by Iris Kincaid
“You look sad. You need a cat.”
Erin looked around to see if someone was talking behind her. But no, her life truly had become as weird as it appeared to be. She could read the thoughts of the cat.
“Why would I need a cat? I mean, I could certainly have one if I wanted to. I do have an apartment to myself and no one to answer to.”
“That’s the spirit. New apartment, new cat. We can make a fresh start together.”
It was a startling moment of bewilderment for Erin to realize that not only could she read the cat’s thoughts, but he appeared to be able to do likewise.
“You know what would make you feel a whole lot better?” the cat asked. “A little shopping. There’s an interesting place right next to the grocery store. They’ve got all kinds of educational toys in the window. And they have a good selection of those comfy bed baskets. We’ll definitely be needing one of those. And a few canned delicacies. You know that store?”
“PET WORLD?”
“That’s the one. Let’s go.”
Figuring out what this cat wanted was no guessing game. He told her exactly what he wanted. This food. This toy. This bed. And when Erin momentarily wondered about the expense that was being racked up, he scolded her for not making his best interests her top priority. It was like listening to a disorienting two-way radio. And by the time they had arrived home, his final acquisition was a new name—Radio.
CHAPTER THREE
Aside from Radio and the occasional cashier (although Erin soon learned to avoid them with the use of debit cards) she was able to get through most of the day without having to touch anyone. Except for her job as a dental assistant. She had to clean teeth and take x-rays and come into close touching distance of about six people every shift.
It felt so intrusive. Although, sometimes, it did provide a useful insight into patients’ dental anxieties. Erin did her best to soothe and comfort people who were almost literally shaking in their shoes about upcoming procedures. They seemed to respond with great relief to someone understanding their root canal fears. As for other comments, well . . .
“I hope Dr. Phillips remembers to take his breath mints today. Seriously, breath mints ought to be part of the dentist Hippocratic oath.”
“Chandler has a lot of explaining to do about his Facebook account,” one mother fumed. “I can’t believe he told his friends that I was prying and controlling.”
“This Erin girl is kind of cute. I should ask her out, show her a good time. Nice rack . . . Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Sorry,” Erin said, not at all sorry. “Lots of plaque to scrape out.”
*****
Erin couldn’t help but wonder about Martine, the talented weather girl who had introduced her to Dr. Svenson and changed her life. As luck would have it, Erin got a call from Ruby, Dr. Svenson’s assistant, with an offer to take her clothes shopping. Geez. Her clothes really must look like a mess. It was Ruby who suggested that they call Martine and make a little outing of it.
Ruby had the organizational mind of a professional stylist.
“Okay, to start with, you’re definitely a Gwyneth Paltrow type.”
“You are spending way too much time with Margo,” Martine said.
“It’s not even possible to spend too much time with Margo.”
“Who’s Margo?” Erin asked.
“She’s one of us—heart transplant,” Martine answered. “And she owns Margo’s Movie House, which is pretty awesome. You’ll love Margo. We all love Margo. So, whenever she meets someone new, she’s always reminded of their celebrity doppelganger. But seriously, Gwyneth? I’d go with Laura Linney.”
“You know what? Good call.”
Never mind the clothes—although Ruby did have a great eye for fashion. It was actually an enormous relief to be around two other people who knew what she was going through.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, ladies,” Ruby said, “But you were both kind of a hot mess right after your operations—definitely in need of a fashion ambush.”
“Hey!” Martine protested. “Whaddya expect? I was in a wheelchair for over three years, and I hadn’t left my apartment in two years. Not the optimal conditions for an investment wardrobe.”
“A wheelchair for three years? That sounds rough,” Erin said. “I was on dialysis for ten years after I lost my last kidney.”
“Let me get this straight. You got to get up every morning, walk out of bed, walk to the dialysis office, walk to work, and pretty much walk anywhere you freakin’ pleased! I would gladly have exchanged a wheelchair for dialysis.”
“Hey! You make it sound as if it was easy. Yes, I can walk, but that still didn’t make it a walk in the park.”
“But when you were being inconvenienced by your disability, weren’t you able to live pretty much a normal life?” Martine demanded. “At any rate, you didn’t become a cave dweller, although that was partly due to my antisocial tendencies.”
“You don’t seem to have antisocial tendencies.”
“Well, not now. My fiancé and his family have just hugged and smothered those tendencies out of me. And the man who raised me, my Uncle Pierre, is back in my life. But . . . before then, I had the worst of it. Admit it.”
Erin had always felt that life had thrown nothing but lemons and rotten eggs at her. But if she really thought about it, the wheelchair would have been worse. Maybe there were people out there with difficulties that were a lot bigger than hers had been. And the mention of Martine’s fiancé helped to stir up the tiniest bit of hope in Erin. She was thirty-eight years old, but maybe there was still time for a happy ending.
*****
The changes in her life were coming at Erin at a furious pace. In the blink of an eye, it was time for the twentieth reunion, an unimaginable weeklong ordeal that Erin felt she had never done anything terrible enough to deserve. But it was free, and she had a pretty fabulous new dress, thanks to Martine and Ruby, and, well, these sorts of things were supposed to provide some kind of closure for the past, weren’t they? And so, Erin Sweeney walked back into a building that she had left behind twenty years ago, Oyster Cove High School, established in 1951.
It was the same school hallway that Erin had walked down a thousand times. That was probably no exaggeration. Four times a day, for three years. She knew these hallways as well as she knew the layout of her own home. It was, nevertheless, a surreal experience.
Thankfully, she was not consumed by renewed feelings of self-consciousness and insecurity, although she remembered them vividly. As she strolled these hallways, she recalled seeing those perfectly in love couples stealing kisses whenever the adult hall monitor was not around. How she envied those girls who had what it took to win that kind of devotion and affection, the charisma, the cuteness, the figure, the fashion sense, the confidence. Yes, the deep feelings of envy came rushing back, and Erin knew that she needed to brace herself for more.
Through a multitude of sources, she had gotten wind that she was about to walk into a room full of accomplishment, acquisitions, dreams fulfilled, and happiness flaunted for all the world to see. There would even be more than a few making obscene amounts of money. Shoot! Erin had always wanted to have obscene amounts of money.
Not because of the cars or the houses or the luxury shopping but because of the long-held conviction that with a sufficient amount of wealth, she could have bought herself a kidney long ago. Not legally, of course. Yes, yes, she would have had to wrestle with herself over the whole issue of getting a black-market kidney.
But if she could have made someone and their family financially secure for life, and they still had one remaining healthy kidney, then it would have been a win-win. Of course, she probably never would have been able to shake the thought of some hapless individual being kidnapped and waking up in a hotel tub buried under bags of ice, their kidney involuntarily extracted by organ thieves. Perhaps both scenarios were ridiculous. But a girl without any kidneys can be forgiven for her wild fantasies.
&
nbsp; As it so happens, truth had proved to be stranger than fiction. She actually was in possession of her new kidneys. The fact that they were a witch’s kidneys and now allowed her to be a mind reader . . . yeah, that was a whole lot weirder than the hotel tub scenario.
And although Erin realized that she should have been nothing but grateful, she was also keenly aware of the loss of twenty vital, productive years of life that could never be recovered. Now, she was about to feel the full weight of that loss in not only the sight of her fortunate cohorts but in their stories and actual thoughts.
She took a deep breath before going into the pool room. This was simply going to be a week in her life that was to be endured and then forgotten as soon as possible.
The new gym was actually rather magnificent. It was Olympic regulation size, with enormously tall ceilings and two walls comprised entirely of windows that must have created a bright, cheery, light-filled space during the daytime. The floor was covered with rubbery security strips to ensure that no one took a tumble. And the buzz of the party was in full swing, complete with an open bar along one of the shorter walls.
As Erin searched the crowd, there were far fewer familiar faces than she had anticipated. Thank goodness for nametags. The impressive pool was surrounded by clusters of loudly chattering groups. There was no forgetting prom king and ex-football star Austin Tanner, who apparently was now an extremely successful car salesman. He was surrounded by his old buddies and a few ladies who would have loved to have been his girlfriend back in the day. But his wife was very attractive and very good-natured. She didn’t seem to mind a bit of nostalgic flirtation.
One of the largest groups circled around Latin instructor Nora Kipling, everyone’s favorite teacher. That is an astonishing level of popularity to pull off while teaching a dead language. How had she managed to make it so much fun?
Ms. Kipling would block the entrance to her classroom, and you would not be let inside until you had spoken a Latin phrase to her. It could be one that had been learned in class. Or if you wanted to give her a big smile, it was one that you looked up by yourself in the library. As Erin passed that particular group, she could hear someone proudly offering their remembered phrase to Mr. Kipling, and Erin knew that she would have to recollect her own favorite Latin phrase before she greeted her old teacher.
Two very intense and studious men were talking to one another, and one of them looked over at her and gave her a shy smile and a wave. How odd. His name was Orlando Wicks, and they hadn’t really known one another. He was a science—biology—geek.
Back in their school days, he was the one everyone wanted as a lab partner. Not for his conversation—he liked to talk about pretty weird things, like most scientists—but because his partners were likely to get an A on the assignment. He got it right every time.
Everyone knew that Orlando was pre-med and would wind up at one of the big Ivy League schools. Erin had had no reason to keep tabs on him over the years, but she did remember that he’d surprised everyone by not going to an Ivy League school as expected but wound up going to the state university. Why was he waving at her?
There was a small representation of faculty and staff there, including Principal Joel Chaplin, Vice Principal Clay Metcalf, and a face no one could possibly want to see, history teacher Regina Gorman. What was she doing here? She was as universally hated as Nora Kipling was loved.
She made a point of announcing on the first day of every class that absolutely no one would be receiving an A grade. There were always protests. The best students were used to working hard and being rewarded for it. There always half a dozen students in every junior or senior class who had never seen anything lower than an A in their entire lives.
“That will destroy my 4.0 average, Ms. Kipling. I need my 4.0 for the college applications and scholarships,” they would always explain.
“An A represents perfection, and perfection is unattainable. It is the striving for perfection that will force you to reach for your very best efforts,” the unyielding teacher replied.
“But I get As in everything, so it’s totally attainable. I get As in English and math and science and languages. I get As in everything. Every semester. So, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to get an A in History.”
“That sense of entitlement will be your undoing,” Mrs. Gorman would threaten. “You’ll get a B+ if you’re lucky. But if I don’t sense that you’re putting forth your best work, you may not even get that.”
There were threats from parents, meetings with parents, angry discussions at the school board . . . Mrs. Gorman would not be moved. This was her classroom and she was going to run it as she saw fit. On this particular reunion evening, she was standing right between the principal and the vice principal. Smart strategy, otherwise it was likely that no one would have gone within ten yards of her.
Erin continued to survey the attendees. Oh, no. There was Mia Garland, the meanest of the mean girls. Although Erin had yet to have her first kidney removed before their graduation, most of the other students could understand that she was having health difficulties and either avoided her or treated her gently. No such luck with Mia. Erin had not escaped her snide tongue, her cruel jokes, and her petty rumors and gossiping.
Erin didn’t understand why it wasn’t enough to have friends and clothes and money and boyfriends. In addition to all that, inflicting misery and stepping all over people’s self-esteem seem to be an essential requirement for Mia’s own happiness.
The years had been kind to her, which somehow gave Erin the impression that there was no reason to think that Mia was likely to have changed. Erin gave that particular group a wide berth on her way to joining Isabel’s group. At least there would be a friendly face there.
Isabel was surrounded by four other women, and most were vaguely familiar to Erin. One of them was prom queen Kira Davenport.
“Erin, I’m so glad that you made it,” Isabel squealed. “You look so, so . . . wonderful. I mean, especially wonderful.”
Perhaps that was partially due to the fabulous dress. But Erin knew it also had a great deal to do with her renewed health.
“Since I ran into you last, I actually had a kidney transplant. I got a new set of kidneys and everything went very well,” Erin explained.
Erin got the kind of satisfying, heartwarming reaction from this group of near-strangers that she had once hoped to get from her family. They screamed, they squealed, and every single one of them gave her a long, joyful hug. From their thoughts, she could see that they had never expected her to live to see this reunion. They were genuinely thrilled for her, and more than one had to wipe away a tear.
But beneath all the boisterous congratulations, a few dark and sobering thoughts still popped through.
“I wish I could feel happier for you. I wish I could enjoy this moment more. I shouldn’t have been so stubborn and refused to go on those antidepressants. It’s so wrong to feel bad for myself when I should be feeling happy for someone else.”
Kira, the prom queen, was thinking, “Why is it so much harder to fix a bad marriage than bad kidneys?”
And the third woman agonized, “Here I was thinking that having no kidneys was a lot worse than not having a job for the past two years. But now, she’s actually got kidneys, and I’m still a loser with no job. Oh, for heaven’s sake, try to forget your own problems for just one night. Erin so deserves this.”
It was such a far cry from the smug bliss that Erin had expected to ooze from everyone’s pores. These women were having some serious difficulties.
“Oh look. There’s Principal Chaplin getting ready to speak,” Isabel noted.
A small podium and microphone had been set up along the wall opposite the windows, and the Principal, Vice Principal, and Mrs. Gorman all stood at it, side-by-side.
Of the three, Regina Gorman was the most changed from Erin’s memories. From the way the frown lines had taken over her face, she appeared to have spent very little of her sixty-five years smi
ling. But she was almost smiling now – it was the sort of smile that reminded Erin of clown dolls that leave children in hysterics.
“How wonderful to see you all here tonight,” Mr. Chaplin began. “I remember every single face, and it fills me with such pride to witness the lives that you’ve have made for yourselves. Families, careers, charitable pursuits, military service, entrepreneurial genius, and even a few of you have gone into education, which is especially gratifying.
“There is no job that could have been so satisfying to me as being the principal for this school. Although as some of you know, that early in my life, I did consider going into the Church. But no one could ever have kept a straight face if they had to call me Chaplain Chaplin.”
It was a very old joke, but it got big laughs every time.
“This is the supremely perfect note on which to end my career. Yes, I will be retiring from the most gloriously satisfying job a man could ever have. It has been my proud privilege and pleasure to be the principal of Oyster Cove High School. But, all good things. It is time for my retirement, which I hope will be an exciting new stage all its own.”
They were gasps of surprise around the room. Nods of understanding. Tears of gratitude. Mr. Chaplin had been a fantastic principal. The best. He was a steady and more supportive presence in most of their lives than a lot of uncles or brothers or employers had been. Or fathers, Erin thought.
Mr. Chaplin was somebody one could go to and talk to about anything. Even when those topics were things you should have gone to the school counselor about, most people preferred talking to Mr. Chaplin. He listened. He cared. What a loss to the school.
“But I want you to know that the school will be left in good hands. Strong hands.”
The crowd tried not to react negatively. Mr. Metcalf was an okay guy. But it was really hard to see him as the head guy. Who knows? Maybe he was capable of rising to the occasion.