Spent

My sister Lucy's oncologist had a poster in her office of a bright red lighthouse, its beam of light shining across a fake blue sea. Underneath, it said "SUCCESS" in bright gold letters. When the doctor leaned across her desk and told us that Lucy's cancer could no longer be treated effectively, Lucy raised her eyebrows, looked at the poster, and said, "Maybe you should rethink that tag line?" Her doctor made a sympathetic face.

"We should talk about what you want to do."

"Die?" Lucy blinked her eyes, several times, and looked at me. She made a fist and said, "This part is less funny."

"Yeah," I agreed. I couldn't look at my parents.

"Not unfunny, though."

"No. It's pretty funny about the poster." I rested my hand between her sharp, skinny shoulder blades and tried not to think about the previous spring and my graduation. Lucy came the night before in an old, holey T-shirt and jeans, with a toothbrush in her hand and a change of underwear in her back pocket.

"Mom and Dad aren't going to let you wear that," I told her.

"I know," she said, "but I really don't have anything nicer."

She looked like Lucy, then, healthy and fearless and inexhaustible. "I'm assuming books are in the bag? Not a change of clothes?"

"Hey," she said, "not all of us are graduating tomorrow."

"And not all of us are graduating just barely." I'd attended college like I'd attended high school--just barely--and done well enough, considering, for my parents to mutter about my potential, and say, "You're just as smart as your sister."

"The hell she is," Lucy said, once. "Let's not just throw around comparisons."

"That's true," I said. "Lucy's the smart one. I'm the pretty one."

"You look exactly the same," my mother said.

"Yeah. But Carrie has 17 kinds of lotion."

"That you use," I said.

"I use them ironically." We both laughed, and my parents looked at my transcript and sighed and left the room, and I looked at Lucy. "Thanks."

"No problem," she said.

It was July when she started dying for real, and it was hot. I moved back home, after quitting my job. My father said, "Carrie, you can't just stop your life."

"It's not that big a deal. I sublet my apartment, and it's not like I have a career. I wasn't one of those fancy personal assistant secretaries, you know. I just answered the phones."

"You don't need to be here."

"Does that mean I shouldn't be?"

"No. Of course not." He hugged me hard, and I let him, for a moment, and then ran away. If I let myself talk to my parents, I'd crumble, and then Lucy would have no one to make lists with, of all she'd done in her life, to see if the good balanced out the bad.

"Leprosy," Lucy sighed. "I wish I was dying of that. It might be really amusing, to watch your body rot. From the outside in, instead of the other way around."

"Maybe for you. I'd rather not have your body parts dropping off right in front of me. Also, it's very human to rot from the inside out. Peaches rot from the outside in. You don't want to die like a peach, do you?"

She started to laugh. "Maybe I do. Maybe I would love to die like a peach."

We talked about how she had to save a seat in hell for me, after we made fun of our parents' new neighbor, who spent every evening on her front porch, wearing tie-dyed pink Capri pants and a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt and playing Bach for her basil plant. We bet who was more likely to be right: the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses. We discussed whether or not devils were actually red and if they had pitchforks. I told Lucy that if they did, she'd have to tell me. She said she'd write in steam on my bathroom mirror: "Seriously, pitchforks?"

We made lists of things she had to do, "limited by your delicate condition," I said.

"Delicate condition is pregnant. I'm the opposite of pregnant."

"The opposite of pregnant. That's funny." We bent our heads over the list, which was made up mostly of movies she needed to see, and she said, "Oh, my god. The Godfather."

"You've never seen The Godfather?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, Carrie, I haven't. Mostly because ever since I was four years old, every time I mentioned watching it, you said, 'You've never seen The Godfather?' just like that. And I've never seen Casablanca, either, and I don't want to hear it."

"All right," I said. "I guess I can cut you some slack, on account of the dying."

The night before I left for college, Lucy and I snuck onto a nearby golf course, to smoke in the sand traps and talk about what it might be like to be happy.

"I have a happy friend," Lucy said, glaring at her cigarette. "Sometimes I want to ask her. You know, say 'what is it like? Is your head calm? Do you take life as it is?'" Lucy sighed and rolled onto her stomach, throwing her cigarette, elbow raised above her head, instead of just flicking it out. "That would sound so whiny."

That was the last night we tried to smoke. We positively hated smoking, thought it wretched, but we looked like girls who chain-smoked; it matched our edginess. We wanted to be edgy. We were afraid we'd fall into the wrong lives without smoking. Lucy and I wanted a future that ended with divorce, screwdrivers for breakfast, drunk in mugs our ex-husbands had given us, that said things like "#1 Wife," gifts we received wearily, too contemptuous to say, "Do you know me at all?" That was the life we imagined for ourselves, and it needed cigarettes.

"You only have one happy friend? Jesus. I think all my friends are happy."

"That's because all your friends are shallow. They do things like run for prom queen."

"You're still mad I ran, aren't you?"

"No. I'm mad you won."

"No, you're not."

"Yeah." Lucy wearily took another cigarette out of the pack. "I just don't get it. Remember when we went to the beach? And Jason told you not to read, because you'd be ruining a beautiful day? How can you date someone like that?"

I touched my neck and tried to remember exactly how it felt to stand on a stage next to my grinning boyfriend, having won nothing other than people's envy. "You sound like Mom and Dad. Are you going to start telling me I'm selling myself short? And I always take the easy way out?"

"No. I just . . ." She sat up and looked at me. "You are who you are."

My parents didn't stop working during the 103 days she died. They hired a rotating shift of nurses and asked Lucy every morning, "Can't we stay?" She rolled her eyes and said, "I'm serious. I'll be fine." They left later and came back earlier, and by September, they were leaving at 11 am and coming back at 2 pm. I was a little grateful for that, because they could help me with the barrage of people who bothered Lucy: neighbors, our parents' friends, and relatives.

I sat in the kitchen and listened to people tell Lucy that the quality of life was more important than the quantity, and I heard Lucy say, "Oh, really? So life is just like cake? And to think, all this time, I thought it meant something more." A cousin of ours brought Lucy a pamphlet about how to die, and she said, "Um, I'm pretty sure it'll come naturally. I would like to read a pamphlet about how not to die, if you have any of those." A great aunt told her she should have "little goals. For example," the woman said, "a friend of mine just wants to live until her grandchild is born." Lucy looked at her and said, "Me, too."

I got so tired of everyone crying all over her, like their pain came anywhere close to hers. I had to hustle people out of the house when they'd tell Lucy not to fear death, and she'd get this shuddering, terrified look in her eyes. When I tried to make them leave, they'd whisper, "I don't think she's dealing with it well," and I tried not to hit them.

"I thought people were supposed to be all indulgent and nice when you were dying," Lucy said. We were trying to carve cabbage roses. "Nobody will talk to me about politics or tomatoes or Friends, they just want to repeat the fact that I'm dying. Because I'm so likely to forget."

"I know. People suck." I looked at the purple vegetable in front of her. "So does your rose."

"It's the cancer!" she said. "I can't believe you expect a dying person to carve a rose out of cabbage."

"Hey, this was your idea. And I don't remember any doctor saying that 'a complete lack of artistic ability' was a side effect of anything."

"I'm a pioneer," she sighed, dramatically. "I think I'll hang onto the knife, though, so I can slit the throat of the next person who asks me if I'm at peace."

"Yeah. It does sort of suck that you need to see the worst side of humanity before you leave the mortal plane forever."

"I know! That's what I'm going to remember! That I was in constant pain, and I was going to cease to exist and people wanted me to glow with inner peace." She looked down at her mangled cabbage. "Except you."

That was all I needed. For 103 days, all I thought about was how to distract Lucy. I read an article about how broccoli prevents cancer, so I served a huge head of it to Lucy on a tray, with the article underneath.

"You never know," I said. "But, actually, I've been thinking. We should start doing the opposite of everything that prevents cancer. I mean, why not? We could very well take up smoking again. We should drink tons of diet soda and chew buckets of sugarless gum. Oh, your teeth! Lucy, I can't believe we haven't thought of this before. You can totally ruin your teeth. Swill sugar soda around in your mouth, eat Jujyfruits and Sugar Daddies and not brush . . ."

"OH! I should get sunburned!" She sat up and grinned, enormously pleased. We'd been so good all our lives about sunscreen, even in the winter, and with SPF 45 in the summer, smearing it on at the beach, clucking our tongues at the girls who lay roasting on their blankets. "Definitely. We need to go outside, at high noon, and sit directly in the sun. And do we have any low-fat food in the house? Because that needs to go. In fact, I don't think I should eat anything that won't eventually kill you." And we were off again. I'd have cut off my toes and run into walls if I thought it would entertain her.

But I couldn't talk to my parents, and I couldn't cry with them while Lucy slept. I couldn't bring myself to discuss Lucy's death in serious terms. But I could talk to her. About politics, or tomatoes, or Friends, or about how she wanted to die in a hospital.

"The last thing I want is the three of you staring at my dead carcass on the couch and wondering whether you'll have to sell it. The couch. Don't sell my body. Although I'm not sure who'd buy it, broken as it is."

"Your eyes still work. And I promise I won't sell your body to some necrophilia club."

"Oh, thank god," she said, lying back on the couch. "I was really worried about that."

She wanted to be cremated, because "If I was buried, I'd have the potential of zombiehood, and we don't want that." We talked about what to do with her ashes, the only thing she really had trouble discussing.

"Oh . . ." She looked down at her body. "I can't believe . . ."

"I could keep them on my mantelpiece to scare people." She closed her eyes. "Or! I could go to some random person's house, and tell them that my sister really enjoyed spying on them, and I'd appreciate it if I could scatter her ashes on her peeping tree."

"I think that's a good idea," she said, "but we should pick someone who's sent me a lot of cards about how to be brave because I'm surrounded by love."

She got the flu in February, and sometime in March she called me, crying. "I might have cancer," she said, and she sounded so pissed off, I almost laughed.

"What?"

"I don't need this. I'm graduating in two months. Summa cum laude! I don't have time to die. Christ."

"Lucy?"

"It's probably acute myelogenous leukemia. I know how to spell it. It's not the kind you want to get. Acute is bad."

"Did you tell Mom and Dad?"

"Of course not. I thought it was the flu. It is the flu. I do not have cancer."

"Lucy?" I could hear her crying into the phone, I was waiting for her to bang it on the floor. "Are you at school?"

"Where else would I be? The hospital? They sent me home. To prepare for some tests. That'll suck."

"I'm coming over."

"Tell Mom and Dad, okay?" She hung up.

I did. I told them, and the three of us drove to her college, and it all began. And doctors and nurses and specialists bustled around me, and Lucy went in and out of rooms, and I ignored everything and just sat with my sister and talked about how maybe the Greeks were right, and she'd get to meet Hermes, on whom we'd always had a crush.

Only one week before she died, I cooked rigatoni with pesto and asked Lucy what shape of pasta she thought would be de rigueur in the after life.

"Well, it's angel hair, obviously," Lucy said, and I rolled my eyes.

"You get an about-to-die pass for that one. I bet it's wagon wheels."

"What? You're insane. If it's not angel hair, it's definitely something else simple. Of course, what kind of heaven would it be without the many varieties of pasta shapes?"

"The kind you'll be in. The kind that's not heaven." She threw a cold piece of pasta at me.

"What kind of pasta would they have in hell?" And we talked until the moon was high, about heaven and hell and pasta.

I can't believe I have to keep eating, now that she's gone. Life, though, is made up of the unimportant. Right after Lucy died, while I was still in the hospital, I went to the bathroom to wash my face. It felt greasy. I checked my reflection in the mirror, brushed back my hair, and thought, what am I doing? What is this?

When her funeral was over, I went home and thought I'd never get out of bed again. But then I had to pee, and once I was in the bathroom, it was only a step over to the shower, and my razor and shaving cream were right there. I put lotion on. I ate lunch.

In a month, I was driving back to my apartment, leaving my heartbroken parents to their childless house. I stood in my hallway for three hours, staring at the clock, until I went to get a sweater because I was cold. "I'm sorry I'm still concerned with the earthly," I told Lucy. I closed my eyes and imagined her saying, "You know, when you're dead, you never get cold. I've discovered many perks. But don't get jealous and visit me too soon. Oh, and Carrie? Good news. No pitchforks."