We Were Never Here (3 page)

My mother comes in and says, “It's not botulism.”

How sick am I? I want to know and I also don't want to know.

She takes the remote and makes a big production of flipping off the TV. My mother hates television. “They think it's something else, but we have to eliminate all the other things.”

I ignore her. One day I will want these details, perhaps, but I decide I want to avoid them right now. I don't tell her about the boy and the dog. Instead, I say, “I was actually watching that.” Someone was blathering on and on about how to talk to your boss if you're a woman and he's a man. “It seemed like useful information for me and my new life. My new life as an office person.”

I hear Thelma giggle.

My mother breathes in, deeply. “I'll bring Daddy's iPad tomorrow, okay? What can I load it up with for you? Please tell me Animal Planet shows. PBS?”

Actually I love Animal Planet, especially
Too Cute
, which really is so cute it slays me, and my mother loves to make me watch
Nova
with her, even though it bores me to tears, but what I want now are the stupidest shows I can possibly get my hands on.
“I don't care,” I say. “
Switched at Birth. 90210.
Old
Gossip Girl
.”

“I think I get it,” she says. “But more importantly, or I should say, more
imminently
, Dr. Malik should be in soon.”

Imminently.

Even though they are pumping me through with saline and antibiotics, and also an antinausea medicine that, if it's working, makes me wonder what life would feel like if it
wasn't
working, I know I'm not getting any better. Because it is really true: sometimes you just know. Outside: school is starting tomorrow. I can picture everyone in his or her first-day-of-school clothes, the hallways all bright and shining and ready. All the teachers coming out from behind their desks to introduce themselves. Lockers. Empty notebooks. That
smell
.

What I have here, all I have really, is a new hospital bracelet with my name and birth date and Social Security number
typed
on. That says to me, this is
permanent
. And I have my mother, who now looks around as if she's going to tell me a secret. “It's not salmonella either. Did the pain people come back? Are you comfortable, sweetheart?” She takes my hand.

She's going to tell me I'm
dying
, I think. I will never see my friends again. I will never cuddle with Mabel and fall asleep to her snoring. I will never go to Spain or any Spanish-speaking country, not Mexico or Venezuela or Costa Rica or Puerto Rico, which I know is not a country. I will never become a vet. In this moment I realize that is always what I've wanted to be. A vet! Now I know, but now, of course, it can't ever happen. Also, I will never again hit the hockey ball around in Lydia's backyard or go shopping with her and Dee-Dee, or go
out to eat with them, or even pathetically wait outside of Lolly Adams's party until a junior from my art class finally lets us in so I can down three beers and make out with Joris, the Dutch exchange student.

I let my mother hold my hand, but I can't talk.

I will never wear an actual gown. It's not a word I've ever used before—they're just dresses—but now the sound of it, a
gown
, sounds so beautiful and so far away.

“Mom?” I say.

She covers my hand with her other hand so that her hand is creating a hand sandwich. Ha, I think. A hand sandwich.
Cheeky.
But really I just feel her wedding ring, cold and sharp.

“Mm-hmm?” she says.

She says it sort of distractedly, which is strange, because I'm so sick and could be
dying
and maybe just this once she could not think about work or what's for dinner, or if Zoe is having sex with Tim. I know she thinks about that, because I hear her talking to my dad about it when they think we're asleep. I don't think they are having sex, but what I do know now is that I will never have sex. There has been no one I have wanted to have sex with yet, minus Michael L, but I'm not really thinking about it because all I can hope for is a kiss, just one day, a surprise. But we can't go anywhere from here. This is nowhere.

“Am I going to die?”

My mother looks up, startled. “My goodness, no,” she says. She brings the hand sandwich to her heart. “No, no, no. We just have to figure out what's going on. And then they can fix it. Dying? No.” She shakes her head vigorously. “And because you
are going to live, we really have to get you out of bed. You need to move around!”

The idea terrifies me. I cannot possibly move around. Perhaps ever again.

My mother clears her throat as she looks away from me, and I believe her, but I can tell my question has upset her. That's when another doctor comes in. This one crosses his arms, and without looking at me, he says that we need to put in a central line.

“A who?” my mother asks. “What?”

He nods. “It's a tube that is connected to a vein, so blood can be taken and we can get medications in more easily without jiggering the IVs and infecting the sites.”

I shiver. It's not just an expression; I really do it.

As if he's read my mind, the doctor turns toward me. He has pens in his breast pockets. Both of them. “It's a small surgery,” he says. “Tiny, really. It will deliver all the medicines and saline and liquid food, and it will let us take blood for testing. So we can figure out the problem.”

I wonder, if I could see inside myself, what would it look like? I imagine a map, roads of sick blood leading nowhere. Blue blood. So blue inside. What I would do now to just feel my old weird self in there.

“Now, Mrs. Stoller, can you please wait outside while we put in the line?”

“I would like to stay,” she says.

He shakes his head. “Please,” he says. “It won't take long.”

She gets up slowly, and as she walks out, I doubt I have ever been so sad to watch my mother leave the room. She leaves the
door slightly ajar, but I can't see her.

“I've got one too,” Thelma says over the curtain. “There are worse things. Believe me.”

A nurse comes in with a kit of some kind that she opens, peeling back the seal, and then she is scrubbing my chest with this brown antiseptic.

“I'm Alexis.” She tilts her head to the side as she spreads out large pieces of gauze over my heart.

“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”

This is when I think of the frogs.

Okay, the frogs. Let me back up to the science lab at school. Middle school, dissecting frogs. There was a lot of human drama about the frogs. Most of the guys were super excited about the prospect of cutting into frogs; a little too excited, if you asked me. And most of the girls pretended to be squeamish, groaning when Mr. Hallibrand told us about it. But we weren't squeamish, most of us. It's just what we thought we should be.

A few days before we were set for the dissection, Zoe had told me that when she and her lab partners cut their frog open, it moved. “It totally came to life!” she said before kicking me out of her room for the night so she could call Tim. “I'm not kidding.”

I knew she was just trying to freak me out, but it did make me even more worried, not so much that the frog would become a zombie, but that it wasn't really dead and that it had a soul and that soul was being tortured.

Of the four in our group, I was the one with the scalpel. I remember pinning the frog to the waxed tray. And slicing into the skin and then pulling it back from the fat tissue and muscle
and bone. The anatomy of an innocent frog, exposed. My hands shook. I remember the scissors cutting, the small bones breaking when I hit something wrong. And I remember the heart. Actually, my sister wasn't lying: when we touched it with our gloved fingers, that heart jumped back, still beating. All four of us screamed.

Now the surgeon's head is turned at my chest. The nurse rubs on some anesthesia—“local,” she calls it, as if she means it's like, made in America—and then he's performing his incision. I can hear it but I can't feel it.

Outside I hear my mother squeal. “Look at you!” she says. “How sweet you brought your dog.”

“He's a therapy dog,” the boy,
that
boy, says. “I bring him to cheer up the patients. There aren't so many teenagers on this ward, so it's nice to have your daughter here! I came by earlier, but she was busy.”

“Busy? Huh. Well, it's nice that you do this,” my mother says.

I remember: the frog heart jumped in my hands. It makes me think now: What does it do when you're alive? Does it jump? The heart, I mean. My heart, I mean.

“At first it was something I had to do, but now I like to come. Sometimes I even get here before school. Originally it was pretty much my parents' idea,” the boy says to my mom. I wonder if he's brushing his hair out of his face with his fingertips. I wonder what it would be like to touch his hair, and I think it would feel warm, like he'd been walking through a meadow, in the sun. “I enjoy it now, though. A lot.”

“I see,” my mother says. “I'm Daphne.” My mother always has
to pretend she's this cool mother, insisting my friends call her by her first name, letting me drink wine on special occasions, taking me to R-rated movies because my dad hates going to the movies and my mom hates going to the movies alone. “My daughter is Lizzie.”

“Connor,” the boy says. “And this”—and I hear his sneakers squeak as he surely squats down; also I know he's rubbing the dog's scruff, and it makes me ache for Mabel—“this is Verlaine.”

“Verlaine,” I hear my mother say. “The poet!”

“Yes!” Conner says. “But also the singer. From the band Television? Anyway, his name is Verlaine.”

“I think that's a better option,” my mother says. “The poet Verlaine was a pretty intense fellow!” She laughs.

My heart beats so hard I wonder if the surgeon can feel it. And then I wonder if it's going to make him slip and puncture it so that it can't ever beat again. Who, I wonder, would come to my funeral? I imagine Nana trying to give a eulogy, breaking down and being led away.

But no. Soon the surgeon gets done puffing into his blue mask, and the nurse pulls back the blue sheets and goes for my mother.

“Bye, Verlaine,” my mother coos. “Come and visit us again soon!” And then she is through my door and her face changes for a moment. When she recovers, she throws me a beaming smile. “Well, that's a sweet pair,” she says. I know she is talking about Connor and Verlaine, but I look at the surgeon, who waits impatiently to speak with her, and wonder if she means us.
Me and Mr. Surgeon sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. . . .

I'm really a frog. Frog-like. Waiting to be dissected. So there you go! Hi! My name is Lizzie Stoller. I'm sixteen years old. I've never been to Spain. Before this, I was normal outside, weird on the inside. Before this I was the kamikaze. I would have liked to become a vet. Welcome to my froggy world.

Zoe has talked to Lydia, and so now I know she's starting varsity. It's a no-brainer, really. No one's faster than Lydia. At first it bugs me—it was supposed to be my turn—but what difference does it really make? I can't even move.

My mother, however, doesn't seem to realize I can't move, and she constantly tries to get me out of bed. I'm surprised she doesn't get me airlifted. She brings me my father's scratched-up iPad, and instead of walking, I turn to what my mother has chosen to let me watch. But she did a pretty nice job.
Teen Wolf
,
Glee
(eh, it got pretty bad after the third season),
Pretty Little Liars
, which I linger on, but then I hit
Vampire Diaries
. Why? Because I like vampires, but I think I like them in general because being one is pretty far away from my life. Vampires have nothing to do with me, and I'm comforted by not having to think about anything real. So I settle back, and then the worst thing happens. I can't set the iPad on my belly. I can't sit up to watch it. And for the brief moment that I do this anyway, looking at the screen makes me sick to my stomach.

So. I have no cell phone, no Wi-Fi, no movies or decent TV, and I have a mother who won't stop harassing me to get up and
walk around. And I have something horrible happening to me that no one can yet name. They have me on medicines, steroids, and some things I don't even know about. And now I have no iPad.

That's pretty much all there is to say about Day Five.

Pretty much the same as Day Five, but add more kinds of medication that do nothing, and also add on my father trying to get me up too. And add one or two of the nurses. I wonder about the boy, about Connor, if he's going to ever come back or if I officially scared him away. I listen for him; I can't help it. It gives me a thing to do in here, in between my mother's chirpiness, the calls from Zoe, the calls from Dee-Dee and Lydia, who phone me together after school. Dee-Dee is going out for Rizzo in
Grease
.
When I talk to my friends from school, there are a lot of sighs and silences. I sort of hate talking to them.

I get a package from David B. I open it up and there's a God's eye, the yarn this deep, deep purple and then an intense red, wound around and around real, bumpy sticks, not the Popsicle sticks the youngest campers use. Maybe I'm softening up in here—a lot—but it feels soulful. My heart catches in my throat when I see it and then the note:
I know everyone laughs at these, but I see them as talismans. They are like the sun. And the sun protects us in all these ways. I am wishing all the best for you, Lizzie!
he wrote.

I think that note is beautiful.

Now I have the talisman hanging by my bed. My mother hung it with a pushpin, one she found on the nurses' bulletin board out front.

And in between all that, Day Six is pretty much just waiting.