Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Read online

  “There’s a tumor in his colon, and it’s metastasized.”

  Carrie’s gaze flew to Mrs. Gardner’s face, and she felt the blood drain from her own. Keith’s cancer had spread, and other tumors had grown. “Where?”

  “His liver. I think Dr. Fineman suspected it when he examined Keith in the ER, but the tests confirmed it.”

  “What are they going to do about it? Can’t they operate?”

  “They can’t simply remove a person’s liver. You can’t live without one.”

  “But there’s got to be some drug! Some chemo or something!”

  Mrs. Gardner put her hand over her eyes and took a long, shuddering breath. “There’s nothing.”

  Carrie felt as if she were choking, as if she’d been underwater too long and couldn’t reach the surface. “But that means—they can’t give up! You can’t let them.”

  Mrs. Gardner took her hand again, squeezing it so hard that Carrie’s fingers went numb. “Dr. Fineman went over every option with us. The fact is, there are no options.”

  For Carrie time seemed to freeze, making that moment incredibly intense. The coolness of the darkened room, the floral scent of Mrs. Gardner’s perfume, the quiet weeping of Holly and the others, burned everlasting impressions into her brain. She felt connected to these people, as if she’d become part of the family. “How long?”

  “Dr. Fineman says making estimates isn’t really fair. It’s not a horse race.”

  “He has an idea. I know he does.”

  Mrs. Gardner sagged. “Maybe three months.”

  Fresh tears clogged her throat. “Only this summer?”

  “Only this summer,” Keith’s mother echoed.

  “I want to see him.”

  “In a couple of days. For now he says he just wants to be alone.”

  “But what can I do? There’s got to be something I can do.” Carrie stood and flapped her arms like a helpless bird.

  “There’s nothing any of us can do for him right now but pray. My son is dying … he’s dying.” She buried her face in her hands. Holly threw her arms around her mother. Gwen and April rushed over and embraced her too, while Jake hugged her lap and buried his teary face in her skirt.

  Carrie stood back for only a moment; then she also reached around the circle, holding tightly to all of them. She pressed her trembling body against the huddle and filled her arms with the warm, soft substance of gathered grief.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Carrie walked into the support-group meeting, she felt as if every eye in the room had turned her way. She adjusted her sunglasses, feeling stupid for wearing them at night, but grateful to be able to hide behind them. Her eyes were so red and swollen from crying, she looked sickly herself.

  Hella rushed over to her, saying, “Carrie, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about Keith. I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything to you in the lobby.”

  “It’s all right. I know you couldn’t. Besides, it was better hearing it from Keith’s mom.”

  “Have you talked to him yet?” Carrie shook her head, unable to trust her voice. “He won’t see anybody but his family,” Hella said. “Mostly he just lies in bed and stares at the wall.”

  “That’s what Holly tells me,” Carrie managed, fumbling for a tissue. “I want to see him so bad.”

  “He’ll come around. Give him some time.”

  Carrie glanced about the room. It was fuller than usual and much more subdued. She also realized that there were several more staff and clinic personnel than normal. “What’s with all the suits?” she asked, sniffing.

  “Support people. Every kid in the group is going to be impacted by this, even if they didn’t know Keith well. We want to be here for those who need to hash out feelings about it.”

  “How do you think we feel?” Carrie snapped. “We feel lousy. It stinks. Keith’s only sixteen years old.” By now her voice and hands were shaking. A hush fell on people standing nearby, and Carrie felt embarrassed for raising her voice.

  “It’s all right to yell,” Hella told her. “If you want, you can even throw something.”

  “I don’t want to just throw something. I want to throw something at something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like all you medical types. Why can’t you do anything for Keith? Why do we have to go through all the chemo and operations”—she gestured toward a boy on crutches with only one leg—”and the radiation, and all the tests and junk and then die! Why is that?”

  Hella uttered a weary sigh. “Nothing’s more frustrating than the practice of medicine, Carrie. And especially oncology. Cancer’s not just one disease, it’s a complicated bunch of diseases. For years cancer was an automatic death sentence, but today almost sixty percent of kids with leukemia survive.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  Hella smiled wanly. “I suppose not. But it does make me feel better. It makes me feel like we’re making some sort of headway against it.”

  “It makes me feel like I’m holding a lottery ticket, and as someone calls out the winning combination, I look and see that my ticket is matching every number called. That’s what happened to Keith, you know. All the numbers matched, except the very last one. ‘So sorry, you lose, Keith,’ ” Carrie said in a sharp voice. She felt angry, but not at Hella, and she told her so.

  “I know,” Hella said. “That’s what support group is all about. That’s why we’re here—so you can yell at us.”

  Carrie felt all mixed up inside. Keith had been handed the death sentence, but she kept seeing herself in his place, and that scared her most of all. She wasn’t brave or heroic. She was plain and ordinary and incapable of handling such news for herself. And her parents weren’t helping her much either.

  When she’d told her father, he’d looked sick to his stomach and said, “You sure you want to hang around this boy? I don’t want you getting all depressed.”

  “Of course, I want to hang around him!” she’d shouted back. “What kind of a friend do you think I am?”

  It was Lynda who’d put her arm around Carrie’s shoulder and said, “Stan, this isn’t the time to ask such a thing.”

  But it had been her mom’s reaction that had really shocked Carrie the most. She’d burst into tears! Why she’d hardly known Keith and had all but ignored Carrie when she’d talked of him. So Carrie had watched her weep, not sure of what to say. How could her mother get so affected by Keith’s situation and yet act as if the same thing couldn’t happen to her own daughter?

  “Do you want me to give Keith a message from you?” Hella was asking.

  Carrie pulled her thoughts away from her parents and nodded vigorously. “Please tell him that I have to see him, that he owes it to me. Tell him that I need my guitar lesson. That he made a deal—a promise—and I won’t let him out of it.”

  “Guitar lesson?”

  “He’ll understand,” she told Hella. “He has to.”

  Two days later Carrie stood outside Keith’s hospital room, torn between crossing the threshold and turning around and leaving. Her arms ached from having carried the terrarium across the lobby, up on the elevator, and down the long corridor. Finally she stepped into the room, mostly because her hands were sweating and she was about to drop the glass tank.

  Keith was sitting in a chair, and he was wearing street clothes. He waved casually, as if it had been only an hour since he’d last seen her instead of four days. She heaved the terrarium onto a nearby table and smiled. “You’re dressed,” she said, then felt stupid about stating the obvious.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “My dad’s already checked me out, and my car’s down in the parking lot. I thought I’d take you with me. Mom’s baking a ham.”

  “Home?” She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it hadn’t been this.

  “Yes. There’s nothing else they can do for me, remember?” A sudden rush of tears filled her eyes. She bit her lip, hoping the pain would stop the flow. Keith came over and put his hand
s on her shoulders. “Can you halt the waterworks, Carrie? I don’t think I can stand one more crying female. My sisters have been puddling up the place for days.”

  She nodded, unable to speak. He dropped his hands and studied the terrarium. “So what’s this?”

  She cleared her throat. “I—uh—made it for you because I know how you like the great outdoors. But I guess you won’t be needing it. You can go outside now.”

  “It’s neat,” he said, peering through the glass at every angle. “Thanks. Dad took my other stuff, so let’s take it down to the car. I want to get out of this place.”

  They left without saying good-bye at the nurses’ station, and once outside Keith paused, turned his face skyward, and drew in a deep breath. “Boy, I’ve missed being outside.” She watched him and wondered how much longer he had to feel the sun on his face. During the ride to his house, he kept the radio turned up loud, so they didn’t talk much. And at his house his family swarmed over him, hugging and touching and telling him how glad they were he was finally home.

  Later they ate baked ham and mashed potatoes and green beans—all of Keith’s favorites. Carrie kept feeling as if she’d fallen into a time warp and the past few days hadn’t happened and Keith was perfectly fine. Jake’s cheerful patter brought reality sharply into focus, however, when he asked, “After you’re dead, will you come back for my birthday party?”

  For a moment no one spoke. Carrie wondered how they would explain the finality of death to a five-year-old. Mr. Gardner said, “Dead people don’t come back to see us, Jake. We go see them in heaven when we die.”

  Jake scrunched up his forehead. “Not even for birthdays and Christmas?”

  “Not even then.”

  “Boy, it’s gonna be a crummy Christmas if Keith’s not here,” the child said.

  Carrie watched Keith wipe his palms along his jeans. He said, “Let’s get that guitar lesson going, Carrie.”

  “Oh, but you don’t have to—”

  “Come on,” he said, pushing back from the table and heading to his room.

  Carrie glanced around the table at his family’s stricken faces. “Go on,” Mrs. Gardner said. “Do what he wants to do.”

  Carrie found him in his room, sitting on his bed Indian style, plucking at the strings of his guitar. The notes quivered with a vibrato that made a lump stick in her throat. She sat across from him on the bed. “I’ll understand if you want to back out of our deal. Helping you cram for exams is sort of dumb now, I guess. Besides, exams are next week already, so you probably won’t be taking them.”

  “When they told me that the cancer was in my liver, I didn’t believe it,” Keith said, shrugging off her comments about exams. “I figured, ‘Man, what a bummer! Now what? What kind of torture’s in store for me to cure this complication?’ ” He gave her a sad smile. “Surprise. No treatment.”

  “Hella told me the same thing at support group. The doctors act like they know so much, but they really don’t.” Carrie found herself torn over wanting to talk about Keith’s diagnosis with him.

  “How’s everybody takin’ it in the group?”

  “Pretty hard.”

  “You gotta promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “After I’m—you know—gone, I want you to have a big party with the whole group. I don’t want everybody standing around and crying and acting all sad. You throw the biggest, best party ever. Will you?”

  She nodded. “Will you come to any more meetings?”

  “I don’t think so. No use bringing people down.”

  “What will you do?” She asked the question haltingly.

  “I spent days thinking about it. I talked to my dad too. We decided no one was going to stand around whispering about me dying. No secrets—it was all gonna be out in the open. That’s why Jake asked the question he did tonight. No use trying to protect him from the truth.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  His green eyes bore into hers. “Yeah, I’m scared. I don’t want to die, Carrie.” His voice faltered, and she thought she’d burst into tears. “But God didn’t consult me, and I didn’t get a vote. I talked to Dr. Fineman about what to expect. He’s seen lots of people die.

  “He was honest with me. He told me I’d be all right for a while, but when I started going down, I could come to the hospital, and they would hook me up to IVs and respirators and monitors. That way I could live a little longer and not be in pain.”

  She shivered but asked, “When do you go back?”

  “I’m not.” His eyes were clear and bright. “I’m never going back to the hospital again.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Carrie blinked, as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. He toyed with the guitar. “Have you ever heard of hospice?”

  “I’ve heard the word, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “I talked with Hella about it. She works with the program through the hospital. It’s a way of letting cancer patients die at home with their families to support them and without hurting. Nurses and social workers and all those types help the patients and then their families after the person dies. Hospice lets you die in your own home, in your own bed and not alone.”

  Carrie recoiled. “That sounds awful! Like people are just standing around waiting for you to croak.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not it at all, but when doctors tell you, ‘We can’t do anything else for you,’ you start thinking about what choices you’ve got left. The way I see it, you get one: you can decide where. I don’t want it to be in a hospital with that stinking smell of medicine all around me.”

  “But you’re safer in the hospital. There’re nurses and doctors and machines. They can help you live longer.”

  “How long? A few more weeks? What difference can a few lousy weeks make?” His voice rose, and she realized how upset he was about it. “And think about my family. Right now I just want to make it as easy on them as possible. I don’t want them taking shifts around my hospital bed. No, that’s not for me. This way hospice people will be with us all the way. None of us will have to be alone.”

  “But none of you are alone,” she burst out. He had no idea what it was to be alone as she did.

  “Wrong. We’re alone all right. After the doctors know for sure that you’re beyond their treatments and cures, they act like you don’t exist. Oh, they were nice to me in the hospital—you know—polite after the prognosis came in. But once they knew there was nothing left to do medically, well—I became a non-person, an embarrassment to them. Business as usual went on around me, but it didn’t concern me. It’s hard to explain.”

  Somehow she understood. “So what will you do now?”

  Keith laid the guitar down on the bed. “I’m going into the hospice program. That means no more treatments to stop the cancer.”

  “Nothing?” Her hands had gone cold.

  “Just medicine for pain—all that I need to keep from hurting.”

  “But—but you could get addicted,” she cried.

  A bemused smile appeared. “Believe me, becoming a junkie is not a major worry to me.”

  She flushed, embarrassed. Of course it wouldn’t be. “And your parents are gonna let you do this?”

  “I told you once before that my folks have always encouraged us to make our own decisions.”

  “But this is different!”

  “No it isn’t. Nothing’s going to change the fact that I’m dying. This way my family can be with me every step of the way—Mom and Dad, my sisters, and Jake.”

  She felt alone and cut off. He was being taken from her in every way. At least in the hospital she could slip in and stand by his bed, but this way—She abruptly asked, “So what happens next?”

  “There’re some things I want to do while I still feel good enough to do them and before I have to start taking megadoses of painkillers. I told my parents that I want all of us to go up to the cabin for a week.”

  Carrie knew how much he loved the woods, an
d part of her wanted him to be able to go. But part of her was bitterly disappointed. She wanted to be with him for as long as she could. “When are you going?”

  “As soon as school’s out.”

  Tears filled her throat, and she dropped her gaze. “I’m glad.”

  “Carrie,” he said, his voice very quiet. “I want you to come too. Please.”

  “Me? You want me to come?”

  “Don’t panic,” he said with a hint of a smile. “There’s indoor plumbing and everything.”

  “I want to come, Keith. More than anything. It’s just that I’m not sure if I can persuade my parents. They expect me to work.”

  “But you’ll ask them?”

  “Of course I’ll ask.” Already her mind was spinning, thinking of the best way to approach them. “Your family won’t mind?” she asked.

  “They want me to have whatever I want. Besides, who’s gonna say no to a dying kid’s wish?”

  He’d made the remark in sardonic jest, but it made her stomach tighten. A dying kid’s wish. “Not me,” she told him.

  He buried his face in his hands. “This isn’t the way I planned for this summer to go.” His voice sounded muffled. “I’m still sort of numb about the whole thing. It’s like my brain is divided into two parts.” He looked at her again. “One part says, ‘This is just a bad dream. You’ll wake up any minute now.’ And the other part says, ‘You gotta get ready, Keith. You gotta get things together because soon it’s all gonna be over.’ ”

  “What does ‘over’ really mean?” she asked, as much for her sake as his.

  “I’m still working on it.”

  “If you figure it out, will you tell me?”

  “You’ll be the first.”

  She smiled. “Who’s on first?”

  “What,” he answered.

  “What’s on second,” she whispered.

  “Three strikes and you’re out,” he said, abruptly changing the flow of the Abbott and Costello routine, “I’m out. What a lousy finish for my game.”