Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (3 page)

Chapter Three

Even from the outside, it was clear that something was wrong at Lori and Havi’s house. The curtains were drawn, their porch was dotted with a week’s worth of rolled-up newspapers, and an empty yellow recycling bin lay overturned in the middle of their dandelion-speckled lawn. If she hadn’t seen Lori’s maroon Honda Accord parked in the driveway, Claire would have driven right on past, still looking for the neatly kept-up ranch house she remembered from previous visits.

Taped on the front door was a sign written on notebook paper in Lori’s distinctive backward slanting cursive. “If you’ve just been sick, are sick, or feel as if you might be getting sick, please visit another time.” Claire raised her hand and knocked softly.

It was a different Lori who answered the door, too. Instead of a designer suit, she wore Levis and a plain black turtleneck. Without saying a word, she pulled Claire inside the shadowed hall and hugged her fiercely. “God, I’ve missed you!” Claire had the weird feeling that Lori was comforting
her,
and she wondered just how bad things were.

Lori pulled back without meeting Claire’s eyes. Her voice was fast and breathless. “Oh, Claire, the gal they hired to replace you, she’s driving me up the wall. She has some new weird symptom every day. She itches or the air conditioner is giving her a stiff neck or she needs her karma readjusted. I could live with that, except she wants to tell me about everything in detail. I can’t escape. She follows me into the break room or even the bathroom, yak, yak, yaking. And now that he’s been promoted, Roland’s worse than he ever was. He’s taped warning signs all over the coffee machines to make sure we don’t make any good coffee in them. He found out that it’s written in the coffee supplier’s contract that we have to use the state-supplied coffee. You know, the stuff that tastes like it was brewed in an ashtray? He’s been checking out the freezer, even sniffing people’s mugs, looking for illegal Starbucks.” Lori still had not paused for breath. She was like a speeded-up, bad imitation of herself.

Fearing that her friend might drown in the torrent of her own words, Claire gave her another hug. “Ssh, ssh,” she whispered in her ear. A black cat with one white foot walked in the half-open door and wound around their legs before jumping on the couch in the darkened living room.

Lori pulled away and turned to close the door. The daylight caught her face, revealing a paper construction of hollows and shadows.

“And Zach, Lori? How’s Zach doing?”

Lori’s voice arced higher. “Okay. He’s okay. Right now he’s sleeping.” Her eyes got wider and she blinked them rapidly. She turned and started down the hall to the kitchen. “Speaking of coffee, would you like some? I’m practically living on the stuff. I’m thinking of seeing if I can just buy a case of Vivarin.”

They both came to a stop in the kitchen doorway. The sink was filled with dirty dishes, the counter littered with wrappers from McDonald’s and Burger King. The red tile floor was dotted with dried spills, as well as a green rubber duck, a Speedy Gonzalez Pez dispenser, a child’s blue suede tennis shoe and a squirt gun. The refrigerator, decorated with children’s crayoned drawings, had been wrapped length-wise with silver duct tape, so that it looked like an odd outsized present. Claire only had eyes for her friend.

“And how about you? How are you doing?”

“Bad,” Lori whispered without looking at Claire. “Real bad.” She leaned her back against the refrigerator, then slid down until she was sitting with her mouth pressed against her knees. Tears leaked from her closed eyes.

“I just keep thinking, I’m his mother, you know? I’m his
mother
. How could I not know that something was wrong? Instead I just had an excuse for everything. Zach was crabby, well, that was because he was finally getting his two-year molars. And sometimes he complained his bones hurt, but I figured that was just growing pains. He picked at his dinner, but I thought he must be eating at a lot at daycare, ‘cause he still had this little potbelly. Now the doctor tells me that Zach’s liver and spleen are
enlarged
, and that’s why he didn’t eat. He
couldn’t
eat because there wasn’t room.” Lori took a deep, shuddering breath. “I told myself all these lies, and the whole time there’s a cancer, a goddamn
cancer
,
in there, chewing on his bones. I’m his mother, I should know when something is wrong.” Her words dwindled to a sharp whisper. “Why didn’t I take him in to the doctor six months ago?” Her lower lip turned white as she pressed her teeth against it, so hard that Claire was afraid it might begin to bleed.

Claire knelt down next to a little heap of spilled coffee grounds and patted Lori’s knee. “But you didn’t know, Lori, you didn’t know. I’ve watched you with your kids. You’re a
good
mother.” Lori responded with a polite grimace. Claire saw that she wasn’t getting through. Getting to her feet, she took a blue sponge from the sink, wrung it out and began to wipe off the kitchen counter. She wanted to do something to help her friend, and it was the only thing she could think to do. “And what’s past is past. You have to concentrate now on Zach, on helping him get better. How is he doing?”

Lori answered with a question of her own. “Do you remember when he was born?”

Claire nodded, thinking of the photo Lori had kept her on her cubicle wall, Lori’s three guys together. In the picture, a three-year-old Max stood holding Havi’s hand while they stood in line to see Santa at Washington Square Mall. Zach nestled in a front-pack against Havi’s broad chest. He was just a week old, his tiny bowed legs like a plucked chicken’s.

“At first, I wondered how I could ever love Zach as much as I loved Max. But your heart, you know,” Lori thumped her closed fist on her chest, “your heart always makes room.” She shook her head, her bangs hiding her eyes. “Zach’s -- changed. Do you remember when he first started to talk? It was always ‘Me do!’ even when he couldn’t. Now he just wants to be carried every place. And he throws up a couple of times a day. It’s a side effect from one of his drugs. Except for he’s also on prednisone, which makes him crazy hungry all the time. That’s why the fridge is taped shut. Havi put the duct tape on there after Zach got up in the middle of the night and spilled an entire gallon of milk.”

Using the refrigerator door handle, Lori pulled herself to her feet and then began to pick at the duct tape with her fingernails. “He’s gained five pounds in the last month. But he has to stick to bland stuff, because his mouth is all full of sores.” She peeled the tape back, opened the refrigerator door and began to rummage around inside, her words muffled. “He’s living off noodles, plain tortillas, and family-sized cans of chicken noodle soup poured straight from the can. But he’s still so hungry he’s been waking me in the middle of the night asking me to feed him.”

“You do look a little tired,” Claire said as Lori emerged with a liter bottle of Diet Coke in one hand and a carton of orange juice in the other. Which was an understatement. Lori would no more go without makeup than she would go without clothes, but now against her pale, nearly translucent skin her foundation and blush stood out like a mask - or war paint.

“I don’t sleep much any more.” Lori pushed aside a stack of dirty dishes and set the pop and juice down on the little table in the breakfast nook. Claire picked up the dishes and began to load them into the dishwasher. “Zach mostly sleeps in our bed now. We do a little shuffle. First we put him in his bed, which lasts about twenty minutes, tops. Then I hear him climbing up the stairs and he comes crawling into our bed. Then Havi feels crowded and goes downstairs to sleep into Zach’s bunk. That wakes up Max and he comes up to the big bed.”
 

Lori dragged a chair from the dining room into the kitchen, then stood on it to reach into a cabinet high above the refrigerator. It was half-full of dusty serving pieces, but in front of them was a selection of junk food. Claire realized she was looking at Lori’s secret stash. “And Zach likes to sleep with his arm draped over my neck, but since his arms are about six inches long, that means I have him breathing into my face all night long.
 
Half the time I end up climbing into Max’s bunk bed - anything so I can get a couple of hours. In the morning we all wake up in the wrong beds, feeling confused.” Holding a box of Wheat Thins and one of Ritz Crackers, as well as a half-empty bag of Lay’s barbecue potato chips, Lori climbed down off the chair. “Want any of this?”

Claire shook her head. “What does the doctor say? I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about leukemia.”

“Leukemia screws up the bone marrow, which I guess is like a factory for blood.” She stuffed a handful of chips in her mouth and continued talking around them. “When you have leukemia, the bone marrow starts churning out bad white cells called blasts. They crowd out all the good parts of blood. The reason people with leukemia die,” she stuffed more chips into her mouth, “is from organ failure or an infection that can’t be stopped. Sometimes they just bleed to death.”

Her hands chattered over the tabletop, her index fingers creating a little pile of potato chip crumbs. “The kind of leukemia Zach has is called ALL. That stands for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. When the doctor told us that, my mind went blank. He was going on and on about treatment modalities, and all I was thinking of was that old commercial where they used to sing out A ... L ... L. He was talking about how my baby might die and I was sitting there thinking about detergent.”

Claire opened her mouth to interrupt, but closed it when she saw the look on Lori’s face.

“I only snapped back when the doctor told me he was going to admit Zach into the hospital that night to start chemo.”

“That soon?” Claire asked. Her hands were filled with balled up fast food wrappers, but the garbage can under the sink was full. She found a paper bag and began to toss all the trash into it.

“The whole idea is that you jump on this thing fast and with both feet. They kept him in the hospital for a week, filled him up with four different chemo drugs plus transfusions. I slept with Zach every night in his hospital bed. And every time I woke up I would just - just look at him.” Lori’s voice broke.
 
“Last month I was drying him off from his bath and teasing him, calling things the wrong names, you know, saying his feet were his knees and his hands were his cheeks. And he got mad and said, ‘You say the left words, Mama, and I say the right ones.’” She stuffed a final handful of chips into her mouth then balled up the empty bag and threw it in the direction of the bag Claire was filling with garbage. It fell short. “He made me laugh so hard that I forgot to ask him about where he had gotten this huge purple bruise on his knee. That’s the kind of thing that can make you crazy, thinking maybe he would be in remission now if I had brought him in earlier.”

“Do they think he’ll go into remission?” Claire was beginning to feel desperate for good news. She picked up the crumpled potato chip bag and put it in the makeshift garbage bag.

Lori shrugged. “Dr. Preston said ninety-five percent of kids will go into remission. But then when I asked the doctor what Zach’s chances were, and he said he wanted to wait until after he was in remission to talking about ‘long-term survival’.”

Lori’s face contorted as she repeated the words
long-term survival.
Claire thought it sounded so awful framed that way, the germ of failure already contained within it. Weren’t those the stories you always heard about kids with leukemia, of failed remissions, of borrowed time bought at great cost? “Isn’t leukemia curable?” Claire took a pink plastic pig from the dishwasher’s utensil basket and added it to the paper bag half-filled with the other toys she had collected. “Or, you know, more curable than some things?”

“Those brochures the doctor gave me are filled with all these cutesy little drawings and these scary little facts. Like only sixty percent of kids are alive after five years.” Lori poured herself a glass of orange juice, then opened up a roll of Ritz crackers and stuffed four into her mouth. “I used to play the lottery for a lot worse odds than that. But that was only for money.”

“How can they tell if he’s in remission?” Claire turned on the dishwasher and then leaned against it as it began to fill with water.

“Every couple of days they take some of his marrow and start counting blasts. He’s officially in remission once they can’t find any more.” Lori rubbed her hand across her mouth. “I have dreams about those numbers, about those people tucked away back in the lab, bending over a microscope. They know what’s happening even before you do.”