It’s a decent song, as sixties songs go. At least it isn’t a knockoff. And not to be the grandchild of hippies but, like a trance, the optimistic thrum of the acoustic guitar sort of hypnotizes me into reaching over, to rip open the foil, and—I guess for old times’ sake—take a giant, careless bite out of the forbidden pizza.
It’s more delicious than a memory can possibly live up to.
See, a memory doesn’t remember the way the congealed tomato sauce comes back to life when you bite into it. The way the greasy crust tastes like sleepovers and inside jokes and curfews. The way the cheese holds it all together.
It’s going to make my stomach hurt, but it’s worth it. It’s pizza. What is life without the occasional risk of pizza?
After I demolish the slice, I switch on my lights, shift into drive, and—without even thinking twice—reach across the seat, pick up the Best Boyfriend award, and use the back of it to wipe off my mouth. Then I’m outtie, past the state’s second-tallest roller coaster and onto the familiar country road. Two songs later, I merge extra-smooth onto the parkway. Usually I suck at yielding, but tonight I nail it, winding the bend toward the underpass, licking my lips into a guilty pizza grin, and holding my breath when I go through the mountain tunnel that always takes me back home.
“There must have been some kind of mistake,” I said.
My clock—one of the old digitals with the red block numbers—read 2:07 a.m. It was so dark outside I couldn’t see the front walk.
“What do you mean?” Mom said absently, as she pulled clothes from my closet. A pair of jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt, socks, shoes. It was summer, and I had woken to sweat pooling on my stomach, so there was no reason for the sweatshirt, but I didn’t mention it to her. I felt like a fish in a tank, blinking slowly at the outsiders peering in.
“A mistake,” I said, again in that measured way. Normally I would have felt weird being around Mom in my underwear, but that was what I had been wearing when I fell asleep on top of my summer school homework earlier that night, and Mom seeing the belly button piercing I had given myself the year before was the least of my worries. “Matt hasn’t talked to me in months. There’s no way he asked for me. He must have been delirious.”
The paramedic had recorded the aftermath of the car accident from a camera in her vest. In it, Matthew Hernandez—my former best friend—had, apparently, requested my presence at the Last Visitation, a rite that had become common practice in cases like these, when hospital analytics suggested a life would end regardless of surgical intervention. They calculated the odds, stabilized the patient as best they could, and summoned the last visitors, one at a time, to connect to the consciousness of the just barely living.
“He didn’t just make the request at the accident, Claire, you know that.” Mom was trying to sound gentle, I could tell, but everything was coming out clipped. She handed me the T-shirt, skimming the ring through my belly button with her eyes but saying nothing. I pulled the T-shirt over my head, then grabbed the jeans. “Matt is eighteen now.”
At eighteen, everyone who wanted to participate in the Last Visitation program—which was everyone, these days—had to make a will listing their last visitors. I wouldn’t do it myself until next spring. Matt was one of the oldest in our class.
“I don’t…” I put my head in a hand. “I can’t…”
“You can say no, if you want.” Mom’s hand rested gently on my shoulder.
“No.” I ground my head into the heel of my hand. “If it was one of his last wishes…”
I stopped talking before I choked.
I didn’t want to share a consciousness with Matt. I didn’t even want to be in the same room as him. We’d been friends once—the closest kind—but things had changed. And now he wasn’t giving me any choice. What was I supposed to do, refuse to honor his will?
“The doctor said to hurry. They do the visitation while they prepare him for surgery, so they only have an hour to give to you and his mother.” Mom was crouched in front of me, tying my shoes, the way she had when I was a little kid. She was wearing her silk bathrobe with the flowers stitched into it. It was worn near the elbows and fraying at the cuffs. I had seen that bathrobe every day since Dad gave it to her for Christmas when I was seven.
“Yeah.” I understood. Every second was precious, like every drop of water in a drought.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you?” she said. I was staring at the pink flower near her shoulder; lost, for a second, in the familiar pattern.
“Yeah,” I said again. “I’m sure.”
* * *
I sat on the crinkly paper, tearing it as I shifted back to get more comfortable. This table was not like the others I had sat on, for blood tests and pelvic exams and reflex tests; it was softer, more comfortable. Designed for what I was about to do.
On the way here I had passed nurses in teal scrubs, carrying clipboards. I passed worried families, their hands clutched in front of them, sweaters balled up over their fists to cover themselves. We became protective at the first sign of grief, hunching in, shielding our most vulnerable parts.
I was not one of them. I was not worried or afraid; I was empty. I had glided here like a ghost in a movie, floating.
Dr. Linda Albertson came in with a thermometer and blood pressure monitor in hand, to check my vitals. She gave me a reassuring smile. I wondered if she practiced it in a mirror, her softest eyes and her gentlest grins, so she wouldn’t make her patients’ grief any worse. Such a careful operation it must have been.
“One hundred fifteen over fifty,” she said, after reading my blood pressure. They always said that like you were supposed to know what the numbers meant. And then, like she was reading my mind, she added, “It’s a little low. But fine. Have you eaten today?”
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “I don’t know. I don’t—it’s the middle of the night.”
“Right.” Her nails were painted sky blue. She was so proper in her starched white coat, her hair pulled back into a bun, but I couldn’t figure out those nails. Every time she moved her hands, they caught my attention. “Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine. This is not a particularly taxing procedure.” I must have given her a look, because she added, “Physically, I mean.”
“So where is he?” I said.
“He’s in the next room,” Dr. Albertson said. “He’s ready for the procedure.”
I stared at the wall like I would develop X-ray vision through sheer determination alone. I tried to imagine what Matt looked like, stretched out on a hospital bed with a pale green blanket over his legs. Was he bruised beyond recognition? Or were his injuries the worse kind, the ones that hid under the surface of the skin, giving false hope?
She hooked me up to the monitors like it was a dance, sky-blue fingernails swooping, tapping, pressing. Electrodes touched to my head like a crown, an IV needle gliding into my arm. She was my lady-in-waiting, adorning me for a ball.
“How much do you know about the technology?” Dr. Albertson said. “Some of our older patients need the full orientation, but most of the time our younger ones don’t.”
“I know we’ll be able to revisit memories we both shared, places we both went to, but nowhere else.” My toes brushed the cold tile. “And that it’ll happen faster than real life.”
“That’s correct. Your brain will generate half the image, and his will generate the other. The gaps will be filled by the program, which determines—by the electrical feedback in your brain—what best completes the space,” she said. “You may have to explain to Matthew what’s happening, because you’re going before his mother, and the first few minutes can be disorienting. Do you think you can do that?”