Althea and Oliver Read online

  He downshifts to a low, guttural groan. It’s not a dream, but he knows the rules the way he would if he were dreaming, and if he can just coax his vocal cords into producing one small sound, it will break the spell and he’ll have his body back. So he reaches into his throat and tries to make something happen—any noise will suffice. And even though he’s doing everything right, there’s no result, and that’s when he starts to panic, thinking that maybe he’s paralyzed for good, or that he’s gone into some kind of coma—don’t they say that it’s never been proven that people in comas are unaware of their surroundings, that maybe when you’re comatose you can still hear what’s going on around you, didn’t he read that somewhere? His silent moan intensifies, and he tries again to thrash his arms and legs, and now he’s really freaking out, because how will the doctors and nurses know he’s awake if he can’t tell them, how long will he have to lie here trapped inside his brain without any access to his nervous system, like the Metallica video about the soldier who loses all his limbs and his nose and ears and—

  And then it’s over. His fear escapes his mouth as a single staccato shout, and suddenly he’s sitting up, panting, his heart pounding so hard, he can see the cotton of his shirt quiver. The door to his room is as firmly shut as when Stella tucked him in, however long ago that happened. It’s no longer clear if he was dreaming. Not that it matters—the panic was real enough. He tears off the electrodes and the oximeter, strips off his shirt, and wriggles out of the enormous rubber band. He’s sure they can see him on the camera and that one of the nurses or doctors will be arriving shortly to debrief him, but he can’t stand the thought of staying in here one second longer. Dressing in a fever, he stumbles out of his room, heading for the lounge.

  There are holiday decorations everywhere—shabby red tinsel taped to the walls, an electric menorah on the windowsill, paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling. The television is off, a first as far as Oliver can recall. The reason is obvious, and it makes him smile. The room is empty, save for Kentucky, who is fully stretched out on the couch reading a book, so absorbed he doesn’t see Oliver until he leans over and whispers, “Hey.”

  “Go Seahawks,” says Kentucky, resting his open book across his chest.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Welcome back.”

  “How long was I—”

  “About four and a half weeks,” Kentucky says.

  Oliver sighs. “So Thanksgiving and Christmas are—”

  “Over.”

  “What about New Year’s?”

  “It was close, but you woke up in time. A few days to spare, even.”

  “Where is everyone?” Oliver asks.

  “Some of the guys are still down; the rest are off with the tutor somewhere.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  Kentucky holds up his book, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. “Independent reading.”

  Oliver takes his favorite chair in the corner, by the window. It’s only late afternoon, but already the sun is sliding down behind the New Jersey skyline, casting its incendiary orange brilliance on the Hudson. “When did you wake up?”

  “I never went down at all,” Kentucky says. “Can you believe that? I’ve been awake this whole time. For a couple of days I was the only one. Had Stella all to myself. They don’t know what to do with me. They can’t make it happen, but I don’t know how long I’m supposed to wait around. And you know if I did leave, I’d be out before my plane even landed in Louisville. That’s just the way the universe works.”

  “Maybe it’s done. Maybe it’s never coming back.”

  Kentucky shakes his head ruefully. “It isn’t done. I can tell. It’s fucking with me—just long enough to make this whole thing a gigantic waste of time. My parents told me to stick it out, stay awhile longer, see what happens. I think it’s easier for them. To have me be someone else’s problem for a while.”

  Something in his voice reminds Oliver of his conversation with the doctor and the warnings about the other side effects of KLS, the ones that happen in between the episodes—the anger, the depression. Hopelessness, Dr. Curls had called it. Oliver can see it in his new friend now.

  Before he can reply, Stella appears in the doorway, holding his chart. She’s wearing a pair of checkered Vans. A delicate gold chain circles her long, perfect neck. It’s not the kind of thing he can picture her buying for herself, and possible narratives begin to unfurl: She inherited the necklace from a beloved grandmother, who on her deathbed pressed it into Stella’s hand when they had a rare moment alone, so her sisters wouldn’t be jealous, and she has kept it like a secret for many years, wearing it only to work where no one will understand its importance; it was a gift from an old boyfriend, who gave it to her right before they went away to different colleges, and then he died of a sudden and unexpected illness, and though it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway, Stella idealizes this boy who remains eighteen and perfect in her heart forever and she can’t love anyone else, and he’s the reason she became a nurse in the first place—

  “Hey, Oliver,” she says, and he forgets the rest of her stories before he can invent them. “Welcome back. How’re you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. Did you miss me?”

  She smiles. “The doctor would like to see you.”

  “Sure.” He looks at Kentucky, already returning to his book. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Not likely.”

  On his way out of the lounge, he pauses by the couch, whispering so only Kentucky can hear him: “I didn’t do anything bad while I was down, did I?”

  “If you relieved yourself in anyone’s presence, I didn’t hear a thing about it.”

  • • •

  Something about the way the doctor sits behind his desk reminds Oliver of a pilot in a cockpit surveying the world, like he can see beyond the walls of his office into the rest of the hospital and, beyond that, the city. He makes a show of opening Oliver’s chart and reviewing several of the most recent pages, but this strikes Oliver as being strangely perfunctory. Of course he already knows what he needs to know in order to have this conversation.

  “So, Oliver. How are you feeling?”

  “A little stiff.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since we talked?”

  “About a month. Right? Not counting anything I might have said, during—you know.”

  “You wouldn’t count any of that?”

  “No. And I’d rather not know how much of ‘that’ there was, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not. That’s also completely up to you. Is there anything you’d like to report? Anything you noticed, anything unusual? I know that you don’t remember much, if anything, but think of us like the detectives you always see on those television shows. The tiniest detail can be incredibly important, even if it seems like nothing to you.”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Oliver answers, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be back in the lounge with Kentucky.

  “You’re sure? Nothing at all?”

  “Sorry, Doctor. Nothing at all.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to know? Do you have any questions for me?”

  “All I really want to know is what happens now. I did what you needed so you could get your data or whatever. So now what do I do?”

  “Whatever you want,” the doctor says.

  “What if I want to go home?”

  “Of course you can go home, Oliver. You can go home anytime you want. This is all completely voluntary. You’re here because you want to be. When you stop wanting to be, we’ll call your mother, she’ll come get you, and you can go.”

  “Really?”

  The doctor laughs, loud and genuine. “We’re not holding you against your will.”

  Instantly, Oliver feels foolish. It’s not that he thought they could ke
ep him here if he wanted to leave. Now that he’s thinking about it, he realizes he doesn’t know what he believed. Or if he even does want to leave.

  Dr. Curls continues, “But I will say that it could be very helpful if you decided to stay awhile longer.”

  “Helpful for who?” Oliver asks sharply.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  “I’m just saying, I’ve been here for almost two months. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I even had a very conveniently timed KLS episode. But you keep saying there isn’t anything you can do for me. And, all due respect, I appreciate that a lot of what you’re doing here is research, but I came here to help myself. Not the medical journals.”

  The doctor struggles to maintain his compassionate demeanor, losing for a moment before his mask of empathy reasserts itself. “I know you’re frustrated, Oliver. I get it; I really do. But you have to understand, just by being here and letting us study you and do our research, you’re helping yourself enormously. We’re still a long way off from understanding KLS. Any treatment we might try would be extremely experimental.”

  “Like what?”

  The doctor wearily massages the bridge of his nose. “There is some evidence that treating KLS patients with lithium can sometimes reduce the frequency of the episodes and make them shorter when they do happen.”

  Oliver leans forward in his seat. “So there is something. Why didn’t you say so? Why haven’t we tried it yet?”

  The doctor sighs. Closing Oliver’s medical chart, he sets it aside so there is nothing on the table between them. All of his solicitous pretense falls away, and what’s left is not unkind, but a countenance as weary and dissatisfied as Oliver himself. Dr. Curls, Oliver realizes, is on the verge of speaking to him like an adult, like a person instead of a patient, and Oliver senses a rare opportunity that will likely not present itself again.

  “Please,” he says. “Please. No bullshit.”

  “In order for the lithium to be effective, you would need to be on it all the time. Some of the side effects can be . . .” He pauses.

  “No bullshit,” Oliver repeats.

  The doctor nods, smiling faintly. “Weight gain. Hand tremors. Eye twitches. Constant thirst. Vertigo. Slurred speech. Psoriasis. Hair loss. Lethargy. That’s just a handful, randomly chosen from a very long list. And once you start taking it, once the levels of lithium build up in your blood, you would not be able to stop, not without weaning yourself off over a period of several months. It’s not a sure thing or a simple fix. You should discuss it with your mother if you want to pursue it.

  “I know what you really want from me, Oliver, maybe even more than a cure. You want me to be able to look inside your brain and understand why this is happening to you. But I don’t know. I’m trying, I’m really trying. But I still don’t know.” The doctor who had been so confident and charming during his CNN interview now looks as defeated as the boy he’s failed to help.

  A reckless, heady rage starts in Oliver’s guts and spreads until he can feel it buzzing in his head. “I came all the way here. I left my mother and my friends and my senior year of high school because I was sick of being the freak with this disease, and now you’re telling me the only choice is to let you make me a bigger one?”

  “Oliver, I know you just want to be like other kids your age—”

  “I don’t want to be like other kids! Other kids are assholes! But I’m done pretending this is all just a minor inconvenience when it’s ruining my fucking life.”

  “We could try the lithium. The possible side effects are exactly that—possible.”

  “Why did you tell me I shouldn’t feel hopeless when you knew there was no hope?” Oliver shouts, and charges out of the office.

  chapter twelve.

  ALTHEA SLEEPS IN the kitchen now.

  Though the floral fabric is faded and stained, the cushions threadbare and flattened, the couch in the kitchen has become her favorite spot in the house. Throughout the night, people wander in and out to fix themselves bowls of rice or get beer from the fridge, but the abiding noise from the living room is muffled in here, making sleep actually possible. The hum of the appliances, the lingering smells of whatever meal has been cooked last, the luminous numbers of the digital clock on the stove—she finds these things all comforting.

  She knew she couldn’t stay in Matilda’s room indefinitely, but had hesitated staking out a place elsewhere. Then, after Althea tried a couple of nights waking up to the gasping sounds of coffee brewing and sunlight illuminating the rocket ships on the makeshift wallpaper, the two girls came to a tacit agreement. Matilda moved back into her room and Althea took her place, putting her clothes on a shelf in the pantry, below the boxes of cereal and cans of vegetarian baked beans. She drew a friendly looking pterodactyl on Matilda’s wall as a thank-you.

  She’d called Garth a few days after Thanksgiving and told him that being landlocked on the mesa was not as unbearable as she had feared, that she had discovered red chiles and was on a mission to perfect her recipe for huevos rancheros, and that Alice was annoying but well-intentioned and fortunately occupied much of the time with her various endeavors. She made sure to work in a few comments about the long drive and how it seemed like she had just arrived and already it was time to leave, and then it was Garth himself who suggested she stay longer if she wanted to, and if it was all right with Alice. Althea assured him that it was, and they agreed she would stay through New Year’s, and then go to Mexico with Garth. She knew Alice would never call North Carolina, that as long as she kept checking in with Garth she could keep the ruse going at least through the holidays. She’s not the one who thinks ahead—that’s Oliver’s department—so she’s asked herself every day what he would do, how he would pull off a scheme like this. She’d phoned a few times after that to report on her increasingly deft snowshoeing skills and the glory of New Mexican sunsets, tapering off her updates as Garth got wrapped up in the end of the semester and planning the upcoming trip to Mexico. At first she’d congratulated herself on these clever machinations, but as Christmas grew closer and her phone calls to the hospital continued to prove fruitless, she had to consider the possibility that she might run out of time.

  But time is working in other ways. For a long time after the Coby incident, it was the first thing she thought about every morning—the eyes of all her classmates, Coby’s stunned face, the ache in her hand. Not guilt so much as surprise that it happened at all, and humiliation that it had been so public. For so long, she’d woken up wincing, mortified. But this morning the wincing doesn’t come, only the desire for coffee.

  Stretching out, she kicks someone; weight shifts on the other end of the couch.

  “Sorry,” Althea says, sitting up.

  Ethan’s copper hair sticks out from under a blanket. He mumbles something. One freckled arm emerges, then another, then his face, printed with sleep. “My glasses. Do you see my glasses anywhere?”

  Still wrapped in Alice’s quilt, she retrieves them from the kitchen counter. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Sorry. Gregory’s in the bed and Kaleb’s asleep in my chair. He had some stupid fight with Leala about a game of Risk. I got up to brush my teeth, and by the time I came back he was passed out. Sorry to sort of barge in, but it was the only spot left in the house.” Ethan cleans his lenses meticulously with a corner of his striped brown comforter.

  Althea pours coffee for them both. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Sooner or later you learn to be a heavy sleeper around here,” he says, blowing on the surface of the coffee and taking a tentative sip. Althea downs hers in a few scalding gulps. “Christ,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was possible to drink coffee that fast.”

  “You have to be really committed to inducing a heart attack,” she says, fishing for clean clothes inside the pantry.

  Upstairs, Mr. Business is le
aving the bathroom, tracking bits of kitty litter that stick to the soles of Althea’s feet and make them itch. She keeps her eyes closed in the shower so she doesn’t have to see the blackened lines of grout between the tiles or the gritty scum along the bottom of the tub. While she gropes blindly for the shampoo and soap lined up on the windowsill, the moldy curtain liner brushes against her leg and she bats it away, shuddering. She quickly lathers the thigh that made contact, down to her calf, the delicate ankle, her calloused foot. Abruptly, she realizes that because it’s hers, this foot is her responsibility; she’s the only one looking after these knobby knees and quick-bitten fingers, and it makes them seem suddenly, relentlessly fragile.

  “Althea? Is that you? Can I come in and pee?” Matilda shouts from the hallway, rapping on the door. Before Althea can even respond, she comes in and sits on the toilet with a sigh of relief.

  Shutting off the water, Althea sticks her hand beyond the dreaded foul curtain.

  “Towel me, please,” she says.

  • • •

  That night, Gregory, an aspiring stand-up comic, insists on practicing his routine for a tepid audience. Ethan reads in his chair, Leala and Kaleb are struggling to get to the next level of Chrono Trigger, and Matilda is at her sewing machine, altering an oversize Metallica T-shirt into a fitted halter top. The assorted cast that Althea is learning to recognize—the diminutive drummer who waits tables at a nearby restaurant and is always chewing on a cinnamon stick, the Columbia dropout with nothing to his name but a MetroCard and a backpack full of socks, the effusive tattoo artist with the pierced tongue and chipped teeth—are elsewhere in the house, scouring magazines and newspapers pilfered from the neighbors’ recycling bin for free activities taking place anywhere in the five boroughs.