Good To A Fault Part 21

Some patients, however, develop chronic (long-lasting) or delayed complications. These complications have many causes, including the transplant itself, pre-transplant radiation and/or chemotherapy, and...Her eyes wouldn't read any more. There was no point, because knowing would not help her. Ignorance might help her to be oblivious, and strong, and placid.

November was cruel, Paul thought, not April. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease. Toronto at least had charcoal smoke and chestnut vendors. Back here in the west it was full winter. Seven paris.h.i.+oners in hospital, and Lorraine.

He pulled into the parking lot and checked in the visor mirror that he did not have blood on his mouth from that morning's shave. He remembered Binnie's mouth in hospital, the dear pearly teeth and her lips all cracked and painful with thrush. The little s.p.a.ces between Binnie's teeth had kept her face always young. Well, she was young. He could not do any more of this. He could not go upstairs.

He went up. But he took the stairs to give himself a little more time, winding up the echoing, wheeling metal flights.

When he got to the door and Lorraine looked so happy to see him, he was sorry not to have taken the elevator. She was tired but talkative-couldn't seem to stop talking, in fact.

"You know what I want? People I used to know, to know how their stories are turning out. How many kids they've got, and what they do now, and where they live, and who they married."

He said, "We can find out some of that, if you want."

"I don't want to actually call anybody, or look people up on the Internet or whatever. I'm just thinking about them. Like there was one set of brothers, one called Dog and the other called Pickle. Darwin remembers them too."

Paul said he had people like that in his own memory.

"Or the girl who lived over the Chinese restaurant, Rosalind. Or that girl who took me to the revival meeting where the woman spoke in tongues-I want to tell them I liked them, or something." She was silent for a while. "It's obviously got to do with thinking I might not be able to, later."

"Yes," he said.

"Only thing is, I don't want to tell anyone. I can't stand talking about all this." She put down the brush. This one was not working out. "I didn't think I'd be ashamed."

"I don't think it's shame. People are devastated when they find out, not just for you but for all the people they've known before, and you have to lift their spirits for them, you have to make them think you're not dying."

"Yes."

They sat quietly.

Dolly went for a walk after school, not telling Clary she was going, not telling Trevor even. She was sick and tired of this place. Her math test came back marked 4 out of 12 and Clary had to sign it, and she was going to be all concerned. Dolly wanted her mother to sign it, but her mother's bones were being sucked out and tested and if the bones got 4 out of 12 she would die.

Dolly said c.r.a.p when she stepped on her left foot and s.h.i.+t on her right foot, walking down 8th Street in the grey snow and traffic-sc.u.m. Way up ahead she saw Key's Books and realized that was why she was walking down here. She needed a new book. The fat librarian at school made you sign up on lists for books, and anyway she was sick of ordinary books, she wanted something good, like Mistress Masham. She had no money again but maybe she could talk the old guy into letting her work for him, dust the books for cash. He bought books, too-maybe she could find some of Clary's old books to bring in. Or Mr. Bunt's.

The door was wide open this time. A metal ramp sloped up the stairs, covered with moving rugs laid in a path to a big truck.

Dolly jumped up on the ramp and sidled quickly through the door before a man in grey coveralls came out with a huge box blinding him. He blundered down the ramp too close to the edge, but saved himself and stomped up into the truck.

The store was dark inside. Dolly couldn't see anything but movement: grey men going around with boxes. They were emptying the shelves, throwing the books into boxes like they were leaves or wood chips. The old guy was sitting by his computer but it was not turned on.

"We're closed!" he yelled. A man packing books almost dropped his box.

"Why?" Dolly asked.

"Retirement."

She knew he was lying. He looked drunk. She should have come in before and dusted his books for him. What a mess this place was, as usual. Even worse with the people trampling around. There were books splayed open on the floor. The men with boxes were just walking on them. She picked one up: Bleak House.

"Take it and go!" the old giant shouted. There was a loud crash from upstairs.

"How much?" Dolly asked.

He leaned forward in his chair and reached his arm out for the book, flipping the inside cover page with huge clumsy fingers. "$95. Nice early edition." He closed his eyes. Dolly looked at the dark eyelids under his flaring white eyebrows.

"Well, I don't have that much," she said, speaking only to him in the crowd of workmen.

The old guy got up from his kitchen chair-taller than the busy grey men. He bent to grab his stick, and walked around the store picking books off shelves, looking at them, dropping them on the floor.

"Always orphans, eh? You'll like this better, for now," he said, hanging on to one. He held it out to her. "Vanity Fair, she's an orphan. Good tips in there, how to cope."

She took it. It was a very old red book, the pages still creamy inside, with little pictures at the front of every chapter. She smelled it, it smelled like church.

He grabbed it back and smelled it too. "Nothing wrong with that," he said. "No," she said. "I like it."

Suddenly moving fast, he grabbed the one he'd dropped, Bleak House, and then more, pulling from the shelves-The Secret Garden was on top, she couldn't see the others.

"Jane Eyre. Oliver Twist. Mary What's-her-name-orphans galore," he said. He shoved the stack into her arms, and pushed her toward the door.

"How much?"

He waved his stick around at the destruction of his store.

"Forty thousand dollars," he said. "You can owe me."

Darwin said he'd seen Paul walking away down the hall. "Did he tell you that his sister died of cancer a couple of years ago?"

"What kind?"

"Leukemia."

Lorraine let her eyes drift off, away from Darwin. He didn't blame her for being sick.

"He's still cut up about it-maybe he didn't want to cry in front of a girl."

Lorraine laughed. "A bald girl." She pushed the rolling table aside. Her scalp-fuzz had promptly fallen out again; her head was as smooth as a pear. The daily blood transfusions buoyed her up physically, although it made her feel trembly in her spirit to think of all those arms, all those Red Cross cots at all those donor clinics that had poured blood into her.

She was grateful to this round of chemo, which had given her back lucidity and seemed to be calming her down almost the way Darwin did, and gave her a window of time to talk to him. It made her want to talk to the kids too, but it was too hard a burden to place on them. When Clary suggested bringing Dolly for a visit, Lorraine did not want to say no. "Wait, okay?" she said. Clary said yes, of course, and they left it.

The full team of doctors trooped in to announce it: Lorraine was in remission, and ready for transplant; Darwin had had all his tests and pa.s.sed them. He said he felt like a matchbook career-college graduate: be a donor, or just look like one! Only Dr. Cormarie and Dr. Lester smiled. They were the kind ones. They conditioned Lorraine's marrow-ridiculous euphemism, Clary thought: they killed it by sticking her in a room and giving her total body irradiation, four days in a row. Clary and Darwin sat down the hall on turquoise vinyl seats waiting for the small Hiros.h.i.+ma to pa.s.s over her. Clary found it strange to think of that bone-blood, that pale, innocuous, powerful fluid, made sterile. It made her own bones feel hollow and frail.

The buzzer went and the door was opened, and Lorraine was rolled out. No outward sign of the destruction showed, but she was sleepy. Clary held her hand all the long way back to the ward, keeping her face mildly positive, as always at the hospital. And then all it was was a blood transfusion. Just her regular old i.v. blood-bag. A little disappointing, after all the waiting.

Then there was was longer to wait.

30. Headlights.

In spite of herself, in spite of all this tragedy and waiting, Dolly could not help sopping up knowledge in huge violent spasms of brain-expansion in school; she read all the time, at lunch and at home. Vanity Fair was like everything, like her life only clearer. She loved it from the very first moment when Becky gets a dictionary after all, and then she throws it back. She was as good a liar as Dolly.

After Vanity Fair she had more books, like insurance: the whole stack left to go. It was as if all books had suddenly unlocked, and now she understood everything. Trevor would never catch up to her. Poor Pearce could not even talk. He made truck noises, brrrmm-brrrm around the carpet with the yellow truck. Dolly would teach him her name, since their mother was not there. There, lurking in the black water under her top thoughts, was the always-there absence of her mother, while everybody waited to see what would happen, or would she die, with all her bones empty.

Dolly glared out the window, not yet able to read because she was supposed to be finis.h.i.+ng her math. Dirty snow everywhere. Teachers' cars plugged in had blue wires dangling like skinny tongues from their hoods. Down that street and down the next, another few blocks, turn right-that way was the hospital. In order not to think of it, Dolly craned her neck around to look back down the grey street past the playground.

There was a car with its lights on, and a man beside the car, leaning on it, staring through the chain links at the school. That was not allowed, there would be a lockdown practice, when the PA system said Alert One, Secure Your Doors in that creepy quiet voice and the teachers scuttled through the halls back to where they should be to shut the doors and lock them and make the kids practice heads-down on their desks, and if you were in the bathroom, too bad for you.

Dolly's head hurt suddenly, an arrow through her forehead. It was her dad, at the car. He turned his head and she knew him. He did look like that weird guy out in Clearwater Lake. Like a grown-up kid who had to be old. She looked away.

She was not, actually, an orphan. Dolly tried to think of herself hanging around with her father and his friends after her mother was dead, but that was not too likely. The only friend of her dad's she could think of was that scary Garvin guy from Winnipeg.

The bell rang for recess. Dolly did not stand up. If she stood up she would have to look out the window again and see her dad. But if she didn't, Trevor might see him and go running over and then he'd get into trouble and maybe the police would come and arrest him. She bolted for the door to find Trevor.

Giving the children a bedtime snack Clary looked at them at the table in their pyjamas, listless and tired and itchy: an ordinary Thursday night. One more school day to struggle through. n.o.body talked. Mrs. Pell had come in for a cup of tea but she wasn't staying long, she said. Figure skating was on her TV back at her place. Clary set cut-up apples on the table in front of Dolly.

As she was leaning over she saw something-what?-something moved on Dolly's head.

Her hands clamped onto both sides of Dolly's head, holding her still as Dolly squeaked with surprise. A bug crawled across the part. A brown, hair-coloured thing. A louse.

Deep shame blossomed painfully in Clary, in the bottom of her groin. She had never seen lice but there was no doubt in her mind at all. A notice had been sent from the school, Clary back-remembered. A cold pink sheet, Headlice Bulletin. What could lice have to do with her?

"Oh, Dolly," Clary said out loud, not meaning to. "Lice!" She was sunk, sunk.

Mrs. Pell's beetle eyes squinted, and she backed her chair away from Dolly's.

Trevor said, "There's kids in my cla.s.s who have lice, they aren't allowed in school for three days, that's what happens to you."

"If she's got 'em, you've got 'em," Mrs. Pell wheezed, almost laughing.

"I can't miss three days!" Dolly cried. "I left my book at school!"

"I'm sorry, Dolly," Clary was saying.

But Mrs. Pell interrupted them all, pus.h.i.+ng her bulk up out of her chair, making the loudest noise possible sc.r.a.ping it back. "I had four kids," she announced. "And we never had lice. Not once."

She picked up her teacup and stalked out the back door.

Clary could hear herself shouting after her, "f.u.c.k you, Mrs. Pell!" But thank G.o.d she found that she had not actually done it. Her head was itchy.

Trevor and Dolly sat very quiet. Even Pearce was still.

"Well," Clary said. "I guess we've got a problem."

Oh my G.o.d, she thought. All of them. And me? She turned suddenly to Pearce, unable to bear it if his head was-infested-that was the word for it. And Darwin-and the hospital! Had they been sending lice over to Lorraine?

Clary sat down on the kitchen floor. Dolly and Trevor stared at her from their chairs. Pearce leaned down, over the arm of his high chair, stretching to touch her with his applesauce spoon.

"I don't know what to do about this," Clary said. "I have no idea, I'll have to look it up."

But she couldn't look it up, because her computer was at work, and it was no longer her computer, or her work. She had nothing left of her original life. Only lice. Her mother would have been so appalled! Clary could hear her-standing beside Mrs. Pell, in fact, saying "We never had lice..." That made her laugh, but only for a second.

Driving down the dark length of 8th Street to the drugstore, she could feel self-pitying tears seeping behind her eyes, but she dismissed them for now. Later on, she promised herself, in bed. After she had done whatever you had to do-washed their hair with toxic chemicals and combed them with those sharp tiny-toothed combs until everyone was ready to scream with tiredness and frustration. Then she would cry. She hated them all, even Pearce; she hated lice, and the whole dirty business of being human. The shame of having to tell Iris Haywood that they had lice almost made the tears spring forth. And Paul. He had visited, had sat on the chesterfield-the squalor of it felt like a weight pressing on her head.

The headlights were not working properly. When she parked at the drugstore she saw the car reflected in the gla.s.s front: her left headlight was burnt out. The complication of getting the headlight replaced was so overwhelming that she had to lean against the car door for a moment before she could get the children out to come trooping in with her, parkas over their pyjamas. What a relief it would have been to leave them in the car. But a woman last winter had left her car running at the store and come out to find it gone, and her baby with it. If they were her own children she could weigh the likelihood and decide; but they were Lorraine's. She only had them in trust. Trust her to let them get lice.

Darwin didn't have lice-Clary phoned the hospital and the nurses checked-and neither did Lorraine. Trevor and Dolly did. None on Mrs. Pell, that Clary could find. None on Pearce: no live ones and no eggs, no matter how painstakingly Clary searched his round, sweet head.

She took the advice of the kindly pharmacist and washed everybody's hair with tea-tree oil instead of the poisonous stuff, and put her energy into hair-combing to get rid of the eggs, rather than obsessive cleaning. But she stripped, vacuumed and remade the beds (trusting that sheets which had lain unused twenty years in her mother's linen closet were safe), and put every stuffed toy and pillow in garbage bags outside to freeze for a few days. Finally, at midnight, she got the de-loused, subdued children into their lavender-smelling beds.

She let them watch videos all day on Friday and cleaned around them, pausing only to make meals. She even vacuumed the car, hauling her mother's old Electrolux out to the driveway in the bitter cold. Mrs. Zenko saw her and came out to help, and when Clary told her what was going on she laughed till she had to hold on to the side mirror.

"It's combing that does the trick," she said, echoing the pharmacist. "I've got a very good metal fine-tooth comb myself, left over from my girls' school days-I'll come over when you're through out here and give you a good going-over," she promised. "What a thing! But it's all a matter of luck and whose coat hangs next to whose."

When Mrs. Zenko went through Clary's head she found no bugs at all. Darwin came back from the hospital and took over the children's hair, combing through strand by strand gently, patiently, checking each hair and pulling away the tiny, sticky eggs and telling them long-winded jokes.

Clary blew through the house once more with the overworked vacuum until it seemed to her to be possible to live there. But Mrs. Pell might be carrying some eggs that she'd missed in her first panicky check. She took a cup of coffee out to the workshop.

"Hi," she said, when Mrs. Pell answered the door. "I've brought the rat-tail comb. I'll check your hair for you."

Mrs. Pell stared at her, without any observable social response.

"It won't take long," Clary said. She sighed. "Can you hold the coffee?"

Mrs. Pell took it and creaked aside to let her into the workshop. Clary transferred the comb and oil from under her arm. She looked around, trying to be neither furtive nor obvious.

"Satisfied?" Mrs. Pell said, her voice catching like a rusted saw in green wood.

"Of course!" Clary said quickly. "It's your home, you keep it as you wish."

But she seemed to want to keep it fairly orderly. There was a smell, but that might be old-woman smell, rather than poor housekeeping. Cozy warm out here, with the furnace going. The bed was made, the tumbling-blocks quilt neatly spread over the blankets.

"I should wash your bedding again."

Mrs. Pell grunted. "Don't be so hasty. Shouldn't run old things through the wash just because you think they're lousy."

Understanding her, Clary said, "I meant to tell you, I want to give you that quilt for your own. When Lorraine-wherever you are. It's yours."

Mrs. Pell moved her bottom lip up toward her top lip, nothing that could be called a smile. Then she said, "Don't just tickle me with your eyes. You going to check my head? Take that chair out into the light, can't see well enough in here."

Clary took the old kitchen chair out into the snow. Mrs. Pell stumped after her, sausage feet in snow boots. They s.h.i.+fted the chair till the light was right, and then Mrs. Pell sat, arms folded, braced against the rat-tail and the fine-tooth comb. Clary worked through her old grey scalp, section by thin section, burying her fingers in the grey horse-hair skeins, pulling through, checking, looking down in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. No need to talk, and nothing to say anyway. Mrs. Pell's old neck strings stood out strong on the back of her head, depending on how her skull twisted inside its papery bag of skin.

"Would you like a haircut?" Clary asked, testing the water.

"Hmmpm," Mrs. Pell said, which Clary took to mean possible acceptance.

"My aunt Bet, Grace's mother, used to go to the beauty school every few weeks, and they'd give her a cut and set. Sometimes a perm, even. They had a seniors' day discount."

Mrs. Pell tilted her head on its bony stalk to catch Clary's eye. "They do a good job?"