Wilder Girls(54)

In the water there’s a crab still and bright and I bend down so my knees break the surface no canvas and denim just the plaid skirt all soft like I never stopped wearing it The crab looks at me

I look at the crab

It floats up floats out of the water and lands in my hands and it’s dry

   I’m dreaming I’m not really there and I know it but I hold the crab up and I look in close at the gleam of the shell and there I am reflected in tiny pieces a hundred little versions of me

and they say “welcome home” and then

The crab twitching and its claws turning black slowly Slowly and then the whole shell until the body black the legs black my hands black my arms black I try to let go but I can’t and around me the water black the shore black and if I let go I will disappear If I lose this I will disappear

I know it the way you know things in your dreams everything black everything everything and oh

Awake



* * *



—

It’s quiet at first. My head finally clear, the ward empty. Nobody is coming. Maybe they have what they need, or maybe they know they will never get it.

“Hey.”

I try to lift my head, and there’s Teddy, propped up in bed. Skin dull and drained, but smiling, wearing a pair of scrubs so white it hurts to look at him.

“They tried another cure,” he says. “A virus that might kill whatever you have, but your body fought it off.”

I’m staring at the ceiling again when he says, “Whatever we have. I mean, whatever we have.”

   After a while he gets up. Crosses to my side of the room and undoes my restraints. No need for them now. We both know that.

“Okay?” he asks.

I nod. Open my mouth and tap my throat.

“Hang on.” He finds the whiteboard in the cabinet. Gets in bed alongside me, helps me wrap my fingers around the marker, and we ask questions we will never have time for.

What’s your last name

“What?”

You know mine

“It’s Martin.”

You know what they say about men with two first names “No.”

Me neither



* * *



—

It takes about an hour, I think, for the signs to come back. And when they do they turn him sweaty and make him shake. They draw dark lines under his eyes and they empty him out.

What hurts

He groans. Rolls up onto his hands and knees and vomits over the side of the gurney. Black liquid, something grainy to the texture. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

   But he isn’t, and he never will be, and I reach under the gurney, press the call button with shaking fingers.

“It’s no use,” he says. “They won’t come.”

I don’t ask how he knows.



* * *



—

It gets worse. He goes limp like his bones aren’t in him anymore, like Gaby from the youngest year who never survived her first.

I kneel, help him take my spot propped up against the pillows. When I lay my hand across his forehead he pulls away.

I didn’t think it would happen to you He shuts his eyes and leans his head back. The skin of his throat is new and young, soft when I press my fingertips to the crest of his collarbones.

“Sure,” he says, and it’s the last thing for a long while.



* * *



—

I write them while he’s sleeping. Over and over across the whiteboard.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry When he wakes up I show him, and I take his hand, press his palm over my heart. Beat and beat and at last he relents, and shuts his eyes, and slumps against me.

What I meant, what I wanted. They don’t matter anymore. We’re here, and that’s the rest of our lives.



* * *



—

   The second flare-up ties him in knots, and when it’s over I can’t touch him without feeling a static shock. He is crying. I feel like crying, too, but I know it would turn into a ragged kind of laughter.

I can see faces in the windows. Sometimes Paretta, sometimes a nurse whose face seems familiar, even behind her mask. They are watching. Waiting for it to end.

“Tell me something,” Teddy says, the last of it wringing him out.

What

“Anything.”

I think back to the day I met him. The questions he asked. I write down the price of milk. He tries to laugh.

“Something else,” he says.



* * *



—

By the time the third flare-up comes, I have torn the bottom of my hospital gown to bits and used it to wipe bile from the corners of his mouth.

Someone is in the window and Teddy is lying down and I am next to him and my hand is cramping as I write out a joke I heard my father tell once. I notice his finger first. The index finger. A twitch, a pulling so small you wouldn’t see it if you hadn’t spent almost a year and a half on a roof looking for it. But I did.

   It makes me scramble away and I wish it didn’t, but I huddle at the far end of my bed, try not to make any noise. I remember how it can go. I remember what it makes you do when it doesn’t want your body anymore.