Just Breathe

by Cammie McGovern

  For a long time, I stare at his hand. I wish I were a better actress. I wish my heart wasn’t beating so hard that I’m afraid he might hear it. I wish my hands weren’t sweaty.

  “It’s okay, David. I’m happy to help you.”

  I give him my hand. He squeezes it with both of his and closes his eyes as if this—holding my hand—helps him relax. He takes a deeper breath than he usually can. “Thank you, thank you,” he mouths.

  I want to relax, but I can’t. My heart is beating too much. My throat tightens. It’s hard to breathe. I wonder if this is what he feels like most of the time: dizzy and light-headed because he has to pant.

  Over dinner in the cafeteria that night, it’s hard to make eye contact with my mom, knowing what I’ve just agreed to do. I wish I could tell her everything and explain the real reason I said yes and how it has to do with Dad. More and more I’ve been thinking the worst part of his depression was how he never talked about it or asked for help. If I learned anything while I was in the hospital, it’s the importance of this part—you have to ask for help, and you have to accept it when it’s offered. I know David isn’t depressed, but he’s giving me something my father never did: a chance to help him.

  “Is everything okay with those girls at school?” my mom asks. “You look a little preoccupied.”

  “It’s fine, yeah.”

  “Do you feel like you’re starting to make better friends?”

  It’s a loaded question, she knows. I think about David, first and foremost, Eileen second. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

  Eileen and I have now been to two more classes, and I’ve told my mom a little bit, but not everything. I haven’t told her that I’m supposed to be keeping my eye on Eileen and lately, she’s been making me nervous. Last week, Nicolai showed up halfway through class.

  “Oh my God, there he is,” Eileen whispered to me.

  “Isn’t he kind of a phony?” I said, trying to sound casual. “I don’t think he’s even from Russia.”

  She shrugged. “He never said he was.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No. He’s a senior and he’s a great dancer. What’s the big deal?”

  I wanted to tell her what David had said, but he’d asked me not to repeat our conversations. “I’ve heard he’s not a great guy.”

  “Oh, please.” Eileen smiled. “I’ll be okay.”

  Twenty minutes later, she was dancing with Nicolai, smiling and laughing as they spun circles around the other couples on the floor. Toward the end of class, though, he left early, walking right past Eileen and me without saying anything. She held up her hand and called, “Nicolai! Wait!” loud enough for everyone to hear and stop talking.

  He didn’t turn around.

  The next week, he was there early and they were all flirtation again—smiling and signaling to each other in what looked like some coded language I didn’t understand.

  “Is something going on with you and Nicolai?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why would you think that?”

  How could I say anything or stop what she wouldn’t even admit? We weren’t really friends. We’d been thrown together, and one of us had been charged with keeping an eye on the other. I hadn’t even done a good job with that.

  Chapter Nine

  DAVID

  REAL AIR IS AMAZING. Even though I’m wheeling an oxygen tank beside me, so I’m not breathing 100 percent real air, it still feels different. It’s colder than I expected, which is thrilling and—actually a problem. With all my circulation problems, I get embarrassingly cold easily.

  “Oh God, I didn’t bring you a sweater,” Jamie says, seeing me shudder. “Should I run back and grab something out of lost and found?”

  “Isn’t that full of clothes from people who’ve died?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. But if you’re freezing, who cares?”

  I let her run back because it gives me an excuse to sit down and rest on a corner bench. Walking this far—half a block, maybe two hundred steps—has left me breathless. I need to collect myself so I can take it all in.

  Nothing about this street is pretty. It’s four lanes of traffic and a block full of strip malls on the other side—a nail salon, a drugstore, and a “Checks Cashed Here” place. A month away from all this, and I feel like I’m seeing it with a fresh pair of eyes. Or maybe I never really looked before. I’m feeling so light-headed. I don’t even realize I’m sitting at a bus stop until a bus pulls up and the door opens.

  “You getting on?” the driver says after looking at me for about ten seconds.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” I laugh. “No, I’m just resting!”

  I’m still smiling as the bus pulls away. It’s like everything has changed! The world has filled with buses that stop if you sit down on a random bench to catch your breath!

  “What’s so funny?” Jamie says when she reappears, holding a bright red cardigan sweater.

  “Nothing,” I say, hoisting myself up to put on the sweater.

  “My only fear now is that the ninety-year-old woman who lost this sweater will be in Denny’s and ask for it back.”

  “That would be awkward.”

  For the rest of the walk, I smile. Everything seems funny suddenly. The image of an old woman wanting this sweater back. The bus driver thinking I was waiting for a ride. I lied a little bit when I told Jamie no one would notice or care if I left the hospital. If I asked, I’m sure they would have said no. Now I’m just happy I never asked.

  “So the good thing about Denny’s is that you can order breakfast all day long,” I say when we get there and sit down. It’s probably been ten years since I’ve been to a Denny’s, but nothing seems to have changed, including the menu. “I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking about biscuits and gravy.”

  “Why? Has it been too long since you’ve eaten something that looks like throw-up?”

  “I’m just curious, that’s all. But now that you say that, I’m reconsidering.”

  “And well you might be.”

  I laugh. One of my favorite things about hanging out with Jamie are these funny little sayings she has. “Where does a fifteen-year-old get a phrase like ‘Well you might be’?”

  She smiles and lifts her menu so I can’t see her face. “Just decide,” she says. “We only have an hour left to eat this crap and get back.”

  JAMIE

  It came from my dad, of course. Even as I remember the hard times with my dad, I also keep thinking about the funny things he used to say. Some of them still make me laugh out loud, which makes no sense. After everything that’s happened, how can he still be funny in my mind? But he is.

  Once, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, we walked into a room we thought was empty and then we noticed a guard in the corner, fast asleep in a chair. I was always nervous around museum guards because I was a child and inevitably one followed us from room to room.

  My dad went over and stood near him, squinting as if he were examining a piece of art. Finally, he turned around and said, “It just doesn’t feel alive to me, you know?”

  My dad also said things like “And well you might be,” when I was young and told him I was bored at the museums he dragged me to. It’s unnerving how often I channel my dad’s joking style when I’m talking to David. Whenever he mentions it, some part of me forgets for a second and wants to say, “If you think I’m funny, you should meet my dad.” Then I go quiet.

  Recently a new worry has cropped up in my mind: David likes the Dad-like qualities in me most of all. Even as I find comfort in being like my mom—working hard, thinking about others, learning practical skills—my dad is in me, too, popping out daily to make this boy laugh. It feels like a high-wire act, too risky to get away with for long. I can’t imitate parts of my charming, suicidal father and be sure that only the charming part comes out.

  I change the subject after we’ve ordered, a turkey club for me and something called a breakfast skillet for him. “Apparently it comes i
n the skillet, which sounds like it might be a little dangerous, but it’s the kind of risk I need to start taking, don’t you think?”

  He can’t stop smiling, which makes me smile. Extended sensory deprivation has left him giddy at the sight and smell of what most people would call pretty greasy food.

  “What does Sharon think about you being in the hospital for another two weeks?”

  This is a new development, designed around an aggressive plan to treat the pseudomonas bacteria he’s tested positive for. To stay on the organ transplant list, he needs to get this bacteria under control, which means two IVs a day of powerful new antibiotics. The bacteria will never leave his system completely, but it is possible to manage it. He’s even found some people who blog about living with pseudomonas. Some people are doing okay five or eight years after contracting it. The big thing they can’t do is come into contact with other CF patients. What your body learns to live with could easily kill another person quickly.

  Of course I don’t tell him I know all this. But knowing it makes it easier to feel okay about being here. The two-week extension is mandated not by his numbers but by the companies who manufacture the antibiotic he’s on.

  Now that I’ve asked, I don’t know why I’ve mentioned Sharon at all. If my dad is a risky topic in one way, Sharon is equally risky in others. It might turn this whole meal into one of David’s monologues about how “generous” Sharon is, putting up with his illness. I hardly need David to remind me that “a lot of girls would just run away.”

  “Sharon is . . .” He waggles his fork by pushing down on the tines. “Sharon. I don’t know. Yes, she’s sad that I’m still sick, and I guess maybe I don’t want to talk about Sharon.”

  “Okay.”

  “I also don’t want to talk about my health. I’m sick of talking about my stupid body.”

  “Gosh, what’s left?” I say. “Origami, I guess.”

  He laughs, and I think: Would Dad have made that joke? It’s hard for me to know what he would have thought of origami, because he wasn’t around when I discovered it.

  DAVID

  Being out with Jamie is different from being out with Sharon. Usually, when Sharon and I are out by ourselves, we spend most of the time talking about our friends, which has always seemed fine because they offer an almost unlimited buffet of problems-that-aren’t-our-own to go over. Like Hannah, who is so anxious about college admissions that apparently she no longer sleeps.

  “She keeps saying Adderall isn’t as bad for you as everyone says,” Sharon told me last week.

  “Except for the addiction part,” I pointed out.

  “Right. Except for that.”

  It’s always felt fine to focus on our friends because we have about the same number of equally screwed-up ones. Recently I’ve started to wonder if we dwell on other people’s problems to avoid looking at the possibility that we might have some problems of our own. Lately, she’s been visiting less and calling in the evening instead. She doesn’t want to bring in any germs, she says, or run the risk of making me sicker than I am. To me, it’s pretty obvious that the hospital scares her so much she makes excuses not to come, but neither one of us wants to have that conversation.

  “How come you don’t talk about your friends from school?” I ask Jamie. “Isn’t that—I don’t know—a big topic for tenth-grade girls?”

  She smiles, but I can see a wince behind the smile. “For some tenth-grade girls, it’s a bad topic. It turns out we’re not all alike. I know that might come as a shock.”

  “I guess not, considering you seem about five years older than you are.”

  “Yeah right,” she snorts. “That’s the reason I never get invited to anyone’s house anymore. My maturity.”

  “Did you used to get invited?”

  “I used to have a few girls I thought of as friends. But it turned out I was wrong.”

  “What kind of girls were they? Not that I’m an expert, mind you.”

  “The kind of girls who are competitive about everything, but then they never really win at anything, so they take out their frustration by being mean.”

  “On you?”

  “Yes. Don’t sound so shocked, David. That’s why we’re not friends anymore. Because they were nice to me for a while and then they decided to be mean to me instead.”

  I laugh, which I probably shouldn’t. “I’m sorry, I just have a hard time picturing that. Why would anyone be mean to you when you’re like the nicest person in the world?”

  “I guess Missy didn’t get the memo about me winning that award. She thinks I’m cruel in ways that I need to atone for.”

  “Come on. You? Really?”

  “I don’t remember exactly what I said but supposedly the b-word was involved.”

  Now I laugh so hard, I have to readjust my cannula. I can’t help it. I’m so happy to be outside the hospital, everything seems funny. “I can’t picture that at all, but I love it.”

  “It’s nice that you find it funny, but it’s kind of ruining my life. I have to plan my whole day at school so I can walk down hallways and not run into her.”

  “What would happen if you ran into her?”

  JAMIE

  We’ve been here for forty-five minutes, and this whole time, he’s been smiling. I’ve already told him this story isn’t funny, and his expression keeps saying, Yes, it is.

  And it occurs to me: maybe this is funny. If Dad were alive, he’d have made jokes about Missy the day after it happened. By now he’d have turned it into an elaborate story that had very little to do with what actually happened. I tell David the first part. How Missy got the idea that she wanted us to be friends with cooler guys, not the ones in our classes but the soccer players who none of us knew.

  “She invited them to her house and told them she was having a big party, like fifty people. When they showed up, it was just four of us and four of them. You could tell they thought it was weird, but she acted like nothing was wrong and teamed us up into boy-girl pairs and forced us to play get-to-know-you games where you ask each other embarrassing questions and tell the group afterward whether you thought your partner lied or not. Does that sound like a strange game to you?”

  “Very.”

  “To me it was. The guy I was paired with got mad and left after about a half hour. Then the other guys all said they had to go, too. Afterward, I told Missy we shouldn’t trick people into being friends with us, and she said it was my fault. That my guy would have stayed longer if I’d been friendlier to him.”

  “She sounds awful, Jamie.”

  “Sometimes she’s not. I don’t know. She said the popular kids played games like that all the time.”

  “No. Popular people would never do something overtly mean like that. They’d be much more subtle. Of course, they’d still be mean.”

  “Really?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  I give him the edited version of what happened the next weekend—how Missy invited us all for a sleepover to talk about planning a “real party” with the fifty people she was pretending to be friends with last time. After listening to her talk for what felt like forever, I blew up and started screaming uncontrollably. I tore up the list she was making. I said she was full of bullshit. That none of these people were our friends. That she had no idea what it meant to really be a friend. “For this split second I thought they would all agree with me. Like it would be a relief that someone had finally said the truth out loud. But it turned out—no.”

  “Marcus Aurelius would say the best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury. Or obviously her in this case.”

  “Since Missy only cares about being popular, and I have no friends, I guess I’ve accomplished that.”

  “You can’t say that anymore. You have friends.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and Eileen.”

  He says that as if it’s simple, but it’s not. I’m not really friends with Eileen, even though I like her. And once David comes bac
k to school, we probably won’t be friends there, either.

  On the walk back to the hospital, he seems to have more energy, not less. Maybe he was right when he said his health would get better outside the hospital. He’s definitely walking faster now. Almost like he’s forgotten where we’re going.

  “Here’s the thing about girls like Missy,” he says. “You got under her skin by speaking the truth.”

  We’re almost back at the hospital. I stop walking so he can catch his breath.

  “It was stupid of me. I created a lot of problems, and I shouldn’t have. That’s all.”

  “Still, it’s good to speak the truth. We should all do it more.”

  We’re standing about ten feet from the side door of the hospital.

  “Look,” I say. “We’re back!”

  His whole expression changes. The smile fades. “Oh my God, you’re right.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird—I just . . . forgot for a second.”

  My heart breaks a little. “I think it’s okay if you want to do this again. I mean—you’re right. You’re stronger than they think. You should be able to get outside once in a while.”

  He looks up at me, with an expression that I haven’t seen on him in ages—happy and hopeful. “You’d do this again?”

  I don’t promise anything. I can’t; it’s too risky.

  The whole elevator ride up, we don’t speak. When we’re back in his room, he surprises me. “My friends can be the same way. So phony that being around them sometimes feels lonelier than being by myself.”

  I’m shocked to hear him say this. I know his friends don’t come around as much as they used to, but I assume they all keep up with him online. He’s never complained about them before, but now that I think about it, he doesn’t say much of anything about them.

  The next day at school, I sit a few tables away from David’s friends. From a distance they look like they’re having a great time—laughing at each other’s jokes, leaning in to hear what someone else is saying. They’re not all beautiful like the table full of football players and cheerleaders, but they exude a certain confidence, like they know they’re going to take over the world someday.