Six

Emily was cold. She always was. No matter what, the hospital rooms were always frigid. The thin, coarse blanket provided by the hospital was never enough to keep her tiny body from shaking and her mother always seemed to forget the bag of extras at home.

“You warm enough?” Her mother's voice could break glass with its shrillness.

Emily nodded. No point in getting mad at her for leaving the blankets. Again.

Her mother was endlessly forgetting things. Emily couldn’t remember if that had started before or after the illness. She had been forgetting more and more lately, too. She couldn’t even remember what city they were in at the moment. All hospital rooms looked the same at this point. Pale wooden doors, curtains for “privacy,” whatever that was, and endless white paint everywhere. And the smell. Emily didn’t think she would ever get used to it. The nauseating itch of rubbing alcohol and bleakness. All the doctors were the same, too. They ran the same tests, said the same things, had the same sympathetic smile when they told her there was nothing they could do. Her life had become one big circle of fake smiles and hand sanitizer.

The first night was always the hardest. The nurses all had different times of the night they liked to disturb her slumber. The first time she’d visited a hospital, the nurses had come in every hour on the hour, just to check she was still breathing. She didn’t miss that. Now they only came in a few times a night—four at most. She could actually get some sleep—or pretend too.

“Will I get discharged today?” Emily tried to keep the hope out of her voice so her mother wouldn’t worry. The page of a magazine turned slowly, her mother’s eyes glossing over, seeing nothing. The night before had been rough.

“Probably tomorrow. Maybe the next day. You’re making progress.”

Emily sighed. There was only so much daytime television she could take.

“Will Howard come?”

Howard never really understood why his sister was whisked away. It scared him to see her with all the tubes and needles but Emily would bribe him with chocolate and cartoons to make him sit in her lap. Emily couldn’t remember a time when Howard had been around that she hadn’t been happy. His innocence, a by-product of childhood, never failed to amaze her. She wished she were that naive about the world. Before she had gotten sick, she’d done everything with him. She’d picked him up from school every day, driven him to soccer practice. Afterwards they’d go get ice cream at the Dairy Queen and watch the cars going through the car wash next door. Howard had big dreams of working there when he was older. He really loved the bubbles.

“So?” She paused. “Will he come?”

Her mother never answered.

Emily was groggy the next morning. She didn’t remember much of the day before. Her medications had been upped sometime around 3 AM, making the world fuzzy at the seams. She felt like she was looking through a fisheye lens. She coughed. Sandpaper. She’d only felt like this once before. The one time the hospital had been hot instead of cold. Hot with the red screaming lights of the ambulance, hot with the breath of her mother, the oxygen mask on her face, the swinging fluorescents above her bursting with flames. She didn’t remember much of that trip, only the sandpaper throat the next morning and the noodly limbs.

“Mom,” she croaked.

Her mother sat up immediately.

“Sweetie?”

There was blood in her throw up. Never a good sign.

The soft beeping of the heart monitor used to annoy Emily. The incessant sound had kept her awake, plagued her dreams. Now it brought her comfort. Even when she was dazed, drugged to high heaven, she could hear the steady beep, reassuring her that she was still alive. Heaven would never be this cold.

“It’s okay, sweetie.” Her mother’s voice was shaking but her hands were steady. She stroked Emily’s hair. “The surgery went great. You’re going to be just fine.”

It took a few days for the sandpaper to go away, for Howard to visit, hesitating in the doorway until Emily flipped the TV to Cartoon Network and escaped to the bathroom. It was so frustrating. She did everything right. She took her meds, same time, every day. She drank water to the point of almost drowning her internal organs. She worked out every day the pain didn't keep her in bed. She ate her leafy greens. She even prayed to the god she was so sure wasn't there. So why the hell was she throwing up blood? She was so tired. So frustrated. So incredibly over being the sick girl. She just wanted a little break. Just a day. A day to breathe, to feel what healthy was again. It had been so long. She didn’t know if she would recognize health if it punched her in the face.

“It’s a rather simple procedure.” The doctor’s accent was thick and southern. “The tumor was hiding behind the shoulder blade but it didn't have enough room there so out it popped!”

Emily didn’t think anyone should sound that cheery about a tumor moving around.

The doctor was still talking. “We should be able to grab it pretty easily depending on how deep inside the muscle it is. While we’re in there, we’ll go ahead and set up the port for chemo.”

Emily nodded numbly.

“What about the use of her shoulder?” Emily’s mother had perfected the fake calm voice.

“She’ll be in a sling for about a month so the muscle can have time to heal. I’m fairly confident she’ll gain back about 80 to 85 percent of her range of motion. There will be physical therapy, of course, but we have an excellent team here.”

Emily could see the tears welling up in her mother’s eyes. “Mom, it’s okay. You’ve seen me play softball. They’re doing me a favor.”

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

Howard came to visit again before the surgery. Emily covered her head with a beanie even though it itched. She had her mom rent Cars and Peter Pan to ensure his love. She left the flowers from her school friends on the shelf even though they were starting to wilt, just to add some color. She opened the blinds for the first time in weeks, wincing at the light. Her aunt stayed to make small chat with her mom while she and Howard played cards in between movies. She tried to ignore the stares her mother and aunt shot her way. She tried and failed to ignore Howard’s stares at her IV. She stood up to go to the bathroom, dragging her uninvited friend behind her. It stung when she pulled the tubes out of her hand. She wrapped some toilet paper around it to keep it from bleeding and pulled her IV stand back to the bed with her. She pulled Howard into her lap and turned on Peter Pan. She almost made it through the whole movie before the nurse came in to check on her. Her mom made Howard leave so he wouldn’t have to watch them put in the new IV.

They came to prep her around 4 in the morning. They told her they would be coming early so she wouldn't have to be without food for too long before the surgery. They forgot that she couldn’t keep any food down anyway. She was subsisting on ice chips and her mother’s hope. Her mother helped her into her new gown. She drank the sickly pink “silly juice.” Emily hated when the nurses called it that. She wasn’t a child. She didn’t need the world to be sugar-coated. She knew all about hard edges. The silly juice didn’t even make her giggle like it used to. It just made her want to sleep. Her mother clutched her coffee like a lifeline.

“Mom.” Emily cleared her throat. “Mom.”

“What’s up, sweetie?” Her mother’s voice was never as steady as her hands.

“If anything-”

“Stop it,” her mother snapped. She never snapped at her, at least not since she’d gotten sick.

“No, I just need you to tell Howard...” Her mother’s hands started to shake. “I hid his Lightning McQueen car under the bed. I thought he would have found it by now.”

Her mother's laugh broke the morning silence abruptly. “I told you to stop hiding that. He hates when his other cars don't have friends.”

Her lips trembled when they met Emily’s forehead. Emily closed her eyes, wishing the silly juice would kick in faster.

“Emily?”

The nurse's voice was too peppy. Didn’t she know that any sane person was asleep at this hour?

“We’re ready to bring you down.” The nurse unlocked the bed's wheels.

“Bye, Mom.” Emily started to drift. Her eyes were getting heavier. Her mom squeezed her hand.

“See you in a bit, honey.” Her tears had started.

The nurse tried to make conversation on the elevator ride down. Emily knew it was rude but she didn’t answer any of the questions. She blinked slowly. The anesthesiologist was cute, she noticed. She never remembered their faces afterwards, though. He said some line to her about letting him know when she smelled chocolate chip cookies but she just started counting backwards from ten. The fluorescents grew fuzzy. Nine. She floated. Eight. She wondered if Howard would be there when it was over. Seven. There was a fire somewhere in her veins. Si-