Forever Sheltered

by Deanna Roy

  Behind her I added just a foggy suggestion of a castle with a big red cross on it. Her hands were empty, so I added a paintbrush in one and a palette in the other.

  Beneath it, I wrote, “The brush is mightier than the sword.”

  “What does that mean?” Cynthia asked.

  “That art is more powerful than fighting,” I said.

  “Ooooh,” she breathed. “I think so.”

  Angela peered over my shoulder. “I didn’t know you could draw.” She picked up the sandwich and passed it to me again, taking the sketch pad.

  Right. I had to eat, too. “I did it as a kid.”

  “You should have kept going,” she said, studying the image. “You knocked this out in no time flat. You could be one of those sketch artists in amusement parks.”

  I smiled as I chewed. She should tell that to my father. Switch a life’s ambition of changing medical history for drawing caricatures at Disneyland. Sounded good to me.

  Cynthia reached for the pad. “Can I color it in?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Make her face green.”

  “Noooo!” Cynthia howled. “She’s not an ogre!”

  “But Fiona is a green princess!”

  “Noooo! Tina is a human princess!”

  “Did I hear my name?”

  We all looked up. I’m not sure whose heart jumped more when we saw Tina’s blond head pop around the edge of the door, Cynthia’s or mine.

  Chapter 19: Tina

  That little girl sure was happy to see me.

  Cynthia cried, “It’s Tina! It’s Tina!” over and over as I walked over to the sink to disinfect my hands.

  By the time I turned around, Cynthia had come off the bed and crashed into my leg. “Where did you go?”

  I kneeled down. “I had to go buy more art paper!” I bonked her pert little nose. “Somebody I know was using it all up!”

  “Come look what Dary did!” she said. Then her eyes got big. “Dr. Darion.” Suddenly she hesitated. “Never mind.”

  I hadn’t missed Darion sitting on the edge of Cynthia’s bed, eating a sandwich. This was not standard practice anywhere. Clearly he was a family friend. This would explain his closeness to her.

  The aunt sat in the corner, watching us. I waved at her.

  “What did Dr. Darion do?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Cynthia said. She sat back on her bed.

  That was odd. I turned back to her quizzically. What was going on?

  Darion spoke up. “I was just checking on her. She thought it was funny her doctor was eating lunch.” He shoved his sandwich in the pocket of his lab coat.

  “You don’t have to stop,” I said. “And whatever your relationship is with the family, it’s no big thing to me.” He was covering up something, and this upset me. He can get all up in my shirt in a surgical suite, but he can’t tell me he has a personal relationship with a patient? He could have said it on the first day, when he asked me to watch out for her!

  Except he didn’t trust me.

  Or maybe it was something more.

  I could see panic in Cynthia’s eyes. Were they asking her to lie about it? This little girl? Indignation burned in me. The doctor was going to get a piece of my mind about this later.

  But I had come here for a reason. “Cynthia, classes will be back on this afternoon, but just a little off schedule since I missed this morning. Are you going to come?”

  “Yes!” she said, her face brightening again.

  I passed a half-sheet of paper to her. “Make sure your nurse knows when to bring you. This is the schedule for today and tomorrow.”

  Cynthia pressed the paper to her chest like it was a treasure. “Okay.”

  I noticed Angela holding an oversized sketch pad. “Have you been drawing?” I asked Cynthia.

  Her eyes got big again. She held up a deck of cards instead. “I’ve been practicing card tricks.”

  Weird. Another redirect. I glanced over at Darion, who was studying his iPad as though he needed to memorize something. What was going on here?

  “Can I see the picture you made?” I asked.

  Nobody answered.

  Now the whole room was tense. I decided to back off.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I’d take this up with Darion later. Ask him straight out who this little girl was to him. His niece? The daughter of a colleague?

  I hadn’t responded to his text. The message had hit me in the gut.

  Let me shelter you.

  So emotional. So unlike him. Or maybe it was like him, and I was the only one who saw it. I didn’t know what to make of it. Instead, I had sat in my room, rearranging the schedule to make sure I saw all the patients today so that whoever had paid for the program would know I was back.

  But was it Darion? Could he be the benefactor? Or his family?

  I glanced down at his shoes again, expensive and perfectly polished. He had money. Came from money.

  Hell, maybe I wouldn’t confront him after all. Maybe I should just shut the hell up. He could be my meal ticket. An anonymous one.

  What a mess.

  “I’ll see you in class,” I told Cynthia.

  “You might not see her tomorrow,” Darion said, his voice back in professional mode. “She has a three-hour chemotherapy drip.”

  I glanced back at Cynthia. She seemed so full of energy today. That would go away after the treatment. “I’ll come by your room later.” I glanced at Darion. “If that’s okay.”

  Everyone looked at him to see what he would say. “I think that will be fine,” he said. “She will be tired but probably not sick for a few days.”

  “I don’t usually start throwing up until the next day,” Cynthia said matter-of-factly.

  I couldn’t even imagine being where she was. “Then I’ll come by. See you in class later.”

  I waved at everyone, Angela still clutching the sketch pad to her chest.

  I had no idea what to say to Darion about all of this, IF I talked to him at all.

  I barely got back to the art room before the nurse wheeled Albert up to the table. He wore his usual flannel shirt, and his mop of gray curls was as wild as always. I was glad to see him.

  “You’re back,” he said. “I got a message that your class was canceled indefinitely.”

  “You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I said. “Just an administrative hiccup.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Glad you got it worked out.”

  I glanced at his hands. He held them in his lap today instead of gripping the wheelchair. He looked better, just a tremor rather than a hard shake. “How are you doing?”

  He held up his hands. “New drugs!” he said. “Started them a ways back, but we tweaked my cocktail. So far, so good.”

  “That’s great. You want to paint, then? Or draw?” I was dying to see what he could do if he had a little more control.

  “Everything!” he said. “Let’s do everything.”

  I got out the paints and the pencils, and the highest-quality paper we had in stock. I’d ask for some good stuff when I sent in an order to Duffrey’s assistant. I wanted some nice things on hand for Albert, not just kids’ paints and crappy construction paper.

  I barely got the paper and pencils on the table when he snatched one up and began sketching in long rapid strokes.

  Rather than gawk at him, I wandered the room, adjusting small things, thinking about what else I could squeeze Duffrey for. The table was the most important. Then chairs. I wondered if I could get a light board. Tracing might be more fun for the patients with less control, and build motor skills. If only I had a bigger room.

  Albert switched colors, and I had to resist walking over to steal a glance. I would get his castle painting back up here tomorrow, although I might keep the mermaid at home. I should probably ask him about it. Technically, it was his art.

  Oh, I should have asked Duffrey about a space to showcase the patients’ work. Dang it. I wasn’t afraid to march up there and request it, but the
thought of having to sit on that hard chair again stopped me. I’d send an email.

  When Albert picked up a third color, my curiosity couldn’t wait another second. I casually moved closer and had to hold back a gasp.

  An amazing scene filled the oversized parchment. A circus was poised on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It had tents and elephants, and clowns stacked ten high teetering on a single unicycle. On the underside of the cliff, the ground and rocks crumbled and fell into the water, while up top, the performers juggled and led lions through hoops with exuberant laughter, unaware of the danger, that the ground beneath their feet was disappearing.

  “How did you do so much so fast?” I asked.

  “Years of practice,” he said, his hand almost a blur over the page, shading in colors, adding depth and texture to the scene.

  I gave up on my nonchalance and just sat to watch. As the image filled out, the tone shifted from innocent to a malevolent glee, as if the performers knew exactly where they were and welcomed the impending disaster.

  Albert added a boxcar in the distance, then a caged compartment, a train the circus came in on. All the colors so far were subdued, slate blue, sea green, dull yellow, but then he picked up a blood-red pencil to fill in a painted sign on the side of the train. It read “Saints of Circus Anthony.”

  That reference to the name of the hospital wasn’t lost on me. I began to look more closely at the performers. The woman with a chair and whip next to the lion was the nurse who rolled Albert to class.

  The tower of clowns seemed familiar too. Really familiar. The one on top had a maniacal look I recognized. From where?

  In the center was a man in a top hat and tails, the ringmaster. I bit my lip as I tried to see if he knew what John Duffrey looked like and had drawn him in, but the man’s features were obscured by the enormous hat. Perhaps not.

  “I love it,” I told him. “Did you ever do any cartooning?”

  Albert set the pencil down. “No. Some illustration here and there. A few posters.”

  “So, you DID work as an artist.”

  He smiled. “Here and there.”

  I couldn’t get anything out of him. “I don’t think it takes a psychology degree to figure this one out,” I said.

  He held his belly as he laughed, and I wondered if he was in any pain. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “You think they’d let me display this in the entrance?”

  “Now that would be something.”

  I turned the page around. “As your official art therapist, I have to say,” I paused as he leaned forward to hear my verdict, “you are quite possibly the only sane person here.”

  He got serious then and peeled back the cuff of his shirt to reveal the red lines on his wrist.

  I grasped his hand and held it for a moment, then shoved up the sleeve to my jacket to show the pale lines of my five-year-old scars.

  He swallowed hard and nodded in recognition.

  I could feel the tremor in his arm and wondered how he could overcome it. I’d prodded him to try, and he had managed, but now that I could feel it, the tension like a taut wire being plucked, I couldn’t see how he even held a pencil, much less drew anything recognizable.

  He was amazing.

  His free hand touched the pale lines of my wrist and walked tremulously along their paths. Then he gripped me tight, his eyes closed, and we sat there silently wishing that only art bound us, not this terrible shared experience. But even as I knew what he was feeling, that grief about the places life had taken us, I also felt gratitude that we were together now.

  We stayed like that, joined hand to wrist to scar, until the evil-eyed nurse returned to roll him back to his ward.

  Chapter 20: Darion

  I knew I should let things go. Tina was tipped off about my relationship with Cynthia. And she had her job back and would see to my sister. I should avoid her and not disrupt the arrangement.

  But throughout the afternoon, I found myself making excuses to walk by the art room. The door was always closed, but a wide window allowed me to see what was happening. I managed to pass by three times before she looked up and spotted me. Then I had to stop going that direction anymore, or else look like a stalker.

  Later that day, when I knew Cynthia had been to art class, I stopped by her hospital room.

  Cynthia said, “Did I mess up? Does Tina know?” She covered her face with her hands.

  “No, no, don’t worry about that. It’s okay.”

  “But I called you Dary!”

  “It’s all right.” I sat on the bed and pulled her hands down. “This is the grown-ups’ problem, not yours.

  I glanced over at Angela. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “I told you so.”

  Angela had agreed to keep the secret, although she didn’t approve of the plan. “You have to learn to trust other people, Dr. Darion,” she said.

  When I tried to tell her about the missed kidney diagnosis, and the infection, she waved it off. “In my twenty years in a hospital, I saw lots of mistakes. It’s part of it. You are not going to be immune to it, and it will hit you so much harder when it happens.”

  I had to disagree. I went over every number on Cynthia. I ordered every test. Anything that wasn’t covered by insurance, I paid out of pocket through my trust. Thankfully, when my father refused to acknowledge Cynthia as his, my mother decided to return to her own family name and give it to my sister as well. The connection between us wasn’t nearly as apparent as it might have been.

  I scooped Cynthia up for a moment and hugged her. She was so light, so insubstantial. I felt like she could just disappear. If we didn’t work very hard, she might.

  “What’s going to be tomorrow’s chemo present?” I asked her. Since we could no longer do our drawings together at this hospital, I always bought her something new.

  “Can it be for someone else?” she asked.

  I set her back on the bed. “What do you mean?”

  “I get lots of chemo presents. But Andrew doesn’t have any.”

  “Who is Andrew?”

  “A boy in my art class.”

  I looked over at Angela. She said, “A.L.L., second relapse, sixty days post.”

  Almost identical situation as Cynthia. Same leukemia. Failed stem cell transplant. “How old is Andrew?” I asked.

  “Nine,” Cynthia said. “He doesn’t feel very well.”

  “Is he doing chemo?” I asked.

  Cynthia’s voice got quiet. “Tomorrow, same as me.”

  “What would you like for Andrew?”

  Her face brightened as she realized I was agreeing. “He loves Pokémon!”

  “That’s still a thing?”

  Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Dary, it will always be a thing.”

  “All righty, then. What do you think? That yellow guy. Peekaboo?”

  “Pikachu!” she corrected. “I thought you were so smart.”

  “Just doctor smart. Not cool-kid smart.”

  “Well, don’t get Pikachu. Everybody has Pikachu. Get Pancham!”

  I laughed. “What is that?”

  “A panda bear with an attitude!”

  “All right, Pancham it is.”

  She grabbed my arm and hugged it. “Thank you, Dary. He’ll really like it.”

  “He’s not going to be your boyfriend, is he?” I teased.

  Cynthia thrust my arm away. “No! And don’t you say that to him!”

  I held up my hands. “Okay, okay. But I’m your big brother. I’m supposed to watch out for boys.”

  “I’m only eight years old, Dary. I can’t get married until I’m at least forty.”

  I let go with a belly laugh then. “That sounds perfect. Forty.” I headed toward the door. I had to get back on rounds. “Don’t you forget that.”

  I was still laughing to myself when I realized I was actually done seeing patients that day. I checked my watch. After six. Tina was probably already gone.

  Just in case, I hurried towar
d her room. I would come up with an excuse about why I was there on the way.

  Chapter 21: Tina

  I was never going to get out of here.

  Some random lady from HR had come by with a stack of papers a mile high, insisting I fill them out before I left. No way was that going to happen. It was already after six, and probably the whole human resources department was home having dinner. And I was only halfway through the stack.

  Statement of intent to do social work.

  Consent for psychological evaluation.

  Prior coursework.

  Grad school application.

  I didn’t even know what some of this stuff was, and I had no idea if I wanted to go the therapist or social work route. I needed advice. And a better pen.

  I shook my hand, trying to work out the cramp. How did Albert draw so intensely for so long without pausing? I knew what he would say. Years of practice.

  He was somebody. Had to be. He was too good. And he’d given me some clues. Posters. Illustration work. I had snapped a shot of his work on my phone to study, especially that clown, which was still bugging me. Maybe I could put something together. If not, I would worm it out of him.

  The halls were quiet. I left my door open, feeling closed in if I was alone in the room. Sometimes I swore I could sense the patients who once sat around the table but were long gone. I knew someday soon I would lose one I was attached to and the ghosts would feel real.

  I lifted my arms high and stretched my back. The HR lady could stuff it. I had to know what I was doing before I could fill out any more forms.

  A figure in the doorway caught my eye.

  Darion.

  I stood up suddenly, and the chair fell backward with a crash.

  I whipped around to pick up the chair. I should have known he would show up. Men like him, manipulators, liars, they probably thought they could do anything they wanted.

  The chair dropped back into place with another clang.

  “You okay?” Darion strode in, concern on his face.

  “I’m fine.” I crossed my arms. “I thought you were going to let me make the next move.”