Hope and Other Punch Lines(59)

At night, when I can’t sleep, I sometimes think about an article I read once about a lady who, as she fell, had the presence of mind to hold down her skirt so she wouldn’t flash the people below. I wish I had told Noah about her, how she should be the national treasure, not Baby Hope, because I realize that’s how I want to die. Not on my terms—no one gets to die on their own terms—and not in a blaze of glory. I want to scoop up dignity wherever I can find it.

“Don’t be scared. I’m not. I mean, I am a little, but this is life with a capital L, right? Surgery, shmurgery.” I speak with a bravado I do not feel. I look up at the Wheel of Fortune puzzle, but the letters blur. I find myself irrationally annoyed about the preferential treatment given to the letter E.

“Dad,” I say, and my voice grows serious. I decide there should be no fear, at least not about words. I want radical honesty. “It’s still and again. As in you are still in love with Mom, and you are also in love with her again. Just to be clear.”

My words are punctuated by the tick-tick-tick of the big spinning wheel on television. We stop talking for a second and stare at the screen to wait in suspense as the pointer lands: a lady named Tess in a leopard-print blouse cheers when she adds a brand-new washer-dryer wedge to her dollar total. A cardboard representation of the possibility of the thing. Better than bankruptcy, if not quite as cool as the Hawaiian vacation.

My mother once told me the most disconcerting part of being a parent is that you never get to settle into it, that your child is constantly being replaced with another version you don’t recognize. She said she looks at old photos of me and asks, Who’s that? I wonder now how it’s impossible to feel our own incremental growth. How this theory of hers could help explain the disconnect I’ve felt since I’ve started high school. I am me and also an unrecognizable version of me, both at the same time. How it’s possible I could have once been friends with Cat and now am not at all. Four entirely different people: the two mes, the two hers. Our new configurations, for whatever reasons, unreconcilable.

It strikes me that Baby Hope only existed for as long as it took the photographer to take that picture.

“You’ll have the biopsy; the tumor’s going to be benign. This will all be over. But it’s going to take us through a surgery to get to fine, and I’d like to fast-forward that part,” my dad says, again to the television. This is hard work we are doing here, the not-looking-at-each-other, the pretending-to-truth-tell. He wants to fast-forward to another iteration of me.

But he doesn’t know I’m going to be fine. No one does.

When I look up at the screen again, my brain fills in the missing letters, and I’m finally able to solve the puzzle, even before Tess.

I shout out the answer, as if to claim the small, well-deserved victory of being right.





“Put on channel four. Are you watching this?” I tell Abbi. I’m at home, in my room, in my pajamas. We’re talking on the phone, which feels weirdly intimate. I can’t remember the last time I made an actual telephone call, other than to Jack from the ER, but I needed to hear that she was okay. Her voice sounds lower and huskier than in real life.

“Details are scant at this time, but eyewitness reports say that Baby Hope, who was made famous by a photograph taken on nine-eleven and who now goes by Abbi Goldstein, was rushed by ambulance to Garden State Hospital after she collapsed at a nearby summer camp. She is sixteen years of age,” reports Brittany Brady, the platinum-blond newscaster who is always outside and who always looks cold. “By way of background, the woman who saved Baby Hope’s life, Connie Kramer Greene, died less than one year ago from breast cancer, a disease many believe was caused by her exposure to toxic chemicals on September 11, 2001. In just the last five weeks, two New York City police officers who were part of the recovery at Ground Zero have died of nine-eleven-related illnesses. No word yet on whether Abbi’s condition is related to the attacks. One of Abbi’s best friends, Cat Gibson, has kindly agreed to talk with us this evening.

“Can you tell us what went through your mind when you heard Abbi had been admitted to the hospital?”

“Best friend my ass,” Abbi mutters.

“It was a complete shock. I’ve known Abbi since we were little, and I don’t think she’s ever even broken a bone. I’m really worried,” Cat says through my television.

“Has she been sick recently?” Brittany Brady asks.

“Um, I don’t think so? I mean, she’s always had asthma.”

“If Abbi is watching right now, what would you like to say to her?” Brittany Brady asks.

“This is so meta. Because you are watching,” I say, and Abbi shushes me.

“Like to her directly?” Cat asks, and Brittany Brady nods. “Right. I hope you get better, Abbi. My mom told me about her conversation with you. You didn’t have to cover for me about that, but you did—even after everything. So thank you.”

“That was Cat Gibson expressing…,” Brittany Brady says, trying to cut her off, but Cat keeps on talking.

“Abbi, you’re the brave one, not me. Always hugging all those strangers. Still, it’s hard when the person who’s supposed to know you best looks at you and only sees who you used to be. Come home soon, okay?”

The newscaster keeps her face placid while she forcibly grabs the microphone back.