Little Red Lies (13 page)

Thursday afternoon, we get there at two as usual, and Mother pulls the curtain between Jamie and the snoring man. We have been there just five minutes, me leaning against the windowsill, Mother tidying Jamie’s bedside table, when Doctor Latham comes in. He stands at the foot of Jamie’s bed, brow furrowed, pulling on his lower lip as if he would pull it right off.

“The diagnosis is confirmed,” he says, “or as confirmed as it can be, at this point. We believe you have leukemia.”

“Leukemia,” Jamie says. “What’s that?”

“It’s a condition that prevents your bone marrow from producing enough normal white cells.”

I watch Jamie frown and nod like a fellow scientist.

“You have a proliferation of abnormal white cells crowding out the normal ones along with the red cells and platelets in your blood.”

“I see,” Jamie says.

I don’t see. All I know is, none of this sounds good. I am scratching my arms before they’re even itchy.

“It means your blood has a hard time clotting. To be blunt, it’s … cancer of the bone marrow.”

At the word cancer, Mother says, “Oh!” and collapses into the bedside chair. Jamie’s pale face looks whiter than ever. As for me, my heart is jumping around my chest in panic. Mother presses her hands into her cheeks. I watch Jamie swallow a couple of times before he can speak.

“Is there …” he clears his throat “… a treatment for it?”

“Yes, indeed,” Doctor Latham answers heartily. “We can give you transfusions of normal blood, and there are drugs we are trying with some success.”

Jamie has dots of perspiration on his forehead, and two red spots appear on his cheeks. Looking through the window at the patch of blue cloudless sky, he asks, “Am I going to die?”

Doctor Latham follows his gaze and says, “We have to look at this positively. We have treatment; we have hope. Let’s leave it at that.”

“But,” Jamie insists, “am I? I need to know.”

“You were a soldier. You knew you had to fight for your life over there in France. No one told you whether you would live through it or die. Well, here, on the home front, it’s much the same. Chin up, Private McLaren. There’s a war on. We’ll keep you here for another week or two to start treatment.” He pats Mother on the shoulder and leaves.

I can barely bring myself to look at Jamie, can’t stand to watch him clenching and unclenching his jaw, flaring his nostrils, blinking hard.

Mother grasps his hand and, for once, he lets her. In that instant, he loses all his fight—soldier or not.

I turn to the window, feeling empty, weightless. I have a vague idea that if I don’t hang on to something, I might drift right through it to become the first cloud in a perfectly clear sky.

“There’s a war on,” Jamie mutters. “Right. It never ends, does it?”

When I turn back, Jamie pulls his hand from Mother’s grasp. “So, I’m sick,” he says. “Cancer. I could die. Ironic, isn’t it? I spent most of the war afraid I’d be killed. Now that I’m home safe and more or less sound, damned if there isn’t a sharpened meat cleaver still dangling over my head.” He flings his arm across his forehead, shielding his eyes from view.

Mother tries to mop up the tears running down her cheeks with her hankie, but she can’t keep up to them. “I’m going to find a phone so I can talk to your father. Will you be all right, Jamie? Rachel’s here.”

The room feels hollow after she leaves, taking her lilac scent with her. The man in the next bed snores on. I don’t know what to do, what to say. I want to throw my arms around Jamie, but I know how he hates mushy stuff.

“Maybe I’ll find Coop,” he says, “if he really is dead, if there really is a nice place to go after death.”

“Don’t,” I say.

“Ah, what’s the use of sentimentality? When you die, you’re dead. There, now. That’s the way I see it. There won’t be any Coop drinking beer beside some heavenly river teeming with holy fish.” He rubs at his eyes.

“When the doctor said there was a war on, he meant you have to fight for your life. So, start fighting.”

“Any minute, now.”

“How can they be one hundred percent sure of what you have?” I get right up close to him, my hands on my hips. “Listen, they’ll give you transfusions, and just like in Dingbat Land, you’ll get up and walk away from this. You will. Believe me.”

We hear Mother’s heels coming along the corridor. He blows his nose, and we both blink hard, trying to look normal.

She sits in the chair near his bed and reaches out to hold his hand, but he pulls away and clasps his hands behind his head. “How’s Dad?” he asks.

“Terribly upset. He’ll come tomorrow.” Her voice is so high-pitched, she sounds like a little girl.

“I expect once they get going on the treatment,” he says, “that’ll do the trick.”

“Oh, Jamie!” she says. “What will we ever do? How can we stand this?”

I watch Jamie’s facial muscles tighten. “Stop!” he says. “I’m the one going up the scaffold, not you.”

“Sorry,” Mother says, searching for another hankie.

A nurse comes in, all starchy and bright, bringing Jamie some fruit juice to sip. She stands between him and Mother, sticks a thermometer in his mouth, and holds his wrist to take his pulse. Mother manages to pull herself together as the nurse makes perky comments about the noisy pigeons and the blue sky and what the temperature is outside.

Patting Mother’s shoulder, she says, “It won’t take your son long to start feeling better. You’ll see.” She leaves, taking her optimism with her.

The heaviness in the room feels like a thunderstorm brewing, in spite of the brilliant sky. Jamie’s pretending to be interested in a magazine about cars. Mother is in his tiny bathroom bathing her swollen eyes.

I stand at the window, grinding my teeth.
So this is what the end of the world is like
. Jamie has a possibly fatal illness, and I am the school outcast. I would cheerfully trade places with him, right about now. At least people would feel sorry for me, instead of hating me.

Realistically, though, he isn’t going to die. Young people just don’t. In a month or two, the doctor will be telling us that he doesn’t actually have leukemia, just something like it, something that won’t kill him. I, on the other hand, will live in infamy forever. No one will ever forget what a fool I made of myself and how I wrecked the play for the whole cast, not to mention the audience.

Ruthie must despise me. What a windbag, what a faker she must think I am, pretending to know all about acting. My life might as well be over. I could jump out this window as quick as take a breath, and that would be the end of it. I try to raise it higher, but it’s blocked. I could probably slip through feetfirst, I’m skinny enough. Except for my head. I’d be left dangling by my neck.

“Put the window down a bit, Rachel,” Mother says. “You don’t want to give your brother pneumonia on top of everything else.”

I slam it shut and walk out of the room. The world revolves around my brother, who probably doesn’t even have leukemia. I wish I had my lipstick to smear on about two inches thick. If I did, maybe people would notice my down-turned mouth and feel sorry for me, for once in my life. No one has time to spend worrying about me and whether or not I harbor dark thoughts. If I found a sixth-storey window that opened wide enough and jumped out, would they take their mind off Jamie’s rotten blood and say,
How sad?
No. They would look at my smashed-up body and say,
What a mess! Pity old Rachel can’t clean it up for us
.

I’m sure Doctor Latham must have doubts about his diagnosis.
As confirmed as it can be
, he said. By now I’ve reached the end of the corridor. But, what if something really
is
desperately wrong with Jamie? My heart is thumping wildly.
No!
I block any further thoughts in that direction and train a spotlight squarely on myself. Everyone and everything else fades into the blackness.

Retracing my steps, I pass the open doors of other patients’ rooms. There are bottles with tubes attached to people, one of them a pale bony girl no older than me. I hear a man groan with pain. Along the corridor coming toward me, a nurse pushes a little boy with a big head
and bulging eyes in a wheelchair. His spindly legs dangle uselessly.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, not very loudly.

“You bad guy,” he says.

“Scotty,” the nurse says. “That’s not very nice.”

He stares at me with his bulging eyes and says it again. “You bad guy!”

I give him a vampire-sneer, with my fangs hanging out, and notice my spotlight fading as the houselights come up. There is no applause.

I go back to Jamie’s room. He doesn’t look very sick at all.

Two days later, we gather in Jamie’s room to say good-bye. Dad has laid down the law. Glaring at him, Mother says, “I’m leaving against my wishes, but we’ll come back for you, Jamie, when you’re well enough to be released.”

“No, I’ll take the train.”

“You most certainly will not. Think of the germs. Trains are traveling cauldrons of toxic bacteria, especially in this weather.”

“I’m going to take the train. There’s something I have to do while I’m here.”

“Jamie!”

“I’ll come home by train after I deliver something to the widow of a friend.”

I’m proud of him for standing up to Mother. He’s James to the nurses and doctors, and it suits him. He’s outgrowing Jamie.

He’s been lying on top of his hospital bed in pajamas and bathrobe. Standing now, he towers over Mother, forcing her to look up. He staggers slightly, a little dizzy from getting up so quickly. “Would you let me look after myself now, Mother?”

She looks into his unwavering eyes, mesmerized, and says, “Whatever you think is right, dear.” She pulls his head down for a kiss on the cheek and leaves the room.

I lag behind, wanting to hug him or just shake his hand. Anything.

“Go,” he says. He reaches out and gives my hair a yank. “I’ll be home before you know it.”

I grab his wrist to make him let go of my hair and squeeze it until he winces.

“You’re lethal,” he says.

“Get better.”

“Okay.”

School is out of the question. I refuse to go back. I argue, stomp up the stairs, slam my door, but my father is right behind me, pounding on it.

“I will call in the truant officer. I will tie you up and drag you, if necessary,” he says. “I will get the chief of police to handcuff you. You
will
return to school.”

Sitting in my room, I try to imagine a life without school. Home all day.

With my mother.

Sometimes you have to admit defeat. I set off at the usual time, but take the long route to avoid meeting up with Ruthie or anyone else I know. Dragging my feet and expecting to be stoned or spit-balled or even worse, shunned, I get to school seconds before the bell and slink into my homeroom seat.

No one gives me a dirty look. No one laughs or points or whispers. Their lives have moved on. Hazel’s broken leg is more newsworthy. How it happened, no one knows for sure, but everyone has a story. Her mother, who has a screw loose, pushed her down the stairs was the favorite. My disastrous stage debut is entirely forgotten. Even this makes me sad. I must be a complete nothing to everyone to be so quickly forgotten. With final exams only two weeks away, teachers give me extra homework to get me caught up.

On the way home, Ruthie says, “How’s Jamie?”

“He’s getting better. He’ll be home soon, good as new.”

“You don’t look very happy about it.”

“It’s not that. It’s the play. I’m so sorry I wrecked it.”

“You didn’t wreck it. You just had a case of stage fright. It could happen to anyone. Even the finest Hollywood actresses freeze sometimes.”

“How do you know?”

“I read about it in a movie magazine. Olivia de Havilland slashed her wrists when it happened to her.”

“But she lived.”

“Deanna Durbin drank turpentine.”

“Go on, I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. Would
Silver Screen
make it up?”

Had I really imagined hanging by my neck from a sixth-storey hospital window because my head was too large to go through?
How unpleasant. This is not something I want to discuss.

“Let’s change the subject,” I say. “Did Hazel really break her leg, or was she just too discouraged to go back onstage after her mother slept through almost her entire performance?”

“Yup. She fell down the cellar stairs at home and landed hard on the concrete floor. Her leg is still in a cast. I take schoolwork to her nearly every day. That family is very, very weird. She wishes you would go and see her. She wants to thank you for taking her role.”

“I can’t. She must know how I botched it.”

“Oh, who cares? It was just a play.”

“A play is never just a play,” I say. “It’s a work of art.”

We part at our usual corner, but I don’t feel like going home, where Mother keeps cleaning and tidying the house. The minute I walk in the door, she’ll ask me to help. Instead, I turn up the street leading to Hazel’s house.

Hazel’s sister, Vera, opens the door and ushers me into the living room, cool after the heat of the day, where Hazel sits beside the radio with her leg propped up on a hassock. A plaster cast covers her lower leg and foot. Only her toes peek out. Crutches lean against her chair within easy reach. She roars a welcome. It actually cheers me up a little to be roared at so happily. She turns off the radio.

“How’s your leg? Does it hurt a lot?”

“Not as much as it did. It’s my ankle, really.”

“How did you break it?”

“I fell down the cellar stairs. Just an accident. Could have happened to anyone.” A flush rises up her neck and into her cheeks. “Thanks for saving the play.”

I snort. “I guess you heard about the terrible mess I made of it.” I sit down, gingerly, on a frail, velvety antique sofa. The last time I was here, I didn’t notice how big the room is or how many pieces of uncomfortable-looking ancient furniture it contains. It makes me think I should sit like a princess, back straight, ankles crossed. I slump down, legs sprawled in front.

“Can you imagine anybody else able to step in and know all my lines off by heart? I don’t think so. I heard you were amazing.”