Free What Remains by Helene Dunbar Page A

it’s taking me so damned long until I look down and see that I’m using a toothbrush. This is insane. My parents have a housekeeper who comes once a week. Why am I doing this?
    I stand up to ease my cramped muscles and a shower of dark hair falls down my shoulders.
    I lurch up in bed. These dreams I’ve been having since I got home are making me nuts. Stupid me for thinking everything would get back to normal.
    On the outside nothing has changed. Nothing, except that I’ve had to turn the page on my calendar and wipe the dust off my trophy shelf to make my room look normal, lived in. When I got home it looked like Pompeii, that city that was frozen when a volcano blew up and encased everything in dust. Frozen the day of the SATs. The day of the accident.
    But on the inside, everything is different. Some days, it’s hard for me to picture Lizzie’s face. On others, it feels like she’s here next to me. Neither is particularly comforting. I miss her. I don’t ever want to forget her. It’s just that thinking about her makes me feel like I’m going to puke. It reminds me that I’m the reason she isn’t here.
    I get dressed and head downstairs, massaging my hands, which are cramped from my dream.
    Please let Mom have left for work , I pray over and over, but like all of my other prayers these days, this one goes unanswered. Of course it does. No chance that she won’t be here on my first day back to school.
    When I get to the kitchen I can see that she’s already exasperated from the way her hands are wrapped tight around her coffee cup. It’s like she wants to turn back the clock and make me her perfect baseball-playing son with a secure future again. And she can’t. So instead, she’s trying to do the things she can. Only I don’t need her to. I don’t want her to.
    â€œI’ll drive you to school, Cal,” Mom says.
    â€œSpencer is picking me up,” I tell her for the tenth time since yesterday. “Not that I couldn’t have walked the five blocks like I’ve done just about every day for the past three years,” I add under my breath while I sort through the mountain of pills I need to take before I leave.
    She leans towards me on the counter and the smell of her coffee makes my mouth water. Caffeine is on my restricted list so I can only inhale the fumes. “You have to tell me what I can say here to get you to take this seriously. It isn’t like you’ve been out with the flu.”
    That makes me laugh, but it isn’t a real laugh. It sounds hollow and bounces around inside my head. I’m not sure I remember how to really laugh.
    â€œI think I know that.” I scratch around the incision. As it heals, it’s itching, which is one more thing on the list of what’s making me nuts. “But I’m supposed to be exercising, remember? Dr. Collins said so.” I play the doctor card because now his word is law and if my mom ignores everything I say, she at least listens to him.
    Mom sighs, puts her mug down, comes over, and cups my cheek in her hand. She’s become a different person since the accident. Someone who remembers she has a kid. But it’s too late. It feels like she’s suffocating me with her need to know the one thing I can’t tell her: that I’m all right.
    â€œI know,” she says. “It’s just difficult not to worry about you.”
    I wonder how hard it would be for her if she knew that I was hearing voices. But I don’t tell her. Instead, I do what I’ve always done. I follow the rules and all of the doctor’s instructions.
    The only thing I’ve taken a stand on is about going back to school because I have to get out of this house.
    My parents are making me prove I can handle all the new rules as a condition for going back, so I’ve made a big show of hanging a list of reminders over my desk: times to take my meds, things I