Wake (57 page)

“Music and Geography.”

I slap Jem’s hand for getting too close to my box.

“Do you want mine?” Hannah offers Jem her unopened apple juice, probably just to get us to stop horsing around at the table. Jem looks at her like he can’t understand why she would offer and says, “No, I’m not thirsty. I just enjoy harassment.”

I snatch my straw out of his fist while he’s distracted with Hannah, so he steals my pudding in retaliation.

A look of understanding suddenly comes across Hannah’s face, and she smiles. “You guys are cute.”

Everything comes to an immediate grinding, screeching halt. Jem and I both freeze. He drops my pudding back on the tray like it’s hot and gets up from the table. Hannah casts a worried glance after him as he walks away, but I don’t turn to look.

“Should I not have said anything?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I’ll try not to hold the awkwardness against her. She can’t have known. I never told her any of it.

*

I leave Hannah and the others at the spot outside the cafeteria where the hall diverges into three separate corridors and head for my locker. Jem appears at my shoulder out of nowhere and says, “Are you really taking Art?” I startle and he chuckles at me.

“No, I’m not taking Art.”

“What are you taking?”

“I never handed in a form.” I turn away from him to open my locker, but he just leans against the locker beside mine and continues talking face to face.

“Sorry I just took off like that.”

I play dumb. “You left?”

Jem lightly smacks my shoulder and tells me to be serious for a minute. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“You weren’t.”

“Did you tell anyone about that dinner in Ottawa?” He doesn’t want anyone to think we’re dating.

“No. Did you?”

“No one in Smiths Falls.”

I pause with my hand on my Soc textbook. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I mentioned it to a friend back in Ottawa. No big deal.”

I shut my locker and tell him that he’d better grab his stuff for class. The bell is due to ring in two minutes.

“Can I have my album back?”

“No.” I walk away.

“Why not?” he calls after me.

“I’m not done with it yet.”

*

Jem’s strategy for getting his photos back faster is to tell me about how it’s so not worth the time to look at them. He pursues this oh-so-convincing line of reasoning all through class, even though I give him every indication that I’m not listening and not about to give that book back any time soon.

We bump foreheads over the assignment sheet and Jem accuses me of doing it on purpose.

“Let me see.” I put a hand to his forehead, pretending to inspect the non-existent lump. Jem lets me because he’s an attention whore like that. I flick the spot where I bumped him and steal the assignment.

“Ow,” he complains.

“Whiner.” Jem elbows me. He’s not that irritated; he’s still smiling. When I look up from the assignment sheet I find he’s stolen my notebook and answers.

“Dude.”

“What?” He’s got his smartass grin on, the lopsided one that makes him squint. His new eyelashes are just long enough to touch when he does it.

I snatch my notebook from under his elbow and tell him to go to hell.

“I’m taking you with me.”

“I’m driving.”

“The hell you are.”

*

I warm up a piece of leftover chicken when I get home from work and take it straight upstairs to work on my new pet project. I’ve only got so much time before Jem stops asking for his photos back and demands them instead, so I have to make the most of my access to that book.

Eric is a very thorough photojournalist. The pictures in this album—most of them Polaroids—have a definite sense of narrative. He likes the candid shot. He captures people in their thoughtful moments.

The story opens with a photo of a sickly, but much healthier Jem sitting in a recliner in the hospital with his dad beside him. The setup of the room is familiar: he’s at the beginning of a chemo treatment. Jem looks straight into the camera, glaring at his brother for taking pictures. Dr. Harper looks similarly annoyed, but his posture and forehead reveal anxiety.

Flip the page ahead in time by only a day or two, and the recliner is gone. Jem is in a bed, green in the face and sick as a dog. The only good Ivy can do for him is to bathe his face and neck with a cool cloth.

Elise plays cards with a petite bald girl. Ivy falls asleep on a waiting room couch. Whole chunks of hair are left behind on the pillow. About the same time that a bald spot develops on the back of his head, the first hat appears in the album. It’s the same color as his hair.

The narrative moves to the Harper house. Jem, laid up on the couch. Elise, poised in front of a blender with a scheming smile on her face. Her hair was so long—straight down to her waist and black as a crow. One of the pictures was taken through the gap in the bathroom door. Jem is visible in the mirror, setting up swabs and a syringe at the counter. He looks pissed off and his lip is curled back like he was about to shout at Eric when the shutter closed.

His weight loss isn’t really noticeable until twenty pages in, during what appears to be his second round of chemo. His cheeks are a little thinner and his shoulders have a habitual hunch. In one of the pictures he’s in what looks like a lounge, watching TV and quietly ignoring his companion while she vomits into an emesis basin beside him. There’s a sweet picture of him and Elise, both sleeping. He’s curled up in bed and she’s in the chair beside. Their hands rest loosely intertwined on the edge of the mattress.

From there, Eric chose to take pictures of all the nursing staff, like yearbook photos. On the white strip of each Polaroid he wrote their names and one memorable thing about each of them.
Laura, likes

watermelon. Maggie the Trekkie. JoAnne, brings in cookies. Kim, reads good books.

When the yearbook catalogue is over, the narrative resumes at home. Jem is bent over a sink with a blood-drenched towel against his nose while Dr. Harper tries his best to help. Eric included a companion shot of Jem’s bed. Presumably the nosebleed started in his sleep, because his sheets and pillow are soaked with blood.

The snapshots move to the hospital for a while. There’s a nice shot of Elise sitting on her dad’s lap, proudly holding out her arms to be photographed. She’s got a band-aid and cotton ball on each elbow, and one higher on her shoulder. Maybe she was preparing to donate marrow, or at least being tested as a potential match.

Frank knocks on my door and I close the album as quickly as possible. I answer the door and tell him there are leftovers in the fridge; I’m not cooking tonight. Frank doesn’t say anything, but he awkwardly hands me a pamphlet for a youth group in Perth:
Companions in Christ: the Healing Power of God.
It’s held in the community hall of a church.

“We’re not Catholic. We’re not even religious.”

Frank clears his throat. “I know, but it’s the closest one. If not that, you’ll be going to Ottawa.” He takes the pamphlet from me and opens it. “They meet on Sundays after services. You’d only have to go one day a week. It shouldn’t affect your school.”

“It’s not the whole day is it?” I skim the brochure, but it’s vague about how long sessions last. At least the program in St. John’s never kept us past the two-hour mark.

“I want you to go.”

And I want to make him happy. “I will .”

Tuesday

Chris and Paige have broken up again. What is that, three times this month? Paige spends the majority of lunch hour crying over what a jerk Chris is while Diane and Hannah try to comfort her. I stay out of it to keep myself from laughing—Paige is mainly aggrieved by this breakup because it means she has no one to go to prom with.

“Prom is a whole month away. You’ll find someone to go with,” Hannah consoles. Diane very helpfully points out that Paige’s dress is returnable, like there isn’t much hope of finding a date now.

“Why don’t you just go stag?” The three of them look at me like I’m a weirdo for suggesting it.

“Maybe Cody will go with you,” Diane says. Paige starts crying all over again.

*

I burn my wrist while frying beer batter fish for dinner and exclaim, “Jesus friggin’ Christ,” without thinking. Frank tells me I better start learning to curb that kind of language. “What if something like that slips out on Sunday?” He gives me a hard look. He’s right.

Frank offers to drive me to the session on Sunday.

“I said I’d go, and I will .”

“I didn’t mean you wouldn’t,” he argues. “I just thought you might like some support or something.”

Does driving count as support?

I shrug. “If you really want to.”

Upstairs, I continue my study of The Narrative of Jem Harper’s Cancer, as I’ve come to think of it. I flip to where I left off, with the pictures of Elise donating blood. Jem doesn’t look much better for having received it. He’s got cotton plugs in both nostrils and bruising around his eyes.

Not long after that I come across the photo of Ivy getting the good news about Elise’s donor status.

She looks so relieved and overjoyed. On the opposite page there’s a shot of Dr. Harper squeezing his little girl in a bear hug, like he’s proud of her for having the right genes.

Flip once, and Jem looks less than happy. He’s on a bed with his knees pulled up and his head in his hands, hunched up as though the news was bad. There’s no follow-up photo; nothing with his facial expression, or any clue as to why he would have been sad instead of happy. The pictures resume with him in a procedure room, lying on a table for radiation treatment. In subsequent photos the burns are visible on his neck and face. He went through another round of chemo, in the recliner this time; Ivy cuddled him.

The next ten pages of photos aren’t very focused. They were taken through the window of an isolation room, so all I can see of Jem and the staff is a vague outline above the glare. He’s always lying down.

His IV pole is always holding three or more bags of fluid. In the few shots where he’s close enough to the camera to be seen clearly, the rash on his hands is dark purple and bandaged in places. There are sores around his mouth and across his cheeks, too.

The marrow worked, but it was clearly a hell of a fight.

Wednesday

Jem slides a note my way in Social Studies. Do you have any plans for tonight?

I write No and slide the page back to him. Technically I’m grounded, but I can tell Frank that I got call ed in to work.

Do something with me tonight?

What?

Surprise. I look over at him and he offers a shy smile. Do acquaintances do surprises? I don’t even particularly like surprises.

We’ll stay in Smiths Falls this time?

Yes.

I agree to his surprise. I have nothing better to do. As we pack up at the end of class Jem says, “I’ll pick you up.”

“When?”

“Five-thirty.” He leaves before I can ask anything else. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he didn’t ask about the photo album again.

*

Jem shifts the car into park and I ask him if he’s serious. I figured he was taking me to his house to hang out, but we’re at the hospital instead. He gives me this sweet smile that I just know is a precursor to one of his attempts at persuasion.

“I was hoping you’d agree to keep me company.”

“So why didn’t you just ask that?”

“I didn’t think you would.” Jem points out that the public library is only a few blocks from the hospital. I can go there and get a ride home from him later if I decide not to keep him company.

“Just ask next time,” I tell him as I step out of the car. “There are worse things than being told no.”

*

The nurse in the Dialysis Clinic is a very petite Asian woman with butterflies on her scrub shirt. She doesn’t say much, other than to give her patient orders: “Lift your arm. We’ll take your blood pressure standing now.” Jem seems very conscious of the fact that I’m watching. He won’t look at me. When the nurse asks him to open his shirt so she can access his Hickman, I see the worried look on his face and duck behind the curtain before he has to ask.

Nurse Butterfly works fast. It only takes her half an hour to set up all the tubing and program the machine after taking Jem’s blood pressure. When I return to the cubicle the machine is humming softly and Jem is lounging with a surgical drape over one shoulder.

“Is that for my benefit?” I point to the drape. “I don’t think it’s gross. It’s not the first Hickman I’ve seen.”

Jem ignores my question completely and offers me an orange from his backpack. Before I can say yes he tosses me one anyway. It’s a fat navel orange, soft and juicy. I pull back the peel and cleave off a piece for each of us. Jem just sucks on his, extracting the juice and taking as little of the pulp as possible. He can’t eat much during dialysis without getting sick, so he leaves most of the orange to me.

“Are you in a talking mood?” he asks. What kind of question is that?

“Uh…”

Jem reaches over to his backpack on the side table and pulls out Tessa's journal, the one I gave him on Sunday. The edges of about a hundred Post-It notes poke out around the pages, and I can’t help but laugh.

“If only you read your English homework so thoroughly.” I move to take the journal and Jem withdraws it from my reach. He opens it to the first Post-It note with the seriousness of a lawyer and asks, “Who is Pat?” He makes it sound like he’s asking for a murder confession.

“Her high school sweetheart.” Tessa kept a diary very sporadical y. That one journal lasted her nearly twenty years. The earliest entries were made before I was even born.

“He’s not in here much.”

“They didn’t date for very long.”

Jem flips to his next Post-It. “What language is that?” He turns the book around to show me.

“Dutch. Our Oma is from Soest.” There are occasional chunks of the journal written in Dutch. Oma tried long and hard to teach her grandkids her language—none of our nursery rhymes and Christmas carols were English—but I never caught on. Tessa was always good at that kind of thing, though.