Counting Thyme (26 page)

I pressed the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Thyme? Is that you?” It was Shani's mom.

“It's me,” I said as a really bad feeling settled over me. “Where's Shani?”

There was a pause. “Oh, baby girl. She wants to talk to you, she really does, but this is so hard on her. Is everything okay? Your message sounded like it was an emergency.”

“Val's in the hospital,” I said numbly. Shani wasn't going to call me after all.

“Oh, Thyme,” her mom said. “I am so, so sorry to hear that. Look, I will get Shani to call you just as soon as she gets home. She stayed over at Jenny's last night. I think it's just been easier for her to be over there instead of here. Ever since that For Sale sign went up in front of your house, it's been hard for her. I mean, we all knew this might happen, but now that it says ‘sold,' well . . . she's not taking it well. Speaking of, how are you holding up, sweetheart?”

“I'm fine,” I said, because that's what I always said, but my mind was racing.

There was a For Sale sign . . . in front of
our
house.

The truth hit with a smack.
They sold our house.

My parents sold our house, and they didn't even tell me. I was stupid to think I could stay and finish that dumb tornado machine. I should have left weeks ago—I had plenty of time saved up. It had to be over a hundred and fifty hours. That was almost a week.

Shani's mom was still talking about Val and staying strong and seeing us soon when I hung up. I didn't even say
good-bye. I just went straight back to my room and stuffed the paper slips back in the Thyme Jar. Then I hefted the jar into my arms. It was heavy, but not too heavy.

“Where are you going?” Cori asked. With her eyes clear of makeup for once, she looked just like Mom.

“I'm going home.”

She made a face. “Don't be stupid.”

“It's not stupid! It's what I want,” I said, “so stop telling me what to do!”

“Whoa.” She held her hands up. “I'm not telling you what to do, T. I just think you look really upset right now. You should calm down. We can talk if you want to.”

“What are we going to talk about? How Mom and Dad sold our house and didn't even tell us?”

She winced like she hadn't known either.

Before she could manage a comeback, I hurried to the front door and set the Thyme Jar on the floor. Mrs. Ravelli came out of the kitchen as I stuffed my arms into my winter coat. I heaved the jar back into my arms. “Can you take me to the hospital?”

“Thyme,
bambina
. What is it? You can tell me.”

But I couldn't tell Mrs. Ravelli. I couldn't tell her how I'd hidden Val from everyone so I could avoid being cancer boy's sister. That, more than anything, I just wanted to go home.

I snatched a MetroCard from the bowl on the counter and jammed it into my pocket. “I'll get there myself.” I brushed past her, out the front door, and down the stairs, gripping
the Thyme Jar like my life depended on it. But before I even reached the third-floor landing, Mr. Lipinsky's door flew open.

“You there.” He wagged his finger at me. “I need to have a word with you, young lady.”

I ignored him and hefted the Thyme Jar in my hands.

“Thyme! I'm talking to you,” he shouted, and I spun to face him.

“You've always wanted us gone, right? Well, I'm leaving!” Then I rushed down the stairs as quickly as I could. By the time I reached the bottom, the jar was growing heavy in my arms. Two blocks later, I had to stop and rest on a stoop. After fifteen grueling minutes of trudging down the streets with my arms on fire, the smell of roasted nuts greeted me.

The 86th Street entrance to the subway loomed ahead—the green line, the one that would take me to the hospital. Mrs. Ravelli and I had made the same trip after she picked me up from school the day before, but I'd never ridden the subway by myself.

I shifted the Thyme Jar in my arms for the hundredth time and hurried down the steps, careful not to drop it. Then I heard the screech of a train arriving below. Other people rushed past me, so I swiped my MetroCard until it worked, forced my way through the turnstile, and took the steps two at a time, the jar lurching in my arms with each hop.

When I got to the platform, the train was still there.

I checked the sign. It was a downtown train.

“
Stand clear of the closing doors,
” the speakers warned.

I slipped on board just before the doors slid shut. The train lurched forward, and I collapsed into a seat, my arms screaming for relief. The windows went black as the train picked up speed.

The hospital is on the green line, two stops away: 77th Street, then 68th Street.

Then I could get off, and I only had to walk a couple more blocks to the hospital. Light flashed in the train car's windows. The green and white tiles of a station blinked by, but the train didn't stop, and the chill of panic crawled up my neck.

I strained to read the subway map on the other side of the car, but there were too many heads in front of it. The train stopped, and the conductor's voice crackled over the speaker. It sounded like he said
59th Street
, which made no sense. I was supposed to take the train for two stops, and get off at
68th Street
, like I had with Mrs. Ravelli.

Panicked, I climbed to my feet, swaying as the train took off again. The floor rocked beneath me, but I wove closer to the doors, the Thyme Jar slipping in my sweaty hands. The train started to slow down again, and my eyes caught a word on the lighted sign above my head.

EXPRESS
.

I was on an express train! The number 5 train, when I should have been on the number 6. The 4, 5, and 6 were all green lines, but the express trains skipped lots of stops.

The doors slid open, and I dashed for the platform, desperate to get off the train before I ended up on the other side
of the city. The sign up above said Grand Central. I stumbled into a crush of people and followed them up a steep set of stairs. I didn't know how I would find my way. I only knew that I needed light. And air. I needed to get out of the subway
immediately
.

A ratty old man was perched at the top of the stairs. “Whatcha got there, missy?” he said. His fingers swiped the jar's glass. “Come back,” he called, cackling as I stumbled forward.

Suddenly, a hand landed on my shoulder.

I jumped, but thankfully, the hand belonged to a policeman.

“I'm lost,” I sobbed as I slid to the floor. The Thyme Jar clinked against the concrete.

“It's okay,” the officer said. His eyes were warm, his voice a relief. “You're going to be all right. Just try to breathe. Is there someone I can call?”

I nodded, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Mrs. Ravelli. You can call Mrs. Ravelli.”

THE TRUTH

AFTER MRS. RAVELLI AND CORI PICKED ME UP AT GRAND CENTRAL
station, we went back to the hospital. When we got to Val's room, the blinds on his windows were drawn.

I looked at Mrs. Ravelli. “Is it okay if I go in by myself?”

“Yes, you go. We wait here.” She took a seat on the bench. Cori sat next to her. Shockingly, Cori hadn't said much about me running off. She just gave me a little nod as I turned to Val's door.

This was it. The moment of truth.

I pushed the door handle with my elbow and carried the Thyme Jar inside. Dad was asleep in the reclining chair by the windows. Val was lying on his bed with his face turned away. Mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his hand. She looked up when I walked in.

“Thyme! What happened? Mrs. Ravelli said you were hysterical.”

“You sold our house,” I blurted out. My eyes were hot with tears, but I had to know the truth. “I talked to Shani's mom. She said there's a sign in the yard and everything. How could you do that?”

Mom tucked Val's hand under the blanket and stood up. Then she approached me very carefully, like she was the one walking on eggshells this time. “I'm so sorry that you had to find out this way. I just—” Her voice caught. “I guess I didn't really believe it was happening, myself. Push came to shove, and we thought maybe we could just rent it, but then . . .”

She shook her head, blinking back tears. Then she wiped at her eyes, and I saw that selling our house hurt her, too. That she didn't have a choice, either.

None of us did.

We'd all come to New York for Val, because that's what he had needed to keep the cancer from coming back—and that getting cancer in the first place hadn't been his choice, either.

She reached for me, but I stepped back. I wasn't ready to let go yet. It was too hard, the idea of leaving it all behind.

“You should have told me,” I said.

Mom nodded, her lips pinched like she was trying to hold herself together. I knew that feeling. It was filling up my chest, too, making it hurt.

Behind her, Dad stirred and sat up.

“I'm so sorry, honey,” Mom said. “I thought I was protecting you girls by keeping all of this as far away from you as I could. I didn't want you worrying about your brother. I wanted you to have your own lives. I see now that I was wrong. I should have trusted you.”

Dad rested his hands on her shoulders, and she took a deep breath. “Your mom is right,” he said. “We should have told you what was going on. We're all a part of this family.”

“But Val is the broken part,” I said, thinking back to what Dad had said about our family being like a printing press. How Val was the broken part, the one that counted.

“Gosh, I can't believe you remember that,” Dad said. “That's the thing, though. You need all the parts to make the press work. All of them together. That means you, too.”

I looked at their faces. Exhausted. Worried. I wanted to take all of those worries away for them. I knew then that I would still trade every good grade, every good thing, anything for Val to get better. Even Shani. Even home.

“I couldn't have done this without you,” Mom said, resting her palm against my cheek. “Thyme, you're the glue. You're the one Val talks to when he's sad. You're so strong and so brave, taking on this whole new place the way you have. You make me so proud.”

Hearing those words, something clicked into place. I thought that maybe the missing piece wasn't San Diego after all. It was knowing that I counted. Seeing that I belonged.

I looked down at the Thyme Jar in my hands. There I was, thinking I could bribe my parents to move back to California with a few measly days of time, when what my little brother needed most was to stay in New York. That's when I realized that I wasn't going anywhere. And neither was my family. I glanced at Val, and the truth settled over my heart.

We weren't leaving.

We were staying.

“I just . . . I want to give my time to Val,” I said, my voice wavering.

“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “What a sweet thing to do.”

She reached for the jar, and I let it go.

Mom and Dad said that with how things were going, it was best if Cori and I stayed. So we said good-bye to Mrs. Ravelli and waited into the night. Val's fever dipped and wavered, but kept coming back. He woke up for a few minutes at a time, but he was confused about where he was and he kept pulling his oxygen mask off even though the nurse said he needed it to breathe.

When it was my turn to sit by his bed, I ran my fingers over his arm, up and down, just the way he liked. I watched him sleep and worried that he wouldn't wake up. Was that how it would happen? Would he just shut his eyes and never open them again? The idea seemed impossible, so I shoved it down, far, far away from my heart. And from Val.

There was only one thing that I knew for sure: I didn't want to leave him. And I didn't want him to leave me, either.

Early the next morning, Dr. Everett came by with an update. This time, Mom and Dad called us into the hall with them. “He's negative for HAMA, so that's good. We know the fever isn't his body rejecting the antibodies,” the doctor said. But I barely had time to feel happy about that, because he kept talking. “I must caution you, however, that we're still waiting for the results from his scans to see if there's any evidence of a relapse. For now, we're proceeding as if these symptoms are from an infection. However, this particular
infection seems resistant to the current medication, so we're switching to a different course of antibiotics. We hope to see improvements within twenty-four hours.”

“Do you think the cancer's back?” Cori asked, and I swear we all stopped breathing.

“There's no way to know yet,” Dr. Everett said. “Not until we read the scans.” The way he said it, it sounded like he wasn't making any promises.

Dr. Everett excused himself, and we just stood there. A man rolled past us in a wheelchair, his head dangling to the side. The nurse pushing the chair smiled, but it looked like she was rolling a dead man around. I crowded closer to Mom.

Suddenly, Cori threw her hands into the air. “This is bull,” she said. “There's got to be something else they can do.
Something.
”

Mom squeezed her shoulder. “They're doing everything they can. We just have to ride this out.”

“I wish—” Dad said, his voice breaking. He pressed his fingers over his eyes. “I wish I had something better to tell you girls. If I could trade places with your brother—”

Dad's knees gave out, and Mom dropped to the floor to wrap her arms around him.

Cori and I both burst into tears and joined them, arms pressed around each other as we cried. We stayed like that for a while, in a family huddle on the linoleum floor.

I was the one who broke the spell. “I'm sorry,” I whispered. Because I was the one who'd wanted to go home so
badly. I was the one who'd considered what might happen if Val's treatment failed, when I should have put every ounce of my energy into believing in it.

Mom squeezed me harder. “It's not your fault, honey. This is no one's fault.”

I wanted to believe her, but that's not how I felt.

The light changed from dark to light and back again. It was Monday, three days since Val had arrived at the hospital. That night, I looked at the Thyme Jar sitting on the counter next to Val's bed, and the idea of counting hours or days seemed impossible. All that mattered was keeping Val alive.

I worried that I was too late figuring out what mattered. Too late choosing my brother. It was funny how I'd thought my worries would go away if I could just make it home. But I would have the same problems no matter where I went, because I would still be me, and worries attach to people, not places.

Mom caught me staring at the jar, running my fingers over the glass again and again.

“I'm scared,” I said.

“Me too, honey.” She looked at the jar. “I'm sorry I let you get away from me for so long. Tell me everything.” So I told her, and she listened. It felt good to let it all out. I told her about the secret garden Grandma and I had planted for her, and about the play, and sound production, and how Emily and Lizzie had fallen apart but pieced themselves back together again. Then I told her about Shani, and how I didn't
think we would be the same anymore. That I didn't know how to be friends from so far away.

“Maybe you can visit her for spring break,” Mom said, surprising me. “I know it's not much, but we all deserve a little normal once this is over . . .” Her eyes lingered on Val. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: that I only wanted this to end one way, with Val safe and healthy again.

“I'm sorry this has been so hard on you,” she said. “I wish I could kiss it and make it better, but it hasn't been that kind of year, has it?” She looked so sad, sitting there waiting for Val to get better. But she always stuck it out, no matter what. She was the toughest person I'd ever known, and I regretted every horrible thought I'd had about her. I'd missed her so much since Val got sick, and shutting her out had only made me miss her even more.

I leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Better?” I asked, and she smiled through her tears.

“My little girl,” she said. “When did you get so grown up?”

I made a face. “Oh, I'm still a goofball,” I said, though I knew better. Inside, I felt different. The homesickness was gone. No matter what happened or where I lived, I would never be the same again. I wasn't so sure that was a bad thing, either.

Mom smiled, teary-eyed. “You know what? You should call Shani.”

“Isn't it too late?” There was no clock in Val's room, but it had been dark for hours.

“Not in California.” She handed me her phone. According to the screen, it was almost eleven, which meant it was only eight in San Diego.

I looked at Val. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. She'll be happy to hear from you.”