by Betsy Byars
Warren slowed as he passed the candy counter, eyeing the mounds of jelly beans, the pyramids of fudge squares. He stopped at the lighted case of nuts and inhaled the scent of warm grease.
Warren was hungry. All he had had for lunch was half of a bologna sandwich, a gift from his friend Eddie. And Eddie’s gifts did not come cheaply. “You bring me a Twinkie tomorrow,” he had said, his long, old-man’s face as stern as a gangster’s.
“I’ll try,” Warren had answered, as he always did.
He began to walk backward through the cosmetics, his eyes still on the candy counter. Goldfish and candy and Twinkies were all out of his price range today. Warren was broke.
There was a woman on the penny scale by the door, her eyes sadly watching the sweep hand rise to two hundred pounds. Warren slipped on just as she stepped off. He was good at getting his weight free. As usual, seventy-nine pounds. Warren was stalling for time. He did not want to go home.
He was still bitter over the fact that his grandmother had taken his postcards, had stepped on them like a crazed giant. She had had no right to do that. They were not her postcards. His bitterness was growing as the time to go home got closer.
He paused in the doorway of Woolworth’s to put on his dark glasses. He wondered where his grandmother had hidden the postcards. He knew she hadn’t destroyed them because his grandmother never got rid of anything. She was known for her collections—twenty-three bed pillows, seventeen perfume bottles, eleven miniature lamps. He himself sometimes felt like part of a disappointingly small collection when she said, “And this is Warren, one of my two grandchildren.”
He walked the six blocks to the apartment slowly, lost in thought. His grandmother had probably hidden the postcards in the freezer compartment of the Frigidaire, he decided. She had folded them and stuffed them into an empty carton of green beans. That’s where she kept her money.
He smiled to himself. His grandmother thought that was a big secret and always made Warren and Weezie step outside the kitchen when she got out her money, but the money she gave them was always cold, and this had led Warren straight to the freezer and the carton of green beans.
He went up the steps, stamping because his grandmother had asked him not to stamp, and knocked loudly at the apartment door. She had asked him not to do that too. “I’m home,” he shouted. He waited with his lips set.
On the walk home his anger had grown. He was now determined to take up the argument with his grandmother. If she tried to avoid a fight by giving him the silent treatment, well, he would make her so mad by his behavior that she would have to fight.
When his grandmother did not come immediately to let him in, he knocked again, louder. “Grandma!” He kicked at the bottom of the door, and it rattled on its old hinges.
There was no answer. She was doing this on purpose, to spite him, he thought. That was why she hadn’t gotten up this morning and fixed the sparse breakfast—oatmeal—she usually did. Or why she hadn’t fixed his school lunch. He had intended to slam out of the apartment this morning, yelling, “I’m not hungry,” but the plan had been ruined when she was not there offering him food.
He beat on the door with his fist. “Grandma!” He leaned his ear against the door. He could not hear the television. That was strange.
He straightened. Maybe his grandmother had gone out, but that would have been even stranger. She never went down the steps unless it was Sunday and she was going to Pepper’s for her weekly visit. Even the time there had been a fire in the Oglesbys’ apartment, she had waited at the head of the steps, not willing to take the stairs unless it was absolutely necessary.
“Send the firemen up when they get here,” she had called down the stairs to the departing tenants. “But if they carry me down, they have to carry me back up!”
“Grandma!” Warren shouted. He was yelling into the crack of the door now, tasting dust.
“Warren.”
He glanced around. It was Mrs. Oglesby from across the hall.
“Yes’m?”
“Is your grandmother all right?”
He raised his shoulders and let them fall, startled for a moment out of his anger. “Why wouldn’t she be all right?”
“Well, I went over this morning to borrow some coffee and there was no answer, and I went over after lunch and there was no answer, and I’m worried. I know your grandmother didn’t go out because I can always hear her on the stairs.”
Warren glanced at the apartment door as if seeking an answer there.
“I’ve got a key, but I don’t like to use it unless it’s an emergency. Well, now that you’re here, we better go inside.”
“Yes, I want to go in.”
But as he stood there, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, waiting for Mrs. Oglesby to get the key, he wasn’t so sure. Lately he had developed a real dread of finding out things.
“Your grandmother has not looked well to me lately,” Mrs. Oglesby said as she fitted the key into the lock. “She needs to have somebody looking after her instead of her looking …” She ended with a long look at Warren. The lock turned and the door opened. “There,” she said.
Warren nodded. He tried to swallow the sudden lump in his throat, but it wouldn’t go down. He took off his dark glasses.
He and Mrs. Oglesby walked together into the unlighted apartment. The shades were drawn, and the living room had a dim, unlived-in look. The stale smell of unstirred air filled his nostrils. The wicker rocker with the tied-on cushions, where his grandmother usually sat in the late afternoon, was empty.
“Grandma!”
Warren went down the hall. He paused to look in the kitchen. His grandmother did not believe in cleaning the kitchen until night, so usually by afternoon the counter was a clutter of coffee cups and dirty pots and pans. Today his grandmother had not even put the kettle on the stove.
The meaning of the old familiar phrases, “Things are quiet around here.” “Yeah, too quiet,” really hit him. He felt the sort of dread he had only imagined before in his movies.
“This is her bedroom.” He touched the doorknob. The door was closed as it had been when he left for school that morning.
“Gretchen?” Mrs. Oglesby called as she knocked on the door. “Gretchen?” She opened the door a crack, glanced in, and threw the door open wide. “Gretchen!” She crossed quickly to the bed, where Warren’s grandmother lay in her bathrobe.
Mrs. Oglesby felt for a pulse. Over her shoulder she said, “Warren, go get Sam.”
Warren inched into the room, drawn against his will to the sight of his grandmother, awkwardly arched over her collection of twenty-three pillows.
Mrs. Oglesby began throwing the pillows to the floor, getting them out of the way. Warren edged around the room, stumbling over the heater his grandmother used on cold nights. He stopped when he was against the closet door. He reached behind him and held on to the knob for support.
“Get Sam!”
“Is she alive?” he asked, choking on the words. He wet his dry, cracked lips.
Now that the pillows were out of the way and his grandmother was lying flat on her back, Mrs. Oglesby had her head on his grandmother’s chest.
“Is she alive?”
Mrs. Oglesby raised her head. “Yes, she is alive. Now will you please go get Sam?”
“Yes’m.”
Warren turned, and slipping slightly on the throw rug in the doorway, ran for the hall, shouting, “Mr. Oglesby, Mr. Oglesby, help!”
“No, no, you’ve got to take me with you. You can’t leave me for the giant mongoose!”
“Farewell, my friend.”
WARREN WAS SITTING ON the sofa in the darkness. The door to the outside hall was open so that Warren would be able to see Mrs. Oglesby the moment she got back from the hospital. Even so, he got up every few minutes to peer over the banister at the empty stairs below.
Warren had wanted desperately to go with his grandmother in the ambulance to the hospital, but Mrs. Oglesby had been firm. “You
wait here, and when your sister comes, the two of you can come over on the bus. You’ll just be in the doctor’s way.”
“I’ve got to come!” He felt the sort of desperation a victim in his movies might feel when he was left behind as monster food. “No, no, you’ve got to take me with you. You can’t leave me for the giant mongoose!”
“Farewell, my friend.”
“Warren.” She had put her hands on his shoulders, but he threw them off in one furious gesture.
“She’s my grandmother!”
“Warren,” she continued in her even, adult voice, “you can help your grandmother most by staying out of the way.”
That was a terrible way to help somebody, he thought as he drew back, stunned, fighting tears. By staying out of the way! He had continued to stand in the same spot, listening to the struggles of the ambulance attendants on the stairs, then to the slam of the door, the silence, the long wail of the siren outside. Warren had never felt so alone in his life.
He thought he heard the door open downstairs. He got up quickly, ran out into the hall, and stared over the banister. There was no one there. He leaned forward, resting on his elbows, his hands dangling over the railing. He sighed aloud.
If his grandmother died … He had to think about this possibility, he told himself, because of the terrible way his grandmother had looked when they were carrying her out on the stretcher. Pale, sort of grayish, her eyes open a little, half-moons of white showing, her jaw slack. He had never seen a dead person except on television or in the movies, but he was sure that was the way they looked. He felt goosebumps rise on his arm, remembering.
If his grandmother died … He straightened abruptly. His eyes snapped open. If his grandmother died, he went on in a rush, his mother would come home! She would have to! It was such an awesome truth it took his breath away.
He paused, holding tightly to the railing with both hands. In his mind he was already at the funeral. He could see the mourners, all in black. They would be standing together around the open grave, under black umbrellas—a light rain would be falling. And back in the mist, half hidden by the towering old tombstones, would be a lone figure, a black hat pulled low over her face, hiding her red hair.
“We are gathered here today,” the minister would be saying in a low, sad voice.
He alone would have noticed the woman. He alone would know it was his mother. He would not be able to run to her, of course, even though that’s what his whole body would be aching to do, because the FBI would probably be there, waiting for just such a move. But afterward, as the funeral procession was leaving, he would slip away and hide behind one of the tombstones.
The rest of the people, lost in grief, never even noticing he was not there, would climb into the long, black limousines, their voices floating back to him, and they would drive away through the old iron gates.
Warren would remain crouched behind the tombstone until the cemetery was empty and still, and then he would hear the sound he had been waiting for—the crunch of footsteps on the wet gravel. The footsteps would come closer, closer, would be at the very stone behind which he was crouching.
Warren would rise, straighten his shoulders, and there she would be—his mother. Her eyes would be swollen from crying. She would have taken off her hat, and her hair—the red color he remembered—would be blowing back from her pale face.
“Warren?” she would say in a puzzled voice, unable to believe this was happening at last.
“Yes, it’s me.”
And then his mother would hold out her arms in the way he had imagined so often, only this time it would be really happening. And he would run forward with a glad cry, and they would—
“Warren, why on earth are you standing out here in the hall crying?”
He spun around. It was Weezie. She had come up the stairs so quietly he had not heard her. He whipped the tears from his cheeks.
“What is wrong?”
He looked at her, as stunned for a moment as if he had been interrupted in the middle of one of his movies. Then his face collapsed as he began crying again, this time aloud.
“Grandma’s gone to the hospital!”
“What? I can’t understand you. Stop crying!”
“Grandma’s gone to the hospital. Mrs. Oglesby thinks it’s a stroke.”
“Oh, no.”
“Mrs. Oglesby said that her aunt looked exactly the same way and she d-died.”
He turned his back, crying now out of guilt, ashamed he had wept earlier, not about his grandmother going to the hospital, as he should have, but over the joy of possibly seeing his mother again.
“Please don’t cry, Warren.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Grandma’ll be all right. She’s been to the hospital before. She’s had attacks before.”
“Not like this.”
He dried his cheeks with his hands and then wiped his hands on his shirt. “We’re supposed to come to the hospital on the bus. I wanted to go in the ambulance—” He began crying again—he couldn’t help it. “But they wouldn’t let me.”
“Honey, I don’t think they let people go in the ambulance. They work in there. They have oxygen and medicine, and half the time the people are better by the time they get to the—”
“They let Mrs. Oglesby ride up front,” he interrupted stubbornly. The need to be part of his grandmother’s illness swept over him again. If he could have gone with them, helped somehow, just handed them things—there had to be something he could have done.
“Warren, listen, we’ll go in the apartment and get some money. You wash your face.”
He nodded dumbly.
“Then we’ll go down and call Pepper—somebody ought to let her know—and then we’ll go to the hospital in a cab. We are not waiting for any bus.”
Warren sniffled loudly. He watched his sister with a grateful admiration as she went into the apartment. No, it was more than admiration. He felt close to Weezie for the first time in his life.
“The money’s in the green-bean box in the freezer,” he called after her.
“I know,” she answered.
He followed slowly. He went into the bathroom and dried his face on a towel. His grandmother only bought brown towels because they never showed dirt. “You never have to wash them unless you want to,” he could remember her saying as she hung them over the towel racks.
He felt the pinch of tears again, and he walked quickly into the living room. In the kitchen Weezie was slamming the freezer door, rattling paper. “Warren, you ready?” she called.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go.”
She came out of the kitchen stuffing cold dollar bills into her purse. She pushed him through the open door and paused to lock it.
“Weezie?” he asked.
“What?” She put the key in her purse and looked up, pausing to see if she had forgotten anything.
“If Grandma dies—”
Her eyes sharpened as she glanced down at him. “Grandma won’t die.”
“If she does though—”
“She is not going to die.”
“But if, I’m just saying if !”
“All right, say it then. If what?” she asked, her voice rising in the empty hall.
“If she does die, will Mom come home?” he asked in a rush. Then he looked up at her, waiting, his eyes still bright from tears, his mouth open, for her answer. He did not even seem to be breathing.
“You never give up, do you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You never give up.”
He gritted his teeth. “All right, I never give up! So will she come?”
“No.”
“What makes you say no? I think she would. She would have to come home, wouldn’t she, to the funeral?” He was squinting now as if the light had suddenly gotten too bright.
“No.”
“She would!”
“No!”
“Well, maybe she wouldn’t be right out there in
front, but she would have to at least be there somewhere, wouldn’t she? She would hear about the funeral. Somebody would tell her. And she would have to come. She couldn’t stop herself. All right, maybe we wouldn’t get to talk to her, but she would …”
Weezie was looking at him, shaking her head with such sadness that he trailed off.
“Come on, Warren,” she said, starting down the steps. “Let’s get to the hospital.”
“She would have to!” He threw the words at her back. He waited, but she did not even turn around. Head lowered, he followed her down the steps.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think something metal was coming down the stairs. Well, it’s probably nothing, but I’d better go check.”
FROM THE BACK, WARREN thought, Aunt Pepper looked exactly like his mother. She was standing, peering into the square of glass on the door of the intensive care unit. Her long, reddish hair was pulled back with a barrette. Her foot was tapping impatiently on the worn tile floor.
The hospital was old. Warren glanced up. Across the high ceiling ran plumbing pipes, painted the same green as the walls and ceiling. Down the hall an elderly man was waiting in a wheelchair to be pushed to his room.
Warren and Weezie sat on straight chairs in the small waiting room. Weezie was holding a worn issue of McCall’s, but she had not opened it.
Warren was concentrating on not thinking about his grandmother, because every time he thought about her—he could not help it—his mind jumped straight to the graveside and her funeral.
He was genuinely glad no one could read his mind. They would be shocked to discover that while everyone else was worrying about his grandmother’s health and praying for her recovery, he was imagining meeting his mother at her funeral. He was shocked himself.
To change his thoughts he looked around the room. This hospital would not be a bad setting for a movie. Of course it would have to be abandoned, the halls unlighted, the small waiting room empty of furniture.
Perhaps some sort of radioactive creature could break into the deserted hospital, attracted by the pull of the old X-ray machines, needing a fix. It could be some sort of snakelike creature that would weave through the ceiling pipes and drop down on people.
