by Terri Favro
“Let’s play fallout shelter,” said Cindy, pushing Suzy under my crib. Even though the other girl, Yvonne, and I, were too old for “let’s pretend,” we followed Cindy, Suzy’s stuffed animals standing in as the household pets we’d eventually be forced to eat. Cindy made grown-up conversation while we were down there, waiting for the all-clear. “Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. The Jews and the Catholics are ruining this country.”
“If you’re not Catholic, why are you at Sacred Wounds?” asked Yvonne.
Cindy sneaked a look from side to side, as if about to reveal a secret, then said in a low voice, “The government put me here. It’s all part of a secret plan to stop the Communists from getting hold of the best female specimens to breed with Russian men after they take over. I’m actually one hundred percent normal, not like the rest of you sicko Twistie kids.” She poked Yvonne. “Show us what’s under your hair.”
Yvonne shook her head and moved away from Cindy, who grabbed a hank of her hair and twisted it up to reveal a seashell of lumpy pink flesh below her ear. It looked slightly obscene, as if Cindy had pulled down Yvonne’s pants to expose her private parts.
“See that? It’s her third ear. They’re going to fix it,” crowed Cindy, as if the word meant something dirty, like fixing a cat. Yvonne yanked down the flap of hair, mumbling something in French that sounded nasty.
“And she’s not the only Twistie. There’s a whole bunch of girls with cockie doodles who they’ve stuck in the boys’ ward,” said Cindy. “Hermaphrodites. Like worms. Yech. There are even a couple of monsters down the hall.”
I shook my head and managed one word. “Liar.”
Cindy put her fists on her hips. “Am not! Come with me and I’ll show you.”
“Better not,” said Yvonne. “Sister will skin you alive if she catches you again.”
“I don’t care. I’ll take the new kid with me after lights-out, if she isn’t too scared,” said Cindy.
Later, after the nurse turned off the lights and the sound of her steps had disappeared, I heard my crib bars sliding down. Close to me, Cindy whispered, “We’ve got to move fast while Sister’s on rounds.”
We went to the door and peered around the corner. At the far end of the hallway, nurses’ white caps bobbed like sails. We could hear their crepe-soled shoes sucking against the waxy linoleum. When the coast was clear, Cindy said, “They’re in the boys’ ward now. Let’s go.”
She took my hand and hurried me down the hall to a door with a large black-lettered sign: NEGATIVE PRESSURE VENTILATOR. Cindy pushed open the door.
The room was dark except for a pool of light at the far end. I could make out two bomb-shaped objects, side by side, giving off a rhythmic whooshing and sucking sound, like the inhale and exhale of a giant. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw that the two objects had human heads sticking out of them. Girl on one side, boy on the other.
Cindy whispered, “They’ve been in there for years. They knew each other when they were little kids, so they stuck them together for company. Now they’ve gone through puberty. The boy must be getting all the urges boys get, but he can’t touch the girl. They’re paralyzed.”
“Who’s there?” The boy’s voice was thin and high. “Come over here where we can see you.”
“It’s me and a friend,” called Cindy in a sweet voice. “Sister said to come check and see if you two were still breathing.”
Cindy grabbed my hand, dragging me closer to the monsters. A pink bow was pinned to the soft-looking brown hair of the girl’s head, which rested on a pillow.
“Don’t touch us,” the girl said. She sounded as afraid of us as I was of them.
I managed to twist my hand free of Cindy’s and was backing away when I bumped into something warm and soft. A hand gripped my shoulder hard.
“Mon Dieu. Not again, Cynthia,” said a woman.
I turned to see a nun dressed head to foot in white, like a ghost: white veil, white robe, white beads around her waist, white wimple under her jutting chin.
“The new kid made me do it,” whined Cindy. “She said she’d let me read her comic books if I took her to see the monsters.”
Sister tsk-tsked as she gripped my shoulder and guided me out, Cindy following.
Back in our room, Cindy climbed snuffling into her crib while Sister tucked a thin coverlet around me and locked the bars in place. “If you get out of bed once more, God will give you polio, vaccine or no, and you’ll wake up in an iron lung, just like Mathieu and Anne-Marie. Comprends?”
I lay under the thin cover, shivering with cold, my throat a furnace, my stomach empty, staring into darkness. I was afraid to sleep for fear that if I closed my eyes, I would wake up without a body, imprisoned for all time in a bomb-shaped metal coffin, my head protruding into a world I could see but couldn’t touch.
First thing in the morning, while the others got their breakfast trays, a nurse in a cap as stiff and white as a restaurant napkin came to our room. For an awful moment, I thought she was the Pat Boone nurse. But this one’s hair was darker, her body, thicker. “There’ll be ice cream afterwards,” she promised as she slid a needle into my arm.
Cindy, nibbling on toast and strawberry jam from space-age plastic packets, said in her know-it-all voice, “See? Told you so. Let me read your comic books while you’re gone.”
Before I could say yes or no, the nurse grabbed my comics and dumped them into Cindy’s crib. Then she wheeled me into a large bright room with blue-tiled walls that looked like the girls’ washroom at school. Eyes smiled at me over white masks.
“See you soon, sweetheart,” said a doctor, just before another needle pushed me down through the bottom of the world and out the other side.
I hadn’t been dropped into the afterlife, or what you think of as sleep, but a drugged half-life where the body surrenders itself to a surgeon who can slice and dice without his patient making a fuss. They even breathe for you. That’s why they call it “going under,” as if you’re falling into water. For most people, it’s a short plunge to nowhere from which they quickly surface.
I’m not most people.
* * *
The first clue that something was wrong came when I didn’t wake up. As I drifted on a dreamy ocean of painkillers, flutter-kicking in and out of wakefulness, the sounds of the recovery room washed over me — the chalkboard squeak of bed wheels on linoleum, the whooshing of the breathing machine, the cries of little kids coming to from their own surgeries, all of them wanting their mothers.
A woman’s voice, comforting as honey on toast, said: “Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”
A man’s voice answered: “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be emptying bedpans.”
The woman sighed. “She’ll probably sleep through World War Three.”
The man said, “’Scuse me, Nurse, I got a mess to clean up. One of the little darlings just woke up puking.”
I opened my eyes. Instead of the recovery room, I was in the wide empty street of a black and white city. Not Shipman’s Corners, but a cartoon metropolis, a Little Nemo nightmareland where skyscrapers swayed like noodles and searchlights swept the sky. In the distance, a speck ran closer and closer. Me. The only one left alive. Overhead, the sky seethed with iron sharks, metal jaws clanking as they swooped to the attack. I tried to lift my hand to swat them away but I couldn’t move. I was awake but paralyzed, like Cindy’s monsters. As Sister had warned, God was punishing me with polio, and now I was locked away in an iron lung for eternity. For one despairing moment, I wanted to die.
A male voice lowered itself into my dream: You aren’t dying.
You can’t die now.
You are on a quest to save the world.
Time to wake up.
I sniffed something spicy. Cinnamon toast. My eyes fluttered open on a blurry face. A woman — no, a man, with peeling pink skin, wearing
a nurse’s cap. The Trespasser. Or Dr. Duffy. Or both of them.
“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty.”
He sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned close to the bars.
“I have an update for you. Your friend Bum Bum took the liberty of improvising after he left you on Halloween. He stumbled over an unlocked car on his way home and tried to rescue Kendal on his own. Things didn’t go well. Cops caught him with the stolen car and someone’s extension ladder. But don’t worry, no scholarship for him, just a stint on a reform-school farm.”
Tears came to my eyes. The Trespasser patted my hand. “Hey, hey, don’t get that way. Probably the best thing that ever happened to Bum Bum. Fresh air, sunshine, new friends. A second chance.”
He stood up and busied himself with a tube leading from a metal IV stand into my arm before stepping out of view. I tried to turn my head to catch sight of him again but the world beyond my bed was a blur.
I don’t remember being taken off the breathing machine. I do remember throwing up all over my pillow, the pain in my throat unbearable, the promised ice cream never materializing.
“It’s either pseudocholinesterase deficiency or malignant hyperthermia. Both very rare,” the surgeon told my parents at the side of my crib. “She’ll need to be tested before she ever goes under again. Be sure to warn her dentist, too.”
I spent two groggy days in my crib while Cindy read my Wonder Woman comics aloud; she never gave them back despite my weak protests to Sister, who told me that Cindy was here long before I came and would be here long after I left, so I should be generous and Christian and let her keep my comics. “Even the Cynthias of the world serve a higher purpose,” she said.
four
Trouble
“Your turn,” Sandy said, her chin on her fist. She was getting tired of losing to me over and over again.
I popped the plastic bubble in the middle of the board, already knowing I’d roll a five. Exactly what I needed to win my tenth game in a row. As I jumped my peg around the board to another victory, Sandy shook her head.
“You cheating or something? How come you always win?”
“Just lucky,” I said with a shrug.
Ever since I’d been released from Sacred Wounds Hospital, every game of Trouble I played felt like one I’d played before. Déjà vu, Dr. Duffy had called it. Not as exciting a power as flying, but handy.
I was spending two dull weeks recuperating at home. The hours moved sluggishly, the silence of the house broken only by Mom’s voice on the phone and the drone of the local radio station. Sandy brought my deskwork home at lunch so I wouldn’t fall behind. After she went back to school in the afternoon, I put a lid on Trouble and turned to my new hobby: drawing.
It had started when Mom sent Dad to the stationery store to find wholesome, educational activities to fill my time. Hidden in the jumble of dusty decoupage sets, pipe cleaners and greasy oil pastels, he found an art instruction book: Walter Foster’s How to Draw Horses. No talent required, Dad reassured me. Walter Foster had worked out a system that turned illustration into a party trick: if you could draw rectangles, triangles and circles, voila, you had a horse, as easy as one, two, three.
I filled stacks of beige manila sheets with mustangs and Appaloosas. With some minor physiological changes, I could turn the basic building blocks of the Walter Foster horse into just about any type of generic four-legged creature, including ones with monstrous dinosaur heads and the legs of a Baba Yaga chicken house.
Finally, the pain in my throat eased and I was judged healthy enough to return to school. The night before my first day back, I sat on my bed watching Linda fold sweaters and underwear into a suitcase. Her face had gone puffy, a bumpy pink rash mottling one cheek. In fact, her whole body was puffy, as if she had been inflated with a bike pump. I sat beside the suitcase, my washed-out quilt soft against my legs.
“Where you going?”
She rubbed the heel of her hand under her nose. “Toronto. A special school for girls.”
“How come?”
“Mom and Dad don’t want me here for a while.”
“’Cause why?”
It took her a while to answer.
“I’m in trouble.”
“What kind?”
“The kind boys get you into.”
“Billy?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why doesn’t he, like, run away with you, or marry you, or something?”
Linda carried on packing without looking at me. “Billy got a scholarship to the same place they sent Kendal. From there, they’ll send him to New Sydney, and then from there —” She didn’t finish her thought, but I knew where Billy was headed: on a one-way trip to the moon.
Another lost boy. It seemed almost pointless to cry about it. Mrs. Kendal was so upset about John that she’d stopped coming to our house to sell cleansers. I suspected that, somehow, she’d discovered I was responsible for Kendal’s fate.
“What’s gonna happen to your baby?” I asked.
“What difference does it make what happens to it, with the world the way it is?”
I twisted my hand into the top of my ankle sock, scratching nervously at a hidden scab. “Are you afraid?”
Linda shook her head. “Mom’s coming with me for a couple of weeks.”
This was news. Mom never went anywhere. Linda looked at me with her big wet eyes and rashy face and said, “Debbie, can I tell you a secret?”
“What?” I asked cautiously. I was learning that my family already had too many secrets.
Linda plopped down beside me, the edge of the mattress sagging as if a boulder had been dropped on it.
“You’re never going to have a chance to grow up. You won’t get to fall in love, or graduate from school, or anything. It’s so sad.”
A chill settled over me. “How come?”
“’Cause you’re going to die when they drop the Bomb, along with three-fourths of the world’s population.” She raised her cupped hands into the air, miming a mushroom cloud. “Poof. All gone. Remember? We’ll be the first to go. Billy said that’s what’s going to happen, for sure. Mutual Assured Destruction. That’s why you can’t be a suck-up kid and do everything Mom and Dad say. The grown-ups are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place, Debbie, with their stupid Atomic War of Deterrence. Billy was trying to get all us kids to help him stop it. Now I’ll never ever see him again.” She sighed, picked up a pink angora sweater and rubbed it against her cheek. “At least I got to fall in love.”
“What’s falling in love like?” I asked.
She thought this one over.
“Like being eaten alive by wild animals, but not minding.”
Linda slammed the suitcase shut and wiped her eyes with the pink sweater. Then she put her arms around me in the kind of hug that made me think one of us was going to the electric chair.
* * *
Dad and I drove Linda and Mom to the train station in our Country Squire station wagon, their suitcases jammed into the third row of seats, me in the second row, Linda up front with my father. I stared at the back of her head. Her black hair was scraped so tightly into an elastic band that the skin of her neck had gone pink from the tension of her ponytail. Mom sat next to me, her face like a stretched white tablecloth. When the car pulled into the train station, she said one thing to me: “Be good.”
The train pulled in, making a hissing sound like the air going out of a balloon. Mom and Linda stepped up onto the train. Linda turned and gave Dad and me a sad little wave, like a beauty queen being sent into exile. Then the train pulled away and they were gone. Dad and I lingered on the platform, not saying a word. Finally, we walked slowly back to the car.
On the drive home, we saw the superstructure of a ship rising in the distance. When we got to the bridge, Dad turned off the engine and we got out of the car to si
t on a bollard and watch the ship glide past, slowly, slowly — for a few seconds, the John Foster Dulles seemed to stand still while the ground around us moved.
The ship passed directly in front of us, a great wall of rusting steel and bolts floating into the lift lock. It was like being next to an airport where the planes flew so slowly, you could talk to the passengers as they passed over.
Where do you come from? Where are you going? Can I go too?
The two of us watched the ship go past in the chilly November air; the John Foster Dulles might well be the last ship of the season. We’d have to wait until spring of the new decade, 1970, to see another.
Dad lit a cigarette. I felt the way I did while playing Trouble. As if I had already lived through this day with him. I knew he was about to say something major, after which nothing would ever be the same again.
He cleared his throat. “Debbie, there’s something I have to tell you before you hear about it from somebody else. I’m not at ShipCo anymore.”
I said nothing. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear the rest.
He took a deep breath and carried on. “That day in the Z-Lands, I went back to the plant and checked the Geiger counter. I thought it was malfunctioning. Turned out it wasn’t, but the others I’d used in the past had been. They’d been tampered with. They weren’t picking up any readings, even when radioactivity was present. Which means the Z-Lands are still dangerously contaminated.”
I shook my head. “Why would anybody tamper with Geiger counters?”
Dad tossed his cigarette into the canal. “Because the company doesn’t want to sink more money into trying to fix the problem.”
“Is that why so many Twisties live on Z Street?” I asked quietly.
Dad rubbed his face with both hands. “I guess.”
I looked up at him. “So what happens now?”
Dad shrugged. “Get another job. Start my own business. We’ll see.” He paused for a moment. “For now, let’s keep this between you and me, Debbie.”
