Ten Below Zero(45)

“What are you writing?” I asked, while yawning.

“Words.”

I sighed and rolled onto my back. “You’re really good at telling the truth through evasion.”

“I thank you for the compliment.”

“It wasn’t one.” I pulled the sheet up higher, to my neck. “For someone who is so forthcoming, so brutally honest, I’m surprised you keep little things to yourself.”

“Who said what I’m writing is a little thing?”

“Is it the next Pulitzer?”

“Probably not.”

“So why can’t you tell me then?”

“Tell me why you stopped fighting.”

It was really hard to not roll my eyes. “Is that going to be your requirement for every question I ask you to answer? For me to open up and tell you the things I don’t even know the answer to?”

Everett closed his notebook and set it down on his nightstand. “Some things are personal. What I’m writing is personal. And we’re not there yet. We’re not at that level.” He slid down into the sheet and turned to face me, propping up his head. “Let’s try something. You ask me any question. I ask you any question. And we decide how much we’re willing to reveal with our answers.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Keeping the earlier questions off the table, I’m assuming?”

“Yes. I won’t ask you why you aren’t fighting and you won’t ask me why I’m choosing to not treat this cancer. Or my notebook.”

“I want you to ask first.”

“Okay,” he answered. He fluffed up his pillow and considered. “Tell me about Mira.”

“What do you want to know?”

“She’s the only person in your life. I think learning about her will enable me to learn about you.”

I thought for a minute and then stared at the ceiling as I spoke. “I remember her voice. It was warm and smooth, like red wine. It was the sound that woke me up. When I’d managed to open my right eye, I saw her. She had this fire engine red hair and eyes caked in black liner. My first thought was that she was a hooker.” I almost laughed, saying that aloud. Instead, the side of my lips tipped up just slightly. It was a compromise. “She smelled like smoke and coffee and she kept clapping her hands in front of my face, to keep me awake. Her voice was impatient, as if finding me on the side of the road in the middle of the night was a massive inconvenience for her. I blacked out then and didn’t see her again until I signed myself out of the hospital early that morning. She didn’t baby me. I remember being grateful for that. She didn’t hold me or console me. Instead, she had me move in with her for a little bit. It was an odd pairing.

“She trained with me, every day, for months. She’s a firefighter and on the side she teaches self-defense, so she’d be gone at random hours of the day. I spent a lot of time alone then. And the time I spent with her didn’t involve any boy talk or hair braiding or chick-flick watching. She helped me a lot.”

“Do you still stay in touch?”

“We do, though not in a traditional sense. Mira has, or had, a boyfriend. He was a scary-looking dude, but nice enough. He didn’t exactly approve of her taking me on, but he didn’t make me feel like a burden. Mira wouldn’t have it. Mira and Six have always been on and off, but he’s the center of her world. She doesn’t like to admit that, but he is.” My mind flashed to memories of him sitting in Mira’s living room, watching her train me. “She’s it for him too, but they haven’t been able to get their shit together and make it work. I don’t know a lot about him, because of how private Mira is, but I know he is often gone.” When I was done speaking, I turned my head to look at Everett. He was watching me, thoroughly invested in what I was saying. I hadn’t meant to say as much as I did, but telling Everett about Mira didn’t bother me. He had been correct when he’d said she was the only person in my life. She was.

“My turn?” I asked. Everett nodded solemnly. I had wanted to ask this question for days, so it was out of my mouth a second later. “Tell me what it was like, fighting cancer as a teenager.”

Everett frowned, but sighed, and seemed committed to answering my question. “When I was first diagnosed, no one thought it would be a years-long ordeal. But it was. I eventually missed enough school that my mom started home schooling me from my bed, at home or in the hospital. I watched my mom suffer through a lot of grief, and my dad lost his job from so many absences. My sister is a couple years older than I am, but she was still in high school when things were the worst for me, health-wise. My parents’ marriage crumbled and my sister was largely ignored and I laid in a hospital bed, unable to do anything useful or productive. No one blamed me, of course, but I still felt responsible. I still do. When surgery was a viable option, we proceeded with it. It was successful, obviously, but I wasn’t prepared for the side effects.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I awoke from surgery, my parents were divorced and my sister was pregnant by a guy ten years her senior. She hadn’t yet graduated high school. And the guy was married.”

I rolled on my side to face him. “Your parents got divorced during your surgery?”

“No,” he shook his head. His hand moved to his head, and he pushed his hair back. “This,” he said, indicating his scar, “took my cancer. But it also took my memory. Or, at least six months of my memory.” He dropped his hand. “I came out of surgery another person. I was angry. I still have a short fuse, as you might remember with my blowup over the seatbelt, but then it was worse. I was angry with my parents, for not fighting harder for each other. I was angry with my sister for wrecking a marriage while our own parents had let go of theirs so easily. Before the surgery, I was happy. I did sports every season, I had a handful of really close friends and dozens of other friends I spent time with regularly. After surgery, I pushed those friends away with my temper. I got headaches all the time and by the time I could legally purchase alcohol I was already a functioning alcoholic.”