The Fate of Mice (30 page)

Well, I got pretty mad when I started thinking like that, let me tell you. I was fuming, by the time the test was over. Dr. Stephenson squeezed my hand and grinned at me and said, “I have good news for you, Ms. Yodel, I see no evidence of a Mass,” and I just looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

“A mass,” he said gently after a minute, “a lump, that means I don’t see anything that could be cancer.”

You’re damn right there’s no cancer, I thought, furious, and then I thought I’d had to drink this stuff that could cause cancer, maybe, to find out I didn’t have any, and I got even madder. But none of that was Dr. Stephenson’s fault and he’d been real nice to me, so I had to try to be polite. “Thank you,” I said, “I’m very glad to hear that.” And then I realized that must sound very cold to him, so I said, “You’re a very nice man. Most doctors don’t explain things as well as you did. Thank you,” and that made him look happy and I felt a little better, about him, anyhow.

Not that I felt better about anything else. How was I going to get Jesus out of there? With prune juice? He’d been in there for months and plenty of other things had come out, but he hadn’t. Who do you talk to about something like that? Any doctor would think I was crazy, and I couldn’t see myself going to Father Antsy. He’d just tell me everyone should have Jesus inside them, and that’s fine if you’re a believer, but I didn’t feel much more religious than I had before I ate the biscuit. Jesus hurt, and that’s the truth, and I wanted my intestines back to myself. If it had been the Devil inside me, maybe a priest would have been some help. I wondered if Jesus could make your head turn all the way around, like Linda Blair’s.

I thought about all of this when I was getting dressed and I walked through the hospital lobby still thinking about it, so mad I wasn’t even looking where I was going, and I practically walked straight into Mandy.

“Cece!” she said, and grabbed me and started crying. She didn’t even ask me what I was doing there, which shows you how upset she was. “Cece, I finally decided the doctor was right, Cindy’s upstairs now, I brought her here two hours ago and went home to get her toothbrush because I’d forgotten it and I was just heading out the door again when they called me to say she’s dying, she’ll only last another few hours, and she knows it, too. She’s asked for Father Anselm.”

“She asked for
him?”
I said. We were already heading for the elevators. “Why in the world would she do that? He’s the one who drove her away from here in the first place!”

“She wants last rites,” Mandy said. “He’s the only Catholic priest in town. It has to be him. Last rites are a formula: How badly can he do? She’s dying and she wants forgiveness, Cece.”

“She won’t get it from him,” I said. A wedding’s a formula too, and we both knew what Antsy had done with that. “That man wouldn’t forgive his own grandmother if she took too long crossing the street. He’d blame it on her sinful body.” It’s a good thing Mr. and Mrs. Mincing were in New Mexico, baking their joints, or Cindy probably would have wanted them there too. All three of those people should have been asking Cindy’s forgiveness, as far as I was concerned, but I guess Cindy was too sick to see it that way. Or maybe if she’d been able to see it that way she wouldn’t have wound up where she was in the first place.

It seemed like that elevator took forever to come, and when we finally got upstairs we found Cindy pretty much looking like a corpse already, lying there just barely able to blink with about five tubes in each arm, and old Antsy standing next to her bed, holding his Bible and yammering away. I don’t know if he’d done the rites yet or not; he was halfway into a rip-roaring sermon, from what I could tell. “Cynthia Marie, let us pray that the Lord will see fit to wash clean your heinous sins,” that kind of thing, as if the Lord might think about it and decide not to after all, with that poor woman dying and wanting just this one thing before she went. It made me crazy, and I guess the Jesus in my belly must have felt the same way, because my stomach started hurting something awful. I could just picture the little guy squirming around down there, just wishing he could set this idiot straight, and I decided I’d help him out.

“Oh,
shut up,”
I said—exactly what I’d been wanting to say to that man for twenty years now, ever since the wedding—and Mandy actually giggled and Father Antsy glared at me like I’d just committed a really world-class sin. But my belly quieted down, so I figured Jesus approved. “You want to talk about heinous sins?” I asked Antsy. “Before you start in on Cindy’s, why don’t you think about your own?” He glared even harder when I said that, but I kept talking anyway. The Jesus in my belly must have given me confidence, or maybe I was a little loopy with being so tired. “Listen to yourself,” I said. “When’s the last time you said anything nice to anybody? I know all the things you hate, Father Anselm. You hate bodies and you hate
TV
and you hate people who make mistakes. Why don’t you talk about what you love, for a change? Isn’t that part of your job?”

“I love God,” he said, looking down his long skinny nose at me, and my belly panged and I thought,
GI Jesus doesn’t think so
.

“If you love God,” I said—as if I was some kind of authority on God, what a joke!—“it seems to me you’ve got to love people too, since God’s supposed to love them. I don’t think you’ve gotten that part down yet. Why don’t you practice? Tell Cindy something you love about her. Go on.”

He looked down at her, down at the bed, and wrinkled that nose like Cindy was some piece of meat that had fallen behind the refrigerator and stayed there way too long, and he said in the coldest voice I’ve ever heard, a voice that would turn antifreeze into icicles, a voice that would give the Grinch nightmares, “God loves you, my daughter.”

“And you don’t?” Mandy said. She was shaking. “No, of course you don’t. How could you? Get out of this room, Father Anselm.”

Antsy got, in a hurry, and I gaped like an idiot. I’d never heard Mandy talk that way to anybody. Even when she wanted Genevieve to die, she never sounded like that. She practically had sparks coming out of her ears, she was so mad. At first I couldn’t believe it and then I thought, well, why not? Here’s the old Mandy who cares about people joining forces with the new Mandy, the one who sticks up for herself, and they make a pretty good pair after all, don’t they? “Good for you,” I said softly. I’d never been so proud of her.

She didn’t answer, just went over to the bed and took one of Cindy’s hands in hers and started rubbing it, and I went over too. Cindy just stared up at the ceiling. There was no way to tell if she’d even heard anything that had just happened, or if she’d hear anything we said now, but I knew I had to say something to her, because I’d never have another chance. And it occurred to me that I’d said a lot of things to Cindy, all those months she’d been at Mandy’s house, but they’d always been about the present, not the past. “How are you feeling today, Cindy? Can I get you some water? Do you want another blanket?” I’d never said anything about how we’d all gotten to where we were, and I’d never told her anything about how I felt.

“I’m so sad you’re so sick,” I told her, and then, all in a rush, “it isn’t fair, you know, it isn’t, not one little bit. I know you think you’re being punished for something, but what happened to you could have happened to just about any girl in this town, Cindy. It could have happened to me. I had a pregnancy scare when I was seventeen years old, I never even told Mandy that, and when she and Bill got married and I was standing up in front of the altar I felt just awful, because I wasn’t any better than you were and by rights you should have been the one up there, if your mother and daddy hadn’t been so mean about what had happened to you. I know Mandy thought so too, she did. I wanted to tell you all of that, but you left before I could. I don’t blame you for leaving; I’d have done the same thing in your place. And whatever else you did, after you left, well, I’m not in any position to judge. All I can say is I wish you hadn’t suffered so much, Cindy.” We still didn’t know much about what had happened to her, or where, but we’d seen things when we were taking care of her. Scars, from needles it looked like—and from other things too, things I didn’t want to think about. It looked like people had hurt her, and not by accident either, and it looked like she’d tried to hurt herself. “You were just a little girl, Cindy, no worse than anybody else, and more than I wish anything I wish you hadn’t had to go through your life thinking you were bad.”

It was the truth, that’s all. She hadn’t so much as twitched the whole time I was talking, and I still couldn’t tell if she’d heard a word I’d said. I bent and I kissed her forehead and I said, “God bless you, Cindy,” because I knew she believed in God, even if I wasn’t sure I did, and I knew she’d wanted some kind of blessing from Father Antsy and she hadn’t gotten one. Mine probably wouldn’t do her much good, but at least I’d tried. And when I straightened up from kissing her I realized that the pain in my belly was gone, completely gone, for the first time in months, and I thought, well, GI Jesus must have liked it, whether Cindy did or not.

Mandy hadn’t said anything. She just stood there, holding Cindy’s hand and looking at me, and I could see she was about to start crying again and I didn’t think I could take it. “I’m going home now,” I said, “so you can say your goodbyes in private. Call me—later. All right?”

She nodded, and I left. It wasn’t even that I wanted to give her privacy, because I knew Mandy wouldn’t have minded if I stayed, but it was just too sad in that room. Whenever I looked at Cindy I thought about my father, and Hank in the jungle, and that poor wooden Christ on his cross, and I just couldn’t stand it, not after a sleepless night and no breakfast. I wouldn’t have been any good to Mandy if I’d stayed, and I had things I had to do for myself. On my way home I bought a gallon of prune juice, and as soon as I got home I started drinking it. I didn’t like the idea of that barium spending one more second sloshing around my insides than it absolutely had to.

I drank prune juice for the next two hours, and then I drank water for two hours after that, and nothing was happening except that I had to pee every two seconds. All that liquid was coming out, but the barium wasn’t. I was starting to get pretty worried about it when the phone rang, and I thought, Oh, Lord, that’ll be Mandy, crying her head off, and it was and she was. I kept saying over and over, “I’m so sorry, Mandy,” and finally I realized that she was trying to say something herself.

“Cece, listen to me, it’s not what you think, she’s not dead, she’s better.”

“She can’t be better,” I said, as gently as I could, and I thought, well, it’s over. Cindy’s dead and Mandy’s gone clean out of her mind, and now I’m going to have to bring up those four girls all by myself. And then I remembered that Mandy was religious, and I thought, maybe this is just church talk. Maybe she’s trying to comfort herself. “You mean—she’s in heaven now, Mandy?” It felt weird even saying the word, but if it helped her that was what counted. “With the—angels?” Like I said, I was really tired.

“Angels?”
Mandy said. “I don’t believe in angels any more than you do, Cece Yodel! I mean she’s better, right here in the hospital, every bit as alive as I am!”

I nearly groaned. If Cindy was still alive that meant they’d put her on some kind of machine, and people could keep breathing for years on those things, sucking money into the hospital faster than a drowning man gulps seawater. “Mandy, I really truly don’t think she’ll ever be better—”

“But she is,” Mandy said, babbling. “It’s a miracle, that’s all, that’s the only word for it, she’s so much better the doctors can’t believe it,
they
say it’s a miracle even, her fever’s gone and she knows who I am and they did some blood tests and they’re
normal
now, Cece, they were all haywire before and they’ve just gone back to plumb normal, Cece, I swear to God I’m not crazy and I’m not making this up—”

“I know you aren’t,” I said. All of a sudden I knew what had happened. “Mandy, honey, I can’t tell you how happy I am and I’ll be there just as soon as I can, but I have to go now, all right?”

I did, too. The prune juice was finally working. I rushed into the bathroom and got there just in time, and sat there, just being happy, while the prune juice did what it was supposed to do. So there, Father Antsy. Even Jesus needs a body to work miracles with, and he picked mine, how do you like that? I know religious people think pride is a sin and most of the time I agree with them, but this time I felt like I hadn’t had anything to feel proud of in so long that maybe I deserved it, and anyway I was mainly happy for Mandy and Cindy. And I sat there thinking about miracles, and I thought, Well, GI Jesus, how about one more miracle, how about letting us know where Hank is?

How about bringing him home, happy and healthy?

I figured Jesus wouldn’t have enough time for that, though, because he was probably on his way out of my body, now that Cindy was better. I wondered what he’d look like when he left, if maybe he’d look happy too, finally. When the juice had finished its work I looked down wondering if I’d see a tiny cross in there, or a little guy in a beard and loincloth, or what.

Well, that was just silliness, of course. What came out was white, whiter even than the barium had been when I drank it, white as freshly bleached sheets or new snow or any of the other things people talk about when they’re trying to describe whiteness—so white it looked almost like it glowed, but maybe that’s because it was radioactive, I don’t know. It didn’t look like anything to do with Jesus, though. It looked like a big fish, and then when I flushed and it was whirling around it changed shape and looked like a bird, and then it was gone. Which just goes to show you that Dr. Stephenson was right: if you look at a shape that isn’t much like anything in particular, you can see anything you want.

So I had to laugh at myself, the way I’d given myself all those airs about pulling off a miracle. Oh, Cindy’s been getting a little stronger every day since then: the next day she drank some Sprite and the day after that she sat up in bed and then she started going to the bathroom by herself and watching game shows and asking for cheeseburgers. She’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow. So it sure looks like an Instant Miracle Cure, but even if it is, it probably has nothing to do with me or my intestines. Cindy just decided she wasn’t ready to die, that’s all—you hear stories about that all the time—or the blood tests were all wrong to begin with. You hear stories about that, too. So I’m still not going to say I’m religious. But I have been putting in a few prayers for Hank, just in case there’s a God after all.