She got up and let him slide lower on the couch. She covered him with a blanket, then gathered all the laundry off the big chair, took the stairs very carefully with blind feet, and started a load of whites. She went back upstairs again, slowly, and lay beside Dolly in the bottom bunk in the kids’ room the way she often did, snuggling along the back of her now that she was sleeping and couldn’t smell the rum-breath.
Dolly was still hers, even if Pearce was not.
In the morning Dolly climbed out from behind Lorraine early and woke up Trevor, and they went to watch TV. Lorraine heard them go, but she did not really wake up till Pearce started to scream, alone in the other bedroom waiting for someone to get him out of the high steel crib they had found at the Goodwill. That would be great, when he figured out how to climb out of it—how to fall out, Lorraine thought. Nine a.m. already. Her head was killing her.
She got coats on the kids and walked them over to the mall to get a few groceries. It wasn’t till they’d been back a while, a good hour, that she missed Trevor. Dolly helped look, Lorraine grabbed Pearce and they went up and down the alley and the street, but he was nowhere in the neighbourhood. They ran back to the mall—nowhere.
She felt sicker than she ever had with the cancer. Slicing waves of fear-pain ran down her arms. She was so tired and hungover she couldn’t think straight, and her head was drumming. There was nothing to do but call the police, so she did it, she called 911. She could imagine every dark grove of pines, every closet from here to downtown. Where Trevor was being tied up against a metal pole, in her mind’s eye—she shut that eye and lay down until the police came to the door.
She could not remember what he had been wearing, when they asked her. He only had one jacket, the blue parka, so that was a start. But was he still wearing the red sweat pants he’d slept in? What year was he born? She couldn’t make her mind give up the year. 1995? The headache was confusing her.
Dolly stood beside her in the doorway, pale and scared, and wouldn’t say a word, even when the policeman asked her where she thought her brother might be. They asked if they could come in, and there was Clayton still out cold on the couch, the rum bottle and glasses on the floor beside him. One of the police officers shook him by the shoulder. Clayton moved his arm vaguely, but didn’t rouse, thank God.
Pearce was yelling again from the kids’ room, and she squeezed Dolly’s hand to go get him, when Pearce appeared on his own.
“Rev!” he yelled. “Revvvv!” Drool coming down his chin. The woman police officer laughed. Pearce was wearing Dolly’s pink runners, on the wrong feet. He waved at Lorraine and pointed down the hall. “Rev!” he said again.
She finally got it. “Trevor?” She ran down the hall and up onto the ladder to look on the top bunk where she could have sworn she had already looked, and there he was, not just the blankets rolled against the wall, but Trevor under them, waking up.
She was up the ladder in a flash and holding him in her arms, more lightning jolts of acid up and down her arms and legs, saying “Oh, Trevor, oh Trev, I was so worried,” like a crazy woman. It scared him and he started to cry. Dolly was already crying, but the police were very happy that he was found. They turned pleasant. Clayton stayed asleep through the whole thing.
Darwin had not called Clary again. She had no claim on him. She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t his sister. He was back to his own life. But she began to worry that Fern and Darwin were—it had not seemed to her, when they were staying with her, that they were sleeping together, but what did she know? Fern was pretty and kind; that old boyfriend of hers had been an idiot. But Darwin and Fern did not make sense, and that depressed her.
As everything did. The clean, empty house, the silence, the meted length of a day. Everything that had kept her frantic in the last months was gone: no children, no Mrs. Pell, no running back and forth to the hospital. Her ordinary life was gone too; no church—she could not go back there now—no work. She had to find a job, but had not yet made herself even work up a resumé or call insurance acquaintances from other firms.
In the middle of March Iris Haywood phoned, out of the blue.
“I hear from Paul that your friend has done wonderfully well,” she said.
Clary murmured yes, oh yes.
“And Dolly tells me that the children are with their parents again. That’s very good.”
Even to hear Dolly’s name was a spike of pain.
“But this must leave you with a bit of time on your hands, if you’ve finished your good work there.”
Clary said yes.
“So it occurred to me, when I was talking with the district superintendent yesterday, that you might possibly be interested in some work with the school board, a short-term contract—unless of course you’re planning to look for insurance work immediately.”
Iris Haywood was very well-informed. Did she know that Clary had quit Gilman-Stott?
“What kind of contract, Iris?”
“Three of our schools have lost librarians to maternity—a rash of Great Expectations! We won’t start their replacements this late in the year, but each school has a backlog of books to be catalogued. I have twelve boxes already here at Brundstone, and if we leave this till next September it will be a mess, so I’ve got permission to hire someone to go round all three schools and get this tidied up. I know it’s not up to your calibre, but it’s a pleasant, manageable task and I can pay you substitute-teacher wage. Would you like some time to consider it?”
“I don’t have to consider,” Clary said. “I’ll take it.”
Trevor could not believe his eyes when he saw Clary in the hall. He thought he was imagining her. She did not see him, in the press of kids heading out to recess. He felt his stomach go crazy. He ran to the bathroom and locked the door of the stall in case she came in. What should he do? Was she here to take him away? His eyes were smarting. How could she not have come to see them all this time? Did Dolly know she was here? He stayed in there the whole of recess, and he went to the toilet twice, all diarrhea. Once right in the middle of pooping he thought he had to throw up, it was awful. His dad was going to kill him if he talked to Clary. His mom! Trevor had never felt so bad, even when his mom was sick.
Dolly didn’t get surprised, because Trevor told her at lunch recess. He was still shaky and shivering even in the warm sun.
“What are you freaking out about?” she asked him.
“Because if she wants to take me to her house!” he said. How could she not get it?
“Well, so? You don’t have to go. Don’t worry, she won’t ask you anyway, she’s mad at us because we left without saying goodbye.”
That was exactly it. They had run out on her, and she would be so mad. Trevor gave up on Dolly, she just did not get it. He skulked around the school, shadowy against the walls, following behind other kids so nobody could see him. When they had library on Friday he tried to go to the bathroom but Mrs. Ashby said no, she held his hand. But Clary was not there. Then he was miserable, because he wanted to see her.
Dolly was surprised at how homesick Clary’s face made her feel. She stuffed that down—it didn’t matter, she told herself. But she kept thinking about going to the library and happening to run into Clary. She was wearing the grey wool dress. Dolly could smell it. She knew where it hung under the yellow boxes, and then around the corner into the clean bathroom with green towels. Clary’s house. Moreland’s house was okay but it was a mess. Her mom got even more tired now because that lady from her dad’s work had found some people who wanted cleaning, a couple days a week. She took Pearce with her.
When Dolly went home the day she saw Clary she was planning to clean up, but there was a mountain of clean laundry on the big chair, and she was no good at folding; there were dishes in slimy cold water in the sink, papers and beer cans and socks all over the living room. Gran in her housecoat and bare old blue feet, watching the soaps, doing nothing. Then her mom came home all crabby because she was so tired.
She stood Pearce
, crying, in his crib, and told Dolly to watch him for a while so she could get supper. But she said it in a sharp voice, and when Dolly said “Forget it,” her mom slapped her.
Dolly slapped her right back. Then she burst into tears.
Lorraine grabbed her and held her and they dropped onto the bed, falling back tangled together. Lorraine’s kerchief slid off, showing her hair, short straw that she knew scared the kids. She tried to smear it back into place, then gave up and pushed it over her eyes for a blindfold.
“You don’t know how scary it is!” Dolly cried, tear-water everywhere on both their faces. “I have to go to school all the time—everybody knows you almost died, you know. They all say, She’s the girl whose mother got cancer you know, blah blah blah, like it was something I could do a single thing about! They hate me because I’m weird, and it’s all because of you. You’re mean, you’re mean,” she tried to say, but it ran into all one loud screaming eeeee sound, because she was so furious, and there was nothing to be done.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” Lorraine said over and over until the scream faded out. It was almost a relief to be able to lie back and cry, but she knew it would give her a headache, so she stopped. She stroked Dolly’s hair and face, and kissed her, and got them both calmed down. She had made $80 at that day’s house, and the woman had tipped her twenty bucks. It was worth it, but it was hard.
“I can’t,” she said, muffled in Dolly’s hair, but the words dissolved into salt. She just had to calm down, and be good for the kids.
44. Sore
Iris Haywood had invited Clary over for dinner. “I’m sorry Paul was not able to come,” she said when she was taking Clary’s coat. “I hear it can be very painful!”
What can be painful? Clary did not feel that she could ask. Iris might not know that she and Paul were not—whatever they had been—any longer. Or maybe she’d engineered the dinner to bring them back together, and Paul was choosing to stay away. She went in to the Haywoods’ living room to meet the others. She had a lump of coal in her chest all the time now anyway, a cold charcoal briquette. But she would eat politely.
Paul could not go to dinner because he had shingles. He stayed at home instead, lying carefully on the bed, trying to read Milton. Might as well, while suffering anyway. From time to time boredom and pain would connive to make him get up, and he would range down to the kitchen for water, avoiding the living room where Clary’s carpet lay, or up to his study to stab at the keyboard until the pain in his side was too bad.
He was in a worse temper than he ever remembered being, and he had lost, it seemed, the ability to pray for himself. Because he was carrying too much bile, he was too angry. He felt that this—everything—was Lisanne’s fault, but knew that it was not, it was the combination of all the various stresses he had been under over the last year or so, made manifest on his body. His hair had begun to fall out in clumps.
Hopkins was better than Milton: I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.
He pulled his shirt up to look: thin lines of blisters, like cold sores, running down the right side of his chest. Hideous. Metaphorical. He had not allowed himself to long for Clary. Instead, these scabbing sores, external evidence of his interior pain. The pain was crazy. He’d been to see Hughes and dutifully accepted painkillers, not intending to use them, but he had twice doubled the dose, last night and again early this morning. They sent him sinking back down into sleep, and that was better than lying awake, frozen in place to prevent another of the jarring, searing stabs that accompanied every movement. He tried to breathe slowly. The tingling on his neck was troublesome because he thought that might mean more of them. He had heard of a woman, a parishioner’s mother, who had developed shingles behind her eyes. The thought of that almost made him weep, he had to pull himself back from the brimming brink. It was possible, the doctor had said, that he would be among the half of those who develop shingles in whom the pain persists for months, for years. Turning his shirtless torso in front of the mirror to search for another line of small fluid-filled blisters, he begged his body not to be like that. Before he could stop himself he said, Please, Binnie, although he did not believe that she listened to his petitions—a private saint, his own, sitting on a white kitchen chair at the curling edge of some cloud. He could see her, elbow leaning on the cloudbank, cheek cupped in her hand, watching him. No, he could not see her. She was nowhere to be seen, but had returned to God to be subsumed into the divine and would not be waiting for him when he died himself; that was a feverish dream to dwell on, Binnie sailing up in a boat to help him over that black river. Helping Lorraine, too, probably, who had come so close to drowning in it.
Back in bed, awake, he lay carefully on his other side, trying not to think about Binnie any more because it did no good, as it did no good to think about Lisanne. He could think about Clary, a little. Her eyes, the sweetness of her eyelids. But a too-deep breath was too much pain. He lay still, and willed himself not to think at all.
Clary saw the children every time she was at Brundstone: Wednesdays and Thursdays. It was like probing a sore tooth with her tongue, almost pleasurable. She had not even said hello—she thought they might be worried about whether they should speak to her, so she was careful not to run into them. They looked tired and unhappy, but she might be imagining that. They were still themselves. They took the bus now, so she never saw Lorraine or Clayton. Thinking about Lorraine still gave her a sharp shiver of antagonism, but she tried to work on that too.
The library at Brundstone had long windows onto the concrete courtyard, and the weather at the end of March was warm enough to leave them open while she worked: one box of uncatalogued books emptying, one box of catalogued books filling, the library silent. School librarian seemed like the perfect job, from that peaceful part-time seat. The other schools were easy too, but Brundstone was home.
From time to time she saw Ann Hayter, and wondered if Ann recognized her. She guessed not, from Ann’s dull animal stare. One day she passed by as Ann was bending to the water fountain, and saw that there were marks on her neck. Dirt? Bruises. She stopped and turned to talk to her, but Ann slid away back to her classroom. Finger marks? If they were bruises, she should do something, help Ann, even if she couldn’t help the others. But she couldn’t. Ann was not hers. Dolly and Trevor were. And Pearce.
She could be wrong, and then there would be all kinds of trouble; she didn’t know Ann’s parents, except the mother was so odd, or unhappy. It would be better to leave it.
Iris Haywood stopped by the library the next day, Thursday, to talk to her.
“I want to tell you how glad I am that you’ve been able to help us out here,” she said, in her stooping, graceful, authoritative way. “It’s hard to compliment people, but I think you are good, and I wanted to tell you.”
Then she moved on, a full-bodied clipper ship navigating the hall.
Clary blinked. She was not good. She got what she wanted by manipulation and sweetness and good grooming. There was no good in her. She wanted Pearce back. She had selfishly wanted him the whole time, and then Trevor, and finally even Dolly, and what had she done? Tried to run their lives, and then sulked when they said no. That redound woman had been right—she had done nothing for them that was not self-serving, and then she’d had the nerve to be angry with Lorraine.
Disgusted with herself, Clary went home at the end of the day and dug out the Family Services woman’s card. Bertrice.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, calm this time. “I think there’s something wrong with a child at the school where I work, but I’m not a teacher, and I don’t know the proper protocol, or who I should talk to. Should I go to the principal?”
Bertrice told her no, to call emergency social services, and gave her the number. “You do have an obligation,” she said. “If you become aware of a problem. But it’s kept confidential, don’t worry. They won’t know it was you who called.”
&n
bsp; That wasn’t the point, but it made Clary feel like a prying busybody. But she kept seeing Ann’s neck, bent over the water fountain, and the long reddish-brown marks, so she called and spent an awful fifteen minutes giving names and details and her suspicion. It seemed thin. Then she hung up and walked around the empty living room, unhappy about everything. Sun sliced through the dining room’s western window. The world was hopeless.
Out the front window she watched Mr. Bunt crashing into the driveway with his Hemi truck and Mrs. Bunt, a moment later, parking Clary’s mother’s car in its new home in front of their house. Poor frazzled Mrs. Bunt struggled back and forth with bags of groceries while Mr. Bunt vanished inside the house. Everybody’s life was miserable.
A noise at the back pulled her away from contemplation of the Bunts: Mrs. Zenko, back from London, coming through the garden way with Jaffa cakes and Branston pickle in her hands. Clary’s mother’s standing order.
Clary sat down on the back steps, took the pickle jar in her lap and said, “I missed you so much. But you’re too late, everybody’s gone—what will I do?”
Mrs. Zenko sat beside her and said, “Never mind. You come to enjoy being alone. I was quite glad to leave my daughter’s place, when the time arrived.”
Clary leaned her head against the stair railing. She was not ready to be Mrs. Zenko yet, she thought.
45. Fool
Good to a Fault Page 34