If I Stay

He strummed chords across the top of my chest, which tickled and made me laugh. He gently brushed his hands, moving farther down. I stopped giggling. The tuning fork intensified—its vibrations growing every time Adam touched me somewhere new.

After a while he switched to more of a Spanish-style, fingerpicking type of playing. He used the top of my body as the fret board, caressing my hair, my face, my neck. He plucked at my chest and my belly, but I could feel him in places his hands were nowhere near. As he played on, the energy magnified; the tuning fork going crazy now, firing off vibrations all over, until my entire body was humming, until I was left breathless. And when I felt like I could not take it one more minute, the swirl of sensations hit a dizzying crescendo, sending every nerve ending in my body on high alert.

I opened my eyes, savoring the warm calm that was sweeping over me. I started to laugh. Adam did, too. We kissed for a while longer until it was time for him to go home.

As I walked him out to his car, I wanted to tell him that I loved him. But it seemed like such a cliché after what we’d just done. So I waited and told him the next day. “That’s a relief. I thought you might just be using me for sex,” he joked, smiling.

After that, we still had our problems, but being overly polite with each other wasn’t one of them.

4:39 P.M.

I have quite the crowd now. Gran and Gramps. Uncle Greg. Aunt Diane. Aunt Kate. My cousins Heather and John and David. Dad is one of five kids, so there are still lots more relatives out there. Nobody is talking about Teddy, which leads me to believe that he’s not here. He’s probably still at the other hospital, being taken care of by Willow.

The relatives gather in the hospital waiting room. Not the little one on the surgical floor where Gran and Gramps were during my operation, but a larger one on the hospital’s main floor that is tastefully decorated in shades of mauve and has comfy chairs and sofas and magazines that are almost current. Everyone still talks in hushed tones, as if being respectful of the other people waiting, even though it’s only my family in the waiting room. It’s all so serious, so ominous. I go back into the hallway to get a break.

I’m so happy when Kim arrives; happy to see the familiar sight of her long black hair in a single braid. She wears the braid every day and always, by lunchtime, the curls and ringlets of her thick mane have managed to escape in rebellious little tendrils. But she refuses to surrender to that hair of hers, and every morning, it goes back into the braid.

Kim’s mother is with her. She doesn’t let Kim drive long distances, and I guess that after what’s happened, there’s no way she’d make an exception today. Mrs. Schein is red-faced and blotchy, like she’s been crying or is about to cry. I know this because I have seen her cry many times. She’s very emotional. “Drama queen,” is how Kim puts it. “It’s the Jewish-mother gene. She can’t help it. I suppose I’ll be like that one day, too,” Kim concedes.

Kim is so the opposite of that, so droll and funny in a low-key way that she’s always having to say “just kidding” to people who don’t get her sarcastic sense of humor, that I cannot imagine her ever being like her mother. Then again, I don’t have much basis for comparison. There are not a lot of Jewish mothers in our town or that many Jewish kids at our school. And the kids who are Jewish are usually only half, so all it means is that they have a menorah alongside their Christmas trees.

But Kim is really Jewish. Sometimes I have Friday-night dinner with her family when they light candles, eat braided bread, and drink wine (the only time I can imagine neurotic Mrs. Schein allowing Kim to drink). Kim’s expected to only date Jewish guys, which means she doesn’t date. She jokes that this is the reason her family moved here, when in fact it was because her father was hired to run a computer-chip plant. When she was thirteen, she had a bat mitzvah at a temple in Portland, and during the candlelighting ceremony at the reception, I got called up to light one. Every summer, she goes to Jewish sleepaway camp in New Jersey. It’s called Camp Torah Habonim, but Kim calls it Torah Whore, because all the kids do all summer is hook up.

“Just like band camp,” she joked, though my summer conservatory program is nothing like American Pie.

Right now I can see Kim is annoyed. She’s walking fast, keeping a good ten feet between her and her mother as they march down the halls. Suddenly her shoulders go up like a cat that’s just spied a dog. She swerves to face her mother.

“Stop it!” Kim demands. “If I’m not crying, there’s no fucking way you’re allowed to.”

Kim never curses. So this shocks me.

“But,” Mrs. Schein protests, “how can you be so . . .” —sob—“so calm when—”

“Cut it out!” Kim interjects. “Mia is still here. So I’m not losing it. And if I don’t lose it, you don’t get to!”