Love Sucks and Then You Die (2 page)

“Where do you want to go?” Aislin asks. She picks up E.V.’s computer and her latte. “Anywhere you want.”

E.V. considers. “The cemetery.”

Aislin wraps her arm around E.V.’s shoulder. “You are some kind of fun, girl. Bob doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

*   *   *

At 5:34
P.M
., Antonio parks his mother’s boyfriend’s Honda in the Ocean View Cemetery parking lot. As E.V. leaves the car, he is already unbuttoning Aislin’s blouse.

“Guys. Seriously?” E.V. inquires, slamming the door. “Um … cemetery? Dead people? Respect?”

“Sorry, E.V.,” Aislin says, possibly chastened.

E.V. hasn’t been here in a year, but her father’s grave is easy to pick out. He was a sculptor, and his headstone is one of his own works, a smooth, round granite piece riven by a deep fissure.

E.V. sits on the damp grass. He’d died in a car crash, one of those awful, late-night-knock-at-the-door moments in life. She’s over it, as over it as anyone can be.

He was a fine artist and a good man, probably flawed, because apparently everyone is. E.V. likes to draw, and that came from him most likely, along with the belligerent hair and the unpredictable temper. He loved her a lot, probably even loved her mother.

E.V. looks past the neat path of graves to a line of eucalyptus trees. A guy about her age is standing between two small gravestones. A blond, surfer type, shorts, black T-shirt, muscular. He drops two flowers—nothing fancy, just roadside weeds—one for each grave, and then walks away.

E.V. watches him go. Something about the way he moves, deliberately, purposefully, makes her stare. Maybe it’s the way he strides past the gravestones without looking at them.

Maybe it’s the way he pauses to take in the trees, the ocean, perhaps even her.

Two seconds pass, maybe three. A blip, and then he vanishes.

E.V. starts to cry. After a while, she collects herself. She feels a little better, lighter. Crying always helps.

She is climbing into the backseat of Antonio’s car when she sees a black sedan driven by her mother’s chauffeur, Joe.

Joe pulls into the lot and parks, then walks over to her father’s grave and places a white rose on the round headstone.

E.V. can just make out Terra through the darkly tinted windows.

Antonio takes a right out of the cemetery. They pass the surfer guy walking on the side of the road.

“Nice,” Aislin murmurs.

“Bitch,” says Antonio affectionately.

In two days, Eve will forget all about the surfer guy.

In one year, seven months, and sixteen days, she will encounter him again.

He will not be perfect, and he will not be a blip.

*   *   *

At 6:40
P.M.
E.V. returns to her bedroom. She marks the moon landing on her time line. She labels the very end of the line “Right Now.”

E.V. examines her work. It’s thorough. Not perfect, but close. Leach will probably give it an A-, but she’s pretty ruthless, so you never know.

E.V. opens her e-mail and clicks on Bob’s note. For eleven seconds, she stares at it.

Four months from now, E.V. will not remember Bob’s name when she passes him in the lunchroom.

One year and eight months from now, she will realize that the head-butt incident makes a great first-date anecdote.

E.V. presses the
DELETE
key.

She lies back and closes her eyes, waiting to be humbled, waiting to be surprised.

1

I am thinking of an apple when the streetcar hits and my leg severs and my ribs crumble and my arm is no longer an arm but something unrecognizable, wet and red.

An apple. It was in a vendor’s stall at the farmers’ market off Powell. I’d noticed it because it was so weirdly out of place, a defiant crimson McIntosh in an army of dull green Granny Smiths.

When you die—and I realize this as I hurtle through the air like a wounded bird—you should be thinking about love. If not love, at the very least you should be counting up your sins or wondering why you didn’t cross at the light.

But you should not be thinking about an apple.

I register the brakes screeching and the horrified cries before I hit the pavement. I listen as my bones splinter and shatter. It’s not an unpleasant sound, more delicate than I would have imagined. It reminds me of the bamboo wind chimes on our patio.

A thicket of legs encircles me. Between a bike messenger’s ropy calves I can just make out the 30%
OFF TODAY ONLY
sign at Lady Foot Locker.

I should be thinking about love right now—not apples, and certainly not a new pair of Nikes—and then I stop thinking altogether because I am too busy screaming.

*   *   *

I open my eyes and the light is blinding. I know I must be dead because in the movies there’s always a tunnel of brilliant light before someone croaks.

“Evening? Stay with us, girl. Evening? Cool name. Look at me, Evening. You’re in the hospital. Who should we call?”

The pain slams me down, and I realize I’m not dead after all, although I really wish I could be because maybe then I could breathe instead of scream.

“Evening? You go by Eve or Evening?”

Something white smeared in red hovers above me like a cloud at sunset. It pokes and prods and mutters. There’s another, then another. They are grim but determined, these clouds. They talk in fragments. Pieces, like I am in pieces.
Vitals. Prep. Notify. Permission. Bad.

“Evening? Who should we call?”

“Check her phone. Who’s got her damn cell?”

“They couldn’t find it. Just her school ID.”

“What’s your mom’s name, hon? Or your dad’s?”

“My dad is dead,” I say, but it comes out in ear-splitting moans, a song I didn’t know I could sing. It’s funny, really, because I cannot remotely carry a tune. A C+ in Beginning Women’s Chorus—and that was totally a pity grade—but here I am, singing my heart out.

Dead would be so good right now. My dad and me, just us, not this.

OR 2’s ready. No time. Now now now.

I’m pinned flat like a lab specimen, and yet I’m moving, flying past the red and white clouds. I didn’t know I could fly. So many things I know this afternoon that I didn’t know this morning.

“Evening? Eve? Give me a name, hon.”

I try to go back to the morning, before I knew that clouds could talk, before I knew a stranger could retrieve the dripping stump of your own leg.

What do I do with it?
he’d asked.

“My mother’s Terra Spiker,” I sing.

The clouds are silent for a moment, and then I fly from the room of bright light.

2

I awaken to an argument. The man is simmering, the woman on full boil.

They’re out of my view, behind an ugly green curtain. I try to do what I always do when my parents fight, adjust my earbuds and crank the volume to brain-numb, but something is wrong. My right arm is not obeying me, and when I touch my ear with my left hand, I discover a thick gauze headband. I’ve sprouted long tubes from my arms and my nose.

“She’s my daughter,” the woman says, “and if I say she’s leaving, she’s leaving.”

“Please, listen to me. She’s going to be your one-legged daughter if you take her out of here.”

The man is pleading, and I realize he’s not my dad because (a) my dad was never a pleader—more of a pouter, really; and (b) he’s dead.

“I have superior facilities, the best medical staff money can buy.” The woman punctuates this with a dramatic exhalation. It’s my mother’s trademark sigh.

“She’s in critical condition in the ICU after a fourteen-hour surgery. There’s every chance she’s going to lose that leg, and you want to
move
her? Because … what? It’s more convenient? Your sheets have a higher thread count? What exactly?”

I feel pretty okay, sort of floaty and disconnected, but this man, who I’ve decided must be a doctor, sounds a little freaked out about my leg, which, as it happens, doesn’t seem to be behaving any better than my arm.

I should probably reassure him, get my mother off his case—when she’s like this it’s best to retreat and regroup—but the tube stuck down my throat makes that impossible.

“I will not release this patient,” the doctor says, “under any circumstances.”

Silence. My mother is the god of painful pauses.

“Do you know,” she finally asks, “what the new hospital wing is called, Doctor?”

More silence. The contraptions I’m tethered to chirp contentedly.

“That would be the Spiker Neurogenetics Pavilion,” the doctor finally says, and suddenly he sounds defeated, or maybe he’s missing his tee time.

“I have an ambulance waiting outside,” my mother says. Check and mate. “I trust you’ll expedite the paperwork.”

“She dies, it’s on you.”

His choice of words must bother me, because my machines start blaring like a cheap car alarm.

“Evening?” My mother rushes to my side. Tiffany earrings, Bulgari perfume, Chanel suit. Mommy, Casual Friday edition.

“Sweetheart, it’s going to be okay,” she says. “I’ve got everything under control.”

The quaver in her voice betrays her. My mother does not quaver.

I try to move my head a millimeter and realize maybe I’m not feeling so okay after all. Also, my car alarm won’t shut up. The doctor is muttering about my leg, or what’s left of my leg, and my mother is burying her head into my pillow, her lacquered nails digging into my shoulder. She may actually be crying.

I am pretty sure we’re all losing it, and then, on my other shoulder, I feel a firm pressure.

It’s a hand.

I follow the path from hand to arm to neck to head, moving just my eyes this time.

The hand is connected to a guy.

“Dr. Spiker,” he says, “I’ll get her into the ambulance.”

My mother sniffles into my gown. She rouses herself, stands erect. She is Back in Control.

“What the hell are you doing here, Solo?” she snaps.

“You left your phone and briefcase behind when you got the call about the”—he jerks his chin toward me—“the accident. I followed in one of the Spiker limos.”

I don’t recognize this guy or, for that matter, his name—because, really, what kind of a name is Solo, anyway?—but he must work for my mother.

He looks down at me, past the tubes and the panic. He is scruffy-looking with too much hair, too little shaving. He’s tall and wide-shouldered, muscular, blondish. Extremely blue eyes. My preliminary taxonomy: skater or surfer, one of those guys.

I’d really like him to get his hand off me because he doesn’t know me and I’m already having personal-space issues, what with the tubes and the IV.

“Chill, Eve,” he tells me, which I find annoying. The first phrase that comes to mind involves the word “off,” preceded by a word I have absolutely no chance of pronouncing since it includes the letter “F.”

Not in the mood to meet new friends.

In the mood for more painkillers.

Also, my mother calls me Evening and my friends call me E.V. But nobody calls me Eve. So there’s that, too.

“Please reconsider, Dr. Spiker…” The doctor trails off.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the guy named Solo. He’s about my age, a junior, maybe a senior. If he does work for my mother, he’s either an intern or a prodigy. “Will you be coming in the ambulance, Dr. Spiker?”

“No. God knows what microorganisms are in that ambulance. My driver’s waiting,” my mother says. “I’ll need to make some calls and I doubt the back of an ambulance is the place. I’ll meet you at the lab.”

The doctor sighs. He flips a switch and my contraptions still.

My mother kisses my temple. “I’ll get everything set up. Don’t worry about a thing.”

I blink to show that I am not, in fact, worried about a thing. Not with the morphine drip taking the edge off.

Solo hands my mother her briefcase and phone. She vanishes, but I can hear the urgent staccato of her Jimmy Choos.

“Bitch,” the doctor says when she’s out of earshot. “I don’t like this at all.”

“No worries,” Solo says.

No worries.
Yeah, not for you, genius. Go away. Stop talking to me or about me. And take your hand off me, I’m nauseous.