Secret for a Song (5 page)

Z
ee
led us to her car, a bright yellow speedy thing that looked ridiculously expensive.

“You’re
getting in the back,” she said to Drew. “I need time to get to know my new best
friend.”

Drew
draped an arm around me, leaning in to mock-whisper a secret in my ear. Even
through my heavy jacket, the parts of my back and shoulders he touched seemed
to ignite, to be engulfed in the hottest flame. I held my breath and watched
his cane support his weight as leaned into me.

“Don’t
be afraid,” he said. “She’s this crazy with everyone. It’s not just you.”

His
words curled around my ear. I wanted to close my eyes and take them in, but I
pretended to laugh along with the two of them. When Drew moved away to get into
the back of the car, I felt a pang, a loss. “Absurd” didn’t even begin to
describe what I was doing, what I already felt for this man. It was madness,
plain and simple.

The
car smelled like fresh leather and lemon cleaner. Zee ran a hand over the
dashboard. “Like my new baby? Twenty-second birthday present from my parents.”

“It’s
beautiful,” I said. I wondered who it’d go to when she died. Did Zee think
about such things constantly, thoughts about her mortality and looming death
eating away at her insides like tiny termites? Was she completely hollow, made
up of jokes and laughter and mirth until she was back alone in her room?

I
took out my phone and texted Mum to tell her I’d be late.

“You
live around here?” Drew asked.

“Yes.”
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. His blue eyes were all I could see,
and flushed with the strange intimacy of the moment, I looked away. “My parents
have a home in The Mills.”

“Ooh
la la, very nice,” Zee said, signaling left at the stoplight. Her car tinkled.
“I’m slumming it with my parents in Statestown.”

“You’re
slumming
it in your four-bedroom house?” Drew laughed. “I don’t even
want to know what I’m doing in my downtown studio apartment.”

“You
live by yourself?” I glanced at him in the rearview again before glancing away.

“Yeah.
It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Zee’s over there all the time, bugging me.
I can never get a moment’s peace. Maybe now that she has you it’ll be
different.”

I
looked at the way they laughed together, their easy banter. Was there something
more there, just beneath the surface?

I’d
only been to Sphinx once, in high school. The casual restaurant/bar had changed
in four years. The crowd was less teens looking to get alcohol illegally and
more young adult, people in college living alone. When we walked in, several of
the patrons looked up and nodded or smiled at Drew and Zee.

“I
guess you can tell we come here a lot,” Zee said. “Hey, Ralph!” she called to a
waiter. “Usual, please.”

The
guy flashed her a thumbs-up sign and looked at me. “And what about you?”

“Um,
just a, uh, a coffee, please.” I felt like my social bones were stiff with
disuse, popping and creaking awkwardly at my effort to exercise them. I glanced
sideways at Drew to see if he was staring, but he was already sprawled on a
couch in the lounge area and pulling some papers out of his messenger bag.

I
took a seat on a recliner and Zee collapsed melodramatically on the couch next
to him, hoisting her feet up so her boots were on his papers. He pushed her
legs off impatiently. “Not now, Zee.”

She
didn’t seem to mind his tone. Rolling her eyes at me, she said, “He’s on a
mission and can’t be disturbed.”

 I
smiled a little awkwardly. “What mission?”

“It’s
always something new,” Zee replied.

“It’s
important,” Drew said, moving the sheet of paper on top to the back. He looked
up at me. “It’s a petition for a TIDD member.”

“Jack
doesn’t come to TIDD anymore,
ergo
, he is not a member,” Zee said, as
Ralph brought us our coffees. “Thanks, hon. Put it on my tab, will ya?”

I
took my coffee and tried to pay, but Ralph shook his head, his hoop earrings
jangling. “First time no charge,” he said. “Hope you’ll come back.”

“Stop
flirting with her and give me my coffee,” Drew said, feigning annoyance. “What
do I have to do to get some service around here?”

I
watched them, my brain teeming with questions. How could they act like this,
like it was any other day? Didn’t they want to go skydiving or setting world
records? Why were they wasting their time with me when these were their last
days? I felt like this was all just a dream, a surreal, bizarre dream from
which I’d wake up at any moment. Maybe Dr. Stone and I’d discuss it at my next
appointment—the implications of coffee and a yellow car.

When
Ralph went back behind the counter, Drew set his coffee on the table in front
of us. “Jack’s too sick to come to TIDD meetings,” he said, as if he and Zee
had never been interrupted. “That doesn’t mean he’s not a member anymore. I
don’t understand why you’re so against this.”

“It’s
just a bad idea for the group to be involved in something so divisive,” Zee
said, her eyes going dark in a way I was sure wasn’t common for her. “We depend
on the hospital administration for fundraisers and other things.” She looked at
me. “They’ve paid for family members’ hotel rooms in the past, when people had
to be hospitalized in a different city. They pick up the bill for stuff like
that all the time. And they’re totally against this plan.”

I
nodded and took a sip of my coffee. It scorched my tongue.

Drew
sighed. “It’s Jack’s choice.”

“Jack
isn’t...all there anymore. You know that. You’ve got to admit it.”

Drew
ran a hand through his hair, a gesture I’d always thought was annoying and
pretentious on guys. On him, it looked genuine. I could see frustration in the
tightness of his jaw. “That’s not his fault. That’s part of the very thing he
wants to stop.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry. We’re probably talking over your head.
The thing is we have a TIDD member who’s too sick to come to meetings now. He’s
got encephalitis—a brain infection—as a complication of cancer. So he wants to
petition the court for physician assisted suicide.”

Physician
assisted suicide. I looked at Drew, sitting there with his cane balanced
against the arm of the couch. I wanted to crawl inside his brain and see what
he felt when he said those words. Was it frightening? Or did he feel like it
didn’t apply to him? I knew what I’d be doing that night: researching more
about Friedrich’s Ataxia, just how quickly it progressed.

“I...see.
That’s, um, euthanasia. Right?”

“Right.”
Drew took a deep breath. “I think it should be his choice.”

“Do
you think the court will approve something like that?”

“It’s
considered a felony in New Hampshire,” Drew replied. “But I’m hoping a petition
from the community might change the court’s mind.”

Zee
made a noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Are you kidding? Do you
live where I live? This little elitist Republican community is never going to
approve of something like that. It’d hurt their delicate sensibilities too
much. Besides, I’m with them on this one. The nature of Jack’s disease makes it
too close to call. How do we know it’s really what he wants and not just what
his addled brain is saying?”

Suicide.
This guy, Jack, wasn’t exactly talking about offing himself in the usual sense
of the word, but he
was
asking to be able to choose how and when he died.
I’d considered it once. It seemed weird that someone like me, someone so used
to bedding disease, would’ve only considered it once. But people with
fictitious disorders, of which Munchausen is the severest, don’t actually want
to die. Many a time we end up dead because we keep making ourselves sicker and
sicker, but that’s not the end result we want when we start. What we’re looking
for is to establish an identity, to hopefully find sympathy or love or whatever
in the eyes of our loved ones.

At
least, that’s what the shrinks said.

Me?
I’d say they were right.

Once,
when I was in the eighth grade, I’d been admitted to the hospital. I had a
severely upset stomach and a high fever, and they were working hard to try and
find the cause for my infection. I remember it was the middle of the night, and
I’d been up and down, alternatively throwing up and thrashing around and even
having the occasional fit when Mum came in to the room. She sat with me, took
my hand, and asked me very seriously if what I wanted was to die. She asked if
that’s what it was all about, my acting out this way, putting them through the
wringer. She said she’d watched me suffer so long that she was seriously trying
to understand my motivation. Surely it wasn’t just that I liked being sick,
right? What kind of fucking weirdo
likes
being sick? We had billion
dollar industries devoted to making people feel better, stronger, faster than
they naturally were. Who spent all her time trying to be weak and sickly?

I
thought about Mum’s question long and hard, I really did. My thirteen-year-old
feverish brain could see that she truthfully wanted to understand me. I thought
she deserved my serious consideration of the matter. But then I realized that I
didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to push through that barrier to the other
side. What she didn’t understand, what no one understood, was that I enjoyed
that place right there
in
the damn barrier. I liked feeling powerless
and sick and diseased.

When
they found out what the cause of my infection was, they discharged me
immediately and gave my parents a referral to yet another therapist.

I’d
been imbibing fecal matter.

Z
ee
insisted on dropping Drew and me off, even though I told her I’d be happy
taking a cab. I watched her out of the corner of my eyes as she drove, her head
bobbing in time to the Bob Marley track on her sound system. One of her braids
was coming undone, and a strand of wispy red hair stuck out at an odd angle. I
had the intense urge to tug on it, see if it would fall out. Her body was
likely still radioactive from all the chemo. I remembered reading somewhere
that the poison from those toxins remained in a patient’s body long after treatment
itself was over.

To
me, it seemed an unfathomable luxury to be a cancer patient. The world was made
to sympathize with cancer patients. They were heroes of billboards on the
interstate, of touching ads with tender music that interrupted our favorite TV
shows. We cheered on celebrities who contracted, and fought, cancer, shaving
our heads when they lost their hair in a show of moral support.

When
we pulled into the gates of The Mills, Drew let out a whistle. “I knew this
place was supposed to be ritzy, but I’d never been inside myself.”

I
spread my hands out magnanimously. “You’re welcome.”

Zee
did that snort-laugh thing.

“Where
did you grow up?” I turned slightly so I was half-facing Drew. That was about
as much as I could handle right then. It was like he had a superpower, like he
could light me on fire simply by looking at me. Even as I thought it, I knew
just how cliché it sounded.

“New
York City,” he said. He tapped the head of his cane against the open palm of
his hand as he talked. I watched, hypnotized. “I loved it, but when it came
time for college, I wanted to go somewhere quieter.” A laugh, a rumbling sound
deep in his throat. “I know, I know. Most kids want to go somewhere to party
when they’re in college. Not me. I’d had enough of that growing up.”

Zee
rolled to a four-way stop sign and I directed her.

“What
do you mean?” I asked. “Were your parents gone a lot or something?”

“Ha.
No. The problem was that they were never gone.” His eyes ran over my face, as
if he was assessing my willingness—or ability—to hear his story. “Look, I don’t
want to lay all this on you the first time we meet. I might scare you off.” He
grinned. “Why don’t you come hang out with us Thursday night and I’ll tell you
more?”

“Oh,
yeah. Come out with us! Pierce’ll be there, too.” Zee bounced slightly in her
seat.

“Come
out where?”

“Sphinx
again. We never go anywhere else.” Drew grinned. “It’ll be fun, though. We’ll
chill, drink a couple of beers—”

I
shook my head at him. “I can’t. I’m only nineteen, remember?” I felt weird
saying that, like I was a child compared to these two with their serious
illnesses and legal ages.

“Oh
yeah, she’s a young ‘un,” Zee said. “That’s okay, they just won’t stamp your
wee hand and you can sit sipping your Diet Coke like a good girl.”

I
laughed.

“So?”
Drew asked, the cane hitting his palm just a touch more rapidly. “Will you
come?”

I
pointed, and Zee pulled up in front of my house.

“Sure.”
I handed him my cell phone, my heart racing. “Put your number in there so I can
text you if anything comes up.” It was, hands-down, the bravest thing I’d ever
done in my life.

I
stood on the driveway and waved as Zee’s bright yellow car zipped off, a little
spot of jaundiced sun on the gloomy street. I clutched my cell phone in my
hand, just a tad heavier now with Drew’s number and Zee’s, too. When I couldn’t
see them anymore, I keyed in the code for the garage and walked into my waiting
house.

My
fingers played with the syringe in my pocket as I stuck my boots by the mudroom
door and ventured out into Mum’s craft nook. She sat hunched over the roof of
her dollhouse doing something to the shingles, her usual cup of tea sitting off
to the side.

“I’m
back.” I held my arms out to the sides, like I was displaying my body for her
to inspect. When I realized that, I let my arms fall back down.

“I
hear.” She didn’t look up. The weird scorching smell of the wood glaze she used
traveled up my nostrils.

“I
ended up volunteering late at the hospital today.” I pulled out a barstool and
sat down, hooking my feet on the spindles underneath.

She
took a sip of tea, glanced at me, and returned to her work. “All right.”

“What
are you doing? To the roof, I mean?” I watched her head, the blue-black of her
hair reflecting the recessed lights in the ceiling.

“Glazing
the shingles.” Her tiny brush paused and she took a deep breath before looking
up at me. “Don’t you have something else to occupy your time, Saylor? You’re
making me nervous, staring at me while I work.”

Childish
rage bubbled in my chest, white hot. “Well, gee, I wish I could, Mum, but it
seems you thought it absolutely necessary that I be pulled out of college to
come home. So if I seem a mite cabin feverish, I guess you only have yourself
to blame. Jesus Christ.”

“Watch
your language.” She sighed, her shoulders rounding out as if she was so tired,
she didn’t have the strength to even hold them up.

“Where’s
Grandma?” I hadn’t realized the question had even been forming when I spat it
out. When she looked up at me, her eyes wide, I felt like my face must’ve
reflected the same surprise.

“What?”

“Where
is she? Is she even still alive? Why did you make her go away?”

When
Mum set her brush down, I noticed with a small measure of spiteful satisfaction
that her hand trembled a touch. “I didn’t
make
her do anything. Why are
you bringing this up now? It’s been thirteen years since you last saw her.”

“So?
Does that mean I don’t have the right to know where my own grandmother
disappeared to? You and Dad won’t tell me anything. It’s like you won’t even
acknowledge that she
exists
. What the hell is wrong with you? How could
you kick your own mother out of your house?”

My
mother took another sip of tea, and I could see she was trying to maintain her
composure. Apparently anger won out, though, because she set her tea cup down
with a crash, spilling some of the liquid onto the table where it beaded and
reflected the light like a pretty piece of glass.

“You
don’t know the first thing about my mother. You think you deserve so much, but
do you ever think about what you
do
to deserve it? What have you ever
done for me? What do you do for anyone besides yourself?”

Her
words cut at me, slashing and ripping, until I was sure my skin was in ribbons.
We stared at each other, breathless. A beat pounded in my head.

Selfish.

Unlovable.

Selfish.

Unlovable.

My
cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out.

Just
making sure you haven’t changed your mind about Thursday! -Zee

Turning
away from my mother, I keyed in,
I haven’t.