Good to a Fault (10 page)

L
orraine was looking well, Clara thought.

“I’m a vampire,” she said when she saw Clara at the door on Wednesday morning. She laughed, but there was a shadow of panic on her blooming face. “
Bride of Dracula.
Look at my skin! You can’t buy creams for this, they ought to sell it.
Fresh blood, prices slashed!
They could pay for medicare. I keep thinking, what if we’d been in the States? We’d of been toast. There are charity hospitals though, like on
ER
—you don’t see them turning people away at the sliding doors, do you? Maybe they get thrown out when they get taken upstairs, like my roommate. Like the red shirts on Star Trek, they’re toast too. Rubber hospital toast.”

She waggled the limp toast from her breakfast back and forth to show Clara.

Clara’s first job was always to calm her down, lately. “I brought some buns from Mrs. Zenko. She tells me they’re made of organic wheat, and she grinds her own flour.”

“Oh goodie, I can hardly wait.”

“She sent soup, too.” Gleaming red and gold, Ukrainian Orthodox borsch with no meat in it. As Lorraine rotated the sealer jar in her long pale
fingers, ruby cubes of beets shone and receded; dill splayed feathery against the glass, then floated off.

“Pretty kind of her for someone she’s never met.”

“She likes the children.” And she’s met Mrs. Pell, Clara didn’t say.

Without warning Lorraine burst into difficult, tearing sobs. “The chemo is so hard, it’s harder than I thought. My white cells were down so far they couldn’t find any to count. And they had to give me blood. The nurses won’t talk, and you know what that means, they want the doctor to do the dirty work.”

She let her head fall back on the pillows and pulled the jar of soup to her chest. Clara made herself listen, not jump up to make it better. There was no better.

“I wish Clayton was here,” Lorraine said, the first time she’d mentioned him to Clara. She continued to cry, the tears spilling vertically down her tilted cheeks and off onto the stiff sheets, almost making noise when they landed.

Clara sat still, a flurry of what she should have done fluttering in her ears, making her pulse race. She’d done the wrong thing, not talking about Clayton, not letting Lorraine know he was gone, so she could try to trace him. Now it would be too late.

Lorraine had stopped crying, it seemed. She might have fallen asleep. Clara leaned forward and took the jar of soup. No reaction.

Lorraine’s eyes were closed, thin lids resting over those slightly-protruding eyes, her mouth slack. Clara felt so deeply sorry for her that for a moment she could not move, even to lean back. She was wracked with sharp pain in her abdomen and knew that it was for her mother’s dreadful, clawing death, not very long before, at this same hospital. In the same yellow sheets, and as close as Lorraine was now. As far away.

Mrs. Zenko’s empty house was not perfectly quiet. The fridge was making a whirring noise, and there was a radio on somewhere, playing swingy music.

Dolly stood on the back step, waiting to hear if Mrs. Zenko was not really out but busy somewhere inside, even though she had seen her walking off to the store with her yellow wheeled basket. Mrs. Zenko’s car stayed in the garage unless she had to drive a long way like to her son’s in Battleford. She liked to walk. It kept her going, she said.

Dolly already knew Mrs. Zenko’s kitchen—her cleaning bucket, her cooking bowls, the plastic containers in their orderly drawers. But there was the desk in the living room, and the bedrooms. Everything was so clean, and almost empty over the polished floors. It was a nice airy house to roam around in. The desk drawer held pictures of her children and a letter from her husband who was dead now. Dolly read the first three lines and then she put it back because she liked Mrs. Zenko. Then she felt so holy and proud that she went zooming down the hall to Mrs. Zenko’s bedroom and opened and closed all the drawers in there, checking. The tops of the dressers were stacked high with a thousand folded sweaters. Mrs. Zenko said her daughters gave her sweaters because she was always a little cold. The one Dolly liked best was white with big flap sleeves like wings that were meant to cross over, and a little tie belt. The small jewellery dresser on top of the clothes dresser had square sections of wood inside it, each holding one ring. She loved rings. Maybe when Mrs. Zenko died she would leave Dolly her rings in her will. She probably had to leave them to her daughters though. Dolly closed the drawers, leaving every ring exactly where it had been, because she would hate Mrs. Zenko to know that she had been snooping in her house. The thought made her stomach turn over, in fact, and without even looking in the bathroom Dolly headed for the back door.

But Mrs. Zenko came in the front.

“Hello, Dolly,” she said, and laughed; Dolly did not know why. “Well, hello, Dolly,” she said again, kind of singing.

“Hello,” Dolly said back.

“Checking out my house, little mousekin?”

Dolly nodded.

“Find any surprises?”

Dolly shook her head. Mrs. Zenko left the yellow cart and put her arm around her. “You look through here any time,” she said. “This is your place too, just like Clary’s. Are you hungry?”

Dolly felt a big space opening at the back of her nose, and hoped that was not the beginning of crying. “I guess,” she said. “Can Trevor have some too?”

Mrs. Zenko was already opening the fridge and pulling out a cookie box. “We’ll run over and see how he and Pearce are doing, and have a picnic in the back yard.”

It was all bad news. The doctor came in with Darwin while Clara was still there, and she stayed to listen. Mrs. Zenko would keep one eye on the children from next door. They were fine.

Lorraine was not. She sat very still while the doctor talked. He was casual, golf-shirted, a communicator, and he sat on the end of the bed with his hand on Lorraine’s leg. Not that any amount of bedside empathy could really help. The counts were bad, he admitted, but they would be watching with interest as the chemo progressed. They were going to continue the blood transfusions every couple of days.

Lorraine looked straight at the doctor while he talked. She did not scowl or tremble, but Clara could hardly bear to look at her absorbed, serious face.

Darwin stood by the window, listening as calmly as Lorraine. They were good at sloughing off emotion when it wasn’t needed, Clara thought. Everyone in this ward was like that, became like that. Clara’s father’s oncologist had said she loved working with cancer patients, because they and their families were all at their absolute best, in extremity.

The doctor gave Lorraine’s leg a last kind squeeze, and left them.

“Well, that’s scary,” Lorraine said.

Darwin sat on the window ledge.

Clara wanted to list the reasons why it was nothing to worry about, but her whole head was enveloped in a white fog. She knew nothing, none of the experience she’d gained by going with her mother and father through illness had done any good.

Lorraine looked at Clara. “I feel pretty bad,” she said.

“We’ll be here. We’ll be with you,” Darwin said.

“I’m afraid to see the kids,” Lorraine said. “I don’t want to freak them out.”

“It’s not going to scare Pearce,” Darwin said. “He’ll just be happy.”

Clara’s heart swooped down. It wasn’t the bringing Pearce in; he’d be ecstatic to see Lorraine. It was the taking him home afterwards, screaming with disappointment and frustration; and the smell of him in the room, and Lorraine’s horrifying sadness.

“It’ll be okay,” Darwin said. “Bring them all.”

Lorraine’s eyes, shining dark in their big hollows, filled Clara’s vision all the way home.

Trevor was silent when Clara told them they were going to visit his mom. He hadn’t seen her for two weeks. Even Pearce went silent, as if by osmosis from Trevor and Dolly. Or else it was Clara passing along her own panic. She must not do that. Instead she made everything normal. She fed them, she insisted on brushed teeth and washed hands, and she laid out clean clothes for Trevor and Dolly before she went to change Pearce.

Her hands were shaking as she slid the diapers into the new diaper bag, which of course she would give to Lorraine, when Lorraine could take the children back—when they moved into some reasonable-rent apartment, here in Saskatoon, until they could find Clayton, wherever he’d gone off to, and until Clara could find Lorraine some work, and get Mrs. Pell on the old age pension, and give Lorraine back her life.

She had to stop for a moment to blow her nose and sit on the edge of her bed, all of her shaking, not just her hands. Pearce pulled himself up by the crib bars and stood watching her seriously. She stopped crying, and he gave her a giant smile and banged with his hand on the railing. Shouting “
Yah!”
at the top of his lungs.

Dolly came in, dressed in the clean pants and top. “Do I look okay?” she asked.

Clara turned to her drawer and found the bracelet with the beads from that first day. “This will make the outfit,” she said. “I meant to give it to you before.”

Dolly stared at her, and Clara worried that she’d made the visit more ominous.

“No big deal,” she said quickly, turning away to lift Pearce out of the crib. “It’s a little young for me, I think.”

Mrs. Pell’s door had been closed since lunch, and Clara didn’t feel any need to tell her where they were going. She left a note on the kitchen table:
Back by supper-time.
It was good to have her own car back from the body shop, the car seat holder firmly attached to the tether-peg which they had installed while she waited that morning. Pearce stared out the window in what looked like ecstasy, patting Trevor’s hand on the edge of the baby seat.

By the time they parked at the hospital Clara felt sick. She couldn’t even guess how frightened the children were. She said to Dolly and Trevor, “It can be hard to visit someone you love in the hospital. You want them to come
home and be with you, and you want to stay with them, and you’re happy to see them, and sad about everything.”

“One thing people do is, they bring people presents,” Dolly said.

They spent ten minutes picking out flowers in the hospital store. On the way out, Trevor found a stuffed pterodactyl like his own, but much larger.

“This is the mother,” he told Clara. She bought it.

There was no fighting over who would press the elevator button, no unruly jumping, no chatter. When they got to the fifth floor, Clara was the first one out of the elevator, and had to hold the door for them. In the hall they paused. Dolly put her hand carefully on the wooden hand-rail, and took Trevor’s hand in her other one.

“Look,” she said. “It’s for people not to get lost when they’re going back.”

Darwin came to meet them, his big face peaceful, and Clara handed Pearce over to him. “You take them in,” she said. “I’ll run down and get some juice.”

He gave her arm an oddly tender pat. “Got to be done,” he said.

She nodded. Trevor and Dolly had already pressed up against Lorraine’s bed, burrowing into her arms.

Down in the cafeteria Clara bought a paper and did the crossword. When her father was dying in this hospital she had brought it up for him every morning: the front section, business section and crossword, carefully folded, ready to work. The first order of each day.

Walking through the line for coffee, Paul Tippett saw Clara sitting all alone. She looked like a woman in a Hopper painting, he thought, like she hadn’t slept since 1943. No wonder. Since he himself did not expect to be sleeping for a while, he felt enough kinship to sit down at her table without asking permission.

“How is Lorraine?”

“Oh—hello,” Clara said, as if she couldn’t dredge up his name. “I was in a daze, I’m sorry. The children are here. I don’t know how they’ll—” She stopped.

“Children’s defences are strong,” he said, to help her. “The world consoles them.”

Those were not the words he’d meant to say, and not very useful.

“They like their bunk beds,” Clara said, smiling.

What a soft cheek she had. The children must love her. He was very pleased that he had helped with those beds. As he went off to the second floor he felt happier than he had in days. Her deep blue sweater or jacket, whatever it was, he loved that indigo hue. He stayed an extra half hour with Joe Kane—his oldest and least likeable parishioner, and Candy Vincent’s uncle.

Left alone, but less alone than she had been, Clara bought apples and cookies and went back up, glad to have given them some privacy. They weren’t her family; she had shoved her oar in enough. But when she got upstairs they were all delighted to see her. Well, of course. She was always glad to see that Mrs. Zenko had a dish in her hands at the door. It was nothing to sneeze at, bringing the food.

Lorraine looked up from the magazine she was reading with Dolly. “
Celebrity Babes, Celebrity Babies,
” she said, grinning with her slightly disarranged teeth, her very attractive smile. Dolly lay beside her; Trevor sat on Darwin’s lap with his new shoes up on the bed, and Pearce was fast asleep at his mother’s feet, bordered by two pillows and the bowed shape of her calves under the sheet. His mouth was open above his tilted chin, his arms raised above his head as if, at last, he could surrender to sleep.

“No celebrity baby is as nice as ours, eh, Dolly?”

Dolly’s forehead rubbed against her mother’s shoulder.

Clara could have cried, for how at home they all were, how much at ease, how everything she’d worked for had been useless. They would never be happy with her. Nothing but their own mother would do.

Lorraine said, “Pull up a chair, Clary. The kids said they would beg you to go get fried chicken for supper, but I said no, no, you’re eating good now, I can see how healthy you are.”

Trying to make her more comfortable, and that should not be her job.

“I notice you didn’t bring Mom Pell,” Lorraine said, making
Thank God
eyes at Clara.

“If she’d of come, we’d of been late,” Dolly said.