I could barely creak out a “Hello?”
I waited for the sound of a parent’s annihilated voice.
“Hazel Grace,” Augustus said weakly.
“Oh, thank God it’s you. Hi. Hi, I love you.”
“Hazel Grace, I’m at the gas station. Something’s wrong. You gotta help me.”
“What? Where are you?”
“The Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch. I did something wrong with the G-tube and I can’t figure it out and—”
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” I said.
“No no no no no, they’ll take me to a hospital. Hazel, listen to me. Do not call nine-one-one or my parents I will never forgive you don’t please just come please just come and fix my goddamned G-tube. I’m just, God, this is the stupidest thing. I don’t want my parents to know I’m gone. Please. I have the medicine with me; I just can’t get it in. Please.” He was crying. I’d never heard him sob like this except from outside his house before Amsterdam.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m leaving now.”
I took the BiPAP off and connected myself to an oxygen tank, lifted the tank into my cart, and put on sneakers to go with my pink cotton pajama pants and a Butler basketball T-shirt, which had originally been Gus’s. I grabbed the keys from the kitchen drawer where Mom kept them and wrote a note in case they woke up while I was gone.
Went to check on Gus. It’s important. Sorry.
Love, H
As I drove the couple miles to the gas station, I woke up enough to wonder why Gus had left the house in the middle of the night. Maybe he’d been hallucinating, or his martyrdom fantasies had gotten the better of him.
I sped up Ditch Road past flashing yellow lights, going too fast partly to reach him and partly in the hopes a cop would pull me over and give me an excuse to tell someone that my dying boyfriend was stuck outside of a gas station with a malfunctioning G-tube. But no cop showed up to make my decision for me.
There were only two cars in the lot. I pulled up next to his. I opened the door. The interior lights came on. Augustus sat in the driver’s seat, covered in his own vomit, his hands pressed to his belly where the G-tube went in. “Hi,” he mumbled.
“Oh, God, Augustus, we have to get you to a hospital.”
“Please just look at it.” I gagged from the smell but bent forward to inspect the place above his belly button where they’d surgically installed the tube. The skin of his abdomen was warm and bright red.
“Gus, I think something’s infected. I can’t fix this. Why are you here? Why aren’t you at home?” He puked, without even the energy to turn his mouth away from his lap. “Oh, sweetie,” I said.
“I wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes,” he mumbled. “I lost my pack. Or they took it away from me. I don’t know. They said they’d get me another one, but I wanted . . . to do it myself. Do one little thing myself.”
He was staring straight ahead. Quietly, I pulled out my phone and glanced down to dial 911.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. Nine-one-one, what is your emergency? “Hi, I’m at the Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch, and I need an ambulance. The great love of my life has a malfunctioning G-tube.”
He looked up at me. It was horrible. I could hardly look at him. The Augustus Waters of the crooked smiles and unsmoked cigarettes was gone, replaced by this desperate humiliated creature sitting there beneath me.
“This is it. I can’t even not smoke anymore.”
“Gus, I love you.”
“Where is my chance to be somebody’s Peter Van Houten?” He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. “I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.”
According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.
I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. “I’m sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.”
“Me too,” he said.
“But it isn’t,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“There are no bad guys.”
“Yeah.”
“Even cancer isn’t a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re okay,” I told him. I could hear the sirens.
“Okay,” he said. He was losing consciousness.
“Gus, you have to promise not to try this again. I’ll get you cigarettes, okay?” He looked at me. His eyes swam in their sockets. “You have to promise.”
He nodded a little and then his eyes closed, his head swiveling on his neck.
“Gus,” I said. “Stay with me.”
“Read me something,” he said as the goddamned ambulance roared right past us. So while I waited for them to turn around and find us, I recited the only poem I could bring to mind, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams.
so much depends
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Williams was a doctor. It seemed to me like a doctor’s poem. The poem was over, but the ambulance was still driving away from us, so I kept writing it.
And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon this observer of the universe.
Half conscious, he glanced over at me and mumbled, “And you say you don’t write poetry.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He came home from the hospital a few days later, finally and irrevocably robbed of his ambitions. It took more medication to remove him from the pain. He moved upstairs permanently, into a hospital bed near the living room window.
These were days of pajamas and beard scruff, of mumblings and requests and him endlessly thanking everyone for all they were doing on his behalf. One afternoon, he pointed vaguely toward a laundry basket in a corner of the room and asked me, “What’s that?”
“That laundry basket?”
“No, next to it.”
“I don’t see anything next to it.”
“It’s my last shred of dignity. It’s very small.”
The next day, I let myself in. They didn’t like me to ring the doorbell anymore because it might wake him up. His sisters were there with their banker husbands and three kids, all boys, who ran up to me and chanted who are you who are you who are you, running circles around the entryway like lung capacity was a renewable resource. I’d met the sisters before, but never the kids or their dads.
“I’m Hazel,” I said.
“Gus has a girlfriend,” one of the kids said.
“I am aware that Gus has a girlfriend,” I said.
“She’s got boobies,” another said.
“Is that so?”
“Why do you have that?” the first one asked, pointing at my oxygen cart.
“It helps me breathe,” I said. “Is Gus awake?”
“No, he’s sleeping.”
“He’s dying,” said another.
“He’s dying,” the third one confirmed, suddenly serious. It was quiet for a moment, and I wondered what I was supposed to say, but then one of them kicked another and they were off to the races again, falling all over each other in a scrum that migrated toward the kitchen.
I made my way to Gus’s parents in the living room and met his brothers-in-law, Chris and Dave.
I hadn’t gotten to know his half sisters, really, but they both hugged me anyway. Julie was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to a sleeping Gus in precisely the same voice that one would use to tell an infant he was adorable, saying, “Oh, Gussy Gussy, our little Gussy Gussy.” Our Gussy? Had they acquired him?
“What’s up, Augustus?” I said, trying to model appropriate behavior.
“Our beautiful Gussy,” Martha said, leaning in toward him. I began to wonder if he was actually asleep or if he’d just laid a heavy finger on the pain pump to avoid the Attack of the Well-Meaning Sisters.
He woke up after a while and the first thing he said was, “Hazel,” which I have to admit made me kind of happy, like maybe I was part of his family, too. “Outside,” he said quietly. “Can we go?”
We went, his mom pushing the wheelchair, sisters and brothers-in-law and dad and nephews and me trailing. It was a cloudy day, still and hot as summer settled in. He wore a long-sleeve navy T-shirt and fleece sweatpants. He was cold all the time for some reason. He wanted some water, so his dad went and got some for him.
Martha tried to engage Gus in conversation, kneeling down next to him and saying, “You’ve always had such beautiful eyes.” He nodded a little.
One of the husbands put an arm on Gus’s shoulder and said, “How’s that fresh air feel?” Gus shrugged.
“Do you want meds?” his mom asked, joining the circle kneeling around him. I took a step back, watching as the nephews tore through a flower bed on their way to the little patch of grass in Gus’s backyard. They immediately commenced to play a game that involved throwing one another to the ground.
“Kids!” Julie shouted vaguely.
“I can only hope,” Julie said, turning back to Gus, “they grow into the kind of thoughtful, intelligent young men you’ve become.”
I resisted the urge to audibly gag. “He’s not that smart,” I said to Julie.
“She’s right. It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”
“Right, it’s primarily his hotness,” I said.
“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.
“It actually did blind our friend Isaac,” I said.
“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”
“You cannot.”
“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”
“Not to mention your body.”
“Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.
“Okay, enough,” Gus’s dad said, and then out of nowhere, his dad put an arm around me and kissed the side of my head and whispered, “I thank God for you every day, kid.”
Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
One of the less bullshitty conventions of the cancer kid genre is the Last Good Day convention, wherein the victim of cancer finds herself with some unexpected hours when it seems like the inexorable decline has suddenly plateaued, when the pain is for a moment bearable. The problem, of course, is that there’s no way of knowing that your last good day is your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.
I’d taken a day off from visiting Augustus because I was feeling a bit unwell myself: nothing specific, just tired. It had been a lazy day, and when Augustus called just after five P.M., I was already attached to the BiPAP, which we’d dragged out to the living room so I could watch TV with Mom and Dad.
“Hi, Augustus,” I said.
He answered in the voice I’d fallen for. “Good evening, Hazel Grace. Do you suppose you could find your way to the Literal Heart of Jesus around eight P.M.?”
“Um, yes?”
“Excellent. Also, if it’s not too much trouble, please prepare a eulogy.”
“Um,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
“And I you,” I answered. Then the phone clicked off.
“Um,” I said. “I have to go to Support Group at eight tonight. Emergency session.”
My mom muted the TV. “Is everything okay?”
I looked at her for a second, my eyebrows raised. “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
“But why would there—”
“Because Gus needs me for some reason. It’s fine. I can drive.” I fiddled with the BiPAP so Mom would help me take it off, but she didn’t. “Hazel,” she said, “your dad and I feel like we hardly even see you anymore.”
“Particularly those of us who work all week,” Dad said.
“He needs me,” I said, finally unfastening the BiPAP myself.
“We need you, too, kiddo,” my dad said. He took hold of my wrist, like I was a two-year-old about to dart out into the street, and gripped it.
“Well, get a terminal disease, Dad, and then I’ll stay home more.”
“Hazel,” my mom said.
“You were the one who didn’t want me to be a homebody,” I said to her. Dad was still clutching my arm. “And now you want him to go ahead and die so I’ll be back here chained to this place, letting you take care of me like I always used to. But I don’t need it, Mom. I don’t need you like I used to. You’re the one who needs to get a life.”
“Hazel!” Dad said, squeezing harder. “Apologize to your mother.”
I was tugging at my arm but he wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t get my cannula on with only one hand. It was infuriating. All I wanted was an old-fashioned Teenager Walkout, wherein I stomp out of the room and slam the door to my bedroom and turn up The Hectic Glow and furiously write a eulogy. But I couldn’t because I couldn’t freaking breathe. “The cannula,” I whined. “I need it.”