In the Clear (5 page)
“My arms and hands are coming back,” he continued. “Soon as I can walk, I'll be out o' here. But till I go, I'll help you out. We help each other. It's us against them, right, guys?”
“Right,” everyone chorused.
All this time, since getting polio on my birthday, I'd wondered what I'd done wrong. I was sure God was mad at me. I was being punished for choosing the red horse.
And now, Bernardo! He was a gift, filling the empty space in my life that had been left when they took away Henry. For the first time in four months, I thought maybe God wasn't mad at me anymore.
Over the next weeks, I watched and waited. I didn't talk.
I learned quickly. The doctors and nurses were busy but nice enough. However, just as Bernardo had warned, it was dangerous to have a problem if Witch Wilson was around. Janet, the girl beside me, wore a heavy brace at night. One morning she was crying because it had been fastened too tight. I watched her pull and pull at the leather strap, unable to get it loose. Could Nurse Wilson please take it off? Nurse Wilson plunked Janet's food on the table where Janet and Bernardo were supposed to sit and eat their meals. But Janet was stuck in her crib in the brace, pulling at the strap. Witch Wilson went about the room, feeding those of us who were paralyzed in our cribs, bringing bedpans and clean clothes. She finished everybody else before she finally stood beside Janet and gave an enormous yank on the strap. Janet cried out with pain, but she was free. “Hmmphh. It's about time you learned to get that off yourself,” Witch Wilson said coldly. Then she turned away and whisked Janet's food tray from the little table. “Breakfast is over.”
After she left, Bernardo pulled out a piece of toast and jam for Janet. The red jam was almost as bright as the mark around her leg.
“One good thing,” he said. “You didn't wet your pants.” Cynthia laughed so hard, she nearly did.
Bernardo turned to me. “You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till someone messes their bed.” He told me Witch Wilson punished kids who messed their beds, but I didn't believe him. Other nurses, even Nurse Toad, just cleaned up accidents. Kids with polio couldn't help it. It was the nurse's job to change the sheets. Not Witch Wilson. She took it as a sign of the worst disobedience.
One morning I saw fear in Bernardo's eyes â and then I smelled his problem.
Witch Wilson was already in the ward, pushing the trolley with our food trays. Those who could sit up and feed themselves got theirs first.
“Someone's dirtied their bed. Some lazy child here couldn't wait.” She left the trolley and stomped through the ward, from bed to bed. She stopped beside B's bed like a wolf cornering her prey.
“So it's you!” she sneered triumphantly. “You think I believe you can't control yourself? You think I've got nothing better to do than clean your sheets?”
She took the brakes off the wheels under his crib. Down at the end of the ward was a deep closet. Deep enough to push a crib inside and close the doors. Deep and dark.
I'm sure she cackled as she closed the doors on B. “At least we won't have to look at you all day. And if I hear one whimper out of you, you'll be sleeping there tonight!”
I felt terrible for Bernardo. He was always the one to tell stories and sing songs at night, after lights out. Everybody loved B, so we started singing his favorite songs softly while Stan, whose crib was near the door, kept lookout. Witch Wilson let B out of the closet after lunch. She wouldn't let him eat, though. He had missed breakfast and the hot noon meal, but everybody who could had saved something for him.
B kept his eyes down until Witch Wilson left the ward.
Then he sat up.
“Hey, everybody. I'm back!” he crowed.
Frank, the boy whose crib was beside Bernardo's, threw him some crackers; Janet, an apple.
“Thanks,” B said, munching hungrily. “We'll show her tonight. Right?”
B reminded me of my Tante Marie. I missed her terribly. She was away finishing her art studies in Paris and I hadn't seen her in all these months I'd been sick with polio. She had no idea the trouble I was in. How could she? I couldn't write her. I didn't talk. And my parents only saw what Nurse Wilson was like on visiting day. But I knew Tante Marie would have seen right through her. She was full of rebellion, just like B.
B told us his plan and we cheered.
That evening after supper was served, things started dropping. Anyone who could, dropped a glass or cutlery or food. Anything we could push out of our cribs and onto the floor was pushed, especially juice and bowls of strawberry Jello.
The ward was a total mess. The cleaning woman didn't come in until morning, and the doctor was about to make evening rounds.
It was a protest.
“What's going on in here? Nurse Wilson?” the doctor asked as he entered our ward. His feet made ripping noises as he tried to unstick himself from the sugar-coated floor. Nurse Wilson stood behind him. Her face turned the same color as the gelatinous glop under her white shoes.
No one said a word. But the doctor ordered Nurse Wilson to clean it up.
And we watched her scrub, smiling small, quiet smiles of victory at each other.
Dad gently shakes me awake. “Shh. Want to go out on the rink?”
He presses a warning finger against his lips. “Mom's still asleep.”
I nod vigorously.
“Dress warm,” he whispers. “Leave your brace off and I'll carry you outside.”
How warmly? I think of how the kids look when they pull toboggans down the street on a snowy day. They are so bundled up, they walk like stuffed crepes. I pull on two pairs of tights, flannel-lined pants and three sweaters. With my long coat, it should be enough.
Thankfully, my bedroom is by the side door. Dad comes back, scoops me up and we're outside before my mother can turn over in her sleep. “I put oil on the garage door so it doesn't squeak,” he whispers. “We'll prove to her there's nothing to worry about.”
He's put a folding lawn chair beside the rink. He sits me on it and heads for the garage. Feeling like a thief stealing a risky moment, I clench my hands as he opens the door. For once it swings up silently, and he disappears for a moment inside, then reappears, bringing my new hockey stick and my old wheelchair.
“Cold?” he whispers when he tucks me under an old blanket in the wheelchair.
“No. Come on, Dad. Before she wakes up.”
He tilts the wheelchair back to get the front wheels over the hard snowbank edging the rink, and I look up to see Henry watching from his window. I'm so happy, I wave at him.
I feel a strong urgency to get on the rink before my mother wakes up. There's no time to worry about Henry.
I'm on the rink!
Cautiously, Dad pushes me forward. “It certainly slides. I wonder how it will do when we try to turn around the goal at the other end.”
“Come on, Dad. This is great!”
We start to move across the hard, white ice, getting closer to the other end. I love it. I ignore the numbing cold in my legs. What will happen if we can't turn? Yikes! We'll crash into the fence. Bravely, I hold my hockey stick out in front of me, planning to push off the wooden boards if need be. But the wheelchair makes a wide arc, and now we're behind the goal, now heading up the other side of the rink.
“We did it!” I cry.
“You planning to spear yourself with your stick? Put it down on the ice,” Dad orders nervously.
I see his breath, like train smoke, above me as we puff down the ice. I have to lean forward slightly to put the blade of the stick down â it bumps up and down. How do hockey players do this so effortlessly?
It's over before we get around a second time.
“Stop, Will!” My mother's anxious voice loops like a lasso around Dad. She stands at the side door in a blue marshmallow-puffed housecoat, waving us in. “Pauline, you could hurt yourself. This is too dangerous.” She clutches her housecoat tightly to her throat.
“No, Dad. No.”
But he stops and turns toward her. Face-off.
I know who's going to win. My mother wants to tie rocks to my dream. I will never fly around this rink.
“Will, she could slide right out and she'd have no protection. She hasn't even got her brace on. Please, Will. It's Christmas. I don't want to worry on Christmas.” Her voice is a tight, strangling knot.
“All right, Agatha.” My father sighs. “But just so you know ⦠it is safe. We'll try it another time and she'll wear her brace.”
My mother scurries back into the house. I hurl my stick against the sideboards. Whack!
In his most soothing voice, Dad tries to calm me down. “We'll go along with her for now. You wait. She just needs to get used to the idea.”
He has to turn the wheelchair backward to get off the rink. The wheels get stuck for a second and I hang there, tilted back into cold reality. I'm a cripple. This is a wheelchair. I'll never skate. There's no point to my dream.
Just then Henry's head appears in my line of vision on the other side of the fence, a striped blue- and-yellow toque above his big, stupid grin.
“Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas, Henry,” Dad calls back. He pokes me in the shoulder to say something.
No way.
Henry speaks in white puffs of excitement. “Need a goalie? Or a defenseman?”
My dad's so friendly. “Great idea, Henry. Too bad we have to go in for breakfast right now. How about we call you for a game later?”
Henry's smile disappears in disappointment. “Oh.”
“But if you've got your skates on now, you can come and skate on our rink if you like.”
No way. No way. If I can't, he can't. I start to shake my head back and forth, then my body, thrashing from side to side, one big no.
Henry backs away a step, the blue pompom on his toque nodding. I jerk my thumb, the same thing I did to him that time he visited me at the House of Horrors.
Henry gets the same message now as he did then. Only this time I mean it.
Go away.
8.
H
ENRY'S
V
ISIT TO THE
H
OUSE OF
H
ORRORS,
1955
After the first awful month in the House of Horrors, we had a welcome change. We had a new, wonderful head nurse most weekends and whenever Witch Wilson took days off.
Bernardo seemed to know about everything â he nicknamed her Nurse Nightingale after a famous nurse he'd heard about.
She laughed when B first called her that, but she didn't try to make him address her by her real name. So it stuck.
My parents brought someone to visit one weekend. It was probably my mother's idea. She hated me not speaking. The more she coaxed, the further inside I went. She had no idea how dangerous it was to talk in here.
“Please, Paulie. Talk to me. Tell me how you are. I don't think you're eating enough and you look so ⦔
“Now, Mom,” Witch Wilson happened to overhear her. “She's just looking for attention and feeling sorry for herself. I've seen lots of that in here. You're best not to give in to her. She'll talk when she realizes all that silence is not going to get her anything.”
My mother looked baffled by this advice. She kept her arm around me but she didn't say anything more.
I didn't care about talking or not talking. My mind was fixed on one thing. I was determined to get out of this place. Somehow, I guessed that my mother couldn't make that happen. The key was getting better. I was going to have to walk again and then they'd let me out.
One Sunday, Nurse Nightingale told me I had visitors. “Not just your parents,” she said with a teasing grin.
I questioned her with my eyes.
“You'll see who it is. I'll take you over to the window.”
Who could it be? I immediately thought of Tante Marie, who had been writing me funny letters every week from Paris.