If I Stay

“Miss Ramirez,” the grumpy nurse at the desk scolds. “You have patients of your own to deal with. Let’s get this young woman intubated and transferred to the OR. That will do her more good than all this dillydallying around!”

The nurses work rapidly to detach the monitors and catheters and run another tube down my throat. A pair of orderlies rush in with a gurney and heave me onto it. I’m still naked from the waist down as they hustle me out, but right before I reach the back door, Nurse Ramirez calls, “Wait!” and then gently closes the hospital gown around my legs. She taps me three times on the forehead with her fingers, like it’s some kind of Morse code message. And then I’m gone into the maze of hallways leading toward the OR for another round of cutting, but this time I don’t follow myself. This time I stay behind in the ICU.

I am starting to get it now. I mean, I don’t totally fully understand. It’s not like I somehow commanded a blood vessel to pop open and start leaking into my stomach. It’s not like I wished for another surgery. But Teddy is gone. Mom and Dad are gone. This morning I went for a drive with my family. And now I am here, as alone as I’ve ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it’s supposed to be. This is not how my life is supposed to turn out.

In the quiet corner of the ICU I start to really think about the bitter things I’ve managed to ignore so far today. What would it be like if I stay? What would it feel like to wake up an orphan? To never smell Dad smoke a pipe? To never stand next to Mom quietly talking as we do the dishes? To never read Teddy another chapter of Harry Potter? To stay without them?

I’m not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I’m not sure that I want to wake up.

I’ve only ever been to one funeral in my life and it was for someone I hardly knew.

I might have gone to Great-Aunt Glo’s funeral after she died of acute pancreatitis. Except her will was very specific about her final wishes. No traditional service, no burial in the family plot. Instead, she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in a sacred Native American ceremony somewhere in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Gran was pretty annoyed by that, by Aunt Glo in general, who Gran said was always trying to call attention to how different she was, even after she was dead. Gran ended up boycotting the ash scattering, and if she wasn’t going, there was no reason for the rest of us to.

Peter Hellman, my trombonist friend from conservatory camp, he died two years ago, but I didn’t find out until I returned to camp and he wasn’t there. Few of us had known that he’d had lymphoma. That was the funny thing about conservatory camp; you got so close with the people over the summer, but it was some unwritten rule that you didn’t keep in touch during the rest of the year. We were summer friends. Anyhow, we had a memorial concert at camp in Peter’s honor, but it wasn’t really a funeral.

Kerry Gifford was a musician in town, one of Mom and Dad’s people. Unlike Dad and Henry, who as they got older and had families became less music performers than music connoisseurs, Kerry stayed single and stayed faithful to his first love: playing music. He was in three bands and he earned his living doing the sound at a local club, an ideal setup because at least one of his bands seemed to play there every week, so he just had to hop up on the stage and let someone take the controls for his set, though sometimes you’d see him jumping down in the middle of a set to adjust the monitors himself. I had known Kerry when I was little and would go to shows with Mom and Dad and then I sort of remet him when Adam and I got together and I started going to shows again.

He was at work one night, doing the sound for a Portland band called Clod, when he just keeled over on the soundboard. He was dead by the time the ambulance got there. A freak brain aneurysm.

Kerry’s death caused an uproar in our town. He was kind of fixture around here, an outspoken guy with a big personality and this mass of wild white-boy dreadlocks. And he was young, only thirty-two. Everyone we knew was planning on going to his funeral, which was being held in the town where he grew up, in the mountains a couple of hours’ drive away. Mom and Dad were going, of course, and so was Adam. So even though I felt a little bit like an impostor crashing someone’s death day, I decided to go along. Teddy stayed with Gran and Gramps.