A Summer to Die (6 page)

"Meg," said my mother again. I nodded. "We have to take Molly to the hospital. Don't be scared. It's just another of those nosebleeds, but it's a bad one, as you can see. We have to hurry. Do you want to come with us?"

My father was moving down the stairs, carrying Molly. I shook my head. "I'll stay here," I said. My voice was shaking, and I felt as if I were going to be sick.

"Are you sure?" asked my mother. "We may be gone for quite a while. Do you want me to call Will and ask him to come up and stay with you?"

I shook my head again and my voice got a little better. "I'll be okay," I told her.

I could tell she wasn't sure, but my father was already in the car waiting for her. "Really, Mom, I'll be fine. Go on; I'll stay here."

She hugged me. "Meg, try not to worry. She'll be okay."

I nodded and walked with her to the stairs, and
then she went down, and they were gone. I could hear the car driving very fast away from the house.

The only light on in the house was in my room, mine and Molly's, and I couldn't go back there. I walked to the doorway without looking inside, reached in and turned off the switch so that the whole house was dark. But the beginning of morning was coming; outside there was a very faint light in the sky. I took a blanket from my parents' bed, wrapped it around me, and went into my father's study, the little room that I had wanted to be mine. I curled up in his big comfortable chair, tucked the blue blanket around my bare feet, looked out the window, and began to cry.

If I hadn't fought with Molly this afternoon, none of this would have happened, I thought miserably, and knew that it wasn't true. If I had just said "I'm sorry" before we went to bed, it wouldn't have happened, I thought, and knew that that wasn't true, either. If we hadn't come here to live. If I'd kept my side of the room neater.

None of that makes any sense, I told myself.

The fields were slowly beginning to turn pink as the first streaks of sun came from behind the hills and colored the snow. It startled me that morning was coming; it seemed too soon. For the first time since I had heard Molly's frightened voice in our dark bedroom, I remembered the light in the old
house. Had I really seen it? Now everything seemed unreal, as if it had all been a nightmare. On the far side of the pink fields the gray house was very dark against the gradually lightening sky, and its windows were silent and black, like the eyes of guardians.

But I knew that back in the blue-flowered bedroom the blood was still there, that it had not been a dream. I was alone in the house; my parents were gone, with Molly, with Molly's hair sticky from blood, and the stain spreading on the blanket around her. Those moments when I had stood shaking and terrified, with my eyes tightly closed against the corner of the wall, moments which may have been hours—I couldn't tell anymore—had really happened. I had seen the light in the window across the fields, as well. I remembered standing and watching its reflection on the snow, and I knew it was real, too, though it didn't seem important anymore. I closed my eyes and fell asleep in my father's chair.

I made two Easter eggs, one for Will and one for Molly. Not just plain old hard-boiled eggs that you dye with those vinegar-smelling colors that never come out looking the way you hoped they would. Molly and I used to do that when we were little—dozens of them, and then we wouldn't eat them, and they turned rotten.

No, these were special, and there were only two of them. I blew the insides out of two white eggs, so that only the shells were left, very fragile and light.
Then I spent hours in my room, painting them.

Molly's was yellow, partly I guess because it reminded me of her blond hair, and partly because my parents told me that her hospital room was depressingly gray-colored, and I thought that yellow would cheer it up a bit. Then, over the pale yellow egg, I used my tiniest brush and painted narrow, curving lines in gold, and between the lines, miniature blue flowers with gold and white centers. It took a long time, because the eggshell was so delicate and the painting so small and intricate; but it was worth it: when it was finished, the egg was truly beautiful. I varnished it to make it shiny and permanent, and when it was dry, I packed it in cotton in a box to protect it, and Mom took it with her when she drove to Portland to visit Molly. It worked, too; I mean it did make the room more cheerful, Mom said.

Molly was lots better, and coming home the next week. In the beginning she had been very sick. They had, first thing, given her blood transfusions; then, when she was feeling better, they decided to do a lot of tests to find out what was wrong, so that her nose wouldn't bleed anymore. They even had specialists see her.

You'd
think
that with medical science as advanced as it's supposed to be, that they could figure out what the trouble was and fix her up pretty
quickly. I mean,
nosebleeds!
What's the big deal about that? It's not as if she had a mysterious tropical disease, or something.

But first, Mom said, after they put all that new blood into her, they started taking blood out, to test it. Then they did tests on the inside of her
bones.
Then they x-rayed her. Then, when they thought they knew what was causing the nosebleeds, they started fooling around with all different kinds of medicines, to see what would work best. One day Mom and Dad went in, and when they came home, they told me that special medicine had been injected into Molly's spine. That gave me the creeps. It made me mad, too, because it seemed to me that they were just experimenting on her, for pete's sake. By that time they knew what the trouble was—her blood didn't clot right—so they just should have given her whatever medicine would fix that and sent her home. But no, instead they started fooling around, trying different things, keeping her there longer.

And my parents were very strange about the whole thing. They were just like the doctors; they didn't even think of Molly as a person anymore. They talked about her as if she were a clinical specimen. They came home from the hospital and talked very coldly about different drugs with long names: whether this one was better than that one.
They talked about reactions, side effects, contraindications; it was hard to believe they were talking about Molly.

I kept my mouth shut as long as I could. But then one night at dinner, the only thing they talked about was something called cyclophosphamide. There I was, sitting there with them, and I wanted to talk about other things: my darkroom, my Easter eggs that I was working so hard on, what I was going to do during spring vacation from school.
Anything.
Anything, that is, except cyclophosphamide, which I didn't know anything about and couldn't pronounce.

"Stop it!" I said angrily. "Stop talking about it! If you want to talk about Molly, then talk about
Molly,
not her stupid medicine! You haven't even sent in her camp application, Mom. It's still on your desk!"

They both looked as if I had thrown something at them. But it worked. I don't think I heard the word "cyclophosphamide" again, and for a while they talked of other things, and life was somewhat normal. And now Molly will be home soon, all better—and no more nosebleeds—and after all that business with the fancy drugs, it turned out that what she ended up with is pills. When she comes home, she'll have to take pills for a while. Big deal. They could have found that out when she got there, and sent her home sooner.

But since they didn't, I made the Easter egg for Molly, to cheer her up, and I made another one for Will. Will's egg was blue, and special in a different way. I thought and thought about how to paint it, and finally I looked up spices in the encyclopedia, and found a picture of nutmeg. I painted tiny nutmeg blossoms all over his eggshell, intertwined so that they formed a complicated pattern of orange, brown, and green over the blue background. I varnished and packed it, and on Easter Sunday I took the box with his egg, and the envelope with his pictures, and walked down the road to his house.

I hadn't seen Will since Molly got sick. Things were just too complicated at first. My parents spent a lot of time at the hospital, and I had to do most of the cooking. Then, when she was getting better, my father had to work doubly hard on the book because he hadn't been able to concentrate on it when she was so sick. I realized that I hadn't been concentrating on my schoolwork, either, for the same reason, so I had a lot of catching up to do too.

But finally things were calming down. It was school vacation, Molly was getting better, and even the mud outside had dried up a little. At night it would still freeze, and in fact I noticed, as I walked past, that there were tire tracks frozen into the driveway of the big house across the field.

That was another reason I wanted to see Will
After that first awful night, when I had seen the light in the window, other things had been happening at the house. Nothing seemed as mysterious as that light in the middle of the night; still, I was curious. There was a car at the house occasionally, and the driveway had been cleared of the last spring-muddied bits of snow. Sometimes when the day was very quiet I could hear the sound of saws and hammers coming from the house. Once I had seen the figure of a man on the roof, working. It certainly looked as if someone were getting ready to move in. I asked my father if the nephew had gotten permission to turn the house into an inn, but Dad said he hadn't heard anything about it; on the other hand, Dad pointed out, he'd been so distracted and so busy that he probably wouldn't have noticed if spaceships had landed in the field.

Will was under the hood of his truck again. I should have taken my camera with me. If there is one way in which I will always remember Will, it is under the hood of that old truck.

"Is it your battery again, Will?" I called as I approached him.

He straightened up and grinned. "Meg! I was hoping someone would drop in for tea. In fact, I have the kettle on. I'm so glad fate sent you instead of Clarice Callaway. She's been hinting for years
that she'll come to call someday, and I live in perpetual fear of seeing her heading down this road with her Sunday hat on and a fistful of overdue library slips to deliver."

I giggled. Clarice Callaway is the village librarian. She's eighty-two years old, and I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that, because she tells everyone that herself as soon as they're introduced to her. She's also the president of the Historical Preservation Society, and my father says that's a real exercise in irony, because Clarice herself is the best-preserved historical monument for miles around. Also, she has a crush on Will. He told me that whenever he goes to the library, she disappears into the ladies' room and then comes out again with bright pink rouge
on
her cheeks, so that she looks like a French doll his sister had when she was a child.

He sighed and wiped his hands on a rag. "It's the radiator this time. In the winter it's the battery, and when spring comes it's the radiator. The tires go flat in summer. Sometimes I think I'll buy a new truck, but then I figure I'd have to learn to deal with a whole new set of disasters. At least now I
know
that every April the radiator hoses will break and the engine will overheat. Better to know what your enemy is before you confront him; right, Meg?"

"Right," I agreed, even though I wasn't at all sure I wanted to be confronted by enemies or disasters, whether I knew them or not.

"Come inside," Will said. "I have a surprise for you."

But my surprise was first. After Will had poured tea for both of us, I opened the big envelope and took out the pictures. I laid the six of them on the kitchen table and watched as Will picked them up one at a time. He didn't laugh or blush or say "Oh, I look
terrible
" the way kids do when they see pictures of themselves. I knew he wouldn't. He picked up each one and studied it, smiling at some, looking thoughtfully at others. Finally he chose the same one that was my favorite: the one where his eyes were closed, and the smoke from his pipe was a thin line along the side and the top of the photograph. He took it to the window and looked at it in better light.

"Meg," he said at last, "all of these are very, very good. You know that already, I'm sure. This is the best one, I think, because of the composition, and also because you hit on just the right combination of shutter speed and aperture setting. You see how the lines in the face are perfectly sharp—you must have a pretty good lens on that little camera of yours—but you slowed it just enough so that the line of smoke has a slight blur to it, as it should.
Smoke has an ephemeral quality, and you caught that, but you didn't sacrifice the clarity of the face. It's a
fine
photograph."

Why did I want to cry when he finished talking? I don't even know what ephemeral means. But something inside me welled up like hot fudge sauce—sweet, and warm, and so rich that you can't bear to have very much. It was because someone who was a real friend was having the exact same feelings I was having, about something that was more important to me than anything else. I bet there are people who go through a whole life and never experience that. I sat there with my hand around the warm mug of tea, and smiled at Will.