Chapter Seven
Seven
MY FEET SWING UNDER THE STOOL. I can almost touch the footrest now. I am getting extremely big. Everyone says so.
I spill a little bit of my Fruity Pebbles on the counter, but that’s okay, because I can reach the paper towels now, and I am very responsible. I clean up my own messes, unlike Jules who still makes everyone else do everything for her like a preschool baby.
Mommy whispers something to Daddy. They’re in the hall and they think I can’t hear them. I totally can. I slip down off the stool and crawl like an army person toward their voices. I’m good at spying. It’s one of my best things. Jules is bad at spying. It’s one of her worst things.
“What am I going to do without my mother?” Mommy is crying into Daddy’s shirt. It’s the kind of crying she calls “ugly”—big and snotty. She’s sad because Bubbe is dying.
I crawl toward Bubbe’s room. Her room is the best for spying. There are lots of tubes and machines that make big noises that nobody likes when you hide behind even though they are the best places to hide.
The biggest machine—the one that makes Bubbe breathe—sounds like a dragon snoring, loud and rumbly. If you put your hand on the machine (which nobody likes you to do either) you can feel the dragon rumbles.
I am going to go feel the machine now. Because I am brave. So much braver than Jules who doesn’t even like to come into Bubbe’s room anymore. But that’s why she’s a baby and I’m a big kid.
I crawl into the room, sneaky and low. I want to plug my nose because of the nose-burning smell that stinks like Daddy’s mouthwash, but I keep going.
“Bubbeleh?”
I freeze. I’m caught.
“Is that you? Where is my little shayna maidel?”
Shayna maidel. Good girl. Pretty girl. That’s me.
“Here I am.” I pop up next to her bed. Bubbe’s face is extra wrinkly now.
Like she was sitting at the bottom of our pool for too long.
A Bubbe raisin. I reach out and touch her little face folds.
They’re soft like a bunch of shirts in a pile.
Mommy always says not to poke Bubbe’s face but Bubbe likes when I do.
She told me so. Mommy doesn’t know everything.
“Gertie,” she says. And she smiles big at me. “Oh, Gertie, I knew you weren’t gone.”
I am not Gertie. I am Sydney. But sometimes Bubbe calls me Gertie.
Mommy says she gets confused and thinks I am her sister.
Her sister died at camp a Long Time Ago.
It wasn’t the good camp that I go to that does lots of gymnastics and has snacks two whole times a day.
Because Bubbe says a lot of people died at her camp.
Mommy doesn’t like when she talks about camp.
She says, “Not in front of the kinder!” which means Jules and I are not allowed to hear.
They forget how good I am at spying. I hear everything.
I crawl into bed next to Bubbe. She doesn’t smell so good anymore, but she still feels good. Her boobies are way bigger and squishier than Mommy’s which means they make good pillows. I am very careful of the wires and tubes.
Bubbe puts her arms around me. “Sydney,” she says and I am Sydney again.
“Your smells are not very good today, Bubbe,” I say.
But I keep my head on her chest. She laughs a rattly, shaking laugh that makes my head wobble.
I smile. Bubbe always thinks I am funny even when I’m not trying.
She doesn’t laugh as hard at Jules’s jokes.
Probably because Jules’s jokes come from a dumb joke book she got at the Scholastic Book Fair and my jokes come from my real actual brain.
“It is almost the end, Sydney,” Bubbe says.
“The end of what?” I ask. Maybe this is a riddle.
“The end of me,” Bubbe says.
“Oh,” I say. “You’re going to die.”
“Yes,” Bubbe says. But she doesn’t cry. Mommy is the one who cries all the time now. Daddy rubs her back, not Bubbe’s.
“What will happen to you?” I ask.
Harper Grace said Bubbe will go to heaven and she will get to eat ice cream all day and I said that Jewish people don’t believe in heaven and my bubbe doesn’t even like ice cream anyway.
She likes macaroons and pretzels that are too crunchy.
But then Harper Grace just stuck her tongue out at me and told me maybe I was going to hell, then.
I told her lucky for me we don’t believe in hell either.
She took her unicorn BFF bracelet back from me after that.
“I will be gone,” Bubbe says. “Soon.”
“How soon?” I ask.
Mommy always asks the doctors and the doctors always say, “Only God knows,” which is not even a time at all.
Bubbe looks in the mirror over her big dresser and then back at me. “I only have a few minutes left.” Her eyes look bright again. Like they did Before. Bubbe is all the way here.
“Should I get Mommy?” I say.
Bubbe says no. “I want to spend these last few minutes with you, Sydney. With you.”
Her eyes fill up and then her eyes go away again.
“There were so many clocks. Everywhere you looked. Never on the guards. Never. Always us. So many clocks. Groups of them. Clusters. Everywhere. Every day. Clocks.” My stomach gets tight and snappy like my Rainbow Loom bands when I pull on them too hard. She touches my cheek. “Gertie.”
I want to slide out of the bed now. I don’t like the way Bubbe’s face is. But she holds on to me. Too tight.
“Bubbe, this is too squeezy,” I say.
“Sydney, do you see?”
I see the door. I want to go. I want to go to Mommy.
“Look at me, bubbeleh, you don’t have to be afraid.”
I am afraid but I am also brave so I look at Bubbe. There is a pink thing over her head. It is pink and floaty numbers. It’s so bright. So pretty. I reach out and touch but my fingers go right through.
“You see?” she asks.
I nod. “Is it magic?”
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe.”
The doorknob to her room shakes. Someone is trying to come in. Mommy?
“LET ME IN, GODDAMN IT. JUST LET ME THE FUCK IN.”
It’s Charles. Shit. He found me.
The doorknob rattles again. Harder. He’s going to break the goddamn door.
“I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE.”
I pull on some pants, my hands shaking, and walk across the hotel room floor, the carpet cold on my feet. “Please,” I say through the door. “Everyone will hear you.”
“DO YOU THINK I GIVE A FUCK,” Charles yells from the hallway.
He shoves the door and the chain breaks.
Snap.
I cover my eyes.
My heart pounds, louder, louder, louder, harder, harder, harder. Just let me die.
Just let me fucking—
I bolt up in bed, and my brain sloshes hard against my skull. My head is throbbing like someone ran over it with one of those oversized trucks for guys with tiny dicks.
My pillow is soaked in sweat and a little trickle of dried blood that apparently made it out of the Band-Aid. I have a fucked-up instinct to go crawl into Jules’s bed. But I’m too old for that. Too old to have nightmares. Or flashbacks. Whatever.
The bathroom door creaks and for one insane second I’m back in that hotel room with Charles.
“Syd?” Jules’s voice floats out over the darkness. “You were screaming.”
“Sorry.”
I’m not in that hotel room. I’m here. I try to convince myself, try to find something—anything—to grab onto.
And then I feel the weight of Jules sinking down next to me in the bed.
“I’ll just stay with you tonight,” she says. Her fingers find mine under the covers and I hold on for dear fucking life.