Морган Райс: Transmission

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm.

That seemed to be enough of an argument to convince his mother, and just that told Kevin how serious this all was. On any other occasion, he would have expected her to fight. Now it seemed that the fight had been sucked out of her.

They went out to the car in silence. Kevin looked back at the school. The thought hit him that he probably wouldn’t be coming back. He hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.

“I’m sorry they called you at work,” Kevin said as they sat in the car. He could feel the tension there. His mom didn’t turn the engine on, just sat.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just… it was getting easy to pretend that nothing was wrong.” She sounded so sad then, so deeply hurt. Kevin had gotten used to the expression that meant she was trying to keep from crying. She wasn’t succeeding.

“ Are you okay, Kevin?” she asked, even though by then, he was the one holding onto her, as tightly as he could.

“I’m… I wish I didn’t have to leave school,” Kevin said. He’d never thought he would hear himself say that. He’d never thought that anyone would say that.

“We could go back in,” his mother said. “I could tell the principal that I’m going to bring you back here tomorrow, and every day after that, until…”

She broke off.

“Until it gets too bad,” Kevin said. He screwed his eyes tightly shut. “I think maybe it’s already too bad, Mom.”

He heard her hit the dashboard, the dull thud echoing around the car.

“I know,” she said. “I know and I hate it. I hate this disease that’s taking my little boy from me.”

She cried again for a little while. In spite of his attempts to stay strong, Kevin did too. It seemed to take a long time before his mother was calm enough to say anything else.

“They said you saw… planets, Kevin?” she asked.

“I saw it,” Kevin said. How could he explain what it was like? How real it was?

His mother looked over, and now Kevin had the sense of her struggling for the right words to say. Struggling to be comforting and firm and calm, all at the same time. “You get that this isn’t real, right, honey? It’s just… it’s just the disease.”

Kevin knew that he ought to understand it, but…

“It doesn’t feel like that,” Kevin said.

“I know it doesn’t,” his mother said. “And I hate that, because it’s just a reminder that my little boy is slipping away. All of this, I wish I could make it go away.”

Kevin didn’t know what to say to that. He wished it would go away too.

“It feels real,” Kevin said, even so.

His mother was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice had the brittle, barely holding it together quality that only arrived since the diagnosis, but now had become far too familiar.

“Maybe… maybe it’s time we took you to see that psychologist.”

Dr. Linda Yalestrom’s office wasn’t anywhere near as medical looking as all the others Kevin had been in recently. It was her home, for one thing, in Berkeley, with the university close enough that it seemed to back up her credentials as surely as the certificates that were neatly framed on the wall.

The rest of it looked like the kind of home office Kevin expected from TV, with soft furnishings obviously relegated here after some previous move, a desk where clutter had crept in from the rest of the house, and a few potted plants that seemed to be biding their time, ready to take over.

Kevin found himself liking Dr. Yalestrom. She was a short, dark-haired woman in her fifties, whose clothes were brightly patterned and about as far from medical scrubs as it was possible to get. Kevin suspected that might be the point, if she spent a lot of time working with people who had received the worst news possible from doctors already.

“Come sit down, Kevin,” she said with a smile, gesturing to a broad red couch that was well worn with years of people sitting on it. “Ms. McKenzie, why don’t you give us a while? I want Kevin to feel that he can say anything he needs to say. My assistant will get you some coffee.”

His mother nodded. “I’ll be right outside.”

Kevin went to sit on the couch, which turned out to be exactly as comfortable as it appeared. He looked around the room at pictures of fishing trips and vacations. It took him a while to realize something important.

“You’re not in any of the photos in here,” he said.

Dr. Yalestrom smiled at that. “Most of my clients never notice. The truth is, a lot of these are places I always wanted to go, or places I heard were interesting. I put them out because young men like you spend a lot of time staring around the room, doing anything but talk to me, and I figure you should at least have something to look at.”

It seemed a bit like cheating to Kevin.

“If you work with people who are dying a lot,” he said, “why do you have pictures of places you always wanted to go? Why put it off, when you’ve seen…”

“When I’ve seen how quickly it can all end?” Dr. Yalestrom asked, gently.

Kevin nodded.

“Maybe because of the wonderful human ability to know that and still procrastinate. Or maybe I have been to some of these places, and the reason I’m not in the pictures is just that I think one of me staring down at people is quite enough.”

Kevin wasn’t sure if those were good reasons or not. They didn’t seem like enough, somehow.

“Where would you go, Kevin?” Dr. Yalestrom asked. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“Well, think about it. You don’t have to let me know right away.”

Kevin shook his head. It was strange, talking to an adult this way. Generally, when you were thirteen, conversations came down to questions or instructions. With the possible exception of his mom, who was at work a lot of the time anyway, adults weren’t really interested in what someone his age had to say.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I mean, I never really thought I’d get to go anywhere.” He tried to think about places he might like to go, but it was hard to come up with anywhere, especially now that he only had a few months to do it. “I feel as though, wherever I think of, what’s the point? I’ll be dead pretty soon.”

“What do you think the point is?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin did his best to think of a reason. “I guess… because pretty soon is not the same thing as now?”

The psychologist nodded. “I think that’s a good way to put it. So, is there anything that you would like to do in the pretty soon, Kevin?”

Kevin thought about it. “I guess… I guess I should tell Luna what’s happening.”

“And who’s Luna?”

“She’s my friend,” Kevin said. “We don’t go to the same school anymore, so she hasn’t seen me collapse or anything, and I haven’t called in a few days, but…”

“But you should tell her,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t healthy to push away your friends when things get bad, Kevin. Not even to protect them.”

Kevin swallowed back a denial, because it was kind of what he was doing. He didn’t want to inflict this on Luna, didn’t want to hurt her with the news of what was going to happen. It was part of the reason he hadn’t called her in so long.

“What else?” Dr. Yalestrom said. “Let’s try places again. If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”

Kevin tried to pick among all the places in the room, but the truth was that there was only one landscape that kept springing into his head, with colors no normal camera could capture.