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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A
few days later, at Gus’s house, his parents and my parents and Gus and me
all squeezed around the dining room table, eating stuffed peppers on a tablecloth
that had, according to Gus’s dad, last seen use in the previous century.
My dad: “Emily, this risotto . . .”
My mom: “It’s just delicious.”
Gus’s mom: “Oh, thanks. I’d be happy to give you the recipe.”
Gus, swallowing a bite: “You know, the primary taste I’m getting is not-
Oranjee.”
Me: “Good observation, Gus. This food, while delicious, does not taste like
Oranjee.”
My mom: “Hazel.”
Gus: “It tastes like . . .”
Me: “Food.”
Gus: “Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does
not taste, how do I put this delicately . . . ?”
Me: “It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five
dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of
fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down all
around your canal-side dinner table.”
Gus: “Nicely phrased.”
Gus’s father: “Our children are weird.”
My dad: “Nicely phrased.”
A week after our dinner, Gus ended up in the ER with chest pain, and they
admitted him overnight, so I drove over to Memorial the next morning and
visited him on the fourth floor. I hadn’t been to Memorial since visiting Isaac. It
didn’t have any of the cloyingly bright primary color–painted walls or the
framed paintings of dogs driving cars that one found at Children’s, but the
absolute sterility of the place made me nostalgic for the happy-kid bullshit at
Children’s. Memorial was so functional. It was a storage facility. A
prematorium.

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When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, I saw Gus’s mom
pacing in the waiting room, talking on a cell phone. She hung up quickly, then
hugged me and offered to take my cart.
“I’m okay,” I said. “How’s Gus?”
“He had a tough night, Hazel,” she said. “His heart is working too hard. He
needs to scale back on activity. Wheelchairs from here on out. They’re putting
him on some new medicine that should be better for the pain. His sisters just
drove in.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can I see him?”
She put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. It felt weird. “You
know we love you, Hazel, but right now we just need to be a family. Gus agrees
with that. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll tell him you visited.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m just gonna read here for a while, I think.”
She went down the hall, back to where he was. I understood, but I still missed
him, still thought maybe I was missing my last chance to see him, to say good-
bye or whatever. The waiting room was all brown carpet and brown overstuffed
cloth chairs. I sat in a love seat for a while, my oxygen cart tucked by my feet.
I’d worn my Chuck Taylors and my Ceci n’est pas une pipe shirt, the exact outfit
I’d been wearing two weeks before on the Late Afternoon of the Venn Diagram,
and he wouldn’t see it. I started scrolling through the pictures on my phone, a
backward flip-book of the last few months, beginning with him and Isaac outside
of Monica’s house and ending with the first picture I’d taken of him, on the drive
to Funky Bones. It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still
infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
*
Two weeks later, I wheeled Gus across the art park toward Funky Bones with
one entire bottle of very expensive champagne and my oxygen tank in his lap.
The champagne had been donated by one of Gus’s doctors—Gus being the kind
of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to
children. We sat, Gus in his chair and me on the damp grass, as near to Funky
Bones as we could get him in the chair. I pointed at the little kids goading each
other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for
me to hear over the din, “Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the
skeleton.”

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We drank from paper Winnie-the-Pooh cups.

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