She, Myself, and I Read online

Oh, he’s so literal, so oblivious to subtle sarcasm.

  “Perhaps you’d like to talk more about how you’ll manage interactions with friends that you had before the surgery?”

  “There isn’t actually that much to manage,” I tell him. My illness and withdrawal from everything that was part of my life before it have seen to that.

  Three days after my tenth birthday, two and a half years after my first symptoms, Mum and Dad got a letter from school saying that “with great regret” it could “no longer meet my needs.” Mum hired a tutor, a retired headmistress with a dust mite allergy, who came to our home armed with textbooks and antihistamines four days a week.

  It wasn’t that long before my school friends dropped away. My fault, as well as theirs. Mum’s fault, as well as mine.

  I remember one afternoon—I must have been eleven—Elliot walked Bea, my onetime best friend, home with him from school to our house.

  “I saw Bea’s mum,” he told me, poking his head around my bedroom door, looking pleased with himself. “She’ll pick her up at five.”

  But it was one of those days when the fatigue felt crushing.

  Bea talked about how mean the new PE teacher was, and how they were going to the Algarve in summer, and how Bea had won an art competition with a picture of a horse that looked more like a dog, and she was going to have a karaoke party, and did I want to come, because everyone would be there . . . And I said she could go.

  Later, I heard Elliot and Mum in the kitchen.

  Elliot was saying, in a kind of hushed shout: “She has to see her friends.”

  “It has to be her call, Elliot! You can’t force it on her!”

  “She’s a kid. She doesn’t know what’s best. You have to help her see her old friends.”

  “What are you?” Mum half shouted back. “And why do I have to? So she can hear exactly what she’s missing out on and they can watch her die, too?”

  The few friends I have now, I found online.

  The girl I exchange messages with most often lives in Tokyo. She has a Tumblr mostly about cats (it was her blog that introduced me to cat sushi—which does not involve any harm to a cat), and after we started swapping kitsch cat pictures with our own captions, I guess we kind of became friends. But if I ever meet her, AikaA, in real life, will she think, “Rosa doesn’t look like how she writes”?

  Hardly. I’ve never even mentioned the disease. As far as she knows, I’m just a regular girl who has a thing about cats and likes old epic movies (really old, like Gone with the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia) and macabre Victorian novels.

  This is all true. But I’ve also told her other things . . .

  Like, a couple of years ago, after a spell in the hospital for an experimental treatment had laid me up, I told her I’d fractured my wrist on a mountain biking trip in Majorca. Who knew they put the brakes on the other side in Europe? (Me, thanks to a Sussex cyclist’s blog.) I also told her about all these bands I’ve allegedly seen in Berlin and Amsterdam, as well as in London. (I took all the details from Elliot’s accounts.)

  Yes, I’ve made up stories about myself. Don’t we all, to some degree?

  “If I remember rightly, you told your online friends that a car accident was the reason you were unable to communicate for months,” Dr. Bailey says.

  “Yeah.”

  “And so now?” he asks. “What do you tell them?”

  “I’m making a really amazing recovery.”

  He nods. “You know, I wonder if, as part of your amazing recovery, you find yourself focusing on how it may feel to have a boyfriend.”

  First Elliot. Now my psychologist. What is with males? Dr. Bailey has broached this topic before, but not so explicitly. How it may feel? Surely he doesn’t mean . . . “You mean . . . ?”

  “Do you feel any remaining concern about having a relationship that would, naturally, to some extent, include an element of physical attraction?”

  “You mean, will it bother me that someone will fancy the dead girl, not me?”

  To Bailey’s credit, he doesn’t cringe. “That’s not exactly what I meant. But it’s close enough.”

  I think of how it was to feel that sunlight in the park. That light that touched the doctor and the bench and the guy with the tattoo, and touched me. I half hear myself saying, “I am her and she is me. We are indivisible, like the father, son, and holy ghost.”

  To his discredit, his expression hardens. I’ve just offended him.

  And I feel . . . I do feel a little bad. I know Bailey’s religious. There’s a fish symbol magnet on his desk lamp. According to Jess, he met his wife on ChristianMingle.com.

  The offense quickly fades from his face. But he says, “I wonder why you put it like that.”

  “It’s not that I’m not grateful,” I tell him. I sigh. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been a patient so long now . . .”

  He nods. “You’re impatient to get on with life in the wider world. It’s understandable you would feel that way.”

  I think, not for the first time: He’s religious—and he accepts me. At least, he’s never looked at me as though I’m anything remotely resembling an unholy freak.

  But that night, something happens to make me think maybe it’s impossible to tell what someone’s actually thinking unless they tell you.

  And then when they do, it can come as a total shock.

  9.

  I’m in the park. The guy with the gray canvas satchel is there. There’s a shiver in my flesh. We’re standing by the bench, just looking at each other. I’m locked in on his expression. It’s serious. Melancholy. He looks like someone who might read macabre Victorian novels. But who might feel that pictures of egg-wrapped sushi-kittens are just the sort of distraction that a mind that enjoys Edgar Allan Poe not only craves but requires.

  Behind him, Dmitri is striding over from the hospital, calling to me. “Rosa, come back! I want to take you to Milan!”

  I hear something else. A whispering. It’s coarse. And it whips me up and out of the bewitchment of my dream into my forest-green room. The flash of the red dots between the numerals on my alarm clock is disorienting.

  3:24.

  My lips are parted—I think there’s drool on my pillow. My body remains sunk in its own natural anesthesia. I feel sad, and irritated. Why did I have to wake now? It was a pretty good dream.

  And I tense. Someone’s behind me. They’re standing or kneeling by my bed. I can smell her, her faint, individual body odor. She’s whispering in a low voice:

  “I take strength from you, Jesus Christ, our savior; your loving heart is everywhere. I humbly ask your pardon.”

  Jane. What is she doing?

  “Forgive our negligence, our manifold offenses, the blasphemy of the disunion of the soul, of the ending of life, of the aberrant form.”

  The blasphemy of the disunion of the soul. She’s talking about them taking my brain from my skull.

  The ending of life. She’s talking about Sylvia.

  The aberrant form. She’s talking about me.

  I know what I should do. Jump up, hit the panic button, get the orderlies, have Jane removed from my room, insist on seeing Dr. Bailey, tell him she’s set my recovery back months, have her disciplined and dismissed.

  But I don’t. For some reason that I don’t really understand, I just lie there, listening. Tears well up. Gradually, they soak the pillow. The cheek that’s pressed against it grows cold. I’m so rigid, and my breathing is so shallow, I think Jane must know I’m no longer asleep. But that doesn’t stop her.

  “Dear Lord, don’t let her suffering be long. Bring peace to whatever she has, body or soul.”

  Don’t let her suffering be long. What is she saying?

  How long has she been there? Can this be the first night she’s done this? For just how many weeks or months has Jane been taking care of me by day while by night she’s been praying to her god for me to die?

  10.

  It’s the morning after that bizarre night I
listened to Jane praying over my bed. The day after Elliot pushed over that bench, acting as prime accomplice in my escape.

  I’ve completed my scan (I still have to wear an EEG cap for thirty minutes first thing each morning), I’ve just finished getting dressed, and there’s a knock at my door. I open it and find Mum with a paper bag and take-out cup.

  I think, I should tell her about Jane. But then she’s smiling and kissing me. Her pink cheek is cold from the walk from the parking lot, I guess. “I have to rush to an appointment, but here. One latte. One cinnamon muffin.” The warm, cozy scent drifts through the paper.

  “Thank you,” I tell her. I’m half waiting for her to mention the park, but she doesn’t.

  “I’ll catch you later,” she says. “Dad’s going to bring pizzas over tonight from Figs. You want the one with the crispy eggplant?” I nod. “Six o’clock? Your room.”

  I’m still tense from what happened last night, but I manage a smile. “It’s a date.”

  After she’s gone, I think, I should have told her about Jane. So why didn’t I?

  I find myself remembering a conversation with Dr. Bailey that took place maybe a month ago. I’d just reread a short story by Poe about being buried alive. In it, Poe queries the location of the soul of a person who has no apparent vital signs but who isn’t actually dead.

  I remember thinking: Is near-drowning like being buried alive?

  And: At what point exactly did Sylvia die?

  I asked Dr. Bailey, “What do you think happened to Sylvia’s soul and my soul?”

  “Your soul?” he said.

  “I guess you believe in souls.”

  He was silent for a few moments. “I have my beliefs, but they don’t feed into my thoughts about you, or my work here with you.”

  “Why not? If they’re what you believe?”

  “I think it’s important to have boundaries in life.”

  “But not in your thoughts?”

  He sat up very straight in his chair. “There will always be people who try to categorize others and set them apart. I try very hard not to do that.”

  Maybe I should call Dr. Bailey and tell him about Jane.

  I debate this with myself while drinking the coffee and eating the muffin—as close to a heavenly experience that I guess I can imagine—then I lie on my bed with my laptop, Googling “Christianity” and “souls.” Then there’s another knock on my door. And a voice calling: “It’s me, Dr. Monzales. Are you there? Can we have a quick chat?”

  After closing my laptop, I let him in. I sit on the edge of my bed. Maybe I should tell him about Jane. But again something stops me. He glances at the muffin wrapper and the take-out cup, which are on my desk.

  “These are not from the hospital café.” His voice isn’t exactly suspicious, but there’s an edge to it.

  “No, Mum brought them. From the café by their apartment.”

  “Ah.” He nods. “Rosa, I know you left the hospital yesterday. I know you were in the park.”

  My heart jumps and races. I feel unjustifiably guilty. I fold my arms across my chest. “It’s just that I’m starting to feel kind of trapped and—”

  He holds up his hands. “It’s all right,” he says, looking a little awkward. “I’m sorry. I should have thought of this before. Of course, have some time in the park. Maybe after your morning study session?”

  Academically, I’m quite a long way behind where I should be; but to give credit to Dawn, she’s nothing if not dedicated.

  “I just ask, for your own safety, that you stay close to the hospital. For now. And in case . . . We don’t want anyone taking photographs of you—we don’t want the media, when this comes out, scrutinizing any pictures of faces from around the hospital, looking for the patient. Is that okay?”

  I’m relieved. I try to force myself to feel more rebellious. To tell him: I don’t even need to be here anymore! But something inside me fails. Perhaps Jane has weakened me. “. . . Yeah.”

  “Okay, good. So I have this for you.” He pulls a hinged silver bangle out of his pocket. “We issue these to many of our longer-term inpatients. It emits a radio frequency signal. It will allow you back in through the other doors, so you don’t always have to be checked by security.”

  “A tracker?”

  “Not a tracker! A bracelet of freedom, Rosa. Think of it like that.” He smiles.

  • • •

  Just as Dr. Monzales promised back before I moved to the rehab wing, there is a classroom here, with space for up to ten laptops. But this morning’s session is solo study. When I log in to my account, I find the modules that Dawn highlighted for me to complete. So I sit at the desk in my room, and I do my best to concentrate on quadratic equations and then alcohol group molecular bonding, aware that “my best” this morning is not likely to impress her.

  As soon as I’m done, I tie my hair back, grab a New Yorker from a pile that Elliot left (given the condition of them, I’m not entirely sure he’s actually read much, apart from the listings and cartoons), and take the elevator to the ground floor.

  I brave the sentimentality of the ground-floor gift shop. I know—this from a girl with a weakness for pictures of kittens on rice, which I realize still sounds gruesome but honestly is just kitsch. I push my way past GET WELL! balloons and lurid cartons of rainbow-colored jelly beans and picture frames with pastel blue bears stuck to the sides, and find a pair of large black sunglasses, which I put on my hospital account. At last, I walk out, into the park . . .

  Now I’m just a girl on a bench, taking in the fresh air and the sun, idly watching people going about their lives. Not thinking about Jane and what she said. Not wondering again why I haven’t told Mum or Dr. Monzales, or if I should call Dad. Not wondering if it’s because I feel a kind of shame. Not thinking about Jane.

  It’s 12:14, and the park is filling up fast. Four nurses in scrubs just settled themselves with noodle boxes and chopsticks in the shade of one of the cedars. A couple of the ball-playing doctors are striding out from the ER, lanyards flying. And, I realize, he—Tattoo Guy—is sitting three benches down from me, holding what looks like an iPhone near the chin of a woman in a long pink fractal-pattern skirt and tan wedge boots.

  She’s doing most of the talking. Every so often, he nods or says something obviously encouraging, because she resumes her monologue. I’m too far away, and the background noise of people talking and a dog barking and a helicopter hovering out over the harbor is too loud for me to hear what they’re saying. Eventually, he gets up. Says something inaudible. She nods. I hurriedly pretend to be focused on the New Yorker.

  While to a passerby I probably appear to be engrossed in a piece about J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, my attention is on him. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as he walks along the path, passes a bench, kicks a half-size soccer ball back to a toddler in a Spider-Man outfit, passes another bench . . .

  “Matthew Radley. He loved life as much as we love him.”

  His voice is deep. Musical. My stomach clenches.

  Is it weird to have this reaction to a guy I’ve barely exchanged a word with? And to dream about him?

  He sits down. Four inches of weathered gray-brown wood separate our legs. He’s wearing jeans, a dark gray shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, and no sunglasses. How didn’t I notice his eyes before? They’re blue, but with an undertone of light. Of silver.

  He squints in the bright sunshine. His face, neck, and arms are tanned. No distinguishing features, apart from that tattoo, which now I can see is of a constellation of stars surrounding two words in Latin: Ad Astra. I guess it means something to do with stars, but I’m not exactly sure what.

  He’s looking at me, and I find it hard to read his expression. Then I think: A year ago, he’d have looked at you with pity, if he’d have looked at you at all. The brute of a thought kicks me in the guts.

  Seven-eleven, I tell myself.

  I’m not even at the four of the seven-count inhalation when he say
s, “Could I interview you?”

  What? “What?”

  He waves the phone. “Joe Tyler, Bostonstream.”

  My words come in a rush, my lungs collapsing as I say, “You’re a journalist?”

  “I’m an intern.”

  “An intern journalist?”

  He nods slowly. “Yeah.”

  A journalist. I scour his face. My heart is attempting to escape from my body. I’m searching for it—the sign that he knows. That he has found out.

  “You know Bostonstream?”

  It takes superhuman control, but I manage to shake my head.

  “Bostonstream dot com. Interviews and reviews, mostly. I do this regular called The Bench.”

  When I don’t respond—I can still barely breathe, never mind speak—he says, “So the idea is I go to a different bench every lunchtime. I sit next to whoever I happen to find there or I wait for someone to sit down, and I ask them to tell me about their life and their views on the issues of the day. I ask for their name and age.” He misinterprets the horror that must be showing on my face right now. “I can change your name if you really want.”

  I glance over my shoulder, suddenly realizing there must be a film crew somewhere, capturing all of this. The approach. The enticement. The sting. He knows. I see only the wall of light from all the glass on this side of the hospital, the doctors jumping about, and the nurses talking over their noodles. But he must know, or why would he be coming out with all of this? Unless . . .

  Unless what he’s saying is the truth. And by chance he just sat down next to—without being immodest—the one person in this city who could most guarantee him international media stardom. How likely is that? I search his face for signs of deception. His serious silver-blue eyes meet mine. I have no idea what he’s thinking.

  “So—could I interview you?” he says.

  “I—I . . .” My subconscious mind takes over. It weighs the options. If I say no, he’ll leave to find somebody else. But how could I say yes? I’d have to concoct a story; it would have to be convincing; there’s just no way—“Okay.”

  He nods. I don’t know if he’s pleased or relieved or even bored, because his serious expression does not change. “Do you mind if I record you?”