I didn’t know what to say to that, either. There were only two black kids in my entire school, and neither one was in my class. I thought about telling him that he didn’t look like he was black, but then I thought that maybe that would be rude. “My mom says to make a friend, you need to be a friend.” When my mother had told me that line it had sounded very wise, but when I said the same words they just sounded silly. Certainly it hadn’t helped me much. I’d tried to be a friend, but so far it hadn’t worked.
“My mom says we keep ourselves to ourselves,” said Andrew. “She says it’s us against the world.”
He pulled my nana’s blanket up higher, struggling to do it with just one hand.
“What movie did you get to see?”
He named the film, which had Blood in its title and was, I knew, rated R. His leg started to jiggle again, bouncing faster and faster. “The best was when my mom took me to the beach,” he said. “I’d never gone swimming in the ocean before.”
The beach was just a block away from my house. I’d been to the ocean more times than I could count, but I’d never been swimming. All I could ever do was walk on the sand and dip my feet in the foam, with my mother trailing behind me in a wide-brimmed hat, watching everything I did. Her gaze would bounce back and forth, from my feet to the water, as if a wave might surge up and snatch me away. She’d told me about the undertow, the invisible current that would suck swimmers to their doom . . . but even before I’d learned about the undertow, I was afraid of the ocean, the endlessness of it, how it stretched farther than you could see and was deeper than you could imagine. I preferred swimming pools, and all the houses in our neighborhood had them in the backyard, rectangles or ovals of clear, chlorinated blue. No seaweed, no waves, no chance of getting towed out to Cuba, no strange things lurking down in the depths.
“Did you like it?”
Andy nodded. He had beautifully shaped lips, full and pink, as if an artist had taken a lot of time to draw them and color them in. I thought he was cuter than Bryan Adams, the singer who Alice said was the cutest boy in the world. “It was so great. The water was really cold at first, and there was seaweed. I didn’t like that.” I nodded in sympathy. “But I figured out how to bodysurf, and then I went out past the waves, and I flipped on my back, and I just floated.” He was almost smiling, and I could picture him, his lean body in the water, his hair billowing out around him, face turned up toward the sun. “It was like being on a roller coaster. I wish I could have stayed forever, but my mom got a sunburn and we had to go back.” He gave a great, shuddering sigh and curled more deeply into the blanket.
“She’ll be here soon,” I promised. Then, to distract him, I asked, “Do you want to hear a story?”
He shrugged, then said, “You can tell me one, if you want to.”
“A baby one or a scary one?” I asked. I looked down at my pajamas, which were pink and had Winnie-the-Pooh on them, and wished that I’d put my bathrobe on.
“Scary,” he said.
I thought for a minute, flipping through my mental inventory before I made my voice as deep and spooky as I could. “Once upon a time there was a woodcutter and his wife and their two children. They lived in a simple cottage in the deepest, darkest part of the forest, where the sun shone for only one hour every day. And even though the woodcutter worked from morning until night, he could not earn enough money to buy food for his family, and they slowly began to starve.”
“ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” Andy said . . . but he didn’t tell me to stop. As I described the woodcutter’s wife growing so thin that her wedding ring slipped right off her finger, he leaned closer to me, and when I got to the part about how the family had only one potato and one carrot to last them for the entire day, he said, “Wait.”
“What?”
“Why couldn’t they go hunting and shoot a bird or a rabbit?” he asked.
I thought about it. “The birds and the rabbits were all starving, too, so they left to go to where there was more food,” I said in my normal voice. Then I deepened it again. “There was a great famine in the land. A plague of locusts,” I added, remembering part of the Passover story we’d learned in Hebrew school.
“What are locusts?”
“Like crickets, but they eat everything.”
Andy nodded, satisfied. I continued the story, about how the woodcutter and his wife became so desperate that they decided to leave the children in the woods, thinking, as I spoke, that my story might have been the wrong choice. Abandoned children in the forest sounded an awful lot like an abandoned boy in the emergency room. But it was too late to go back.
“Okay, so, the children were all alone in the woods, except, luckily, Hansel had some bread crumbs in his pocket.”
“You know what I always wondered?” Andy said. “If they were starving, why didn’t they eat the bread crumbs?”
I’d never thought of that. It occurred to me that Andy might actually know what it was like to be hungry, really hungry, not just-off-the-school-bus, lunch-was-three-hours-ago-and-I’m-ready-for-a-snack hungry.
“The crumbs were so hard that they would have broken his teeth if he’d even tried to eat them. Also, they were moldy. They were green as emeralds with mold!”
The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. “But then if the crumbs were green, they wouldn’t be able to see them if they left them on the forest floor.”
I groaned and said, “You’re kidding me!” the way my dad did on car trips when Jonah asked to stop for a bathroom break ten minutes after we’d gotten on the highway.
“Maybe the forest floor was covered with dead pine needles, which were brown, so the emerald-green bread crumbs showed up.”
“Ah.” When the sliding doors whooshed open, Andy and I both turned to look, but it was only a gray-haired woman who hurried over to the couple with the little girl and started talking rapidly in Spanish. I caught the word Barbie a few times.
“So then what?” Andy asked.
I described Hansel and Gretel’s journey back through the forest. How they slept out alone in the dark woods, with all kinds of scary growls and screeches echoing through the night, with only pine needles for beds and leaves for blankets. I told how they caught a single tiny fish and cooked it over a fire they started by banging a rock against a piece of flint that they found in the river.
“Scott Lindsey?” called a nurse. The teenager got up and sauntered through the swinging doors on giant basketball shoes that made his feet look too big for his legs, with his mom, still holding her magazine, behind him. The moaning man watched him go and said, “Shee-it,” and his wife looked at me and Andy and said, “ ’Scuse his language.”
Andy and I looked at each other and started to giggle. “Shee-it,” Andy whispered, doing a perfect imitation of the man, and then I said, “ ’Scuse his language,” and we both laughed even harder, and he said, “Keep going.”
“Hansel and Gretel wandered deeper into the forest, trying to find their little cottage . . . but instead they found a hideous witch. She had curly black hair like wires, and a big red wart on her chin.” In my retelling, the witch looked like Miss Bonitatibus, my music teacher, who would say, “How honored we are that you could join us,” every time I came back to class after being home sick.
“The witch said, ‘Come! I will show you a sight such as you have never seen!’ And she led them through the forest, to a house made entirely . . . out . . . of . . . candy.” I described the walls made of gingerbread, a fireplace filled with peppermint logs, and a roof tiled with Necco Wafers, pale pink and mint green and melon orange.
“Were there any doughnuts on the house?” Andy asked, lifting up the remainder of the one I’d given him.
“The doorknobs were doughnuts, and the floors were milk chocolate, and—”
At that moment, a woman hurried through the emergency-room doors. She stopped and scanned t
he crowd, her head turning from side to side until she spotted Andy. Her skin, sunburned a painful-looking pink, was much lighter than her son’s. She had a tangle of taffy-blond hair and wore high black boots, blue jeans, and a low-cut black top. Black rubber bangles covered one arm from wrist to elbow (“They look cheap,” my mother had sniffed when I’d asked her to buy me some), and as she walked over to us, I smelled the nose-wrinkling, sweet-sharp scent of liquor. She looked nothing like my mom or like the other mothers I knew. The moms in my world did not have wild mops of hair, or long fingernails with glittering polish, or four earrings in their ears. I wondered how my mom would look, out of her crisp cotton skirts or linen pants and twinset, and in high heels and a shirt cut low enough to show the tops of her bosoms.
“What happened?” she asked, bending down so that she was looking right into Andy’s eyes.
Andy mumbled to her what he’d told me—that he’d waited up for her but she hadn’t come, so he’d gotten onto the balcony to try to see down to the pool, and he’d fallen. She touched his shoulder once, briefly. Her colored lids descended, and she stood for a minute with her eyes shut. “Okay,” she finally sighed. “Who found you?”
“Lady from the hotel,” Andy said.
His mother sighed, then straightened to her tallest—in her heels, she seemed very tall—and said, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “Hello? Is anyone here going to help us?”
“Sorry,” said Andy. I heard, but his mom didn’t.
The elevator doors slid open, and Sandra walked into the waiting room. Her ponytail was crooked, with strands of hair slipping out of the elastic, and she looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. As soon as she spotted me, she hurried over, just as Andy’s mom was saying to no one in particular, “I bet this is all out of network.” She said some of her words in a funny way, all stretching into awl, and she kept turning her head from left to right, looking, I thought, for someone to yell at.
“Rachel, you need to get upstairs,” said Sandra.
Andrew’s mom ran her eyes over me briefly—my babyish pajamas, the wheelchair, the IV pole, and the ID bracelet on my wrist. She looked at the moaning man and his wife, the family with the little girl. Everyone was staring at her, but she didn’t seem to notice as she turned to Sandra.
“How long has my son been waiting? Why isn’t anyone taking care of him? Where’s the doctor?” Her accent stretched and shifted vowels, and her voice kept getting louder, and it seemed like with every question she was getting bigger, taller, swelling with rage. “How could you just leave a little boy sitting here?”
The wife of the moaning man turned around. “Where have you been?” she asked, but her voice was quiet, and Andy’s mom either didn’t hear her or pretended that she didn’t. The receptionist came out from behind her desk. “Ma’am. We cannot treat your son, or any minor, without a parent’s permission. No one was able to find you. No one at the hotel knew where you were . . .”
“Oh, so this is my fault?” Andy’s mother stepped toward the receptionist until they were almost toe to toe. “My son gets hurt, and you leave him sitting here for hours, and it’s my fault?”
As his mom spoke, with her hands on her hips and her breasts jiggling, Andy pressed himself into his chair, making himself as small as he could. I reached for his hand and he held mine, squeezing tight before letting go when a doctor, a short man in a white coat with the sleeves pushed up, entered the room. Dark stubble dotted his chin, and his tie had been yanked to one side. “What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem,” Andy’s mother announced, “is that my son has been sitting here for hours, and not one of you so-called professionals has done anything to help him.”
“Mother of the year here,” the moaning man’s wife said. This time, Andy’s mom couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard. Her head snapped around and her pink face got even pinker.
“Excuse me, but did anyone ask for your opinion?”
“Where were you?” the woman asked again. “That poor child’s been sitting here for over an hour.” She shook her head, looking disgusted.
“Ladies,” said Sandra, and the doctor offered Andy’s mother his hand and bent low when she took it, almost like he was bowing.
“I’m Dr. Diallou.” He was round, almost penguin-shaped, with dark skin and a puff of hair over each of his ears. His voice was melodious, like he was singing instead of talking. “May I have the pleasure of your name, madam?”
“Lori Landis.” Lori sounded like Lawrey. I wondered if everyone in Philadelphia talked like that all the time, or only when they were angry. Dr. Diallou put one hand on her forearm and the other, very gently, on Andy’s shoulder. “Let’s get a look at this handsome young man.”
“Finally!” Andy’s mom said, cutting her eyes at the woman who’d confronted her. “Finally, someone sees reason!” Tall in her heels, she pushed Andy after the doctor and through the swinging doors. He still had the stuffed bear tucked under one arm.
For a minute, my ears rang with the sound of her voice. My blanket was on the empty chair next to where Andy had been sitting. I reached over and picked it up. Sandra looked down like she’d forgotten I was there. Her face had softened; her usual spark and snap were gone, and her voice was low as she said, “Time for bed.”
“I want to stay,” I said. “I want to make sure he’s all right.”
“He’s got his mom now.” Which was hardly any kind of consolation, and the expression on Sandra’s face suggested that she knew it, too.
“I want to stay,” I repeated. “I didn’t get to tell him the end of ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
“I’ll tell him,” Sandra said. “I’ll tell him that Hansel and Gretel killed the witch, and moved into the house made of candy, and they both lived happily ever after.”
That wasn’t the ending I remembered. “Don’t they go back to their parents?” I asked.
Sandra shook her head. “I think he’d like it better my way.”
•••
Upstairs, Alice’s door was still closed. Sandra walked me past it and into my room, where I adjusted my cannula under my nose and climbed into a bed made with Care Bears sheets, surrounded by my toys, my books, the lamp with the pink lampshade from my bedroom at home. My get-well-soon cards were lined up on the table, next to my Walkman, my Simon game, my tapes, and my books.
I closed my eyes, listening to the beeping of the heart monitor, the hiss of the oxygen compressor, the low murmur of people in the hallway, the PA system echoing as someone paged Dr. Blair. Normally, those sounds soothed me. That night, though, sleep took a long time to come. I thought about Andy, five floors down, having his broken arm set. I wondered if his mother knew my mom’s trick, of having me squeeze her hand as hard as I could whenever I got a needle, passing my pain along to her.
In the middle of the night, I woke up in the dark to a horrible howling sound. For a minute, I thought that I was Gretel, lost in the forest, with animals all around me and no mother or father to keep me safe. The sound went on and on, and I heard footsteps and voices, and then, finally, the noise stopped, like someone had ejected a tape from a player.
I woke up early the next morning, planning on telling Alice all about what had happened in the night. It would be, I decided, my best story yet. I’d describe everything—the nurse with the hairy chin and the girl with the Barbie shoe in her nose and the man who’d been cursing, and about Andy and how he was all alone. Our parents almost never left us alone. Alice would like that part.
When I got to her room, though, the new sign had been taken down, and nothing had been put up in its place. I pushed the door open. The room was empty. The bed was bare, with not even a sheet. Alice’s Duran Duran poster wasn’t on the wall, and her pink plastic bucket that held her toothbrush and her face towel and washcloths wasn’t on the table. The stack of books and puzzles had been removed. Everything except the Ouija bo
ard was gone.
I crossed the room and picked it up. A sticky note was attached to the box. For Rachel, it read, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. Someone had come in and mopped the floor, and the disinfectant smell was strong enough to sting my eyes, but I didn’t leave. I sat in the chair with the Ouija board box in my lap. She hadn’t said goodbye to me. She hadn’t told me enough about what it was like, when you knew you weren’t going to get better. She hadn’t told me if it had hurt.
“Alice?” I whispered. Maybe her spirit was still nearby. Maybe she was even watching me. But no answer came, and when I closed my eyes and then opened them again, everything in the room was exactly the same.
•••
On the day that I finally got to go home, my mom came early to pack up my things, deliver more treats, and tell the nurses goodbye until next time. She was hurrying around, making sure she’d retrieved my shampoo and conditioner from the shower, when Sandra knocked at the door with a letter in her hand. My name, Miss Rachel Blum, was printed on the front of a square pink envelope, in carefully formed letters that were almost too small to read. Bloom like flowers, not blum like plum, I thought. Inside was a single sheet of paper, and more of that cramped handwriting, as if my correspondent was being charged for each drop of ink.
Dear Rachel. Thank you for keeping me company the night I broke my arm. And also for Rudolph. I will never forget you. Your friend, Andrew Landis. Beneath his signature was a drawing of a boy with brown hair and something black—my bear, I guessed—under his arm. The other arm was wrapped in white. The cast, I figured. Next to him was a drawing of a girl with curly hair and a big pink smile and, when I looked carefully, a tiny, hash-marked scar on her chest. Around the boy and the girl was a red crayoned heart.
Andy
1987
Andrew!” Sister Henry’s voice echoed down the hallway, but Andy didn’t slow down. His eyes were on the door, and the street beyond it; the gray sidewalks and the gray winter sky.
He pounded down the hall and pushed through the glass doors, hearing her heels on the hardwood, hearing her calling—“Andrew, wait!” Like it even mattered. School was letting out at noon anyhow. It was already Friday, and Christmas was on Monday, and break started that afternoon.
Who Do You Love Page 3