The Fault in Our Stars

“I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter
Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the honesty with which he had
written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in Amsterdam except to
ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching
question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there
drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn’t
know: Half of marriages end in the year after a child’s death. I looked back at Van Houten.
I was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and asked, “You
had a kid who died?”
“My daughter,” he said. “She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be
beatified.”
“She had leukemia?” I asked. He nodded. “Like Anna,” I said.
“Very much like her, yes.”
“You were married?”
“No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we lost her.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
“Did you live with her?”
“No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York, where I was
living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without
increasing the number of them.”
After a second, I said, “So it’s like you gave her this second life where she got to be a
teenager.”
“I suppose that would be a fair assessment,” he said, and then quickly added, “I
assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem thought experiment?”
“And then I show up at your house and I’m dressed like the girl you hoped she would
live to become and you’re, like, all taken aback by it.”
“There’s a trolley running out of control down a track,” he said.

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“I don’t care about your stupid thought experiment,” I said.
“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”
“Well, hers either,” I said.
“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would
die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she
was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet.
But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that
in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked
me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
After a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”
He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”
I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another novel. Do
the thing you’re good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.”
He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. You’re
right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled out his mostly empty fifth of
whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door. “Good-bye, Hazel.”
“Take it easy, Van Houten.”
He sat down on the curb behind the car. As I watched him shrink in the rearview
mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it looked like he would leave it on the
curb. And then he took a swig.
It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a cloud. It
was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air when the walk from
his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the doorbell, and Gus’s mom answered.
“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.
She made me eat some eggplant lasagna—I guess a lot of people had brought them
food or whatever—with her and Gus’s dad. “How are you?”
“I miss him.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t really know what to say. I just wanted to go downstairs and find whatever
he’d written for me. Plus, the silence in the room really bothered me. I wanted them to be
talking to each other, comforting or holding hands or whatever. But they just sat there
eating very small amounts of lasagna, not even looking at each other. “Heaven needed an
angel,” his dad said after a while.
“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and piled into the
kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and then watched the kids run around the

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kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and movement, excited molecules
bouncing against each other and shouting, “You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I
tagged you you didn’t tag me you missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s
a time-out DANIEL DO NOT CALL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not
allowed to use that word how come you just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then,
chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s parents were
now holding hands, which made me feel better.
“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The kids were
still singing their dumb-butt song.
“We can check his computer,” his mom said.
“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.
“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the basement,
Mark?”
“No idea.”
“Well,” I said, “can I . . .” I nodded toward the basement door.
“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can.”
I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the TV. His
computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it up and then searched for his most
recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most recent thing was a response
paper to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves, looking for
a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through his copy of An Imperial Affliction. He
hadn’t left a single mark in it.
I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem, the ninth sequel to The Price of
Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down.
He’d never made it to the end of the book. “Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,” I said out
loud to him, just in case he could hear me.
And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a
cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better,
breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest
burning until I couldn’t distinguish among the pains.
I sat up in the bed after a while and reinserted my cannula and breathed for a while
before going up the stairs. I just shook my head no in response to his parents’ expectant
looks. The kids raced past me. One of Gus’s sisters—I could not tell them apart—said,
“Mom, do you want me to take them to the park or something?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or
something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by hospice.

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“Hazel,” his dad said, “you were there every day with us. You— he wasn’t alone
much, sweetie. He wouldn’t have had time to write anything. I know you want . . . I want
that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming from above, Hazel.” He
pointed toward the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just above the house. Maybe he was. I
don’t know. I didn’t feel his presence, though.
“Yeah,” I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.
I never quite caught his scent again.

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