Anxious

My eleven-year-old niece calls me once a week, on average, to ask if she can come live with me if her parents and older brother are killed. We don’t live in a war zone, or even a big city; the nearest thing to us anyone would recognize on a map is Sioux Falls, and that’s an hour away, and as far as I know nobody is out to get Sioux Falls. But my niece knows that people can die anytime, anyplace. Her thin skin prickles at the thought of it. So she plans. She is okay living with her older brother if he is not killed. Simon is seventeen, and he would certainly be capable of keeping her alive and clothed and enrolled in school, if it came to that. But in her worst-case scenarios, Simon is killed too, all of them are killed, usually in a fiery car crash, but sometimes in other ways.

One of the worst, she tells me, is the carbon monoxide leak, because she is the one to find the bodies. In the carbon monoxide leak, they all die in their beds one night, and only Liz is spared because of some freak arrangement of the furnace vents. She awakens to a strangely silent house and creeps to her parents’ open door: they are still as stones, their skin waxy and their eyes staring, and a silent scream sticks in her throat. She forces herself to approach Simon’s room, even though my sister, Shellice, Liz’s mother, has strongly advised that she leave the house and go next door to the Jordans at this point. Simon is splayed on his back, one arm half off the bed, mouth open but eerily silent, and she knows he is dead too. She manages to get herself downstairs and out the front door, and at that point the screams come. The police find her rolling hysterically on the lawn, this slight, dark-haired girl in a Vikings night shirt, and she is taken to a mental ward and drugged until after the funerals.

At which point, I pick her up from the mental ward, and she comes to live with me.

Perfect, Shellice said to her once. You and Aunt Marcy will have mac and cheese from a box every night of the week. You’ll never again have to eat food that isn’t fluorescent. But Liz is rarely in the mood for jokes when she’s just unburdened herself of another scenario. Shellice tries to be serious, to respond with rational explanations, but eventually, inevitably, she veers off into a joke. We’re not going to die in a carbon monoxide leak; Daddy checks the carbon monoxide detector on a regular basis. Simon is a strong swimmer or they wouldn’t let him be a lifeguard, and anyway I’ve never heard of a lifeguard drowning in the presence of five other lifeguards at a public swimming pool the size of a postage stamp. The house will never burn down because Daddy and I take turns roaming the house at night, sniffing for smoke and checking the wiring. Well, I do think I’m funny, and someday you will too.

You talk to her, Shellice finally said, about six months ago, and I didn’t need to ask why. Everyone in the family believes that Liz inherited this from me, the anxious gene making its way crabwise from aunt to niece. Nothing Liz says seems that weird to me, although we worry about slightly different things. She worries about death and public humiliation and terrorists releasing a computer virus that shuts down all e-mail forever; I worry about death and public humiliation and Amazon taking over the world so I can’t even go to a store to buy books and pants and things but have to do everything online. She worries about everyone she loves dying, and I worry about never really mattering because I’m not married and am not the nucleus of anyone’s world. These are big differences, but we speak the same language. So now whenever Liz gets off on one of her worry jags, Shellice hands her the phone and makes her call me. I have my own approach to these things.

If there’s a carbon monoxide leak and the detector doesn’t go off, you’ll wake up vomiting. Then you’ll open some windows, drag your unconscious family members down the stairs and out the front door—adrenalin gives you strength—and then shriek hysterically for help. If it’s too late? You’ll come live with me. We’ll be devastated, but we’ll buy a horse with some of the insurance money. You’ll make us mac and cheese out of a box whenever you want, except on Fridays, which is pizza night.

After these conversations I hang up and reward myself with a nice salty snack—pretzels, or slices of dried beef wrapped around garlicky dill pickles—and turn on a movie, any movie. It takes it out of me, talking her through these scenarios, even though I understand exactly how she feels. Because I understand exactly how she feels. But I am happy to be of use. I am not usually the most useful person in the family. I don’t know the things Shellice knows, like how many pounds of turkey to buy per person or how to sew the antlers on a moose costume. And I don’t make a bucket-load of money like my oldest brother Jason, who sends everyone expensive hams and cheeses for Christmas. I am short and fat and I think we are all just relieved that I am gainfully employed at the Brookings Plant Nursery because there is no sign that Mr. Right will be galloping over the horizon anytime soon. But so far I am the only one who thinks to tell Liz that if an ax murderer creeps into their house, all she has to do is set fire to her bedroom curtains —the fire department has bigger axes than anyone. If it’s too late for the others, she will come live with me, and we’ll get a second horse to keep the first horse company and go riding together. We’ll spend every vacation on an island, because Liz likes the idea of islands.

Eventually we buy our own island. This is just after Shellice and Carl and Simon drown in a boating accident on Lake Campbell. It’s a modest island, but it’s all ours, and we agree to keep things simple, with just one helicopter pad. That seems safer to both of us than a landing strip.

Then Carl and Simon are both shot while deer hunting, and Shellice literally dies of grief at the double funeral, so Liz and I put up a slightly larger house on our island than originally planned. We add on one of those home theater rooms for a widescreen plasma HDTV, although mostly we are into outdoor activities on this island. The horses have a lovely paddock which they rarely use because the emerald hills are perfect for grazing. There is a small natural waterfall that fills a clear pool lined with sparkling granite and pink quartz, and we swim there. Sometimes we sit in the sun on the mossy banks. Once a month the helicopter brings a supply of boxed mac and cheese and other groceries. Liz studies in the morning and hands in her homework via computer, and I spend a good deal of time discovering new varieties of tropical orchids.

Then Shellice and Carl die when a terrorist flies a small plane into their house, and Simon lingers in the burn unit of the hospital before succumbing to a slow, painful death. (This terrorist, I ask Liz, what does he know about Brookings that the rest of us don’t?) Liz decides that a soda fountain is in order, because why not, and she calls me back five minutes later because she thinks I should have a greenhouse. I am touched, and tell her so.

I tell Shellice on the sly that she and Carl had better up their life insurance.

Liz imagines a new horror: becoming the only girl in the history of Brookings Middle School to get her period while receiving the Citizen of the Month award in front of the whole school. She does not spot her panties lightly; she gushes like a slit artery, flooding her white capris and actually making the stage slippery. She doesn’t die but she wants to. I advise: don’t wear white capris to the awards ceremony, wear black denim, and if that doesn’t work, let’s think about whether we need a rollerblading path around the perimeter of our island. I may be fat but years of ice skating les-sons have made me the most graceful thing on blades.

Saturdays are open pit barbeque night on the island, for which we fly in friends. Liz invites her best friend Sara and the boy she likes, whose name she won’t tell me, and I invite Gordon, the assistant manager at work. He is stocky and has large square hands that look clumsy but can pluck renegade seedlings with the grace of a harpist, and after dinner I take him on a tour of the poinsettias that grow like weeds all over our island. He is enchanted by the poinsettias, by the skill with which I find new varieties of orchid, and by my understated but undeniable attractions.

I have never been so wonderful in my life.

Liz has not slept so well in months.

I lose weight.

Shellice, Carl, and Simon all choke to death while eating junior mints at a movie starring Angelina Jolie. I tell her I don’t think you can actually choke on junior mints, because they’re so melty, but maybe they could be eating chocolate-covered peanuts. We install skylights in every ceiling and clarify that we each have our own cell phones.

Then Sara invites Liz to attend an overnight retreat sponsored by the youth group at her church, and Kara, the wife half of the husband-wife leadership team, draws Liz out the next morning while everyone else is distracted making their own breakfast banana splits. Kara is adored by every girl who has ever been near this youth group, all of whom now long to have red hair, freckles, a raspy alto voice, large breasts, and a long, lanky stride, not to mention a cute, adoring husband. Kara has not talked to Liz for five minutes before Liz shyly admits that she barely slept the night before because she was worrying that her family was home dying of a carbon monoxide leak. Kara nods throughout this disclosure; it is a scary world, she says, and she tells Liz how she used to worry that her parents would die in a car crash. But God doesn’t ever want you to be afraid, she says. Just tell him when you’re afraid, and then thank him in advance for taking care of everything.

That night, back home in her own bed, there’s another carbon monoxide leak. Liz remembers Kara’s words. Liz tells God that she’s afraid of a carbon monoxide leak. She asks him to spare her and her family, and to help her to sleep unafraid. Then she thanks him for sparing their lives—surprised at her own boldness, but bolstered by the thought of Kara’s red, red hair. Miraculously, she goes to sleep right away and sleeps through the night. She calls me the next morning to tell me this. She has faith! she says. She asked God for something, and he granted it. I tell her this is wonderful, and ask if we should build a small chapel on our island. She manages a weak laugh and tells me about the youth group’s next trip: indoor rock climbing at Garret’s Sports in Sioux Falls. Kara has been rock climbing since she was Liz’s age.

While Liz is traveling back from Sioux Falls in the youth group van, Shellice and Carl are ground to death in a grisly accident with the neighbor’s riding mower. She tells this to Kara in the back seat, who prays with her. Kara thanks God for protecting Liz’s family from harm. Liz returns home to find that Shellice and Carl are alive and well, and even Simon has failed to die, although he reports having cut himself shaving. Liz calls Kara because she promised to tell her how it all turned out, and then she watches American Idol with Shellice and Carl and goes to bed. She doesn’t get around to telling me until the next day.

I admit I’m a little jealous.

That month God graciously refrains from striking Liz’s parents with lightning, flattening the house with a tornado, and allowing strychnine into the family’s water supply. Shellice tells me that Liz actually laughed a little when she admitted to that last one; isn’t it a great sign that she can laugh about it? It certainly is, I say, meaning it. That’s better than I did at that age. My intestines were a Gordian knot of worry at that age, worry over teachers calling on me and peers humiliating me and everyone always noticing me and nobody ever noticing me and also everyone dying and leaving me without even an aunt with whom to move to an island. I never laughed about any of it. And when I told my mother anything, she would just say worrying was useless: it was never the things you worried about that went wrong anyway.

It turns out my mother was right, though I hate to admit it all these years later, because what happens next is my liver blows up to the size of a beachball, and the one damn thing I never thought to worry about (having concentrated on breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and shark attacks) is my liver. Shellice is the one who makes me go to the doctor—she doesn’t like the weight loss or the way my eyes look—and afterward Shellice is the one who says let’s not tell Liz until we know more; you know how she is. I agree, but nervously, not because I can’t keep a secret but because I could use a good trip to the island at this point. But Liz hasn’t needed a trip in some weeks, and when Shellice and Carl and I finally sit her down one night and tell her that I am going to have something called chemoembolization to try to reduce the size of a tumor on my liver, so I can maybe have surgery to remove it, Liz surprises us all by remaining calm. I’m going to pray for you, Aunt Marcy, she says, and it turns out she means right now because she bows her head and folds her hands and says, Thank you, God, for completely healing Aunt Marcy of this tumor. I don’t have to look at Shellice and Carl to know that they are exchanging looks (their interest in God is satiated twice a year, at the Christmas and Easter services at St. Jerome Catholic Church). When Liz says amen, I say, well, thank you, Liz. She smiles and gives me a hug and lopes from the room. She has been loping under Kara’s influence.

My hair starts falling out. Shellice wants to take me shopping in Sioux Falls for a couple of real silk scarves, and we try to coax Liz into coming, but she declines. Instead she thanks God for making my hair grow back overnight, then waves good-bye from the couch where she has settled in front of a video. My energy is limited, so Shellice takes me right to Dyana, the most expensive boutique in downtown Sioux Falls. One of the scarves we find is like nothing I have ever owned: emerald green with a riot of tropical flowers glowing like jewels. We wind it round my head and tuck it in like a turban (another of Shellice’s talents), and I hardly know myself in the mirror. To my everlasting amazement, when Shellice says I have to get it, I do.

The next day when Liz sees the scarf wrapped round my head, I am suddenly shy. I try to hide this by asking if some of the flowers might grow on our island, but she just asks if my hair hasn’t grown back. Shellice says Liz. I say that maybe healing takes at least as long as it took you to get sick, which seems like a good thing to say, but Liz keeps staring at the scarf, darkly, as if the scarf were to blame, or as if I were to blame for wearing it. I excuse myself to throw up and leave her at the mercy of Shellice.

The only thing that helps me breathe at night is the soft blue breezes wafting in off the ocean, carrying the scent of coconut all over the island. For some reason coconut does not nauseate me. Without consulting Liz I make the entire island wheelchair accessible, for those days when I’m too weak from the chemo to do much walking.

Liz thanks God nightly for shrinking my tumor, which barely shrinks. They will not do the surgery unless it sheds another three centimeters, and if they do not do the surgery, there will be a hospice unit on the island before you know it. Liz tells me she and Kara meet weekly to thank God for my complete recovery, and at last I tell her that it’s making me really nervous, thanking God like that, which feels like telling him what to do in an underhanded sort of way. Liz gets upset. At first she defends Kara; then she breaks down and admits she can’t bear to tell Kara she’s worrying about me again. What she’s really really worrying about is that maybe it’s all her fault, and all along she hasn’t had quite as much faith as she thought when she was thanking God for healing me, so maybe God is punishing her by letting me—she won’t say die— by letting me not get better.

I bark at this—I can’t help it. I’m really mad at Liz for maybe the first time in her eleven years. You and God can keep me out of your feuds, I say; don’t either one of you think it’s okay to push me around like a pawn just to prove some point! They’re doing another round of chemo, and I’m spending it at the island, I say. You feel free to come visit if you promise to stop provoking God on my behalf. I don’t need the creator of the universe mad at me just because you haven’t got the manners to ask nicely.

Liz withdraws. She barely speaks to me in the next few weeks, maybe because I yelled at her and maybe because she’s scared of me and everything that’s happening to me. They hit me with the chemoembol-thingy again; it’s not so bad this time, which I take as a sign that things are not going well. I say, Shellice, maybe Liz can go live with Kara and her husband. I mean after you and Carl and Simon all fall off the roof and die. Shellice loses it because she knows I love Liz more than anyone else in the world could love her kid except her, and she cries in front of me for the first time since our mom died. What are you crying for? I say. You’re dead too, in this scenario, but Shellice doesn’t laugh. She says you really have to listen to me, Marcy. You really can’t die. You know what Liz said to me last night, when she was crying in bed? She said Aunt Marcy can’t die. If she dies, the whole island just sinks.

I think about this for a long time because it’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about me.

So the next day I call Kara. I ask her if she can’t tell Liz that sometimes you can just ask God for something without thanking him about it first as if you could trick him into it. Because I’m all right with her and Liz praying for me, in fact I’d appreciate it, they can say all the pleases they want, and they can say thank you for things that have already happened, but please don’t say thank you anymore for things that haven’t happened. It’s making me nervous, and anyway if I really don’t get better then Liz might think God is broken or something. I mean what if she needs him later on? Kara says she’s not trying to trick God when she thanks him for healing me, she’s just showing him how much she believes, and I say I bet God’s not that easy to impress. He already knows everything, right? Kara says maybe God isn’t easily impressed but he’s deeply touched when we come to him like trusting little children. I say I bet it touches him just as much when we’re scared shitless, or what kind of mean alien freak is he anyway? Kara is silent for a moment, and then she says she can’t argue with that. She says she never meant to cause trouble between us and if it makes me feel better, she’ll pray with Liz and they won’t thank God for healing me, they’ll just ask him to do it, and I thank her and hang up and have to admit to myself that she’s nicer than I’d expected. Not just nicer but better.

I land in the hospital again: chemo-whatsit number three. This time my temperature soars, and I have to stay an extra couple of days. There’s not a lot to do while I’m lying there so I start praying myself, but I’m not very good at it. This is discouraging, and I go from using a lot of words down to using just one, please, over and over. I think this word every time I breathe in and every time I breathe out until I fall asleep, and when I wake up I keep thinking it, as if there’d been no interruption, and before you know it I’m kind of impressed with myself. Pride—that’s the worst thing that could happen. I’m sure of it. I apologize and say humbly that I would really appreciate not dying just yet, if it wouldn’t put God out, and also that it would be nice not to be scared for awhile, but just saying it makes me want to cry, which in turn makes me mad at God. Everything must be so easy for God; what possible excuse could he have? What possible reason to say no?

Shellice shows up with Liz.

This isn’t much of an answer to prayer. I can tell it scares Liz to come near me after staying away for weeks, and anyway I am in no shape to buck up somebody else. I’m not even wearing my scarf. I manage to say that sometimes things get worse before they get better, but they can still get better. Liz pulls some coconut-scented candles out of her bag, and we light just one hoping that the nurse doesn’t notice us. Shellice goes off supposedly to find magazines in the lounge, and Liz asks how I feel. I can tell she’s trying hard to be grown up about it. I say not bad. I tell her what Shellice and Carl have already explained, that if the tumor has shrunk enough by next week’s ultrasound, they’ll schedule me for surgery right away. Liz doesn’t say anything. For a long while she won’t look away from the window. I know what she’s thinking; there’s only one thing to think. Finally I say, as if I believe it myself, keep praying because maybe God will say yes.

The stoplight visible from my window spends exactly nine seconds on green and four on yellow, and red depends on whether there’s anybody sitting there waiting.

You know what we’re missing? Liz says suddenly, and at first you’d think she was talking to the stoplight. I say no, what, and she says, a water park. So Liz and I start planning this amazing water park on one end of the island. Liz wants long water slides with loop-de-loops that somehow intersect, and I want one of those giant mushroom-shaped things you stand under with water sprinkling off the edge of the mushroom cap. It’s really more of a kiddie pool thing but Liz doesn’t mind. We get out some paper so Liz can show me what she means and I can show her what I mean, and then Liz comes up with the idea of putting rope bridges everywhere. They start to spill onto the rest of the island, and for the first time we try to get it all down, a blueprint for the whole island, the helicopter pad on the mountaintop, the mansion with Liz’s soda fountain and the plasma hdtv and my greenhouse stretching all along one side, the paddock for the horses and the bunker where we keep our supply of mac and cheese, the natural little waterfall lined with granite and quartz, and this enormous tree house that Liz gets completely absorbed in. Liz connects everything with rope bridges that sway when you run along them, and I start to draw in the palm trees and the poinsettias and the orchids and the ferns. I’m starting to feel giddy, my hands smudged with pencil lead are tingling. By now we’ve taped all these sheets of paper together and moved to the floor, which is the only space big enough, and which is freezing so we’re kneeling on pillows. We’ve turned on the bedside lamp and pushed my supper aside and sent Shellice out for dinner, we’ve thrown caution to the winds and lit all the coconut candles around us on the floor and shamelessly bribed the nurse with an invitation to the island, and in that pool of bluish light we bend over the paper, cramped and chilly and breathing hard from excitement, because we have a lot of work to do. We haven’t even started on the lagoon.