Emily Wang

A squat yellow bungalow trimmed neatly in white, with twin wooden planters that had never been filled by anything but tidy beds of gravel—this was the church where Rick and I first met as kids. Inside, a wide-open room, empty until we set up ten rows of metal folding chairs before each service, empty after we stacked the chairs in two teetering columns off to the side. Near the windows, the table set with plates of cookies and lemonade for after the service.

Ever since we were old enough to sit quiet for the full two hours, our families brought us to Wednesday night meetings and Sunday morning services. All of us kids occupied the back row, running our fingers over the gold-embossed leather covers of the Bible, flicking through the slick white pages of Science and Healing.

I used to sneak glances at Rick in-between my hand games with Mary. As soon as the grown ups began to read aloud healing testimonies, he’d stop elbowing the other boys or squirming around in his seat and sit up real straight. When we got old enough to start recognizing the same old stories, he would sometimes mouth along the words, like he didn’t even realize, halfway and silently.

We lay our hands on him and kneel. Mine against his temples, to cool the flush. Fever licks off his skin in hot pulses.

Is any sick among you? The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.

—Heavenly Father, Rick begins. I know this prayer by heart now. Twenty times this morning. All day yesterday, all day Monday. But James is worse today than yesterday, worse now than this morning. Scared, too: more scared than I’ve ever seen him. More than the time our car broke down out near Crater Lake and we kept on walking around and around the same bends, pretending each time that the trees looked different. The thought grips me with its claws and shakes me all over. Even in the soft dark of James’ bedroom, I can make out two red clefts on his lower lip where his front teeth have been gnawing. My mouth moves fast over rote prayer.

Let him call for the elders of the church; and let us pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

James called for me Monday morning from his bed, said he didn’t feel well enough for school. I know what you’re thinking: kids lie about this stuff. Thermometers against light bulbs. But James has never been the type, and when I saw him folded up half-sized in bed sheets, trembling and pale-cheeked, for the first time I let myself count out the things that could go wrong. A whole ton. Everything.

—It’s not working, I say. Everyone looks up with a start. Rick glares at me lips pinched like he could spit.

—…if it be thy will, he finishes. Amen.

—It’s not working, I repeat. James’s eyes flicker open and he watches me through half-lids.

—Not if you’re talking like that, Rick’s sister Anna says. Not unless we all believe.

—I want him to get better too, I say. I’m scared.

—How hard is it to fucking try, Rick says.

Rick looks at me and breathes deep like he’s the only one feeling it.

—We’ll see you in the morning, bud, Rick says, pulling the cover over James and tucking in the folds around his shoulders. Anna and her husband John touch the backs of their hands to James’ face one last time and leave the room. I linger for another moment after everyone’s cleared out and smooth my palm over James’ forehead. How many years until his hair turns all coarse like Rick’s? With a clammy hand, James reaches for my arm and grips it tight, squeezes it three times, like he’s trying to say something in Morse code. If he is it’s lost on me. But I know what I need to do.

Right above James’ bed I taped up three drawings he brought home from school last year. Second grade art class. The middle and the right are of me and Rick. I’m a peach circle atop a pink triangle dress. Rick is a peach circle and a red square and two blue rectangles. Rick’s smiling; I’m not.

And on the left: a self-portrait of James as a tiger. His face, tiger’s body**. **Actually, peach circle with two dots for eyes, a row of triangles for teeth, big orange oval with lightning-bolt lines. He brought these pictures home, splayed them across the kitchen table, and said I made art of us. I hung them up straightaway: me, Rick, and this tiger of ours.

There’s a commercial that plays on TV sometimes when Rick watches football. In it a woman has to take down photos from her son’s room after he died from some drunk driving accident. All day today I’ve been thinking about how I’d feel packing away the tiger drawing. I don’t know how Rick can blame me, if he does, or if he will.

In the middle of the night when Rick’s still as death on his side, I quietly dress and slip into James’ room.

He throws the covers off and climbs into a pair of pants. I hand him a sweatshirt and socks. We hug the walls of the dark house, James half a step behind me as we creep across the long hallway, then through the living room. When he stubs his toe on a bookshelf and yelps, I put my index finger to my lips. He nods and puts an index finger to his lips too, my little wide-eyed mirror.

We’re at the door. When the chain on the deadbolt tinkles, my breath catches, and I hear the half-imagined sound of Rick rolling over in bed. We stiffen up, hand in hand, waiting for the moment to pass. Then we step out into the cold.

—Yep. Seatbelt, James. He scrambles around and I hear a click.

I start up the car, dimming the headlights as I roll out of the driveway, and throw a blanket from the passenger’s seat back to James.

—Don’t worry about Dad, I say. He wants you to get better too.

James nods with his eyes closed, and for a while I think he’s fallen asleep. I follow the signs up Highway 5. My headlights bounce off the sparse thicket of tree trunks around us. After Oregon’s dry spell over the last few years, bark beetles and twig weevils climbed into all those beautiful pine trees and hollowed them out. The county cut down the ones in danger of falling onto the road, but now the forest left behind looks even frailer. As I signal off at the hospital exit, James yawns and readjusts his blanket.

—The doctor. Will it hurt? All the kids at school complain about the doctor.

—Oh, I don’t know, James. I’ve never been.

—Oh. At this he pauses and scrunches up his face. So I’m the first, he says, grinning wide.

I pull into the hospital parking lot and spot the sign on the far edge of the lot. Urgent Care. As soon as I see the entrance I want to turn the car around and drive straight home, say it was all a big mistake, pretend it never happened, I didn’t mean to take him to the hospital, let’s try the whole thing all over again. There but for the grace of God go I. My hands turn the wheel, and in my head I start doing the math—if we’ve been gone for forty minutes, if we get back in another forty, could Rick have been asleep this whole time?

But then I look in the rear view mirror. James has twisted his body inside his seatbelt and kneeled to get a better view of the hospital. His whole upper body is pressed up against the window, leaving what must be a James-shaped smudge mark on the glass. I put the car into park.

—You’re the first, James. You’re the first.

Freshman year of high school, the first time Rick and I snuck out of our houses to meet each other, I asked why he liked those testimonies so much. We were sitting in the parking lot of our school on the benches near the drop-off zone. It was late March and the night was cool. I leaned into his side for warmth and wondered if he could hear my heart all crazy. He said those stories were the closet thing he’d ever felt to magic. Other than this, he said, and turned his face to meet mine in a kiss.

And where is Rick now, in this moment? Is he still asleep on his side? How many hours until he wakes up and finds my half of the bed empty, my robe in a polyester pool on the floor? Until he rushes into James’ room and realizes what I’ve done? Will he immediately know where we’ve gone? Or will the realization that I’ve betrayed him come later, a sudden and sick lurch?

In the hospital lights James looks even worse. The receptionist hands me a form to fill out. I write down what I know in the first section under contact information, leaving only the home phone number blank in case they call Rick on accident. But then the rest of the front page, and the next page, and the one after ask for all these things I don’t know. Insurance number. Known allergies. Family history of disease. I give up and return the form to the receptionist.

—Is it all filled out? she asks, eyeing the nearly-blank first page.

After a short while, a doctor walks into the lobby and calls for James, and she takes us through double doors and through a hallway to a smaller room. As James climbs up onto a padded reclining chair with a thin sheet of paper on top, I eye only one other seat in the room and can’t figure out who’s supposed to sit. I stay standing.

—Hey, James, she says with a big smile like it’s not three in the morning. You’re not feeling so good, huh?

—It says here you’ve got a fever? She sticks something in his ear and waits for a beep, then reads the screen with a murmur.

—That’s high, I say hesitantly. She looks at me like she can’t make out the question.

The paper beneath James crinkles as he shifts his weight.

—Is he bad off? I say softly. Can you do anything?

—Well, we’ll have to see. Hey James, you feeling up for some more tests?

She wraps a cuff around his arm and pumps a ball in her hand.

—Do you know what I’m doing, James? He shakes his head no. Do you know what I’m doing? she turns to ask me.

I watch and try to remember doctors I’ve seen on television shows. She drops the inflatable ball in her hand.

—I was taking his blood pressure. That’s what I was doing, just now.

—This is our first time, James volunteers. I’m the first.

He’s trying to help but I want to cry. She turns to me slowly.

—You’ve never taken him to a doctor before.

—You’ve never been to a doctor before.

She stops and shakes her head, collects herself for a moment, resumes pumping the ball again, then scribbles something on her notepad with her face all scrunched up.

—His blood pressure is very low, she says. He’s at risk for septic shock. At my silence she continues. If you leave an infection untreated, it can enter the bloodstream. And if sepsis isn’t addressed—and sometimes even if it is, within twenty-four to forty-eight hours—it’s serious.

I turn to James in fear, but he’s reading a poster on the wall, his mouth moving in quiet shapes around the vowel sounds. If he dies it’s on me, I realize.

I never even thought about kids until one day in March junior year of high school, in the back of Rick’s car, he pressed two fingers inside me and asked when the last time I bled was. When I took too long counting back the weeks he called his sister Anna, who had just married John that Christmas, and asked her to buy a pregnancy test. That night, before Rick brought the test over to my house, I locked myself in the bathroom and let the water run, told God I wasn’t ready, and then I sat in the bath for two hours and waited for red to bloom in the water.

Rick saw the two pink lines first, and from the scared look on his face I knew everything that would have to happen from there on out: the courthouse wedding, dropping out of school, Rick taking up a job at the paper mill, getting a place of our own. I worried I wouldn’t know how to love a baby I never wanted in the first place. Rick worried, too, about other things, but on his first day at the mill he laced up his work boots and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek and said It’s the first day of the rest of our lives, like one of those motivational posters, so I put on a brave face and waved at him from the window, and then after a little while I wasn’t pretending anymore, and I would catch myself standing and staring at nothing in particular with one hand on my stomach, and that’s when I knew I was ready.

After dozens of pricks and tubes and bags of clear fluid emptying into James, they finally leave him be on a hospital bed just before morning.

Emily Wang

Emily Wang

Fiction

Fall 2016

The Anointed