Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home 6 page

I got up late the next morning. I watched TV in bed and checked my email and then after a while started crafting an email to Peter Van Houten about how I couldn’t come to Amsterdam but I swore upon the life of my mother that I would never share any information about the characters with anyone, that I didn’t even want to share it, because I was a terribly selfish person, and could he please just tell me if the Dutch Tulip Man is for real and if Anna’s mom marries him and also about Sisyphus the Hamster.

But I didn’t send it. It was too pathetic even for me.

Around three, when I figured Augustus would be home from school, I went into the backyard and called him. As the phone rang, I sat down on the grass, which was all overgrown and dandeliony. That swing set was still back there, weeds growing out of the little ditch I’d created from kicking myself higher as a little kid. I remembered Dad bringing home the kit from Toys “R” Us and building it in the backyard with a neighbor. He’d insisted on swinging on it first to test it, and the thing damn near broke.

The sky was gray and low and full of rain but not yet raining. I hung up when I got Augustus’s voice mail and then put the phone down in the dirt beside me and kept looking at the swing set, thinking that I would give up all the sick days I had left for a few healthy ones. I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn’t let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the sound unhinged from its meaning. I was still saying it when he called back.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hazel Grace,” he said. “Hi,” I said again.

“Are you crying, Hazel Grace?” “Kind of?”

“Why?” he asked.

“’Cause I’m just—I want to go to Amsterdam, and I want him to tell me what happens after the book is over, and I just don’t want my particular life, and also the sky is depressing me, and there is this old swing set out here that my dad made for me when I was a kid.”

“I must see this old swing set of tears immediately,” he said. “I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

I stayed in the backyard because Mom was always really smothery and concerned when I was crying, because I did not cry often, and I knew she’d want to

talk and discuss whether I shouldn’t consider adjusting my medication, and the thought of that whole conversation made me want to throw up.

It’s not like I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father pushing a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other metaphorically resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there, abandoned, the two little swings hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of wood, the outline of the seats like a kid’s drawing of a smile.

Behind me, I heard the sliding-glass door open. I turned around. It was Augustus, wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve plaid button-down. I wiped my face with my sleeve and smiled. “Hi,” I said.

It took him a second to sit down on the ground next to me, and he grimaced as he landed rather ungracefully on his ass. “Hi,” he said finally. I looked over at him. He was looking past me, into the backyard. “I see your point,” he said as he put an arm around my shoulder. “That is one sad goddamned swing set.”

I nudged my head into his shoulder. “Thanks for offering to come over.”

“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you,” he said. “I guess?” I said.

“All efforts to save me from you will fail,” he said.

“Why? Why would you even like me? Haven’t you put yourself through enough of this?” I asked, thinking of Caroline Mathers.

Gus didn’t answer. He just held on to me, his fingers strong against my left arm. “We gotta do something about this frigging swing set,” he said. “I’m telling you, it’s ninety percent of the problem.”

Once I’d recovered, we went inside and sat down on the couch right next to each other, the laptop half on his (fake) knee and half on mine. “Hot,” I said of the laptop’s base.

“Is it now?” He smiled. Gus loaded this giveaway site called Free No Catch and together we wrote an ad. “Headline?” he asked.

“‘Swing Set Needs Home,’” I said.

“‘Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,’” he said.

“‘Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,’” I said. He laughed. “That’s why.”

“What?”

“That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

I took a deep breath through my nose. There was never enough air in the world, but the shortage was particularly acute in that moment. We wrote the ad together, editing each other as we went. In the end, we settled upon this:

Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home

One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It’s all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.

Swing set currently resides near 83rd and Spring Mill.

After that, we turned on the TV for a little while, but we couldn’t find anything to watch, so I grabbed An Imperial Affliction off the bedside table and brought it back into the living room and Augustus Waters read to me while Mom, making lunch, listened in.

“‘Mother’s glass eye turned inward,’” Augustus began. As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

When I checked my email an hour later, I learned that we had plenty of swing-set suitors to choose from. In the end, we picked a guy named Daniel Alvarez who’d included a picture of his three kids playing video games with the subject line I just want them to go outside. I emailed him back and told him to pick it up at his leisure.

Augustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed. We were sitting there on the couch together, and he pushed himself up to go but then fell back down onto the couch and sneaked a kiss onto my cheek.

“Augustus!” I said.

“Friendly,” he said. He pushed himself up again and really stood this time, then took two steps over to my mom and said, “Always a pleasure to see you,” and my mom opened her arms to hug him, whereupon Augustus leaned in and kissed my mom on the cheek. He turned back to me. “See?” he asked.

I went to bed right after dinner, the BiPAP drowning out the world beyond my room. I never saw the swing set again.

* * *

I slept for a long time, ten hours, possibly because of the slow recovery and possibly because sleep fights cancer and possibly because I was a teenager with no particular wake-up time. I wasn’t strong enough yet to go back to classes at MCC. When I finally felt like getting up, I removed the BiPAP snout from my nose, put my oxygen nubbins in, turned them on, and then grabbed my laptop from beneath my bed, where I’d stashed it the night before.

I had an email from Lidewij Vliegenthart. Dear Hazel,

I have received word via the Genies that you will be visiting us with Augustus Waters and your mother beginning on 4th of May. Only a week away! Peter and I are delighted and cannot wait to make your acquaintance. Your hotel, the Filosoof, is just one street away from Peter’s home. Perhaps we should give you one day for the jet lag, yes? So if convenient, we will meet you at Peter’s home on the morning of 5th May at perhaps ten o’clock for a cup of coffee and for him to answer questions you have about his book. And then perhaps afterward we can tour a museum or the Anne Frank House?

With all best wishes, Lidewij Vliegenthart

Executive Assistant to Mr. Peter Van Houten, author of An Imperial Affliction

* * * “Mom,” I said. She didn’t answer. “MOM!” I shouted. Nothing. Again, louder, “MOM!”

She ran in wearing a threadbare pink towel under her armpits, dripping, vaguely panicked. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing. Sorry, I didn’t know you were in the shower,” I said.

“Bath,” she said. “I was just . . .” She closed her eyes. “Just trying to take a bath for five seconds. Sorry. What’s going on?”

“Can you call the Genies and tell them the trip is off? I just got an email from Peter Van Houten’s assistant. She thinks we’re coming.” She pursed her lips and squinted past me.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to tell you until your father gets home.”

“What?” I asked again.

“Trip’s on,” she said finally. “Dr. Maria called us last night and made a convincing case that you need to live your—” “MOM, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!” I shouted, and she came to the bed and let me hug her.

I texted Augustus because I knew he was in school: Still free May three? :-)

He texted back immediately.

Everything’s coming up Waters.

If I could just stay alive for a week, I’d know the unwritten secrets of Anna’s mom and the Dutch Tulip Guy. I looked down my blouse at my chest. “Keep your shit together,” I whispered to my lungs.

CHAPTER NINE

The day before we left for Amsterdam, I went back to Support Group for the first time since meeting Augustus. The cast had rotated a bit down there in the Literal Heart of Jesus. I arrived early, enough time for perennially strong appendiceal cancer survivor Lida to bring me up-to-date on everyone as I ate a grocery-store chocolate chip cookie while leaning against the dessert table.

Twelve-year-old leukemic Michael had passed away. He’d fought hard, Lida told me, as if there were another way to fight. Everyone else was still

around. Ken was NEC after radiation. Lucas had relapsed, and she said it with a sad smile and a little shrug, the way you might say an alcoholic had relapsed.

A cute, chubby girl walked over to the table and said hi to Lida, then introduced herself to me as Susan. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she had a scar extending from the side of her nose down her lip and across her cheek. She had put makeup over the scar, which only served to emphasize it. I was feeling a little out of breath from all the standing, so I said, “I’m gonna go sit,” and then the elevator opened, revealing Isaac and his mom. He wore sunglasses and clung to his mom’s arm with one hand, a cane in the other.

“Support Group Hazel not Monica,” I said when he got close enough, and he smiled and said, “Hey, Hazel. How’s it going?” “Good. I’ve gotten really hot since you went blind.”

“I bet,” he said. His mom led him to a chair, kissed the top of his head, and shuffled back toward the elevator. He felt around beneath him and then sat. I sat down in the chair next to him. “So how’s it going?”

“Okay. Glad to be home, I guess. Gus told me you were in the ICU?” “Yeah,” I said.

“Sucks,” he said.

“I’m a lot better now,” I said. “I’m going to Amsterdam tomorrow with Gus.”

“I know. I’m pretty well up-to-date on your life, because Gus never. Talks. About. Anything. Else.”

I smiled. Patrick cleared his throat and said, “If we could all take a seat?” He caught my eye. “Hazel!” he said. “I’m so glad to see you!”

Everyone sat and Patrick began his retelling of his ball-lessness, and I fell into the routine of Support Group: communicating through sighs with Isaac, feeling sorry for everyone in the room and also everyone outside of it, zoning out of the conversation to focus on my breathlessness and the aching. The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.

It was Lida the Strong. Lida in remission. Blond, healthy, stout Lida, who swam on her high school swim team. Lida, missing only her appendix, saying my name, saying, “Hazel is such an inspiration to me; she really is. She just keeps fighting the battle, waking up every morning and going to war without complaint. She’s so strong. She’s so much stronger than I am. I just wish I had her strength.”

“Hazel?” Patrick asked. “How does that make you feel?”

I shrugged and looked over at Lida. “I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.” I felt guilty as soon as I said it. “I don’t think that’s what Lida meant,” Patrick said. “I think she . . .” But I’d stopped listening.

After the prayers for the living and the endless litany of the dead (with Michael tacked on to the end), we held hands and said, “Living our best life today!”

Lida immediately rushed up to me full of apology and explanation, and I said, “No, no, it’s really fine,” waving her off, and I said to Isaac, “Care to accompany me upstairs?”

He took my arm, and I walked with him to the elevator, grateful to have an excuse to avoid the stairs. I’d almost made it all the way to the elevator when I saw his mom standing in a corner of the Literal Heart. “I’m here,” she said to Isaac, and he switched from my arm to hers before asking, “You want to come over?”

“Sure,” I said. I felt bad for him. Even though I hated the sympathy people felt toward me, I couldn’t help but feel it toward him.

Isaac lived in a small ranch house in Meridian Hills next to this fancy private school. We sat down in the living room while his mom went off to the kitchen to make dinner, and then he asked if I wanted to play a game.

“Sure,” I said. So he asked for the remote. I gave it to him, and he turned on the TV and then a computer attached to it. The TV screen stayed black, but after a few seconds a deep voice spoke from it.

“Deception,” the voice said. “One player or two?”

“Two,” Isaac said. “Pause.” He turned to me. “I play this game with Gus all the time, but it’s infuriating because he is a completely suicidal video- game player. He’s, like, way too aggressive about saving civilians and whatnot.”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering the night of the broken trophies. “Unpause,” Isaac said.

“Player one, identify yourself.”

“This is player one’s sexy sexy voice,” Isaac said. “Player two, identify yourself.”

“I would be player two, I guess,” I said.

Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem and Private Jasper Jacks awake in a dark, empty room approximately twelve feet square.

Isaac pointed toward the TV, like I should talk to it or something. “Um,” I said. “Is there a light switch?”

No.

“Is there a door?”

Private Jacks locates the door. It is locked.

Isaac jumped in. “There’s a key above the door frame.”

Yes, there is.

“Mayhem opens the door.”

The darkness is still complete. “Take out knife,” Isaac said. “Take out knife,” I added.

A kid—Isaac’s brother, I assume—darted out from the kitchen. He was maybe ten, wiry and overenergetic, and he kind of skipped across the living room before shouting in a really good imitation of Isaac’s voice, “KILL MYSELF.”

Sergeant Mayhem places his knife to his neck. Are you sure you—

“No,” Isaac said. “Pause. Graham, don’t make me kick your ass.” Graham laughed giddily and skipped off down a hallway.

As Mayhem and Jacks, Isaac and I felt our way forward in the cavern until we bumped into a guy whom we stabbed after getting him to tell us that we were in a Ukrainian prison cave, more than a mile beneath the ground. As we continued, sound effects—a raging underground river, voices speaking in Ukrainian and accented English—led you through the cave, but there was nothing to see in this game. After playing for an hour, we began to hear the cries of a desperate prisoner, pleading, “God, help me. God, help me.”

“Pause,” Isaac said. “This is when Gus always insists on finding the prisoner, even though that keeps you from winning the game, and the only way to

actually free the prisoner is to win the game.”

“Yeah, he takes video games too seriously,” I said. “He’s a bit too enamored with metaphor.” “Do you like him?” Isaac asked.

“Of course I like him. He’s great.”

“But you don’t want to hook up with him?” I shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

“I know what you’re trying to do. You don’t want to give him something he can’t handle. You don’t want him to Monica you,” he said.

“Kinda,” I said. But it wasn’t that. The truth was, I didn’t want to Isaac him. “To be fair to Monica,” I said, “what you did to her wasn’t very nice either.” “What’d I do to her?” he asked, defensive.

“You know, going blind and everything.” “But that’s not my fault,” Isaac said.

“I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.”

CHAPTER TEN

We could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that she couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my parents had gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was supposed to spend its life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and forth to Dayton, where Morris Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often visited.

I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase, since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in

the first place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-thirds of the suitcase.

In the end, we both lost. So it goes.

Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty, turning on the light and shouting, “AMSTERDAM!” She ran around all morning making sure we had international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we had the right number of oxygen tanks to get there and that they were all full, etc., while I just rolled out of bed, put on my Travel to Amsterdam Outfit (jeans, a pink tank top, and a black cardigan in case the plane was cold).

The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat breakfast with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields. But anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade versions of Egg McMuffins they liked.

“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t we have curry for breakfast?” “Hazel, eat.”

“But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.”

Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have breakfast for dinner. Deal?”

“I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime.”

“You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.” “Quite a bit behind you,” my dad added, and Mom laughed.

Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.

After they finished eating, Dad did the dishes and walked us to the car. Of course, he started crying, and he kissed my cheek with his wet stubbly face. He pressed his nose against my cheekbone and whispered, “I love you. I’m so proud of you.” (For what, I wondered.)

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I’ll see you in a few days, okay, sweetie? I love you so much.” “I love you, too, Dad.” I smiled. “And it’s only three days.”

As we backed out of the driveway, I kept waving at him. He was waving back, and crying. It occurred to me that he was probably thinking he might never see me again, which he probably thought every single morning of his entire weekday life as he left for work, which probably sucked.

Mom and I drove over to Augustus’s house, and when we got there, she wanted me to stay in the car to rest, but I went to the door with her anyway. As we approached the house, I could hear someone crying inside. I didn’t think it was Gus at first, because it didn’t sound anything like the low rumble of his speaking, but then I heard a voice that was definitely a twisted version of his say, “BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE, MOM. IT BELONGS TO ME.” And quickly my mom put her arm around my shoulders and spun me back toward the car, walking quickly, and I was like, “Mom, what’s wrong?”

And she said, “We can’t eavesdrop, Hazel.”

We got back into the car and I texted Augustus that we were outside whenever he was ready.

We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.

“Well,” Mom said after a while, “we are pretty early, I guess.”

“Almost as if I didn’t have to get up at five thirty,” I said. Mom reached down to the console between us, grabbed her coffee mug, and took a sip. My phone buzzed. A text from Augustus.

Just CAN’T decide what to wear. Do you like me better in a polo or a button-down? I replied:

Button-down.

Thirty seconds later, the front door opened, and a smiling Augustus appeared, a roller bag behind him. He wore a pressed sky-blue button-down tucked into his jeans. A Camel Light dangled from his lips. My mom got out to say hi to him. He took the cigarette out momentarily and spoke in the confident voice to which I was accustomed. “Always a pleasure to see you, ma’am.”

I watched them through the rearview mirror until Mom opened the trunk. Moments later, Augustus opened a door behind me and engaged in the complicated business of entering the backseat of a car with one leg.

“Do you want shotgun?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “And hello, Hazel Grace.” “Hi,” I said. “Okay?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay,” I said.

My mom got in and closed the car door. “Next stop, Amsterdam,” she announced.

Which was not quite true. The next stop was the airport parking lot, and then a bus took us to the terminal, and then an open-air electric car took us to the security line. The TSA guy at the front of the line was shouting about how our bags had better not contain explosives or firearms or anything liquid over three ounces, and I said to Augustus, “Observation: Standing in line is a form of oppression,” and he said, “Seriously.”

Rather than be searched by hand, I chose to walk through the metal detector without my cart or my tank or even the plastic nubbins in my nose. Walking through the X-ray machine marked the first time I’d taken a step without oxygen in some months, and it felt pretty amazing to walk unencumbered

like that, stepping across the Rubicon, the machine’s silence acknowledging that I was, however briefly, a nonmetallicized creature.

I felt a bodily sovereignty that I can’t really describe except to say that when I was a kid I used to have a really heavy backpack that I carried everywhere with all my books in it, and if I walked around with the backpack for long enough, when I took it off I felt like I was floating.

After about ten seconds, my lungs felt like they were folding in upon themselves like flowers at dusk. I sat down on a gray bench just past the machine and tried to catch my breath, my cough a rattling drizzle, and I felt pretty miserable until I got the cannula back into place.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention. Mom was looking at me, concerned. She’d just said something. What had she just said? Then I remembered. She’d asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Amsterdam!” she half shouted.

I smiled. “Amsterdam,” I answered. She reached her hand down to me and pulled me up.

We got to the gate an hour before our scheduled boarding time. “Mrs. Lancaster, you are an impressively punctual person,” Augustus said as he sat down next to me in the mostly empty gate area.

“Well, it helps that I am not technically very busy,” she said.

“You’re plenty busy,” I told her, although it occurred to me that Mom’s business was mostly me. There was also the business of being married to my dad—he was kind of clueless about, like, banking and hiring plumbers and cooking and doing things other than working for Morris Property, Inc.—but it was mostly me. Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.

As the seats around the gate started to fill, Augustus said, “I’m gonna get a hamburger before we leave. Can I get you anything?” “No,” I said, “but I really appreciate your refusal to give in to breakfasty social conventions.”

He tilted his head at me, confused. “Hazel has developed an issue with the ghettoization of scrambled eggs,” Mom said.

“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.” “I want to talk about this more,” Augustus said. “But I am starving. I’ll be right back.”

When Augustus hadn’t showed up after twenty minutes, I asked Mom if she thought something was wrong, and she looked up from her awful magazine only long enough to say, “He probably just went to the bathroom or something.”

A gate agent came over and switched my oxygen container out with one provided by the airline. I was embarrassed to have this lady kneeling in front of me while everyone watched, so I texted Augustus while she did it.

He didn’t reply. Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds of Amsterdam trip–ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental breakdown) and I felt like there was something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked away.

And just when the lady behind the ticket counter announced they were going to start preboarding people who might need a bit of extra time and every single person in the gate area turned squarely to me, I saw Augustus fast-limping toward us with a McDonald’s bag in one hand, his backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Line got superlong, sorry,” he said, offering me a hand up. I took it, and we walked side by side to the gate to preboard.

I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us, and whether it would kill us, and how heroic my mom must be, and everything else. That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people. We were irreconcilably other, and never was it more obvious than when the three of us walked through the empty plane, the stewardess nodding sympathetically and gesturing us toward our row in the distant back. I sat in the middle of our three-person row with Augustus in the window seat and Mom in the aisle. I felt a little hemmed in by Mom, so of course I scooted over toward Augustus. We were right behind the plane’s wing. He opened up his bag and unwrapped his burger.

“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled eggs—they’re important.”

“Ludicrous,” I said. The people were starting to file into the plane now. I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at

Augustus.

“I’m just saying: Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special. They have a place and a time, like church does.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”

“You’re a hard person to comfort,” Augustus said.

“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said. “You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember.” For a moment, he said nothing. “You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 595