Day Twelve is pretty much just awful. For one thing, I wake up and shout my usual hello to Thelma, but there’s no shout back. Her television is quiet. When I cock my head and look in through the crack in the curtain, I can see that the bedding has been changed, and there are new sheets pulled up tight, the IV stand empty just like a coatrack waiting for someone else to hang her jacket and hat.
Thelma is gone.
When my parents come in, I can’t look at them.
“Hi,” my mother says, slowly. “Hello?”
My father hovers by the door, his hands in his pockets.
I just gulp and look over at Thelma’s side of the room.
As usual, they don’t get it. “Are you in pain?” my mother says. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”
I nod, though there are tears streaming down my face. This is a different kind of cry. I’ve never realized before how many different kinds there are. But this one, it is a silent cry, the cry, my cry, for another person, a kind of cry I thought was saved for old people.
Slowly it registers. I can see the realization take over my mother’s face, first in her eyes and then her twitching nose, then her frowning, trembling mouth. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I let her keep it there.
I am glad my father looks at the floor, because I will dissolve into one million pieces if he looks at me. I will become air. When I was little, it was always my dad and me. Superman rides, raking leaves, me sitting on his lap, pretending I was the one driving the Volvo. But that was all before. It was before high school and it was before this. I am so far from there now.
No one says anything and then, to add to this joyous moment, Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, comes in. He stands over my bed and sucks at the inside of his cheek, which makes a crazy-loud tsk tsk sound.
“It’s going to have to come out.” He flips my folder closed. “If not today, then tomorrow or the day after, but I can tell you, it’s going to have to go.” He touches one pudgy hand to his stomach, which is pudgy too.
Both my parents straighten, like they’re meeting with my high school principal or some head of state.
“You can try all this.” Dr. Orlitz points to the IV stand, which has a zillion wires coming off it, all connecting to balloons of medicine and liquid food. “And you should try everything,” Dr. Orlitz says. “Everything. You’re young, after all,” he says.
“She is,” both my parents say at the exact same time. “She is very young.”
“Can I have a look?” He waddles over to my bed.
For anyone who’s curious, when a surgeon says to you, Can I have a look?, what he means is, I am going to touch you right now.
He places his hands over my stomach and squeezes lightly.
I scream in pain.
“That hurt?” he says.
For real? I don’t think I need to dignify that one with an answer.
“You see that?” He points at my stomach and looks at my parents. “Her stomach is getting very, very hard.” He shakes his head. “You know what that means?”
Everyone is silent.
“It’s not a good sign at all. It means the colon isn’t functioning right. It could be getting toxic. If it explodes in there, it’s going to be a real mess. Your daughter could die.”
Inadvertently I cover my ears.
“Well, we don’t think it’s going to come to that, do we, Martin?” my mother says.
“They are finding new drugs all the time. We just have to hang in there,” my father says, but I can tell he doesn’t believe it.
“It might be a little beyond that.” Dr. Orlitz, the surgeon, that asshole, gives me a look that says, We know what’s up, don’t we?
Stupidly, I grin back at him, because, after all, he’s the doctor, and I do need him on my side.
He winks at me. “We’re going to have to make some serious decisions,” he says. “We wait too long and it will explode.”
My mother sits down, and my father puts his hands on her shoulders.
“See you tomorrow.” Dr. Orlitz grins my way like the villain mugging at the camera in the movies. “We have some serious decisions to make then.”
So. Thelma is gone and the surgeon is unbearable and my father leaves and my mother stays, just reading the Washington Post silently, and here’s the other unbearably terrible thing about Day Twelve. Connor doesn’t come. The morning goes by and I can hear the wheels of the lunch carts whir and squeak by, but they don’t stop here. I’m getting a new roommate, I’m told. And then I guess it’s afternoon, after school, and what’s worst about Connor not coming to see me is that I can hear him in the hallways, swooping in to all the rooms with his sunshine and his good cheer, and I hear old people laughing and the nurses greeting him and he doesn’t stop here and there is no sunshine at all in here, just the surgeon telling me my life is about to be pretty much over.
For a moment I wonder why Connor doesn’t come, but then I know why. It’s that I told him about my gross disease, and he went home and Googled it and decided it was so disgusting, just thinking about it, that he couldn’t even do his volunteering job with me. He is letting himself off the hook now so he doesn’t have to be attached to some freak with an ileostomy bag in the real world.
My mom looks up from her paper just as I come to this realization. Maybe she can see it on my face, the way it must be crumpling like an old Coke can, ripped and ruined.
“Honey,” my mom says slowly.
I nod. My throat is just stitched closed. I can’t swallow or speak.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says. “The surgery, if it happens, and also after. It’s just temporary, honey.”
I don’t care if that’s what she thinks it is. I am trying to be me. I am trying to stay me, I mean. And stay funny and also keep my sadness inside away from my mother, who will want to take it and hold it and discuss it with me and also take it away from me. She is my mother.
I see her come toward me. This one time, the first time since we’ve been here in this horrible place just waiting for people to come in and steal my blood and prick me and prod me and tell me what the matter with me is and also be wrong, for the first time I let all of her come toward me, and I lean my head on her chest and I feel her arms around me, her fingers brushing at my hair, and I can’t help it, I start crying. Weeping really. That kind of cry. I don’t think I will ever be able to stop crying, and I am also thinking about Connor, who will never come back here, and Michael Lerner, who was never going to be more than a friend, and every boy who was supposed to love me back. I am crying for the past and also for what I don’t know about even tomorrow.
I can feel my mother’s arm. I smell her Yves Saint Laurent perfume, from the bottle with the deep-red top that has sat on her bureau for as long as I can remember.
“Mommy,” I cry into her chest, and she holds me tighter.
“Mommy,” I say again, and I realize now I’m saying it and I realize now that in all of this I am just a little girl, not like Thelma’s kid, who I know doesn’t have a mother now, but young, like I have never seen myself before, too young for this thing, and also alone. I am crying and crying and also I am hoping my mother will never let me go.