Chapter 9:The Birds of Rhode Island
Somehow the night slipped away into morning, and somehow I fell asleep on the bare bed. Birds were calling to each other outside; their voices were like a chorus singing together of sopranos, altos, bases, and tenors. Their soft cries for their partners who may, or may not, be waiting to call back. Out of chance my window took up one of my main walls in my bedroom and the warm sunlight spilled through my shear curtains. My bed lay parallel to the window on the opposite wall and the light spilled over my comforter in a heap on the floor and made designs on the wood floor. I sat up and looked at the walls, bare. The room looked as if it had been barren of an occupant for sometime, even though it was cleaned daily, because there is always certain aspects of a room that will show what kind of person lives in it. Mine, well I wouldn't truly know, but I think it showed what I was…sick. See the only other rooms I've ever really seen, to compare, would be Chelsey's and Karen's. I hadn't been to a sleepover in ages; not if I'd even been invited to one would my mother even have let me go. My walls were pale blue and I had a blue comforter with silver sparkles on it. A white dresser and matching mirror, and a white pair of closets was all I had of a room. Chelsey had a small room to herself because she was the only girl. It had pale pink walls since she was born, a twin sized bed painted white and a small dresser also painted white stored in her closet because there was no other place for it, posters of soccer players and basketball players cover a majority of one wall, and a small desk was tucked in the corner. The green carpet was hideous, but there was nothing that could be done about it and so it stayed. See Chelsey's room showed that she was had siblings. It showed she wasn't rich and that maybe she just didn't care about it anymore, it was just a fact of life, you don't always land in the family you want. Then there was Karen. Karen was an only child and her room showed it. She had a massive bedroom that took up half the upstairs. The purple walls and white curtains to cover the six windows that her room had. She had her own bathroom attached to her room with full double sinks, shower, tub, and toilet. Sea colored tile covered the floor and dazzling gold accents were thrown in randomly in the tile work. She had the best room. The master sweet was the only other room upstairs, and no one went in there anymore. Not since her mom died.
My alarm clock read 11:27 A.M. I'd already slept half the day away. I climbed slowly off the bed and weaved my way around the bedding to my closet. Soundlessly I dressed and fixed my hair. All I had to do was get out of the house. I walked to the door and pulled it open with only a few feeble creaks and squeaks. Then I headed down the hall to the front door and pushed open the glass door, took one step outside and then heard my mother walk out of the kitchen behind me.
"It's Monday, everyone's in school Abby" said her calm voice. "Why don't you just come back inside and eat breakfast".
"I'm not hungry". I said a little to sharply then I meant to. I kept my eyes down, not wanting to turn and look at her.
"You haven't eaten since yesterday morning".
"Chemo doesn't make you hungry".
"Well luckily you're not on chemo anymore".
"But the fact that you're used to throwing up everything is usually a turn off from food".
"Abby just come eat".
"No thanks, I'm not hungry" and with that I walked outside and away. I don't know when things started to go down hill between my mother and I. It was like one day I thought I would die if my mother wasn't there holding my hand every step of the way, and the suddenly the next day, or maybe not that suddenly, I didn't seem to need her. I was pushing her away and blaming her…for everything. Of course that's when reality was setting in. The chemo was supposed to have saved me by this point. I was supposed to be on my way to remission, but all I felt was sicker. All I wanted was to sleep and wake up when it was all over. I wanted to believe that someone was going to jump out from behind a wall with cameras and go "Oh we really pulled your leg on that one. You never had cancer." I wanted that to happen; I wanted it all to be a prank…it never was. I should have foreseen what I was living now; I should have known that the percentage of people who did die from cancer included me. I should have known that I was in the ratio of people who died this weird twist of fate. I should have known that if Kimberly were dead…then I would die too. And they say that knowledge comes with time and that you're suppose to make your mistakes to learn your lessons, but I wasn't given those chances. I wasn't given the choice to screw up. I lived in a bubble for more than a year. I lived in a white, obsessively clean, filtered aired, visitors scrubbed clean environment. I had nurses hovering over me constantly, and doctors checking me every day. They didn't catch my cancer early, and time wasn't a thing, I learned, that you could turn back. They caught my cancer before I became terminal…only to make me…terminal.
They found the cancer shortly after I started complaining about headaches. At first it was shrugged off as being from all the crying after Kim's death. I didn't want to bother my mother who had taken to locking herself in Kim's room, which had been left exactly as she had left it that day. My father threw himself into his work and was never home enough to say more than "good night" to me, which I think pained him to even say, because, even if small, Kimberly and I did share some resemblances. But the headaches got worse. They got to the point where my eyes would water and my head would feel like it was going to explode. I was always nauseous and dizzy. I just remember waking up one night screaming. My eyes feeling like they were being pushed out of my head, and that my brain might actually explode. I remember my mother running into my room and flicking on the light fallowed by my father and seeing them watch me twist in agony on my bed hold my head. I remember the ambulance coming and I remember being put in the back, but then it blanks out, and suddenly I'm in a hospital. Blood tests and a CT scan later I was diagnosed with a level four brain tumor. Which then they proceeded to go in and cut it out. Which showed that it was indeed, to my parent's horror, a metastasized brain tumor and cancer. This also meant that that was not the only tumor. See brain tumors don't metastasize in the brain if they're the only tumor usually. If a tumor is to metastasize in the brain it usually has to have been created from another tumor elsewhere in the body. And the search was on. When they did find it, it was in my right lung. The shortness of breath I had ignored thinking it had been my allergies to mold. That maybe it had recently gotten slightly worse, but once again it was only terrible, looking back now, right around the time Kim died, and I once again turned to too much crying. Radiation and chemo started two days after I entered the hospital that faithful night, and I left home permeably that day too. I became one of those cancer kids. I became a bald cancer victim…just like everyone else on my floor. I lost everything that month. I lost my health, my hope, my school,…my friends,…my twin,… a part of my brain and lung and everything I thought I knew about life so far. I lost…everything. I lived through each day, but I died inside. I felt empty. It didn't matter that I was missing hair or parts of organs; I felt empty because I lost everyone…and everything. I lost Kimberly, when I needed her here the most.
And now, standing outside in the warm Rhode Island sun, the pavement radiating its heat up to my pale skin, I understood the birds as they rang their lonesome calls out to their missing partners…who might, or might not, call back.