Winded
Published in Stillwater Literary Magazine, spring 2012
When I was five years old, I named my inhaler Super Jack. I don’t know why I decided that was its name. Probably because it was simpler calling it that than trying to explain or understand the chemicals inside of it. Mucolytics, tobramycin, saline. It was this magic mix, this Superman sort of concoction that made me cough up all the bad stuff. Sometimes it felt like the air itself was my enemy, my kryptonite. Super Jack was my sidekick. And the way Mom used to stroke my hair and whisper to me that I was so, so brave, I think I got it in my head that I was some kind of hero. Since then, there’s been Super Jack junior, Super Jack Mach 5— the list goes on and on.
I knew early on that I wasn’t like other people. As soon as I stepped into that kindergarten, everyone in the Medway school system knew about me, then a few years later, about Laura. When the teachers read off “Mike McLellan” every year on the first day of school, the other kids always turned, eyes jolting open. Some kid on the playground once asked me if I’d stop using my inhaler on a dare. I told him it didn’t work that way. I had the inhaler for a reason. I needed it. That’s just the way it was, really. The pastor told me and my parents that it was God’s will. My parents told Laura and me that God loved us anyway, even if he made us sick.
When Laura came along and she was big enough to use an inhaler too, we named it Super Jill. Mom thought it was cute that we matched them up. For a while, I liked to make faces at her when she sat at the kitchen table, every afternoon at four, taking deep breaths in and out through the plastic green mask they’d given her. My parents got mad when she would laugh in the middle of a breath and salty, green globs used to splutter out of her nose.
I guess I feel a little guilty about that now. After all, every breath counts.
I guess people assume that I won’t have as much time, so what time I do have means a lot. But I think I remember things just the way any other kid would. I pinned A+’s to the refrigerator. I can remember finger painting with Laura on the floor and spilling red onto the beige carpet. I remember vacations and snow days. I remember crushes—I wouldn’t say I’ve had a lot, but probably just as many as any guy once I got over my fear of freaking cooties. Let’s face it; some made-up disease was the least of my problems.
When I was fifteen, I went on my first date with Sarah Masterson. I thought I was this big shot. We went out for hamburgers at Goldman’s while my Mom and Dad sat a few tables away. She grimaced at the way I pulled the pickles out from beneath the bun with my teeth. I laughed at the way she smeared ketchup on her nose, and then told her not to worry, I thought it was cute. I don’t remember too much else. We were going to go swimming back at my house.
I say we were going to swim because we didn’t really get that far before she said she had to go, her mom wanted her home early.
I can still see the shock in her eyes from when I pulled off my shirt.
They were just scars. Just a few hundred pink and red fibers, stitching me together like some hot, younger version of Edward Norton back from some great war. Okay. Maybe I wasn’t that much of a badass. But I was fine, one hundred percent fine. I wasn’t some fragile, shattered pet that couldn’t be touched. I wasn’t going to fall apart in the water.
I just thought that maybe she’d be different. Maybe it’s cruel, but I’d hoped she wouldn’t start crying like everyone else when they saw the doctors’ little cuts.
When she was alive, my sister Laura was my best friend, really. She was the biggest goof, sure, and her room was an explosion of pink and purple daisies and she was five years younger than me. But she was a tough little thing. I could pinch my pointer finger and my thumb around her thin wrist, but she could zip through the hallways in her wheelchair faster than any of the kids on the sixth floor of Boston Children’s. We practically owned real estate there. The nurses knew us both well. Laura’s favorite was Joyce, a plump black woman who taught her how to make paper cranes. My sister had her favorite pack of red and gold paper and strung them up on the curtains around her hospital bed. She made ones for me too, in hues of green and black.
A few weeks after my first transplant, when I first got those scars, Laura caught me staring at the new, pink lines etched across my chest while I was in the bathroom. Scooting her bunny slippers across the tile, she looked up at me, her eyes wide above slender black and blue smears.
She always looked so tired.
“Does it still hurt?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. “It’s a bit weird, like there’s these new little spaces in me and the air goes through me different. But nah.”
We stood in silence for a moment, staring into the mirror.
“The lines look like an X-wing,” she said, giggling. “You know? The pointy W-shaped ones.”
“Huh?”
“Those fighter ships in Star Wars. You know. The one Luke Skywalker drives.”
“Huh… I don’t see it, Lore.”
Laura grabbed the tube of toothpaste sitting beside the sink.
“Bend down a little bit,” she commanded. I leaned forward, feeling the insides of my torso shift awkwardly. She popped the top of the tube and rubber her thumb against a little blue blob of it. Grinning, she pressed the toothpaste against my skin in three thin lines above the left and right vertical cuts. I stood back to admire her handiwork. It took less than a second for her to start giggling, another second for me to start laughing with her.
I stared at the ridiculous image, my chest done up in light blue Colgate to make little lasers from my X-wing scars. My new lungs shook with the happy, rapid in and out of air.
I tried to be normal. Or as normal as you could be with Cystic Fibrosis. As normal as you could be when you know that you could die in a month. Sure, I had to go to the hospital a couple times a year, and mom used to freak out every time I sneezed more than twice in a short span of time, but I dealt with it, I guess. When I was younger, I tried baseball. I wasn’t the best runner, obviously, but I could throw pretty good. I tried out for the play freshman year, but the director didn’t give me the lead. I think it’s ‘cause I’d have had to play dead. So I was peasant number three.
For a long while, I felt most normal whenever I was with Julia. I had other friends, sure, but if I wasn’t playing Parcheesi over cocoa and IV packets of saline with Laura or just hanging around watching TV with mom and dad, I was with Julia.
We met in American Lit. Senior year. I remember thinking that she was way too smart for that section of the class. She should have been in honors. But, as she claimed, the teacher didn’t like her “pattern of thinking.” So she was plopped amongst the rest of the not-so-English-minded people like me. Julia had Shakespeare lines scrawled on her notebook covers before we even started the school year. She went to art galleries on the weekends and had an aversion to wearing matching colored socks. On Wednesday nights, like some ritual, she treaded the train tracks from Medway to Millis.
Not too far into the school year, on an early autumn day, I decided I’d join her.
We started off as friends. I say started off because, well, it became quite clear that we weren’t just friends.
Julia didn’t make me feel normal because she was so different. It wasn’t like that. Julia made me feel normal because she didn’t treat me any different. She didn’t constantly ask if I was okay. I wasn’t the sick kid who couldn’t do certain stuff. For a few months, unless I was green in the face or strung up in the hospital, I was limitless.
Dates were never called dates. They were adventures. When she pulled up in her dad’s beat-up old Volkswagen, always narrowly missing our mailbox as she made the sharp turn into our driveway, I never knew where we were going. She never knew either. Burger joints were the perfect place for her to order anything but a burger. We would walk through a drive-through to order soft serve. We snuck into movie theatres. Blasting Kings of Leon on her car’s crackling stereo, we’d open up the windows and drive through the Howard Street tunnel over and over to listen to the endless echoes of the lyrics.
A trip to the supermarket for fish led us into Boston, to Faneuil Hall for Pizza Regina. Julia and I sat by the harbor for two hours, licking the grease off our fingers and talking about anything, everything.
We talked about the future.
“I’d name my son Jeremy Ryan Blahblahblah and my daughter Emma Rose Blahblahblah,” she told me, leaning back on the cool green bench, her eyes slowly gliding across the harbor. The dinner cruises were coming back in, their passengers’ chatter growing clearer and clearer across the water.
I grinned. “You’re gonna marry someone named Blahblahblah?”
“Psht. Jerk. No, I’m just seventeen and who the hell knows who they’ll end up with at seventeen? I’m quite happy being Princess Julia Nemo for now.”
She turned to me and smiled, “What about you?”
I’d been asked the same thing before. It was always a punch to the gut. I turned my eyes to my sneakers scratching at the cobblestone.
“I can’t have kids,” I mumbled.
“Shouldn’t stop you. You’ll adopt. What’ll their names be?”
I turned back to see her smile, her head cocked a bit to the side, strings of blonde hair catching in her lips, which were pulled into a smile.
“James Patrick McLellan,” I told her, giving away the two secret wishes I’d never really shared with anyone before. “And Laura Quinn McLellan.”
Laura and I spent a good chunk of that December in the pulmonary unit. A nasty cold had been going around school and we’d been hit with it, even though we always made sure to stay away from the kids popping cough drops like candy and hovering around the box of tissues on the teachers’ desks—catching whatever that kid had was way worse than what his sniffles were like. But, honestly, I sometimes wonder if Laura was in the hospital twice as much as I was because she had CF worse or if she just couldn’t stop hugging people all the time.
In the hallways, the ever-familiar What Do You Know about Germs posters were covered in metallic garlands of red, green, and silver. In Laura’s room, a small parcel of presents sat in dad’s customary green hospital chair, waiting to be opened the next morning.
Joyce came into the room, pompom snowmen clipped to her ear lobes.
“What can I get you, honey?” she asked, standing beside Laura to peer down at the Scrabble board on the bed tray.
Laura smiled. “Can you make any words outta these letters?”
“You can’t push the help button for Scrabble,” I groaned. “Joyce, come on, please don’t help her.”
Joyce smirked as she leaned in to take a look. She pushed letters on the wooden slot side-to-side with her pinky finger, pinching several and shifting them.
“Ah, there. Ya see that?” Joyce said. “You can get lots of different things, shiftin’ them around.”
“Are you gonna help me with mine?” I complained.
“Nope,” she replied, her pompom earrings jingling with her laugh. “But I can get you some juice. What’ll it be, you two? Apple or grape?”
I took grape. Joyce shuffled off to the refrigerator, no doubt going to come back with a round of Pulmozyne for Laura and apple juice to top the meds off. I stole a quick glance at the clock. 7:35.
“I gotta go soon,” I told her, offering a smile. “Gonna call Julia in like ten minutes.”
Her face fell slightly, “Oh. Um. Okay.”
“Can we finish when I get back?”
“Oh…I dunno if I’ll be up. I’m really, really sleepy.”
Laura’s eyes blinked rapidly, as though she was already combating the forces of slumber land.
“You can just…go,” she said, “and I’ll go to bed.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. I turned back to my letters.
“I mean, you know you’re gonna beat me even without—”
“Do you love Julia?”
I looked up from the row of wooden pieces to meet Laura’s eyes, their creases firm and fixed between lines of soft purple.
“I think so,” I said.
“What’s it feel like?”
“What?”
“I dunno…being all like…lovey… Like… when you kiss do you…feel…you know?”
“Know what?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Laura shook her head as Joyce walked in, holding the nebulizer in its case, cups of juice on a tray. She handed me my plastic cup of sugary purple and smiled.
“Can I get you anything, honey?” she asked, filling the nebulizer’s body with a concoction of corticosteroids before handing Laura the mask. “I’ll be in for your treatment in a bit, alright?”
“Okay.”
I flipped my letters upside-down to hide them before putting the little tray on the bedside table. I glanced at the clock: 5 more minutes.
I turned to my sister. A cloud of mist was hovering about the machine beside her bed. Laura’s gaze was distant as the drugs and oxygen pushed through the mask and raced down her throat. She always hated using that thing.
“Do you want me to—”
She cut me off with a slight shake of her head and a weak wave of her needle-clad hand towards the door.
“Robin said the Christmas dance was awesome,” Julia told me later, her sigh crackling through the phone. I couldn’t use my cell; there wasn’t ever any reception in Children’s.
I pulled back the curtains in my room. I breathed in, much deeper than I had in days, my nose catching a strong whiff of Clorox from the phone’s receiver. Outside, the streets were motionless, further lit up by the white lights lining the skinny trees. Boston seemed strangely gray, the air heavy with the promise of snow.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Mhm. They took lots of pictures. You can see them on Facebook.”
“Not going on Facebook for a bit, remember?”
“Oh. Right. Sorry…”
“No, no. It’s okay,” I offered a smile even though she obviously couldn’t see. “I just don’t want people to freak out. Or just badger me. Like all the time. It sucks.”
“Everyone asked me loads of questions before break.”
“Yeah? What’d they ask?”
“Is it just a cold? Flu? Surgery? Therapy?”
“What’d you tell them?”
“Freak accident involving cheesecake and a barrel of monkeys… No, I just told them it was a little cold and they were keeping you for some test or another.”
“Thanks…”
There was a rare moment of quiet, uninterrupted by a thought or a cough.
“Sorry, Jules…about the dance,” I rasped, curling myself up onto the hospital bed.
“No… no, it’s okay,” she murmured. I could tell she was disappointed.
“You could have gone with someone else, you know. I would have been cool with it. I just had a cold.”
“It wouldn’t have been the same… not without you.”
My empty fingers traced the line dripping fluids into my other wrist.
“I’ll be at the next one,” I promised. “You can count on it.”
On Laura’s thirteenth birthday in February, Mom baked a towering vanilla cake with strawberry frosting, topped with sprinkled ice cream cones of different shapes and sizes to make it look like the Disney castle. Real candles were out of the question; even the nurses we’d come to know as aunts wouldn’t allow that.
But Joyce dimmed the lights and we all huddled together around my sister in her pink-covered hospital bed: my parents, the nurses, Julia, and I. I raised my arm above their heads to point the beam from a flashlight onto the cake. Little shadows shimmered among the frosted turrets as the light lit up Laura’s face. She’d been there for a week, but it looked like she’d been in since Christmas. Those dark smears beneath her eyes were black and purple, her dark brown hair hung thin and mousy beside her hollowed cheeks. But she smiled so wide when they started to sing, “Happy Birthday, dear Laura, Happy Birthday to you!”
When it was time to blow out the fake candlelight during the final line of the song, Laura could barely raise a big enough breath to blow it out. Her lungs were too clogged, too tight. She choked. I’d known the feeling time and time again. Julia noticed, hesitated. I gave her a small nod. She stared, seemingly unsure of how to handle frail little Laura, who wanted so badly to make her birthday wish. Julia’s gaze quivered, shaking from staring at the cake to looking to me to help her.
“I can’t,” she mouthed. “They’re hers.”
For God’s sake. Why couldn’t she have blown them out, if not for Laura, then for me?
Another nurse, Madeline, puffed up her cheeks like some wild-eyed blowfish and blew a steady stream of air at the cake, her tongue making obscene noises that made Laura giggle.
I clicked off the flashlight as everyone started to clap. Mom covered her face with wet, embarrassing kisses and Dad tousled her hair, grinning as all hell and booming, “My little girl’s a teenager!” Julia was scared to touch her. I could tell. Laura pushed all her strength into tightening her arms around her waist to encourage her, as though to tell her to not worry about her body cleaving in two from the force of a hug.
As she lifted her weak arms towards me, I knelt on the edge of the bed, letting her rest them on my shoulders. I felt her cold wrists around my neck and I pulled her closer to me. She was fading and I knew it, even then.
“This is the third time, Mike.”
“Jules, I know, but I can’t just leave.”
“We haven’t done anything together in almost two weeks.”
“I see you every day in English.”
“Like that counts as an adventure or something?” she yelled so hard the receiver of the nurses’ station phone seemed to crackle like wayward fireworks. “Am I dating all of Ms. Tovel’s American Lit. then?”
“I didn’t say that!” I snapped. “What’d you do if I was in the bed hooked up to the machines, huh? What would you do, Jules?”
A light beeping from room three-oh-seven filled the silence on my side of the line.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered.
“I’m not saying it’ll happen,” I said, hand to my face, my words spilling out in a sigh in an attempt to soften my voice. “I’m feeling fine.”
“They told us Laura was fine last week. Now look.”
“Laura is different. She’s smaller, meeker.”
“But you have the same thing, Mike,” Julia choked. I could picture her throat clenching, her eyes widening as her voice squeaked through the phone.
“We’re here, Julia,” I mumbled. “We’re here as long as we can be. Laura’s on the emergency list for a transplant. She’s gonna be okay.”
“I know but what about you?”
“I don’t care right now about me.”
“I do!”
“So then come to the hospital,” I said, nearly a command. “You’ve been here, what, once?”
“Everything there is… it’s death. It’s sterile,” she whispered. “I can’t go. I can’t break down crying just ‘cause I entered the place. Just… please, call me when you’re back? I miss you. So much. And I love you even more.”
“I love you too,” I muttered.
It happened two weeks later.
Laura’s funeral was beautiful and brutal all at once. I don’t remember much of the ceremony at all. I’d written something to add to her eulogy. Something about watching Red Sox games, teaching her to ride a bike, folding paper cranes. It had heart to it, sure. But my mind was somewhere else; my brain could barely process Julia’s tears, the way she clamped my hand so hard it hurt.
At the Millis Cross Inn, they served little tea cakes, sandwiches, and pot after pot of strong French roast. I mostly sat in the corner. People came up to me, watery eyes staring into mine, to say how sorry they were about Laura. I nodded.
“Thank you for coming,” I said a hundred times.
Dolosa. Dolosa was a virus. Dolosa slept inside my sister, woke up, killed her.
For an hour, Julia bit her lip and said very, very little, except to ask me to pass the honey for her lemon tea. But by the time they started to clear away the last of the coffee mugs, I could tell she wanted to talk.
I held the back door open for her as she wrapped her black shawl tight around her ribs. We stepped through the chipped lattice archway, wary of the shifting wet stone beneath our feet. As we wound around the garden, I waited for her to say something, anything. I had nothing to tell. All I had was spent the few days before, poured out into the confines of my pillows, clenched into the lines in Julia’s hands, absorbed by her vacant, searching eyes.
“We’re by the tracks,” she whispered, her cheeks trying to turn up a smile beneath lines of watery makeup. “See? They’re right down through the woods.”
“Huh.”
“We could go…we haven’t walked there in a while. Maybe…um…take your mind off it a bit?”
I could have smacked her. Like train tracks could have led me anywhere other than through puddles and over slick rails.
“I don’t think so.”
We settled ourselves on a wet, granite bench but didn’t speak for a long time. Birds chirped nervously through the mist and cars’ wheels crunched the stone of the parking lot as their drivers headed home. I sat there tapping my toe against an anthill squirming with tiny life.
Dolosa killed my sister. The doctors couldn’t do anything.
“She never got to go,” I mumbled.
“What?” Julia breathed, ceasing the numb twirl of her fingertips against my back that she usually used to try to comfort me.
“She never got to go,” I repeated. “Like, anywhere. To the prom. To the Sox game I bought her tickets for. To see the Great Wall. ”
Julia pressed her fingers into mine.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” she said.
Like ‘sorry’ could do anything.
April brought a thick humidity that seemed to melt my guts. My breath had a taste that hinted at the slimy soup in my lungs, my skin was salty with sweat no matter how many times I took a shower. I could barely breathe. Needless to say, I could understand how Julia might have preferred to kiss a frog. At least she’d get a prince outta that one, instead of just me.
“Why’d you turn it off?” I asked from the other side of the couch, glaring at her as she lowered the remote to the DVD player. She popped her gum and stared at the pictures hanging in our living room.
“We need to talk,” she said flatly.
“Can’t it wait?”
“You’re going to Boston tomorrow morning. So, no, not really.”
“So let’s talk. Talk about what though?”
Julia glanced at me before dropping her gaze back to the fibers in the carpet.
“It’s the elephant in the room,” she whispered.
“What.”
“Everyone’s thinking it.”
“Thinking what?”
“Thinking about…this next trip. To Children’s,” she twisted the purple ring on her finger, the skin beneath it turning an upset pink. “Mike… are you scared?”
“Scared? Of what?”
“For fuck’s sake, Mike. They put you back on the list and you’ve only had your lungs for three years.”
“Oh…” I shook my head fast and hard and tried, tried, to offer a smile. “Ha… is that what this is all about… you got me nervous… Um…It’s just a thing…like, uh… when you put your name on a wait list for a table at a…restaurant…”
Julia twisted to face me, curling her knees onto the couch cushions and leaning forward on her arms. Her eyes were sharp, lit, angry.
“What if you don’t get it, Mike? People don’t just die perfectly preserved to give you a new set of lungs.”
I laughed, hacking up a bit of slime that slid uncomfortably beneath my tongue, “I’ll get it, Jules. I’ll be fine.”
“But…”
“Those doctors have no idea, Julia. They’re dumber than us, even. They told us Laura’d live to thirty, not thirteen, yet here we are, huh? Fuck the doctors, I’m living ‘till I’m eighty-one.”
Julia’s pointed gaze softened before she buried her face in her palms.
“How can you say that? How can you possibly think that way?” she whispered.
I forced a grin. “’Cause I’m Superman.”
“Mike, I mean it. Stop it.”
“I’ve got so much time left on me, Julia. Quit your worrying, okay?”
“Don't act like some dumb jerk,” she spat up in some kind of strangled cough, thrusting her fists against the couch. Her eyes glimmered above squiggled lines of muddy mascara. “Joking about this sort of thing won’t change anything, Mike McLellan.”
“No. I guess it wouldn’t,” I mumbled, staring at the carpet.
I was still in the pulmonary unit when she went to prom with Brett Hayes. She’d asked me if that was okay, of course. Called me up and stuff. What else was I supposed to say? How was I gonna tell her no, she couldn’t go, when I was the one who promised I’d be there to take her? And I wish I could have been there, really. I wanted to be there. I wanted to see her spin around in that blue and gray dress she bought and tried to hide from me. I wanted to be the one that practically held her up in the matching heels that she could never handle walking in, as though I had the strength to do that with the flu to top all flus.
I know. I should have seen it coming. Julia deserves to be normal. I just really thought she was different.
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