Breathless (7 page)

“But if I won’t get better—”

“As long as there’s brain activity, people are kept alive. That’s medical protocol. We don’t kill people who have the hope of recovery.”

“What kind of hope have I got? I’m not getting well, and I don’t want to be hooked up to a bunch of machines that tie me to a bed for the rest of my life.”

“Ventilators help a struggling body breathe. They’re wonderful machines.”

“And feeding tubes? Are they wonderful too?”

“If it’s necessary. A person has to have food and water.”

“Why? Why hang on if I’m never going to get better?”

Mom throws down her napkin. “You don’t know that. New treatments come along every day.”

“But don’t I get a say-so?”

“This isn’t up for discussion,” she insists.

Travis reins himself in. “I don’t want to go on life support.”

“If you’re alive, there’s hope. I will never give up hope. And neither should you. Do you hear me?”

They stare each other down.

Dad steps into the fray. “It was only curiosity, Jackie. Wasn’t it, Travis?”

Seconds tick away before Travis says, “Sure.”

More seconds pass, the only sounds coming from silverware clicking on plates. I’ve lost my appetite, and I’m pretty sure everyone else has too.

T
he first time Travis tells me what he wants me to help him do, my brain goes numb. He tells me again, and it’s like I’m watching those airplanes hit the Twin Towers on TV reruns of 9/11. Like this can’t be happening. “What did you say?”

He repeats the words patiently and I know this is no drill. This is real. This is my best friend asking me to help him die.

“That’s crazy talk.”

“Not crazy.” He’s holding a pillow against his chest, and every few minutes he buries his face in it, muffling a bad cough. “The cancer’s spreading.”

This news hits me hard. I want to heave. First the amputation and cancer. Then remission and
relapse. Then the spread to his lungs. Now more. I’ve watched him endure every bit of it. “But all that chemo they gave you. It was supposed to help. Why didn’t it help?”

“Luck of the draw, I guess.”

“Your mom will find other doctors. She’s a bulldog.”

He presses the pillow to his face and coughs hard. When the spasm’s over, he says, “I don’t want to fight anymore. Contest is over. I lose. Help me go out.”

I blink, swallow a knot of emotion. “No, I can’t.”

He catches my arm. “I want a say-so in how this all ends. I want to decide. I don’t want the cancer deciding for me. My body. My choice.”

“But you might get better—”

“I’m not getting better.” He coughs and curses. “Mom’s giving me shots and pills round the clock. Oxycontin, vicodin, morphine—none of it stops the pain.”

I shake my head. “I can’t do it, bro.”

“Yes, you can. And I won’t ask you to do anything that makes people think you helped me. I’ll do the deed. I just need your help to do it.”

I’m dog tired from all day at school and working a full shift. I’ve come over late because I know he’s awake and alone and in pain. Tonight I wish I hadn’t come. “Killing yourself is wrong.”

“Why? It’s not like I don’t have a good reason.” He sits up. “I’ve researched it all on the Web. There are sites that support a person’s right to choose to die. Doctors do it for terminal patients every day. It just isn’t talked about.”

“I’m not your doctor.”

“Mom wouldn’t let him do it anyway. She’s already said as much.”

I’m reeling. “Why ask me?”

“Because you’re the one person I can count on.”

“I don’t kill people.”

His eyes never leave my face and his voice goes quiet. “If you ran over a dog and it was still alive and suffering, would you help end its suffering?”

“You’re not a dog. You’re my friend.”

“Then be a friend. Help me. If you don’t, I’ll find someone who will.”

I’m cold all over. Really shivering. I know he isn’t bluffing. He means it. “It’s the pain. If they can control your pain—”

“They can’t. I won’t die on cancer’s timetable.” He’s getting upset. “I’m going to die. Don’t you get that? All I want is to control the timing. Me in the driver’s seat. Me going out my way.”

My chest feels like it’s being crushed with a ten-ton weight. I think about his parents, about Emily, about how they’ll feel if he does this. “What about your family?”

“They’ll bury me either way. And don’t worry, I’ll do it in a way so they won’t know I did it. I have a plan.”

“And what way is that?”

He coughs hard into his pillow, looks over my shoulder, turns pale.

I turn and see Emily standing in the doorway wrapped in a pink bathrobe. “What’s going on?” she asks. “It’s one-thirty in the morning. What are you two so worked up about?”

I
march into the living room, not one bit self-conscious about being in my robe and pajamas, because the looks on their faces tell me I’ve interrupted something important.

Travis shakes his head. “Nothing. Guy talk.”

Cooper won’t look me in the eye. He studies his hands.

“I don’t believe you,” I say.

“Believe what you want,” Travis says. “Why are you up?”

“I heard voices.” Not true. I’m having trouble sleeping. I have bad dreams and wake up feeling scared to death.

He coughs into the pillow. “You should be in bed,” I say.

“You’re not the boss of me.”

An attempt at humor—that’s what I used to say to him when we were kids and he told me what to do. “Want me to get Mom?” I ask softly when his coughing fit’s over.

He shakes his head. I feel helpless and useless.

Cooper stands. “I’ll take off.”

“No, don’t leave,” Travis says. “Just crash here.”

Cooper glances at me, but I don’t encourage him. I don’t think he should hang around. Travis is all agitated, and Cooper has something to do with it. “Emily’s right. You should be in bed, not out here talking to me.”

Travis doesn’t like the idea. “Why does everyone think they know what’s best for me? Don’t I get a say-so? I want Coop to stay.”

“Later,” Cooper says. “I’m fried right now.”

Once he’s gone, I say to Travis, “I heard you say ‘die.’ I don’t want you to die.”

“The whole family would be better off.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes. It is.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Now don’t be a snitch and run and tell Mom and Dad.”

“I’m not a snitch. But you need to adjust your thinking.”

He ignores my lecture, grabs my shoulder. “I want to go to my old room for something. Help me up the stairs.”

I lock my arm around his waist and hold him upright while he takes hold of his crutch, and although we go up the stairs together, I feel like there’s a wedge between us a mile wide.

I decide to ask Darla if she knows anything about Travis that I don’t. I know the two of us will never be best friends, but she’s impressed me with her devotion to my brother. I never picked her for the type to stick around, but I’m glad she is.

“What should I know?” she asks me.

“Travis and Cooper are acting sneaky. Cooper drops by practically every night. They act like they’ve got some big secret, and if I walk into the room, they clam up. This has been going on for over a week. They’re up to something.”

Her brow knits, but she shakes her head. “Travis hasn’t said anything out of the ordinary to me.”

I can tell she’s clueless, and it irritates me. “What do the two of you talk about?”

“Boring stuff. I tell him about school, cafeteria gossip, who’s dating who—anything to keep his mind off of how bad he hurts.”

“Well, I’m telling you, something’s going on. Something they don’t want me to know.”

She thinks, nods. “Okay, I’ll see what I can find out.”

When she turns, the light hits her face in a way that I see a bruise on her cheek. She’s covered it with makeup, but I see it faintly spread under her eye.

Jolted, I blurt out, “What happened to you?” and reach toward her face.

Darla pulls away. “Oh nothing. Clumsy me. I walked into a door. Can you believe it?”

I can’t, but I let her keep her story. “Well … be careful. And—and if Travis tells you something you think I should know—”

“I’ll share,” she says brightly.

I watch her walk away, and it hits me that Darla Gibson may have secrets too.

I
stand on the towering platform, and look down on clear blue water sparkling in eternal sunlight. I already know how it will feel flying downward to meet the water, because I’ve done this leap hundreds of times. My toes are pointed, balancing my body just on the edge of the concrete, my mind mapping the execution of my perfect dive.

My dive will have a degree of difficulty that’s unmatched. I will be the first in diving history to do it in high school competition. The judges look up at me with military attention. Not the usual panel of judges, but instead Cooper, Darla, Emily, Mom, and Dad. I wonder why they’re in the jury seats. No matter. I want to be perfect in their eyes and earn perfect scores from each of them.

I stretch my arms over my head, picture the moves in my mind: execute a perfect leap, arms outstretched as if in crucifixion; fold into the pike position; then twist and somersault before I stretch vertical toward the water.

But when I leap something goes wrong. My arms separate from my body, my legs vanish, and I hurtle down toward the concrete-hard water, tumbling out of control, falling, falling….

I wake in a cold sweat. The dream again. Always the same—my body separating, falling apart while people watch. My room is dark, and the last morphine shot Mom gave me has worn off. Dull fire is spreading through my body.

I concentrate on my plan to make the hurting stop forever. It’s simple. When the weather warms up, Coop will drive me out to the lake very early one morning. Everyone knows how much I love the lake, so they’ll think nothing of our going. We’ll rent a canoe at the marina. He’ll paddle us out to the deep-water platform, a floating wooden pallet where kids like to hang out in the summer, sunbathing and swimming. We’ll be alone. I’ll send him to get something I left in the car. He’ll return to the shore, make certain he’s seen by people,
and while he’s gone I’ll slide off the platform into the water. I’ll swim out as far as I can. And when I can no longer lift my arms, when my leg can no longer kick, I’ll slip beneath the surface and drown.

That’s how I want to end my life, in the water alone, with sky above me, the deep below. And Cooper will be exonerated. An expediter, but a nonparticipant. With only me responsible for the final act. Simple. Just me and the water I love so much. No hospital, no machines, no lingering and waiting for cancer to end my life. My right to die. My life in my control.

And no one will ever know the truth. Except Cooper.

E
mily’s right. Travis is keeping something from me. I know because he’s my boyfriend. Because I know every inch of him inside and out, and he can’t keep a secret from me even if he thinks he can. I know because there’s a kind of peace about him I haven’t seen in a long time. He’s still in horrible pain, but there’s something inside him that’s different these days. I haven’t said anything to him, and he doesn’t know I suspect any change, but I know it’s there.

We’re together every day, alone after his mother leaves and before Emily and his dad come home. I hold him against me when the pain comes. It soothes him to be in my arms. I kiss him, distract him. I love him with all my heart. I hate
cancer and his doctors and sometimes even his mother. She’s always searching for new treatments that end up building, then dashing, hope.

One afternoon I slip Emily a note to meet me in the school parking lot after the last bell. She’s waiting beside my car when I get there. “What’s up?” she asks.

“I agree that Travis is holding something back. And I’m sure Cooper’s in on it.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not yet.”

Emily looks disappointed. “Did you ask him?”

“That’s not the way it works, Em. I can’t pry information out of him. He’s got to want to give it up.”

She looks baffled, and I realize she’s got zero experience when it comes to guys. “Listen, I’ll work on Travis and you work on Cooper. He knows what’s going on too.”

Her face reddens, and she glances in two directions as if we might be overheard. “Cooper! I hardly ever speak to him. Why would he tell me anything?”

“You honestly don’t know that he likes you?” This surprises me.

She stutters out, “No way,” and blushes bright red. Now I get it. She likes him too but can’t admit it.

“He has a soft spot for you, Emily. I thought you knew.”

She shakes her head. Denial.

“Trust me. I know these things.” I put my hand on her shoulder, look her in the eye. “You’re going to have to get him to talk to you. Get him to open up and maybe tell you something that will help us figure out what’s going on.”

“H-how do I do that?”

“Start by spending time with him.”

“Even when he comes over, he hardly talks to me.”

“Then talk to him. Ask him to take you to the store or run an errand. It isn’t hard to get a guy who’s interested in you to spend time with you.”

She looks flustered. “I—I don’t know. I study most afternoons in the library.”

“How do you get home?”

“Dad, usually.”

“Well, duh. Ask Cooper to bring you home. I’m betting he’ll jump at the chance.”

“What if he won’t?”

I pat her arm. “He will.”

“Is—is that how you got Travis?”

Her chin’s tilted, and I see that she’s suspicious of me. I realize how calculating I must have sounded to her. “Travis got me,” I say. “He got me by caring. That’s why I love him. Because he cares and isn’t afraid to show it. Isn’t that what girls want? Someone who makes us feel special and loved and wanted?”

She doesn’t answer me, so I smile and get into my car. “Travis is my one true love,” I say out the window. “I’ll do anything to make him happy. Got to run. Don’t want Travis alone too long.”

I drive off, watching Emily trudge toward the school library, and hope she’s clever enough to take on Cooper Kulani.