Something right behind h.., p.1
Something Right Behind Her, page 1
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Copyright © 2012 by Claire Hollander
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First electronic edition November 2012
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In memory of Ellen James
SOMETHING RIGHT BEHIND HER
CHAPTER ONE
If you didn’t know Eve, she was that girl with the perfect skin, the glossy hair, the figure that turned your boyfriend into a drooling idiot. You tried not to stare. You tried not to compare yourself to her, to think what she had that you didn’t.
If you didn’t know Eve, she was that girl who lost a lot of weight, all of a sudden, who your boyfriend stopped gaping at, her tiny wrists lost in the turned-up cuffs of a baggy sweater. She was the girl who had her arm in a sling all year, and no it wasn’t a sprain, and no it wasn’t broken, and what it was she’d never say: damaged. She was the girl who started walking with a limp, the girl who sometimes fell down.
You tried not to stare. You tried to think of her as someone just like yourself.
If you didn’t know Eve, she was the girl who one day disappeared.
If you were me, and Eve O’Meara was your best friend, she came to you in your dreams, throwing her head back when she laughed, the way she always had, running a few strides ahead of you on the track, her straight, blond hair whipping in the breeze, her strides long, and languid. In your dream, she’d be apologizing for something. She’d be trying to explain why she hadn’t called.
She’d be telling you everything was ok now. That she was better. She’d be speaking in her same old husky voice. She’d be leaning forward, so her hair fell across her face. She’d be telling you about Jacob, as though he were a guy who was worth the trouble. She’d be telling you how happy he’d been to see that she was well now, and she’d have tears in her light blue eyes that she’d be blinking back, and you’d be happy for her too, but also a little jealous, in this dumb-ass dream, that she’d gone to see him first. That when the miracle occurred, she’d gone straight to him.
This would be a nightmare, of course, a nightmare about your own selfish heart, your small-mindedness, your ancient jealousies, and you’d wake up from it in a cold sweat, wondering how you’d actually face her.
That’s how I woke up the first day of school, junior year. My junior year, not ours, since Eve was out of-the-picture, being ‘homeschooled,‘ so she said. It was the kind of first day you dreaded, no sign of Autumn, everyone asking too many questions. I spent most of the day avoiding people, ducking out of the cafeteria, eating a greasy, buttered bagel right out of the wax-paper cafeteria wrapper, alone on the grass, on some lonely corner of the green where no one hung out, not even freshman losers. But more than trying to get away from people, I was trying to get away from that dream feeling - that tightness in my chest that made every breath I took come up short.
I hardly had a real conversation with anyone all day until seventh period, when I had study hall with Jill Gottleib, my last friend standing. Or last real friend anyway. Last girlfriend who didn’t get on my last nerve. We sat by the window as far from Mr. Doyle as possible, passing notes. Mr. Doyle must’ve drawn the short straw at the English Department meeting, to be stuck supervising last period study hall.
Jill had lost weight over the summer, looked pretty good, her long black hair falling past her shoulders. Jill used to be jealous of Eve, back when Jill was chunky, and Eve was Eve. Back when Eve was my best friend, and Jill sometimes didn’t want to know.
Did you hear about Jacob and that freshman? Jill scrawled across the top of her notebook, passing it to me. I frowned, shook my head. What was the point in keeping track of shit like that?
Always a douche. I wrote.
Eve had bad taste in guys. It used to amuse me, in a way.
I hope she doesn’t hear about it!
I wrote quickly in pencil, the lines thick and dark. Worse things have happened.
I had to shut Jill down on the topic of Eve, and stupid-ass Jacob. I didn’t trust myself to have patience with anyone. I made a show of taking my algebra text book out, as if that first day crap about keeping up had really sunk in. Everyone had suddenly started talking about college and the SATs. I was practicing avoidance, something I was a natural at.
I blew Jill off later when she asked if I wanted to go over to her house, sit by the pool. She lives in this crazy beast of a house, marble everywhere, and a pool with a slide and diving board, and the joke is it’s just her and her parents, and Jill is such a lazy-ass. “Maybe after track,” I lied.
“Come for dinner,” she said. “I’ll make fish sticks.” Jill was an orphan weeknights, both her parents working in the city.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to check in with Mill, “ I told her. Milly is my little sister, who’s crazed about the first day of school. She’d been on me that morning about ice cream sundaes, our traditional celebratory dessert. Not that I was in the mood.
Jill and I walked together down to the junior parking lot, wilting in the heat, and I dropped her at her car, an obnoxious red Mustang, much too showy for her, something her father had chosen. She lit up a cigarette as soon as she got in the car, and I shook my head at her, and tried to grab it out of her mouth. “Don’t be such a poser,” I said.
“OK, bitch,” she said, moving the cigarette to her other hand, and giving me the finger at the same time.
I’d have to get used to this year slowly, I told myself. Jill, and her little moments.
By the time I got down to the gym, the locker room was crowded with lots of people I hadn’t seen since the beginning of summer, including my track-buddies, people I didn’t actually mind seeing, at first. “Hey Andy-lynn,” Naya said, giving me a half-hug. Naya was a geek, who always added extra syllables to everyone’s name. She had blue braces and looked about twelve, but she was a sweet girl, who mostly minded her own business, though now that that Eve was gone, everyone had something to say.
“Say hey for me?” Naya said. “Say hey to Eve-ster?” God, Eve hated when Naya called her that.
All day, people had been telling me stuff to say to Eve for them, and my answer was always the same. “Say it yourself. Send her an e-mail. She likes to hear from people.” I was like a little cheerleader for keeping things normal, but what I didn’t tell anyone was that I hadn’t seen her myself, hadn’t laid eyes on Eve since early summer, before I went down to the beach to do nothing but sit on my butt, and think about what a shitty best friend I was. But then she went away too, traveled the world on her whirlwind tour of advanced medical facilities. But she’d been back now a couple of weeks, and where had I been?
Mrs. O’Meara had sent my Mom her update on Eve’s condition in August. She had explained, in her careful way, that the doctors at Mayo, the ones who specialized in pediatric ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, were concerned about the degree of deterioration they were seeing in Eve’s right side. She explained how Eve’s ALS had entered an “aggressive phase” over the summer that had required Eve to use a wheelchair full-time now. Eve’s correspondence was being handled by others as well. There was no such thing as a private email or text, since Eve couldn’t text back on her own. Everything had to go through Mrs. O’Meara.
That was what started it, my putting off any kind of visit. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to call Mrs. O’Meara, couldn’t call for an appointment to see my best friend. I wanted things to be magically how they were, even back in the spring, when sick as she seemed, Eve had hope. She had been looking forward to going to California to see “the best neurologists in the world,” as if going to the Mayo clinic was like going to a museum in Paris, a brush with greatness.
But now she was back, wheel-chair bound, and thoroughly mom-dependent. I couldn’t help but wonder how much seeing me would help her, and how much it might hurt. How would I have felt in her place, seeing everyone else going on with their lives? But maybe that was all an excuse for my own fear. Maybe I just didn’t want to see for myself what kind of disease “aggressive” ALS really was. How many times had I reached for the car keys, started down route 117 on my way to the O’Meara’s? How many times had I turned around and gone home?
Maybe it was that I had such a strong association of being at track with Eve, or maybe all that guilt and pretending had finally gotten to me, because I hadn’t planned at all on doing what I did next. I just started walking, not saying anything to anyone. I left the locker room with Naya and the rest of Girl’s Track, as if I was headed out to the practice. Then I just walked off into the blazing sun of the parking lot.
I’d tell them I got sick, that I had a migraine, or heat stroke. I wouldn’t lie because I was covering anything up, but because there were certain words it was hard for me to say, and Eve’s name was one of them.
All the way over to Eve’s house, I could feel my heart beating in my chest. At one point, I even forgot which street was Eve’s, a street I’d driven a thousand times.
I went straight to the back porch, up the creaky old wooden steps, hesitating slightly before opening the screen door, and letting myself in. Mrs. O’Meara was in the kitchen, wearing a white and pink tracksuit, her hair in a slightly frizzled bob. She was by the kitchen table, unpacking groceries, a lot of frozen-type stuff, like lasagna-in-a-box. Eve always liked to eat over at our house, because my Mom cooked real food, unlike hers. My Mom even had a dish she called Eve’s chicken, since Eve always found some reason to come over whenever she made it. Eve would ask my Mom questions about ingredients, as if one day she planned to cook the same way.
I rapped on the metal pane of the door as I opened it, so I wouldn’t startle Mrs. O’Meara. The woman had to be a ball of nerves. But she seemed pretty composed--acting so chipper and sweet you’d think her head would pop off with the effort. “Oh, Andy, dear!” she said, “how lovely! Eve will be so delighted you stopped by.” She kissed my cheek and held my hands in hers, holding me, I thought, a bit too firmly, a bit too long, and I worried for a second she would say something about how she hadn’t seen me in months. But she didn’t say anything more, just sighed and said, “She’s downstairs resting, but you go right on down!”
I did as she said, side-stepping a bunch of wood and junk, part of some stalled home-improvement project, and started down those familiar stairs, wondering how much my own steps had contributed, over the years, to the wearing -out of the dingy, brown carpet.
Eve was in her big beige hospital-type chair, watching a cooking show. There was a yellow ceramic bowl on a side table with some dried-up grapes in it, and a bottle of green tea with a chewed-on straw sticking out of it. I recognized the bowl from an art project we’d done back in fourth or fifth grade. We were supposed to mix our glazes, but Eve didn’t like the look of the drip-marks, didn’t want to ruin her best bowl, the first she’d thrown on the wheel. I wondered if Eve remembered that, or if the story had its only residence in my mind. I had been impressed with Eve back then, by her small acts of defiance, her need for things to be her way.
What’s going on? My voice sounded thick, unnatural.
It wasn’t the right thing to say.
Eve said nothing, holding her head to the side, as if it were unnaturally heavy. Her right eye appeared somehow diminished, lacking a clear eye-shape, drooping at the corner. It was still as blue as the other, but vacant-seeming. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see, I realized over time, but the immobility of those tiny eye muscles left the eye kind of dead. This is who we are, I thought. Who knew how many muscles it took to make a face?
She narrowed her good eye at me. “Thinking about a trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro,” She said, the right corner of her mouth dropping--it was the opposite of a seizure, these lapses in the hold of muscle.
“Guess that’s off the agenda for the moment,” I said, my voice sounding hushed, though I’d tried to speak normally. Tanzania had been her idea, and I’d backed out of the trip in April, after she found out she couldn’t go.
Track had also been Eve’s idea, back in freshman year, and at first I could barely run a single lap. For some reason I didn’t quite get, it had been important to Eve that I make the team. Most of our crowd played field hockey, or were cheerleaders, but Eve loved to run, and she wanted me to love it too. “It’s just a mental block,” she’d say whenever I doubled over with cramps. But when I finished our first meet in fifth place, she’d hugged me. “I knew you could do it!” she said, her face still flushed from her own second place finish. I wasn’t sure, if the situation were reversed, if I’d have been so encouraging. Would I even have cared if she’d been cut from the team, if I’d succeeded where she failed?
It wasn’t a good start, her bringing up Tanzania, and I panicked, like I always have, whenever I thought I’d disappointed her.
“I got this idea,” I said. “And came right over. Coach Landy will have to wait until tomorrow to freak out on me.” I chuckled, like an idiot, as if blowing off track was this wild-ass thing. “It isn’t Africa, but it’s supposed to be nice this weekend, and if Doug or someone could come help out, it could be cool to go down to the beach.” I could see she was starting to smile, the good corner of her mouth rising into a familiar dimple.
I had already started to train myself not to look into the right side of her face, the side that sagged into blankness. “Maybe,” she said. “Doug is coming home to work on that ramp.” The metal parts in the pile by the stairs were parts of a ramp her dad was building, so she could ride all over the house in her wheelchair. The thought of the ramp sent a chill down my spine, the permanence of it, like a scar on the O’Meara’s house. “I’ll ask Doug tonight.” It was odd to hear her speak, her voice still rich, though quieter. It had been such a big voice, voice of a girl who ran fast without effort, voice of a girl who’d never struggled for breath.
She eventually lightened up on me, stopped with the Tanzania comments. “As you can see, I’ve been doing a lot of fascinating reading in my spare time, “ she said, gesturing with her bare foot to a pile of books and magazines on the floor. There were fashion magazines, a couple graphic novels, some dumb-looking thrillers. I noticed she’d had a pedicure, movie-star red, and wondered, for a moment how--how did these basic things get done?
“My mom says we don’t have to start the real curriculum until next week, but I think that’s because she’s clueless. She thinks home-schooling means watching the Discovery Channel.” I thought of Eve alone in the house with her mother 24/7. Her mother’s relentless cheer.
“That could work,” I dead-panned. “I like When Animals Attack.”
“Edifying,” she said. “Definitely on the biology regents.” Eve leaned over and took a sip of green tea out of the crummy-looking straw. She moved jerkily under her loose, white blouse, and I had to stifle the impulse to hold the bottle for her. “After this summer, I could probably take the MCATs,” she said. “I am practically an expert on autoimmune disorders.” She rolled her good eye, and the bad one stayed in place.
“Must’ve been a lot,” I said softly. She nodded, leaning her head to the left, her bad eye looking watery, beginning to tear.
“That happens,” she said. “They tell me I have to think about blinking.” I pulled a tissue out of the rose-patterned kleenex box on the table by her tea, and wiped the tears from her cheek. Her face felt too soft, like the skin of someone very old.
“Guess you sprung a leak,” I said, and my own voice, again, was hard to recognize. It was just above a whisper, a sick-bed voice. I’d have to lose that, I thought. I’d have to find a way to sound like myself with Eve.
Saturday morning I showered quickly, and threw on my bathing suit, a bikini that was, sadly, a little stretched out on the bottom from a summer’s worth of use, a pair of jean shorts and a white gauze shirt I didn’t even bother to button. I was already late, groggy from yet another bad night’s sleep. Mom and Milly were in the kitchen making pancakes, Milly’s favorite thing to do on a Saturday morning. The whole house smelled faintly of butter, with a whiff of confectioner’s sugar. I couldn’t begin to think of
choking anything down, least of all the doughy mess Milly was concocting, and just grabbed the orange juice from the fridge and started drinking right from the container.
“Glass,” Mom said, but I ignored her, finished drinking, and put the container back in the fridge.
“Keep stirring, don’t let that burn” she said to Milly, who was standing on a chair in her pink- striped pajamas, stirring blueberry sauce. Milly’s hair was all puffed up and knotted in the back, a little blond bird’s nest. Milly is a cool kid for a ten-year old, but she is high maintenance in the food department, always getting Mom to make her this or that.
