“It wasn’t your fault,” Father Mike says.
“Not for that.”
“Then for what?”
“For not doing something great.”
Father Mike, Trevor, and I stand in a semicircle around the hair. It’s the ugliest wig I’ve ever seen, but it was so Lexi. The way her mother chased her around her hospital room, trying to force it on Lexi’s bald scalp. I think she would appreciate this. “You ready?” I ask, pulling the matches out of my pocket.
“May I?” Trevor asks. I hand him the matches. He takes a deep breath and marches up to the wig. He drags the match along the strike strip and watches it flare to life. He cups the tiny, fragile flame in his hand and says, “Bye, Lexi. See you in Canada.” He tosses the match into the hair. The wig catches instantly, like a miniature flaming heart of God. The strands blacken and curl while sooty black cinders float away in the wind, toward the ocean.
Soon there’s nothing left of the wig but the cap and some ash. I push the remains over the side, into out there, where they belong.
“I have to go,” Trevor says. “My parents are probably freaking.”
I offer Trevor my hand, and he shakes it. “Be great,” I say to him. “For her.”
Trevor nods and walks away. I know that I’m never going to see him again, and I think that’s okay.
Father Mike rests his hand on my back. “I meant what I said about letting go and living.”
When Trevor’s gone, I look up at him and say, “People like me don’t get second chances.”
Without Trevor and Lexi, the hospital feels infinitely smaller.
I take satisfaction in knowing that Trevor is out there, going on. Living and doing all the things that people are supposed to do. I wish that Lexi were out there so they could face life together, but if my time in this hospital has taught me anything, it’s that we so rarely get what we want. If Trevor survives long enough, he’ll find a new girl, fall in love, and live happily with her. She won’t be Lexi, but no girl could be. Not even the wig could have changed that.
I lose track of time in my unfinished prison. I only leave my filthy makeshift mattress to relieve myself. The pain is too much. My nightmares weave through reality until I am Patient F, on the table, surrounded by the doctors in red lab coats, screaming as they take me apart one limb at a time. When I wake in the dark, the nightmares don’t recede. I seek comfort in my memories, but they are tarnished now. I’ve let everyone down. Trevor, Lexi. Rusty. He’s gone by now, I’m sure of it. I was supposed to run away with him days ago. But I couldn’t go. I don’t deserve to escape. I thought that hell awaited me out there, but hell is here, around every corner.
I was wrong about Death. She wasn’t late to get me; she was right on time. She’s had me where she wanted me all along.
The nightmares never cease, and I feel myself being reassembled into something new, something unfeeling and impenetrable that can survive the nuclear winter to come. Not even my memories of Rusty, with his heart and his lips and all the feelings he has locked inside him, can penetrate my new skin.
Except, I think about him in that bed, waiting for me. Waiting for me to rescue him, thinking I’d abandoned him, that I’d let his parents take him away. And I realize that I owe Rusty an explanation so that he can move on. It’s the least I can do.
The hospital is bustling, so I don’t try to not be seen. I become part of the massive flow of characters running, walking, pacing, through the maze of hallways. People see me, but their eyes slide past because I’m not unique; I’m no one special. They see the old sketch of me that’s been circulating the hospital while I was hidden away but don’t connect it to the wretched creature in their midst. In that way, I am invisible. Not that I even care anymore. I focus on finding a phone so that I can get Rusty’s number and call him. Try to explain why I didn’t come.
“Drew?”
A hand grabs at my sleeve as I pass by. I keep going until the voice registers in my brain as familiar. I turn. Nina is sidestepping a wheelchair to get to me, her face a mess. Blotchy, red, her eyes are bruised and set deep. She’s wearing clothes that don’t match: capri-length jeans and a pink T-shirt with a black belt.
“Nina? What are you doing here?”
She yanks me around, drags me along behind her. Her steps are stony, wrathful. The click-clack damning me. We stop in a cold waiting room I’ve never waited in. There is only a small elderly woman here, clutching a tote bag full of green yarn.
“Where the hell have you been?” Nina asks. Her voice is an acerbic hiss.
“Lots of places,” I say. She didn’t know Lexi. Didn’t know of her. The details won’t make sense to her the way they will to Rusty. “I was going to see Rusty. Is he still here? You have to take me to him.”
Nina crosses her arms over her chest, then drops them by her side, then crosses them again. Her eyes dart everywhere but won’t meet my eyes. “He waited for you,” she says. “When the doctors tried to move him out of the ICU so he could begin his physical therapy, he screamed. Rusty told them how much pain he was in. That bought him two more days.”
“Two more days for what?” I ask, though I know the answer. My voice and tone are snappish because it’s easier to be annoyed with Nina than admit how guilty I feel that Rusty waited and waited for me and faked being ill so that he could wait longer.
Nina sneers. “At first, I thought you were good for Rusty. He deserved to be happy and you made him happier than I’d ever seen him.”
“I tried, I really did, but—”
“Well, he’s dead, thanks to you.” Nina says it quickly. The words have no spaces. They have no meaning. I look at her lips to match the shape of the words to the sounds that come out of her mouth because I simply cannot believe what I heard.
Blood stops circulating through my body. I feel it leave my face as I fall. Nina doesn’t catch me, and I smack into the wall so hard that it feels like my cheek has shattered like an eggshell. I’m no longer attached to my body. The energy of me hovers over the meat sack I once inhabited, and I see the whole world, all time. Everything is spread before me like an ocean of laughter and madness and events that mean so little without context.
Rusty is the context that gives my life meaning. And Nina says he’s dead.
“Are you okay?” Nina pulls me to my feet. I allow her to lead me to a seat across from the old woman, who is interested in neither her knitting nor us. My cheek throbs, and I wince when Nina touches it. “That’s going to bruise badly.”
“Rusty?”
Nina shakes her head. “He told me to tell you that he was dead. He said you deserved it.” Her shoulders shake, and her lip twitches before the tears roll down the sides of her nose. “He was destroyed when you didn’t show up.”
My stomach drops. “But he’s alive?”
“Yes,” Nina says, sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She snorts with a little laugh. “He is sick, though. Isn’t that stupid? He faked it for two days and then developed a real infection, like his body was creating the reality to back up his lie.”
“Nina, what the fuck happened?”
She loses her sad smile and glares at me. I know what she’s thinking: I have no right to demand anything from her. Or from Rusty. I don’t need her to tell me that this is all my fault.
She sighs. “Rusty didn’t tell me about your plan right away, only that you were supposed to come and that he couldn’t leave without you. But I’m no idiot. He had a packed bag in his wardrobe, and he asked that man, the one from the cafeteria, to bring him a couple of books.”
“Arnold.”
“Yes,” Nina says. “That’s him. He reads to Rusty every day.”
“Tell me Rusty is okay,” I say to Nina. “Tell me.” My cheek throbs in time with my rabbit heart, but I’m beyond pain.
Nina looks up at the old woman to see if she’s listening to us, but that old woman hasn’t so much as twitched since we arrived. “It was the day before yesterday. Rusty’s
parents were worried about him. He kept going on and on about how much pain he was in. They were hoping to get him out of the ICU so that he could begin putting all this behind him.” Nina shivers. “Andrew, you should have seen how terrified he was. They haven’t caught the boys who did it or made any arrests. The principal made a statement to the newspaper about bullying and doing everything they could to keep Rusty safe, but that’s bullshit, and everyone knows it. School safety is a joke.”
My heart is breaking inside my chest. I spin back through time until I’m standing by Rusty’s bedside, watching him squirm and beg to be allowed to stay in the hospital so that he won’t have to go back to school, while his parents and the doctors and the principal all tell him that he’s going back, that he’s going to be safe, even though they all laugh behind their hands with the knowledge that the bullies will get him, beat him, before the end of day one. I watch Rusty lie in the dark, long into the night, as he dreams up ever more disturbing ways for the bullies to torment him. In his nightmares, they resurrect medieval devices that stretch him and tear him into pieces and uncoil his meaty insides. He waits for me to come, waits for me to rescue him from the cruel hands of his foes, but I don’t come, and he falls into despair.
“I’m not sure when the fake pain became real,” Nina says, “but he developed an infection in his leg.” She closes her eyes and tries to take a deep breath. “His doctors say he’s not responding to the antibiotics, and they might have to amputate before it spreads.”
“Where is he?” I ask, knowing that I have to see him.
It’s like she doesn’t hear me anymore. “He’s not even fighting. He’s given up. That’s your fault, Drew . . . or whatever your name is. Rusty cared about you, and when you didn’t show up he stopped caring about anything.”
I grab Nina by the wrist. Her bones are iron. She’s made of sterner stuff than even Patient F. “Where is he, Nina?”
“Still in the ICU. But you’ll never get to him now. They’ve stationed a security officer outside his door.”
I get up to leave, but Nina pulls me back down. “This is my fault, you know,” she says.
“It’s not.” I narrow my eyes at her. “I told him I’d come, and I didn’t.” I don’t bother explaining the reasons for my absence to Nina because she doesn’t care about me or my feelings, only about Rusty.
“No. Before that,” says Nina. “I made him go to that damn party. He’d never have gone if I hadn’t bullied him into it.” She realizes what she just said and looks embarrassed. “I knew about the boys and all the stuff they did to him, but I thought that if everyone could get to know Rusty like I know him, they’d see how great he is.” Nina starts to shake with sobs.
I hug her and let her cry, her tears soaking my shirt. “You shouldn’t have made him go,” I say. She wails and clings, her nails scraping my skin. “But what happened would have happened eventually. Evil is everywhere, and no one can escape it.”
Nina tries to claw at me as I push her away. None of this is about her. It’s about Rusty, and right now he’s languishing in a hospital room believing that I abandoned him. And he’s right. There’s a part of me that thinks I should leave him be, let him battle his demons and live or die on his own. But that is the part of me that is scared. A coward. The part of me that knows what I’m going to have to do to save him.
“When this is all over,” I say to Nina, “he’s going to need you. Try not to let him down again.” My words are harsh and uncharitable, and they cut Nina to the bone, but her feelings mean little to me, so long as she protects Rusty.
Without giving her a chance to argue, I leave the waiting room. The old woman doesn’t say good-bye.
• • •
I wait in Grandma Brawley’s room because I don’t want to cause a scene in the ICU. Mr. Kelly was sleeping and didn’t yell at me about the nurses trying to kill him. Weirdly, I missed it.
“Who are you?” Grandma Brawley asks.
Her voice nearly knocks me out of my chair. I was trying to think of a better plan than the one I’d come up with, which is very likely to fail, and I didn’t notice Grandma Brawley sitting up, staring at me with inquisitive brown eyes.
“Andrew,” I say. “Andrew Brawley.” The moment after I speak, I know I’m an idiot.
“Brawley, huh?” she asks. “So you’re the boy everyone tells me is my grandson.” I nod. “That’s funny, because I haven’t got any grandchildren. Though, with that nose you do resemble my uncle Toby. Nobody liked him much.”
“It’s a long story,” I say. Part of me wants to feed her some tale about us just having the same last name or being long-lost cousins, but she’s keen. I can tell. She’d detect my bullshit before it left my mouth.
Gran laughs. “It’s always a long story, kid.”
Awake, Grandma Brawley looks different from how she did asleep. This is a woman you don’t trifle with. She was no fairy-tale princess waiting for her prince to wake her with a magic kiss. She’d probably have broken the arm of any man who tried it.
“What’re you doing in my room?” she asks bluntly.
“Waiting.”
“We’re all waiting,” Gran says. “Who or what are you waiting for?”
I look at the picture frame with the lock of hair in it. “Can I ask you a question?”
Grandma Brawley thinks about it and then nods. “Go on, kid.”
“Whose hair is that?” I point at the frame, in case she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but her mind is probably sharper than mine. This woman will be alive and kicking long after I’m dead.
“Why?” she asks.
Grandma Brawley is staring me down, and it makes me squirm. Maybe coming here was a bad plan. “I had this idea that it belonged to your long-lost love. A man who disappeared from your life, and you waited all your years for him to return. I imagined that the hair in the frame was all you had left to remember him by.”
This makes Gran snicker. Then laugh. She’s got a great laugh that fills the room and makes me want to laugh along with her, even though there’s nothing funny in what I said. “You’re a strange bird, kid. The nurses told me you spent a lot of time in here writing some kind of story. It’s a good fiction but not the truth.”
“Then what is the truth?” I ask.
Grandma Brawley reaches behind her for the frame. She traces the hair through the glass. “You’ll never be more perfect than you are right now, kid. You’re too smart to believe in all the bullshit but too naive to know that it’s all bullshit. That’s a great way to live. Everything is possible.”
“But whose hair is that?”
“My daughter’s,” Grandma Brawley says. “I lost her too young.”
“Oh,” I say. “Can I ask another question?”
Grandma Brawley shrugs like she doesn’t care either way, but I know she does. Only someone who cares could fake not caring so well. I feel like maybe it’s a bond we share.
“How do you move on from something like that? How do you deal with losing all the people you love?”
“You don’t,” she says. “Not like everyone expects you to.” Grandma Brawley sighs and rests the frame on the bed. “Life goes on with or without you, and that’s just the reality of it. You never move on, you just keep moving forward.”
“What if you don’t deserve to move forward?”
Grandma Brawley touches the frame again. “The past is a cold place. No one deserves to be trapped there, no matter how terrible you believe your sins to be.”
There’s something in the way she looks at me that makes me think she knows about my parents and sister and the truth of why I’m here, living in Roanoke General, but she can’t unless she heard everything I told her while she was asleep. I suppose anything is possible.
“Michelle,” Grandma Brawley says, looking toward the door.
A chill enters the room, seeps into my bones, and my skin prickles. Death stands in the doorway in black trousers and a pale cream blouse that dips dangerously low.
“You know each other?” I ask.
Gran nods. “I know her well.” She winks. “But I don’t suppose you’re here for me, are you?”
Death shakes her head and says, “Andrew. I believe we have some things to discuss.”
I take a deep breath and stand. It’s a desperate plan. I may not be able to move forward, but Rusty shouldn’t suffer for my sins. “I want to make a deal.”
Death and I barely speak.
The walls of Roanoke General groan as we pass: Death and Andrew Brawley. She’s calm and quiet while I rehearse what I’m going to say, trying desperately not to gnaw my fingernails to the quick and give away my fear.
“I don’t suppose I’ll need to call the police right away,” she says. Death’s voice is raspy. She straightens her back obsessively, as though she’s reminding herself not to slouch. These are the cracks in her foundation. The signs that Death, though patient, has grown tired of the chase.
“No,” I say. I’m not sure if she’d be calling the cops because I trashed her office or because she thinks she’ll need help removing me from the hospital. “Like I said, I want to make a deal.”
Death nods. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m seventeen,” I say. “I’m always hungry.” Death chuckles at my joke, but the truth is that eating is the last thing on my mind. My serenity is a charade, the last act of a desperate man.
We enter the cafeteria, where Arnold and Aimee are working behind the line. Drawn on the menu board is a hideous illustration of some smiley, psycho tubes dancing on a grave of Technicolor blood. PENNE WITH VODKA SAUCE! the sign exclaims.
Arnold glances twice when I enter with Death, but whatever his thoughts, he puts on his best Ah-nold grin and says, “Drew! You like my sign? Get it? They’re drunk and dancing.”
“Yeah. You’re the Jackson Pollock of cafeteria artists.”