Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  ‘First of all – how many times do I have to tell you that I was drawing Jack Frost and not you,’ I said. ‘Second, who says I would be lusting after you if I didn’t have a boyfriend. I’d say you aren’t my type at all.’ The truth was, he wasn’t any type I had ever met.

  ‘Oh, I’m your type all right. But that’s okay. Life is long.’

  We were nearing Red River by this time, and I wondered where Farley was going. Maybe I would have asked him, but as I went to put my history binder back in my backpack, Farley remembered that I hadn’t shown him any art.

  ‘Hand the books over. We had a deal.’

  ‘We only had a deal if I think you’re not a psycho. I’m not convinced you aren’t,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have real art. Just doodles.’

  ‘Have you not seen any of Picasso’s early stuff? All doodles,’ he said, and dug into my bag to retrieve another two binders.

  I hadn’t realised how much doodling I had been doing lately. Every margin was filled. There was way more doodling than notes. Farley flipped through the pages, bringing the binders up to his face with each turned page, which kind of made him look like an old man. Only without the old man smell, more musky-clean, with no cologne to mask it. Dell always wore cologne.

  Thinking that made me feel self-conscious, like he might be reading my thoughts, until I saw that he was actually, no bullshit, still intensely looking at my squiggles and lines, where there should have been school work. He looked through every binder I had, twice, before he would let me put them away. I kept trying to take them from him, and he kept turning away from me until he had finished with each one.

  Finally, all binders were safely away and I felt dressed again. We were nearly at the station.

  ‘So, you’re good at faces. You’re getting the essence of people. You need to work on more detail though, a little more perspective. Where’s your camera? You should be taking tons of pictures of people. Then, sit down and draw them until you can see every line in your sleep.’

  ‘What, are you some kind of master painter, who knows about art?’ I meant it as a joke.

  ‘Not exactly. But I guess the arts are kind of my thing. I’m told I am kind of good at the violin.’ He held up the case that was at his feet. So that was what was in there.

  ‘Is that why you are coming to Red River, to take lessons?’

  The bus had come to a stop now, and we joined the others in the aisle, waiting for the door to open.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I’m kind of teaching some classes.’

  ‘Right.’ Here he was, stepping out of any box I tried to build for him. ‘And you know a lot about art and music too?’

  ‘I kind of have no choice. I absorb it like a sponge.’

  I wanted to ask him more about that, but he was gone as soon as we were off the bus. He just waved and smiled – and left. So much for social etiquette.

  It felt okay though. I’d had one of the most honest exchanges with anyone in ages, and I hadn’t scared him off. I’d see him again.

  It was only as I was walking toward the hospital that I started to question the honest part. There was a little thought niggling at the back of my mind that kept trying to come to the front. I hadn’t once mentioned Emma and her illness – the reason I was heading to Red River. It hadn’t seemed important at the time. It hadn’t come up. We had been talking about ourselves, what mattered to us. I was sure that Farley had whole reams of things that he had not shared with me.

  So, it was normal right, to not mention it?

  Still, it made me feel a little guilty. Like here I was, with a promise of a life, while Emma was stuck inside the hulking institution that kept growing as I moved toward it. And I hadn’t even thought she was important enough to mention.

  It wasn’t like she would know, or even care. It’s just that sometimes I missed the sister that she might have been growing into – if she had a chance to, outside of being the perpetual patient, I mean. Maybe if she had gone to the high school this year we would have started to have friends in common. Maybe I would have had a reason to try harder – so that she would have someone to look up to.

  Instead, there had been this nothingness; this void. It wasn’t Emma’s fault, but the cancer had become a pretty big black hole in my life.

  For the first time since I could remember though, I felt like something could be different. It felt good, and I didn’t want to share Emma’s illness with this newness. I wanted this feeling all to myself. This was my life and my feeling. That was allowed wasn’t it?

  Something was wrong. I could feel it even though both Mom and Emma smiled big, toothy grins when I walked in. Mom’s chair – the one with her pillow and blanket from home, with her paperback books piled on the floor beside it – was nearly two feet back from Emma’s bed. Usually Mom couldn’t get close enough to Emma.

  ‘What’s up?’ I didn’t expect an honest answer, and I didn’t get one.

  ‘Your birthday is what’s up!’ said Mom, which elicited a glare from Emma. An actual glare. I didn’t think Emma was capable of it. It didn’t really count though, focused as it was on Mom’s back as she left the room to retrieve a cake with sixteen unlit candles on it. The cake was one of those ones from the supermarket, no writing or anything.

  ‘Sorry, we can’t light them here,’ Mom apologised.

  Emma still hadn’t said anything. When Mom went back out to find a knife to cut the cake, she took a paper bag from under her blankets and handed it to me.

  ‘This is from me,’ she said and then added for emphasis, ‘Just me.’

  Inside was a bracelet with intricately painted beads. From a distance, it looked like a very pretty bracelet, but when I looked closely, there was a tiny figure on each bead. Star Wars figures. I didn’t care that her present was two years out of date. I hadn’t been obsessed with Star Wars for ages.

  ‘I’ll play monopoly with you any time, Ems,’ I said, pulling her little body in for a hug.

  ‘I had lots more ideas, but I couldn’t do much from here. The lady who does jewellery making on Tuesdays with the kids hooked me up with the beads.’

  I wondered when she had stopped seeing herself as one of ‘the kids’.

  ‘Here we go!’ Mom said, coming back in with a knife. ‘Now, Dad will have your proper present for you when you get home, but we had to have a bit of celebration here too.’ She handed us each a slice of cake on blue, hospital paper towel. Emma had gone silent and sullen again, but Mom was ignoring it, or not noticing, filling the silence herself.

  ‘Mmmm. That’s very good cake,’ she said. ‘Much better than any I make. What do you think, Jane? I got the black forest because I know you love cherries.’

  ‘Thanks, Mom. Delicious,’ I managed, though I could tell she wasn’t really waiting for my response anyway. Emma left her cake untouched, and Mom didn’t say a word about it. I ate mine, though Mom was wrong – even her worst cakes were better than this.

  ‘I got us a DVD to watch together as well, and popcorn. We’ll have a proper girls’ afternoon.’

  I felt like I was at the Mad Hatter’s tea party the way Emma and Mom were acting. All upside down. Emma always tried to please, even when you knew she didn’t want to, and Mom was like me, not able to hide how she felt, no matter how hard she tried. She was trying to do it now, but she wasn’t that good at it. She forgot to keep the happy face once the movie was on.

  It was an old movie, one of those that you flip past on TV because you have seen it so many times before. I could tell that Emma was tired, because she laid back and watched it anyway, ending her angry stand-off with Mom. Whatever was going on between them had taken its toll on her.

  I looked over to find Mom staring at the wall, so lost in her thoughts that she had forgotten that she was with us. The happy façade was gone. She looked – old. Everything about her sagging and tired. More than that though, I had never seen her look as sad as she looked right then. I watched her for a long ti
me, and that sadness did not lift one bit.

  We might have stayed like that until the end of the movie. I had even curled onto the end of Emma’s bed to watch it when I got tired of watching Mom. And then, I was being splattered with water – well I thought it was water until I sat up to see blood pouring out of Emma’s nose.

  ‘I’m alright,’ she gurgled, even as she seemed to be bleeding to death. Mom didn’t seem any more assured than I felt though, rushing to grab paper towels, and pressing the button for the nurse. There was blood everywhere.

  ‘Oh, Hon,’ the nurse who came in said, taking over from Mom.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Emma still managed, though it was looking less and less okay to me.

  ‘Head forward, pinch your nose. We’re okay.’ Every move the nurse made was steady and sure. The blood was stopping, or at least I couldn’t see it through the gauze the nurse had held over Emma’s nose.

  ‘She can’t take this, can she?’ Mom was talking to the nurse as if Emma and I weren’t even there.

  ‘It’s just one nose bleed. We’ll see what the doctor says tomorrow,’ the nurse said. ‘He’ll do his best to spare…’

  Mom cleared her throat so loudly that there was no disguising the fact that it was a signal for the nurse to stop talking.

  ‘Spare what?’ I asked. Nobody answered me.

  ‘What?’ I tried again.

  ‘Emma is just on a new medication, that’s all, Jane,’ Mom said, but she didn’t look at me. ‘The doctor just wants to make sure she is okay.’

  She was lying. I wished that Emma’s face wasn’t hidden in gauze, so I could have seen her expression. Did she know what was up?

  I knew that this was not ‘nothing to worry about’ when Dr Jonathan came in the room. Doctors didn’t just come around at any old time, not even blue coats. Rounds are in the mornings. Plus, he didn’t just stroll in like he was stopping by for a chat; he rushed in like he had been called.

  ‘So, this is an odd one,’ he said, as he did what every doctor did first – pull his stethoscope out of his pocket. With doctors it was always the stethoscope, with nurses it was the blood pressure cuff. I suspected neither mattered much most of the time. They just needed something to do when they didn’t have a clue where to start.

  ‘Jane, can you go get a couple of drinks from the machine?’ Mom asked, reaching for her purse to get some money.

  ‘Right now? You can’t be serious?’

  ‘Please. Just give the doctor a minute.’

  ‘What is going on? What are you not saying? Is she dying?’ I blurted. I knew I shouldn’t be so blunt, especially with Emma still under a pile of gauze, but I couldn’t help it. Mom was being so vague, and it wasn’t fair. Sure enough, she was not-so-subtly trying to give Dr Jonathan a signal to shut up. I don’t know how she thought I would miss her waving her hand in front of her mouth like that.

  He got the message. I could tell by the way he looked straight back at her and kept her gaze for a second or two before answering.

  ‘You don’t need to worry, Jane.’ He remembered my name, I’d give him points for that; most doctors didn’t.

  ‘Do I not need to worry? Oh, good. Glad you have this whole thing under control, and I’m delighted that I don’t need to know anything about it. Sure, I’m only the sister. And obviously, my mother feels it’s much more important that I go fetch drinks for her precious other daughter than hang out here finding out if there actually is something to worry about.’

  ‘Jane! Stop this right now!’ Mom hissed.

  ‘I hate this place! I come here every fucking day, and I hate it. The least you could do is stop treating me like I am some kind of unpaid childminder, fetcher of stuff …’ I knew everyone was looking at me, but I couldn’t stop. ‘I don’t even have a chair in this room!’

  Okay, it wasn’t the most articulate of rants. But the chair part was true. There was only one. For Mom.

  I walked out before my heart could stop racing, knowing that any second now I was going to want to take back every one of those words. It was embarrassing how I couldn’t shut myself up sometimes. I seemed to be getting worse at spouting off the first words that came into my head.

  It had looked like Emma was going to bleed to death though and even out of the room I couldn’t stop picturing all of that blood.

  It was just a nose bleed I told myself. No worse than the vomiting. Just another in a list of side effects Emma had to endure. So why did it make me feel so scared? Why did something feel so wrong?

  I calmed down after I wandered around the ground floor of the hospital for a bit, before finding a machine and heading back upstairs with the drinks I’d been sort-of sent for. I didn’t want to be here anymore though. I thought I would drop Emma and Mom their cans of soda and go.

  I was just about to Emma’s room, when Dr Jonathan came out of the door. He could have headed down the hallway in the other direction, but instead he stopped, and looked straight at me, and he was going to tell me the truth. I could see it in his eyes.

  ‘You are right. Things are not exactly as we would like them right now, but there isn’t anything to panic about.’ He waited, probably to make sure I wasn’t going to start ranting again. ‘Emma might be having a nose bleed because kids just get them sometimes. But that isn’t likely, is it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘This isn’t the cancer though. It could be a reaction to the drug we are giving her. This one is giving Emma grief.’

  ‘Okay.’ I could feel my heart slowing finally. At least one person would tell me the truth when I wanted to hear it.

  It wasn’t until I was on the bus going home that I thought about Dell. He had sent me three messages by that time. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JANE xoxoxo. U COMING OVER? And finally, WHERE ARE U NOW? CAN U COME OVER? Dell didn’t message me much. It just wasn’t what we did.

  Funny, I hadn’t actually thought of him as part of my birthday at all, if you could call it a birthday. All I really wanted to do was crawl into my bed and stay there. Even before losing the plot with Mom it had been a fairly crap day. I just wanted it to be over.

  The only good part had been talking with Farley. It felt like seeing Dell would ruin that somehow.

  I messaged Dell back: TIRED. HOW ABOUT TOMORROW?

  PLEASE? He messaged back straight away.

  Fine. I’d go over.

  Maybe this is a good time to explain my relationship with Dell. We’ve been together fifteen months now. See, I am not completely indifferent; I know our anniversaries. And I am aware that everyone around me thinks I am the luckiest girl on earth. It’s probably the biggest reason why there’s such a rift between Brenda and Aishling and myself. They are jealous. I know they are. If there was a choice, Brenda would totally be with Dell and not Stan. She doesn’t think that, but she feels it. Tracey and I may have spent most of grade eight secretly wanting to be with Dell, but Brenda had made no secret of her intentions, practically stalking him the whole year. She had never quite forgiven me for being the one to land him in the end, though why it was me has always been a bit of a mystery to us all.

  Poor Dell. I’m saving him from them. He doesn’t know it, but if Brenda got her claws in his sweet hide, he’d wake up at forty-five and wonder what the hell had happened to him. She has her whole life mapped out – from the big wedding, to the two kids, to the bungalow and landscaped garden. To her, he would be a commodity, an acquisition, kind of like a glorified garden gnome. Granted, he’d be a very good looking acquisition, but I’m afraid that it might only take ten years for him to lose that value. And I’d like to see him loved for a bit more time than that.

  Not that I picked Dell as my boyfriend. I didn’t pick anyone.

  There was this softball tournament the summer before last that Tracey dragged me to. Well that isn’t true; I think I actually wanted to go to it. Emma had been at home then, in remission, and looking back I’m sure that it had felt like I could begin to live again. It’s hard to imagine now, but I’m sure that
I thought the cancer was over. Lately, I have a hard time remembering how I felt when times were good. It doesn’t feel like they ever were good, but if I think about it, I think they must have been.

  If I really think about it, I can see Tracey and I that weekend, perched on the top bench behind first base, watching the games. The sun is shining and the shorts and t-shirts we are wearing look ‘first-thing-thrown-on’ even though it took us ages to decide what to wear. Well, ages for Tracey to decide for both of us, because she has always been my fashion guru, since I have no idea about clothes myself. I can see this air of possibility hanging over us, making us almost magnets for people to look at. I can see that, but I can’t remember how it felt anymore.

  Anyway, I ended up at this dance on the Saturday night, this barn dance. It literally was in a barn. There was a band playing and there was a makeshift bar behind these bales of hay. I was just hanging out with Tracey, waiting for the music to start, and to see whether there was anything to stay for. When you live in a small town, unless it’s specifically designated a ‘house wrecker’, any party is for every age – which means that you are never too sure whether it’s going to turn into an entirely geriatric event, or offer a bit of interest for those of us under twenty.

  The band had started to play, the usual country and western cover tunes that bands always started with at these things. Tracey was sitting beside me, not really just hanging out at all, but on the vigilant look out for any of the guys from the out-of-town teams. She had a couple of them in particular earmarked as potentials. Not the best looking ones – Tracey never aimed that high – but the sweet-looking ones. She didn’t say it, but I think that she hoped that they wouldn’t frighten her as much and she would be at least be able to open her mouth.

  But it wasn’t any of them that came up to us. It was Dell, and one of his friends. We pretty much assumed they were just hanging out with us because there was no one else better around yet. I mean, they’d known us all their lives; it didn’t mean anything that they were hanging out with us. It might have just been an ordinary night. There was no way I would have believed that Dell actually liked me. That was so far out of my idea of possible that he didn’t even make me nervous.