And so I retreat. I have learned to move out and away from the pain and the illness, becoming a separate being from my body. I pull away from these feelings now, away from my body, away from the hospital room; and my mind slips through the moonlit rooms of the place where I grew up, the church-run foster home for girls like me, whose absent parents clung legally until their children were unadoptable. People want babies to adopt, they told me over and over, as I wrapped gangly legs around chair rungs and ached to be small and petted and loved.
Now I am far from my body, and I glide through the living room of the central building, stroking the smooth oak tabletops and the sturdy upholstered chairs. I had once thought them ugly, and they were. They are. But they are an anchor to my other world, and I need to touch them.
The moon shimmers through windows without drapes, open to the fields and the woods of gnarled elm and mesquite, and I can see beyond to the vegetable garden where I once helped to hoe fat clumps of weeds from between rows of pole beans and corn, whacking the weed roots with a vengeance in the hot summer sun, clods of dark soil flying into the air, sweat running down my face and back.
Softly, I am now in the kitchen, slipping into one of the wooden chairs, remembering old Carlotta, who does the baking and who hands out cookies like love tokens. Even in the aloneness of night the kitchen is memory-fragrant with cinnamon and chocolate and the warm breasts of Carlotta, who knows when a child needs a hug in order to survive.
And here is the room in which I cried at night when I was very young, wishing someone would want me, wondering how anyone would find me in this hill country place. Here I grew older, no longer caring about the childhood I had once wanted, focusing all my energies on a future I would build for myself.
Holley Jo, my best friend, has been at the home almost as long as I have, and our lives are so intertwined that we would sit cross-legged on our beds after lights out and talk about the years we would plan and how great they would be, until someone would come in from the next room and threaten us with all sorts of dire things unless we let them get to sleep.
As I move through the closed doorway, I am no more opaque than the moonlight that spills over the windowsill. The room is vibrant with rhythmic breathing and sleep murmurs and tiny night noises. Holley Jo’s long, brown hair is spidery across the pillow, and I finger it wistfully, thinking of the short, thin curls that are all I have left of the dark hair that once whipped through the air as I ran.
Holley Jo stirs, and I pull my hand away. Hush. Sleep. I’m not here to disturb. I’m here because I’m clinging to something it’s hard to give up. My bed is still empty, and I curl up at the end, my cheek against the fuzzy chenille spread. For so many years this bed has been my refuge, my planning place. Here is where I had decided that the whole world ahead was open to me, and what I wanted to work for could be mine. I would aim for a scholarship, and knew I had a darned good chance of getting one. I would go to the University of Texas, and work part time, and live in a dorm, and come out clutching a degree in economics and an acceptance to law school. That’s when my real life would begin. I was going to win. I could be patient with the promise of what my life was going to be.
Then that dream was ripped apart and smashed. When the doctor sent me to the hospital in San Antonio and they told me there that the chills and weight loss and that stupid lump on the side of my neck meant Hodgkin’s disease, I cried out that it wasn’t fair! I couldn’t be a winner because they had snatched away the race. And I wasn’t ready to die.
“What am I doing here?” I whisper.
Jarringly I am back in the hospital room with its medicine smells and the brisk footsteps following the jangle of a cart in the hallway past my door. The words I had whispered hang in the air, reminding me of another whisper, and I shiver, clutching the blanket to my chin for comfort.
Who are you, Sikes?
Lying there in the dark room, I hold my breath, terrified that I will hear an answer.
CHAPTER
2
Hospital mornings break the day into clatters and rattles with a background of voices, even before the sun is up. There’s not much privacy in a hospital. We can’t keep from hearing what goes on in the rooms around us.
There’s an old lady across the hall who sometimes cries like a little kid and keeps calling, “Eddie! Eddie!” Mrs. Cardenas said the old lady is ninety-six, and she wants Eddie to come and take her home, except there isn’t an Eddie anymore.
One night I sneaked across the hall and sat in the chair by her bed. I thought if she had someone to talk to, she might feel better. She was like a little skeleton, with transparent skin stretched over her bones; and her fingers kept poking out the top of the blanket, wiggling like spider legs. She stopped crying and stared at me, but she didn’t talk; so I told her about Rob, whose tortoiseshell glasses match his hair and slip down his nose when he leans over to write, and about the terrific poetry he writes in English class, and about the special poems he wrote just for me. I told her he had promised to give me his senior ring next year, but since I came to the hospital, I haven’t heard from him.
And I told her about the place I lived before I came here, and how my friend, Holley Jo, keeps sending me get-well letters that make me homesick for the low hills and the brown grass in the fall and the wild flowers in the spring, and even for the dust smell of the garden and the rattling bus to school.
And I told her they said I couldn’t go back there to live again because they had no facilities for taking the right kind of care of me. And I told her I was going to die.
She just kept staring at me, and all of a sudden she made noises and began to smell awful. So I ran back to my own bed and scrunched down under the blanket and cried.
This morning—the day after Julie had come—is just like every other morning, with all the bustle of trays and face washings that have to take place before anyone is really awake. My doctor won’t come by until ten, so there’s going to be a long wait after the breakfast trays are picked up. I take a shower, then decide to paint my toenails. Holley Jo sent me the nail polish in my favorite shade of pink.
I glance over at Julie. “You didn’t eat much breakfast.”
“I don’t like that stuff,” she answers.
I can see they’ve given her a liquid diet. They probably have to until they find out if everything is all right.
My knee is tucked under my chin, and I take a smooth stroke with the brush, thinking at the same time how pale and spindly my legs look. I need the sun.
“That’s pretty,” Julie says.
I hold out my foot, stretching my toes, and smile at her. “Would you like me to paint your toenails, too?”
She nods, so I pull the sheet and blanket away from the end of the bed, put her feet on my lap, and paint away.
I am just finishing when a nurse’s aide comes in and watches us, shaking her head. “She’s not supposed to move around,” she tells me.
“Only her feet got moved,” I answer, “and the concussion isn’t in her toes.”
Julie actually smiles, and she lifts her feet to examine her toes. It’s funny how a little thing like nail polish can make you feel better about yourself—even if the feeling lasts for only a few moments.
“Julie, I’ve brought you a comb and hair brush and toothpaste and the other things you’ll need,” the aide says. She pulls the curtain between our beds and tells me to scoot. Julie’s got to have one of those chilly bed baths that make you feel like dried soap for hours.
“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 bod
y.
“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 dur
ing 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?”
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