That first night I woke up all night expecting fluorescent lights and thermometer probes, and I was met instead by Mabel on my legs, snoring. That morning a plant arrived from Dee’s mother, who had driven me to and from soccer practice for all of fifth grade when my mother was at work, that said, We are all wishing you well!
Really? I thought. Another plant? I had no idea what I wanted, but I did not want another plant.
“This looks nice,” my father said, rubbing the waxy leaves between his fingers.
“Take it.” I shoved it in his direction.
He looked up at me then, pausing. “Okay, Liz,” he said. “I’ll plant it in the garden.”
Dee texted me all day that first day I was home. How are you when can we see you do you want to go to the movies to see some music? I wanted to do none of those things. Family time, I wrote back. Family, family.
But there was nothing from Connor. Not the first day or the second or the one after, on all the days where I sat in my room and did my homework and got caught up and watched Party of Five reruns in my parents’ room and just listened to music. I binged on Animal Planet and Teen Wolf and Friday Night Lights. Also Gilmore Girls and Daria. Old stuff like that made me feel so old and ahead of my time. My mother, who had taken time off work to be home with me, brought me lunch upstairs that whole first week.
It was maybe my fourth day back and she came upstairs, a plate of scalloped potatoes and chicken left over from dinner the night before wobbling on a wicker tray. But truth was, the onions from the potatoes didn’t agree with me—which meant they didn’t agree with it—and so I had gotten scared to eat. Also, just putting these four days of solid food in me was already making me gain weight. I needed to, but I’m just saying, it was happening.
“What?” she said as I dragged my fork through the food. She rubbed my legs and I let her. “No good?” she asked.
“It’s good. I just can’t eat all this stuff yet.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just trying to make up for all that time without real food in the hospital. But maybe we should just go back to beef broth and Jell-O. What do you think?”
I gagged at the thought.
“Hey,” she said. “I hate to do this again, but we have to talk about getting you out. We have to talk about you seeing your friends again and getting back to school. And walking, Liz. You need to be walking now.”
“My friends?” This was what I chose to focus on. “I don’t know, Mom,” I said. I wanted her to ask about Connor, and also I really didn’t want her to ask. Before all this, she might not have even known about some guy I liked. She had no idea about Michael L for instance, though there was a period in ninth grade where I talked to him every night for hours. Literally. Half the time he talked about Rachel P and Tracey B, and all the things he wanted to do to them, but this was how it was. Friends. I had come in as a friend and I was going out as one, if that. Friends. Say it enough out loud and it sounds so awkward on your tongue.
“Nora might be coming,” I lied, sort of. Though we were emailing—she didn’t email in British really—to find a time for her to visit, it wasn’t going to be this weekend.
“Really.”
“Hmm,” I said.
Nothing from Connor. No news. He wasn’t on Facebook, and I confess I looked for him there. He didn’t seem to be online at all. It was like he’d never walked here on earth. Like I’d dreamed him up. I held my phone close, all the time. It was back, and I hated it but I knew I needed it because it connected me. To the possibility of Connor. But the connection was cut now. Whatever you want to name what it was we had, what we were, it was gone now. He didn’t call.
I listened to his voice mail. A lot.
Hello, Lizzie. His voice.
The guy with the cute dog.
Hello, Lizzie.
Hello, Lizzie.
Hello, Lizzie.
What was he trying, all these times, to tell me? Once he’d told me: We were never here. I had been too dumb to realize that this meant we would never have met. If we were never here, we were also never there. And so we would never meet again.
How many times, how many ways could we say good-bye? “It will be nice to see her.”
Who? Oh yes, Nora. Sure.
My mother gave me a last pat on the knee. “Mabel needs a walk, and maybe, just this once, it can be someone else who takes her.”
I nodded. “Got it,” I said, moving the potatoes around on my plate. Just because I knew I shouldn’t eat them didn’t mean I wasn’t dying for them. I was so hungry then.
The guy with the cute dog, he said to me, over and over. Hello, Lizzie, he said. Hello.
Hello.
So: that first week home I tried to eat; I tried to avoid getting up; I tried not to think about Connor. I tried to catch up. And I trolled every social media site I knew to find out what was going on with everyone. Did you know everyone was amazing? They looked amazing and they went to amazing places and they did amazing things there and they ate the most amazing things with their amazing friends and amazing boyfriends. You know who wasn’t amazing? Me.
You know what was better than looking at everyone else’s amazingness? Petfinder. All the beautiful dogs no one wanted. I couldn’t bear it, but I couldn’t help it. The pit bulls everyone thought were aggressive, the beagle who was too old, the Lab with three legs, the matted puppies rescued from mills. I can’t explain even now the way those animals hurt my heart. And I really couldn’t stop looking.
I was coming off all the steroids and pain meds and my hair was growing back and my face was getting back to my face. After I got my staples out, I could stand up straighter. But what did it matter, really, I thought, with all these sick, sad dogs and Connor gone?
Tim was really sweet. Sometimes he’d stop by my room on the way to Zoe’s and lean in the threshold, wave, ask me if he could drive me anywhere. “I wish I could help you get better,” he said, and it was so nice I couldn’t bear that either.
I listened to Birdy. Basically, I tortured myself, and if there was a soundtrack to that torment, it was Birdy.
Birdy. It’s just that it’s the words, the sound, the girl. The feeling. Just over and over and over: “Where I am (A stranger with your door key explaining that I am just visiting.) Where I am (And I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving.)”
Oh! And I finished Wuthering Heights.
The first weekend I was home, in mid-September, Dee-Dee and Lydia called to ask if they could come over. What could I say? Sorry, I’ll be out at the beach? And so I watched from the window as Dee’s mom dropped them off—that same Toyota Camry we drove to soccer in—and they came bopping up the front stairs. They whispered to each other and straightened their cardigan sweaters and swung their hair as they rang the doorbell.
“Girls!” My mom was so excited to see them. “Dee and Lydia are here!” she cried up to me, as if I didn’t know it was them.
I don’t know why I didn’t go to the living room before they came, because everyone turned to watch me as I walked down ever so carefully, clutching the banister. Their smiles, which had been so real at seeing my mother, changed. I could see them holding on to them, their eyes wide. Why me? I thought. Why the hell did this happen to me?
What did I look like to them? Did I still look like Birdy? My hair was not as thick, but it was still long. I had a cold sore on the side of my mouth, I know that. My immune system was just shot. And while my face looked a lot better to me, I imagine to them it looked a lot larger than before, rounder. My eyes were puffy. I was twenty pounds skinnier.
“I made it!” I said, as I hit the bottom step. “Hi!” I tried to steady my breath.
For a moment they just stood there. Dee-Dee all WWRW (What Would Rizzo Wear) style, had on a yellow pencil skirt and a purple cardigan. I half expected her to pull out a cigarette and burst into song. And I had no idea what the hell Lydia was up to. Her hair had once been really cute and natural, and now it looked like she’d curled it into ringlets or something. She also wore a ton of eyeliner, and it was all smudged. She kind of looked like one of the poor children hanging out in the dirty pub in Les Misérables, which I’d seen with Nana at the little theater near her house in Florida. Our little bit of culture in the sun, she’d called it.
Then, as if someone had prodded them with a hot iron, both of my friends leaped forward. “Hi!” Dee went in for a hug, as lightly as she could. I had become so fragile. I could tell that was what they saw.
Lydia had a big bag with her and she set it down, also hugging me softly.
“Poor Lizzie,” she said, pouting. “Poor thing.” I pictured her without all that makeup, zipping in and out of the orange cones on the hockey field. Lydia was always the fastest one.
What is it about young people trying to sound like old people? I mean, we are teenagers, I thought. How can she be talking like this?
My mom ushered us over to the couch. “Something to drink, you guys?” she asked. She was beaming. Her face was like throwing sunbeams.
“Thank you, Mrs. Stoller.” Lydia crossed her legs. “Do you have Diet Coke?”
Well, Lydia just lost a lot of points there. Did she not remember that Mrs. Stoller was against soda? Like, full-on against it. And I couldn’t drink it now anyway. The bubbles. Don’t ask.
“Nope,” my mother said. “No soda in this house. How about some lemonade?”
My friends agreed on a lemonade, and then Lydia reached into the bag.
“So,” she said. “We have stuff from school, which your mom asked us to bring. We’ve got your assignments from English, your physics textbook, your Algebra Two textbook.”
“Algebra Two,” I said. I mean, Algebra I had been enough for me. “Physics.” It had been a stretch when I’d registered for it, and now, even with this new prospect of vethood, it just seemed ridiculous.
“Sorry,” Dee-Dee said, probably realizing how depressing a math textbook would be for me. “Okay, so other things.” She bent into the bag. “A card from all of us. Everyone signed it,” she said, handing over a sealed envelope. “And this is from your hockey team.” Also a card.
“Not my hockey team now,” I said.
Everyone squirmed.
My mother brought out the lemonade, and then she went upstairs to her study to work.
“And this,” Dee said, holding something at her chest and smiling at me coyly, “is from Mr. Michael Lerner.” She handed me a little white box.
What would I have once done for a teeny-tiny box from Michael L? But now? I mean, was it a lifeline? A turtle? Was it even alive? That, I now knew, had nothing to do with love.
I set it aside.
Dee-Dee looked at me, dumbfounded.
“What?” I said. I looked back at her.
“Open it!” she said.
I did. It was a little dangling heart necklace. It was sweet and very Spencer’s or Laila Rowe, from our mall.
“So sweet!” Lydia said, falling backward on the couch.
I closed the box and placed it on the wooden coffee table in front of us. How could it mean so little to me now? It just sat there with the magazines and books scattered all over the surface. Just another thing. A thing that was not from Connor.
“Hey, so, some news,” Dee said. She told me about a tree catching fire in the quad, a friend I’d been close with in elementary school who was moving away, the fight for green vegetables for lunch.
“And homecoming,” Lydia said, leaning forward. “It’s soon.”
Dee-Dee nodded.
“Don’t care,” I said. “At. All.”
They looked at me, and I will say it was sort of blankly. Did they do anything separately now?
“I mean, do you guys care now?” I asked. Our freshman year we had laughed about the whole thing. King Queen Prince Princess. It was all so ridiculous and petty, and the prize never went to the right person. Even when there was some interesting or weird choice, like, I don’t know, the chess champion, or the girl who everyone loved despite her eye patch, it always seemed pretty misguided.
“I don’t know,” Dee-Dee said. “Well, there’s also hockey? There’s a home game that weekend too.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I can’t even.”
“Can’t even what?”
“That was the end of my sentence, Dee.”
They were both silent, fidgeting in their seats.
“Anyway,” said Lydia. “We’re older now. It’s kind of fun. I mean, who do you think it could be this year? For queen, I mean. Who do you think?”
I felt the tug of my bag and the tickle that tells me something is going into it.
“Also, I do have a pretty big part in the play this year. Just saying,” Dee-Dee said.
Lydia nodded. “She really does, Lizzie. Can you believe?”
“It’s very cool, Dee, about the part. But I don’t know,” I said, both hands on my knees. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been in the hospital for, I don’t know, like, three weeks and then, like, I don’t know, had a vital organ chopped out of me, but I really, really don’t care.”
They sat up straight and silent.
And I will admit now that for a fleeting moment I thought, I could get the pity vote. Perhaps I could be princess. . . .
I could hear my mother shuffling in the study. My poor mother.
“Sorry,” said Dee.
Oh, what did I care. I was also sick of people apologizing to me for just living their lives.
“Okay, okay,” said Dee. “You. Tell us about you. How are you doing? Like, what does this mean now? For you, I mean. How is it . . . different?”
They looked at each other. They had clearly talked about it on the way over, how to act, what to say, or what I might look or seem like, and here it was, upon them: me.
I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt these people were strangers. Had I ever spent the night at Lydia’s, slathering our faces with her mother’s beauty packs, playing “light as a feather” and trying to contact the dead with Dee’s old dusty Ouija board?
Was I different or were they? And I couldn’t help but wonder, why did this not happen to one of them? Like, why was I here and why were they over there, all intact and shining and (tediously) the same?
I started to say it. I met this boy. It was on the tip of my tongue and then I stopped it. It was like talking about camp or summer—yeah, it was a lot like Danny and Sandy in Grease—and what I had with Connor just seemed so different and special and otherworldly really. And now it seemed so over.
“I’m so tired, you guys.” I wasn’t lying.
My mother came out of the study. “It was so great to see you two,” she said, walking down the stairs. My mother didn’t use the banister. Just me. The old lady of the house. “Come visit again soon, okay? Lizzie doesn’t head back to school for a few more weeks. Not exactly sure when yet.”
They both stood up. Did they do anything separately?
“I’ll call my mom,” Lydia said.
“That long?” Dee-Dee looked at me. I saw her again, the girl she used to be, a tomboy with a bowl cut, dribbling a soccer ball, her tube socks pulled up high. She was there, inside, I could see down, down, down to it. I could tell she was thinking, she must be really sick. Me. I could feel myself soften toward her, toward my Dee-Dee from patrols and soccer and sneaking out through her sliding glass door.
I crossed my arms before anyone tried to hug me.
“I guess we’ll wait outside,” Lydia said.
I was headed up the stairs again, slowly, slowly, when Dee-Dee said, “We’ll come by again soon, Liz. We’ll see you again soon!”
Here was my first assignment:
In three to five pages, please write a critical essay that examines one of the three topics listed below.
1. Is Heathcliff’s gradual decline the result of delusion, insanity, or a supernatural haunting?
2. What are the features of older gothic novels that Emily Brontë adopts and/or reconfigures for her use?
3. Does Heathcliff love Catherine Linton?
(Be sure you back up all your assertions with textual evidence! Also, work that is not double-spaced and paginated will not be accepted.)
Okay, option three: Does Heathcliff love Catherine Linton? Because Heathcliff, as repulsive as he is, and also as enthralling, clearly loves Catherine. His whole life is affected by her and by their love. By this time they had together when they were young.
But Heathcliff never says it. I looked through the whole book again, did an online search for the word “love,” and there was no evidence. All I could see clearly was that Catherine loved him. Here’s what she once wrote in her journal: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
He never says it, but we know. But how do you really know if someone loves you? Or loved you. Catherine dies before she ever knows for sure.
I decided against that essay and went with option two. The gothic novel. I thought it would be much easier to write about ghosts, but how can it be that ghosts are more of a sure thing than love?
Ghosts: the girl who died. Did she haunt Connor? I imagined this little girl in a green dress scratching at Connor’s window. Was she covered in blood? Or was she the girl she was before she was killed?
Did he try to save her? Was he trying to save me? Would that make up for something? Could it have been anyone? It could have been anyone.
As I wrote my first essay for my junior year, I asked myself all of this, and this is what I came up with: I was only there to help Connor with his guilt over not being able to help that little girl in the green dress. And maybe, just maybe, he was only there for me to get through that time with something sweet to, well, live for I guess.
But Connor, now, was gone. All I had was a turtle named Frog growing bigger every day, and a haunting message on my voice mail. The turtle needed a lot of taking care of. Sidebar: Who knew how much trouble turtles were?
Fake gold dangling hearts. No love and care needed there.
As I wrote about foggy full-mooned settings, about the wind along the moors, about ghosts and blood and the way we say the names of the dead, I took a break from Birdy and listened to Nora’s CD.
The Ronettes: “The night we met I knew I needed you so, and if I had the chance I’d never let you go. So won’t you say you love me?”
Say Lou Lou: “’Cause I nurtured the clouds in my eyes, and all of those times I lost myself in lies, it was you I was trying to find.”
TLC: “My outsides look cool, my insides are blue. Every time I think I’m through, it’s because of you.”
Sleater-Kinney: “I’m your monster, I’m not like you (peel back the skin, see what’s there), all your life is written for you (I’ll never show you what’s in here).”
Girls, the soft ones, the angry ones, the sweet, the cool, they all know how to say it.
In how many ways, how many ways?