. I don’t care that it wasn’t technically my fault; watching her gasping for breath, turning blue right before my eyes, marks the worst moment of my life. And after her fight with sepsis, she was such a shell. We all thought the oxygen deprivation and seizure had caused brain damage. I almost thought it would be better if she didn’t come home after that. I didn’t want my vibrant, wonderful little sister to be reduced to the level of an infant.

  I did a lot of bargaining with God.

  “They’ll keep him for the weekend at least, right?” I ask Dad. The longer they keep Jem in good care, the better chance both he and Elise have.

  “They won’t send him home before he’s ready,” Dad assures me. What a convenient way to sidestep my question.

  It’s Morning

  They really are discharging Jem. Apparently his fever is pretty much gone, and apart from a tendency to cough up phlegm, Jem is ready to go home to recover. I don’t like it. I think they should keep him for at least another day, until he’s a little stronger. I argue this with Dad over breakfast, but all he can say is that it’s not his decision. “You know Jem hates the hospital,” he tries to reason. And I hate the dentist, but I still go when I need to.

  “They need the bed,” he says when he gets tired of arguing with me.

  “Jem needs that bed.”

  Dad gives me a testy look. “Trust me. It won’t be easy, but he’s strong enough to come home, okay? Enough.”

  Mom insists on driving over to the hospital early, even though Jem isn’t being discharged until at least two o’clock. He missed his dialysis appointment this week, so he’s hooked up to a dialyzer now, and the plan is to discharge him when that treatment is done. Mom is the first one off the elevator when the doors open, but Dad and I follow at a more reluctant pace.

  Dad hates seeing Jem in the hospital. The only way he can deal with it and not lose his mind is to treat him like a patient, and that’s a sure way to test Jem’s temper.

  A nurse is with him when we walk in, taking his blood pressure. She has him in a good mood and that’s better than I could have ever asked for.

  The dialyzer takes up quite a bit of room beside the bed, so I make myself comfortable against the far wall with as much distance between me and that creepy thing as possible. It turns my stomach a little, watching the blood flow through the tubing and get spun around like the feed on a cassette tape. Jem catches me looking at it before I have time to hide my disgust, and his mood takes a nosedive.

  I don’t even want to be here. I only came because Dad asked for my help.

  Mom pets Jem’s head and kisses his cheek. She tells him about shopping for fresh fruit with Elise to make milkshakes for him. Jem tries to show enthusiasm, but it obviously costs him a lot of effort.

  It takes another half hour to finish his dialysis treatment, and then another forty minutes to get him ready to leave and complete the discharge paperwork. He’s at the tipping point between s
ick enough to need care and not sick enough to merit a bed in the hospital. I try to keep it in perspective, because all of his symptoms will look worse in the atmosphere of the hospital. It’s not that bad that he’s still so achy and stiff that he needs my help to put his clothes on—that’s just a regular flu symptom. So he coughs a little—he’ll be okay soon.

  “What are you looking at?” he snarls at me. We glare at each other for a few seconds before my inevitable win comes: Jem has to break the stare to cough, and I chuckle.

  “Score.”

  “Shut up.”

  Dad comes back in with the discharge paperwork tucked under his arm. “Don’t antagonize your brother.” I’m not sure whom he’s talking to. “You ready to go?” he asks Jem. Dad doesn’t seem bothered by the lack of response; he’s just eager to get home.

  Mom brings the car around the door of the hospital while Dad and I wait with Jem inside the vestibule. The wide hospital wheelchair makes my brother look even thinner. He’s well bundled in a thick fleece blanket, but he’s still shivering slightly. It’s a damp day and that makes his breathing worse.

  As Dad and I help Jem into the car, I silently hope whoever gets my brother’s newly vacant bed desperately needs it, because otherwise I’m really going to resent this whole situation. He’s still so weak and sluggish that he can barely buckle his seatbelt.

  “Just sleep, honey,” Mom tells him. “It’ll be a quick ride home.”

  As we pull out of the parking lot, Mom drives so slowly you’d think she was a first time parent with a newborn in the car. Jem leans a little closer to me in the back seat and asks how warm it is outside. “It’s pretty warm.” The rest of us are wearing t-shirts, but he’s bundled up and cold. I put an arm around him to warm up and feel his cheek. It’s clammy.

  “He’s a little warm. Maybe we should take him back to the hospital,” I tell Dad.

  “I don’t want to be in that fucking hospital,” Jem mutters. “I’m fine.” I think the wad of phlegm he proceeds to hork up would beg to differ.