I took a train into the city the afternoon I killed my best friend of ten years.
Sure, an Uber might have gotten me there faster, but I was down to my last five hundred dollars before my new job paid me – and that was going to be at least another month from the date. Gods bless Nora Leerhaser and whoever else is responsible for making sure train rides stay under three dollars one way.
As I made the half mile walk from my condo to the station, I listened to a liberally biased podcast about why the world is currently pissed off at us and why they’re absolutely justified in that feeling. I desperately wanted a coffee, but the past due bill collector I just sent to voicemail said I’d have to suffer through yesterday’s lukewarm water in my unbranded water bottle. Undercaffeinated resting bitch face in place, I kept my two empty seat on either side of me buffer as the doors closed.
Typical of the red line in the summer, there was enough noise that I could hear nearly every other conversation happening over the sounds of the latest nightmare that the current administration was making of international trade. The couple across from me was talking about how the cheap lemonade from the dollar store was the best way to get their blood sugar back up when it was crashing. An email reminder that my credit card payment was due in a few days flashed on the screen just as the train stopped blocks away from Wrigley Field. Without fail the sight of the never updated exterior reminded me of my dead mother, almost as clearly as the scent of cigarette smoke and cheap red wine at the grocery store.
Besides their occasionally sour attitude my friend and my mother shared one big thing in common: the kind of disease that lies in wait. For my mother it was the stage four lung cancer we all knew was coming – Not an if but a when. Invisible until it decided it no longer wanted to be, and then crashing through her insides all at once. One day, you’re as fine as a woman in your sixties can manage, and the next your loves ones can count the bumps on your spine like they’re counting the stops between here and North and Clybourn. Or the stitches on my needles for the garter stitch dishcloth I work on because I have to keep my hands busy.
Two and forty-five. Respectively.
I have to hope none of them are dropped as I shove the project back into my backpack without time to put the covers on the points of the needles. As I cram the cream-colored cotton into the top of the bag, I feel the intake papers from last night’s hospital visit crumple under the weight. In my haste to catch the door and avoid missing the stop entirely, I wrench my hand out and feel the papercut the pointy edges leave long before I see it. If my green text bubbles don’t raise the eyebrows of the security outside of the Apple store, the swearing does.
I knew when they told me I’d have to wait to talk to the doctor before making it past the waiting room that it wasn’t going to be good news. The coffee is black and bitter, but it’s also free as I make my way back to the clinically comfortable bench.
“Hey, you were here last night too; I remember your backpack. Is your friend going to be okay?”
The blessing and the curse of carrying a bag with rainbow straps and patches is visibility. I smiled for the sake of the woman that asked, because she looked more nervous than I was to be back in the sterile waiting room.
“Nah. Probably not.”
Smooth as barbed wire. Her eyes went wide and she started to stumble over an apology that I waved away with a shake of my head. I asked her about who she was here to see as a distraction, and her scared rambling is soothing. It’s four years of undergraduate theater that allows me to dissociate but still give her the “mmhm” and “ahhs” she needs when she goes on.
My friend’s immune system was fucked long before I ever met her. For the sort of disease she had, the “in remission” came with a silent, persistent “but” attached to the end of it. You might not get sick now, or even in the next five years. But when you did? It was bound to be swift and brutal. A sword of Damocles we spent a decade ignoring.
A nurse finally called me back after what felt like an eternity of waiting, since I’d managed to arrive right as the handoff was happening for the midday shift change. The waiting room woman said she’d hope for the best for Us before I followed him to the patient rooms.
“Her temperature dropped last night, so we have warm blankets and the heater blowing on her here too. There was a kink in the feeding tube last night, so we had to pull it out and run a new one.”
Some things never changed. Sick or not, She was a stubborn bitch; when she set her mind to something, even if it was not eating for longer than anyone should, She was determined to stick to it. Honestly? Probably one of my favorite things about Her. While the nurse fussed with one of the monitors that was beep screaming about occlusion, he let me sit on the other side of the bed. She opened her eyes and turned her head towards me. No oxygen tubes or mask – At least not yet.
It was Her, but it also sure as hell wasn’t. Our green eyes were always mirrors of one another, but she couldn’t keep hers open and on me for more than a few seconds. Her hand was a limp noodle when I put mine under it instead of either of us really holding on. At some point while I stared at this cold, barely breathing, husk of Her, the doctor had replaced the nurse.
Pretending to understand what they meant as they went on about “hepatic lipidosis” and levels was too much. Somewhere into the scrub-clad woman’s recitation on levels and enzymes, the dam broke.
“You can be honest.”
I hated that I could hear every crack and break in my voice. The weakness echoed back almost as loudly as the sound of me blowing my nose.
“She isn’t where we’d like her to be. With how long it’s been since she’s been able to keep anything down, and her medical history….”
All the money in the world and time couldn’t undo what had begun. The doctor kept talking like she was trying to calm down a child, or a spooked animal. I felt like both and neither at the same time as I ran my thumb across Her fingers.
Sad, not surprised. I’d been saying it since She started to feel off two weeks before. You couldn’t be surprised when the outcome was weighted so heavily. But you COULD be sad when you saw your emotional support friend looking nearly as shitty as you did when you were on chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma years before. At some point while I stared at Her thin chest moving up and down, the doctor had turned off the monitors.
“Tell me about Her. What did she like to do?”
I went on about Her love of sunbathing while the line was flushed and primed. Somewhere into an anecdote about Her love affair with the cabinets in the kitchen of our first apartment and an obsession with the crisp taste of Chicago tap water, the doctor pulled off her gloves and sat down next to me.
“It’s okay. She’s gone.”
I took the train back home after charging the four hundred dollars it would cost to have Her body burned. Made it the whole way back home, and inside the door before I realized I’d be coming home to an empty room for the foreseeable future. Maybe there was some surprise still to be had after all.
Macabress Manuscripts 