The John Green Collection (107 page)

My phone buzzed moments later.

I was very tempted to respond
Okay
again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and that helped me text properly.

•••

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, “You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really,” my dad said. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you’re worth, we’d just toss you out on the streets.”

“We’re not sentimental people,” Mom added, deadpan. “We’d leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.”

I laughed.

“You don’t have to go to Support Group,” Mom added. “You don’t have to do anything. Except go to school.” She handed me the bear.

“I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight,” I said. “Let me remind you that I am more than thirty-three half years old.”

“Keep him tonight,” she said.

“Mom,” I said.

“He’s
lonely
,” she said.

“Oh, my God, Mom,” I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled with him as I fell asleep.

I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head.

I
screamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself—as I’ve told myself before—that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

Dad drove, talking on the phone with the hospital, while I lay in the back with my head in Mom’s lap. There was nothing to do: Screaming made it worse. All stimuli made it worse, actually.

The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.

People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

•••

I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn’t have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because I was alone: They don’t let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children’s because it’s an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody’s kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.

A nurse came in seconds later. “Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Hazel. I’m Alison, your nurse,” she said.

“Hi, Alison My Nurse,” I said.

Whereupon I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I reached up for them and tried to squeeze, but my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!)
of which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was,
hey look at that
, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad’s favorite amber ale. Mom told me I was going to go home, that I really was, that I would just have to get this drained every now and again and get back on the BiPAP, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs. But I’d had a total body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no tumor growth. No new tumors. My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain. Heart-working-too-hard pain.

“Dr. Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic,” Dad said. I liked Dr. Maria, and she didn’t bullshit you, so that felt good to hear.

“This is just a thing, Hazel,” my mom said. “It’s a thing we can live with.”

I nodded, and then Alison My Nurse kind of politely made them leave. She asked me if I wanted some ice chips, and I nodded, and then she sat at the bed with me and spooned them into my mouth.

“So you’ve been gone a couple days,” Alison said. “Hmm, what’d you miss…A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.” I smiled. “You can’t go disappearing on
everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.”

“More?” I asked, nodding toward the white Styrofoam cup in her hand.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, “but I’m a rebel.” She gave me another plastic spoonful of crushed ice. I mumbled a thank-you. Praise God for good nurses. “Getting tired?” she asked. I nodded. “Sleep for a while,” she said. “I’ll try to run interference and give you a couple hours before somebody comes in to check vitals and the like.” I said Thanks again. You say thanks a lot in a hospital. I tried to settle into the bed. “You’re not gonna ask about your boyfriend?” she asked.

“Don’t have one,” I told her.

“Well, there’s a kid who has hardly left the waiting room since you got here,” she said.

“He hasn’t seen me like this, has he?”

“No. Family only.”

I nodded and sank into an aqueous sleep.

•••

It would take me six days to get home, six undays of staring at acoustic ceiling tile and watching television and sleeping and pain and wishing for time to pass. I did not see Augustus or anyone other than my parents. My hair looked like a bird’s nest; my shuffling gait like a dementia patient’s. I felt a little better each day, though: Each sleep ended to reveal a person who seemed a bit more like me. Sleep fights cancer, Regular Dr. Jim said for the thousandth time as he
hovered over me one morning surrounded by a coterie of medical students.

“Then I am a cancer-fighting machine,” I told him.

“That you are, Hazel. Keep resting, and hopefully we’ll get you home soon.”

•••

On Tuesday, they told me I’d go home on Wednesday. On Wednesday, two minimally supervised medical students removed my chest tube, which felt like getting stabbed in reverse and generally didn’t go very well, so they decided I’d have to stay until Thursday. I was beginning to think that I was the subject of some existentialist experiment in permanently delayed gratification when Dr. Maria showed up on Friday morning, sniffed around me for a minute, and told me I was good to go.

So Mom opened her oversize purse to reveal that she’d had my Go Home Clothes with her all along. A nurse came in and took out my IV. I felt untethered even though I still had the oxygen tank to carry around with me. I went into the bathroom, took my first shower in a week, got dressed, and when I got out, I was so tired I had to lie down and get my breath. Mom asked, “Do you want to see Augustus?”

“I guess,” I said after a minute. I stood up and shuffled over to one of the molded plastic chairs against the wall, tucking my tank beneath the chair. It wore me out.

Dad came back with Augustus a few minutes later. His hair was messy, sweeping down over his forehead. He lit up
with a real Augustus Waters Goofy Smile when he saw me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. He sat down in the blue faux-leather recliner next to my chair. He leaned in toward me, seemingly incapable of stifling the smile.

Mom and Dad left us alone, which felt awkward. I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to look at. “I missed you,” Augustus said.

My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. “Thanks for not trying to see me when I looked like hell.”

“To be fair, you still look pretty bad.”

I laughed. “I missed you, too. I just don’t want you to see…all this. I just want, like…It doesn’t matter. You don’t always get what you want.”

“Is that so?” he asked. “I’d always thought the world was a wish-granting factory.”

“Turns out that is not the case,” I said. He was so beautiful. He reached for my hand but I shook my head. “No,” I said quietly. “If we’re gonna hang out, it has to be, like, not that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I have good news and bad news on the wish-granting front.”

“Okay?” I said.

“The bad news is that we obviously can’t go to Amsterdam until you’re better. The Genies will, however, work their famous magic when you’re well enough.”

“That’s the good news?”

“No, the good news is that while you were sleeping, Peter Van Houten shared a bit more of his brilliant brain with us.”

He reached for my hand again, but this time to slip into it a heavily folded sheet of stationery on the letterhead of
Peter Van Houten, Novelist Emeritus
.

•••

I didn’t read it until I got home, situated in my own huge and empty bed with no chance of medical interruption. It took me forever to decode Van Houten’s sloped, scratchy script.

Dear Mr. Waters,

Yours truly,

Peter Van Houten

•••

It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a little, so I knew it was really real.

“Mom,” I said. I did not say it loudly, but I didn’t have to. She was always waiting. She peeked her head around the door.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?”

W
e had a big Cancer Team Meeting a couple days later. Every so often, a bunch of doctors and social workers and physical therapists and whoever else got together around a big table in a conference room and discussed my situation. (Not the Augustus Waters situation or the Amsterdam situation. The cancer situation.)

Dr. Maria led the meeting. She hugged me when I got there. She was a hugger.

I felt a little better, I guess. Sleeping with the BiPAP all night made my lungs feel almost normal, although, then again, I did not really remember lung normality.

Everyone got there and made a big show of turning off
their pagers and everything so it would be
all about me
, and then Dr. Maria said, “So the great news is that Phalanxifor continues to control your tumor growth, but obviously we’re still seeing serious problems with fluid accumulation. So the question is, how should we proceed?”

And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. “Um,” I said, “I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?”