The Winters in Bloom (15 page)

They were off the boat, in the parking lot. Michael felt like his legs had turned into stiff boards now that he was walking without the motion of the waves. He thought about it for less than a minute before he told her no, he didn’t want to go home yet.

After he told her about Six Flags, she nodded and pulled out a cell phone. He wondered if she was going to call his parents—and sort of hoped she wasn’t, so they couldn’t say no—but instead she called the theme park, to see how late they were open. “Nine o’clock,” she said, hitting the off button. “We’ll make it.”

“What is that?” Michael said, pointing to the phone’s screen. It was very blue, light blue and dark blue and several shades in between, with white blobs that could be clouds or snow on top of mountains.

“It’s called utopia,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

He shook his head.

“Well, I didn’t know, either, when I picked that background for my phone, but today, I do.”

He wasn’t sure what she was saying, but he forgot about it when she leaned down and kissed him. Her breath smelled like lemons, from the mint she’d been sucking on since she threw away her hot dog. Which reminded him to ask why she did that. Wasn’t she hungry?

“I don’t really eat,” April said, and opened the back door of her gray car. He hopped in, and she belted his seat belt and then got into the driver’s seat. When he asked her why she didn’t eat, she shrugged and looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I’ve been told it’s something very wrong with me.”

“You should only eat if you’re hungry,” Michael said. He was just repeating what his parents had told him a thousand times. “The clean plate club is not a health club.”

She laughed. “Good one. Maybe I’ll try that on the doctors.” She started the car. “But in the meantime, we’re off to Six Flags. More of our utopia.”

Michael had been reading since he was three years old—he’d learned accidentally from watching his parents read to him; that was why they had started calling him gifted—but if he’d had to spell the word April kept using, he would have been way off. It sounded so goofy: You-Toe-Pea-A. He wondered if it was something on the computer, like YouTube, which his parents used to watch political speeches.

They were driving away from the beach, toward the entrance to the highway. He was playing with his favorite toy, the red windup robot, watching the robot try to walk on the armrest vibrating from the engine of the car. April was trying to explain what
utopia
meant.

“It’s like the perfect place, buddy. Like everything we’ve seen today: the whale breaching and the ocean waves and even the crisp white paper sleeves that held the hot dogs. It’s you and me singing together. It’s your mom loving numbers.” She took a breath. “It’s you loving your parents so much and them loving you. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t, but he was distracted trying to find the robot’s key, which had fallen onto the floor. He knew he couldn’t reach it with his seat belt on, but he wanted to see it. Then he wouldn’t worry that it was really lost.

A few minutes later, he heard April say something. He couldn’t make out the words, but her voice was so scared that he looked up. In the rearview mirror, her eyes looked big and her face looked as pale as his, even though she hadn’t used sunscreen. “I have to pull over,” she said, and then she did, so quickly that she didn’t use her turn signal and the car behind them honked.

She leaned her head against the steering wheel. He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear her breathing fast, like she’d been running for miles. When he asked what was wrong, she said, “I’m feeling sick,” and then she was totally quiet. Michael was quiet, too, because he knew people who are feeling sick don’t like to talk.

After a while, he looked down and there was the robot key, peeking out from under the passenger seat. He didn’t know whether he could take his seat belt off now, but he didn’t really care that much about the key anymore. He was scratching his elbow, wondering what his mom and dad were doing. Normally, when his dad got home from the college where he worked, they would all take a break together and have something to eat. But seeing Michael was the best part of the break, according to his parents, though for Michael the best part was the goofy songs and funny stories.

As he stared out the window at the empty street—nothing but a brown field, a rusted truck, and a seafood restaurant that said Out of Business on a big white sign—he wondered if his parents could still have fun without him. But he wasn’t really worried about how they were doing. Maybe this was because, if they weren’t having fun, neither was he anymore. And if they were sort of scared, so was he.

THIRTEEN

C
ourtney knew
she was in trouble when she put on a slouchy brown jacket, her floppiest hat, and sunglasses, and drove to the West Mt. Airy neighborhood where her ex-husband lived. She had too much time on her hands, but a normal person with free time does not spy on her ex-husband’s family. The problem was she couldn’t stop herself. She felt as if she was tumbling down a steep hill with no branches or brush or even rocks to break her fall.

It had all begun on a Tuesday night in October, when she went to her favorite deli after work and ordered a mushroom cheese steak. Such a normal thing to do. Yet a few hours later, she had vomited so much blood that her perfect white bathroom looked like a crime scene. Her legs were wobbly, but she managed to drive herself to the hospital, all the while telling herself that this was merely a precaution. “There is nothing wrong with me,” she said to the foggy windows of her car. It was after midnight, and the streets of her little town were nearly deserted.

When the hospital released her two days later, she followed up with the gastroenterologist, a smart, friendly man with the unfortunate name of Dr. Downer. Dr. Downer ran a tube into her stomach and found “suspicious cells.” It looked like cancer, but he couldn’t be sure because her stomach was so inflamed. “Do you take ibuprofen?” he asked, and she nodded. Didn’t everyone?

One wall of the doctor’s office was covered with a poster of the digestive system. Courtney was staring at the part under the transverse colon called the jejunum. She wondered if the word derived from the same Latin root as
jejune
, which meant silly or childish. Meaning the jejunum was the silliest part of the digestive system?

He took out a pad and wrote prescriptions for two kinds of pills to reduce stomach acid. He told her to avoid citrus and a bunch of other foods, none of which she ate that much anyway. Then he said, “You have to reduce your stress. It’s very important.”

“I’ve always been a nervous kind of person,” she told him, twirling a piece of her hair between her fingers. It wasn’t true, but it might as well have been. She’d been like this for years and years now.

“Then it’s time to change.” He looked so serious, which scared her, as it was probably meant to.

As she left his office, she told herself that she would do it, somehow. She would become so calm that people would remark how serene she seemed. She would become a person who was so calm that she couldn’t have cancer and die.

Though she meant this, still, a month or so later, she’d surprised herself at how well she’d succeeded at her goal. People at work
had
remarked that she seemed “relaxed” and “peaceful.” At meetings now she sat still as a sphinx, not chomping on candies or biting her lips or twirling her hair. The only tic she had left was ChapStick. She used it every hour, sometimes many times in one hour, and she never went anywhere without a tube of it in her pocket.

The people in Courtney’s department knew she’d been in the hospital, but they didn’t know the rest of it. She hadn’t told anyone about the suspicious cells—not because she was afraid they wouldn’t understand, but because she didn’t want her office to change from the safest place in her life to another place that reflected back her image of herself as a person who had problems, a person who wasn’t normal enough to belong anywhere.

If only she’d told Betty Jean, her supervisor, about the cancer scare, she might still have her job. Or maybe not. Courtney no longer had any idea. Betty Jean wasn’t a bad person, but she had a very short fuse. She’d directed her anger at Courtney a few times, always about some little thing in the documentation that Betty Jean had suddenly decided to care about and huff and puff until Courtney cared, too. Everyone in their department knew that Betty Jean was like this, but everyone, including Courtney, knew how to defuse the situation by nodding along and taking copious notes, some of which would later be thrown away. It wasn’t that hard to handle. It was really nothing compared to the other things that Courtney had been through, which was why it was so odd, what happened on that particular night in December.

Courtney was working late, but her project was relatively unimportant. She was merely helping out because Betty Jean had asked her to. She was planning to go home soon, even thinking about ordering a sandwich from her favorite deli: the first time she’d dared to go back there since she’d gotten out of the hospital, though Dr. Downer had assured her that the deli was not responsible. It was either an ulcer or it was those dangerous cells, lurking inside her stomach, waiting until they could be biopsied for the third time at the end of February. Surely the inflammation would be gone by then, as Courtney was taking the medicine and eating the special diet and being calm. She’d even stopped tearing at her fingernails. Her hands looked so clean and young. She liked to click her new nails on her desktop.

When Betty Jean came roaring into her office at about six thirty, to tell her the letter she’d written was completely unacceptable, Courtney had already shut down her computer and taken out her keys from her purse. The problems Betty Jean had identified were trivial. If only Courtney had written down her suggestions and said nothing more. But she was so afraid of losing her inner peace that she begged Betty Jean to talk about this tomorrow. When that didn’t work, she claimed she had a headache, which was true. Finally, she blurted out that all of this was unnecessary. She was working from a sample letter—and Betty Jean herself had written the sample. Most of the stylistic problems the woman was so obsessed with had been taken directly from the sample. So it wasn’t possible that the errors were that serious, was it?

“You never listen!” Betty Jean was shouting, standing over her. Was she pounding her hand on the desk or on her own forehead? “Everyone has this problem with you. Don’t believe it? Trust me, people talk around here, and you’re getting a reputation. You’re not going to make it in this company if you don’t learn to shut up and listen!”

Courtney had been doing technical writing for a long time, but she’d only been at this particular company for ten months. She was the newbie; still, she felt sure it wasn’t true that everyone had a problem with her. But when Betty Jean took the sample letter from her desk and ripped it up, barking that it was no justification for Courtney’s mistakes, Courtney started to cry. And Betty Jean kept yelling for at least ten more minutes, because in truth, the woman didn’t know how to handle the fact that she had made someone cry. The next morning, though, she must have realized something had gone wrong because she went to Human Resources to report an “incident” with Courtney Hughes.

Olivia, the HR rep who summoned Courtney upstairs, “just to talk,” agreed that it sounded like she hadn’t done anything wrong. Of course the Incident would have to be investigated, which Courtney expected now that it had become the Incident, capital I. But Olivia said Betty Jean was known to have some “anger management issues.” “You’re not the only person who has been on the receiving end of her temper,” Olivia said, sighing and crossing her small hands. “I’m speaking off the record, of course.”

There was a record? Courtney knew she shouldn’t have been surprised: HR departments were notorious for viewing everything as a potential legal problem. One of the coworkers she had lunch with hinted that she could sue for something or other, but she didn’t want to sue. She wanted her job to go back to the way it had been before: peaceful and calm and the best distraction she had from the question of whether cancer was destroying her stomach lining even now, while she was eating an innocent salad.

Though Betty Jean had started all this, she didn’t try to hide the fact that she was very unhappy with Courtney. Day after awkward day, the older woman childishly exited the lunchroom when Courtney came in and pretended not to see her if they passed each other in the hall. On some level Courtney was aware that her very presence was now a challenge to one of Betty Jean’s personal myths: that she was boisterous and funny and good-hearted, the kind of person the younger employees liked. It was mostly true, that was the strange part. Betty Jean was almost sixty years old, but she still wore black Converse shoes, jeans, and hoodie jackets. She was the only one in the department who had given Courtney a present for her birthday. It was a bottle of wine, and Courtney didn’t drink, but still.

At the beginning of January, though the investigation was still in the early stages, Olivia decided that Betty Jean needed to at least do the professional thing and say she was sorry for losing her temper. Courtney was called to the HR conference room on Monday morning. Olivia was already there, and Betty Jean came in a few minutes later, ostensibly to deliver the apology.

She did seem sad. She cried through most of the half hour—though she denied all of the things she’d yelled that night. She hadn’t done anything but wad up the sample letter, but even that wasn’t something she was sorry about. Yet Olivia kept nodding encouragingly, as if Betty Jean’s nonresponse was exactly what she’d been hoping for.