Everything changed then. All my good feelings. All my power. Who was I to say I didn’t need my bracelet, a leash? Okay, the colon was gone, but who was going to save me now? Save me save me save me, was all I thought as I struggled up the stairs to my bedroom. Well, save me and why me. Why me why me why me? I felt that power drain out of me, like I was an old car leaking oil onto the road.
I heard my father at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew he was looking up to me, both hands on the banister. I was sixteen years old and I was winded when I reached the top.
I went into my bedroom and shut the door.
My room. That hideous blue, those purple venetian blinds. Zip. I opened them. The sound like the Velcro of the blood pressure cuff. Dust motes in the light. A Moonrise Kingdom poster hung lopsidedly on the wall across from my bed. My Velvet Underground banana poster.
Two twin beds. One I slept on, a headboard slapped with stickers I couldn’t remove. Hello Kitty. Butterflies. Orphan Annie. Also the Beatles and Wonder Woman and dancing bears. The string of dusty lights I hadn’t yet turned back on. The other bed, covered in old teddy bears and ugly dolls I couldn’t, for some reason, throw away. Because I’d once loved them? Perhaps. I threw the new one from the hospital on the heap as well.
My little bag from the hospital had been unpacked. David B’s God’s eye was on my desk, laid there sweetly by my mom. She had also fanned out the pamphlets from the hospital on my bed.
About Your Ileostomy: Guidelines to Help You Care for Your New Ostomy at Home. So there won’t be paella or nights asleep in Spanish castles, I thought.
Frog was there too. Zoe had taken good care of her, and she had this big tank on my desk, and a heat lamp, and I could see her hiding beneath one of the fake ferns.
“Hi,” I said, peering in.
She slammed into her shell.
“Okay then, bye.” I backed away to get a better view.
My phone! Someone had taken it out of my camp stuff where I’d been storing it, uncharged, and I plugged it into my computer. I felt that almost long-ago buzz of it charging, which instead of making me happy and relieved, made me anxious. How many messages? How many ways would I have to tell people what had happened to me? This was also why Connor was so important. He had been on the moon with me. Why hadn’t he just left me there?
I heard a soft knock at the door. “Honey?” my mother said. “Are you okay in there? Do you need . . . help?”
I closed my eyes. For a while, but again, not like I was going to speak and close my eyes. I will always despise that. “I’m good, thanks,” I said.
“Is it okay?” she asked.
I knew she meant the bag. I think she wanted to see it. But that was never going to happen.
“It is, Mom,” I said. “I am.”
I could still hear her hovering.
“I’m just getting settled here,” I said. “I’ll be downstairs soon.” I’m not going to lie: the thought of walking down those stairs was daunting.
I heard my mother pad away and then I opened my Mac. As I turned it on, I took a moment to praise myself for having it password protected, and made my way in. (Mabel 1/2/05—anyone could have figured it out.) There I was. There we were: Dee, Lydia, and me on a class skiing trip last year. It was the last time we’d do a thing like that; we were too old now. I think we were too old then, too, but I still remember the hum of the bus wheels beneath us while we sat on the bus together, me across the aisle from them. In the back row two couples were making out, and someone was passing around a bottle of Coke that was also half rum, but we were only listening to music and braiding one another’s hair and talking shit about Nelly R, who had hooked up with someone’s boyfriend that weekend. We were so stupid then. And Lydia still had her braces. My hat had a pom-pom on top.
While I waited for all the news of the real world to pummel me, I shuffled through the mail on my desk. There wasn’t much; my mom brought most of the stuff I’d be into to the hospital, but she’d left the brown envelope from Nora that said: Do Not Open Until Home blazoned in red across the back. I opened it. For the strongest girl, Nora had written with a silver metallic Sharpie on the plastic of the old-school CD case. She’d pasted a picture of a woman cut from a magazine, overly tanned, with pumped-up muscles in muscle-woman position on the song list folded inside.
Nora.
I slipped it into my computer, which sucked it in like it was starving. And then: “Close your eyes, give me your hand, darlin’. Do you feel my heart beating.” I had to smile. Girl bands. We listened to them at camp when we were campers, hairbrushes and pretend beehives, jumping from bed to bed.
Girl bands.
I unfolded Nora’s handwritten song list. The Supremes, 7 Year Bitch, Sleater-Kinney, Spice Girls, the Go-Go’s, TLC, Sister Sledge, the Bangles, Le Tigre, Say Lou Lou.
Nora.
I turned the song list over: Girl Groups: Because no one can do it alone, Nora had stenciled. She’d drawn these really delicate birds and butterflies and also these skull and crossbones, a string of dancing bears.
This was what I thought then: there are different ways to be saved. There are the doctors and the nurses and the parents and there is the boy who comes and sweeps you off your feet and then there is the girl who comes and lies on your bed with you and tells you everything, makes it seem all her secrets are only for you. Who cares if they actually are? You can’t do it without the girl. Without a girl. So I ask you: How could I ever turn off the lights here?
Downstairs I could hear the clank and crash of my parents making dinner together, crab cakes and baked potatoes, my favorites. I had just started eating solid foods—it had begun with broth and Jell-O and then rice and then a vegetable or two. It all seemed to be working. It. It seemed to be okay.
But Connor was gone. He had left.
I opened my closet, to face the mirror hanging on the door. How many hours had I spent in front of this mirror? Leaning in, learning how to put on eyeliner. Backing up to see if a skirt was too short because before all this starvation stuff, my thighs were never an asset. How many times had I changed and changed and changed? I wanted different clothes and better clothes and cooler clothes, and I wanted to be thin and easy in my skin and casual in everything, but I was not that. Now I could see the faint smudge that had once been Dee’s lip gloss kiss.
I stood back. I could see all of me and I was tiny. My jeans folded over at the zipper, so much extra fabric. I’m not going to lie: I liked being that small. I liked feeling like I had slipped into these jeans, a delicate, pedicured foot into a glass slipper, as opposed to the way I had to force myself into them at camp, like a rag-wool-socked foot being shoved into an old muddy duck boot.
Who wouldn’t rather wear a glass slipper? If you were going to the right place, anyway.
But it was the first time. The first time there was a full-length mirror with me alone in front of it.
I did it: I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall to my ankles. My hip bones jutted out and my stomach sank in. But that’s not what I saw. What I saw—all I could see—was the bag, which hung just to the right of my belly button. It was just a regular plastic bag, stuck to me. One end of it was tucked into the Gap boy shorts my mom had brought to the hospital. When I lifted up my T-shirt, I could see the top of it, to where the small intestine came out of my stomach—the stoma—and into the bag. There were so many powders and tapes and creams and flanges I would need to change it and make sure it didn’t get irritated or open unexpectedly, but I’d had to deal with none of that then. All I had was the visual, and it looked so not a part of me. Of myself.
Sleater-Kinney screamed out from my computer. “Why do good things never wanna stay? Some things you lose, some things you give away.”
I dropped my T-shirt and the fabric covered it. It was almost, for a moment, like the bag was gone. I pulled up my jeans, buttoning them carefully so as not to jostle anything. I felt the staples of my incision against the rough denim.
“Lizzie?” my mother called up, like I had been here every night, my mom calling me down to set the table or peel these carrots or grate this cheese. “Lizzie!”
I opened the door and Mabel was seated outside, quietly, waiting.
“I’m so sorry!” I said, bending down with considerable effort to pet Mabel. I’d had no idea she’d been waiting for me. “I’m coming,” I called down, shutting my door and picking my way slowly, gingerly down the stairs.
The smell of alcohol and urine and starched sheets, the scent of the hospital I only now realized I’d been smelling for just about three weeks, was gone. Here was garlic and butter and chives and vinegar.
“Okay!” I said, walking into the warm kitchen. “Here I am.”