Chip and Maggie
“You asked me to tell you when it was close,” Dr. Palmer says. Maggie and her parents are standing out in the hallway, Chip asleep in his room.
Maggie feels like she’s outside her body, like she can’t possibly be listening to what Dr. Palmer is saying.
He has been good to them all along. He has kind eyes and has hugged each of them a few times, sat beside Chip’s bed and asked him about what position he played in baseball and who he thinks will win the World Series.
“I like Oakland,” Chip said. “Me too,” Dr. Palmer said.
Now Maggie looks at the floor, and there is a white pen next to the molding that no one must have noticed. She pushes it with her sneaker.
She is a senior in high school. King of the hill, Chip said this time last year, and she felt envious and couldn’t wait until she was in the same spot.
A senior. Senior Skip Day. Senior privileges in study hall.
Senioritis. She couldn’t wait. How small their world was then. How easy it was when no one was sick.
“You asked me to tell you,” Dr. Palmer says when her parents look away and don’t reply. He pauses. “And I’m telling you it’s close. A day or two, I imagine.”
Maggie’s mom begins to sob, and Maggie’s father takes her in his arms as tears leak down his cheeks.
Maggie bites her nails. She glances into Chip’s room to see if the noise woke him, but he is still in the same position. Where are her own tears? They haven’t come. It feels like the wind blowing across an empty plain, like in a Western.
She tries to imagine going back to classes and doing her locker combination after Chip is gone and how ridiculous that will all be.
She imagines hearing the chants and screams at pep rallies, lining up for attendance in phys ed, drawing the infinity symbol in calculus.
She glances at her brother, and his face looks peaceful.
He has a rash on his cheeks and neck, and he says his teeth have been hurting.
When he sleeps she feels grateful that he’s getting a break from the pain.
Now she realizes someone is standing next to her.
Vicky laces her hand into Maggie’s, and Maggie looks down.
Her nails are so pretty. Where did she come from, and how didn’t Maggie notice?
Vicky squeezes her hand tightly, and Maggie feels the burning in her eyes, and then the tears come out of nowhere like when popcorn kernels spin around and around in the machine and nothing happens for so long and all of a sudden they start popping and then they overflow.
“I don’t want to hear the ending anymore,” he whispers to Maggie later.
“Gotcha,” she says. She wants to give him the tightest hug, but she doesn’t want to hurt him.
“Is it hot in here?”
She nods. She takes the book and waves it up and down, fanning him, and he basks in the tiny breeze. “Now I know how the emperors used to feel.” He gets a stupid smile on his face, and she doesn’t stop.
“Palmer says it’s happening soon,” she tells him.
“You think I don’t know that?” he says. He looks up at her, and he puts his pointer finger in the air.
“Me first!” he says, and his voice cracks, and she’s reminded of when he would sprint for the front seat in the car or when he’d slide into his chair at the dinner table, always holding that finger up and saying that: First!
“He told me first. He’s solid that way. I imagine some people die clueless, no one telling them what’s happening.
Dr. Palmer knows I like a game plan. Coach Grakowski used to write ‘Game Plan’ on the board, and he’d map it out in chalk.
” His eyes startle her for some reason. As if they’re starting to lose their light.
Maggie stops fanning and finds a section she knows he likes: “Nana was in a hurry, and it was too much trouble to hunt for china dogs at bedtime, so she simply looked about her, and seeing that the toy cupboard door stood open, she made a swoop. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘take your old Bunny!’ ”
“Classic,” Chip says, and Maggie looks down at her lap and keeps reading. Then she glances outside, and she realizes every day, they’re losing more light. Daylight Savings is ending soon, and the afternoons will be unbearably dark.
She sees her mother walk by the door with a cup of coffee, looking down at it like she doesn’t know what it’s for. Her dad has gone home to let Birdy Girl out, and Vicky said she’d be back after dinner.
Maggie imagines she’s a teacher, not a sister who’s reading to someone in his last moments of life.
She imagines the hospital is a classroom, a bunch of kids listening to her words. They are watching her, and she is reading, and they have no idea yet how the story will end.