Noggin (21 page)

“I’m fine. Sorry.”

He gave me one of those half-body guy hugs and then hugged Cate and said he’d call me the next day. I waved at him as he drove off. Cate was looking over at me and she was still very worried; I could see that. I was embarrassed. I felt like I’d just thrown a three-year-old’s temper
tantrum in front of her. Probably not the best way for a teenage guy to win back his grown-up girlfriend.

“Okay. Let’s get you home, champ.”

“Champ?” I asked.

“Champ,” she said more clearly. “Champion. Champione!”

I laughed a little as we pulled onto the street. Then I started breathing really fast. I noticed it first in my chest, like it wouldn’t rise all the way, like my lungs were blocked or something. I sat up and put both hands on the dashboard. I was hyperventilating. My heart was trying to force its way out of my chest, and I could feel my legs shaking.

“Travis! Travis, are you okay?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Okay . . . okay . . . just close your eyes, okay? Close your eyes and lean back.”

“I can’t . . . my heart’s beating so fast . . . I feel like I might pass out.”

“You won’t pass out, Travis. Just close your eyes and breathe really deep. Deep, deep breaths. Just trust me.”

I kept my eyes closed, breathing really deeply and steadily like she said, until we were at my house and she had the passenger door open and was kneeling down and holding my hand, asking if I was okay. I’d calmed down a bit, my breathing was better, and it didn’t feel as much like I was having a heart attack. So we walked inside and sat down on the couch.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not sure why that happened.”

“Has that happened before?”

“No. Not really.”

“Before I got there, you were really hot, right?”

“Yeah. You saw, I was sweating like crazy.”

“And were you . . . irritable? Like, did you want to punch someone in the face every time they spoke to you?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Yep. Okay, so you definitely had a panic attack.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“Because I had about one of those a day for six months.”

“Damn, Cate.”

“It was a while ago. It’s fine now. I’ve got it under control.”

“A while . . . like . . . five years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Six months?”

“First they tried meds . . . but they gave me headaches. You know I don’t like taking medicine. I don’t even take aspirin. Then I saw someone for a while, and I got to where I could stop them before they got too bad. Like what I told you in the car . . . you just have to close your eyes and breathe. As long as you know it’s gonna pass, you just have to stay calm and wait it out.”

“Can you stay for a little while? I guess Mom and Dad are working or something. I can’t keep up with them anymore.”

“Yeah. I guess I can stay. But look, Travis. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea either.”

My girlfriend who used to dare me to make out in public places and play footsie with me at the dinner table
and park down the road to sneak into my house in the middle of the night didn’t want me getting the wrong idea. My girlfriend who hadn’t seen me in half a decade, who had come to save me from my breakdown at Arnie’s,
that
girlfriend needed a little more convincing. I wasn’t sure I could keep this up for much longer. Being her friend was fine, but I needed things to go back. I needed them to be the same as before, and the longer I waited, the less possible that seemed. Maybe that’s why I freaked out in the car. Maybe, like some transplanted organ in an unfamiliar body, I was being rejected by the world around me. I had to fix things before I ran out of time.

I should probably tell you about my last Christmas. I mean, the one I thought would be my last Christmas. And, well, to tell you about it means that I also have to tell you about my last New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween. Because they were all on the same day.

You’ll remember that Kyle and Cate came with us to Denver so they could say good-bye to me. But what I haven’t told you is that we arrived there about six days before my actual surgery. For fear that I wouldn’t make it much longer, Dr. Saranson flew us all out and put my parents, Kyle, and Cate in a couple of suites they had at the hospital. I call it a hospital, but this place, the Saranson Center for Life Preservation, was more like the starship
Enterprise
. The walls were all shiny metallic or foggy white, and all the doors were glass and moved silently out of the way whenever someone approached
them. My room was designed to make sure my (very probable) last days of life were more comfortable than all the ones before them. The mattress had all these settings that I could control with a touch screen, and I could use that same screen to completely shut out the light from outside and make the ceiling glow with a million little digital stars. It was beautiful. I usually made fun of things like that, but they got it right, I think. It was peaceful without being creepy like those weird clown murals you see in some children’s hospitals.

I’d already said my final good-byes to the few family members we’d told about my procedure because you don’t need an audience to die and, plus, we knew how uncomfortable it made them feel. My grandmother especially had a hard time understanding why I’d want to take such a big risk and lose even one extra second of the life I was living. She kissed my cheek for the first time I ever remembered, and she told me that if it came to it, I should probably tell my grandfather hello for her. I thought that was sweet, the way she said it like I was just going to visit a foreign city or something.

We got to Denver and I settled into my room. Cate helped me while my parents and Kyle went to put their things in the guest suites across the building. She and I played around with the touch screen that the nurse had shown us, opening and closing the curtains, making fake stars twinkle one second and then turning the room into a bright, almost blinding white the next.

“So if you see a bright light, it’s not you dying. It’s me playing around in this room,” Cate said, both of us squinting at each other.

Soon enough it was the early evening, and I noticed that this was the time when everyone always got the saddest. I think there’s something about the sun going down that maybe pushes you just over the edge if you’re standing too close to it. Mom was crying because she was always crying, and my dad was holding her hand and trying to make casual conversation with everyone. But I think it had hit us all at once that we were suddenly there. We had reached our final stop on the Travis Coates Is Dying Express, and now no one knew what to say.

“It’s a shame,” I said. “What is it, like, September?”

“Yeah. School starts next week,” Kyle answered.

“I thought I could at least squeeze in one last holiday before I had to go.”

“There’s always Labor Day,” Dad suggested.

“I think that only requires resting. I’ve got that down to an art,” I said. “It’s a real shame. I like how people act on holidays. Everyone just seems . . . I don’t know—lighter, maybe. Like they’re allowed to have fun all day long and eat anything they want and do silly things, and no one cares because, hey, it’s a holiday, so why not?”

“When you were little,” my mom started up, her tears still flowing, “you had that calendar. Remember that? Remember your big calendar?”

“Yeah. With the marker.”

“That’s the one. He had this big calendar on his wall. Thing must’ve been, oh, probably about the size of a movie poster, and he used to use this green marker to fill in some made-up holiday for every single day of every month. Every
single
day. So I knew when the first rolled around, Travis would be tearing off one sheet and starting on the other.”

“What were the holidays?” Kyle asked.

“Oh, things like Squirrel Day or Dad’s Ties Day,” I said.

“What about Talk While Breathing In Day?” Dad said. “That was my favorite.”

“And you’d celebrate them all?” Cate asked.

“
He
would. He’d try to get us involved in any way possible, but it wasn’t always very successful. How does one celebrate The Way Porcelain Figurines Make a Popping Sound When You Move Them on a Shelf Day?”

“That was a good one,” I said. “Probably my favorite.”

“Do they really do that?” Cate asked.

“They do at my grandma’s house,” I said.

“So it was basically just everything you liked, right?” Kyle asked.

“I guess so, yeah. I was a weird kid.”

“The best weird kid,” Mom said.

Then she walked out of the room because I think she wanted to spare us some pretty ugly crying. Dad followed after her, and we all watched some TV until I felt like I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Eventually Kyle
headed back to his room and left Cate and me alone for a few minutes.

“What would you call today? I mean, if it had to be a holiday?”

“Hmm . . . maybe Travis Gets Lucky in Denver Day?” I laughed.

“Okay, rock star.” She rolled her eyes.

“Oh. Denied. That’s pretty harsh, considering.”

But she didn’t laugh. She just bent down and quietly kissed me on the forehead and then paused for a second with her eyes really close to mine, looking right into them. You ever feel like you know someone so much that they can breathe for you? Like when their chest and your chest rise and fall, they do it together because they have to? That’s how it felt. That’s how it always felt.

The next morning I was feeling pretty good for a guy who couldn’t sit up by himself and had to pee into a bag. Mom and Dad brought in a huge thing of doughnuts, and the three of us watched some TV while we smothered our emotions with sugar and lard. I asked where Cate and Kyle were, and my parents acted like they had no idea. Dad said maybe they’d slept in.

“You’d think they could wait a few days, huh?” I said, a little miffed.

About an hour after we’d eaten, the door opened and in walked ten nurses, all dressed in homemade costumes. Dracula, a princess, the Hulk, Batman, Superman, a zombie—I think one of them may have been a hooker, but
I was afraid to ask. These were maybe the worst costumes I’d ever seen. They were made mostly of paper and hospital gowns that someone had used Magic Markers on. But it didn’t matter because they were laughing and holding out their hands, fists closed. Kyle and Cate walked in behind them, both wearing surgical masks and scrubs.

“TRICK OR TREAT!” they yelled in unison, followed by some laughter. A couple of them looked very visibly uncomfortable with all of this.

They took turns coming up to the bed and putting handfuls of candy in my lap. Each one smiled at me, and the young guy dressed as Batman gave me a high five and shouted “YES!” afterward. The last two trick-or-treaters were my girlfriend and best friend, and they lifted their masks to reveal sneaky grins. Then they all yelled, “HAPPY HALLOWEEN, TRAVIS!” and walked back out.

“That was awesome,” I said, sad it was over.

“Just be patient,” Dad said.

Sooner than I could unwrap a piece of the candy, the lights in the room dimmed to almost pitch-black, and I couldn’t really see anything until the first nurse walked in, holding a lit candle. Several more filed in behind her and there were some doctors, too. Then, of course, Kyle and Cate. My parents stood up, took candles out of their pockets, and lit them on Kyle’s flame.

“Guys . . . I don’t know what to—”

“Travis Coates,” a middle-aged male nurse said. “Merry Christmas.”

Then he counted, “A one . . . two . . . three . . . ,” and they all started singing. And it was “O Holy Night,” and my mom and dad were crying, but they were still singing. Cate and Kyle, too. And the yellowish glow on all their faces was maybe the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

When it was done and they’d all walked slowly out, my parents followed behind them. But not before I felt something being put on my head. I sat in the darkness for a little while until I felt someone walk up to me.

Then the room lit up with stars, and all the nurses were dancing around to music that started piping out of a black boom box in one of their hands. And they were cheering and blowing on party horns and wearing hats, just like the one on my head. Kyle ran into the room wheeling an IV cart and said, “Who’s ready for the countdown?”

He knelt down and disappeared for a second in the dark. Then a faint glow suddenly illuminated the room—he’d haphazardly wrapped an empty IV bag with little twinkling lights, like the ones you see on miniature Christmas trees—and now we all started to count down from ten as he used plastic tubing to raise the bag up from the floor. When we got to one, everyone cheered even louder and started singing “Auld Lang Syne.” I joined in because how could I not, and we all laughed when my dad started dancing in the middle of the room with a nurse who was still very much dressed up like Dracula.

They kept dancing and the music kept playing until the room was clear of everyone. But the stars were still
covering the ceiling, and I laid my head back on my pillow and watched them, waiting to see what would happen next, hoping it wasn’t over. Kyle walked in a few seconds later and handed me a bouquet of flowers.

“Why, thanks, Kyle,” I said.

“No, no. These are not for you.”

He walked out quickly and pushed play on the little boom box that the nurse had set by the door. It was some beautiful violin music, something romantic. And Cate walked in smiling at me. She was still wearing her jeans and a hoodie, but her hair wasn’t in its usual ponytail. It was flowing wild around both sides of her face. She was beautiful. Of course she was.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, leaning in and kissing me.

I handed her the flowers and she acted surprised, throwing her head back and being really funny in her dramatic way. “You shouldn’t have, darling. Why, I must be the luckiest girl in the world.” We laughed and kissed a little more, and I think maybe we were both crying when she finally said it wasn’t quite over yet.

Suddenly the lights were back on, and before I could protest or even think about protesting, she and Kyle were helping me down from the bed and into a wheelchair. My parents were smiling in the hallway as we wheeled past them, and every time we approached a nurse or doctor, I got a head nod or a high five or a little cheer. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.