The Fault in Our Stars(66)

We took the elevator. I walked Isaac to a seat in the Circle of Trust then slowly worked my way around the Literal Heart. I checked everywhere: under the chairs, around the lectern I’d stood behind while delivering my eulogy, under the treat table, on the bulletin board packed with Sunday school kids’ drawings of God’s love. Nothing. It was the only place we’d been together in those last days besides his house, and it either wasn’t here or I was missing something. Perhaps he’d left it for me in the hospital, but if so, it had almost certainly been thrown away after his death.

I was really out of breath by the time I settled into a chair next to Isaac, and I devoted the entirety of Patrick’s nutless testimonial to telling my lungs they were okay, that they could breathe, that there was enough oxygen. They’d been drained only a week before Gus died—I watched the amber cancer water dribble out of me through the tube—and yet already they felt full again. I was so focused on telling myself to breathe that I didn’t notice Patrick saying my name at first.

I snapped to attention. “Yeah?” I asked.

“How are you?”

“I’m okay, Patrick. I’m a little out of breath.”

“Would you like to share a memory of Augustus with the group?”

“I wish I would just die, Patrick. Do you ever wish you would just die?”

“Yes,” Patrick said, without his usual pause. “Yes, of course. So why don’t you?”

I thought about it. My old stock answer was that I wanted to stay alive for my parents, because they would be all gutted and childless in the wake of me, and that was still true kind of, but that wasn’t it, exactly. “I don’t know.”

“In the hopes that you’ll get better?”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not that. I really don’t know. Isaac?” I asked. I was tired of talking.

Isaac started talking about true love. I couldn’t tell them what I was thinking because it seemed cheesy to me, but I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet. What my dad had told me, basically.

I stayed quiet for the rest of Support Group, and Patrick said a special prayer for me, and Gus’s name was tacked onto the long list of the dead—fourteen of them for every one of us—and we promised to live our best life today, and then I took Isaac to the car.



When I got home, Mom and Dad were at the dining room table on their separate laptops, and the moment I walked in the door, Mom slammed her laptop shut. “What’s on the computer?”

“Just some antioxidant recipes. Ready for BiPAP and America’s Next Top Model?” she asked.

“I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Well, you’ve gotta eat before you—”

“Mom, I am aggressively unhungry.” I took a step toward the door but she cut me off.

“Hazel, you have to eat. Just some ch—”

“No. I’m going to bed.”

“No,” Mom said. “You’re not.” I glanced at my dad, who shrugged.

“It’s my life,” I said.

“You’re not going to starve yourself to death just because Augustus died. You’re going to eat dinner.”

I was really pissed off for some reason. “I can’t eat, Mom. I can’t. Okay?”

I tried to push past her but she grabbed both my shoulders and said, “Hazel, you’re eating dinner. You need to stay healthy.”

“NO!” I shouted. “I’m not eating dinner, and I can’t stay healthy, because I’m not healthy. I am dying, Mom. I am going to die and leave you here alone and you won’t have a me to hover around and you won’t be a mother anymore, and I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it, okay?!”

I regretted it as soon as I said it.

“You heard me.”

“What?”

“Did you hear me say that to your father?” Her eyes welled up. “Did you?” I nodded. “Oh, God, Hazel. I’m sorry. I was wrong, sweetie. That wasn’t true. I said that in a desperate moment. It’s not something I believe.” She sat down, and I sat down with her. I was thinking that I should have just puked up some pasta for her instead of getting pissed off.

“What do you believe, then?” I asked.

“As long as either of us is alive, I will be your mother,” she said. “Even if you die, I—”

“When,” I said.

She nodded. “Even when you die, I will still be your mom, Hazel. I won’t stop being your mom. Have you stopped loving Gus?” I shook my head. “Well, then how could I stop loving you?”

“Okay,” I said. My dad was crying now.

“I want you guys to have a life,” I said. “I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.”

After a minute, Mom said, “I’m taking some classes. Online, through IU. To get my master’s in social work. In fact, I wasn’t looking at antioxidant recipes; I was writing a paper.”