One Last Song Part 9

Drew sank into the chair next to Jack's bed. At first I was confused about what the chair leg was touching. It looked like a yellow plastic bag. Then, with a whoosh of realization, it came to me. It was a plastic bladder. Jack was catheterized, and his urine was collected in this bag. I looked away.

"Look what I got," Drew said, handing the pet.i.tion to Jack. "It's not much yet, but we'll have a lot more signatures soon, man. I guarantee you."

With some effort, Jack held the papers up and looked at them. "Thanks," he said. Then, looking at me, "Who's the hot chick?"

I noticed Drew's brief look of disappointment at Jack's lack of enthusiasm, though he covered it up so quickly I had to wonder if I'd imagined it. "This is Saylor. Saylor Grayson, meet Jack Phillips."

I waved in a sort of awkward little circle. "Hey. Heard a lot about you."

"Have you..." Jack began, and then exploded into a series of coughs, dry and crackling. Jeannie came back into the room but he waved off her help. When she was gone, he looked at me as if nothing had happened. "Have you heard my phone number? It's even better."

Drew burst out in guffaws that sounded only a little bit forced, and I obliged with a small laugh. I wondered if this was really happening.

After some idle chatter, Jack raised up his bed and Drew and he played a video game for a little while. They asked if I'd like to play, but I declined. I'd never been one for video games, and anyway, the longer I stayed in Jack's house, the guiltier I felt. I wanted to engage with him as little as possible.

Finally, when Jack fell asleep midround, Drew looked at me. "We should go," he said. "Take Zee's car back."

We walked back out to the living room, where Jeannie came bustling up and rerouted us by grabbing and pulling us gently back to the sofa. Pointing to a tray of brownies, she said, "You're not leaving without eating those."

Nausea rolled in the pit of my stomach. The thought of eating anything made me want to hurl, and the thick smell of sugar and b.u.t.ter wasn't helping at all. "No, thank you. I'm good."

"Oh, come on," she said. Then, looking at Drew. "I know these are your favorite, so you better eat up."

She didn't have to ask him again. He picked up a big piece and shoved it in his mouth, crumbs showering down the front of his shirt. When he saw me watching, he grinned, teeth blackened by chocolate. "Hot, right?"

Jeannie slapped him lightly on the arm, laughing. "Don't scare her away." She sat beside me and, taking both of my hands in hers, shook her head. Tears glittered in her eyes. Even in my fevered state, I was taken aback by her openness, the way she gave of her affection and emotion so freely. "Thank you for visiting. Every friend Jack has who knows what he's going through... it helps him. I just know it does. So thank you."

If I could've offered anything at that moment-a kidney, bone marrow, blood-I would've, without question. I hadn't suddenly become a philanthropist. It was just that the guilt weighed on me like a thousand boulders. It crushed me, cracking and snapping my bones like they were little, brittle twigs. I wanted to be worthy of her tears. I wanted to be the girl they saw when they looked at me.

But the truth was, I had nothing to offer. I was empty inside, devoid of everything but the infection I had put there myself.

Chapter Twenty.

Outside, I watched as Drew's breath and mine mingled in a misty tangle. It wasn't actively snowing, but the clouds were brooding and low, and I could smell it in the air.

When we got in the car, I blasted the heat at full. "You know, he doesn't seem so out of it."

Drew raised his eyebrows in question.

"I mean, Zee said she didn't like the idea of physician-a.s.sisted suicide for Jack because the cancer had affected his brain. But he didn't seem... off to me at all." I began to back out of the Phillipses' driveway.

"Yeah. He was having a pretty good day today."

"Really? So that wasn't normal?"

Drew made a "meh" face. "It's not like he's usually a rage machine or anything, but his personality goes through this intense change. At the beginning, when I first met him, he was really easygoing and happy, in spite of his diagnosis. When he has his bad days, you can't see any of that Jack anymore. I guess that's what Zee was talking about." He paused. "But see, when he's alert and mostly with it like he was today, he still says he wants to have a choice in when he goes and how he goes. That's what makes me fight for his right to die."

We were quiet for a moment, and then Drew reached inside the zippered compartment of his messenger bag. "Mind if I put this on?"

I glanced at his hand and saw a Carousel Mayhem CD. Smiling, I waved toward the stereo. "Go for it."

"I knew you had good taste in there somewhere," he said. "You know, buried under the Carly Rae Jepsen stuff."

As I laughed and turned to mock-glare at him, I noticed his fingers reaching to feed the CD into the drive. But instead of lining the disc up with the opening, Drew kept smashing it against the part of the dashboard that held the dials for the heat.

Thinking he was being goofy, I chuckled. "What are you doing?"

But he didn't answer. When I looked up at him, his eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw hard. He let his hand go limp against the gearshift. "Would you mind doing it for me? Please?" I had to strain to hear his voice; it was barely audible against the whoosh of the heater.

I took the CD. "Um, sure. No problem." I stuffed it in without incident and the music began to play. When I plucked up the courage to look at Drew again, five minutes later, he was asleep. His head lolled against the headrest, his lips parted as if in a sigh. There was something upsettingly, terribly vulnerable about him in that moment. He reminded me of a five-year-old, spent after pitching a tantrum and not getting what he wanted. Of course, if Drew had pitched a tantrum, it had been internal, a silent raging. No wonder he was exhausted.

When I pulled into Zee's driveway, I was feeling sick. My body hurt all over, and I knew my fever had to be creeping higher. Drew stirred in his seat. I didn't have the nerve to check on my abscess when he might wake up any moment, though my fingers tingled with the need to pull down the neckline of my sweater. I turned the CD off and his eyes fluttered open.

"Tired?" I asked.

He didn't answer me, his mood still ruined from what had happened with the CD player earlier.

"We're here," I said.

He pushed the eject b.u.t.ton on the stereo, and grabbed his CD-this time without any problems-when the thing spit it out. Opening the car door, he used his cane to get out and stretched his legs in the snow-pregnant evening.

I followed him out.

The woman who answered the door was thin and bespectacled, with a head full of crazy, dark curls that stuck out every which way. I felt a pang of sympathy. I'd thought my loose curls were bad, but hers were the tightly wound, kinky kind I'd always been secretly thankful I'd been spared.

She smiled when she saw Drew and me. "Hi. You must be Saylor. Zee's told me all about you. I'm Lenore, her mom. Thank you for getting her home safely the other night. Come in, you two, get out of the cold."

We followed her in, Drew dragging behind me. Zee was propped up on the living room couch, watching a rerun of Santa Barbara, a soap opera with dramatic women with big hair I remembered my mum watching when I was much younger.

"How're you feeling?" I asked.

She rolled her eyes. "Fine, though Mom won't let me so much as go take a leak without badgering me about it."

"Language," her mother warned, but without much mettle. "And if you didn't want me badgering you, you shouldn't have danced till you almost pa.s.sed out."

"Mooooom." Zee threw her head back against the couch pillow, but I could see she didn't mind too much.

Her mother picked up a batch of laundry she'd been folding. "All right, all right. I'll let you visit with your friends. Holler if you need me." And with a quick pat on my arm, she bustled out.

I sat next to Zee on the couch and Drew took the chair next to me. "You look better than the last time we saw you," he said.

"Just needed to get on my oxygen for the night," she replied. "It was still worth it, though. Pierce is a h.e.l.l of a dancer. Tell ya, if he wasn't gay, I'd be all over that."

"Too much information," Drew said, but his voice was limper than usual.

I chuckled and let my head fall against the back of the couch. My eyes closed without me asking them to.

"Are you okay?"

I forced them open again and found that Zee was staring at me. "Yeah. Fine."

"She's been sort of out of it since we left downtown," Drew said. "Won't say anything to me, though."

"You look like you might have a fever. I'd hold my hand up to your forehead, but my hands are always cold now," Zee said. "Drew. You do it."

I felt my face heat up even more, and not from my fever. He bent over me and put the back of his enormous hand against my forehead. "Yeah, I'll say that's a fever." His breath smelled like mint. "She needs some ibuprofen."

"Mom!" Zee yelled, looking toward the doorway where her mom had disappeared minutes before.

"No, really, don't wor-"

"MOM!"

"What? What is it?" Her mother came bustling back in, her face creased with worry. "Are you okay? What do you need?"

"Do we have any ibuprofen for Saylor? She's got a fever."

"No, really, it's okay," I said again. I tried to lift my head off the couch, but it felt like it was filled with lead. And it was beginning to hurt, as if it were made from little splinters of gla.s.s.

"You don't look so great, honey," Lenore said. "Here, let me take your temperature."

I closed my eyes and opened my mouth when I felt the cold nib of the thermometer touch my bottom lip. When it beeped, someone took it out of my mouth.

"101.5," I heard Lenore say. "Do you need to go to the ER, Saylor?"

Uh-oh. No. No ER. They were familiar with me, and I couldn't risk Drew or Zee finding out. "No, I'm fine. Just need to rest, I think. I have an appointment with my doctor on Monday." The lie slipped out easily, without much conscious thought on my part. It was as if my survival instincts kicked in, which, if you thought about it, said a lot about the kind of person I was.

"Okay. Well, here's some Motrin for you, then."

I took the pills from Lenore and swallowed them with a cup of water she brought me.

"Here's a blanket, too," she said, spreading out a chenille throw over my knees. "You just let me know if you need something else, okay? Would you like me to drive you home?"

I smiled. "No, thank you."

"Mom, you're hovering," Zee said.

"I don't mind," I replied, thinking, If only you knew. To Lenore: "I promise I'll let you know if I need anything."

"All right, hon." She squeezed my hand gently, refilled my water cup, and left us alone.

There was silence for a full minute, and I kept my eyes closed. I wanted to open them, to see what Drew and Zee were up to, but I could've sworn someone came along and pinned fifty-pound dumbbells to my eyelids.

A moment later, I felt someone tucking in the blanket around me. A big hand, cool and slightly callused on the fingertips, brushed my arm. I held still; I could barely breathe.

Across the couch, Zee snorted. "I think she's warm enough now, jeez." Drew chuckled a little and I felt his weight shift, like he was sitting back down. "So, how'd the pet.i.tion thing go?" Zee continued.

"Really well. We hit about twenty-five shops today. Saylor was a rock star."

"You walked to twenty-five stores? How did your legs do?"

Just the slightest breath of a pause. "Fine. No issues."

I opened my eyes then, just a slit, to stare at Drew's face as he said it. I believed there were things you could tell about a person by looking at their face mid-lie that you might not be able to tell after ten years of friendship. Drew's face was impa.s.sive for the most part, but the tips of his ears were fuchsia. Not as calm as he wanted to portray after all. I thought about him sprawled on the sidewalk as people pa.s.sed him; fumbling with the CD in Zee's car.

I started to say something when I realized with a great big stab of horror that I was going to throw up before a word ever left my mouth. At least I had time to lean forward so the mess went on the floor and not on Lenore's Laura Ashleylike floral couch.

"Mom!" Zee yelled, and Lenore came back. When she saw what had happened, she made an about-face, only to return armed with industrial-strength cleaners and a mop and bucket.

"All right, I'm taking you home," Drew said, hooking his arm around my shoulder. I tried to stand up, my legs weak and rubbery. I knew I couldn't lean on him too much-he couldn't handle my weight and his. But I let him think he was doing much of the work anyway.

"I'm so sorry," I said, the veil of fever making my mortification just a little less mortifying.

"Don't worry, honey," Lenore replied. "You just concentrate on feeling better."

"Yeah, seriously. I'll text you later," Zee said. "And take my car. I'm not going to be driving anywhere anytime soon. I'll get it from you tomorrow."

I nodded and Drew and I shuffled out.

Chapter Twenty-One.

We decided outside Zee's car that of the two of us, Drew was probably better qualified to drive me home. "Muscle weakness" trumped "barely conscious," and I was beginning to shiver in the cold, so he helped me get in the pa.s.senger seat. Closing the door, he went around to the driver's side. When he was safely sitting, he draped his heavy jacket over me.

I opened my mouth to say something teasing about his quaint chivalrous gesture, but nothing came out. I liked that he did that, that he was taking care of me, and I didn't want to ruin it.

"I don't like this car," he said, adjusting the seat so it was pushed as far back as it would go. "I swear they made it for elves."

"Hey," I said, my voice thready and hoa.r.s.e. "I like it."

"Exactly what I mean," he muttered. "Now hold on. This may get a little b.u.mpy. At least we don't have that far to go." And then we were off.