Chapter 43: Elephants in Rooms

Friday, November 15, 1985

Besides trying to focus on exams — very important, since I had one today! — I spent some time making sure my head was right for my date tonight. Amy wasn’t Darla, not at all. I had some guesses as to who Amy might be, but they were still merely guesses. She was the least transparent girl I’d dated since Jess, and the two of them might be in competition with each other. Jess had always known who she was inside, or at least who she mostly was. I wasn’t sure Amy understood herself nearly as well.

That didn’t mean Amy and I might not wind up in a chase, or simply in bed, but it was extremely unlikely to happen tonight. That would have been true anyway, but my guess was that tonight was going to be about hospitals and what might have happened to, or around, Amy in one.

Not a good chasing topic, but potentially a very good peeling-back-a-layer topic.

As I had before, I went with a darker look than I would have for most dates: gray shirt, black slacks, black shoes and socks. I didn’t do ‘goth,’ or even close, but this would complement most things I thought Amy might wear.

I arrived at her dorm room right on time. As I’d expected, she was ready to go when I knocked. The usual dating games were probably a bit lost on Amy. She wore a similar outfit to the one she’d worn to the hospital: a dark purple t-shirt, black skirt, somewhat lighter purple stockings, a black studded collar and cuffs, and black chunky flat platform shoes that gave her at least an inch or two of extra height. She was also wearing silver earrings. Ankhs, which I found quite interesting.

When I simply offered her my arm without hesitation, she gave me a little smile and took it.

“Not too much for you?” she said, flicking her eyes downward.

“It looks like you. That’s good for me,” I said.

“You...” she said. “Are unusual. But, then, I am also unusual, so ... perhaps that is why we are doing this.”

“Perhaps so.”

That ended all conversation until we got to the car. Once I’d helped her in (no hand on the ass this time!) and gotten in myself, I said, “I didn’t make any set dinner plan. I thought you might like something simple like Chinese buffet, but if you don’t...”

“Chinese sounds good!” she said, smiling. “It’s been a favorite since I went to college. My parents ... they don’t do that.”

I got the car moving, and said, “My parents didn’t either. Angie and I had to nudge. We wound up starting with dim sum.”

“I have not had dim sum. It sounds very interesting, from what I have heard, though.”

“We were in Chicago — my Dad is from there, and so is Angie — and it was easy to get to Chinatown and find a place.”

She shifted and said, “Wait. Angie is from Chicago? I thought she was your sister.”

I chuckled and said, “It makes sense that you haven’t heard the explanation. Angie was, and I guess still is, my cousin. Her father was my father’s brother. He passed away in 1979, and Angie’s mother proved incapable of caring for her, so she moved to Houston in 1980. My parents adopted her as soon as they were allowed to, so she’s been my sister for over five years.”

“Oh,” she said, in a monotone. In anyone else, that would have been between underwhelming and startling, but it was just the way Amy talked. “That is fascinating. It makes sense, but I have never heard of anything like that.”

“We haven’t either. The best part was, we just ... clicked. There were never any real fights or tension. I didn’t feel displaced, she didn’t feel like she needed to compete, and ... whatever. Maybe it helps that I’m also adopted? I hate to fall back on that, because that sounds like Mom and Dad were different because I am and I don’t think that’s the case, but ... well, maybe.”

She nodded, then said, “I used to wish I was adopted. I love my parents, but I do not understand them and they do not understand me. It might be easier to simply feel as if we were only connected by their having raised me. Instead, I have to wonder where things went ... differently ... with me.”

“Being different isn’t bad,” I said. “It’s something that makes life interesting.”

She snorted a bit. I’d already noticed that some of her few real emotional signs — at least, ones I thought came naturally to her — were little snorts and scoffs and the like.

“It is bad for them. They wish I was not different, and it is ... stressful ... when I show myself to be. Which ... is much of the time. I do not think they mean anything bad for me. They want good things for me, and being different gets in the way of many things. But they wish to change me in ways I cannot change and be myself.”

“Think of them as Tiffany?” I said, making sure to get her name right.

Amy snorted even louder.

“I have thought of that, yes. Repeatedly. She, and they, care about how one appears, not how one is. In very different ways, though. They are ... much less shallow than she is.”

I looked over to her, and said, “Appearances can matter, though.”

“Oh?”

I looked her up and down and said, “Case in point.”

She blushed a little (another sign I’d seen before) and said, “I ... see. You ... have a point. I think of it as ... I am ... prickly ... on the inside at times. It helps to look prickly on the outside, too.”

“Are you really prickly, though?” I said. “Or are you prickly because people can be mean?”

She shifted a little, looking thoughtful.

“I ... do not know. Probably ... more ... the latter.”

After a second, she added, “I think this is an unusual date conversation.”

“We already agreed that we are both unusual people.”

“Touché,” she said, smiling a bit.

I pulled up to the Chinese restaurant. That ended our conversation for now. Between getting a table, ordering drinks (hot tea, for both of us), and getting food, we had plenty to do.

I noticed that she and I were similar, picking small portions of a wide variety of foods. We could have exchanged plates with neither of us feeling slighted, though her portions were a bit smaller than mine. She was a smaller person, though, so that made plenty of sense. Not tiny, but smaller than me. Bigger than Jas, though, and at least comparable with Paige, if I was judging her shoes’ contribution to her height properly.

After a bit, she sighed and said, “I ... am guessing you are ... curious. About the hospital, I mean.”

“Quite curious, and thank you for bringing it up.”

She shrugged a little. “It is the elephant in the room.”

“It is.”

She sighed again.

“I ... did not want to go. But I wanted you to be ... to not be sick. Which ... surprised me. I still ... part of me is still ... I said...”

She looked more than a little flustered. I jumped in and said, gently, “You came to a logical conclusion. It was wrong, but you were missing key information. Unusual information. It’s not the first time someone has guessed wrong about me, and I’m good at understanding and moving past that.”

She nodded a little.

“Still ... dating...”

“Is fun, and a good excuse to talk.”

That got a little smile.

“Touché, again.”

“Back to what you were saying...?”

She sighed, then took a bite of an egg roll. I thought it was a very conscious move to delay speaking, but it worked.

Once she finished off the egg roll, she said, “I do not like hospitals. People die there.”

“People also recover there, but ... yes. They do.”

“I did not want to go. But ... I did not want you to die. And the right thing to do when someone is sick is to go see them and tell them you do not want them to die and you hope they recover quickly.”

Her phrasing was interesting, and I wanted to pursue it, but it felt like a topic for later. Instead, I said, “Something happened.”

She sighed.

“I ... said I would talk about it later.”

“You don’t have to.”

She shrugged a little, and said, “No. I think ... I do need to. It seems as if I trust you, which is surprising, considering ... history. I am not sure why, exactly, but I do.”

“Flattering. Thank you,” I said.

She gave me a little smile.

“When I was young, I had a friend. Her name was Cindy. We were good friends in kindergarten and well into elementary school. That was...”

She paused, then added, “She was ... important to me. I did not have many friends.”

I nodded quietly, listening. Where this was going seemed obvious, but the path along the way? Not at all.

“She ... became sick. At first it was headaches, then seizures. Over time, it became ... bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

She gave me a look, but whatever she saw in my face seemed to please her.

“Not everyone who says that means it,” she said.

I nodded, smiling softly.

“Cindy went into the hospital, and then she came out. Then she went back in. She got behind in school, but I helped her catch up. Then she would fall behind again. Eventually...”

She sighed a bit.

“Eventually, they decided she had a type of glioma. Brain cancer. There were treatments, and they tried them, and sometimes they thought it was working. And then it didn’t.”

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“I visited a lot. She was my friend. Her mother was almost always there, too. On one of my trips, her mother had been there for hours. She was hungry, and I said I would sit with Cindy, because of course I would. I did that all of the time.”

This was not sounding good.

“Cindy and I talked, and then...”

She took a deep breath, and a few tears appeared on her cheeks. Not many, but ... enough.

“Cindy said she saw stars. That ... she saw things sometimes. We talked about the stars a bit. Then she said they were turning into a bright light, and ... the light was calling to her. And then ... she just ... died.”

“Saying I’m sorry isn’t nearly enough,” I said, softly, and took her hand. I wasn’t sure if she consciously realized it, but she squeezed my hand back tightly, anyway.

“There were alarms. Nurses came, and doctors. They tried to revive her, but she was gone,” Amy said. “Cindy’s mother came back. She yelled at the doctors, and then she yelled at me, and ... when it was all over, we couldn’t talk to each other any more.”

“That’s awful,” I said, still holding her hand.

She sighed.

“I have never liked hospitals since, because ... something awful could happen. Awful things happen. Sometimes they happen unexpectedly. And ... I do not like it when people die. Some people say I am obsessed with death, but ... I mean what I say. I am happy when people do not die. But I know they do. We all do. Thus ... it matters that they have not, yet.”

I squeezed her hand. She seemed to consciously realize we were holding hands and almost flinched away, then abruptly shifted to nearly clinging to my hand.

“Have you been around anyone who died?” she asked.

I had to ponder that. The real answer was ‘yes,’ in more ways than I could possibly share now. I couldn’t justify that with a story I could share, though, so I said, “No, not really.”

“I...” she said. Then she stopped.

“What were you going to say?” I asked after a little wait.

“Do you believe in life after death?” she asked, looking a little shy.

“Not in the way most religions teach, exactly, but yes. I think it’s likely that there is life after death.”

She sighed a bit, smiling, and squeezed my hand.

“As Cindy was ... going ... I felt like I heard her, just briefly. Her lips did not move, but I heard her say that she was going to be all right. I ... believe that. That whatever happened, she was ... is ... all right.”

“Then I will believe she is all right, too,” I said.

She gave me a somewhat bigger smile.

“You are not the person I thought you were.”

“Oh?”

Giving a little shrug, she said, “First, you were dating Claire. You were polite to me, which ... not everyone is, but you were dating Claire, and Claire has been nice to me. So that made sense. And then, you were nice enough at Hullabaloo, but there were the girls. And ... I guessed wrong, but then ... well, what sort of guy dates multiple girls?”

“So, I was something of a playboy.”

She laughed, just a bit.

“A good word. Perhaps you are, but ... if so, an honorable one.”

“I can go with that.”

She leaned forward a little, and said, “Tell me. Are we dating, or are we merely having some nice meals and good conversation?”

“Would you date something of a playboy?” I asked.

She blushed a tiny bit, but almost smirked.

“Perhaps I deserve that. I ... would not have. But an honorable playboy? I ... might.”

“For me, I don’t think the two sorts of dating are mutually exclusive. You told me a story. Yours is very personal. I’ll tell you a story, which is rather public but also quite personal.”