The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (35 page)
Resigned silence widened around us in arcs like pond ripples. Through the gloom, I noticed that the dark smears under the doctor’s eyes had grown more purple, the cracks in his lips deeper. He appeared as worn out as an old front porch, and this suddenly alarmed me. Maybe using Tabby’s recipes on him hadn’t been a good idea, I reflected. It hadn’t made me feel any better. It was a good thing I’d stopped. I leaned forward and put out a conciliatory hand across the table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Please try to understand.”
“I always thought you’d go before me,” he whispered.
I squinted at him. “I know. It’s time for me to leave.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” He shook his head.
“What are you talking about?” I pulled my hand back.
He closed his eyes. “I finally got around to seeing the doctor, and he finally got his tests back. I have acute myeloid leukemia.”
There was a beat of silence. Even I could tell that sounded bad, but I asked the obvious question anyway. “What is that?”
“A type of cancer. My white blood cells are multiplying too quickly. They’re choking out the red ones.” I hadn’t realized you could divide blood into opposing colors, but I supposed if anyone could turn something as elemental as his own blood into something that seethed and fought, it would be Robert Morgan. It seemed that after all these years, he was finally finding out what the rest of the human race already knew—that he was a man at serious odds with himself.
I let out my breath in a long, slow stream. “How long have you got?”
“Weeks. Maybe months. It’s highly individual.” He avoided my gaze. “There’s really nothing anyone can do. Nothing I want them to.”
I thought about Priscilla Sparrow’s last visit and seriously doubted that. When the sick got sick enough, I’d learned, there’s nothing they
wouldn’t
let you do for them. But the doctor was going to find that out for himself sooner rather than later, it seemed. And when he did, I wanted to be around to witness it. My future would have to wait—again.
A
body can bear anything for a few months, which is the only explanation I can give for the uneasy and unexpected peace the doctor and I managed to forge in the final weeks of his life. On the surface, it was as if nothing between us had changed. He spent hours in his office, sorting files and cleaning out a years’ worth of prescriptions and medicines, and I busied myself in the house. Even without Bobbie, I had plenty to keep me occupied, and though Robert Morgan’s natural pace might have been winding down, he seemed determined not to act like it. He still stuck his shoes out in the hallway for a spit polish, and demanded knife-sharp creases ironed into his trousers, and wanted extra starch on all his shirts. He chastised me when the water at the bottom of the flower vase in the foyer got cloudy, reprimanded me for accidentally buying salted butter, and found the new brand of hand soap I’d switched to less than satisfying.
“I just don’t like the smell of it,” he snapped when I asked him what was wrong with it, and then he watched as I dumped all the new bars in the trash and replaced them with the old cakes.
I suppose that if there was anything different between us during this time, it emanated from me instead of him. I wasn’t exactly done hating him, but I couldn’t muster up quite the same amount of ire as before. It would have been too much like taking a swing at a scarecrow when what I was really after were the crows.
After he told me about his illness, I’d crept back up to my room, my stomach lurching, where Tabby’s quilt draped my bed, the orbs of its blossoms pointing at me like dozens of accusing eyes.
What if I’m the one who caused his illness?
I wondered. Fighting off a wave of nausea, I tugged and pulled at the quilt until I’d made a ball of it, and then I carried it downstairs and restored it to its original place on the wall in the parlor. There would be no more mixtures, I vowed. No more steeping herbs for hours—not even for myself. No more blending foul-smelling pastes. I was done with Tabby’s spells. From here on out, all the doctor would be getting out of me was sweet charity.
But no matter how solicitous I was, no matter how many times I refilled his hot-water bottle or changed his sheets, no matter how many times I emptied the basin of vomit next to his bed, the question of Robert Morgan’s sickness wouldn’t leave my mind. It rubbed and irritated me like a grain of sand stuck in my shoe, until I finally couldn’t take it anymore and flat-out asked him.
“Why do you think you got sick?” I put a cup of tea—just a cup of tea, plain and simple—on his bedside table and folded my hands, awaiting an accusation or, at the very least, some kind of suspicion.
But Robert Morgan just blinked, sorrowful as an owl. He had lost more weight than I thought he had on him in the first place, and his cheekbones had gone from stark to skeletal. I turned my eyes away. “I thought I explained it,” he answered. “It’s a disorder of the white blood cells.”
“No. I know that. I mean, why do you think you have it? Did something cause it? Like something you ate, maybe?”
The doctor peered up at me. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” I shifted.
“No, Truly. It’s not because of something I ate. It’s not because of Bobbie leaving. It’s just because some of the cells in my body have decided to reproduce too quickly. That’s it. If I knew more than that, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair right now. I’d be sitting in front of the Nobel Prize committee.”
“But, that can’t be
it
,” I replied. “There has to be more to it than that. There has to be some kind of reason.”
The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid there isn’t. The body is just the body. It has its own structure, its own laws. It’s a thing unto itself. When it breaks down, that’s it.”
I breathed out and glanced out the window at the blue, blank sky. “Is that what you think? We simply are the way we are?” I remembered him speaking those words so long ago, the first time he ever examined me. “What about me? Will I ever change?”
He waved his hand vaguely. “You—you’re a thing of exception, Truly. I don’t know what to tell you.” The doctor closed his eyes and took a sip of tea. Outside, wind rustled the leaves. “Sickness doesn’t mean anything,” he finally said. “It’s either something you can fix or it’s not. All I’ve ever tried to do is to give people a way to live with it.”
I pictured Marcus’s garden, planted in a slow spiral that would leaf and bud into sustenance. “What do you think happens when we die?” I asked. “Do you think we go back to the earth?”
The doctor frowned. “You mean ashes to ashes, dust to dust?”
“I guess.”
“Biologically speaking, yes. I’m not sure about anything else.”
But I was. All of a sudden, without doubt, I knew that everything and everyone on earth was one and the same. I thought about Priscilla Sparrow, and what I’d done for her, and how one day I might need the same favor myself. And though Robert Morgan and I had radically different casings, we were still stuck together by Bobbie and my sister, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. But still, for all that, we weren’t exactly alike, the doctor and I. He was wasting away while I’d gotten a double helping of what the universe was serving, and it hadn’t killed me yet.
Instead, it was teaching me to live.
Amelia didn’t share my newfound grace. “He’s got a house full of medicine, let him dose himself,” she said when I told her I wasn’t moving to the farm and why. “He’s a mean so-and-so, and always has been. Let him get what’s coming.”
Her venom shocked me. “That’s not very Christian,” I responded, and Amelia snorted.
“Tell me what the Lord has ever done for us.”
I stared at her. She was spring cleaning, and she’d been acting strange all morning, like a snake about to shed its skin. Now that the doctor was confined, and there was no one around to hear her but me, she often hummed while she worked and sometimes even had conversations, like now. Irritated with my lack of an answer, she wiped a layer of dust from one of the kitchen shelves and began swabbing the floor.
“You can’t really be suggesting that I leave him here all alone to die? Besides, did it ever occur to you that I might have other reasons for staying?”
Amelia shrugged. “What goes around comes around.” She paused in her mopping. “You don’t know the half of it with the doctor,” she said, “and, trust me, you don’t want to, either.”
I opened and closed my mouth. “You don’t know the half of it, either,” I finally said. I still hadn’t told her about my condition. She thought all my pills were a vitamin program.
Amelia looked up at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” I wanted to come right out and tell Amelia about my illness, but something stopped me.
I’ll tell her later,
I vowed,
after she’s done cleaning
,
when we’re having our coffee
. Today, I was particularly eager for Amelia to be finished with work so I could ask her for news about Bobbie.
Ten times a day I imagined myself walking across town to the cemetery to visit him, but there was the issue of Marcus. The doctor had made it clear what would happen if I let Marcus back in my life, and I didn’t want to make trouble for him. Also, I wasn’t sure where we stood with each other. Were we friends? Back to old acquaintances? Or were there still some unopened buds left on our branches?
He’ll come to you,
a voice inside my head urged.
Just wait
. I randomly wondered if Tabby had sewn any love charms into the quilt but quickly squashed the idea.
Amelia waited a beat to see if I’d give in and pour out what was sitting heavy on my heart, but I didn’t, so she shook herself, offended as a rooster. She wrung out her mop and leaned it in the corner. “That’s that,” she said. “I’m going out to tackle the office.” I watched her march across the porch to the clinic and throw open its windows. All afternoon she scrubbed and polished, but by the end of the day, her breath was coming in shallow scoops and her heart was skipping beats. She finally returned to the kitchen to switch disinfectants.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed at how flushed her cheeks were.
“This stuff’s no good,” she said, dumping the cleaning fluid and grabbing a jar of vinegar from the pantry. “I think I’m allergic.”
Next, she tried tying a bandanna over her nose and mouth, but after only an hour, she tore it off, her heart hammering, frantic as a landed fish. She vacuumed and dusted the blinds, scrubbed at the upholstery in the desk chair, and took apart the light fixtures, but none of that appeared to help. Then she dusted the doctor’s books. I peered through the kitchen windows, watching as she stood frozen halfway up the stepladder, her pink feather duster gripped in one hand, a single book clenched in the other. I saw her lips move and her finger trace a line across the cover, then she shook her head, clamped her lips, and stuck the book back on the shelf.
Moving carefully—she’d inherited her father’s dodgy back—she pushed all the books back into their original places and maneuvered herself backward off the ladder. She didn’t bother to fold up the ladder, however, and she didn’t position that last book very well, and I remember thinking that was out of character. The book remained stuck out on the shelf, its spine cracked from rough handling. I considered pointing it out to her, but I was too eager for news about Bobbie, so I let it go.
“Tell me how he is,” I urged when we were finally settled in our usual places in the kitchen and I was pouring her out a cup of strong black coffee. “Tell me if he’s happy.”
Amelia seemed less waspish now that she was finished with her chores, and I was glad.
Maybe it’s just the pomp of the doctor’s death she’s dreading,
I thought. Waiting around for someone to make up his mind and die, I knew, could wear the living out.
Maybe she wishes we could just put him in a hole at the farm like her father.
Amelia slurped her coffee and gave me the skinny. “His friend Salvatore just got him a job at that men’s bar in Hansen. I’ve read about that place in the paper. The church folks picket out front sometimes, and a couple of times now, the police have been called in for a fight.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What does Bobbie do there? He’s not of age.” I held my breath, hoping it wasn’t anything illegal.
“He works in the back, I think. They serve food, I’ve heard, so he helps out in the kitchen. Turns out he’s a prodigal whiz at the stove.”
I exhaled. “What’s he dressing as these days?” I thought back to my own early childhood of rough-hewn boy’s clothes and how I still preferred plain garments to frills or fluff. Did we dress ourselves from the outside in, I wondered, or was it the other way around?
Amelia shrugged. “Boy, mostly, but Marcus says he’s not giving up on that blue dress of his mother’s.”
I nodded. “He must miss Serena Jane fierce. Robert Morgan never let us mourn her right.”
Amelia looked uneasy all of a sudden. She shifted in her chair a few inches, opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it up tight again. At the mere mention of Marcus’s name, it was as if vines were choking us both. “And how is Marcus?” I finally asked, my heart squeezing into a familiar fist in my chest. “Garden going good?”
Amelia avoided my gaze. “Real good. We’ve already got bean vines halfway up the poles. Why don’t you come see sometime? He’s out there most days of the week. He could tell you more about Bobbie. Besides, I know he misses you.” When it came to Marcus, it seemed, Amelia never minded being wordy.
I tilted my chin down toward my chest. “Maybe.”
Amelia went funny again, as though she had a pound of lead she wanted to get off her tongue, but she still didn’t say anything. We see what we want to see in life, regardless of whether it’s really in front of us or not, and what I saw at that moment was how Amelia’s braid hung over her shoulder like a bell pull, how her birdlike clavicles rose and fell with each breath she took, how tiny and precise her fingers were. In short, I saw everything I was not, and I was jealous. I looked down at my own rough arms and my thunderous legs, and I wished they were as petite and neat as Amelia’s.
Maybe then,
I thought,
Marcus would come to my door and plant a garden, no matter what the doctor says
. Then I thought about what might happen between Marcus and Amelia if I disappeared, and my heart grew even more pinched. I longed to go visit Marcus and see what could be between us, but then I checked myself. I was a ticking time bomb. How could I offer myself to a man who’d already had his fill of death?