The Memory Book(45)

I DIDN’T DIE


Bette and Davy are building a fort of cushions around me as I write, which makes sense. I barely move from the floor anymore, so I am an ideal load-bearing structure.

Here’s what I see: my feet spread out under a blue fuzzy blanket, the kitchen/dining room table covered in the remains of two peanut butter sandwiches. On the sill of the window above the sink, a line of orange pill bottles with white lids.

Small circular white pills for pain.

Oval blue pills for vertical gaze palsy.

Red pill-shaped pills for numbness.

Prozac for depression.

Et cetera.

The last one on the list, I haven’t taken yet. But I’m about at that point.

“Play with us, play with us, play with us,” Davy is chanting, the fort abandoned as she and Bette run around the couch. I look around for Harrison, hoping he can distract them, but remember he’s at camp.

“I can’t,” I tell them. Too busy watching a terrible, terrible show about people who compete to find valuable goods in storage lockers.

“Why?” Bette asks.

“I can’t move,” I say.

“That’s not true,” Bette says. “You get up to go to the bathroom and get food! I saw you just now!”

She was right. I can move. I just don’t want to. Move to go where? Outside? To the border of our property?

The only comforts I have are two fictions: the fiction of whatever is on TV, and the fiction of texting Stuart, who now thinks my strep has turned into mono. (It turns out it’s easier to lie when you’re typing, and because of medicinal side effects, your tongue is dry anyway.)

And neither comfort requires movement. So.

Speaking of Stuart, where is my phone?

Uggghhh.

I keep it next to me so I don’t have this problem. Seriously, I’m not having a memory lapse. I didn’t move it.

Then I hear Bette and Davy giggling under the kitchen table.

Oh god.

“See? You can move!” Bette shouted with a triumphant smile on her face when I stormed over and snatched it back. They both ran outside.

Whew, they didn’t text or call Stuart.

They texted Coop. They must have found his name as the only one they recognize. Coop sometimes gives them “helicopter rides” at church.

I yanked open the sliding doors and screamed at them. “DON’T DO THAT!”

Bette called from somewhere in the tree line, still laughing. “HE TEXTED YOU FIRST! I JUST TYPED ‘OK’!”

Oh, so he did.


Coop: Hey gurl just wanted to check and see how you’re doing. Can I drop by? Also Mom made you guys a ton of food so I’m gonna bring that.

Me: Ok



So I guess Coop’s coming over. I need to put a password on my phone.





WHAT HAPPENED


I was outside for the first time in a week and a half on one of our plastic lawn chairs, realizing that Vermont had turned into summer while I was indoors. The sky was heavy with potential rain clouds, but the daffodils had made way for lilies of the valley and purple clover, the tomatoes in Mom’s garden were streaking red, and there were a couple of hummingbirds at the feeder.

Bette and Davy were watching them, crouched in the bushes near the house, trying not to make a sound.

As Coop approached from down the mountain, holding two bags in either hand, I held a finger to my lips and pointed to the colorful blurs.

I may be a useless sack of shit but all of us McCoys like watching the birds. Especially hummingbirds. I used to know so many facts about hummingbirds.

Coop set the bags down slowly and put on a silly I’m-a-spy walk.

Bette and Davy giggled, blowing their cover, and the birds jetted away.

“Way to go,” I said as he picked up the bags again.

“I did my best,” he said, shrugging. As he got closer, my instincts fired and I checked for a joint behind his ear. Coop would forget something like that, especially in the summer. There wasn’t one.

“I’ll put these in the kitchen?” he asked. I waved him on.

I heard him banging around in there through the crack he left in the sliding doors, opening and closing the fridge. “Did you guys move the cups?”

“Yeah,” I called. “They’re in the other cabinet now.”

It was strange to let Cooper Lind go inside our house as I knew him now, always surrounded by this crew of people shorter than him, hanging on him, a huge, doped-up smile on his face.

But then again, we would never see each other in the hallways like that anymore, around all the people.

And there were the ratios I always relied on: Coop had a ratio, too. Fourteen years to four years. Four years he spent in a cloud of parties and weed, fourteen years he spent in this house. He was still seventy percent of the kid who knew where the cups were.

I guess it wasn’t that strange, if you think about it that way.

So he came back out with a glass of water, pulled up the other lawn chair from where it was turned over near the gutter spout, and sat down. I braced myself for the questions that were no longer relevant to me.

Are you really that sick?

Will you be able to go to college?

What are you going to do now?

When he didn’t say anything, I cut the sound of the breeze and the birds and the bugs, so we could get it over with.