“Is this how you felt when Sony was dying?” I ask. I sit in a rolling chair at the nurse’s station, holding the Hit List as I watch Hikari’s room from afar.
Winter is here, and her mom has quit her job. She spends her days at the hospital to stay with her daughter while her husband continues to work to pay off medical bills.
“Did you think, This is it?” I ask again. “This may be the day I lose her.”
Eric either doesn’t hear my question, or he ignores it. Rummaging through charts, he handles paperwork with efficiency, as always, only now with an added edge. After we spread Sony’s ashes, he went back to work as if nothing had happened. He was offered leave, but all of his colleagues, tiptoe around him still, offering to do tasks for him.
I don’t think Eric likes that.
I don’t think he’s ever liked me either, but I’ve known him since he first began clinical rotations fresh out of school. When he first saw me, he reacted the same way all others do. He felt he knew me fundamentally, a face from his past, but he didn’t question it. It was a natural ignorance. He saw me as a detail. A stethoscope around a doctor’s neck or the sound of shoes against the tiles.
It doesn’t dawn on him that I don’t look like I’ve aged a day since then. People don’t question background details unless prompted. They accept them as they are. Sometimes, though, I wonder if like Hikari, Eric wonders what I am. I wonder if he does notice all those peculiarities. I wonder if he ignores them because, for all he doesn’t like about me, he likes that I am constant. I don’t bend and tiptoe for him. I don’t offer what I would not have offered him before.
People need that sometimes. They need things to stay the same to make room for what has changed.
“I think I’ll lose her every day,” I say, standing up and laying the Hit List on the counter next to whatever Eric scribbles on. “Every night once her mother goes home, I lie with her and I beg her not to leave me.”
Hikari is no longer tempted by blades of any kind. She barely has the will to be fed by others, let alone the will to feed herself. In the absence of knives, she becomes vegetative. She doesn’t leave her bed unless forced. She can’t be awake more than a few hours at a time. She vomits after every meal. She loses strands of hair before they have a chance to grow.
“Neo’s mother gave me this,” I say, caressing the front page and title of our glorious little notebook. “It’s everything we ever stole.” It’s everything they never got to steal.
“She thanked me,” I say, my voice weakening. I didn’t save Neo. I didn’t save any of them. And yet, “Why did she thank me?”
Eric continues to go through his charts, letting them loudly fall back into their trays as if to accentuate he has no answers to offer me.
The cat that has made a home on this floor hops onto the counter.
Eric ignores her too. With a hooked paw, she plays with his ID badge clipped on the breast pocket of his scrubs. If I thought she was capable, I’d say Hee was trying to cheer him up. At another time, maybe if Sony were still alive, Eric might’ve actually smiled for her.
He doesn’t. He grabs another chart and gets back to work, only now his pen is fresh out of ink. He gets frustrated and scribbles so hard that the tip breaks through the page. His eyes become heavy as if the pen itself has committed a great offense by not working. He tosses it aside and knocks the chart off the table entirely. It clatters, and Eric plants his elbows, pulling at his own hair.
“Eric?”
“Do you know where the word patient comes from?” he asks. “It means the one who suffers. Hospital comes from the word hospes which means stranger. Or guest, depending on how you feel interpreting Latin. I learned that in college. I was on my eighth cup of coffee alone in the medical section of the old library. I sat in a crummy chair praying that I’d pass my finals and right there, in the midst of my privileged struggle, I realized that a newborn baby and a dying old man are both suffering strangers.” His hands descend to his face, forming a prayer bind around his nose. “I realized that I was starting a career in a place where people begin and end their lives.”
Hee meows again, propping herself up on her hind legs to press her paws against Eric’s chest. She nuzzles under his jaw, scratching her head against his stubble.
Erics sighs and pets her.
“I could lie to you, Sam,” he says. “I could tell you that it’s important to be grateful, like Neo’s mom, but I’m not. I’m angry. I’m angry that their doctors didn’t do more. I’m angry that I didn’t do more. I’m angry that kids have to go through this sheer amount of pain and I’m angry they died.”
His voice gains a struggled quality. But rather than throw a pen or capsize a chart or hit something or yell, he crumbles. He takes Sony’s cat into an embrace and stifles a cry into her fur. When she gives a little mewl of protest at his clinginess, his cry turns into a laugh.
“You were all so happy that day on the roof, dancing together,” Eric whispers. He smiles against his hand at the thought. “You have no idea how comforting it was getting your phone calls, catching you sneaking out, stealing, being stupid, and just… being kids.”
I remember the night we all fell asleep under blankets like little yellow hills on the rooftop. Eric must’ve come to tell us to come back inside, but when he saw us in the midst of music and frost, he let us just be.
I used to have an estranged concept of love. I think I tried to give it a face the way I give faces to all things I don’t understand. But from the look on Eric’s face as he remembers Sony dancing, I know for certain that it cannot be stolen.
“Your purpose isn’t saving suffering strangers, Sam.” Eric wipes his eyes. He hugs me and pats my hair, and smiles the way you smile at an old friend. “I hope you know it’s so much more than that.”
Eric doesn’t say anything else. He picks up the chart and pen, putting them neatly back into place. He straightens his ID card and pats down his wrinkled scrubs. As he turns to get back to work, a group of toddlers runs into his legs. The little gowned creatures huddle around him like herding dogs. One of them holds up a picture book, the rest jumping up and down, shrieking and giggling.
“Hey! Slow down! What did I say about running!? Sebastian, stop picking at your mask. Caitlin, Nora, didn’t we already read you this book last week? You didn’t steal it did you? Hey! Sawyer quit kissing Hazel. You’re going to eat her cheek if you keep at it! C’mon, I’m not reading unless everyone takes their medicine without complaining–Did you hear me, Nora? Don’t walk away from me, you little pest. I see you.”
Eric picks up one of the children, bouncing her in his arms once and adjusting the breathing tubes over her cheek and ear.
I smile for Eric. I know he is hurting, but as he leaves to care for his new little band of thieves and doesn’t look back, I know he is content too.
A stale, burrowing sadness lays heavy in my chest when I gaze back at the lonely notebook on the counter. Eric boxed and took home Sony’s clothes and her dirty white sneakers. Coeur’s parents emptied his room and took home his records and tangled earbuds. Neo’s father burned his manuscript and all of his books.
The Hit List is all I have left of them.
I slowly flip to the first page and read the dedication, the raging declaration of war against all those who committed injustice upon us. I can feel Neo’s skinny fingers writing out the words and hear C’s voice orating. I see Sony’s tapping feet as she spun in circles around the notebook, the wind catching her hair and splaying it red against the gray.
I flip to the next page. The words are jumping ship, uneven, scribbled about, with note after note in the margins and a list of things stolen so long it should be kept from the police at all costs.
I smile to myself, remembering when Sony said that once. I flip more pages, reading them all. I laugh at center entries, the time-stamped ones Neo wrote with such vigor, the rather funny entries made by Sony, the rather odd ones made by C.
The last header stares back at me in bold: Our Escape
In the end, they didn’t escape with all they took.
They didn’t get away with it.
They didn’t find their everything.
And their only heaven left to reach was in death.
I don’t realize I am crying until a teardrop hits the page. It soaks into the white and smudged tint of blue and black. I clench my fists over the counter, shutting my eyes so hard they hurt.
Is this it?
Is this what their lives amounted to? Is this the unfair ending that I was told to cry and rage and curse? Is that single day full of tattoos and beaches the in between I am meant to cherish? Did they live only to die? Is love pointless? Is even the only thing that cannot be stolen destined to be lost? Is there anyone, anyone in the world, whether they be human, shadow, enemy, or God, that could answer me?!
I cry silently, staring down at the empty page. I miss them so much it carves through me. I miss Hikari and all the things that make up her soul. I miss being able to fall and knowing I would be caught. I miss the moment we caught her and our embrace on the cold floors of the old cardiology wing that kept out the world.
Hee meows in my face then. I try to pet her, but she shakes me off. She meows again, running across the Hit List, knocking it over and tearing the page with her claws.
“Hee! Careful!” I yell.
I grab the notebook as tenderly as I can, placing it back on the counter like a crying baby in need of attention. I wipe it off and look through the ripped piece. Only, after the torn, tear-ridden page of Our Escape, there isn’t an ensemble of empty sheets like I expected…
A sad string of piano notes sings as it starts to snow. All else becomes blurred. Muffled. Lost to another world. White spots sink in a gray, foggy evening. They cast their light through the glass on a glossy photograph taped to the page.
It’s a polaroid.
Taken by Sony on a sunny day with shrubbery as a background. She extends her arm with a toothy grin, showcasing herself, Neo rolling his eyes beside her, C holding Neo’s hand, and me on the very edge, awkward and stiff. Beneath it, it reads:
Spring.
There is a paragraph under the caption, a messy, albeit legible, marker-written account of what we did that day.
I’m confused at first, my crying stalled. But when I turn the page, there is another.
There is one of Neo and I asleep in the library together. There is another of C trying Sony’s oxygen therapy, the tubes sticking out of his nose as she giggles when he says it feels funny. There is a photo of Neo’s first day in a wheelchair. There’s a photo of his last. There is a picture of C getting an ultrasound of his heart, his tongue sticking out. There is one of Sony hugging me on her first day without oxygen therapy. And there are so many more.
There are song lyrics and book passages and movie lines. There is a leaf, brown and crumpled taped down. There are little drawings and doodles I recognize as Hikari’s all around. There are excerpts from Neo’s stories, the ones I always said were my favorites. There are depictions of the bad days and the good days. There are moments we laughed and moments we cried.
I reach the last page with a trembling hand.
Here, there is no overflowing writing or mess of words. There are no artifacts or lyrics.
There is only a photo of a beautiful girl in a sundress kissing her ordinary lover on a shore. Tucked beneath is the final picture Hikari drew of our friends. And on the other side, just before the notebook shuts, there is a message.
Sam,
Your garden grew and flourished and it was beautiful for a time.
It fell ill and died and its beauty lasts only in memory.
But without you,
Those flowers might’ve never known light.
So to our narrator and dearest friend, thank you
For the memories.
For the goodbyes.
For the Heaven.
The snow continues to fall with the slow rhythm of a sad song. I close our lonely notebook and gaze out with blurry vision at the city I watched grow from the time it was a wilderness.
My tears flow, and yet I smile.
I smile with an open mouth and crush the Hit List to my chest.
I think to myself how lucky I am.
To have known a boy, foul-mouthed and resilient with poetry in the mouth. A girl, brave and brusque, and passionate. A heartful beast, gentle, musical, elsewhere, and above all, kind. An ill-tempered nurse with a sense of duty and care beyond anyone. A girl whose soul I already knew.
She walked into my life through that door, a creaky, loud entrance, bright yellow crowding the darkness of her roots and glasses, too big, too round, perched on the bridge of her nose. When she gave me her everything, and I gave her mine, I fell again.
Although when I look out the window a second time, in the middle of a brewing storm, the empty streets carry a single traveler. A girl whose soul I already know walking across a bridge in nothing but a coat, a hospital gown, and bare feet to mark the snow.
