In the corner, I can make out the bulky outline of the new robo-technology wheelchair, creepy in its emptiness. It even has a robotic arm that Matt is eventually supposed to be able to use to pick up basic items, but he hasn’t learned how yet.
“Matt?” I hiss through the darkness, careful of where I step. No answer. “Matt?” I tiptoe to the far side of his bed, where the open curtains allow a trickle of moonlight to paint swatches of his bed sheets silver. It’s still quiet. The lumpy form under the covers doesn’t move. I place my hands gently on his chest and shake him. Matt still doesn’t move. “Matt, wake up.”
“What, Lake?” I can’t tell whether his voice sounds groggy or not.
I draw back my hand and clam up. I remember a time when I was only five or six and Matt had the flu. Mom didn’t want me catching it, so she kept shooing me from his room, but I had painted him a picture that I wanted him to have. So I snuck in when she was doing laundry, only for some reason when I got there, I became deathly shy all of a sudden and dropped the picture on his lap and ran. I glance at it still pinned to the wall behind Matt’s desk and try to be brave. This time I can’t catch what Matt has, but it’s so much worse.
“It’s me. Lake,” I say, when saying something becomes preferable to saying nothing at all.
A small laugh.
“I had to come see you,” I say.
“Oh.” His voice is a whisper in the dark.
“I’m going to crawl up. Hang on.” I have to push past the awkwardness before literally pushing him to the side. The bed is taller than I’m used to. He has a mattress that mechanically raises and lowers now, the same as the ones in hospitals. His legs and arms are floppy when I move them, but after some grunts and groans on my part I’ve made enough room to nestle in beside him.
We both just lie there for I don’t know how long. For some reason I thought his body would feel cold and dead and am relieved to find that it’s warm next to mine.
“Does it hurt?” I ask at last.
He grunts. “Sometimes.”
“Like…where?”
A pause. “Like, everywhere.”
“Matt.” I turn onto my side. The mattress creaks beneath my weight. “Nobody will tell me what happened. Mom and Dad keep treating me like a little kid or something.”
He sighs an impatient Why are you here? sigh. “What do you think happened, Lake?”
“You had an accident.” This is the only thing I know. Matt’s paralyzed. He won’t recover. We have to take care of him now. That’s all my parents told me. End of story.
“I…fell.”
“Doing what?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
He sighs again. Why is he so annoyed with me already? “Out of a tree, Lake. I fell from a tree.”
I swallow so hard, I know that we can both hear it. Matt must feel dumb for falling out of a tree and that must be the reason he sounds so irritated, not because of me, I tell myself.
“It’s going to be okay.” I put my hand on his hand, but I’m not sure whether he can feel it. I hadn’t thought to look that part up.
“Easy for you to say.” He lets out an angry laugh I haven’t heard before.
I’m hurt, wounded, but I try to think of the stupid tree, not myself. Matt will be okay. Maybe not in the way he wants to, but he will be. He has me. I push closer to him until it feels like our sides are sewn together and we could be one person.
“You know they were trying to cure paralysis?” Matt says out loud, even though I’m not sure he’s really talking to me. But then again, who else would he be talking to?
I hadn’t considered this possibility. “They will!” I say excitedly. “Of course they will.”
“No. When they discovered the vitalis process. It was an accident. They were trying to cure paralysis. How fucked up is that?” I’ve never heard my brother say the F-word. “They thought, ‘Hey, if we can just regenerate the cells in the disabled nerves, then whoop-dee-doo, we’ll be able to get a body working again.’”
We don’t get to study resurrections until eighth grade, and everyone has a different opinion about them, so my parents say it’s not something I should bring up in polite conversation, like politics and religion. “But…doesn’t it regenerate dead cells?” I venture, confused.
“Sure.” There’s the angry laugh again. “But it doesn’t stop there, it spreads and regenerates every fucking cell it touches until it’s wiped the whole body. Kills the live ones, cures the dead ones. Hooray for science.”
I don’t know what to say. I think what Matt needs is time. And hope. And probably me. I shimmy to a sitting position, excited that I came equipped with my very own distraction. “Guess what? We’re not finished with The Chocolate War,” I interject.
“Lake, I can’t read it to you.”
“Sure you can.” I reach over and flip on the lamp. I hear Matt wince. He squeezes his eyes shut. Without meaning to, I let out a small gasp. A catheter bag filled with Matt’s urine is sitting on the other side of the bed from me. There’s no way Matt can cover it himself. More than that, he looks pale, with deep grooves cut into the hollows of his eyes. His hair is greasy. My voice rasps. “Nothing’s wrong with your eyes, Matt.”
He opens them and stares up at the ceiling. “I said that I can’t.”
“Fine.” I split the spine open to the dog-eared page. “Then I’ll read it to you.”
“I didn’t invite you in here.” There’s a snap to his tone that stops me cold, mouth open, ready to begin the first word of chapter twenty-five. “You just busted in.”
“Yeah, because Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me in to see you.”
“It wasn’t Mom and Dad, Lake.”
“But—” His meaning dawns on me too late.
“I didn’t want to see you.” My mouth goes dry. “There’s nothing you can do to help. There’s nothing anyone can do to help. I’d be better off if…if I were dead.” He chokes on the word. “Now can you please…Can you please just get out, Lake? You’re annoying me. Don’t you get that? I’m tired right now. I just…I just want to be alone.”
There are no words. I try to tell myself that this is just the dumb tree talking. That Matt will get over it. He’ll have time to heal on the inside and things will be different. Quietly, I close my book and slide off the bedside.
And as surely as I tell myself that Matt needs time, I know that my heart has already begun to fracture—irreparably—just like his spine.