Dessert First (18 page)

Beep didn't die that night, so we didn't need the body bag, but in the morning I did suggest sticking Rachel in it when she whined about how long it took to get coffee going.

Our cute team of buff porters returned, and we packed off for home. While our husky Wishlings carried Beep's stretcher, I walked next to it, holding his hand.

“That was great,” he said about fifteen times, drifting in and out.

I guess we got our miracle: Beep lived long enough to get to the Geminid light show, and the winds carried off the clouds at the right time, leaving us a night sky perfectly dark and clear. It was the best Geminid shower for decades, according to an astronomy blog.

Not the miracle we'd have picked, for a fill-in-the-blank test, but you make do.

• • •

Two mornings later, the Beepster died at home, surrounded by all of us.

It was a Saturday, and Dad was home. Mom had been up the night before with Beep, on death watch, and at one point when she barely dozed off, Beep started making gargling, rattling noises until she put his oxygen mask back on. Mom was exhausted. She went off to bed with Dad, while Rachel and I sat up with Beep, after promising to get her and Dad if Beep seemed like he was about to go. Beep hadn't been conscious in a day.

Rachel and I talked quietly, mostly about Beep, and watched him. At some point, he started shifting, rolling to one side, then the other, and arching his back, like he couldn't get comfortable, even unconscious. I looked at Rachel. She said, “Should I get Mom and Dad?”

I didn't know how I knew, but I knew he was going, like she did. “Yeah. Now.”

Rachel rousted them, and they trailed in after her, still groggy.

Standing at the head of the hospital bed in our living room, Rachel started singing songs from Green Day, Beep's favorite band. (Beepster was an old-school little guy.) She started quietly, then her voice got stronger, perfect, clear, but with a little quaver, the part about how summer is gone and innocents don't last.

I was holding one of Beep's hands. Dad was holding the other. Mom was stroking his smooth small head, where his soft, tufted hair had come back in.

“I love you. I'm so proud of you, son.” Dad's voice broke, and he started crying, and he couldn't say any more.

Mom was murmuring, over and over. “My little boy. My little boy. I love you. Please don't go.”

I was doing counter-programming, telling him it was okay, and he should. “We'll be okay, Beep. We love you. Go toward the light. You don't have to hurt anymore. We love you so much.”

Rachel kept singing, with that beautiful voice, the part about pain falling from the stars. Then Beep stopped breathing, but we kept holding him and talking to him, while Rachel sang. Rachel went on to another Green Day song, “Last Night on Earth,” about how Beep could rest assured that she was sending all her love to him. It was the most beautiful good-bye gift. She prepared it all for Beep. Rachel doesn't even like Green Day—their music was too interesting.

Rachel's voice quavered on the final line, holding that note so long. Then we hung out quietly, together, around the hospital bed in the living room. We hugged each other and cried and talked about Beep, and about how he never needed the Valium dropper. I told Rachel her singing was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. Dad turned off Beep's oxygen compressor, and when its gurgling wheeze stopped, the house got way too quiet.

After a while, Dad called the funeral home and the hospice ladies and the medical equipment company, and pretty soon a bunch of strangers were in our house.

The hospice ladies came and hugged us all, those long nurturing hugs that last half a minute. They put Beep's time of death on some official certificate, and one of them signed a form, while the other one took the Valium dropper bottle.

“Kind of a shame to have that go,” Rachel said. “It'd be nice if we could squirt a little liquid Valium under Mom's tongue, as needed.”

“Yeah.” I put my arm around Rachel and leaned in to whisper. “But that little bottle wouldn't last twenty minutes.”

We wrapped Beep up in a white sheet and the guys from the funeral home let Dad and Rachel and me carry him out to the back of their car, a beetle-black long dark station wagon like a vampire prom limousine, with curtains in the back. While we watched, they took my brother away.

Then Mom collapsed, sobbing, on the sidewalk. We surrounded her, first trying to pick her up, but that turned into a kneeling group hug while we all shook. Then there was an awful, awful howl, like a siren, but full of agony and loss and something broken and gone, and it went on for seconds before I realized it was coming from me.

Rachel sang again at Beep's funeral, and I joined in on vocals during the chorus and played electric guitar, especially butchering the opening to “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Mom's friend Mrs. Castlewitz played electric violin, so between her and Rachel's great voice, we had plenty of production value to cover my mistakes.

When we got back to our seats, Calley Rose and Amber gave me little hand hugs, reaching from the row behind me to squeeze my shoulders.

“You sang perfect. Beautifully,” I whispered to Rachel. “Sorry I played so bad.”

“You were fine.” She put her arm around me. Under that comforting touch, something broke in me. I leaned into her, and buried my face in her shoulder, grabbing her with one arm, like I was never letting go. She wrapped the other arm around me, and I put both of mine around her.

During the eulogy part, someone's cell phone went off and I whispered to Rachel, “It's resurrection calling.”

Afterward, we stood outside, shaking hands with everyone as they left, and eleven zillion or so people shook our hands and hugged us. They all said “What a beautiful service” and told Rachel how wonderfully she sang and fibbed to me that I also played and sang the chorus well. And every single one of them said “I'm
so
sorry.”

I wanted to say back, “Apology accepted. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't your fault.” I didn't, though. Turns out, even I can keep a lid on it in extreme circumstances.

On the way out, Evan didn't say anything. He just gave me the longest hug. Which was way better than “I'm so sorry” eleven zillion and one.

We had an after party at our house that Mom called a reception. I didn't feel like hearing “I'm so sorry” twelve zillion more times, so I mostly hid out in a corner with Evan and ate poppy seed cake with ice cream.

Evan leaned close. “Don't let your parents try to make you forget Beep”—approximately the weirdest thing he'd ever said.

Before I could ask him what he meant, Mrs. Umbriss tottered over on stiletto heels under piled-up dark hair. “I guess God needs little angels.” She wiped away a tear.

“Excuse me?” I said. “If God is all-powerful, he can solve his staffing shortages without child labor. Recruited through freaking
cancer
.” I wanted to pelt her with cupcakes and then shove her face into a plateful of macaroni salad—give her another something to cry about. Instead, I grabbed Evan's sleeve and pulled him away and toward Mom. “You're coming with me, but you have to promise to not talk.”

“Okay.” He leaned back slightly, though, as I dragged him along.

I told Mom we were walking to Thousand Oaks Park, where Beep used to play when he was little, to say good-bye to him.

Mom compressed her lips into a
how will I explain you're not here
tight white line, but I had her. Was she going to say, “No, Kat—you're not allowed to mourn your brother your way”? No. Besides, it would be even harder to explain if I started bashing her guests for saying stupid things or shoving their faces into little plates full of food until they couldn't even mumble.

On my way out, Rachel shot me an annoyed look, maybe because if she thought of it first, she could have used the saying-good-bye-to-Beep-at-the-playground excuse to sneak off with her actual boyfriend Brian. But now the excuse was taken, because I said it first. As usual.

So Evan and I walked the few blocks to the park and sat in the swings, like little kids. It was overcast and had rained, so the playground sand was wet, under gray clouds.

Finally I just sat in the swing and cried, closing my eyes while the tears trickled out, pretending I was invisible. When I opened them, Evan was finishing a message he'd dug into the wet sand of the playground with his heel. I walked over. In big letters, it read,
There will be sunshine again, someday.
Then he drew a heart shape with his heel. It was cheating on the no-talking rule, but I didn't mind.

I gave him a quick hug to say thanks, and stepped away. “We should go back,” I said.

He put out his hand, offering to hold mine on the walk.

I just looked at it.

Six totally stupid reasons I didn't hold hands with Evan:

1. I was so freshly wounded from Beep dying, I couldn't bear the hurt of also maybe messing up my friendship with Evan. We were back to best friends, and I didn't have anybody else. I needed him to be there, not just be some boy who might break up with me.
   
2. I didn't want to use my brother dying as the excuse to get a boyfriend. That didn't seem right. Plus, I didn't want Evan to be only a pity boyfriend.
   
3. If I walked back in holding hands with Evan, Mom would have freaked, that I'd snuck off from Beep's wake to hang out with a boyfriend, without even changing my name to Rachel.
   
4. My hands were rough from the hand-washing and hand-sanitizer-rubbing that comes with hanging around a cancer kid with a missing immune system. For Evan, it would have been like holding hands with a chapped sandpaper brick.
   
5. Hunter, 3000 miles away, was calling himself my (possibly dying) boyfriend. Even though I wasn't Hunter's actual girlfriend, holding hands with Evan would have made me feel weirdly disloyal to a possibly dying guy.
   
6. I have no idea. Those first five reasons I made up afterward. At the time, I wanted to take Evan's hand, but somehow couldn't. I was afraid. What I did instead: crossed my arms in front of myself and gave him a shake of my head.
   

He looked forlorn, and let his hand drop, and I knew I'd blown it. Except when he's playing guitar, Evan is shy, and I'd rejected him. He wouldn't be offering to hold hands again.

We had Beepster cremated and put him in a dark lacquer urn, a little bigger than a water bottle. It was closed and looked like a polished flower vase with a clamped lid. Like some sealed magic bottle for a genie—except, of course, that when you rubbed it (a) no genie came out and (b) no magic wish came true. I tried.

Next year, when the Geminid meteors would be back in Earth's atmosphere, we were going to scatter Beep's ashes near the campsite where we saw the shooting stars. In the meantime, Beep-in-a-bottle hung out on the mantle above the fireplace in the living room.

The Monday after the funeral and reception, we had to go back to school and to work, to the rest of life, still bleeding from this huge new hole in our world.

So I went from doing something important—taking care of Beep, being there so Mom could get a break and cling to what little sanity she had, even talking Beep through it when he went on to find the light—to doing algebra problems in a daze, in the back of class where the other girls were tying themselves into square knots over who was or wasn't invited to Tracie's birthday party. (There was a rumor that Sara might be on the outs. And on the ins—
moi?
Nope
.
Somehow I wasn't on the invite list. Shocker.)

Except I wasn't ready to let go and move on. And I was trying to figure out how I would make up for not saving my brother—and for maybe helping to kill him—with my borrowed bone marrow.

So I kept writing my cancer blog, and posting on the blood cancer Facebook page and AML cancer forum, and Skyping and emailing with Hunter.

I did let go of one thing. My hair.

I couldn't think of what else to do with myself after Beep died, so a few weeks later in January, I had my hair chopped off.

This was not as completely stupid as it sounds, because I donated it to Locks of Love, which makes hairpiece wigs for cancer kids. Radiation and chemo kill fast-growing cells like hair, so cancer kids' hair falls out. It's especially tough on girls. When they go out in public, ignorant strangers hassle their moms (“I can't believe you let her cut her hair like that”) or call them boys—despite the pink dress.

I was nervous, though. My prior donation, stem cells, hadn't worked out so great. Plus, my hair wasn't super-long, so I'd have to cut it almost completely off to give Locks of Love enough to work with.

Also, I wasn't sure I'd look even semi-okay. The woman at Heads on Solano sold me on the new look by showing me a picture of this cute woman with short spiky red-tipped hair, but the picture was of a gorgeous model, which I didn't have going for me.

I went with it anyway, short, spiky dyed-red highlights in the middle and all. After my bone marrow killed Beep, or at least didn't save him, I wanted to be a different person.

I sat there crying while the hairdresser maimed my hair with scissors and clippers. I was saying good-bye not just to my hair, but also to Beep. And what I had left, when she finished, looked like red squirrel leftovers from a blender, on my head. Not, you know, in a good way.