The Strength of Bone

by Lucie Wilk

  But she did smile at him when he saw her on the ward later that day, and she agreed to meet him here, in the storage closet the next morning. Now it is the best part of his day: meeting Maria here in the darkness of this room where no one can spy on them or tease him or push him to do even more. He would like to, but he doesn’t want to ruin it. Now that he is a man, he knows how important it is to have patience, and to be willing to wait for things. He knows he is not as hasty as he once was; he doesn’t do anything without thinking long and hard about it first. Maria has told him, in fact, that she noticed that about him, that he was different from the others in that way. His patience. His calm.

  He hugs her one more time and then takes her hand and leads her to the closet door. He unlocks it. She leaves first and in a few more minutes, he will follow.

  *

  “My husband”—the woman spits out ‘husband’ as though it is a dirty word—“found other women. Again and again, he found them and bedded them and tossed them away.” She pauses here to take a sip of the water she had asked Jakob to bring. “To tell you the truth I didn’t care. Let him have them. Let their bodies be used up. I have my home and my garden. I have my body.”

  At this, Jakob takes another look at the woman perched on the edge of her bed as though she is trying to minimize the parts of her that touch the mattress. She is in a private room. She sits on a larger bed in her own room with her own window and her own attached bathroom. It is a room reserved for dignitaries and the like, although it usually sits empty. People with money usually fly down to South Africa, or attend a private hospital instead. Jakob isn’t sure why this woman who sits so elegantly in her plush bathrobe is here, is occupying this room. If she has money enough to have this room, then she must have money enough to avoid the place altogether.

  The woman drains the cup and places it carefully on the bedside table and then, very suddenly, she begins to cry. Her hands move over her face and she heaves large sobs until her hands are wet and her makeup is running in black rivers down her cheeks. Jakob reaches for a tissue in the box on the table beside her and hands it to her; she balls it up in her hands. He doesn’t say anything. He is not used to this. Most patients lie quietly in their beds, stare at the ceiling or out the window if they are close enough. Their sadness is felt, not seen. And they don’t wear makeup.

  “I had my body. Or I thought so, but he used it up, too.” Her voice trembles and she uses the balled-up tissue to wipe one streaky cheek. “He gave me a dirty disease from all his dirty women.” She looks up at Jakob, as if seeing him for the first time. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” he answers untruthfully.

  “You look like a child. Still innocent.” She sighs and looks at her hands. Her fingers are long and skinny and are cluttered with fat rings that jingle when she moves her hands. “Look at me.” She opens her soft bathrobe and reveals a sunken chest with breasts that are narrow and droop down into the long dull points of her nipples. Under her breasts he can count her ribs. “I’m so skinny now. And this rash.” She lifts up one end of her robe and shows him a bony ankle where a reddened area thickens the skin. “It’s so ugly.” She drops the robe. He wonders how old she is. Her voice—high and girlish—is the only thing that seems young about her. A coarse cough rattles in her narrow chest.

  “The doctors are good here, aren’t they? Not like ours.” She squints at him again.

  “Yes’m,” he replies truthfully.

  “They gave me these.” She reaches to the bedside table again and picks up an orange plastic bottle. She rattles it and the pills knock about inside. The pills sound as if they are made of plastic, too. “They make me feel sick.” She puts the bottle back down.

  Jakob had come in to collect a kidney-shaped metal basin that she had filled with blood-streaked globs of stuff from her lungs. He looks down at the basin before covering it with a towel. One thing he has learned: blood in the lungs always seems to foretell severe illness. She is quiet now; the tears have stopped. Her eyes are nice—oval-shaped and turned up slightly at the edges, like a cat. He can tell she was once beautiful.

  “I’ll bring you a clean one.” He puts the basin on his cart and turns away. He’ll ask one of the nurses to go in with the new one. He quickly wheels the cart around and follows it out of the room.

  *

  In the storage closet, Jakob pulls Maria down. He pulls hard. They tumble to the floor, her lying on top of him. He can just see the round outline of her eyes in this light, and can’t read her expression. Those ragged, lusty breaths that fill the space like cotton—those can’t be his. But the sounds fill his ears as he reaches up and unbuttons the front of her dress, pushes his hand in and under her bra. Her breast is large and soft and spills out of her bra and it warms his hand which is cold from washing the basins. The basin of that woman. He pulls Maria’s breast out until he can see her nipple—large and dark and tight. He puts his mouth over it and sucks hard. He hears her gasp. His cock, straining up against her body through his trousers, pains him; he reaches between her legs but she pulls back and then moves off him. She is quiet and he can’t hear her breath, it is drowned out by his own. She pulls her bra back over her breast and buttons up her dress.

  “You wanted me to do that.” His voice sounds weak here in the dark of this closet. Suddenly he hates this closet.

  He watches her let herself out. When she opens the door, a wedge of white daylight falls on him: bright and accusing. Then the door swings shut and he is alone in the dark.

  *

  Maria doesn’t meet him in the closet the next day and Jakob finds her working behind the desk in the labour room. Three naked and expectant mothers lie on beds in the room in different stages of labour.

  Maria looks at Jakob then looks back down at a chart.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted.” He does his best to sound convincing; he tries to convince himself.

  “You weren’t gentle.”

  One of the patients lies on her side and watches them. “Daughter, you must be very young if you still expect gentle.”

  Maria ignores her and stares at Jakob. “You used to be different.” She studies his face. “Were you upset about something?” Jakob wills himself not to look away. He shakes his head, not trusting his voice. Something like anger makes his muscles twitch under his skin; he is supposed to be a man.

  “I’m sorry.” He hates the sulk in his voice. He turns and leaves. On his way out, he hears the patient tell Maria that a man who says sorry is one worth holding on to, gentle or not.

  *

  Maria did not take the labouring patient’s advice. For three days, Jakob went to the closet and let himself in to find it empty. Today he goes all the way in, to the overturned bucket and sits down on it. He looks at the second bucket and then puts his foot on it. His clubbed foot. He has not looked at it for a long time. He lifts his trouser leg and twists his leg this way and that for a good view. It is still ugly.

  He knew, deep down, that this sweetness could never last. A girl like Maria. He touches his lips and remembers the way hers moulded under his. The bristle above his upper lip is scant but he shaves nonetheless, with a razor stolen from the surgical suite. His mind runs through an inventory of things he could find in the hospital and bring back for Maria, but she is beyond that, now. And how can he blame her? He can barely understand his own wild swings in temperament. One minute he is calm and patient, the next minute he is feeling like a caged animal. Aliyense. Everyone. Ha. Perhaps this is his problem: he is too many people, a whole family of different personalities, of siblings that could have been, all jostling for space in one small body. Ever since that day he watched the boy threaten Dr. Bryce he has felt the anger inside him spring out at all the wrong times. Little things set him off.

  This time, it was the woman. Seeing her so ruined. It sickened him and he needed something round and full and healthy and whole. He lo
oks at the thick hairs that are filling in over his forearm and he wonders if this is being a man. Savaging the pure. Ruining beauty.

  *

  His mother is sleeping when he approaches her tonight. Jakob stands over her cot and studies her in the moonlight and he is taken by her gauntness; even in this light he can see how she is a skeleton under that blanket. But she has the warmest and thickest blanket that he could find. This is one of the first things he brought her when he was new on the job and had access to every cranny of the hospital. It was a donation. Someone in the West didn’t want this blanket. Perhaps it was not thick enough or warm enough. He leans over and bunches it up below her right leg so she won’t notice her missing foot when she wakes up.

  He looks down at the food in his hands: a few pieces of lemon cake—today’s dessert at the doctor’s lounge.

  “Eh, I’ll have some of that, Brother.” The man in the cot beside Jakob’s mother is eyeing the food. Jakob passes him the cake. His mother won’t want it, even if she were to wake up. She has no appetite these days. He settles on his pallet beside her bed, lies down and listens to the ward breathing hundreds of breaths. It sounds like ocean waves—all the breaths rise and fall together in some mysterious harmony. He dreams of Maria, and falls asleep.

  *

  “My mother is dying.” Jakob doesn’t look at the doctor when he speaks. Instead, he studies the mop strings; the strings are many shades, all grey. He moves the mop to the other side of him and the wet floor shines briefly. For a moment, he can see himself in the floor, looking down the length of the pole. His face is mostly shadow and then it is gone, swallowed up by the disappearing water. He now glances up briefly at the doctor’s face, to see his reaction. He has strung together the most convincing words he knows.

  “Which one is your mother?” Jakob can tell that the doctor—the big surgeon named Ellison—is annoyed to be stopped like this on his way to his lunch meal.

  “She is in the TB ward. She has been there for months. She is shrinking. She is coughing. She is dying.” And then he adds: “You took her foot.”

  The doctor looks at Jakob for a long moment and then says, “Let’s go see her.”

  Soon they both stand over her cot. Her eyes are closed, but Jakob can tell that she is not really sleeping.

  Dr. Ellison lifts the blanket over her missing foot and Jakob winces. The stump looks as it always does: wrong. Jakob feels guilty every time he sees it. Dr. Ellison is running his finger along the line where the skin was sewn together; it is now just a dark line in her skin like a clumsily drawn tattoo, surrounded by dark dots where the staples used to pierce the skin. Now Dr. Ellison pokes his thick finger into the end of her leg and his mother moans some awful sound and shifts her leg away. Her eyes are still closed, but squeezed closed now, with a furrowed brow stitched together overtop of them.

  “Hm,” says Dr. Ellison. Just to be sure, he pokes again, and again his mother cries out in pain. “We’ll get an x-ray to confirm, but she may have osteomyelitis. An infection in the bone.”

  “Again?”

  “Still.”

  “It never went away?”

  “Yes.”

  Jakob feels his heart shift into his belly again, like it did so many months ago. “Even after taking the foot? Even with all the medicine?”

  “Has she been taking it?” Dr. Ellison says this mildly, as if he doesn’t care what the answer is. As if he wouldn’t be surprised to find she’d been throwing it away. Jakob feels it again, under his skin: an irritability, his muscle’s own desire to strike. He knows she’s been taking her pills. She may be weak, but she is not stupid.

  “Yesss.” Jakob hears the hiss, coming from between his own teeth. “She takes it every day. All of it. Even though it makes her feel sick. It makes her stop eating.” He has seen her push herself up on her stick arms so she can sit and take the pills. She places them in her mouth individually and it takes a painfully long time for her to swallow each one, wincing, complaining in between. But she does it.

  He wonders when he last saw her smile. She has a wide, uneven grin with crooked, yellowed teeth. She would crack this grin right before the funny part of a story and Jakob would feel like laughing even though the funny part had not been told. She used to hunt with the men. This was before Jakob, before she became a mother of one, before her family moved to the city. He wonders if it was true or if it was a fable, another of his mother’s stories, another joke. Everyone tells a story. He feels strung along, a pawn in others’ stories, the butt of others’ jokes.

  “If the x-ray confirms it, she’ll need another operation.” Dr. Ellison is saying. Jakob hears it through a thick window of glass, from the other side of where he stands alone in the ward. He knows, suddenly, that his mother will soon die.

  Her face is relaxed, now. The pain is gone, or better at least. He had no idea she had pain. She is telling him nothing, now. He feels her loss of trust as a sharp pang deep in his gut where his heart is lodged.

  “Will she have something for her pain?”

  The doctor nods. The surgery is a fable, too. He knows as well as Jakob does that there is no point. Jakob wishes he had not said those words: my mother is dying; they were composed to get the doctor’s attention and now they are no longer a story. He has been proven a truth-teller, not a storyteller. He wishes he was a storyteller like everyone else. Why should he be forced to utter only truths? And Jakob wishes that he had not brought her here, that he had not said yes, okay, that he had not had any anger, that he had been willing to let her die at home.

  *

  He passes Maria in the halls, soon after his conversation with Dr. Ellison about his mother. When he smells Maria’s coconut smell, when he sees the rounded soft swells of her breasts beneath her uniform, he cannot bear it. He wants to pull her to him, to push her away, to pull up her dress and take her there in the hallway, the closet be damned. He wants to ransack the closet, break everything in it. He doesn’t want to be near her, he can’t stand the sight of her or any other soft, womanly shape. As he marches past her down the hall hating his rolling gait, he can feel her staring after him. She calls out his name once but he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.

  He ends up in the closet and grasping a stack of metal basins he hurls them to the floor. The noise helps the rage and he eventually sits and lets his breath return to normal. He stares at the mess on the floor.

  His foot aches.

  Chapter 28

  Iris carries the bag of saline in one hand and pushes the metal pole with the other. The bag is warm and heavy. It swings briefly from its pole as she pushes the intravenous line into the tube at the bottom of it—a short piece that dangles like a length of umbilical cord. Fluid makes its way down the tubing and she holds onto the other end of it until saline begins to spill out of it onto the floor. Then she gently attaches the end of the tube to the line taped to Dr. Bryce’s arm. The line that leads, ultimately, to his heart. She pats down the hair there, on his arm. The red-gold hairs.

  Dr. Bryce shifts in his cot and opens his eyes. Even his lashes contain some of that gold. His eyes are blue. A pale, almost colourless blue.

  Dr. Bryce turns his head toward the yellow wall, or perhaps the window—this is where his gaze seems to automatically rest, turning like a compass in the direction of the village, and Alile.

  He has been quiet since their return to the hospital. Iris can tell he has been doing a lot of thinking, which worries her. She is beginning to adopt some of her grandfather’s strategies: think less, do more.

  She watches him watch the window for a moment longer then touches him again on his arm. “I miss her too, you know.”

  Dr. Bryce finally turns his head toward hers. His skin is a better colour, now. No more yellow. And his beard has been trimmed; he allowed her to do this for him the other day. He looks good, she thinks, and feels a certain pride in this which immediately em
barrasses her.

  “Tell Ellison I want to do something for these people.” He waves his arm out from the cot, gestures around the ward, indicating all the bodies that he lies among. “Make a change.” His jaw tightens as he says this. So he has not lost his stubbornness. So his experience has not broken that in him.

  “I will.” She says, and then before she can walk away, he calls her name.

  “What if it’s all just belief?”

  She looks at him.

  “That’s a dangerous place to go. As a doctor.”

  Something else passes between them, unsaid. And then she walks away between the rows of beds.

  *

  “Hey, boy!”

  Jakob hears the call, that high, girlish voice coming from that room. He pushes the cart past the doorway and pretends he doesn’t hear. He hears her cough once and then her voice again, slightly weaker, slightly more lonely. “Boy?” He stops the cart, knowing that she knows he has stopped the cart because the wheels squeak. Now he has no choice. He leaves the cart and enters her room, hovering by the doorway.

  She is sitting on the bed again, still in her bathrobe. It is as though she has not moved and has spent all the days since then right here in this same place. Nothing has changed. Except everything has changed. His mother is now dying where before she had been sick. He is now alone where before, for brief stolen moments, he’d had Maria. This woman is now expanding where before she was withering. He looks at her again. She smiles. She looks better. Somehow more whole. More full of something—life? Hope? A future, he decides. Somehow, she has been given back her own future.