Page 43 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
Miller looked up then, peering across the table at my handiwork. “Looks perfect to me,” he said. “Egg smiley.”
“It’s not.” I held it up for him to see. “Look at the mouth, it’s all pointy.”
“So’s mine,” he said, and gnashed his teeth over the table likehe was going to bite my hand. I laughed, recoiling.
“You’re not an egg,” I told him. The table between us was littered with jelly beans and egg-shaped chocolates, all the Easter spoils Vera kept for me that Dad wouldn’t let me have at home.
Miller dumped a handful of neon-green beans in his mouth and spoke through them. “If I was, would you still be friends with me?”
I rubbed my chin like I was considering it. “Maybe. But I’d have to roll you everywhere. Or build you a wagon to pull behind my bike.”
“Sounds like a life of luxury,” Vera said, carrying a tray to the table. She set it down and I peered over the rows of cups, each a different color dye. “Maybe we’d all be better off as eggs.”
“Only hard-boiled, though,” Miller said. Vera placed five cups in front of each of us, two rows of contained rainbows. The smell was strong—stinging vinegar. I coughed a little, then looked up at Miller.
“Otherwise,” he told us, “we’d break each other.”
The hospital smells the same: sharp antiseptic like vinegar. The sense memory yanks me back in time so keenly I check my fingertips as we ride the elevator upstairs, half expecting them to be stained with dye. They aren’t, of course: they’re just my same hands, pale and shaking.
Miller stands next to me at a careful distance. Not touching me, but close enough to block out Felix, who followed us all the way here and is standing at the back of the elevator with a tall man in a black peacoat. So far, he’s had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
Vera is on a hospice floor, tucked away at the back of the building. I’ve never left Colorado, have seen barely any of the world, but even still, I know—this is the worst place on the planet. The hallway lights are dimmed, voices hushed. At the end of the hall, a doctor steps out of a room, her head leaned close to talk to my father. He stays in the doorframe as she moves away and then, finally, he looks up.
I don’t know what’s waiting for me inside. I don’t know how my legs keep moving me toward Dad but they do; suddenly I’m there and he’s gripping my shoulder and he’s talking to Miller over my head and I can’t hear—or don’t care—what they’re saying.
Inside, Vera’s asleep. Every light is on in her room and I see her thin chest rising and falling, slow, beneath the blankets. I go to her, sit in the only chair at her bedside.Soak it up, half of me cries, shrieking from inside.Soak it up, soak it up, soakitup.This is the last time I’ll see her. The last time we’ll breathe the same air. I’m torn between wanting to remember every inconsiderable detail and wanting to look away, to not remember her like this even a little.
Her arm rests on top of the sheets and I reach for her, wrapping my fingers around her slim wrist. Her skin is cool and dry. For a moment I can feel her pulse,but then I realize it’s only my own, fast and frantic and all alone.
“You okay, honey?”
I look up at Dad. He’s in jeans and a hoodie he’s had my whole life.
“What happened?” I whisper, as if the facts of this—metastaticcancer, her body too weakened to keep being her body—will give me something to hold on to. As if there is anything that could make this make sense.
But before Dad can answer me, Vera gasps. I look at her, my heart rising in my throat, but her eyes are still closed. Her machines start beeping in unison, an angry chorus that seems to be telling me toget out, get OUT. I rise from the chair as a rush of nurses fill the space around me, crowding the bed until I can’t even see her anymore.
“Only one visitor in the room, please,” one of them says. Urgently.Get out.But I’m paralyzed, staring at one of the nurse’s backs like I could look straight through her to Vera.
“Ro,” Dad says, and his voice sounds shatterable as spring ice. “Wait in the hallway.” His hands land on my shoulders, making me move. “It’s okay, baby. Wait in the hallway.”
It’s not okay, and we both know it. He takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheek, pushes the hair from my forehead like I’m small again. He looks up at Miller, then back to me. “Go on.”
Miller: standing in the doorframe, his bow tie undone. Cluster of cilantro drooping from the safety pin on his lapel. I can’t look at his face, and when I move past him into the hall I suddenly feel like I can’t look at anything else, either. The whole world is blurring out in front of me, the hallway walls melting into the floor. Felix and the guy in the coat are standing close to the wall, the guy’s arm around Felix’s waist. I can feel them looking at me, and when Felix reaches a hand toward me I flinch.
“Oh, honey,” he whispers, and the syllables bleed into thebeeping from Vera’s room. Inside, the nurses are loud with each other. I clamp my hands over my ears.
“Ro,” Miller says. His voice barely reaches me. “Look at me.”
When I don’t, his voice comes louder. “Hey. Ro.”
I’m thinking:I can’t breathe.I’m thinking:Everything wrong is happening here, all at the exact same time.I’m thinking:I need to go to the woods.But I can’t. I’m bound here by the sadness I have to bear witness to, that I would never forgive myself for missing even though it is the last thing I ever, ever, ever want to look at. There is no way around this, there is only through.
“Ro,lookat me,” Miller says again, and either he’s louder or he’s closer, because I do.
“Hey,” he says, firmly, when my eyes land on his. His gaze is familiar and steady in the way I’ve only ever known from him—like Miller is an island all his own, immovable, unchanged as the air. I feel the tears on my cheeks with an inhuman detachment, like they belong to someone else. But still, I don’t look away from him. It’s as if he’s brought my woods to me: the wind moving in the leaves, the earth’s heartbeat he reached for with the flat of his hand when we were five years old. I breathe.
“This is the worst,” Miller says. We’re a foot apart, and he doesn’t touch me. “There is no silver lining. This is impossible, and you’re going to get through it.”
