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“MOM, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!” I shouted, and she came to the bed and let me hug her.
I texted Augustus because I knew he was in school:
Still free May three? :-)
He texted back immediately.
Everything’s coming up Waters.
If I could just stay alive for a week, I’d know the unwritten secrets of Anna’s mom and the Dutch Tulip Guy. I looked down my blouse at my chest.
“Keep your shit together,” I whispered to my lungs.
CHAPTER NINE
The day before we left for Amsterdam, I went back to Support Group for the first time since meeting Augustus. The cast had rotated a bit down there in the Literal Heart of Jesus. I arrived early, enough time for perennially strong appendiceal cancer survivor Lida to bring me up-to-date on everyone as I ate a grocery-store chocolate chip cookie while leaning against the dessert table.
Twelve-year-old leukemic Michael had passed away. He’d fought hard, Lida told me, as if there were another way to fight. Everyone else was still around. Ken was NEC after radiation. Lucas had relapsed, and she said it with a sad smile and a little shrug, the way you might say an alcoholic had relapsed.
A cute, chubby girl walked over to the table and said hi to Lida, then introduced herself to me as Susan. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she had a scar extending from the side of her nose down her lip and across her cheek. She had put makeup over the scar, which only served to emphasize it. I was feeling a little out of breath from all the standing, so I said, “I’m gonna go sit,” and then the elevator opened, revealing Isaac and his mom. He wore sunglasses and clung to his mom’s arm with one hand, a cane in the other.
“Support Group Hazel not Monica,” I said when he got close enough, and he smiled and said, “Hey, Hazel. How’s it going?”
“Good. I’ve gotten really hot since you went blind.”
“I bet,” he said. His mom led him to a chair, kissed the top of his head, and shuffled back toward the elevator. He felt around beneath him and then sat. I sat down in the chair next to him. “So how’s it going?”
“Okay. Glad to be home, I guess. Gus told me you were in the ICU?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Sucks,” he said.
“I’m a lot better now,” I said. “I’m going to Amsterdam tomorrow with Gus.”
“I know. I’m pretty well up-to-date on your life, because Gus never. Talks. About. Anything. Else.”
I smiled. Patrick cleared his throat and said, “If we could all take a seat?” He caught my eye. “Hazel!” he said. “I’m so glad to see you!”
Everyone sat and Patrick began his retelling of his ball-lessness, and I fell into the routine of Support Group: communicating through sighs with Isaac, feeling sorry for everyone in the room and also everyone outside of it, zoning out of the conversation to focus on my breathlessness and the aching. The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.
It was Lida the Strong. Lida in remission. Blond, healthy, stout Lida, who swam on her high school swim team. Lida, missing only her appendix, saying my name, saying, “Hazel is such an inspiration to me; she really is. She just keeps fighting the battle, waking up every morning and going to war without complaint. She’s so strong. She’s so much stronger than I am. I just wish I had her strength.”
“Hazel?” Patrick asked. “How does that make you feel?”
I shrugged and looked over at Lida. “I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.” I felt guilty as soon as I said it.
“I don’t think that’s what Lida meant,” Patrick said. “I think she . . .” But I’d stopped listening.
After the prayers for the living and the endless litany of the dead (with Michael tacked on to the end), we held hands and said, “Living our best life today!”
Lida immediately rushed up to me full of apology and explanation, and I said, “No, no, it’s really fine,” waving her off, and I said to Isaac, “Care to accompany me upstairs?”
He took my arm, and I walked with him to the elevator, grateful to have an excuse to avoid the stairs. I’d almost made it all the way to the elevator when I saw his mom standing in a corner of the Literal Heart. “I’m here,” she said to Isaac, and he switched from my arm to hers before asking, “You want to come over?”
“Sure,” I said. I felt bad for him. Even though I hated the sympathy people felt toward me, I couldn’t help but feel it toward him.
Isaac lived in a small ranch house in Meridian Hills next to this fancy private school. We sat down in the living room while his mom went off to the kitchen to make dinner, and then he asked if I wanted to play a game.
