First Love Read online

  “I’m not sure that’s a bad thing,” I said. There were four other people in the waiting room, and by the looks on their faces, they’d been there awhile.

  Robinson shook his head. “I just need to sit down,” he said in a raspy voice.

  The woman at the desk glanced at me warily as I approached. Maybe she saw the fear in my eyes—or maybe she thought I was homeless or on drugs. I could see my pale reflection in the corner of a mirror, and I couldn’t exactly blame her.

  “Can I help you?” she asked. Her name tag read DEBBIE.

  “My friend is sick,” I said, pointing to Robinson, who was huddled on a plastic chair in the corner. The scene in the truck played over and over in my mind. It was nightmarish.

  “The doctor has been paged,” Debbie said. She inspected my face, frowning lightly. “Do you need to see him, too?”

  “I’m absolutely fine,” I said stiffly, even though I felt like I might collapse from exhaustion.

  I rejoined Robinson, and we sat in the corner for what felt like hours. Eventually, an old man with his arm in a cast leaned over and put his good hand on my knee.

  “It’s a Saturday morning, hon,” he offered. “Most of the doctors and whatnot are fishing.”

  I bit my lip, hard. We had no doctor. And when we got one, I knew what it would mean: blood workups, fine-needle aspiration biopsies, positron-emission tomography scans.… The thought of going through this again made me want to run and hide.

  “Welcome to small-town America, Axi,” Robinson said, “where the bowling alley and the Elks lodge have larger staffs than the hospital.”

  “Don’t worry, the doctor is coming,” I said. “Hey, in the meantime, we can watch TV. I know you haven’t been getting your daily dose lately.”

  Robinson nodded. “If only you had a Slim Jim and a box of Oreos, everything would be perfect.”

  I tried to wipe a spot of blood from his collar. “You really have to eat better.”

  “I know,” Robinson said. “I’m in the ER because of too many Slim Jims and not enough TV.” He looked at me slyly.

  Oh, if only that were true, I thought. For just a moment I clung to a wild hope that the doctor would give him a spoonful of extra-strength Maalox, and then we could be on our way to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or the world’s largest ball of twine. But I’d seen his blood, the way it was dark, almost coffee-colored. I knew that meant it came from his gastrointestinal tract—where the cancer had been.

  Where maybe it still was.

  “Why do they have to pick the Home Shopping Network?” Robinson asked.

  I looked up. A lady with long red nails was selling figurines, smiling at the camera with glossy lips and blindingly white teeth. “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t love that jade elephant,” I teased.

  Why were we talking about crap made in China? About junk food? The elephant we needed to talk about was the one in the room: Robinson’s blood, his illness, which wasn’t a matter of nutrition.

  On the other hand, ignoring that truth was exactly how we’d gotten as far as we had. We didn’t sit around and mope. We took charge; we took off. We laughed and we drove too fast and we stuck our heads out the window and gave cancer the finger. Because we understood that a person could be dead long before he or she actually died. And no matter what the future held for us, we didn’t ever want to be that kind of people.

  Robinson blinked drowsily. “I do kind of like the elephant. I think jade’s supposed to be good luck. We could probably use a little of that.”

  His voice was thick with sleep. His eyes closed, and he leaned his head on my shoulder. I squeezed his fingers, still wrapped in mine. Just like he’d said, we were in this together.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” I whispered. But Robinson had fallen asleep already, and he couldn’t hear me lie.

  27

  THE BITTER IRONY OF MY LIFE WAS THAT two years after my sister, Carole Ann, died in a pediatric oncology ward in Portland, Oregon, I became a patient in the same wing. I recognized all the nurses, who’d shaken their heads in disbelief. “Both Moore babies?” they’d whispered. “Both?”

  If God or fate or karma has decided you’re going to get cancer, though, you cross your fingers for a kind like mine. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not uncommon, which means that doctors know a lot about it, and by now they’re pretty good at curing it. That’s the glass half-full.

  “Yeah, the glass half-full… of shit,” Robinson used to say. I’d met him for the first time in that place, and every time he’d curse, I’d sort of punch him in the arm, because I didn’t like it. But I did like him, which made being there a little bit easier.

  Don’t get me wrong. Even a highly curable cancer is no walk in the park. Yes, the hospital walls were painted pretty colors, the nurses wore Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs, and some of the older kids pretended the ward was a boarding school complete with uniforms of thin blue gowns, fuzzy slippers, and bald heads covered in colorful scarves. But being there and being sick totally sucked.

  Until the day I met Robinson. Until the day he found me.

  If life were a movie, we’d have had what they call a “meet cute.” Sort of like this: I’d knock into Robinson while carrying a giant stack of magazines I’d borrowed from the waiting room. And all those good, trashy weeklies like Us, People, and Life & Style would slide everywhere on the floor. I’d make a joke about studying for my pop culture quiz, and he’d laugh as he helped me pick up the mess. By the time the magazines were back in my arms, we’d have realized we were totally hot for each other, and hilarity and romance would ensue for the next ninety minutes.

  In real life, it went like this: in a narcotic haze from a bad reaction to a chemo treatment, I was staring at the TV, convinced that Barney the purple dinosaur was speaking directly to me. When I failed to decipher his message, I fell asleep, waking later to see a beautiful dark-haired boy sitting next to my bed. I knew then that I had died, because unless I had been transported to heaven, there was no way a guy that hot would be smiling at me.

  But I wasn’t dead. It was Robinson, and he was real. He said to me, “You look like shit. I feel like shit. Let’s be friends.”

  And just like that, we were. That’s how magnetic Robinson was: he could tell you that you looked terrible, and you’d still adore him.

  Robinson was sicker than I was, but he didn’t act like it. He had a rare kind of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma called Burkitt’s. The non means it’s worse.

  “Burkitt was the doctor who discovered the cancer in equatorial Africa,” Robinson informed me. “It’s a lot more common there.” He sounded almost proud of his strange and exotic cancer. Then he grinned. “Burkitt also had this whole elaborate theory about the right posture for taking a crap. He said if you squatted—you know, like a baseball catcher—you’d never get colon cancer. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.”

  I looked up Burkitt’s immediately. For patients with Robinson’s numbers (his cancer was Stage IV) the survival rate was 50 percent.

  There were kids on the ward who’d only have to have a foot amputated or a mysterious lump removed, and then they’d live to be a hundred. Why Robinson? Why this disease? But Robinson was philosophical. He said, “Fifty percent? I’ve seen worse.”

  We all had.

  A 50 percent chance of surviving was a flip of a coin. So the night after I learned what the odds for him were, I sat up in my adjustable hospital bed, held a penny tight in my palm, and squeezed my eyes shut. “Heads, he lives,” I said. I didn’t even whisper what tails meant. I threw the penny into the air, and when I caught it, I had to breathe deeply for a long time before I could look.

  It was heads.

  I can’t tell you how much weight I put on that coin toss. I believed in it with every single cell of my body. Our luck would not run out. That’s what I told myself.

  But they were only words. My mom could predict rain by the dull ache in her knee. My childhood dog, Sadie, could sense the mailman when he was s
till two blocks away. In this weird, quiet way, they knew what was coming.

  And now, so did I.

  Now, in the cold, cold waiting room, Robinson leaned against me. I could feel his breath. I imagined I could see the faint, precious pulse of his heartbeat, fluttering beneath the skin. He was so beautiful, so alive.

  But for how long? I didn’t need a doctor to tell me what I already knew. Robinson—my better self, my heart, my life—was very possibly dying.

  Our luck would not run out? Please, Axi. Everything runs out eventually. Everything.

  28

  EVENTUALLY, ROBINSON WAS ADMITTED to the La Junta hospital, and a nurse took us to a private room. She helped him into a bed, and I hopped up on the empty one beside him.

  “Are you going to write this down?” Robinson wondered aloud. “In your journal?”

  “I only write down the good parts of our adventures,” I said.

  Robinson snorted. “You can’t write a book without a conflict.”

  I said, “Who said anything about a book? This is my journal. It’s a pink notebook I got at Walgreens for two ninety-nine.”

  Robinson shrugged. “You never know…”

  For some reason, this made me laugh. “Sure, I’ll write a book,” I told him, “as long as you promise to actually read it.”

  He held up his little finger. “Pinkie swear.”

  But before I could lean toward him, a voice boomed from the doorway. “So—just what do we have here?” We looked up to see a bearded giant wearing a lab coat and staring at us.

  He introduced himself as Dr. Ellsworth, and he hadn’t even asked Robinson’s last name before he launched into a list of questions. Did Robinson use drugs? Alcohol? Had he traveled internationally recently? Had he ever had an ulcer? Was he allergic to any foods? Had he eaten any spinach during last month’s E. coli outbreak?

  Robinson shuddered at the thought of spinach. He answered no to everything.

  I was still amazed by the doctor’s size. He could have been a circus strongman, but now he was bending over Robinson’s chest, listening to his heart and lungs.

  He was frowning.

  He palpated Robinson’s stomach, and Robinson inhaled sharply, wincing. I had to look away then. I couldn’t bear to see him in pain.

  After several minutes, Dr. Ellsworth spoke. “I’m going to send you to get a CT scan and an X-ray. There are… abnormalities.”

  Just because I was expecting to hear something like this didn’t mean it didn’t knock the wind out of me. I drew in a wobbly breath as Robinson said, “Actually, if it’s all the same to you, Doctor, I’d rather not have those things.”

  “You might be a very ill young man,” the doctor said.

  Robinson watched him, blinking his dark eyes. “Might,” he allowed. “But let’s just leave it at that. No news is good news, right? In the meantime, I do think I have a touch of the flu or something.” He offered the best rakish grin he could muster, which, considering the situation, was pretty impressive.

  “You have walking pneumonia,” Dr. Ellsworth said. “And pleurisy is likely. I can tell you that right now.”

  “Please let that be all he has,” I whispered. I suddenly thought of the orb Robinson had bought me in Mount Shasta, and I reached for it at the bottom of my backpack. I ran my fingers over its smooth surface. It was both a worry stone and a good-luck charm.

  The doctor turned to me. “And you?” he asked. “Are you in need of any medical care you’d like to refuse?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just here for moral support,” I said.

  Dr. Ellsworth walked over to the side of the bed I was borrowing and touched my neck. His fingers were cool. “I see the scar right here,” he said. “It’s from a radiation burn, isn’t it?”

  I moved away from his touch, saying nothing. I wasn’t a patient here, and I didn’t have to answer. It didn’t matter what I’d had. I was clear. In remission.

  Although, as my dad’s friend Critter used to say, Just because it’s sunny today don’t mean the shitstorm ain’t comin’.

  Dr. Ellsworth crossed his arms over his massive chest. “What’s going on with you two?” he asked. “Where did you come from?”

  Robinson and I looked at each other. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  I spoke for us. “We can’t say at the moment.”

  Dr. Ellsworth gave us both sharp looks. “This is not a game. It is my belief that this young man here has a mass in his abdomen. A tumor. Do you comprehend the seriousness of that?”

  Robinson tried to sit up. “Hey, Axi. What’s the difference between a doctor and a lawyer?”

  I knew this joke—it was one of Robinson’s standards. And I was only half-surprised he was trotting it out now. Playing along, I said, “I don’t know. What?”

  “A lawyer will rob you; a doctor will rob you and kill you, too.”

  Dr. Ellsworth made a sound in his throat—a choked-back laugh? A grunt of annoyance? “I’m trying to help,” he said.

  “Then bring in a TV,” Robinson quipped. “Preferably one with cable.”

  The truth was, Robinson and I had a routine down. We’d perfected it in the halls of the Portland cancer ward. The nurses loved us. We were the Abbott and Costello of cancer. “Hey, Robinson,” I said. “What do you call a person who keeps getting lymphoma over and over again?”

  “I don’t know—what?” But he was already laughing.

  “A lymphomaniac!” I cried.

  Robinson whooped and pretended to slap his thigh. “Oooh, that was a good one,” he said.

  Dr. Ellsworth sighed. “If there were a drug to prevent gallows humor, I’d prescribe it for both of you.” But I could tell that he thought we were just a tiny bit funny.

  He stepped toward the door. “I’m going to give you some intravenous antibiotics, and I’m going to encourage you to think very hard about those tests I mentioned.”

  “I don’t like tests,” Robinson said. “I always fail them.”

  “Where are your parents, young man?”

  I glanced at Robinson. That was a question whose answer I didn’t know, either.

  Robinson turned away. “I’m a legal adult,” he said. “Do you want to check my ID?”

  Dr. Ellsworth gave Robinson one more long look, then shook his head and left the room.

  Robinson closed his eyes. “I’m just going to take a little nap,” he said. “If you can stand to be without my company for a while.”

  I got up and pulled the thin blanket over him. I didn’t want him to leave me, not even for a minute. “I think I can manage,” I said softly.

  He said, “You should close your eyes, too.”

  “I’m not tired,” I said, lying again. But I knew I couldn’t sleep, anyway; I needed to watch him. To make sure he didn’t start coughing again. To make sure the blood stayed inside him, where it was supposed to be. To watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall.

  I sat down by his bedside. I hoped the antibiotics would work their invisible cellular magic, and quickly. And I wished that what Robinson needed was only—to use his terminology—a little tune-up. Because we weren’t going to stick around to get six weeks of chemo in La Junta. That wasn’t in the plan.

  A few minutes later, I looked up to see that Dr. Ellsworth had returned. “We’re moving you to a different room,” he said. “I don’t want you too far from a ventilator. Or the nurses’ station.”

  Robinson looked over at me and offered a faint, sleepy smile. “Precautionary, of course,” he said.

  “Of course,” I repeated. “You just have a touch of whatever’s been going around.” Like cancer was contagious, the way doctors once thought it was. Like it was no more serious than the common cold.

  I didn’t dare look at Dr. Ellsworth. He was going to add crazy to Robinson’s list of diagnoses, I could already tell. And that was just fine with me.

  Because as far as I knew, nobody ever died of crazy.

  29

  IN THE EVENING
THEY SEDATED ROBINSON, because his breathing had become labored and painful. That, apparently, was the pleurisy. Or maybe it was the pneumonia. I didn’t want to know. When they said things like “peritoneal fluid analysis” and “low platelet count,” I put my fingers in my ears.

  Alone, I read every magazine I could find: Golf Digest, Sport Fishing, and Fit Pregnancy. None held any useful information for me, but considering I’m a golf hater, a vegetarian, and a virgin, that was not exactly surprising.

  Then I wandered the corridors, noticing again how much one hospital resembles another. They sound the same (the beeps of heart monitors, the hiss of oxygen machines, the murmuring tones of visitors). They serve the same food (syrupy, too-sweet grape juice; soggy dinner rolls; and pink, plastic-looking ham). They even smell the same (odors of disinfectant, recycled air, and bodies and what comes out of them—a mix I can only describe as lavatorial).

  As terrible as La Junta General was, a tiny part of me relaxed a little. Unlike the rest of our cross-country journey, the hospital ward was known territory. A place I could navigate. And I guess I was glad to have a roof over my head again.

  But as Robinson would be the first to point out, you can’t be Bonnie and Clyde in a hospital. You’re in a different movie altogether.

  “Pace much?” one of the nurses asked with a friendly smile when I walked by the station for the twentieth time.

  I smiled. “Sorry. Just stretching my legs.”

  “No worries, keep at it,” she said. “Exercise does a body good.”

  She looked like she could stand to get a little exercise herself, but she was busy playing FreeCell on her computer. Slow night in the ER, I guess.

  I turned down a new hallway and came upon a set of heavy double doors. Pushing them open, I found myself in the foyer of a small chapel.

  It was utterly unlike the rest of the sterile white hospital. The front wall was a deep red. There was a plain wooden altar with LED candles flickering alongside it. There was no statue of Jesus on the cross, though—no Mary or Ganesh or Buddha or L. Ron Hubbard, either, or whoever it was people prayed to around here. There was just that red—the red of valentines, of blood. Faint classical music came from invisible speakers.