Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  Mom didn’t lead me to Emma’s room. Instead, Dad and Emma were in the ‘family room’. I think it’s supposed to make you feel like you are not in a hospital, with comfortable sofas and magazines on the end tables. In a way it reminded me of that councillor’s office in school, only not so nice. Plus, there was no way you could ignore the hospital smell.

  There was nothing comfortable about this room. It oozed hopelessness. Everyone avoided it. Every family of a kid with cancer knew what its purpose really was. This was where families were told the truly bad news. It was even worse when there were families in it for days, waiting, when there was nothing more to tell. I tried not to notice any of the other kids on the ward most of the time, but when this room was in use, you couldn’t help it.

  Following Mom in the door, I wanted to pick Emma up and carry her back to her bed. Seeing her there, sitting in a chair, wearing a pair of loose jeans and a soft, blue sweater that I had never seen her wear before seemed wrong. It had been weeks since I had seen her out of bed, or dressed. It’s not that I exactly liked that, but I hated this more. She was too sick to have to try this hard not to look sick.

  ‘Jane, sit down.’ It was Emma, not Mom, directing me. I realised I was still standing in the doorway. Emma held out her hand, ushering me to sit beside her. I’d expected her to look tired, or sad, or terrified, but there was wasn’t one trace of any of these on her face.

  ‘You know what I’m going to tell you, don’t you?’ Her words sounded too grown up for her young voice. I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything, even though my head was reasonably quiet. ‘There’s a new drug that I am going to be put on. It’s been working really well for lots of people. There’s a chance, if this drug works, that my leg could still be saved, but the tumour in my thigh is pretty big; worse than the one in my knee was.’

  She’d said it in plain language for me. Mom and Dad already knew all of this of course. They would have been given the much longer version, with all of its technicalities. Somewhere in that spiel would have been the dreaded statistics. It’s what everyone wants to know – what are the odds of their kid living? Emma had prepared her spiel carefully for me, leaving out that detail especially.

  She waited for me to say something. I could hear Mom sniffle, and when I looked over, even Dad had tears in his eyes. All of this for me, and I couldn’t feel it. I had this urge to unzip my backpack and dump the contents in the middle of the floor. I gripped the edge of the sofa and tried to concentrate on breathing instead.

  ‘We’ve spent a lot of time talking with Dr Whitman, and even other doctors. They’d wait. They’d try the drug, if that’s what I want. Maybe they could save most of the bone. It’s not what they want though.’

  ‘This is a really promising drug though, Emma,’ Mom tried to assure her, but Emma didn’t even shift her eyes from me.

  ‘The second choice is to give me a titanium rod instead of a thigh bone, and join me all up again. But I’d still have to learn to walk again, and my cancer isn’t like most; there’s a pretty good chance of another tumour showing up in my lower leg – even with this chemo, even with the rod. I’m not taking that chance. I’m having the whole leg off.’

  ‘Emma!’ Mom looked shell shocked. ‘That is not what we discussed. That is not what we told Dr Whitman.’

  ‘That is not what you told Dr Whitman, Mom.’ Emma reached for my hand and I gave it to her. Her voice was getting quieter. I squeezed her hand in support because it was all I could do right now. I so badly wanted to say that she didn’t have to lose it, but it wasn’t the time. She went on, louder now. ‘I am tired of this. I don’t want to take more chances, so that, what, maybe I can dance again? It’s highly unlikely, and even if it did happen, it isn’t worth it.’

  ‘But it is Emma. There’s a good chance …’ Mom let her argument go. ‘Don’t you want the best chance to dance again?’

  ‘If you’d asked me three years ago, probably. But not now. It’s too late now.’ Her answer was sure. ‘Besides, I never knew how much I hated the pressure until I didn’t have to do it anymore. Don’t you remember, Mom? I used to throw up before almost every performance.’

  I’d never known that. All of those times, sharing the backseat on the way to her performances, when I had thought she was worried, she had probably been concentrating on not puking. I squeezed her hand harder.

  Mom nodded.

  ‘Are you sure, Ems?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Dad, I just want to live. That’s all.’ She was getting tired now. Her face was getting that ashen hue of exhaustion. ‘Tomorrow. They’ll do it tomorrow, if you say yes. Am I letting you down?’

  It was so much worse than I’d thought. There were no good choices. Poison Emma or take her leg. I could feel the pictures, the words, start to swirl in my head.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, Emma.’ Mom was crying, just like she had cried when she came home and told us that Grandad was dead. Just like she had told us it was okay when he died – leaving out every single detail of how his death was anything but okay. How could have she left it out? How could she have lied about something like that? How could she have made me be the only one to have to know?

  There was this movie playing out in front of me. I could see Mom and Dad were going to move in to hug Emma, to say it was okay. That it was over.

  But in my head there was a different movie. It made everything that was happening in front of me wrong. It was severely fucked up in fact.

  Still, all I had to do was let the scene finish. Let the curtain fall. It wouldn’t change anything. Emma tried to take her hand away, but I couldn’t open mine to let it go.

  ‘Ouch, you’re hurting me!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I am not letting you go, Emma.’ I tried to stop what I was going to do, to breathe, to just shut up, to stop the pictures starting to flash through my head again. ‘They are all lying to you. There isn’t a fairy tale ending in what they are going to do to you.’

  I turned to Mom. Part of me wanted to stop. To not ruin this. But I couldn’t.

  ‘Mom, stop pretending that it is all okay. You know it, and I know it. They’re still going to keep pumping her full of poison – what’s left of her. One more drug, one more toxic, cell-destroying drug. Look how much good it did Grandad! Look at the bloody mess he ended up to be! You want her to end up like that!’

  Looking from face to face, shocked and hurt, I wanted to take back every word. I wanted to cry. I wanted it to be over. I wanted that scene just before the curtain fell.

  I couldn’t have it. I got pictures of severed limbs and blood splattered rooms instead. I dropped Emma’s hand and walked out.

  There was one more thing I had to do before I left the hospital. I went into Emma’s room, found the DVD of Grandad and snapped it in half.

  The problem with leaving like I did, well besides EVERYTHING that was wrong with it, was that now I was stuck. If you’ve never lived in a village of 423 people, in an area where the trees outnumber the people by, say, billions then you might not know that it’s not exactly easy to get from where you are to where you want to go. This is especially true on the weekends, when bus service is almost non-existent. Unless you like taking two days to get there.

  I didn’t even know where I wanted to go.

  At first, all I wanted to do was get as far away from the hospital as possible. I’d needed to calm down, and try to slow the pictures. It was getting harder to make them go away completely, but walking helped. So that’s what I did.

  My phone rang twice, but I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to Mom or Dad, or especially Emma.

  I had my mittens, and a jacket. I could just keep walking.

  I lost time somehow. I’d just kept walking in one direction. I didn’t really know my way around Red River, so I just picked a road and started walking. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been walking for. The road had kept going, first leaving the businesses behind, then the houses, and now there were mostly trees, and a few houses set way off the roa
d, down long drives. I might have stayed in that comfortable fog, just walking, but the park stopped me. It was empty of people, and there were swings in the corner, behind the baseball diamond. It was starting to get dark and in another few minutes I wouldn’t even have seen them. It was a good place to stop and make some sort of plan.

  Guilt was setting in now. My hospital stunt had been bad enough, without subjecting Mom and Dad to a day of worrying. What time was it anyway?

  When I checked my phone, it was nearly four. Sure enough, there were three missed calls from Mom’s phone. No messages from Dell. It really was over. One message from Farley. I opened it. JUST CHECKING TO SEE IF YOU MADE IT TO OKAY.

  I rang him back. He answered on the first ring.

  ‘I’m not sure I am totally okay.’

  ‘It’s a relative term when dealing with these sorts of subjects.’

  ‘Any tips?’

  ‘I’ve Kaitlin’s car. It’s been known to induce laughter. Seems to help.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Where do I find you?’ I had no idea where I was. I looked around, for some sort of clue, finally spotting a park sign in the corner.

  ‘Do you have a sat-nav?’

  I’d like to say that Farley was there in the next few minutes, but that would have been sort of impossible, since he was in the middle of nowhere and I was in another middle of nowhere. I tried not to think about how cold I was getting. The swings helped. Plus, now that I’d had a few hours to get over the fact that Emma seemed to be fine with letting the doctors cut off her leg, I could get back to thinking about how I was going to make sure that didn’t happen.

  I tried to recall everything that Dr Jonathan had said this morning. The names of places that treated cancer naturally, the treatments, the statistics of how many got better. I’d taken notes. Or had I shown Dr Jonathan my own notes? It was all a little jumbled to be honest. I’d read so much, written so much down. It was hard to separate what I’d found out on my own from what Dr Jonathan had said.

  I tried to put it all on a timeline in my mind, like writing out a history assignment. It wasn’t working though. Time was all jumbled up, and I couldn’t keep straight what I’d thought and what we’d talked about. It had been today that we’d talked, hadn’t it? I could see him, in that halo of light. Only – that couldn’t be right. There weren’t windows in the basement.

  It didn’t help that there were so many other thoughts that kept jumping in the way, making it too hard to keep it all straight. The slide show was worse though. Thinking that made me start to feel scared that it was going to start again. What is wrong with you, Jane?

  I concentrated on pumping my legs, swinging as high as I possibly could. I just needed to wait for Farley. Everything was better when I was with him.

  It was properly dark before I saw headlights slowly approaching. I jumped off the swing and ran to the road so that Farley would see me. It was him alright. I could hear the rattling exhaust pipe of Kaitlin’s car.

  ‘You were not kidding when you said that I wouldn’t find the place easily,’ Farley said when I got in.

  Even with the hole in the floor, the car was heavenly warm. For a moment, just feeling the blast of hot air pouring out of the vent, I felt like I was okay again. You know that feeling, the relief of knowing you are going to be warm again, when you have been colder than you ever have been before?

  ‘So, according to my map of the area, we are nowhere near this village of ill-repute that you live in.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I suppose if we were, then I’d be at home by now, huddled under ten blankets to get warm.’ Even with the heat blasting on me, there wasn’t any feeling in my fingers yet.

  ‘I can get you there if you’d like? Maybe go for a coffee or something, if there’s a place for that in Verwood.’ He was tentative in asking, like he wasn’t sure what I would say. Most of the time Farley seemed so sure that I would succumb to his charm, but then I’d catch this little bit of vulnerability. He was trying to sound casual, like he’d just thought of this, but even in the dark, I could feel the shift.

  Could he really like me? I’d thought it was part of the banter between us. But then, I hadn’t looked for the signs either. I had been with Dell.

  I tried to see his face in the dark, but couldn’t. His hands gave him away though. They were always so still, and here he was drumming away on the steering wheel. Waiting for my answer. He was putting himself out there. I could crush his soul with a single word.

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t trust myself to say more. All of the fighting thoughts in my head, all of the horrific pictures, were gone, replaced by this overwhelming desire to kiss him. Pure and simple lust. I closed my eyes, savouring the feeling. I wanted to just stay in this moment forever.

  We stayed in that quiet as we drove back into Red River. I didn’t know I had walked so far. It seemed to take ages to drive, but I wanted it to take even longer. It felt okay to not talk, like Farley knew that was what I needed most right now. Everything was still. Even in my head. Just this feeling of wanting to be here, with Farley, in this moment, with no thoughts at all. Properly feeling for the first time in days. Safe.

  I had to talk when we got to Red River though. Farley didn’t have a clue how to get to Verwood, and he didn’t have a sat-nav.

  ‘But how did you find me?’

  He waved an envelope at me, with a mess of lines drawn on the back of it.

  ‘That’s your map?’

  We’d pulled into a service station so I could have a pee, and now that the spell was broken, I knew that I was going to have to deal with Mom and Dad. I couldn’t leave it forever.

  ‘Just let me ring my mom, and then I’ll be the navigator,’ I said. I rang her before I could think of a good reason to put it off.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Mom,’ I said as quickly as I could when she answered, though I knew it wasn’t going to erase what I had done.

  ‘Jane, where are you? We’ll come and get you.’ She didn’t even sound angry.

  ‘I’m okay. I’m with a friend.’

  ‘We rang everyone. Tracey hadn’t heard from you. Dell wasn’t answering. Are you with him?’

  ‘No. Dell and I broke up.’ That was for Farley’s benefit.

  ‘Where are you? Are you okay? Can we come get you?’ I hated how she sounded. I hated that I was doing this to her.

  ‘Farley is giving me a lift home. In a bit.’

  ‘Farley? Who is he?’ I could feel that the conversation might descend rapidly into a bad place if I didn’t give her what she needed to stop worrying.

  ‘Here, I’ll give you his number.’ I searched in my backpack for a pen to hand Farley, and mimicked writing as I handed it to him. ‘He’s nice. He plays the violin.’

  When I got off the phone, Farley was grinning at me.

  ‘He plays the violin?’ he said, voice full of mockery.

  ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

  ‘And that is the most essential piece of information to relay?’

  ‘Axe murderers don’t play the violin, Farley. Every mother wants her daughter to have a boyfriend that plays the violin.’

  I noticed that Farley kept grinning as he pulled out and drove toward Verwood.

  If we would have just stayed in the car, everything would have been perfect. I might have kissed him. He might have kissed me back. Maybe.

  We didn’t stay in the car though.

  I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to go into Shirley’s for the coffee Farley had promised. I forgot that I live in a village of 423 people. I forgot that it was early December, when nothing is happening and where does anyone go, but Shirley’s?

  While I’d been trying to keep it together, to think straight, to just get through each hour, each minute, each second, real life was happening for everyone else. Farley was the one real thing for me and I was bringing him to a place where nothing was real for me anymore. A place where everyone thought they knew me, but nobody really did. Do you know w
hat I mean? You see them every week, but they don’t really see you?

  As soon as we walked in the door all of the thoughts that had stayed away the whole way from Red River came rushing back in. The place was packed with people. A dozen conversations happening all at once. It felt like we were walking into a wall of noise and my mind was racing. I couldn’t keep up. And then every face turned our way, and now they really had something to talk about.

  I sat down and tried to breathe. It was too hot in here. All of the windows were locked shut and I could feel the hot air pouring out of the vents from the central heating. Half an hour ago I had been a block of ice, and now I was melting. It was difficult to focus with the heat.

  I hadn’t thought about how Farley would fit into my world here. Hell, I didn’t have a world here anymore. Emma’s cancer had turned our family into ‘a topic’. People thought they were being kind, that they cared. They didn’t. They just wanted something to gossip about.

  And here I was feeding them some more gossip.

  Every head turned in our direction. Every eyebrow rose. Everyone frowned.

  Farley was oblivious to all of this of course. Well, maybe not oblivious, but it wasn’t his village, wasn’t his concern. Not that I think he would care that everyone was wondering who the hell he was, where Dell was, and what he was doing here with me instead. And it’s not like Farley was exactly someone who could blend in. Birkenstock sandals in the winter, hippie jumper – never mind that half the people in the place had only seen skin his colour on television.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but our valley seemed to be divided into very distinct regions, keeping the red necks and the hippies as far apart as possible. Verwood was mining and logging territory. It wasn’t Kendal. We should have gone to Kendal.

  Every word I thought seemed to lead on to a different thought, and I couldn’t seem to stop it, to get back to the thought that lead to it.