Maybe One Day (31 page)

Dr. Maxwell had been talking to the nurse, but now she came over to stand by Mrs. Greco.

“He’s saying that we have to stop the medication, Adriana. It’s too dangerous for Olivia. She won’t survive the complete course. We can’t give it to her anymore.”

“Oh my God,” Mrs. Greco whispered, pressing her knuckles against her lips. “Oh my God.” She clutched at Dr. Maxwell, who let Olivia’s mother stand there, grabbing on to her. “Oh my God,” she cried, and she cried it again and again
and again, and even when Mr. Greco and Jake came into the room, she didn’t stop crying those three words over and over, as if eventually God would hear her and he would have to show some pity.

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36

I had some idea that you have to die in a hospital, but it turns out I was wrong.

That night, when Olivia had recovered from the medication that had been supposed to save her life but that had almost killed her, Dr. Gold and Dr. Maxwell approved Olivia’s discharge for the following morning. At first, they’d thought she’d have to stay on oxygen when she went home, but within a few hours of their stopping the new medication, Olivia was breathing on her own again.

Right before I left the hospital, I ran into Dr. Maxwell, who was walking out of another patient’s room across from the elevator. I touched her sleeve lightly, and together we stepped to the side of the hall.

“How long . . .” I took a deep breath. “How long do you
think Olivia will . . . how long do you think she has?”

Dr. Maxwell shook her head and leaned against the wall. “There’s no way to know, Zoe.”

It felt coy, her saying that, and it made me angry. “I don’t mean I need an
exact
number. I mean
approximately
.”

“I think that you could have as long as a few weeks,” she said. Her voice was calm. I could see the distorted reflection of my face in her glasses. “But I don’t want you to count on that.”

I leaned against the wall also, and I closed my eyes. “As long as a few weeks,” I repeated. Like a few weeks was long. Like a few weeks was
anything
.

“These are precious days,” said Dr. Maxwell. I opened my eyes and looked into hers.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.” She slipped her hands into her pockets without taking her eyes off mine. “These are precious days. Don’t squander them.”

When the Grecos’ car pulled into the driveway the next morning, Jake said, “They’re here.” He and Luke and Tommy and I had been sitting and watching one of the Harry Potter movies, and I realized I’d actually gotten caught up in the plot. Maybe everyone else had too and that was why nobody was talking.

We turned off the television and went into the foyer. Mr. and Mrs. Greco senior, who’d been waiting in the kitchen, were
already there. Jake opened the door. Olivia was leaning on her dad’s arm, her mom walking slightly behind them, holding a small suitcase. I stood at the door next to Luke, watching them make their slow progress up the front steps. I did not make eye contact with any of the Grecos.

Upstairs, Olivia’s mom and I helped her into a pair of pajamas. Livvie was rail thin, her spine protruding from her back like a thick rope. We propped up some pillows under her head, and then her mom headed downstairs to get her a protein shake. Apparently it was what the doctors had suggested she drink to keep her strength up.

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?”

I went over to the bed, and she patted the blanket next to her. I sat down carefully, not wanting to shift the bed too much. “Do you think your mom will let you stay over tonight?”

Frankly, even if my mom had a problem with it, if Olivia wanted me to stay, I was staying. But Mrs. Greco was going to be trouble. There were about a million people staying at the Grecos’. Mr. Greco’s parents were there already. Mrs. Greco’s parents were arriving that evening, and her brother was flying in from California the next day. Mrs. Greco had never liked what she referred to as
a crowded house
. “Your mom’s never going to say yes,” I said.

Livvie rolled her eyes. “I’m dying, Zoe. She
has
to let you stay over.”

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37

Time does not care how precious it is, how hard you are working not to squander it.

Time passes.

“What do you think people did before television?” I asked. We were lying on Olivia’s bed, her mom’s laptop propped up in front of us. I’d gone downstairs to get Olivia the bowl of sorbet she was currently eating.

It was hour six of our
Glee
marathon.

“You mean in general?” Olivia asked. “Or just when they were dying?”

“I was thinking about dying,” I admitted, taking a bite of my own sorbet.

Olivia dipped her spoon into the glass bowl and took a small bite as she considered my question. Then she swallowed.
“I bet they read the Bible a lot,” she said.

She took another bite, and I pressed play.

At school one day, Stacy told me they were talking about canceling the prom. “It’s hard, though,” Stacy explained. “Because, you know, Olivia’s not a senior.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see how that would be a tough call.”

The relatives arrived. Cousins of Mr. and Mrs. Greco’s. Mr. Greco’s sister. Sometimes when I walked into the house, it felt almost like a party was going on, and in what I guess was a Pavlovian response to seeing a huge group of people gathered together, I got excited for an instant before I remembered why they were all there.

Jake got into Rutgers. Calvin got into Middlebury, and he said something about how Vermont wasn’t that far from New Jersey, and I realized he was thinking about us and next year and I realized I was supposed to be glad, but I just didn’t feel anything. Not even when I kissed him.

I went over to Olivia’s after school one afternoon, and when I pushed open the door of her room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, just kind of staring at the air in front of her. Normally she was surrounded by people, but today she was alone.

“Hey,” I said.

“You know what I was just thinking?” she asked.

I walked into the room and shut the door. “Tell me,” I said.

Slowly, she swiveled her chair around in a circle. “I was thinking I’m never going to live in Manhattan.”

My eyes stung, and I bit my lip to keep from crying.

Olivia continued to turn the chair in slow circles, her head back so she was staring at the ceiling. “And I’m never going to go to Paris. And I’m never going to get married.” She hesitated briefly, then pushed off on her foot and gently turned a quarter of the way around so that she was facing me. “And just for the record, I was right. I’m going to die a virgin.”

I nodded and swallowed hard so I could speak. “I know,” I said.

She closed her eyes. “I feel like there are all these things I should be doing, and all I can do is sit here and think about them.” She got to her feet and slowly made her way over to the bed. “And even that tires me out.”

Together, we helped her get settled under the covers. In a few minutes, she was asleep.

A hospice nurse came every morning and checked Olivia’s vital signs and helped Olivia take a bath and get dressed. That was just life now. It was weird, sure. But if you’re getting dressed and taking a bath—even if you need
help
to do those things—then you’re still alive. There was a lot of talk of morphine.
When she needs morphine
.
If she’s uncomfortable, we’ll start her on morphine
. Nobody told me this, but slowly I realized that morphine would mean Olivia was dying.

But she wasn’t taking morphine now, and morphine could be, for all we knew, a long way away.

At lunch one day, there were artichoke hearts in the salad bar. Mia was pissed. There was talk of the community service coordinator’s being fired due to budget cuts, and Mia had been working on a film about how much good the community service requirement did for the student body. “Right there.” She pointed at the salads Lashanna and I had made. “Right there is your community service budget.”

Lashanna and I looked at each other. Then I said to Mia, “It’s a really good salad.”

“Seriously, Mia,” said Lashanna, holding out an artichoke heart on her fork. “You should try it.”

Because even though Olivia was dying, we still ate lunch.

My mom let me take the car to school so I could visit with Olivia during my free periods and make it back for class. One day when I went to visit, Livvie was sleeping. I told Mrs. Greco I’d come again later, and I drove back to school and then sat in my car in the parking lot. I started crying. I heard Jake and Calvin and Sean walk by, but I thought they didn’t see me because I was hunched over the steering wheel. A few minutes
later, the passenger door opened, and Calvin got in. I was still crying. He took my hand.

“Let me help,” Calvin said quietly.

I thought about all the times I’d made out with him so I could forget about Olivia’s being sick.

Then I thought about Olivia lying in her room knowing she was going to die.

“Zoe?”

I managed to take a few long, deep breaths. “The thing is . . .” I was about to start crying again, but I swallowed and stared hard at the steering wheel, tracing its pocked pattern rather than thinking about what I was about to say. “The thing is,” I repeated, clearing my throat, “I can’t . . . I can’t do this anymore.” Gently I extracted my hand from his.

He didn’t respond. When I couldn’t stand it, I filled in the silence. “I’m sorry, Calvin. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t do this,” he said. His voice was low but firm. “Please.”

I turned to face him. His eyes bored into mine, and I couldn’t meet his stare for more than about a second before I had to look back at the steering wheel. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Zoe . . .” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tracing the edge of the seat with his index finger.

It wasn’t enough to
look
away—remembering what his hands felt like on my body made me need to
get
away. So even though it was my car, I opened the door and stepped out.
Calvin started to say something, but I shut the door before I could hear what it was.

When I went to my locker after school, there was an envelope taped to it with my name on it. Inside were my car keys.

There was no note.

Later that same afternoon, I arrived at the house as the hospice nurse was leaving. We met on the sidewalk.

“Hi, Zoe,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. I couldn’t remember her name. She was an Asian woman, so slender and graceful that she could have been a ballerina.

“How are you doing?” she asked. She put her hand on my arm. The hospice nurses were always touching you. I didn’t mind it, actually.

“I don’t know. Okay, I guess. How is she today?”

That was the question I always asked when I first got to the house.
How is she today
? And Mr. or Mrs. Greco or the nurse or one of Olivia’s grandparents would say,
She’s a little tired this morning
or
She had a rough night
or maybe just
She’s doing fine
.

“She’s doing fine,” said the nurse.

I glanced up at the house. It looked like it always looked. Then I looked back at the nurse. “Do you . . . I was just wondering if . . .” I took a deep breath. “Do you know how
much longer she has?”

“Oh, honey.” The nurse looked deep into my eyes. “That’s the thing about dying. Nobody knows how long it takes.”

“Right,” I said. I’d been on the verge of crying, but I swallowed my tears. I thanked the nurse, and I watched her get into her car and drive away.

I thought about what she’d said as I made my way up the walk.
Nobody knows
. Even Dr. Maxwell didn’t know. She’d said it could be weeks. If it could be weeks, why couldn’t it be months?

And if it could be months, why couldn’t it be years?

“I’m having the weirdest thought,” said Olivia. It was nineteen days after she’d come home from the hospital, and I was sleeping over, lying on the trundle bed right next to her bed. She’d been dozing for a lot of the day, but we’d watched some more
Glee
and then a few
Law and Order
episodes.

I got up on my elbow, facing her. The shades weren’t down all the way, and just enough light from the streetlamp came into the room for me to make out Olivia in the darkness. “What?” I asked.

“I’m thinking . . .” Her mouth was dry, and I could tell it was hard for her to swallow. “I’m thinking maybe if we went somewhere else, I’d be okay. Like, what if in New Jersey I’m dying of leukemia, but in Alaska I’m fine.”

In my head, I pictured Alaska as miles and miles of white.
Endless white. I could almost feel the burn of the cold on my cheeks. We could hide out there. Leukemia would never find her there.

“Let’s go,” I said quietly. “We could get in the car and go.”

“Road trip!” she whispered. And then, even more quietly, “I wish we could really go.”

I started to cry. “Me too,” I said. “I wish we could really go too.” In the dark, she reached over and took my hand.

I leaned across the space between our beds and wiped at her cheeks, but her tears were coming too fast for my fingers, and I had to let them fall. A few minutes later, still holding my hand, she fell asleep.

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38

When I woke up in the morning, Olivia was restless and out of it. She was sort of tossing her head, and she moaned quietly once. Then it seemed like she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, not even when she clutched me by the hand and said, “I have it. It’s in the closet, Zoe. It’s in the . . .” The last word was all muddled. She seemed agitated, so I went to the closet and opened the door, but that didn’t calm her down. I looked around, thinking she wanted me to find something for her, but there was nothing besides her clothes. I went to get her mom, who called the hospice nurse, who said she’d be right over.