Chapter 23 Don’t Panic #3
“Mom’s not feeling good either. She likes the cold cloths.” Connor smoothed the towel over my forehead.
“You’ll get sick.”
“I’d rather be sick than lonely. You won’t hurt me will you?”
I’m not sure how I answered that. I only know after whatever I said, he crawled in bed with me, his back tucked into my side. Snuggling close.
“Can I have the painting?”
“Sure.”
“Is that you in the painting?”
“It was the assignment…”
“I like the colors in the water and the sailboat.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re really talented aren’t you?” he asked.
“Everybody’s good at something,” I said.
“I’m good at violin. My teacher says I’m the best.”
“Teachers are good. Listen to your teachers. Believe them. Not whatever else you hear.
“You don’t smell very good.”
Connor smelled good, though. A very Texas kind of smell. Like autumn leaves and fresh-cut grass. Possibility and regret. “Maybe you shouldn’t lie so close. I’ll make you stinky.”
“It’s comfortable. Is it making you feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll stay. I can take a bath later.”
“How’d you know I was sick?”
“I figured something was wrong, or you wouldn’t still be here,” he said.
“It was brave of you to check.”
“When you get better, will you take me to the place with the purple water?” he asked, talking about the painting again.
“Sure.”
“Is that where you go when you leave?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is it very beautiful there?”
“Beautiful,” I repeated. “And safe.”
“Can we go tomorrow?”
“We’ll see…”
It was so much like a dream, I never counted it as a memory.
Even in the days that passed afterwards, it faded and contorted as remembered dreams do.
But as I look at the self-portrait of me on a pier, staring out at a sailboat distant on the gray and purple water, I do recall the painting disappeared from my room, and I had to paint Helen something else.
Connor receives ten different units of blood and blood products overnight. He gets his stomach pumped, he has two seizures, and when I finally arrive at the hospital, he’s in a medically-induced coma in the ICU, attached to a machine that’s breathing for him.
It’s almost exactly the condition I found him in when I came back to Austin four years before. The same near fatal blood loss, the same kind of ICU room. Weirdly, the same doctor. Only difference is this time, it wasn’t an accident.
Tristan is as close to my brother as he can get without climbing into the bed with him.
He’s in a chair, holding Connor’s pale, thin hand, rubbing my brother’s fingers with his thumb.
He doesn’t acknowledge the fact that I’ve arrived.
Maybe that’s why I get so agitated. I’m up and down from my chair, in and out of the room, fidgeting and picking at my cuticles.
Tristan has to close his eyes to block me out.
He gets a text around two in the morning and looks down at the phone on his lap. “My mom’s on her way,” he says.
“Good. Maybe when she gets here, I can take you home, and you can get some rest.”
He shakes his head, eyes fixed on Connor. “I’m not leaving, Archer.”
“You’re exhausted—”
“I'm fine.” His eyes fill with tears again. “I need to be here when he wakes up. I have to stay with him. I’m all he has.”
Those words are as effective at shutting me down as ripping out my heart would be.
Despite all the things he’s said over the last two weeks diminishing the importance of this friendship, his love for my brother is still so complete.
Daunting. And here I am on the outside looking in again, my face pressed against the glass, trying to see how it works, but unable to—this thing called unconditional love.
It’s always just hidden from my view. Something getting in the way, blocking my line of sight.
I walk over to Tristan and kneel on the floor next to him, facing away from the bed so I won't have to look at Connor. “Just for a little while,” I say to him. “We’ll get a few hours of sleep and come back.”
He looks down at me with pure confusion on his face. “How can you even think about leaving right now? Or sleeping?”
“Please don't make it sound like I don't care—”
“Do you?”
“Tristan—”
He turns his face away from me.
“What?” I ask, part of me begging for understanding, but the other part—the other part is angry.
He’s angrier. “He died tonight. Do you realize that? Your brother died. They literally had to make his heart start beating again. He was dead. Just a few hours ago, your brother was dead, and you want to go to sleep? I don't understand that,” he finishes in a whisper.
I stiffen and let go of him.
His face hardens beneath his glare. “Go. Go take your nap,” he says like a nap is the equivalent of shooting heroin. “I'll just be here picking up the pieces, like always.”
“That's not fair.”
“Do you wanna know what's not fair, Archer?” he asks, his blue-green eyes blazing. His fury and pain are turned on me so suddenly, I don’t have time to brace myself.
“What’s not fair is being a senior in high school and losing both your parents and your baby brother in a single hour.
What's not fair is being made to feel unwelcome in the home of the only family you have left.
What's not fair is jumping down someone's throat who is young and scared and grieving.
Where have you fucking been for him the last four years?
Why were you so unwilling to build a relationship with someone who wanted it so bad he would cry himself to sleep at night thinking he must be too ugly, too broken, too gay for his own brother to bother with. That's not fair.”
His words are acid eating through my skin.
Contempt is the worst thing.
Tristan’s contempt is so horrible, it makes me wish I’d been the one in the bathtub. Except I would have cut myself deeper. I would have done it without pills. The pills probably put Connor to sleep before he was able to finish the job. They made him lazy. I wouldn’t have made that mistake.
I get up from the floor, taking a step away from both of them.
Two Saturdays ago, Tristan told me he loved me, and I’d almost believed him.
Almost.
Tonight, in the ICU, the veil lifts. His teenage fantasies are gone, and none of them can pretty me up anymore. There is no love left for me in his eyes. I can tell. I’ve seen this look before.
It was the look on Connor’s face when I told him I was selling our parents’ house.
The look on West’s face just after my fist pounded it junior year.
The look on Jayne’s face when I told her to move out.
You can see it if you look close enough.
You can watch someone’s love for you burn out.
A candle inside a jar. And then if you wait long enough—if you’re really, really brave—you can watch their eyes grow cold and distant as they cut you out of their life like gangrene, because they know you’ll rot them from the outside in.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, the truth of it—and the shame—swallowing me.
His face changes. The contempt morphs into something more like remorse. “Wait, Archer—” He starts to stand, but I shake my head, holding up my hand to stop him.
I move away from him—away from them both. Away from the sight of someone else’s blood dripping into my brother’s sewn up veins while a machine does the work his lungs won’t do.
Tristan is talking, but all I hear is the sound of my brother’s life translated into beeps and whirs.
The ghosts of his tiny hands press into my face…a whisper from another life.
I’d rather be sick than lonely.
Nothing is real. The halls of the hospital blur like they exist in some other reality. My vision tunnels, blackening around the edges, blinding me enough at times for me to stop walking and pray the walls will hold me up until I can see again.
I go into a bathroom and start throwing up. It comes in convulsive waves. Coffee and bile. It gets so bad that I’m glad I’m in a hospital. Someone will find me eventually. Maybe they can give me something to make it stop. Maybe they’ll make a mistake and kill me.
Right now, I would prefer the latter.
I don’t know how much time I spend puking in the hospital toilet, or whether I fall asleep or pass out with my cheek against the cold tile wall. It’s enough that I’m not throwing up anymore. Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
What I can share is that the second I begin to move, it starts all over again.
I may not be dying, but I am not okay.
So at three-ten a.m. on a Saturday in August, from the floor of a bathroom stall at St. David's hospital during one of the ten-second stretches I get between throwing up and gulping for air, I text West.
I pass out again before he finds me. When I wake, it’s because his hand is on my shoulder, shaking me.
“Jesus, brother, could you have been any more fucking vague about where you were? I've been in and out of twenty bathrooms between here and the parking lot.”
He’s kneeling down next to me, putting his hand on my clammy forehead.
“Did you take something?” he asks.
I make a weak attempt at shaking my head, closing my eyes again.
But when I close them…fuck.
I see Tristan. Tristan bent over my pale and bloody brother on another bathroom floor. The image has me over the rim of the toilet bowl again in a second flat.
West rubs my back until I slump against him. “You okay?” he asks, one hand in the middle of my chest and the other arm around me. He’s keeping me upright. The way he always has.
“No.”
“You want me to check you in?”
“No.”
“Let's go then,” he says.
And then, using both arms and his super-strength, he lifts me up.