Little Red Lies (23 page)

He strides ahead, and I have to run to catch up. “No, it’s not what I hope.”

Dad’s car is in front of Velda’s house. Inside Jamie’s apartment, he stands looking out the window at the sad backyard, with its overflowing garbage cans, motorcycle parts, washtub heaped with what looks like the rest of the motorcycle, and clothesline on which hang ladies’ fancy and colorful undergarments. He turns and shakes his head at us, with a deep sigh of disappointment.

“Rachel, why did you do this to your mother?”

I stoop to pick up the cat. “I didn’t do anything to anybody. I needed to talk to Jamie. You may not have noticed, but he doesn’t have a telephone.”

He frowns at Jamie. “Why don’t you simply have a phone installed? They’re not that expensive.”

“I don’t want to.”

One arm propping the other, Dad presses his fingers into
his forehead. “Could you turn a light on in here? It’s dark.”

Jamie flicks the light switch. “Would you like to sit down?” He indicates the one comfortable chair now covered with cat hairs. Dad doesn’t seem to notice them and sits, willingly enough. I spoon cat food into a dish for Rose. Jamie perches on a rickety wooden stool.

Dad looks as if he’s about to say something but, instead, shakes his head. After a moment, he says, “It’s pretty hard, you know. These are difficult times.”

“Yes,” Jamie says.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.”

Jamie says, “Yes.” There is another stretch of silence. Then Jamie says, “Rachel says she was just kidding about running away with some boy. She wants you to trust her.”

Dad nods sadly. “Perhaps I was being a little overly protective.”

“A little!” I say. “You were threatening to make my whole life unbearable.”

“I’m sorry.” He leans over his knees, head in his hands.

“You can’t go snooping around, quizzing my friends and the teachers.”

Jamie makes that throat-clearing sound that Granny does, when it’s time for someone to step in and change the general mood. “Don’t rub it in, Rachel. Dad’s sorry. Isn’t that enough?”

Dad sits back, leaning his head against the chair-back, and gives me a weary look.

I keep it up. “It’s spying, that’s what it is. You might as well lock me in my room and throw away the key.” I stand directly in front of him so I can burn him with the heat of my anger.

“Rachel, what else can I say? Your mother and I have a lot on our minds right now.”

I realize it’s over. Fathers don’t apologize, usually. I’m used to a world where fathers know everything, and daughters just accept it. “Okay,” I say. He nods.

Nobody can think of what to say next. Rose prowls back and forth, flicking her tail across my ankles. I scoop her up and plunk her in Dad’s lap. “This is Jamie’s cat. How do you like her?”

Tentatively, he pats her, but she jumps down, preferring to keep contact with my ankles. “I didn’t know you had a cat, son.”

“Neither did I until
your
daughter introduced us.” The atmosphere is lighter now, by several degrees.

Dad stands up. “Well, Rachel, you’d better gather your belongings. I don’t like to leave your mother for too long.”

I consider rebelling but decide that, if Jamie won’t take me in, there isn’t much point. While I throw my few items back into my bag, I hear Dad ask Jamie how university life suits him.

“A bit tiring.”

“Are you feeling all right, son?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“You look rather pale.” I watch him peer closely, as if he’d like to study Jamie under a microscope. For the first time since I arrived on his doorstep, I notice how haggard Jamie looks, as if he’s been off somewhere, fighting a war. And losing.

At home again, life does not change dramatically. I study, write my spring term exams, and actually pass them. My brain must be like a dark little attic. Lots of stuff in it, but you can’t tell what’s there until you pull the string on the lightbulb. Somehow it got pulled, just in time.

Mother is about the same, except that she keeps asking me if I’m hungry or warm enough or tired.

A letter arrives for Jamie, with “Please forward” on the envelope. As I’m hunting in Dad’s desk for a bigger envelope to put it in, to readdress it, the phone rings. Dad hurries along the hall to answer it.

“Yes, Doctor Latham,” I hear him say. “Yes, I see. Yes, by all means.” It isn’t a lengthy call, but I can barely contain my curiosity.

“They’d like to try blood transfusions, again,” is all Dad says. “Get Jamie back into remission. He’s agreed to go into hospital.”

“Has something happened?” Mother asks.

“I don’t know. I think this is what occurs from time to time.”

I feel an instant chill. Upstairs, sitting at my desk, wrapped in a blanket, I stare at my math homework, believing I’m solving problems. I could be working in Egyptian hieroglyphics, for all I know.

Jamie’s stay in the Toronto hospital is longer this time or, at least, seems longer. He phones us, from time to time, to bemoan the fact that he’s missing so many classes.

The following Sunday, a bleak day that threatens rain, we drive to Toronto to visit him. I am first through his door.

“What’s the occasion?” he says. He quickly puts a stack of handwritten papers he’s been leafing through into the top drawer of his bedside table.

Mother and Dad fill the doorway. He says, “My whole family! I must be about to croak.” I grimace. Has the faith-healing myth worn off?

Mother looks pained when he says that. She leans over to kiss him, her swollen belly pressing against his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. He could be asphyxiated right now, I think, killed by his unborn sibling.

“We brought you a treat,” Mother says. She hands him a box of Laura Secord chocolates. He opens the box and passes it around. Mother declines, but whispers, “Save some to offer the nurses. They’re always so nice to you.”

“Where’s Rose?” I ask.

“Velda’s looking after her.”

Mother busies herself folding Jamie’s bathrobe and
stacking newspapers in a neat pile. “Who?” she asks. I translate for her, even though I’ve already told her about the cat.

Jamie and Dad talk about the work he’s missed and about his final exams. “They’ve got to let me out in time to write them. I wish I had my books. I need to study.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” Dad says. “They might give you your year, based on your marks to date.”

“I don’t want to take that chance. I want to make sure I get back in, next fall.”

“I think you should talk to your professors or the dean and tell them about your situation,” Mother says.

Jamie closes his eyes. “What exactly is the
situation
I’m supposed to tell them about?” He opens them. “That I am burdened with a cat named Rose? That I might be dead by next fall? That my mother is busy baking another little gingerbread man to take my place?”

I stop breathing. Both parents look as if they’re being sucked backwards, into an abyss. Their faces are bloodless. How can someone as sensitive as Jamie be so heartless? He suddenly puts his fist to his mouth and bites down hard on his knuckle, as if he thinks physical pain will wipe out the emotional pain he’s inflicting on all of us, but on Mother most of all. My brother, the jerk.

It’s as though I can see myself, in slow motion, pick up the glass of water from beside his bed. In quick-time, now, I throw its contents in his face. He looks as shocked as if
I’ve turned a fire hose on him. He wipes the water from his eyes with the sleeve of his pajamas.

Mother’s hands cover her face, but tears escape down her cheeks, anyway. Dad puts his arm around her and helps her out of the room. Comforting her, he takes out his washed and ironed hankie and wipes her tears. Then he rubs a knuckle past the corner of his own eye as they head down the hall toward the waiting room.

While I’m deciding whether to stay and say something to Jamie or leave with Mother and Dad, he says, “Go. I need to be alone. The world will be well rid of the likes of me.”

We fumble our way out of the hospital, like three blind mice, turning this way and that, until we find the right door. A different kind of family might stay, go back, ask for an explanation, an apology, comfort. We don’t seem to know how to be that kind of family. There doesn’t seem much point in staying.

Mother stops crying and looks through the rain-spotted side window of the car. Through the windshield, the view is of gray streets lined with ghostly trees and colorless buildings, half-hidden in a weeping fog that the wipers can’t obliterate.

On the seat beside me lies an envelope addressed to James McLaren. “Cripes!” I say. Mother doesn’t even flinch at the word, deafened either by the drumming rain or her grief. “Dad, stop the car! We have to go back.”

“We’re not going back.”

“I forgot to give Jamie the letter.”

“What letter?”

“Somebody sent him a letter with ‘Please forward’ on it. I brought it to give to him, only I forgot. I want to go back.”

Dad wheels into a side street and pulls up to the curb. He looks at Mother, whose expression gives away nothing. “What do you think, Dora, should we go back?”

“I don’t care.”

We sit together in silence for a moment. “Please, Dad.” I wave the letter at him. He turns in the driveway of an apartment building and heads back the way we came. The rain is coming down steadily, now, as he pulls in close to the entrance.

“In you go,” he says. “I don’t think your mother wants to get out in this downpour.” He looks at Mother, who is busy studying the path of raindrops down the windshield. “And come right back. Don’t dillydally.”

When I get to Jamie’s floor, I go straight to his room. The door is closed, so I knock. I can hear voices, none of them Jamie’s. I open the door and peek in.

A nurse catches sight of me and quickly slips through, closing the door behind her. “James can’t have visitors just now,” she says.

“Why not?”

“He’s lost a bit of blood, and we’re … involved with treatments.”

“Did he cut himself?”

“No, nothing like that. A nosebleed. A rather severe one.”

Fear presses heavily on my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. “Well, is he all right? He’s my brother, you know. Can’t I even see him? I have a letter for him.”

“I’m sorry. He can’t have visitors just now. I’ll see that he gets the letter, once he’s feeling better.” She holds out her hand. Reluctantly, I put the letter into it.

“But what about my parents? Shouldn’t they see him?”

“No need. He’s going to be fine.” When the nurse opens the door to go back in, I crane my neck to see what’s going on, but she shuts it too quickly.

I trudge back down the stairs, not bothering with the elevator. The big question is, should I tell my parents about the nosebleed or not? Not. But then, surely they have a right to know. Tell. They will worry. Tell them tomorrow, once they’ve calmed down. And that’s my final decision. Possibly.