Too Good to Be True(11)
Thus went our childhood—Natalie perfect, me adoring, Margs gruff and a little above it all. Then, when Natalie was seventeen and I was in my junior year at William & Mary, I got a call from home. Natalie had been feeling crummy for a day or so. She was not one to complain, so when she finally admitted that her stomach hurt pretty badly, Mom called the doctor. Before they could get to the office, Nat’s appendix ruptured. The resulting appendectomy was messy, since infected fluid had spread throughout her abdomen, and she came down with peritonitis. She spiked a fever. It didn’t come down.
I was in my dorm room when Mom called me, nine hours away by car. “Get home as fast as you can, Grace,” she ordered tightly. Nat had been moved to the ICU, and things weren’t looking good.
My memories of that trip back home alternated between horribly vivid and completely blank. A professor drove me to Richmond International Airport. I don’t remember which professor, but I can see the dusty dashboard of his car as clearly as if I were sitting in that hot vinyl front seat right now, the crack in the windshield that flowed lazily down from its source like the Mississippi bisecting the United States. I remember weeping in the plastic seat in front of my gate, my fists clenched as the airplane crept with agonizing slowness toward the terminal. I remember my friend Julian’s face at the airport, his eyes wide with fear and compassion. My mother, swaying on her feet outside Natalie’s cubicle in the hospital, my father, gray-faced and silent, Margaret tight and hunched in the corner near the curtain that separated Natalie from the next patient.
And I remember Natalie, lying in a bed, obscured by tubes and blankets, looking so small and alone that my heart cracked in half. I took her hand and kissed it, my tears falling on the hospital sheets. “I’m here, Nattie Bumppo,” I whispered. “I’m here.” She was too weak to answer, too sick even to open her eyes.
Outside, the doctor spoke in a somber murmur to my parents. “…Abscess…bacteria…kidney function…white count…not good.”
“Jesus God in heaven,” Margaret whispered in the corner. “Oh, shit, Grace.” Our eyes met in bleak horror at the possibility we couldn’t imagine. Our golden Natalie, the sweetest, kindest, loveliest girl in the world, dying.
The hours ticked past. Coffee cups came and went, Natalie’s IVs were changed, her wound checked. A day crawled by. She didn’t wake up. A night. Another day. She got worse. We were only allowed in for a few minutes at a time, sent off to a grim waiting room full of old magazines and bland, nubby furniture, the fluorescent lights sparing no detail of the fear on our faces.
On day four, a nurse burst into the room. “Natalie Emerson’s family, come now!” she ordered.
“Oh, Jesus,” my mother said, her face white as chalk. She staggered, my father caught her and half dragged her down the hall. Terrified that our sister was slipping away, Margaret and I ran ahead of our parents. It seemed to take a year to get down that hall—every step, every slap of my sneakers, every breath was punctuated with my desperate prayer. Please. Please. Not Natalie. Please.
I got there first. My baby sister, my birthday present, was awake, looking at us for the first time in days, smiling weakly. Margaret careened in behind me.
“Natalie!” she exploded in typical fashion. “Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, we thought you were dead!” She wheeled around and charged out to smite the nurse who’d taken a decade off of each our lives.
“Nattie,” I whispered. She held out her hand to me, and you can bet that I promised then and there to make sure God knew how grateful I was to have her back.
“YOU DID WHAT?” JULIAN ASKED. We were strolling through the four-block downtown of Peterston, eating apricot danish from Lala’s Bakery and sipping cappuccinos. I’d already dazzled my friend with my story of clubbing the neighbor, completely outranking his tale of having successfully cooked chicken tikka masala from scratch.
“I told her I was seeing someone. Wyatt, a pediatric surgeon.” I took another bite of the still-warm pastry and groaned in pleasure.
Julian paused, his eyes wide with admiration. “Wow.”
“Kind of brilliant, don’t you think?”
“I do,” he said. “Not only have you taken a stand against crime in your neighborhood, you’ve invented another boyfriend. Busy night!”
“I just wish I’d thought of it earlier,” I said smugly.
Julian grinned, bent down to give Angus a piece of his pastry, then resumed walking, only to pause again in front of his place of business. Jitterbug’s Dance Hall, tucked between a dry cleaner and Mario’s Pizza. He peered in the windows, checking that everything was perfect within. A woman walking behind us glanced at Julian, looked away, then did a double take. I smiled fondly. My oldest friend, though he’d been a pudgy outcast when we’d first met, now resembled a clean-shaven Johnny Depp, and the woman’s reaction was fairly typical. Alas, he was g*y or I would have married him and borne his children long ago. Like me, Julian had been burned romantically, though even I, his oldest friend, didn’t know the details of his long-ago breakup.
“So now you’re Wyatt’s girl,” he said, resuming our stroll. “What is his last name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t invented that yet.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Julian thought a minute. “Dunn. Wyatt Dunn.”