Read Online The Half Life and Swim by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online

wasn’t good enough for me. When I checked in on a sunny afternoon in June, I arrived with a twenty-four-inch top-of-the-line Zenith, housed in shiny walnut paneling, with a remote control and stereo speakers. Grandma would prevail upon one of the orderlies she’d plied with baked goods to carry it into my room and set it up on a table that she’d convinced a friendly nurse to lend us.
    The week before, Grandma and I had gone shopping together at Lord & Taylor downtown, buying pretty new pajamas and nightgowns, three new robes, slippers, and socks. We’d packed a reading lamp to plug into the wall, and board games: checkers and chess, Boggle and backgammon, decks of cards so we could play Crazy Eights. Instead of the ugly green plastic water pitchers most patients used, Grandma brought me one made of acrylic, with a candy-pink swirl that ran through it, and a matching drinking cup and a pink bendy straw to match. The night before I checked in, we went to the library and chose a dozen books: Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia . “I’ll read them to you,” Grandma promised, because the doctors had told us there would be times when reading would be uncomfortable. My face would be swollen, stitched up, and bandaged after the jaw operation. I’d wear compression bandages once the plastic surgeon did what he could for my cheek, and I’d have a patch to let my eye heal, when I wasn’t doing exercises to learn how to track and focus with it again. “Eye gym classes,” Grandma called them.
    I spent my summer on the fourth floor, in the bed by the window in a room for two, where a bulky air conditioner wheezed and rattled day and night. Most of the children on the floor with me were there for simpler surgeries. They were having their tonsils or appendixes taken out, getting tubes put in their ears, having broken bones set or birthmarks removed. These kids would come and stay for a night or two. Parents and siblings and grandparents and friends would crowd into the room with balloons and presents and get-well-soon cards, cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with the orange-and-pink logo, and sheet cakes from Stop & Shop. They’d draw the curtains and imagine I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the flimsy cotton. What’s wrong with her? Jesus. Poor thing. Theah but for the grace ah God, I heard somebody’s mother say in a thick Boston accent . Well, can they fix it? a boy once asked, and his mother had shushed him and hadn’t answered. Once, someone’s little sister wandered through the curtains. She stood at the side of my bed, looking down at me thoughtfully.
    “Do you have cancer?” she’d asked. She was, I guessed, maybe five or six years old.
    “Uh-uh,” I said, and shook my head back and forth the few inches I could move against the pillow. This was between Surgery Two and Surgery Three. Most of my head and face was swathed in tape and gauze. The left half of my mouth worked fine, but the right half was immobilized by the bandages, so everything I said came out of the corner of my mouth, sounding like a secret. “I was in a car accident. I’m having operations to fix my face.”
    She looked at me steadily, staring in a way the grown-ups and older children wouldn’t let themselves. “What’s it look like underneath?”
    “There’s a scar.” With my fingers, I traced the scar that extended from the corner of my right eye to the edge of my mouth.
    “Does it hurt?” asked the girl.
    Because Grandma wasn’t there yet, I could tell the truth. “Yeah, it does,” I said, “but it’s going to get better.”
    She considered this for a moment. “My brother had food poisoning,” she confided. “He’s ten. He throwed up everywhere.”
    I smiled, wincing as the right side of my mouth tried to mimic the upward motion of the left. “Is he feeling better?” She frowned. “He got a new bike! And he says I can’t even use his old