All the Things We Didn't Say (24 page)

Stella looked away. ‘A little, honey. Here and there.'

The fluorescent light flickered and shivered. Outside, two elderly people were walking up the sidewalk into surgery. A man in an electric wheelchair sat by the curb, waiting for a ride. I looked up, recalling what my father had told me the last time I saw him. ‘Kay was pregnant.'

Stella clucked her tongue. ‘It was a big deal for the time. Especially for Cobalt. That boyfriend of hers married her while she was in the coma. There was a ceremony and everything.'

I tried to hold on to a single thought, but my head felt like it was caught in a windstorm. Things were whirling everywhere. This was like working for sixty years on a scientific theory and discovering that the principle underlying your idea was incorrect, so your research was useless. It couldn't be possible, any of it. My father couldn't have been the one driving. He would've wrapped the car around a tree rather than hit a deer. And Kay Mulvaney was in love with Mark Jeffords. They were going to get married; my father was their friend. He met my mother in college; that was when he fell in love. That was where his story started; he escaped Cobalt because there wasn't enough here for him. There wasn't anything more. There couldn't be.

I stood up, banging my knee hard against the edge of the bed. ‘That's just some stupid rumor.'

Stella's lips parted, startled.

‘He would have told me. He wouldn't have kept something like that a secret. It's an easy thing to speculate, anyway-girl dies in car accident, my father leaves town-let's blame it on misguided love, on him feeling
responsible,
or whatever
you said. Let's blame it on loving the wrong person. They were
teenagers.
They couldn't have been in love. That doesn't come until later.'

Stella looked amused. ‘It doesn't?'

Her mocking tone of voice scratched against me. I plucked the hedgehog from her chest and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall so hard that it squeaked.

‘I know my father,' I said in a shaky voice. ‘And that never happened.' I thought of the picture I'd found all those years ago:
Mark Jeffords and Kay Mulvaney, (secret!) engagement, 1970.
I thought of Kay's round, pie-like face, her button nose.

‘I can understand if it's hard to accept,' Stella said.

‘There's nothing
to
accept. I know my father. It didn't happen.'

‘Summer…'

‘I know my father.' As I said it again, a little voice needled me.
Do you?
The voice sounded like Stella's, but her face was blank, indicative of nothing.

I slumped back down in the chair and put my head in my hands. When I looked up, Stella's eyes were closed again, but she wasn't asleep. I moved to the other side of the room, picked up the hedgehog, and put it back on her chest. ‘Thank you,' she said.

I answered by letting out a little groan. I pressed my palm onto her bare leg.

‘Your hands are cold,' she said, her eyes still closed.

Outside, a black van pulled up, a ramp mechanically lowered, and the man in the electric wheelchair motored inside. Far off in the distance, a dog barked. Stella smiled, hearing it too. I was sure she missed her dogs, who were roaming around the house without us, who were swimming in the creek without an audience.

‘So how's my dad doing?' I asked quietly.

‘He's good,' Stella said, opening her eyes a crack. ‘You know he and Rosemary are living in Brooklyn, right?'

I nodded silently.

‘She sounds like a good person, Summer.'

I swallowed hard. ‘I know.'

I plucked the hedgehog off her chest once more and squeezed it. It made a small, dying wail. I shut my eyes, about to cry, but nothing came out.

Stella pressed her thin, papery fingers against one of the IVs in her hand. ‘So. Tell me straight. It's in my brain, right?'

I looked over at her. Thankfully, they hadn't taken her wig off. I could still see the flaking remains of the temporary heart tattoo we affixed to her chest, right under her chemo port. A chill ran through me, and I got a horrible fear that I was either going to pee my pants or throw up. ‘Yes,' I whispered.

‘I thought so,' she said. ‘So what do we do now?'

I sat down next to her on the bed. She was so small that there was plenty of room. She smelled the same way she had the day I met her-like peanut-butter cookies. It was a scent that emanated from her pores, even when her insides were rotting.
We reschedule Cheveyo
, I wanted to tell her.
We try meditation. We could go to Tibet. We don't have to stop.
So what if I was trying to save her? She deserved saving. I wanted to be able to save someone.

The following day, I would wake in the same hospital waiting room and see a crowd gathered around the television. What they thought was a small plane had crashed into a building in New York City, and I would soon find out which building it was. I would stand there as a jumbo jet hit the building next to it. Someone-many people-would scream. More things would happen, more things would fall down, people would run, and the whole view I remembered from my Brooklyn apartment window would immediately
change forever. A minute would morph into a half-hour, but I wouldn't move. People around me would be slack-jawed in the middle of the hospital hall.

‘Can you believe what they put on TV these days?' Stella would demand, as soon as I entered her room. ‘It's for some movie, right? It's in poor taste, blowing up the World Trade Center…but then I stopped understanding Hollywood after the Fifties.'

And a nurse would turn halfway, looking at me with terror.
I don't have control of this, do you
? I would tell Stella that yes, it was for a movie. And that she shouldn't worry, that television did all kinds of horrible, manipulative things these days, just like
War of the Worlds
on the radio years ago.

Samantha would show up that day, too, her face pale, her lipstick in need of reapplication. At that point, her arrival wouldn't even seem shocking. ‘Do you know anyone…?' she'd whisper. And, ‘Didn't your mom…?' and I'd tell her that probably not, almost definitely not, but I didn't know.

Later, Samantha and I would drive back and pick up Stella's car from the parking lot of the general store. The people inside would run out and ask how Stella was doing. I'd tell them fine, and they'd give us candy, silly things like Now and Laters and Reese's Pieces and Blow Pops, their eyes big and round, full of charity. The physical world would be surreal, bursting with blueness and late-summer leaves and chirping birds and a cloudless sky. Samantha and I would return to our own separate cars, on our way back to the hospital, listening to the endless radio broadcasts. We'd crane our necks out the windows, searching for falling planes, a falling sky. Instead, we'd see a little wooden shack on the side of the road. Samantha would pull over into the parking lot and roll down her window. ‘Is that?' She'd point a carefully painted nail at the sign.

The words would be inky black, striking against the
gray-blue weathered sign.
Come on in to see the World-Famous Jackalope.

The door would swing open easily, as if hanging by one rusty hinge. The room would be dark and cool, and there'd be an old woman sitting behind a makeshift counter that bore a few pamphlets, some magnets that said
Jackalope
and a picture of something unidentifiable, on sale for $1.50. She'd be watching the news, too, like everyone else. The turquoise sky, the burning buildings, falling again, one floor then the next then the next, collapsing into dust. People running, screaming.

‘Excuse me,' Samantha would say very softly to the woman at the desk, ‘can you tell us where the jackalope is?'

The woman would look up and study us for a moment, as if she couldn't understand why we were there and what we wanted. Then she'd point and say, ‘There. Right there.'

There would be a glass case across the room. Behind the glass, we would make out something stuffed: a large, fat, brown and gray rabbit standing on its hindquarters, its head turned jauntily to the side. On the base of its skull would be two large antlers, almost as big as the rabbit itself, the ends of each tapering into two sharp, curving points that almost touched one another. There would be an old sign underneath, printed in a small, dated, Sixties font, that said,
The Jackalope (
Lepus temperamentalus
) is one of the rarest animals in the world. A cross between a now-extinct pygmy deer and a species of killer rabbit, they are extremely shy unless approached. It is written that you can extract the jackalope's milk as it sleeps belly-up at night. The milk is believed to be medicinal and can be used to treat a variety of afflictions. Many do not believe in the jackalope's existence
,
but do not be swayed! It will kill you if you aren't looking! These dangerous creatures ARE REAL!

Samantha and I would stand there for a while, not saying
anything, admiring the jackalope like we were looking at an artefact in the Smithsonian. The jackalope's eyes would be glassy, and I'd see the clear lines of glue where the horns had been attached, the piece of fur on its back that was torn back, as if a dog had recently been playing with it. But, despite this, I would grapple for something magical. I would want to believe it was real, that everything was real-Cheveyo, miracle cures, loving someone I'd met seven years ago and had only briefly kissed. But believing that the jackalope was real would mean I had to believe what was going on behind me on television-the planes, people screaming-was real, too. And that cancer was real. And that my father truly loved a girl that died, desperately loved someone before he desperately loved my mother, and that perhaps he desperately loved Rosemary, too. That he had changed, leaving me behind, and that it was probably the best, healthiest thing he could have done.

My fingers would graze my phone in my pocket. I knew I would call him, at least to see if he was all right.

There would be nothing else in the shack, except for the jackalope and a few books of jackalope lore and a few suspicious photos of the jackalope in the wild. After a while, Samantha would begin to talk. ‘I'm selling the most wonderful houses in Northglenn right now.' Her voice would be low, shaky. ‘All empty. You walk through the rooms and they echo. They smell like new carpet and fresh paint. The garage is so clean, the closets don't have dust in them. There's enough room for a big refrigerator in the kitchen and a sectional in the living room. There are rooms for nurseries and for kids' bunk beds. The master bedrooms are gorgeous, too. Vaulted ceilings. Whirlpool tubs.'

She'd stop, then, for a moment, and glance at me. Her lips would quiver, and I would notice that, for whatever reason, she wasn't wearing her wedding ring. But I wouldn't ask.

‘Tell me about the backyard,' I'd goad her.

She'd exhale and relax. ‘The backyard is beautiful.'

All that was going to happen the very next day. In just twenty-four hours, what we were going to do and what we would worry about would change, and the distance between us would change, too. But in the hospital, sitting on the edge of Stella's bed, that all seemed impossible, unimaginable. We were still, for the most part, innocent and okay.

‘What do we do now?' Stella asked again, hugging the hedgehog to her chest.

I touched her hand. ‘We have fun, just like you said. We go get you some pie. And that martini, too.'

She smiled. ‘With three olives?'

‘With
four
, if you want. We'll have a martini-drinking contest.'

She sighed decadently, already imagining it. ‘Sounds like a plan.'

The first time I saw you, you were wearing a flowered smock and pink cotton pants. Terrible shoes: those white nurse things. Orthopedic. I didn't think much about you the first time I saw you. You were a new aide, one of the many aides that cycled through the place. The aides didn't do much, just tried to keep us comfortable and entertain us and do all of the things that the nurses didn't have time for. Some of the aides volunteered, in fact, and weren't even making money at it. They were just doing it because…I don't know, I guess they saw it as charity. Maybe it made them feel less crazy.

You were younger than most of the aides. You didn't have that cropped-short, old-woman hair helmet, but shoulder-length, wavy hair, wavier in some spots than in others. You had delicate hands, red-raw skin, sensitive to cold, dry temperatures, a long, sloped nose with a little bulb on the end, and a wide smile, although you withheld your smiles most of the time, almost as if you worried smiling too much might upset us. When the other aides and nurses went out to smoke, you read all of the pamphlets near the meds room, the ones that were titled
What Is Anxiety?
, as
if any of us didn't know. Perhaps you read them simply to look busy, to pose as if you were perfectly fine with not being included. I liked you for that, because the other aides acted like bitchy hens out there, smoking together. It's obvious they were talking about us, the patients.

Then there was the morning I had the episode. According to some, I started screaming. I pulled the couch cushions off the floor in the TV room, and I kicked Thatcher in the shin and upturned Ursula's and Kevin's chess game. They don't even play chess, they just sit there staring at the pieces and talk about how indecisive they both are, so I didn't feel bad about messing up their game. I don't remember any of it, though. All I remember is waking up and seeing Kay hovering above me. Her wavy hair hung around her face, her gray eyes slanted down with concern, and she kept pressing her full lips together, just like she always did when something worried her. I was certain we were in the back room of Dairy Queen, just waking up from a nap.

I said Kay's name. Kay smiled tentatively. She put her hand to my forehead and then glanced somewhere I couldn't see. Then Bev came into the picture. ‘Just lie there,' Bev said.