Going Too Far(36)
Author: Jennifer Echols

A cop car came around the corner. I knew instantly my dad had called the heat on me. I tried to stand up and run, but I was still out of breath. They tackled me and handcuffed me and I struggled and cussed, beyond caring. They drove a few blocks and parked at the emergency room of the hospital. They tried to get me out of the car and I started kicking. They strapped my legs together and picked me up like a sheep going to slaughter. My dad pulled in right behind them. My mom was crying in the passenger seat. I could hear her, even with all the noise of the city I could hear her crying inside the car, and my dad told her to go park the f**king car and he followed us inside. The two cops carried me into the elevator with my dad. Somebody got on the elevator with us, some hapless secretary who had nothing to do with us, somebody you would normally nod to politely when she got on the elevator. Suddenly it struck me as hilarious that I would have this thought about propriety while hanging facedown from two policemen with my hands and feet bound. I giggled. The policemen asked if I could be a good girl and go nicely to my execution now. I started kicking again as best I could, bucking. For the first time in this whole ordeal, I wanted to hurt someone.

We got off on our floor. The cops put me on a stretcher, but they stayed to help hold me while they wheeled me down the hall. All the kids on the ward stopped short in their doorways, wearing their bright pajamas, and watched me pass by cussing. Nurses clumped around us and traveled down the hall with us, shielding the innocents from me. They whispered resistant and uncooperative and noncompliant, which are hospital terms for hysterical brat in room 86. I screamed anything I could think of to make them let me go. I don’t really have cancer. My parents want to kill me. My dad is trying to get rid of me. The nurses hissed anything they could think of to shut me up. You ‘re acting like a three-year-old. You ‘re scaring the other children. We had an autistic kid in here last week who screamed less than you. Trailing after us, the doctor spoke with an Indian accent and a British clip on his words, so different from my dad’s southern drawl, it was like they weren’t even speaking the same language.

Doctor: She’s the borderline age where we’d respect her wishes and counsel her longer, seeking her consent to treatment.

Dad: I know.

Doctor: It’s also the borderline time when if we don’t treat her, she’ll be at high risk of treatment failure no matter what we do later.

Dad: I know.

Doctor: But her chart suggests she is likely to remain combative—

Dad: Look, Doc, I know. Just strap her down and give it to her.

We got to the room and the cops pressed me down on the bed until the nurses could get the tethers around my wrists and ankles. I strained against the bindings until my hands went numb. This wasn’t happening, this couldn’t possibly be the way it ended, but it was. I screamed so loud, I could hardly hear the nurse telling my dad he would need to fill out a form to consent to them restraining me and a form to consent to them sedating me, and maybe he would like to come to the nurse’s station to do that. He left the room. Another nurse whispered calmly in my ear, Sweetie-pie, which hand do you want the IV in? She tried to fool me into thinking I had some choice as she gave me a shot of tranquilizer. Calm down, sweetie-pie, it’ll all be over soon. I felt it right away. They took the restraints off. I thought, I’m free now, but I couldn’t move. It was like the restraints were still there. I went to sleep, and later I woke up dying.

I went willingly to every chemo session after that, and every radiation session, because I didn’t want to be strapped down again. Sometimes my hair would grow back in a sad little way between sessions, and my mom would tell me how pretty I looked, and I would dye my hair purple. And every time I had an adverse reaction and started to die again, I would turn to my dad and say, I told you so.

*

John and I were sitting on the hood of the police car. Actually John was leaning back against the hood with one boot on the pavement and one boot cocked behind him on the bumper. I balanced on the hood, curled into a ball with my knees to my chest, rubbing the back of my left hand where the IV had been. Now that I had blinked back to the present, I kept blinking to stop myself from crying. I did not cry.

John watched me, dark eyes inscrutable. His shoulders rose as he inhaled through his nose. He was about to say something like I am so sorry or I had no idea or even You are a terrible person. In which case I was going to lose it. There was a reason I did not talk about this.

He said, "I feel sorry for the officers on that call."

I laughed and laughed and laughed. This was a good excuse to cry just a little. I kept laughing and wiped the tears from my eyes. "Historically the fuzz loves to see me coming."

He laughed, too, and put one hand up to his eyes. But he looked down and away, and I looked down and away, so I could tell myself his tears were my imagination.

He sniffed. Because he’d turned away, his voice sounded muffled as he said, "Your dad loves you, and he was scared."

I leaned forward and took John’s hand in both of mine. "John, this week, I know you’ve tried to show me I’m living on the edge and I’m not immortal. I get it. But I’ve had cancer, and nothing will ever seem dangerous to me after that. So I would appreciate it if you would just f**king quit." I patted his hand in a friendly way that turned into more of a slap before I let him go. "Anyway, it’s over now."

He gazed down at his abused hand. "Is it?"

"Well, sure. It was worse than your garden-variety childhood leukemia because I was pretty old when I got it. It could come back. But probably not."

"I mean, it’s not over in your mind. You’re still on that table, strapped down, with an IV in your hand."

Watching the gold police badge glint as his chest rose and fell, I stroked my fingers down a lock of my hair. It surprised me, how long it had gotten. When I flipped it in front of my eyes to examine it, I was surprised again that it was blue.

"So, what happened after that in the hospital?" John asked. "You came to terms with it."

" I wouldn’t go that far."

"You became a role model for the ward."

"Uh, no."

"But the other kids hung out in your room." I looked up at him. "Yes! It was like Grand Central freaking Station in there. How’d you know?" "And you survived."

"Yeah, and some other kids there didn’t. My roommate died." As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I’d stepped off the path I walked down every day and put one foot in crap. I had no intention of ruining my magical last night of incarceration with John remembering Lizzie Dark, who was ten years old. whose parents brought her golden retriever to visit her on the ward every Sunday afternoon, and who always beat me at gin.