Once Upon a Wish (45 page)

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The day after surgery, Serena was home with her family, on the road to recovery. Listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games kept her busy, and most importantly, still. Sleeping in her waterbed risked tearing the stitches in her neck, so her parents pulled a mattress out of the basement and set it up for her in her dad’s office.

The second night after returning home, Serena stayed up late,
chatting online with friends from other countries, testing out games on the family’s new Xbox, and surfing the net. When she saw that a preview to Michael Jackson’s upcoming release “Cheater” was available online, she immediately hit “play.”

The song’s slow, playful intro dragged her in, the snapping of fingers enticing her as they led to the heart of the song—a cool, steady drumbeat and the artist’s signature “Oh!” echoing in the background. She closed her eyes and let the power of the lyrics, the strength and familiarity of his voice, seep in.

It was well past midnight and quiet in the house save for the subtle sound of voices coming from the TV in the living room, where Seanza was watching and dozing on the couch. Lost in the words, consumed by the music, Serena tapped her thumb on the desk, oblivious as silent, invisible hands crawled up her back and clung to her neck.

She shot her eyes open and inhaled short, quick breaths. Panic rushed through every limb, into her heart, her mind, to the ends of her fingers, which clutched the arms of her chair as she sat up, fighting the urge to run into the cool, Nebraska night to take in all its air.

Instead, she walked into the living room with a hand clutched to her ribcage and looked at her sister. “What’s the matter, Rena?” Seanza asked, standing immediately.

“I’m …”

Serena paused, closed her eyes. She hunched over her arm, wrapping it even tighter around her ribcage, before taking in another short breath. “I’m having trouble breathing.”

“Oh, God,” Seanza said. “Go sit down in the office and I’ll wake Mom and Dad.”

She came to the office a few minutes later, alone. “How are you doing?” Seanza asked.

“It comes and goes,” Serena said, waiting for the next suffocation. Her lungs seemed to tighten and loosen with every attack. “Where are Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“I can’t wake them up,” Seanza said.

Their father had always been a heavy, comatose-type sleeper, and Sedra was exhausted from a long night at the hospital and taking care of Serena during the days following surgery. Their bodies had moved fluidly beneath Seanza’s fingertips, their ears deaf to her pleas, until she finally gave up.

“I’ll try again in just a little bit.”

For the next several hours, she talked her sister through the panic and into the calm, reminding her with soothing words, “in through your mouth, out your nose.”

During moments when air cleverly maneuvered more freely through its constricted passageway, giving Serena momentary relief, she would nearly whisper, “It’s not working.”

The hours passed—2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m.—and with more failed attempts at waking her parents, Seanza knew it was up to her to keep her sister calm. She knew something was terribly wrong, but, in her seventeen-year-old logic, not bad enough to call an ambulance or use force to get her parents out of bed. She just needed to get her sister through the night.

They talked, played video games, listened to music, anything they could to keep Serena’s mind in the right place—a place of survival, of taking one more breath. It wasn’t like other nights they had spent staying up late together, Serena draped across her sister’s bed, talking and laughing while Seanza created some form of artwork—a painting or drawing—that illustrated her vision, her interpretation, of the world.

Her sister was known as “the artist,” Serena, “the music buff.” They had grown up with music filling the rooms of their
home—from Michael Bolton to Green Day, Eddie Money to Motown—and the lyrics had always spoken to Serena, inspired and enticed her.

Serena spent hours as a little girl, tucked away in her bedroom, placing vinyl on her record player—Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson, Madonna—which her mother had given to her. At the age of five, Serena knew words to songs by The Cars, Tina Turner, Rush, and Billy Ocean.

Her grandfather Red worked a laundry route in the 1950s, when Sedra was just a little girl, driving between diners, stores, factories, and service stations throughout Loves Park, Illinois, to collect old towels and dirty dishrags. When owners of those diners updated their jukeboxes, they’d give Red piles of outdated forty-fives, which later ignited a passion for music in Sedra that trickled down to Serena and ran through her blood. Her exposure to it—the old vinyls, her growing collection of CDs, the instruments her father dabbled with here and there—prompted her to sign up for her school’s orchestra in the fourth grade.

Branching out from the guitar and drums her father, Kevin, had introduced her to, she decided to play the violin when Red gave her one that had been passed around his family for more than one hundred years. The violin’s nostalgia, its history, wasn’t enough to keep her playing. After a year, she found the instrument tedious, its sound, monotonous.

In fifth grade, she changed to the drums and immediately connected to the strength of the instrument, the heartbeat of music, but the school band bored her instantly with its setting and structure. Serena stuck with it but decided to further her instruction at home, in the basement, working out rhythms, learning—by ear rather than sheet music—the beats to her favorite songs. The first song she taught herself was Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”

That freedom of song choice, those lyrics crashing in her mind, was liberating, addictive.

Through middle school and into high school, Serena’s CD collection continued to grow, with albums of U2, Prince, Justin Timberlake, and Eminem becoming part of her musical family. Posters of her favorite artists—namely Michael Jackson—began gracing her bedroom walls. Researching music, writing it, absorbing it, became her inspiration, an expression of who she was.

The night Serena became absorbed in the lyrics of “Cheater,” the night that death wrapped its bony fingers around her ribs and up to her neck before squeezing, ended the next day in the emergency room. Seanza had talked her sister through the night, soothed her mind, her spirit, until 6:00 a.m., when Serena decided that a warm bath would calm her panicked, shaking body. She sat in the suds, wrapped in the steam’s threatening embrace. The warmth of it seeped into her lungs, pushing against the relentless wall determined to keep air from its deep, natural motion.

When panic resurfaced, threatened, she crawled slowly from the tub, wrapped her body, her pain, in a towel before opening the bathroom door to find Sedra standing directly on the other side.

“Oh, my God,” her mother said, cupping her mouth. Serena’s skin was the color of clay. “We’re going to the hospital—NOW.”

After hours of tests, CT scans and X-rays, shallow breaths, and moments of panic, doctors finally determined what had kept Serena and her sister up all night—a blood clot in her lungs, a pulmonary embolism. Over the next twenty-four hours, Serena’s inhales finally steadied from calmed panic as her passageway, with the help of clot-dissolving shots in her stomach, expanded, letting tired air through.

She could finally breathe.

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After three days, Serena was discharged and sent home with her family. Doctors put her on blood thinners for the next six months to keep clots from forming, and placed her on a low-iodine diet before starting her on radiation to kill any remaining cancer cells. To eliminate vitamin K, which helps blood to clot faster, from her diet, she lived on a very strict, mostly fruit diet, and then it was time for radiation.

The threat of radiation would be present at all times; it could seep from her skin and into the bodies of others. It was a medical necessity that Serena enter seclusion, locked away, for days, sometimes a week, at a time. She could spend no more than two hours at a time with family members, three feet of space separating them at all times. No long car rides, no hugs, no good-night kisses.

Her bedroom door felt closed to the world, where she was locked inside with her thoughts and her music. Confined to total solitude other than leaving to eat a meal from paper plates that nobody else would touch or using the restroom—her own—Serena began to feel like a stranger in her home, an outsider looking in.

She spent hours staring out her bedroom window, imagining the endless rows of corn and farmland and green pastures that existed beyond her neighborhood. When the smell of spicy nacho sauce, drenching salty tortilla chips piled with guacamole and sour cream, would creep down the hallway and under her door, reminding her of all the food she was no longer allowed to eat, she’d become angry with her situation, homesick with thoughts of Tucson, thirteen hundred miles away. She resented those yellow rows beyond her window, dancing, teasing, those pastures covered in winter white, those smelly farms.

I hate corn
, she thought.
I hate snow, I hate train tracks, I hate
farms, I hate Nebraska.
They had lived there for a year and a half, her old life remaining in Tucson, Arizona, where she was born and raised. Moving at the end of middle school would have been difficult enough for any kid, but being rejected by the town, the people, the culture, had made it even worse.

Seanza was pulled into the assistant principal’s office on her first day of eleventh grade. He carefully studied her clothes, her style, before bluntly asking, “Are you goth?”

Seanza looked down at her jeans and colorful T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing black. Her face was not white. Her eyes were not hidden in the shadows of dark makeup, and she had no spikes around her neck. Her fingernails were not black, her lips not blood red.

“No,” she answered sharply.

It was one of her and Serena’s first experiences with the town’s small-mindedness, its spirit of disapproval for newcomers—especially newcomers who did not go to church, did not play a single sport, and cared nothing about labels on clothes. They didn’t fit the mold.

Serena had never turned a head in Tucson with her brown hair dyed bright blue or red or green—or all colors of the rainbow at the same time. Anything out of the norm, expression of who she was through the colors in her hair, was something to be questioned, laughed at, in this small town they now called “home.”