The Fault in Our Stars(53)

A week after our dinner, Gus ended up in the ER with chest pain, and they admitted him overnight, so I drove over to Memorial the next morning and visited him on the fourth floor. I hadn’t been to Memorial since visiting Isaac. It didn’t have any of the cloyingly bright primary color–painted walls or the framed paintings of dogs driving cars that one found at Children’s, but the absolute sterility of the place made me nostalgic for the happy-kid bullshit at Children’s. Memorial was so functional. It was a storage facility. A prematorium.

When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, I saw Gus’s mom pacing in the waiting room, talking on a cell phone. She hung up quickly, then hugged me and offered to take my cart.

“I’m okay,” I said. “How’s Gus?”

“He had a tough night, Hazel,” she said. “His heart is working too hard. He needs to scale back on activity. Wheelchairs from here on out. They’re putting him on some new medicine that should be better for the pain. His sisters just drove in.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I see him?”

She put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. It felt weird. “You know we love you, Hazel, but right now we just need to be a family. Gus agrees with that. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll tell him you visited.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m just gonna read here for a while, I think.”



She went down the hall, back to where he was. I understood, but I still missed him, still thought maybe I was missing my last chance to see him, to say good-bye or whatever. The waiting room was all brown carpet and brown overstuffed cloth chairs. I sat in a love seat for a while, my oxygen cart tucked by my feet. I’d worn my Chuck Taylors and my Ceci n’est pas une pipe shirt, the exact outfit I’d been wearing two weeks before on the Late Afternoon of the Venn Diagram, and he wouldn’t see it. I started scrolling through the pictures on my phone, a backward flip-book of the last few months, beginning with him and Isaac outside of Monica’s house and ending with the first picture I’d taken of him, on the drive to Funky Bones. It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

*

Two weeks later, I wheeled Gus across the art park toward Funky Bones with one entire bottle of very expensive champagne and my oxygen tank in his lap. The champagne had been donated by one of Gus’s doctors—Gus being the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to children. We sat, Gus in his chair and me on the damp grass, as near to Funky Bones as we could get him in the chair. I pointed at the little kids goading each other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for me to hear over the din, “Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.”

We drank from paper Winnie-the-Pooh cups.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN





A typical day with late-stage Gus:

I went over to his house about noon, after he had eaten and puked up breakfast. He met me at the door in his wheelchair, no longer the muscular, gorgeous boy who stared at me at Support Group, but still half smiling, still smoking his unlit cigarette, his blue eyes bright and alive.

We ate lunch with his parents at the dining room table. Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and last night’s asparagus. Gus didn’t eat. I asked how he was feeling.

“Grand,” he said. “And you?”

“Good. What’d you do last night?”

“I slept quite a lot. I want to write you a sequel, Hazel Grace, but I’m just so damned tired all the time.”

“You can just tell it to me,” I said.

“Well, I stand by my pre–Van Houten analysis of the Dutch Tulip Man. Not a con man, but not as rich as he was letting on.”

“And what about Anna’s mom?”

“Haven’t settled on an opinion there. Patience, Grasshopper.” Augustus smiled. His parents were quiet, watching him, never looking away, like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town. “Sometimes I dream that I’m writing a memoir. A memoir would be just the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.”

“Why do you need an adoring public when you’ve got me?” I asked.

“Hazel Grace, when you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you . . . now, that’s the trick.”

I rolled my eyes.



After lunch, we went outside to the backyard. He was still well enough to push his own wheelchair, pulling miniature wheelies to get the front wheels over the bump in the doorway. Still athletic, in spite of it all, blessed with balance and quick reflexes that even the abundant narcotics could not fully mask.

His parents stayed inside, but when I glanced back into the dining room, they were always watching us.

We sat out there in silence for a minute and then Gus said, “I wish we had that swing set sometimes.”

“The one from my backyard?”

“Yeah. My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched.”

“Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer,” I told him.