I hear a buzz of surprise in the audience. I cannot even imagine how astonished my parents, my grandmother, and my brother must be. If their hearts are racing half as fast as my own, they’ll be having heart attacks. I feel like a starlet in one of Ruthie’s sister’s movie magazines, getting my big break, my chance to show the world my magnificent talent.
Standing in the wings, I can’t think of my first line. My leg bones are rubbery. If I scratch my arms one more time, they’ll bleed all over the green suit. In the second before I am to make my stage debut, with the houselights down and the audience silently awaiting the action, I experience a moment of truth. I’m not a good actor; I’m a good critic. I have no idea how to act.
I walk quickly onto the stage, dressed in Hazel’s costume. Ruthie, as maid, is busily dusting the fake pictures on the fake walls. I say my lines mechanically and not very loudly. I sit on a fake chair, knowing this is what I’m supposed to do, rise when my elderly fake mother enters stage left, and speak my lines rapidly because I can’t wait to get them out of the way. At the end of my scene, I walk briskly through a fake door into another room of the nonexistent house.
Backstage, Mr. Tompkins nods encouragement. He shakes his shoulders around. “Loosen up,” he whispers.
I want to go home at intermission, only I can’t find my clothes. I think Ruthie hid them somewhere.
I do not loosen up. My acting does not improve. When the curtain comes down and the audience applauds politely, I do not go out for my curtain call. I run back to the dressing room and tear off Hazel’s costume. I scrub at my makeup with a handful of absorbent cotton, not even bothering with cold cream. I’m out of the room and out of the school moments before the audience surges out through the front door. I’m in bed before the rest of my family returns, and when they do, I refuse to talk to them through my locked door. Tonight I blindly leapt from the steepest cliff I will ever encounter, never to rise again. I lie beneath it, splattered and shattered.
Sunday morning, my eyes are red and puffy. I didn’t mean to cry half the night. But, every time I remembered the disastrous play, I heard my own voice rattling out the lines like popcorn popping as I rushed to get through them.
I go down to breakfast knowing I am a disgrace.
“Don’t say anything,” I’m at the kitchen doorway. “I know it was a disaster.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Jamie says over his coffee cup.
“It wasn’t bad at all,” Mother says. “You spoke a little quickly, that’s all.”
“I thought you were great to step in and save the day,” Dad says. “Magnificent, in fact.”
“Liars,” I say.
I hurry back upstairs because my eyes are filling again. Passing my parents’ room, I see their open suitcase on the bed. Beside it is Mother’s best blouse, and on the floor, Dad’s polished shoes. They intend to drive Jamie to Toronto this afternoon to see the specialist tomorrow. I wasn’t planning to go, but now I think I will. I can’t face school. I throw what I’ll need into a small suitcase and put Little Red Lies into my skirt pocket, I don’t know why. It didn’t help me pass myself off as an actress. I feel like a fraud.
But, I wash my face, soak my eyes, and go back down. “I’m going with you.” I say it loudly and firmly. I will not be talked out of it.
“But you have school tomorrow,” Mother says.
“I’m never going back.”
“Oh, now, now,” Dad says. “Never is a long time.”
“Give her a break,” Jamie says. “She’s had a traumatic experience.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was as bad as all that,” Mother says. “There’s no need to be quite so dramatic, Rachel.”
“I’m not going!” I glare, not at them, but through the window, my arms folded majestically, my brow a firm line. Mrs. Hall, sweeping her steps next door, sees me and waves. I turn my back.
Dad says, “Dora, she’ll miss only a day or two.”
So he thinks, I say to myself.
“It’s silly to give in!” She takes another look at me. “Oh, well—but bring your books. You’ll have to study.”
I run upstairs to get my bag. I pull my hair closer around my face and, at the bathroom mirror, add a smear of Little Red Lies to hide my puffy lips. With a little imagination, I look fine. The lipstick’s back in my pocket.
Downstairs, Mother takes one look at my lips and says, “Hand it over.”
“What?”
“You know very well what.” She’s staring at my mouth. “It makes you … look like someone you’re not. Give it to me.”
“But I bought it with my own money,” I say as I put it in her outstretched hand.
She places it in a corner of the nearest kitchen cupboard. “There it will sit until you’re twenty years old. By then, maybe you’ll be old be enough to see that less is actually more. Now go and wipe your face.”
Sullenly, scratching my arms to shreds, I sit next to Jamie as we drive to Toronto. We’re spending the night with Dad’s second cousin Betty, an elderly woman who lives alone in a big house.
She welcomes us by bustling in and out of rooms, showing us where we’ll be sleeping, asking if we’d like a cup of tea, and giving Jamie and me the critical once-over.
“Rachel,” she says, “Is something wrong? You look as if you’re moping.”
I bare my teeth, which she can take as a smile … or not. If I had an ax handy, I’d wedge it in her head.
To Jamie, she says, “Dear boy, what have you been doing to yourself? You’re awfully frail, my dear. Do they not feed you?”
He draws himself up tall, as if he can make up in height what he lacks in width. This will not be a pleasant visit.
Promptly at nine, next morning, I mope along behind the others to the specialist. Jamie goes into the doctor’s office while the rest of us stay in the waiting room. After about twenty minutes, Doctor Latham calls us all into his office.
“I’d like to admit Jamie to hospital here for further testing,” he says.
Jamie’s arms are folded defiantly. “Actually, I feel fine now and have for the past week. I think it was just some bug I picked up.”
Dad says, “Jamie, have the tests. We’ll come back for you as soon as they’re over.”
Mother says, “I’ll stay.”
“No need,” Jamie mutters. “Go with Dad. This is a waste of time.”
“I’ll take Rachel back,” Dad says. “She should be in school.”
“I’m not going back to school. I’ll take correspondence courses.”
Doctor Latham clears his throat.
“This is something we’ll discuss later,” Dad says.
CHAPTER
12
I get my wish. They let me stay with Mother. I try my best to be nice to Cousin Betty, and she rewards me by letting me look at all her books, of which she has hundreds. “Choose whatever one you like,” she says, “as long as it’s appropriate.”
I start looking for something racy and come up with The Anatomy of the Human Body, a textbook for medical students with her brother’s name on the flyleaf. Flipping through it convinces me I’ll know more than I ever wanted to about people’s private parts.
Each day, we visit Jamie in hospital. Visiting hours are two to four, so we always get there sharp at two to make the most of them. He shares a room with a man who spends most of the day snoring, but Jamie is lucky enough to have the window side.
“I don’t mind the snoring,” he says, “I just wish he’d talk a bit.” He has to rely on books and magazines for company.
Thursday afternoon, we get there at two as usual, and Mother pulls the curtain between Jamie and the snoring man. We have been there just five minutes, me leaning against the windowsill, Mother tidying Jamie’s bedside table, when Doctor Latham comes in. He stands at the foot of Jamie’s bed, brow furrowed, pulling on his lower lip as if he would pull it right off.
“The diagnosis is confirmed,” he says, “or as confirmed as it can be, at this point
. We believe you have leukemia.”
“Leukemia,” Jamie says. “What’s that?”
“It’s a condition that prevents your bone marrow from producing enough normal white cells.”
I watch Jamie frown and nod like a fellow scientist.
“You have a proliferation of abnormal white cells crowding out the normal ones along with the red cells and platelets in your blood.”
“I see,” Jamie says.
I don’t see. All I know is, none of this sounds good. I am scratching my arms before they’re even itchy.
“It means your blood has a hard time clotting. To be blunt, it’s … cancer of the bone marrow.”
At the word cancer, Mother says, “Oh!” and collapses into the bedside chair. Jamie’s pale face looks whiter than ever. As for me, my heart is jumping around my chest in panic. Mother presses her hands into her cheeks. I watch Jamie swallow a couple of times before he can speak.
“Is there …” he clears his throat “… a treatment for it?”
“Yes, indeed,” Doctor Latham answers heartily. “We can give you transfusions of normal blood, and there are drugs we are trying with some success.”
Jamie has dots of perspiration on his forehead, and two red spots appear on his cheeks. Looking through the window at the patch of blue cloudless sky, he asks, “Am I going to die?”
Doctor Latham follows his gaze and says, “We have to look at this positively. We have treatment; we have hope. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But,” Jamie insists, “am I? I need to know.”
“You were a soldier. You knew you had to fight for your life over there in France. No one told you whether you would live through it or die. Well, here, on the home front, it’s much the same. Chin up, Private McLaren. There’s a war on. We’ll keep you here for another week or two to start treatment.” He pats Mother on the shoulder and leaves.
I can barely bring myself to look at Jamie, can’t stand to watch him clenching and unclenching his jaw, flaring his nostrils, blinking hard.
Mother grasps his hand and, for once, he lets her. In that instant, he loses all his fight—soldier or not.
I turn to the window, feeling empty, weightless. I have a vague idea that if I don’t hang on to something, I might drift right through it to become the first cloud in a perfectly clear sky.
“There’s a war on,” Jamie mutters. “Right. It never ends, does it?”
When I turn back, Jamie pulls his hand from Mother’s grasp. “So, I’m sick,” he says. “Cancer. I could die. Ironic, isn’t it? I spent most of the war afraid I’d be killed. Now that I’m home safe and more or less sound, damned if there isn’t a sharpened meat cleaver still dangling over my head.” He flings his arm across his forehead, shielding his eyes from view.
Mother tries to mop up the tears running down her cheeks with her hankie, but she can’t keep up to them. “I’m going to find a phone so I can talk to your father. Will you be all right, Jamie? Rachel’s here.”
The room feels hollow after she leaves, taking her lilac scent with her. The man in the next bed snores on. I don’t know what to do, what to say. I want to throw my arms around Jamie, but I know how he hates mushy stuff.
“Maybe I’ll find Coop,” he says, “if he really is dead, if there really is a nice place to go after death.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“Ah, what’s the use of sentimentality? When you die, you’re dead. There, now. That’s the way I see it. There won’t be any Coop drinking beer beside some heavenly river teeming with holy fish.” He rubs at his eyes.
“When the doctor said there was a war on, he meant you have to fight for your life. So, start fighting.”
“Any minute, now.”
“How can they be one hundred percent sure of what you have?” I get right up close to him, my hands on my hips. “Listen, they’ll give you transfusions, and just like in Dingbat Land, you’ll get up and walk away from this. You will. Believe me.”
We hear Mother’s heels coming along the corridor. He blows his nose, and we both blink hard, trying to look normal.
She sits in the chair near his bed and reaches out to hold his hand, but he pulls away and clasps his hands behind his head. “How’s Dad?” he asks.
“Terribly upset. He’ll come tomorrow.” Her voice is so high-pitched, she sounds like a little girl.
“I expect once they get going on the treatment,” he says, “that’ll do the trick.”
“Oh, Jamie!” she says. “What will we ever do? How can we stand this?”
I watch Jamie’s facial muscles tighten. “Stop!” he says. “I’m the one going up the scaffold, not you.”
“Sorry,” Mother says, searching for another hankie.
A nurse comes in, all starchy and bright, bringing Jamie some fruit juice to sip. She stands between him and Mother, sticks a thermometer in his mouth, and holds his wrist to take his pulse. Mother manages to pull herself together as the nurse makes perky comments about the noisy pigeons and the blue sky and what the temperature is outside.
Patting Mother’s shoulder, she says, “It won’t take your son long to start feeling better. You’ll see.” She leaves, taking her optimism with her.
The heaviness in the room feels like a thunderstorm brewing, in spite of the brilliant sky. Jamie’s pretending to be interested in a magazine about cars. Mother is in his tiny bathroom bathing her swollen eyes.
I stand at the window, grinding my teeth. So this is what the end of the world is like. Jamie has a possibly fatal illness, and I am the school outcast. I would cheerfully trade places with him, right about now. At least people would feel sorry for me, instead of hating me.
Realistically, though, he isn’t going to die. Young people just don’t. In a month or two, the doctor will be telling us that he doesn’t actually have leukemia, just something like it, something that won’t kill him. I, on the other hand, will live in infamy forever. No one will ever forget what a fool I made of myself and how I wrecked the play for the whole cast, not to mention the audience.
Ruthie must despise me. What a windbag, what a faker she must think I am, pretending to know all about acting. My life might as well be over. I could jump out this window as quick as take a breath, and that would be the end of it. I try to raise it higher, but it’s blocked. I could probably slip through feetfirst, I’m skinny enough. Except for my head. I’d be left dangling by my neck.
“Put the window down a bit, Rachel,” Mother says. “You don’t want to give your brother pneumonia on top of everything else.”
I slam it shut and walk out of the room. The world revolves around my brother, who probably doesn’t even have leukemia. I wish I had my lipstick to smear on about two inches thick. If I did, maybe people would notice my down-turned mouth and feel sorry for me, for once in my life. No one has time to spend worrying about me and whether or not I harbor dark thoughts. If I found a sixth-storey window that opened wide enough and jumped out, would they take their mind off Jamie’s rotten blood and say, How sad? No. They would look at my smashed-up body and say, What a mess! Pity old Rachel can’t clean it up for us.
I’m sure Doctor Latham must have doubts about his diagnosis. As confirmed as it can be, he said. By now I’ve reached the end of the corridor. But, what if something really is desperately wrong with Jamie? My heart is thumping wildly. No! I block any further thoughts in that direction and train a spotlight squarely on myself. Everyone and everything else fades into the blackness.
Retracing my steps, I pass the open doors of other patients’ rooms. There are bottles with tubes attached to people, one of them a pale bony girl no older than me. I hear a man groan with pain. Along the corridor coming toward me, a nurse pushes a little boy with a big head and bulging eyes in a wheelchair. His spindly legs dangle uselessly.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, not very loudly.
“You bad guy,” he says.
“Scotty,” the nurse says. “That’s not very nice.�
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He stares at me with his bulging eyes and says it again. “You bad guy!”
I give him a vampire-sneer, with my fangs hanging out, and notice my spotlight fading as the houselights come up. There is no applause.
I go back to Jamie’s room. He doesn’t look very sick at all.
Two days later, we gather in Jamie’s room to say good-bye. Dad has laid down the law. Glaring at him, Mother says, “I’m leaving against my wishes, but we’ll come back for you, Jamie, when you’re well enough to be released.”
“No, I’ll take the train.”
“You most certainly will not. Think of the germs. Trains are traveling cauldrons of toxic bacteria, especially in this weather.”
“I’m going to take the train. There’s something I have to do while I’m here.”
“Jamie!”
“I’ll come home by train after I deliver something to the widow of a friend.”
I’m proud of him for standing up to Mother. He’s James to the nurses and doctors, and it suits him. He’s outgrowing Jamie.
He’s been lying on top of his hospital bed in pajamas and bathrobe. Standing now, he towers over Mother, forcing her to look up. He staggers slightly, a little dizzy from getting up so quickly. “Would you let me look after myself now, Mother?”
She looks into his unwavering eyes, mesmerized, and says, “Whatever you think is right, dear.” She pulls his head down for a kiss on the cheek and leaves the room.
I lag behind, wanting to hug him or just shake his hand. Anything.
“Go,” he says. He reaches out and gives my hair a yank. “I’ll be home before you know it.”
I grab his wrist to make him let go of my hair and squeeze it until he winces.
“You’re lethal,” he says.
“Get better.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER
13
Little Red Lies Page 10