We Were Never Here (5 page)

Who knows what time it is when an X-ray tech guy comes into my room with a portable machine, covering my chest with something that resembles a bulletproof vest—if I close my eyes, I can imagine I'm a cop, with a gun I'm not afraid to use,
bang, bang!
Maybe, I think as he takes a picture—
poof!—
from outside of the room, I have some special baffling disease that no one has ever seen before? This pleases me, like maybe they'll write up my case in a special journal. They could name the disease after the doctor who has cured me.

I'm listening to Velvet Underground when my parents walk in with their
looks
, and then the surgeon too, and I take the buds out of my ears before I turn the music off. I can hear Nico singing, all throaty and drugged:
I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don't know . . .
while I wait for them to tell me about my incurable disease.

Here it is: it is not cholera or consumption or any of those unnameable illnesses in old novels, those diseases that can, like,
take you
. I have: ulcerative colitis.

Bleh.

They're talking, but I'm not listening. Okay, so I won't be
possessed
or
consumed
, though my colon, which they are saying is one of the few vital organs a person can live without, might be taken. I might have to have surgery to get it out of there. Out of me.

“The colon is getting bigger and bigger,” Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, says, moving his hands farther and farther apart. His hands are pudgy, and I think of them dissecting me, pulling back my skin to expose muscle and fat. “If it grows too large, it could explode. Do you know what happens when a colon explodes inside a little girl?”

Am I the little girl in this scenario? What happens to her? I would lie if I said I'm not totally alarmed.

My parents nod.

“It's very dangerous,” the surgeon says.

“We need to
save the colon
,” my father says. He says it to the surgeon; he says it to my mother; he says it to the nurse, who smiles away from him. He says it to me now as he sits on the very, very end of my bed. “Surgery!” he says, head in his hands. “Whatever we have to do,” he says to my mother when the surgeon leaves. And then to me. “Lizzie,” he says. “My Lizzie, my poor Lizzie,” he says.

And then he has to turn away.

After my parents leave, I call Zoe. From the landline. The novelty has worn off; I'm getting sick of this no-cell-phone policy. I know that phones can interfere with pacemakers and that, a nurse told me, it can short-circuit a ventilator (what the hell? I don't even know what people are saying in here anymore), and while I have
not seen a cell phone in use, it's true, I'm not exactly trolling the communal bathrooms and lounges for people using them in secret. Besides, I feel like my mother has just taken mine and made up all these rules. I feel like she has done this so I will not have access to the web, so I will not be able to understand what's really happening to me. Surprisingly, I feel a little relieved. I don't want to go into the dark tunnel of the internet, where I can find all these stories about people with this disease. It is a dark, lonely hole in there, I know that it is.

It's a dark hole outside too. I am missing everything. I am missing the beginning. Junior year. I am missing discovering all the newness. I don't want to know who else is starting during preseason. I don't want to know who's Frenchie. I already know Dee-Dee got the part of Rizzo. I am a horrible person, but I cannot stand everyone's good news.

So instead I just call Zoe to tell me the truth and deliver me more crappy news.

“Okay!” she says when I tell her the name of this thing I now have, and I can tell she's psyched to just have a task, like a concrete thing she can do to help. “It's
diseased
. The colon,” she says. And then, like it's friggin' show-and-tell, she recites, “‘The colon is a six-foot-long vital organ where all the water is taken out of the food you digest before it leaves the body. It connects to the small intestine, which sucks out the nutrients before the digested food hits the colon, where it sits and waits to be
eliminated
.'”

Vital
. That word again.

There is a pause, and then I hear the rapid-fire sound of my sister typing. “Okay, this site is more clinical,” she says.
“‘Ulcerative colitis is the result of an abnormal response by your body's immune system,'” she reads.
Blah, blah, blah
, is what I hear; just squawking. My ears hurt from the sounds.

Then more artillery fire at the keyboard. “So you've just had a super-serious flare-up. You can be throwing up, and obviously there can be blood in the
stools
.” Now she giggles.
Giggles!

“Really?” I say. But it comes out teeny.

“Sorry,” Zoe tells me. “So it says that some people have this for a long time and go in and out of remission and flare-ups. I think your colon is just giving out,” she says. “I'm so sorry, Lizzie.”

Fantastic. Why, then, does everyone want to save it?

“Do you want to know the rest?” Zoe asks. “I mean, what happens if they have to remove it?”

“Is it bad?” I ask her. Zoe. For some reason I remember the two of us flying a rainbow kite on the longest string. I know my father is behind us, steering, but I don't see him.

Zoe clears her throat. “Yes,” she says.

I'm silent. I listen and I don't listen. I still can't make myself think about it. Apparently you can't just get your colon taken out and walk back into your old beautiful life. I can't let myself think about it. I see the blue of the sky, the soft white clouds; I see the rainbow kite soaring. And then I see him: there's my father letting go.

Now the new thing is not what is wrong with me but the thing is to:
Save the colon!
So how will we know when we've saved it? Is a bill passed? Does a school stay open? Does an innocent man walk free?

There are, apparently, a million and one ways. Several types of new medications in many kinds of combinations. Massage. Herbs.

“What about a fecal transplant?” I hear my mother say to a doctor or a resident outside. Did I hear her
correctly
?

Save the Colon.
It's like a cheer at a football game, which, for the record, I'm also about to miss. I can picture the bleachers filled up with everyone, the weather turning. I can hear that stupid marching band. I used to feel bad for the kids in marching band, their tall hats always off-kilter, their heavy tubas and trombones marked with greasy fingerprints. But then, when I thought more about it, I was in awe of them. Can you imagine? Making that kind of music while walking?
Marching?
Well.

I wonder now if I'll be out by homecoming, but part of me knows that even if I am, I won't be there. At the game. I can't imagine caring. I never cared, for the record, about football,
though sitting on the bleachers up from the field, hanging out with my friends, that was something that was once fun. But king and queen? It was not even a concern. Other things I'm about to miss: all the parties the seniors weren't going to let me and my friends into anyway. Preseason. Sitting at a desk with
Wuthering Heights
, raising my hand. The future. It's happening without me.

I'm having these lovely thoughts when my mother comes in with her coffee.

“Okay, lover,” she says. “Up, up, up.”

I have secretly always loved it when my mother called me that. “But don't you think it's best for me to save my strength?” I try. Honestly, though. Shouldn't my colon be resting too?

She sips her coffee. “When,” she asks, her mouth around the lip of the paper cup, “is best for your schedule?”

My mother. And her
coffee
. I don't drink it, but still it taunts me.

“Later,” I say. “God, Mom, later.”

She sips.

My food goes in through an IV from the bag of TPN, a kind of milky, liquid food that's supposed to provide nutrients. Even though I know I'm losing weight, I'm convinced it's going to make me gain thirty pounds. If I get out of here, I won't even get to leave
skinny
.

I take a breath, but it's like I can't catch it. I am so weak. I am so small. I am just about to give in to trying to get up when there's another knock at the door, and I see the little snout again.

“Verlaine!” my mother says. “Come on in, you guys! You're here early, Connor.”

I feel my face get hot with embarrassment, and I tilt my head
and look at my mother with the biggest eyes I can muster, which she also chooses to ignore.

“Thanks!” Connor says.

I mean, the wrinkled oxford shirt, the perfect-fitting jeans. And the long, light eyelashes? The gray-blue eyes? Come on.

Verlaine's dog mouth is smiling, and his big tail is wagging. It would be nice to pet him again, it's true, but now I've got this whole, like,
layer cake
made of shame—the
diagnosis
layer and then the falling-on-my-face layer and then the layer that is me lying here practically naked—and I can't deal at all. “We're talking.” I nod to my mother, who I hope will have my back.

“Oh, sorry,” Connor says, pulling back on the red leash. I swear Verlaine stops smiling. “I'm just doing a quick hello before school. I like to check in and see who is up for a real visit later. But usually everyone's around in the morning for checking in.”

You got that right, I think. That's for sure. We're all
around
.

“Also just checking in. After our talk and all.”

“Talk?” says my mother, and I feel my face get even hotter, and so I know it's even more red.

“I'm fine,” I say. “I'm totally fine. Thank you.”

Why isn't this boy out playing lacrosse or sailing, knee bent on the bow of a boat on the Chesapeake? That is where he belongs, not here in the land of darkness and doom. If he were in here, though, as a patient, I bet his mother would just sit by his bed, quietly holding his hand. There would always be fresh flowers on the side table and cold filtered water on the swingy table.

“Come on in!” my mother says. “Hi, sweetie,” she says to the dog, who wags his way over to her. “I was just going to get some
coffee,” she says, and then she, like, hides her coffee! Mortifying. I touch my head, feel the dreadlocks forming on my scalp. No, dreads would be more fashion-forward, though totally wrong for me, deeply wrong. Wrong on so many levels. But I haven't washed my hair since camp! I am a monster. Revision: I am a monster who has not bathed.

My mother is out the door before I can convince her not to go, using my extreme illness, my new superpower, for good.

Connor scrapes what I have come to think of as my mother's chair over to the side of my bed.

Verlaine sits next to him.

Thelma stirs.

“Perhaps I should properly introduce myself,” he says.

I blush. Again. Can he see it on my sick, gray face? “Yes?” I say.

“I'm Connor.” He holds out his hand. “Connor Bryant.”

His hair sort of swishes to the side, as if it's forever being blown in the wind. His lips are the slightest bit chapped.

“Lizzie Stoller,” I say, sort of sticking my hand out and letting him shake it.

“So,” says Connor. “Tell me everything.”

Maybe it's because my mother isn't here to watch me. Maybe it's that I can't eat this cake of shame anyway. Or that I've really got nothing left to lose here. Whatever the reason, I consider the question.

“Okay,” I say slowly. But what have I got to tell him?

“It doesn't have to be a thing. It can be a feeling.”

I look at him, and I know my face says
what the hell
. “A feeling?”

“Yes.” He reaches down and pets Verlaine.

Who is this person? What is he doing in here, precisely? I wonder. But I don't ask him. Who cares really? I am in a jar. I'm like a firefly in here, bumping up against the glass, frantic, the holes my father has punched into the metal cap the only way air gets in. My blinking light just might go out in here.

“I'm tired,” I say. But I don't mean it like I need sleep, which I very much do. You cannot sleep in here at all.

He nods.

“Of being me. In here. I wish I could just be the kind of sick person who is sad and upset and shows it. Who's, I don't know, vulnerable.” I shrug.

He nods again.

“That's annoying,” I tell him.

“Is this you being vulnerable?”

I have to laugh. “No. It's all just coming out angry. That's what I'm saying. I'm tired of that. It takes a lot of energy to be pissed off all the time.”

He nods.

“Okay, but it is annoying that you keep nodding! It's like we're in a movie and you're the shrink.”

“Shrink I can do,” he says, pressing his fingertips together and forming a triangle with his hands. “See?”

“I do,” I say. I wonder about Connor.

“What else, Lizzie Stoller?” Verlaine has gone from sitting to lounging. He yawns.

“I'm boring Verlaine,” I say.

“Don't do that,” Connor says. “You're
deflecting
.”

I look hard at Connor. So beautiful and weird and in my
room. It's like he's staring at me through this glass. I'm flying around like crazy and there he is, head tilted, peering in.

“I'm scared,” I say. It just comes out.

Connor stops smiling.

“I'm really scared.” It's all I can say. I feel it all over. It's in everything.

He stands up. He goes to the side of my bed. He touches my arm, and I get goose bumps. Goose bumps.

I go to pull my arm away. But I stop myself.

“I understand,” he says. Connor Bryant says.

I look into his eyes. They're blue and gorgeous and clear, and he looks like he's almost crying.

“Thank you,” I say. And for one brief and fleeting moment I am filled up with gratitude. Just filled up and over. Brimming.

And that's when my mother cracks open the door. “Hello?” she says tentatively. “Guys?”

Connor nods. “We were just going,” he says, readying to leave.

I feel deflated again. Back to the misery.

And then my mother steps inside.