What’s Left of Me

“I’ve got to go to someone’s house today,” Hally had said as she stuffed things into her bag that particular afternoon. “We’ve got a project due—”

Addie hesitated. “Tomorrow, then.”

“No, wait,” Hally said. She smiled. “I won’t be long. Half an hour at most, okay?”

I said nothing. Addie didn’t look Hally in the eye. She stared at the half-erased chalk marks on the blackboard, the graffiti on the tops of the worn desks, the bent plastic chairs.

“Devon will walk you—” Hally started to say, but Addie cut her off.

“I remember how to get to your house.”

“Oh,” Hally said and laughed, which should have eased the tension but only made the silence that followed more pronounced. She slung her book bag over her shoulder, her smile unfaltering but her eyes blinking a little more rapidly than usual. “Half an hour at most,” she repeated. “Devon knows where the medicine is. And he’ll make sure nothing happens to Eva while you’re asleep.”

Addie ended up walking home with Devon anyway, since we ran into him by the school doors. It was possibly the most uncomfortable ten minutes I could have imagined. He didn’t speak to Addie. Addie didn’t look at him. The heat made them both sweat, made an uneasy situation worse, and it was an even bigger relief than usual to reach the cool, airy Mullan house, to swallow the drugged water and lie down and wait for Addie to fall asleep.

It still made me sick to feel her ripped away from me, but I was getting better at keeping calm. She would come back. It was easier knowing that she would come back, that the drug’s effects lasted only an hour at most, and sometimes only twenty minutes or so.

Devon had been sitting at the table when Addie went to lie down, but about ten minutes after she disappeared, my name came floating through the blackness.

“Eva?”

He said my name like a secret. Like a password, a code whispered through locked doors.

<Yes?> I said, though he couldn’t hear. Everything was darkness and the soft couch beneath Addie and me. I could feel the ridges of the fabric beneath our fingertips, the textured grain against the heel of our hand.

I felt the warmth of his palm as he laid it softly on the back of our hand, the pressure of his fingers, the brush of his thumb against our pulse.

“It’s Ryan,” he said. “I figured you—that you’d like to know there was someone here.”

I tried to speak. I focused on our lips, on our tongue, on our throat. I tried to form thank you with a mouth that belonged to me yet didn’t want to obey. But it seemed I wasn’t going to be able to speak this particular day.

So instead, I focused on Ryan’s hand, which was easier. He’d slid his palm down over our knuckles, his fingers tucked beneath our hand. I curled our fingers around his and squeezed as hard as I could, which was barely anything at all.

I figured that was as articulate as I was going to get.

But the thought of one day being able to respond to him, to sit and laugh and talk with him as anyone else might have done, was added to my ever-growing list of reasons to keep on coming to the Mullan house. To keep fighting, no matter the cost.

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he days passed. Then a week. Then another and another. I used to count my life in weekends or theater visits or Lyle’s dialysis sessions. I marked the days with school assignments or babysitting jobs. Now I tallied my life by the improvements I made lying on a couch with Ryan or Devon, Hally or Lissa, by my side. The number of words I managed to speak. The fingers I managed to move.

And for the first time, my mind filled with memories that were mine and mine alone. My first smile while Hally whispered to me all the stupid, crazy things she’d dragged her brother into when they were little. My first laugh, which startled Lissa so much that she’d jerked away before laughing, too. And even on the days when all my progress seemed to backslide and I lay mute and paralyzed on the couch, trapped in the darkness behind our eyelids, I had someone beside me, talking to me, telling me stories.

I learned how the Mullan family had moved to Lupside a year before Addie and I did, when their mother had changed jobs. How Ryan missed their old house because he’d spent twelve years there, had known the position of every book in the library, the creak of every step in the curved stairwell. How Hally didn’t miss it because they’d hardly had any neighbors, and the ones they did have had been hateful. How they both had fond memories, though, of the fields behind the house and childhoods spent running through them, pretending to be anywhere but where they actually were.

I remember with perfect clarity the first time I opened our eyes.

Hally had screamed, then scrambled to fetch Devon. “Look!” she’d cried. “Look!”

“Eva?” Devon had said. But it hadn’t been Devon.

That was the first time I caught them shifting, caught Ryan pushing through and looking out at me. I couldn’t even move our gaze or smile or laugh, could only stare up at his face. He was so close that I could pick out his individual eyelashes, long and dark and curved like Hally’s.

I remember that snapshot of him, smiling with only one side of his mouth, hair damp and curlier than normal from that afternoon’s rain. It was my first glimpse of him, really, because we hardly ever saw him at school, and even when we did, Devon always seemed to be in control. He rolled his eyes slightly as Hally nudged him aside so I was looking at her instead.

“Soon,” Hally said, grinning, “you’ll be doing cartwheels.”

At times like that, I believed her. Other times, I wasn’t so sure.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ryan said one afternoon. Hally and Lissa were gone again that day. They seemed to be leaving us with Ryan more and more now, and Addie had stopped asking where they went. I didn’t mind. I liked this boy who pulled up a chair next to the couch, who talked to me about wiring and voltage and then laughed and said I was probably bored out of my mind, that this was all incentive for me to get control of my legs so I could escape.

<What if the control never comes back?> I said. I talked to him and Lissa like this a lot now, knowing they couldn’t hear me but speaking anyway. Sometimes they carried on one-sided conversations for up to an hour. The least I could do in return was speak to them, even if they didn’t know it.

Ryan pulled his chair closer. “Devon and I never really settled. There were a few months when we were five or six when I kept losing strength. Everyone was sure I’d be gone by our seventh birthday.” His lips twitched into a smile. “But I came back. I don’t know how, exactly. I remember fighting it, Devon fighting it … and I don’t know. Our parents never told anyone. You remember our mom works at the hospital?”

I did. That was where the medicine came from—stolen one day when Hally had gone with her mother to work. Addie had barely kept from shuddering when she’d learned.

“She knows a bit about this kind of stuff. She thought maybe we were just late bloomers or something. Or she hoped, anyway. So she never reported it, and she made sure we hid it—she hid us. Donvale—that’s where we lived before—is this tiny, rural place, so it was easier to keep to ourselves. Our dad homeschooled us through first and second grade so we wouldn’t be in public so much during that time, when every-one’s newly settled. Our parents were afraid, you know?”

It took all my strength—all my strength and all my concentration—but I managed to force our lips, our tongue, to form one word: “Yes.” And in that one word, I tried to convey everything.

Ryan smiled, like he always did when I spoke, even when it was just a few syllables. But then his smile faded. “The officials wouldn’t have been lenient about the deadline—not with us.”

I was torn between horror and envy. If you knew your child was sick, wasn’t developing naturally, how could you not take him to the doctor? How could you not worry?

“But eventually, not going to regular school was attracting more attention than it was worth. Our mom thought Devon showed signs of being dominant, so when she finally registered us, she put only his name. Just pretend, she told us. We’d already learned how important it was that we did.”