The Smart One and the Pretty One

by Claire Lazebnik

  The woman’s son moved over to support her and guide her into place. His body’s violent energy seemed to soften into an anxious tension as he bent over her. “I just want to get done and go home,” she said again.

  “All right,” he said. “All right.” He brushed some hair off her forehead and let his fingers rest against her temple a moment. Then he turned back to the nurse. “Can you at least get this thing going?” he said, his voice strident again. “Can we please just move quickly for once?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the nurse said. “But I can tell you on behalf of the entire staff that a pleasant tone of voice and a little respect would go a long way toward generating some goodwill.”

  “Respect has to be earned,” he said. “Making a promise to someone who’s sick and then not keeping it—”

  “Daniel,” his mother said. Her voice was soft, but he immediately turned back to her. “I’m thirsty. Could you get me something to drink?”

  “I can bring you some water,” the nurse said. Man, she was clueless, Lauren thought. Even from where she was sitting, it was clear that the mother was trying to get rid of the son, give him some time to calm down.

  Sure enough, the mother said, “Thank you, but what I’d really like is some juice—there’s usually some in the snack room. Daniel, would you mind—?”

  “Of course,” the guy said. “I’ll be right back.” He moved off. As he did, he noticed Lauren staring at them all and narrowed his eyes at her.

  As soon as her son was out of earshot, his mother took hold of the nurse’s arm. “Don’t be mad at him,” she said. “He’s just worried.”

  “Everyone here is worried,” the nurse said, a little stiffly. “There’s no need to take it out on the staff. We’re doing the best we can.”

  “I know you are,” the mother said. “He does too. He just wants to take care of me so badly. He hates that he can’t control this.”

  “Maybe he should see one of our social workers,” the nurse said. She pulled on her patient’s arm, straightening it out, turning it palm up, running her finger over the most prominent veins, all with a practiced efficiency and detachment. “They’re very good at helping people deal with their anger and pain. Let me know if you want me to schedule an appointment for him.” She gently stretched the skin on the inside of the woman’s elbow between her thumb and forefinger and studied it, shaking her head. “Too many punctures. Have you talked to your doctor about getting a port put in?”

  The woman reached up tentatively to touch her own collarbone. She let her fingers trail down to the skin a few inches below it as if checking to see that the flesh there was still untouched. “He wants me to. But it seems so . . .” She hesitated before saying, “Permanent.”

  “I don’t see that you have any choice,” the nurse said. “Your veins can’t take any more sticking. I’m going to let him know that it has to be done.”

  The woman nodded briefly and closed her eyes.

  The nurse resumed her work in silence. Lauren checked her own mother’s IV bag, which was only a quarter empty. Nancy was watching the TV that hung down from the ceiling, either feigning interest in the talk show that was on or genuinely absorbed by it. “Mind if I stretch my legs?” Lauren said.

  “Of course not.” Nancy looked up at her. “I’m sorry this isn’t more entertaining.”

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?” Lauren said. “I was expecting nonstop laughter here.”

  Nancy said, “Go.”

  Lauren found the snack room on the other side of the floor. There wasn’t much to the place; it wasn’t even really a room, just a sectioned-off area with a small dorm-sized refrigerator on the floor, a hip-height counter that ran around the edges, a bunch of drawers and shelves under the counter, and a coffeemaker, microwave, and toaster on top of it.

  The area was empty except for one person: the guy who’d yelled at the nurse. He was frowning down at a couple of small packets in his hand, as if their contents offended him. As Lauren entered, he looked up and waved them at her. “Partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil,” he said. “That’s all these cookies are made of. That and sugar. I thought the goal here was to make people healthier. Why would they have these?”

  “Yeah,” Lauren said. “Sick people shouldn’t be putting poison in their bodies.” She smirked. “Oh, wait—isn’t that why they come here?”

  “Ha,” he said. He didn’t exactly seem amused, but he did look at her with a little more interest now, pausing to take in the tight jeans, the formfitting T-shirt, the long curly hair she was wearing pinned up in a loose knot with painstakingly arranged tendrils escaping. “Is that gallows humor?”

  “Just trying to keep myself amused.” She opened the mini-refrigerator and took out a bottle of water. “I’m bored out of my mind.”

  “I noticed.” He tossed the two packets of cookies back in a big tray of assorted snacks. “I saw you staring when I was talking to Nurse Ratched over there. Hope our argument kept you entertained.”

  “It was kind of hard not to stare,” Lauren said, unscrewing the bottle cap. “You were talking pretty loudly.”

  “They drive me nuts here,” he said. “Every time we come, they fuck something up. The nurses are morons.” A nurse passing by the area shot him a dirty look over the top of the partition. He returned the favor and she went on with an audible snort of disgust. “The part that drives me nuts is that one will make a promise and then the others will act like I’m the irrational one for believing it. Bad enough we have to keep coming here, but to be treated like we’re idiots—” He shook his head.

  “How many times have you been here?” Lauren asked.

  “You mean specifically for chemo? Or in general?”

  “Chemo, I guess.”

  “This is our fifth time,” he said. “You?”

  “First.”

  “Who’s the patient?”

  “My mom. She has breast cancer. It’s not too serious, though. You’re here with your mother, too, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said and rooted aimlessly through a basket filled with bags of chips.

  Lauren said, “She looked pretty wiped out.”

  “She is.” He picked up a juice box. “I should get this to her. She was thirsty.” Lauren waited, an eyebrow raised skeptically, and he sighed. “Or maybe she wasn’t. She knows I hate watching them put the IV in. Ever since this one time . . . The nurse couldn’t get it in right. She just kept digging and digging in there with the needle and my mother actually fainted from the pain.” He smiled humorlessly. “That nurse no longer works here.”

  “You got her fired?”

  “I don’t know. They may have just moved her to a different part of the hospital. All I know is she isn’t anywhere in sight when we come. But if she ever again walks into a room where my mother’s being treated, I’ll—” He stopped.

  “What?” Lauren said. “What will you do? Now I’m curious.”

  He considered her. “You’re still looking to be entertained, aren’t you?”

  “Desperately.”

  “I have an idea.” He opened up a drawer and pulled something out: a deck of cards. “I found this the other day.”

  “Terrific,” Lauren said. “Let’s play.”

  He wanted to be within sight of his mother, so they went back to the chemo area and found some chairs across the hallway from where their mothers were reclining. There weren’t any real tables, but Lauren pulled up a stool to play on while the guy took his mother the juice and made sure she was comfortable.

  “Okay,” he said once he had rejoined her and they’d both sat down. “What’ll it be? Lady’s choice. Five-card stud, Texas hold’em, Omaha?” He riffled the cards expectantly.

  “Texas hold’em,” she said.

  He made a face. “Should have guessed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everyone plays that now,” he said. “Every socialite and soccer mom. It’s hip and adorable to play Texas hold’em. Which go
es against the whole idea of poker. It should be grimy, dirty, low-class, played only by the lowest form of what’s barely humanity—”

  “I could spit tobacco all over the cards, if you like,” Lauren said.

  “It would be a start.” He stacked the cards and evened out the edges with his fingers. He had long, slender fingers. Lauren wondered, idly, if he played the piano.

  “So how’d you end up with mom duty today?” she asked. He didn’t strike her as the caregiver type.

  “I do it every day.”

  “Why you?”

  “Short answer is there’s no one else.”

  “Are your parents divorced?”

  “No. My father’s dead.”

  Lauren winced. “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “You have any siblings?”

  “One younger brother. He moved to Costa Rica two years ago. If he calls my mother once a month, it’s a miracle.”

  “Do you work?”

  “I have a job back in New York.”

  “So what’s going on with that?”

  “I took a leave of absence.”

  “That was good of you.”

  The guy—what was his name, anyway? His mother had said it, but Lauren had already forgotten what it was—looked annoyed. “Good of me?” he repeated. “She’s my mother, for God’s sake. What choice did I have?”

  “Everyone has a choice. Your brother didn’t come running.”

  “My brother,” he said with a disgusted roll of his eyes. “I had to be here. End of story. My life will wait for me.”

  Lauren wasn’t bothered by his abruptness. It seemed more honest than rude to her. Well, maybe a little of both. But she didn’t mind other people’s rudeness: she never took it personally. “What do you do back in New York?”

  “I’m an investor.”

  “And you can just take a leave of absence from that?”

  “From the office, yeah. I’m still working—most of what I do I can do on the computer from here. And the time difference helps. I get a lot of work done early and then I’m available the rest of the day to help my mother.” He made three piles out of the cards and then stacked them up again, each one on top of the next.

  “You fly back and forth a lot?”

  “When I need to,” he said. “Stuff comes up. But I don’t like to leave her alone, so it’s usually just a twenty-four-hour thing. I spend more time on the plane than I do in New York.”

  “And did you always know you wanted to play with money?” Lauren asked.

  “Well, not always,” he said. “I mean, when I was five, I didn’t walk around saying I wanted to work for Morgan Stanley. But I’ve been on a pretty steady track since college.”

  “What did you walk around saying you wanted to be? I mean, when you were five?”

  He grinned with a sudden and surprising charm. “A professional poker player.”

  Lauren pushed her chair back. “That does it. I’m not playing with you now. You’ll beat the pants off me.”

  “I like the image,” he said. Their eyes met briefly. Then, almost as if in direct response to that shared look, he shifted away and looked across the hallway at his mother. You could see his eyes tracing the length of his mother’s arm and the tubing up to her IV.

  “It’s got to be pretty scary,” Lauren said. “What you’re going through.”

  He looked at her with a sudden savage embarrassment, then settled back in his seat and rapped the cards loudly on the stool. “Are we playing or not?” he said.

  “We’ll need something to bet with.”

  “They have M&Ms in the vending machine. Go get some.” He started to deal the cards. “You need change?”

  “I’m good.” Lauren stood up. “Hey, hold off on that dealing until I get back. I don’t trust anyone who deals when my back is turned.”

  “Nor should you,” he said, gathering the cards he had dealt back up. “I was planning on cheating.”

  “Really?”

  “Nah, I’m just joking,” he said in a tone that made her wonder.

  He was a much better poker player than Lauren, and the discrepancy between their abilities seemed to bother him.

  “Why the hell did you keep betting?” he said after winning a particularly huge pot. “You knew I wasn’t going to fold and you had a crappy hand.”

  “They’re just M&Ms,” Lauren said. “Why not take a risk or two?”

  “You’ve got to think like they’re twenty-dollar chips.”

  “Why?”

  “Because otherwise there’s no point to playing at all.”

  “I thought we were playing to pass the time.”

  “We are,” he said. “But it’s more fun and more interesting if you take it seriously.”

  “It’s more fun if you have fun.” Lauren stretched her arms, arching her back a little and surreptitiously watching his reaction. The move—a classic, and usually effective—was wasted on him: he was looking across the hallway, checking on his mother again. She let her arms drop to her sides. “Want to play something else?”

  “Let’s take a break.” He threw the cards on the table. “Your mother’s bag is almost through.”

  “Should I go over there?” Lauren started to rise, but he shook his head.

  “The nurses will take care of it. It’ll be a while yet—they’ll flush her out with some extra liquids first.”

  “Oh.” She fidgeted. “You want to grab a cup of coffee?”

  They went back to the snack area. Lauren pushed a button on the coffee machine that dispensed exactly one cup’s worth of coffee into a Styrofoam cup. She handed it to the guy, who stared at it absently. “My mother always drank a ton of coffee,” he said. “Cups and cups, all day long. Then, months ago, she stopped suddenly. She said it made her stomach feel funny. She thought it was because she was getting older—just couldn’t handle the acid anymore. But it was the cancer. It was already affecting her, only no one knew it. Not until the real pain started.”

  “So it’s stomach cancer?” Lauren punched at the coffee machine again and filled up a cup for herself.

  “No. Pancreatic. Stage four. Inoperable.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said, turning with her cup of coffee. She didn’t know much about cancer, but the little she had read online had made it clear that stage four was bad. “All of this must be so overwhelming.”

  He looked around and past her. “You see milk anywhere?”

  “How’s this?” She fished a little plastic container of creamer out of a bowl full of them and tossed it to him.

  He made a face as he caught it. “You know what this stuff is made of? Corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils. Not a drop of real milk in it.”

  “Maybe there’s some in the fridge.” Lauren put her coffee on the counter, squatted down, and peered into the refrigerator. “So are you some kind of health food nut? That’s twice you’ve complained about bad fats.”

  He dropped the creamer onto the counter. “Years ago, a friend of mine read an article about how bad partially hydrogenated oils are for you and wouldn’t stop talking about it—this was way before everyone else started worrying about them. She convinced me my blood would just stop flowing if I ate any. So I try to avoid them. But it’s not like I eat tofu and broccoli every day. I enjoy my hamburger and fries as much as the next guy.”

  “So long as they’re not cooked in trans fats.”

  “Exactly. Or so long as I don’t know that they are. When it comes to french fries, I observe a strict ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Especially if they’re hot and salty.”

  Lauren stood up with a small carton of milk and knocked the fridge door shut with her knee. “I eat everything.”

  “Everything?”

  She handed him the milk. “Except flan. I have a deep-seated fear of flan.”

  “It’s scary stuff,” he said. “I don’t blame you.” He opened the milk, sniffed it carefully, then poured a little into
his coffee before offering the carton to Lauren.

  She shook her head. “I like coffee creamer. Think I’ll die young?”

  He gestured around him. “Nice joke to make here.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Give me a break. I didn’t mean—”

  He put his hand up. “I was kidding. Make any joke you want. If you can’t laugh at this fucking shitty situation . . .” He didn’t bother to finish. Instead he said, “You know, the more time we spend together, the more awkward it’s going to be when I admit I have no idea what your name is.”

  “I don’t know yours either,” she said. “But I heard your mother say it. Let me see if I can remember.” She sipped her coffee, frowning in thought. “Is it David?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Hey, I was pretty close. Want to guess mine?”

  “I’m at a slight disadvantage,” he said. “Never having heard it at all.”

  “So? You could still guess.”

  “That’s stupid,” he said. “I could guess for hours and still not get it.”

  “I could give you the first letter—”

  He made an impatient noise. “Just tell me the name, will you?”

  “It’s Lauren.”

  “I never would have guessed that,” he said.

  The coffee was old and sour, even with the creamer. Lauren gave up on it and tossed it into the plastic-lined trash can. The cup had been pretty full and coffee sloshed over all the garbage. “I better go check on my mom.”

  “Do you know when her next appointment is?” Daniel asked as they made their way back to the chemo area.

  “In a week, I think.”

  “We’re back then too. We’re on a twice-a-week schedule for six straight weeks. Which doesn’t even include the checkups with her oncologist. I spend half my life on the freeway between Encino and here.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and then said, “Sounds like there’s a good chance we’ll run into each other again next week. Maybe we could play some more cards.”