Specter (9780307823403) (10 page)

Julie’s bed is empty, and the small electric clock on the chest of drawers informs me that I’ve slept through most of the morning. I stretch, enjoying the luxury of awakening when I like, of opening my eyes to trumpet flowers instead of to pale green hospital walls, of smelling hot chocolate from a kitchen and not from a tray.

But guilt crawls in. I had promised to help Mrs. Cardenas. I can’t stay in bed another minute. I hurry to get dressed in my jeans and a pink T-shirt
that hangs loosely on me. I follow the sound of voices and find Mrs. Cardenas in the kitchen with Julie. Julie is swathed in a gigantic apron over her shorts and shirt, and she is happily drying cups.

“I’m helping Mrs. Cardenas,” she tells me. She looks so smug that I have to smile.

“And I’m not,” I say. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”

“You need your rest. And now you need some breakfast.” Mrs. Cardenas bustles to the gas stove and turns on a circle of blue flame. “We have scrambled eggs,
pan dulce
, and Julie and I made hot chocolate.”

I look at the round, sugared loaves of
pan dulce
that are piled on a yellow platter. “I’ll get fat.”

“You need a little fat. A little fat never hurt anyone.”

The guilt clings. “I should have eaten with the rest of you and washed the dishes.”

Julie puts the cups she has dried into the cabinet as though she knew where everything went. “Each morning I’ll do the breakfast dishes, while you sleep, and you can do the dishes after dinner.”

“There are other jobs to take care of,” I answer. “What else would you like me to do, Mrs. Cardenas? Dust? Vacuum?”

“Not today,” she says. “Today you eat something, then go sit on the porch in the shade. If you feel like it, take a walk down the block to the lake.”

So I eat slowly, and it’s peaceful in the breakfast
room. There is a honeysuckle vine on the fence next to the window, and a small blur of hummingbird swoops and darts into the blossoms. Mrs. Cardenas answers the phone in her bedroom, and Julie is somewhere in the house. The breakfast room, with its scratched wooden chairs and plastic tablecloth and puddles of sun, belongs to me.

I have no sooner finished, surprised that I’ve eaten my scrambled eggs, when Julie returns, sweeping my plate to the sink and rinsing it. “I made your bed,” Julie says. “And I hung up your clothes in the closet. And I put your other stuff in the top two drawers of the chest, because you’re taller than I am.”

Why should I feel irritated? She’s trying to help. “Thank you,” I manage to say. “You didn’t need to do all that.”

“But I wanted to.”

In the distance I can hear the sounds of children playing some kind of game, so I say, “I bet there are some kids your age around here. Mrs. Cardenas would know. When she gets off the phone, why don’t you ask her?”

Julie just shrugs. She peels herself out of her apron, stretching on tiptoe to hang it up. “Let’s go outside. We can sit on the porch.”

She takes my hand and leads me, opening the door and the screen for me. It’s really funny in a way. I had thought I was going to have to mother her. Now she’s trying to mother me.

There are some chrome and webbing chairs on the porch, but I sit on the steps, my legs in the sun. At the foot of the block, across the boulevard, the strip of lake that is visible is flat blue-gray. A pair of joggers pump their way along the edge, and a boy with a fishing pole strolls past.

Julie sits beside me, and I point out the pole the boy is carrying. Maybe Mrs. Cardenas has something like that left over from when her sons were young. “You could go fishing.”

“I don’t like to fish.”

“You’ve got a whole summer ahead of you before school starts. We’ll have to find some things for you to do, so you can have fun.”

“I’ll have fun right here. With you.”

“But I won’t always be with you.” What do I say to her?

Her head pivots toward me. “Why not?” she demands. “Are you going back to that place—that home?”

“No.” I give a long sigh. “I’ll never be able to live there again.”

Strangely, her expression changes to one of satisfaction, but she asks, “Then where are you going? Why won’t you be with me?”

“Well, Julie, you know I’ve been very sick.” She’s only nine. I can’t tell her about the percentage who make it, the percentage who don’t, and how I’m marking time, waiting until I’m one of the statistics. What do I answer?

But she has taken charge. “Then I’ll take care of you,” she says. It’s as simple as that.

Two guys come down the street. They look to be about my age. One of them is wearing a cutoff net shirt and walks like a football jock. Good body, but I bet he wouldn’t know an isosceles triangle from a Bunsen burner. The guy with him is a little shorter, a lot less in the muscle department. He’s wearing glasses that look like Rob’s glasses. He reminds me of Rob.

They stop, and the jock says, “Hi, skinny.”

“Do you always come on so charming?” I shouldn’t bother answering him.

The two of them come up the walk to the porch. “Mrs. Cardenas told my mother she was taking in some foster-home kids,” he says. “You don’t look like a kid.”

“I’m a junior in high school.”

“You look older than that. You going to our high school next semester?”

I shrug. The other one speaks up. “He’s Claudio, and I’m Dave. We live next door to each other—just up the street.”

“This is Julie, and my name is Dina.”

Dave nods at Julie, but Claudio ignores her. “My sister cut her hair like yours, Dina, and I think it looks awful. Why don’t you let yours grow long? You’d be prettier. You’re not bad-looking even if you are skinny.”

I’d like to date again. But I don’t want to go
through another Rob thing. I’ll tell them now and get it over with. “I lost all my hair,” I say, “when I had chemotherapy treatments. For a while I was bald. Now it’s growing out.”

Claudio takes a step back, nearly tripping over Dave. “You had chemotherapy? But that’s for—”

“Yes.” I look directly up at him. “I have Hodgkin’s disease. It’s a form of cancer.”

He moves around Dave, putting more distance between us. “Is it contagious?”

“No.”

“Uh—well, Dave and I have gotta get down to the gym. We’ll see you.”

Why should it hurt, when this guy is no one I’d want under any circumstances? But it does hurt. I won’t let him see it.

“Come on, Dave,” he yells from the sidewalk.

Dave sits down on the steps, near my legs. “You go on, Claudio,” he says. “I didn’t want to go to the gym anyway.”

Claudio doesn’t stick around long enough to argue. I watch him striding down the street. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with him?” I ask Dave, and it’s hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“No,” Dave says. “I was going to come sometime today and get acquainted. This seems like a good time, unless you’re busy.”

“Yes, she is,” Julie says. “Dina promised to take me to see the lake.”

“I’ll walk with you,” he says.

Julie stiffens, and I don’t answer him. I don’t know if I want his friendship or not. Is he going to be another Rob?

“Mrs. Cardenas told me you have Hodgkin’s disease.” Dave looks at me so intently I can’t look away.

“You should have gone with Claudio.”

“She also told me that you’re an interesting person, a smart person. She said we’d find a lot to talk about.”

“Did she ask you to come and see me?”

“Does that make a difference?”

“Shouldn’t it?” I ask.

“Why?”

“Are you going to answer my question?”

“How do you like this game we’re playing—answer a question with a question? Do you know you can be the winner if the other person goofs and makes a statement?”

I have to smile. “Are you crazy?”

He grins. “That’s the spirit!” Then he slaps his hand over his mouth, and we both laugh.

The screen door squeals open, and Mrs. Cardenas comes out on the porch. “Hello, Dave,” she says. “I’m glad you came by.” And she adds, for my benefit, “Dave’s a nice boy,
muy simpático
.”

She may be right. I find that I’m glad Dave has come.

Mrs. Cardenas lowers herself into a chair and fans herself with her hand. “The hot weather is here for sure.”

“I like it out here on the porch,” I tell her. “And I like the sun. I’ve spent so long being cold.”

“Did Julie tell you that some of my relatives are coming over tonight to meet both of you? Julie and I are going to make fudge brownies. All the kids like fudge brownies.”

“Will you give out samples?” Dave asks.

“Come to the party,” Mrs. Cardenas answers. “There’s lots of room for everybody.” She hoists herself out of the garden chair and says, “Come on, Julie. The oven’s lit, and we should get busy with those brownies.”

Julie’s glance rapidly flickers between Dave and me. “I can’t,” she says. “We’re going to walk to the lake.”

I give her hand a reassuring squeeze. “We won’t go to the lake without you. Have fun with the brownies.”

“You’ll be right here?”

“I won’t leave the porch. I promise.”

“Okay,” Julie says reluctantly. She follows Mrs. Cardenas into the house, flashing Dave one last resentful glare.

“She’s really hanging on to you,” Dave says. “What’s her problem?”

“She was in an accident. Both her parents were killed, and she has no other relatives. They put her in my room at the hospital, and I guess she needs someone to cling to for a little while.”

“That’s tough,” he says, “on both of you.”

Now’s a good time to change the subject. “Claudio
talked about the gym,” I tell him. “Are you on some kind of team?”

“No,” he says. “We were just going to goof around and see if there were enough guys there to get together a basketball game. Claudio’s into all the sports, but I just tag along sometimes.”

“What do you like to do?” I have to ask the next question. “Do you write?”

“No,” he says, looking surprised. “My grades in English are good enough, but what I really like is science. I may go to med school after college. I don’t know yet.”

He’s not another Rob. He doesn’t write bad poetry. I lean forward, resting my arms on my knees. “Studying to be a doctor would be hard work. Will you specialize?”

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “It’s the research that interests me the most.”

So we talk about that for a while. I haven’t talked to a guy my age for a long time, and I feel good about it until he says, “Tell me something about this Hodgkin’s disease.”

“What’s there to tell? I don’t even like to think about it.”

“Well, I mean are you cured of it now?”

“No, I’m not!”

He turns toward me quickly, banging his right knee on the steps. He rubs his knee. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at—” Suddenly it’s too much, and everything spills out. “We talked
about what you want to be. Well, I was going to be an attorney. And now I’m not. My doctor says the percentages of people who survive the disease are getting higher all the time, but face it. There are some who don’t survive.”

“They let you out of the hospital. That must mean something.”

“I’m what they call ‘in remission.’ That means I’m sort of hanging in space until the disease comes up and zaps me again.”

“You’re giving up.”

“I’m facing facts.”

“What you’re doing is telling yourself that you’re going to die.”

There is a gasp behind me. I turn to see Julie standing in the open door, her face against the screen.

“Julie!” I say. “I didn’t hear you!”

The door slams, and all I can see is the imprint of her stricken face.

“What a terrible way for her to find out!” I am on my feet, reaching for the door.

But Dave is beside me, and he grabs my arm. “Why don’t you tell her that you’ve got a good chance, too?”

“Because I don’t believe that I have.”

“You don’t know anything for sure. Sit down for a minute. Think this out.”

I sit on the steps next to him, shaking my head, trying to remove the memory of Julie’s face. Dave pulls a leaf from the ligustrum bush that crowds the
edge of the steps and turns it over and over as though he’s studying it.

“Look at it this way. Even if you were an attorney—a really good attorney—for ten years, or five years—” He stares right into my eyes. “Even if it was for only one year, Dina, you would have reached a goal, wouldn’t you?”

I jump up. “I can’t talk now. I’ve got to explain things to Julie.”

“Want me to help?”

“No, thanks.”

He stands on the lower step, squinting at me in the sunlight. “I’ll be back.”

“Are you sure you want to?”

He doesn’t have time to answer. The windows rattle with Mrs. Cardenas’s shriek. I stumble up the steps, banging through the pair of doors. Dave is right behind me.

Julie is standing in the middle of the kitchen. Blood is splattered on her clothes, the sink, and the floor.

“She must have tried to chop some more nuts!” Mrs. Cardenas cries. “I told her not to—the knife—she cut—oh!
¡Madre de Dios!
Could it be an artery? We got to stop the bleeding!”

I am at Julie’s side in an instant. It’s not an artery. I know that much from first aid. And I know my pressure points and what to do. Things are under control before my heart is. It’s still popping around in my chest when I take a look at Julie’s woebegone face. It has a good color.

“It looks as though she lost more blood than she did,” I tell Mrs. Cardenas. “See—it’s just a surface cut, and the bleeding has practically stopped. She won’t even need stitches.”

“Should we take her to the doctor?”

“We won’t need to,” I answer. “If you’ve got something to make a bandage with and an antiseptic I’ll take care of it.”

“In the medicine cabinet.” Mrs. Cardenas hurries toward the bathroom.

“How did you know what to do?” Dave seems impressed.

“I teach— I used to teach a first-aid class.”

Mrs. Cardenas returns with gauze pads and tape. “I thought I was watching. A big girl of nine. I told her not to touch the knife. Oh,
pobrecita niña
. I wasn’t careful enough.”

“You were careful, Mrs. Cardenas. Don’t blame yourself. This was Julie’s fault.”