Specter (9780307823403) (3 page)

“Don’t go away,” Julie tells me.

“I’m right here,” I say. I turn on the television, and sit on my bed cross-legged, brushing my hair. In all my jumbled-up memories of what happened to me after I came to this hospital, one of the worst was losing my hair. I was sick—so terribly sick—from the radiation and the medication they were giving me, and I was weak and sore and tired from the bone marrow tests and the operation. For a while pain was not just a word. It was a monster that had come to inhabit my body.

“What is a spleen, anyway?” I had asked.

They said it wasn’t important to me, and I’d never miss it, and it had to come out. And after they studied it and tested it, they said encouraging things. But my mind did not agree they told the truth, because my miserable body was the lie.

On my back, in bed, I’d watch the little cracks in the plaster near the ceiling, watch them come together like a tiny face with fat cheeks and puckered lips. And I’d drift in and out of the pain and the illness and think about what mattered most—my hair.

When I began to feel better, someone gave me a wig. It made me look as though I had just stepped out of a beauty parlor some time in the sixties. It
was made of washable stuff and had a permanent curl. Oh, how I missed my own hair!

What was growing on my head now was soft and curly and baby-fine, and I had the weird feeling that I’d been given the wrong hair.

Holley Jo and I used to measure our hair with a tape measure to see whose was the longest, and we’d brush our hair each night, feeling it slither down over our shoulders.

I wasn’t going to wear it that long forever. The day I graduated from college I planned to have it cut in one of those smart, straight hairstyles that would be just right for a woman with a degree in economics who was on her way to law school.

“Why are you thinking of economics, Dina?” Mrs. Schaefer, the math teacher, had asked me.

I rested my elbows on her desk, leaning into her smile. “Because I like the way economics puts everything into order. Because the laws of economics make A lead to B, and it’s fair. I like things to be fair,” I added.

Fair? I found out that nothing is fair.

“I didn’t know they had televisions in hospitals.” The voice sounds a little stronger.

I climb off the bed and poke my head around the curtain. The nurse’s aide has left, and I haven’t even noticed.

“The board of directors at the home where I live paid for it.”

“What are you watching?”

“I have no idea.” I really haven’t noticed. It’s a game show, and it runs into the next game show, which runs into the next day, I guess. They all look alike.

“Can you pull the curtain back?” Julie asks.

“Sure,” I say, and proceed to do so.

“The nurse this morning was nice,” Julie says.

“Some of the people around here are real nice,” I tell her. “Wait until you meet Mrs. Cardenas. She gives back rubs and she’s full of good stories.”

“I’m going to have some X rays this morning,” Julie says. “They’re going to wheel me down to the X-ray room on a cart. The nurse told me. She said it won’t hurt, and I shouldn’t be afraid.”

But fear is in her eyes. I sit on the edge of her bed again. “X rays are just a way of taking pictures. They aren’t anything for you to be scared of.”

“I wish you could come with me.”

“They’d never let me. But remember—I told you I’ll be here when you come back.”

“Promise?” Julie says, and I wonder where they’ll send her to live.

“Promise,” I answer.

“I’ll try not to be scared.”

I look at her thin arms, bare against the white sheets, each discolored bruise standing out.

“You’re afraid of a lot of things, aren’t you?” I ask. When she doesn’t answer, I add, “You can’t keep all that fear inside. I think you should talk to someone who could help. Maybe the police.”

For a moment she grows even more pale. She
grips my hand, and I’m startled at how strong she is. “No!”

“Okay,” I say. “But you’re awfully scared of that guy Sikes. You said last night that he killed your father, and that you were supposed to die. If I thought someone was going to try to murder me, I’d yell for help.”

Her fingernails are digging into my hand. “You help me,” she says.

“I can’t help you the way the police could.”

I shift on the bed and try to pry her fingers loose. She’s stronger than I am and she’s hurting me.

“Stay here,” she says. “I need you to be here.”

“Okay, but stop hurting my hand.”

She looks surprised, and I can see her trying to relax.

“Thanks,” I say, and rub my hand. “You want me to help you. Are you going to talk to me?”

Her eyes narrow just a little. “About what?”

“For one thing, about how the people at the hospital can contact your relatives.”

“I haven’t got any. Really.”

“How about where you were living before you moved to San Antonio? Aren’t there any friends of the family?”

Her face puckers up like one of those dolls made out of dried apples, and she starts to cry. “We moved and moved and moved! And I don’t have anybody!”

Awkwardly I smooth back her hair, trying not
to feel guilty for causing the tears. “Hey, Julie, it’s okay. Don’t cry,” I say.

Julie suddenly pulls up and flings herself at me, hanging on as though we’re in the middle of Canyon Lake and I’m the only life preserver.

“I want to stay with you,” she says.

“Julie, I can’t take care of you. I can’t even take care of myself.”

Her body is shaking now, and I try to move her back on the bed, to help her lie down, but she won’t budge. “Please,” she sobs.

Warm tears are dripping down my neck, and I squirm away from them, saying, “Look, I’ll see what I can do. Okay? Please stop crying.”

It helps a bit, but a nurse comes in, gets excited, and sends me back to bed.

“I don’t know what happened,” I tell her. “I guess I said the wrong thing.”

“She shouldn’t be upset,” the nurse tells me. She soothes Julie and wipes her nose and washes her face again.

I lie in bed watching some fat woman on the television screen jump up and down and beat on the master of ceremonies, and I wonder if she’ll have a heart attack with all that screaming. And I wonder what made Julie cry with so much desperation.

Were some of those tears for her mother and father? I’ve never seen anyone so panicked before, and it seems to me that it takes more than one problem to make someone explode like that. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t want to tell the police
about Sikes if she’s afraid she’s going to be murdered. It doesn’t make sense.

The door bursts open, and a pair of orderlies fasten it against the wall. They rattle the cart to the side of Julie’s bed and lift her onto it. As they wheel her out of the room, she holds out a hand toward me. Her eyes are pleading.

“I’ll be here when you get back, Julie,” I tell her.

They release the door, but it does a double flutter as Dr. Hector Cruz comes in, stepping out of the way of the cart. He’s a quiet man, with not much hair on top and a nose that looks as though it had been in a lot of rough football games. He perches stoop-shouldered on the side of my bed and smiles at me.

“I know better than to ask how you’re feeling,” he says. “Last time I asked, your answer went on for five minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sometimes I get angry.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being angry. It’s a human emotion. It’s what you do with the anger that counts.”

“Sometimes feeling angry is the only thing that helps,” I answer. But at the same time I remember Dr. Lynn telling me how people can cling to their anger because they’re afraid to leave it and take the next step.

“Let’s talk about remission,” he says in his calm way. “I don’t think you really understand it.”

I stuff a pillow against the painted headboard of the bed and wedge myself against it, pulling my
knees up under the bedspread and wrapping my arms around them.

Dr. Cruz waits until I’ve settled down and says, “If you understand remission, you might feel better about what is happening to you. You’ve responded very well to treatment, and we feel your disease is in remission. That means during a certain period the disease will not progress. How long the period will last we can’t say, but we have hopes it will be for a number of years.”

“And after that? We’re back to zero. Right?”

“We’re back to more treatment, and a hopeful chance for another remission.” He takes my hand and looks at me earnestly. “Dina, the scientists who are working so hard to discover a cure might—”

I interrupt. “They’ve been working to find a cure for cancer for a hundred years!”

“There are many forms of cancer. Hodgkin’s disease has its own characteristics, and there has been great progress made in moving toward a cure. There are many people living active lives with the disease in remission, who wouldn’t have been able to do so years ago.”

“You sound like a textbook.”

“I’m offering you the facts.”

“You’re offering me wishful thinking.”

“I’m offering you hope.”

“Same thing.”

He sits there rubbing his chin. Finally he says, “Doctors have found that a patient’s attitude can
mean a great deal of difference in whether he’s cured or whether he dies from a serious disease.”

Another woman is screaming on the television. Another winner. Mornings full, days full, weeks full of winners. Who cares? I snap the off button and blot her out as though she never existed.

“Please don’t talk to me about my attitude, Dr. Cruz.” I try to keep my voice quiet and calm to match his. “I had a whole life ahead of me, filled with all the things I wanted—a career and love and all I was going to be and do. And you’re holding out scraps of it, little pieces that won’t add up to anything. How can you expect me to be happy about that?”

“I didn’t say ‘happy.’ I want you to simply make the most of the life you do have.”

I close my eyes and shake my head. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“All right,” he says. “Let’s talk about your leaving the hospital.”

For a moment I can’t breathe. My eyelids snap open. “You mean I can go back?”

“No,” he says. “You need to live here in San Antonio, where you can be treated at the hospital as an outpatient.”

“But where? I don’t know anyone here.”

He smiles again. “Oh, little Dina, do you think we’d turn you out with a map and an apartment guide? Believe me, we’ll find a foster family who’ll take good care of you.”

I realize I’m not thinking clearly. I’m trying to absorb this news. I’m surprised to find that I dread having to live with strangers. I long for the comfort of the home that’s familiar to me, the people I know.

And there was a promise.

“What about the little girl they put in this room—the one who was in the accident—Julie Kaines? What are they going to do about her?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “She isn’t my patient.”

I lean forward and grab his arm. “Listen, Dr. Cruz, she’s awfully frightened. She hasn’t got any relatives and doesn’t even want to talk about where she’s lived. I think she’s afraid to tell anyone—even me. But she does trust me, and she made me promise I’d stay with her. I can’t break that promise.”

“You can’t stay here,” he says. “You’re well enough to leave the hospital as soon as they find a home for you.”

“I guess what I mean is, could they put both of us in the same home? At least for a few months? I think it would help her if we stayed together for a while.”

He studies me for a moment. Then he says, “I’d have to talk to her doctor, of course, and I don’t know how all the red tape works. I’ll ask a few questions. We’ll see what we can find out.”

I know what he’s thinking. He’s wondering if this will help me get my mind going in the direction he wants. I’ll let him jump to any conclusions he
wants. I won’t tell him that it’s not going to do me a bit of good.

It’s just that I made a promise to Julie. And I can understand how scared she is. I’ve been scared, too. What I don’t understand is why no one around here seems to be worried about what Julie said—that she was supposed to die, too. I can’t walk away and leave her with a fear that she might be murdered. Just because no one saw that guy Sikes doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the room.

Dr. Cruz picks up his clipboard and makes some notes. Then he gives me another big smile. I automatically smile back, and he looks pleased and encouraged.

“I’ll try,” he says again, and leaves the room.

A hospital volunteer comes by with the mail, and I reach for my letter, hoping it’s from Holley Jo, who hasn’t written for almost two weeks. Or Rob. Just once, if it could be from Rob. But it’s never been from Rob. I open a funny card from Carlotta, just signed with her name.

The morning sunlight hurts my eyes, making them water, and I blink. I’m glad she sent me the card, but couldn’t she tell me what was happening at the home? Couldn’t anyone write that the six-year-olds had started their swimming lessons and they wanted me to come back and be their teacher, or that whoever had replaced me in the first-aid class wishes I was still there?

Couldn’t someone say how cool the lake water is early in the morning before the sun has warmed it?
And if the old, blue station wagon still makes that
buckety-buckety
noise that the mechanic never has been able to fix? And if the driver’s-ed teacher still keeps teasing the kids in his class, telling the slow, scared ones that they ought to drive in the Indy 500? And if the red clover has faded and the long grass smells dusty-sour in the noon sun?

I’m startled when the door bangs open again and Julie’s cart is wheeled through. Her doctor is following. He’s a long, thin man whose body dangles through his clothes. He waits until Julie is tucked into bed, and he tries to talk to her; but she gives him the same answers she gives everyone else.

Finally he leaves. Lunches are brought in and slapped on the rolling tables that fit over the beds. Julie’s bed is rolled up this time, but she stares at the tray without moving.

“Hey, it’s like a big surprise,” I tell her. “You take off those metal lids to find out what’s underneath.” I hop out of bed and pull the covers from the plates. It’s an improvement over breakfast, which is a good sign they think she’s basically okay.