Star Witness

4

TOMÁS

My mama pushes into my bedroom in the middle of the night.

"Can I sleep in here tonight?" she whispers.

I don't say anything, just shift toward the wall.

She slides under my covers, and I curl blindly into her, grabbing one of her arms. "Something wrong?" I murmur into her shoulder.

"I'm not sure," she answers.

"You teenagers," I say. "So moody."

"I think I just wanted company."

"Mama, you have a wife in the other room."

"Your company, fool. You're a specific company."

Lucia and my siblings were a relatively recent development. For most of my life, it's just been me and my mama. Moving in with Lucia took adjusting, because we had our routine down, and it didn't very often involve separation. In a lot of ways, my mama was my closest childhood friend. In and out of hospitals, ups and downs at school--we made inside jokes and traditions and quality time out of it all. I think suddenly having somebody else who took up her attention shocked and bewildered both of us. Some part of me was disproportionately scandalized by the idea of romance and sex in her life; an inability on my part, I'm sure, to perceive her as the grown autonomous person she is, living a life out of my reach. She was supposed to be mine, or at least only do things comprehensible to me.

But she's happy. I could always tell. Eventually, it sunk in.

"You weren't asleep," she says. True. I sleep like the dead. Her entrance would not have roused me if I were already out.

"Just restless. I'm not hiding anything, so put away the searching voice."

"Searching voice. I can't stand you." She pauses. "You are, though. You're all closed off since everything. I can tell, and I don't know how to reach you. I miss you."

I pull back enough to look at her. "I'm trying," I whisper.

She turns her head, facing me too. "I know. It's just hard shit doing this life thing without you."

"What are we gonna do when I move out?"

"You're never moving out. But I have a plan for any possibility. Dorm room? I'll sleep under your bed. If there's not space under the bed, I'll sleep beside it. If something obstructs the floor, I'll get a big office chair. I can sleep anywhere. And if you get an apartment, I have like a million sub-plans for that scenario."

I laugh, and it almost hurts it feels so good. "Are we weird?" I say.

She's too close for me to quite see her grinning. "We're so weird."

-

My doctors say I am situationally depressed.

It started last fall, when I got home after months in the hospital. I felt wrong. Like nothing was worth it, like everything was exhausting, and anyway, why was I exhausting myself to do things when they didn't change anything? Joy has never been a bargaining act; I find tiny homes everywhere, something to love everywhere I go. But now I have to search.

I realized I was hoping for some physical problem.

The nurse practitioner of my CF care team, who is named Marina and has been my nurse since I was rewarded for PFTs with lollipops, said, "I think you may be depressed."

And I said, "Me?"

And my mama said, "Depressed?"

Marina said, "Are you having feelings of hopelessness?"