Page 50 of No Place Like You

“Janet’s immune system has become very weak with her chemo, which is expected like many in her condition, and it’s made her highly susceptibleto infections,” Dr. Pham explains. “It’s not uncommon for things like this to happen, and every person responds differently to different infections. Some are surprisingly able to get over it on their own, and most usually need some help with antibiotics. With Janet’s case, her body wasn’t able to fight it on her own.

“Getting a lot of rest is important. That, along with protecting what little you have left of your immune system. When you’re tired, it makes your body more vulnerable in these types of situations.” She turns to Janet, making sure this next part is specifically for her. “So, as much as I know you want to keep working and keep acting as if this disease isn’t trying to kill you from the inside out, you need to rest.”

I hear the curtain clink open, announcing another presence in the small, confined area. When I look up, I see Lucy, her solemn face full of concern, looking at me with a strained smile tugging back the corners of her lips.

“They’re getting your bed ready,” Dr. Pham continues. “Once we hear back from the floor, we’ll get you admitted.”

We all sullenly nod.

“And visiting hours are over, so most likely everyone will have to come back in the morning,” she adds.

“Thank you, Doc,” Janet says quietly, smiling sadly in Charles’s direction.

Dr. Pham’s gaze lingers on Janet and Charles for a second longer, and he lifts my sister’s hand to his lips for a gentle, reassuring kiss. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

Another hour passed before Janet was finally wheeled away to her room. Dr. Pham was able to allow one visitor to be with her as she settled into her room. I encouraged Charles to stay, mainly so that I could get Lucy home, but also because I couldn’t ask if I could be the one to stay when she looked at Charles with a sad smile before we came to the decision. So withthe reluctant steps of my feet and the staggering in my heart that made me wish I could set up a small tent in the waiting room, I left.

Lucy and I are standing at the edge of the sidewalk outside the hospital, both of us making dithering gestures that lean toward flagging down a cab. Without the drone of street traffic this late at night, the quiet feels loud. And every ache in my chest, every twinge and tug, stands out like a beacon in the dark night.

“Dexter,” I hear Lucy call from behind me. I turn to face her, and she looks at me with her downturned eyes and a tiny frown that makes me want to fall to a heap right on the hard concrete. She doesn’t say anything, like offering me some false assurances that Janet’s in good hands in her room up there or pretending to know the extent of Janet’s illness through assumptions and the general knowledge that people don’t die over silly infections.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes as I feel the first of the tears start to gather. “She’s all I have,” I croak. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I lose her.”

Lucy’s body crashes into mine, and her arms wrap around me, caging me to her. My forehead falls into the crook of her neck, and I feel her press a small kiss to my temple. Her hands run up and down my back in a soothing way that makes me believe she has magic laced in them, something of the healing nature. Sirens call in the distance, reminding us where we are. The wailing grows louder and louder as an ambulance pulls into the bay outside the emergency room entrance we’re standing next to.

I pull away, and our foreheads lean against each other where our breaths mingle. Her thumb brushes away the wetness on my cheek, and I grip her hips, letting my fingers curl over her waist and holding her tight like she might disappear.

“Let’s go home,” she whispers as my lips inch closer to her.

I nod and slowly pull away from her.

We walk at a slow, unhurried pace, our gazes on the ground in front of us, and the quiet, comfortable silence creating a small amount of distance between us. A stark reminder that I shouldn’t have let my fingers slip under the loose hem of her shirt, where my fingers grazed over the small sliver of skin above the waistband of her skirt.

“She was diagnosed a couple of months ago,” I say, cutting into the silence. “Lung cancer.” I can feel Lucy look in my direction, but I keep my eyes on the sidewalk littered with old gum stains and weeds growing in between the cracks. “The doctors gave a pretty good prognosis, considering the severity of her cancer, but we’ve had our set of ups and downs since chemo started. I don’t really…She’s…”

I sigh and run a hand over my face. The things I want to tell her aren’t light. They’re heavy and substantial, and I don’t know if I’m ready to have her carry that chunk of my burden. Because whatever I tell her, I can’tuntell her. But wouldn’t it be amazing to not have to carry all of it on my own? If she could act as a pillar or a support beam or just anything so I don’t feel so lost and lonely?

“I was fourteen when my mom and dad died,” I say with a shaky voice. “Janet was nineteen. She was away at college. I was home by myself, watching some lame TV show I can’t even remember anymore. My parents had gone out for the night to dinner for a friend’s birthday party or something.

“I remember I walked out of my room to go to the kitchen. I was hungry, so I was about to microwave a burrito. And then I noticed lights out in the driveway. I thought it was my parents, but the lights were flashing red and blue. Someone knocked on the door, and my mom told me to never open the door, even if it was them knocking because they would always have a key, so I didn’t know what to do.

“I heard police sirens outside when another police car parked in our driveway, and an officer told me to open the door. So I finally did and after that, I don’t really remember much. It’s like I skipped the part where they told me my parents were in an accident, and I was suddenly in the back of the cop car on the way to Janet’s school an hour away. I don’t even remember telling them what school Janet went to.”

I pause when we hit an intersection, and we have to wait for a car to pass before crossing. Lucy takes that break in our trek to slide her hand into mine and squeeze my palm.

“She insisted she quit school, but I told her not to,” I continue. “She’d gotten a scholarship to one of the best art schools in the state, and I didn’t want her to lose that on top of everything else. So she agreed to move back home and commute to school. We got a hefty settlement from the insurance company, along with an even larger one from the drunk driver that killed my parents, so we were okay for a while.” My throat feels tight and vulnerable. It shows when it cracks and the lodged ball in my throat feels too big to push down.

“We don’t have anyone else. Our parents were only children, and our grandparents are all gone. Holidays and birthdays were usually pretty lonely for us when our parents were alive, and now…it’s just me and Janet.”

Lucy listens to me talk without interrupting. Without demanding more than I’m offering. And we continue to walk without any indication of wanting to hop into a cab or stop to discuss further logistics, like if we’re going to take the subway or if we’re really going to walk the second half of our journey on foot. Because that feels irrelevant at this moment. Whether we spend the next hour getting home or an entire week, time feels irrelevant.

I tell her about the last Christmas I had with my parents when I got a PlayStation 3 and powered through a seventy-two-hour Call of Duty marathon. I tell her about the time my dad taught Janet to drive, and she broke down when she hit a curb and sat sobbing in the car while I inhaled a bag of Cheetos in the back seat. She tells me about her own Christmas when she was fourteen and her dad gave her mom a brand new Volvo, whichshocked the hell out of her and her sisters. She talks about her parents, how they met in college and moved out to Ohio for her mom’s work before Nat was born. And the time she and her sisters spent a summer in Los Angeles with their dad’s side of the family, where her grandmother gave them informal Spanish lessons over the sound of stone rubbing against stone from hermolcajeteand the clatter of pots and pans. Something Lucy’s mom did when she was welcomed into the family as someone who otherwise would’ve been considered an outsider with her freckled cheeks and Irish roots. They learned traditions the way their mom did, through a language that no longer became foreign to them and an abundance of love and food.

We talk and talk while the streets remain quiet and the night starts to haze into light. We walk as if we have all the time in the world. As if Janet isn’t laid up in a hospital bed and as if Lucy wasn’t outed to her sister about moving out to New York City in secrecy. As if so many things aren’t working against us. And maybe, for tonight, they aren’t. Maybe things are slowly working in our favor, and they all led to us, right now.

By the end of it, when we’ve finally walked through the doors of my apartment and kicked off our shoes, it’s officially morning. We slump onto the couch cushions with a heavy sigh and the light streaming through the windows. I turn the window AC unit on so we won’t wake up in a few hours too sticky from the humid heat. Neither one of us moves to our separate bedrooms. Instead, we stay on the couch, where we linger against each other. Her shoulder nestles under the crook of my arm, my hand grazing over the warm skin of her knee. As our eyelids fall heavy, we shift so we lie side by side. She buries her face into my chest, and I rest my chin atop her head while we doze off into a sweet slumber.

25

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