Dee-dee was still unconscious from the anesthetic. She couldn’t hear me; but a quiet sob, quickly stifled, drew my attention to the accordion-pleated expandable wall, drawn halfway out on the opposite side of the bed. When I walked around it, I saw Consuela sitting in a chair on the other side. Her features were tightly leashed, but the tracks of tears had darkened both her cheeks. Her hands were pale where they gripped the arms of the chair.
“Connie!”
“Oh, Paul, we almost lost her. We almost lost her.”
It slammed against my chest with the force of a hammer, a harder stroke for having missed. Someday we will. I took Connie’s hand and brushed the backside of it as I had brushed Dee-dee’s. “It’s all right now,” I said.
“She is such a sweet child. She never complains.”
Prognosis: The life span is shortened by relentless arterial athermoatosis. Death usually occurs at puberty.
“She’s all right now.”
“For a little while. But it will become worse, and worse; until.…” She leaned her head against me and I cradled her; I rubbed her neck and shoulders, smoothed her hair. With my left hand, I caressed her cheek. It is not the end; but it is the beginning of the end.
“We knew it would happen.” The emotions are a very odd thing. When all was dark, when I believed myself helpless, I could endure that knowledge. It was my comfort. But now that there was a ray of light, I found it overwhelming me, crushing me so that I could hardly breathe. A sliver of sunshine makes a darkened room seem blacker still. I could live with Fate, but not with Hope. I found that there was a new factor in the equation now. I found that I could fail.
“Where is Brenda?” I asked.
Connie pulled herself from my arms, turned and pulled aside the curtain that separated her from Deirdre.
“She didn’t come.”
“What?”
“She didn’t come.”
Something went out of me then, like a light switch turned off. I didn’t say anything for the longest time. I drifted away from Connie over toward the window. A thick stand of trees filled the block across the street from the hospital. Leaves fresh and green with spring. Forsythia bursting yellow. A flock of birds banked in unison over the treetops and shied off from the high tension lines behind. I thought of the time when Brenda and I first met on campus, both of us young and full of the future. I remembered how we had talked about making a difference in the world.
* * *
I found Brenda at home. I found her in the family room, late at night after I had finally left the hospital. She was still clad in her business suit, as if she had just come from the office. She was standing rigidly by the bookcase, with her eyes dry and red and puffy, with Dee-dee’s book, The Boxcar Children, in her hands. I had the impression that she had stood that way for hours.
“I tried to come, Paul,” she said before I could get any words out. “I tried to come, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed; I couldn’t move.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Connie was there. She’ll stay until I get changed and return.” I rubbed a hand across my face. “God, I’m tired.”
“She’s taken my place, hasn’t she? She feeds Deirdre, she nurses her, she tutors her. Tell me, Paul, has she taken over all my duties?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I didn’t think there was room in your life for anyone beside your daughter. You’ve shut everyone else out.”
“I never pushed you away. You ran.”
“It needs more than that. It needs more than not pushing. You could have caught me, if you’d reached. There was an awful row at the office today. Crowe and FitzPatrick argued. They’re dissolving the partnership. I was taking too long to say yes to the partnership offer; so Sèan became curious and.… He found out Walther had wanted a ‘yes’ on a lot more, so we filed for harrass.… Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter any more; none of it.”
She was talking about events on another planet. I stepped to her side and took hold of the book. It was frozen to her fingers. I tugged, and pried it from her grasp. Slowly, her hands clenched into balls, but she did not lower her arms. I turned to place the book on the shelf and Brenda said in a small voice, “It doesn’t go there, Paul.”
“Damn it, Brenda!”
“I’m afraid,” she said. “Oh, God, I’m afraid. Someday I will open up the tableware drawer and find her baby spoon; or I’ll look under the sofa and find a ball that had rolled there forgotten. Or I’ll find one of her dresses bundled up in the wash. And I won’t be able to take it. Do you understand? Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any feelings at all? How can you look at that shelf and remember that her book had once lain there? Look at that kitchen table and remember her high chair and how we played airplane with her food? Look into a room full of toys, with no child any more to play with them? Everywhere I look I see an aching void.”
With a sudden rush of tenderness, I pulled her to me, but she remained stiff and unyielding in my arms. Yet, we all mourn in our own ways. “She did not die, Brenda. She’ll be OK.”
“This time. But, Paul, I can’t look forward to a lifetime looking back. At the little girl who grew up and grew old, and went away before I ever got to know her. Paul, it isn’t right. It isn’t right, Paul. It isn’t right for a child to die before the parent.”
“So, you’ll close her out of your mind? Is that the answer? Create the void now? You’ll push all those memories into one room and then close the door? You can’t do that. If we forget her, it will be as if she had never lived.”
She softened at last and her arms went around me. “What can I do? I’ve lost her, and I’ve lost you, and I’ve lost … everything.”
We stood there locked together. I could feel her small, tightly-controlled sobs trembling against me. Sometimes the reins have been held so close for so long that you can never drop them, never even know if they have been dropped. The damp of her tears seeped through my shirt. Past her, I could see the shelf with The Boxcar Children lying flat upon it and I tried to imagine how, in future years, I could ever look on that shelf again without grief.
“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear
Long, long ago; long, long ago.
Sing me the songs I delighted to hear
Long, long ago, long ago.”
Dee-dee was wired. There was a tube up her nose and another in her arm. A bag of glucose hung on a pole rack by her bed, steadily dripping into an accumulator and thence through the tube. A catheter took her wastes away. A pad on her finger and a cuff around her arm were plugged into a CRT monitor. I smiled when I saw she was awake.
“Hi, Daddy.” Her voice was weak and hoarse, a byproduct of the anaesthesia.
“Hi, Dee-dee. How do you feel?”
“Yucky.”
“Me, too. You’re a TV star.” I pointed to the monitor, where red and yellow and white lines hopped and skipped across the screen. Heart rate, blood pressure. Every time she breathed, the white line crested and dropped. She didn’t say anything and I listened for a moment to the sucking sound that the nose tube made. A kid trying for the last bit of soda in the can. The liquid it carried off was brown, which meant that there was still a little blood. “Connie is here.” I nodded to the other side of the bed.
Dee-dee turned her eyes, but not her head. “Hello, Connie. I can’t see you.”
Consuela moved a little into her field of vision. “Good morning, Little One. You have a splendid view from your window.”
“Nurse Jeannie told me that. Wish I could see.…”
“Then, I will tell you what it looks like. You can see the north end of town—all those lovely, old houses—and far off past them, on the edge of the world, the blue-ridge mountain wall and, in the very center of it, the Gap; and through the Gap, you can see the mountains beyond.”
“It sounds beautiful.…”
“Oh, it is. I wish I could be here instead of you, just so I could have the view.”
I looked up at Co
nnie when she said that and, for a moment, we locked gazes with one another. I could see the truth of her words in her eyes.
And then I saw surprise. Surprise and something else besides. I looked over my shoulder—and Brenda was standing there in the doorway, smartly dressed, on wobbly legs, with her purse clutched tightly in her hands before her.
“The nurses,” she said. “The nurses said she could have two visitors at a time.” Visiting was allowed every three hours, but only for an hour and only two visitors at a time. I was a doctor and Connie was a nurse and the staff cut us a little slack, but the rules were there for a reason. Consuela stood.
“I will leave.”
Brenda looked at her and caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her purse with military precision on a small table beside the bed. “I would like to spend some time with Deirdre, Paul. If you don’t mind.”
I nodded. As I stood up I gave Dee-dee a smile and a little squeeze on her arm. “Mommy’s here,” I told her.
Connie and I left them alone together (a curious expression, that—“alone together”) and waited in the outer nursing area. I didn’t eavesdrop, though I did overhear Brenda whisper at one point, “No, darling, it was never anything that you did wrong.” Maybe it wasn’t much, not when weighted against those years of inattention. It wasn’t much; but it wasn’t nothing. I knew—maybe for the first time—how much it cost Brenda to take on these memories, to take on the risks of remembering; because she was right. If in later years you remembered nothing, you would feel no pain.
And yet, I had seen two centuries of pain come washing back, bringing with it joy.
* * *
Children recover remarkably well. Drop them, and they bounce. Maybe not so high as before, but they do rebound. Dee-dee bore a solemn air about her for a day or two, sensing, without being told, that she had almost “gone away.” But to a child, a day is a lifetime, and a week is forever; and she was soon in the recovery ward, playing with the other children. Rheumatic children with heart murmurs; shaven-headed children staring leukemia in the face; broken children with scars and cigarette burns.… They played with an impossible cheerfulness, living, as most children did, in the moment. But then, the Now was all most of them would ever have.
There came a day when Dee-dee was not in her room when I arrived. Connie sat framed in a bright square of sunlight, reading a book. She looked up when I walked in. “Deirdre has gone to visit a new friend,” she said.
“Oh.” A strange clash of emotions: Happy she was up and about again, even if confined to a wheelchair; disappointed that she was not there to greet me.
“She will return soon, I think.”
“Well,” I said, “we had wanted her to become more active.”
Consuela closed her book and laid it on the small table beside her. “I suppose you will no longer need my services,” she said. She did not look at me when she said it, but out the window at the new-born summer.
“Not need you? Don’t be foolish.”
“She has her mother back, now.”
Every morning before work; every evening after. Pressing lost years into a few hours. “She still needs you.”
“The hospital staff cares for her now.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that she needs you, but that she needs you. You are not only her nurse.”
“If I take on new clients,” she went on as if I had not spoken, “I can do things properly. I can visit at the appointed times, perform my duties, and leave; and not allow them such a place in my heart when they are gone.”
“If people don’t leave a hole in your life when they are gone, Consuela, they were never in your life at all.”
She turned away from the window and looked at me. “Or two holes.”
I dropped my gaze, looked instead at the rumpled bed.
“In many ways,” I heard her say, “you are a cold man, Doctor. Uncaring and thoughtless. But it was the fruit of bitterness and despair. I thought you deserved better than you had. And you love her as deeply as I. If death could be forestalled by clinging tight, Deirdre would never leave us.”
I had no answer for her, but I allowed my eyes to seek out hers.
“I thought,” she said, “sometimes, at night, when I played my flute, that because we shared that love … that we could share another.”
“It must be lonely for you here, in a strange country, with a strange language and customs. No family and fewer friends. I must be a wretched man for never having asked.”
She shook her head. “You had your own worry. A large one that consumed you.”
“Consuela Montejo, if you leave, you would leave as great a hole in my life as in Dee-dee’s.”
“And in Mrs. Wilkes’s.” She smiled a little bit. “It is a very odd thing, but I believe that if I stayed I might even grow to like her.”
“She was frightened. She thought she could cauterize the wound before she received it. It was only when she nearly lost Dee-dee that she suddenly realized that she had never had her.”
Consuela stood and walked to the bed. She touched the sheet and smoothed it out, pulling the wrinkles flat. She shook her head. “It will hurt if I go; it will hurt if I stay. But Mrs. Wilkes deserves this one chance.”
I reached out and took her hand, and she reached out and took mine. Had Brenda walked in then, I do not know what she would have made of our embrace. I do not know what I made of it. I think I would have pulled Brenda in with us, the three of us arm in arm in arm.
* * *
The really strange thing was how inevitable it all was in hindsight.
When I left Consuela, I went to visit Mae. It had been nearly two weeks since I had last seen her and it occurred to me that the old bat might be lonely, too. And what the hell, she could put up with me and I could put up with her.
I found my Dee-dee in Mae Holloway’s room. The two of them had their heads bent close together, giggling over something. Deirdre was strapped to her electric wheelchair and Mae lay flat upon her bed; but I was struck by how alike they looked. Two gnarled and bent figures with pale, spotted skin stretched tight over their bones, lit from within by a pure, childlike joy. Two old women; two young girls. Deirdre looked up and saw me.
“Daddy! Granny Mae has been teaching me the most wonderful songs.”
Mae Holloway lifted her head a little. “Yours?” she said in a hoarse whisper. “This woman-child is yours?”
“Yes,” I said, bending to kiss Dee-dee’s cheek. “All mine.” No. Not all mine. There were others who shared her.
“Listen to the song Granny Mae taught me! It goes like this.”
I looked over Dee-dee’s head at the old woman. “She didn’t tell you?”
“Noor brought her in, but didn’t say aye, yea, or no. Just that she thought we should meet.”
Dee-dee began singing in her high, piping voice.
“The days go slowly by, Lorena.
The snow is on the grass again.
The years go slowly by Lorena.…”
“Her days are going by too fast, ain’t they?” Mae said. I nodded and saw how her eyes lingered on my little girl. “Growing old in the blink of an eye,” she said softly. “Oh, I know how that feels.”
“Granny Mae tells such interesting stories,” Dee-dee insisted. “Did you know she saw Abraham Lincoln one time?” I rubbed her thinning hair. Too young to know how impossible that was. Too young to doubt.
Mae’s hand sought out Dee-dee’s and clenched hold of it. “Doc, I’ll have me that operation.”
“What?”
“I’ll have me that operation. The one that’s supposed to make this tumor of mine go away. I’ll have it, even if my music and my memories go with it.”
“You will? Why?”
“Because I know why you been poking me and taking my blood. And I know why the Good Lord has kept me here for all this long time.”
* * *
Noor Khan was waiting in the hallway when I stepped out of the room.
“Ah, Doctor,” I said. “How are things at Sunny Dale?”
“Quiet,” she said. “Though the residents are all asking when you will be back.”
I shrugged. “Old people dislike upsets to their routine. They grew used to having me around.”
Khan said, “I never knew about your little girl. I heard it from Smythe. Why did you never tell me?”
I shrugged again. “I never thought it was anyone’s business.”
Khan accepted the statement. “After you told Wing and me of Mae’s remarkable longevity, I knew you were taking blood samples to that genetic engineering firm—”
“Singer and Peeler.”
“Yes. I thought you had … other reasons.”
“What, that I would find the secret of the Tree of Life?” I shook my head. “I never thought to ask for so much. Mae has lived most her life as an old woman. I would not count that a blessing. But to live a normal life? To set right what had come out wrong? Yes, and I won’t apologize. Neither would you, if it were your daughter.”
“Is Singer close? To a solution?”
“I don’t know. Neither do they. We won’t know how close we are until we stumble right into it. But we’ve bought a little time now, thanks to you. Is that why you did it? Because you knew that meeting my daughter would convince Mae to accept the Culver-Blaese gene therapy?”
Khan shook her head. “No. I never even thought of that.”
“Then, why?”
“Sometimes,” said Khan, looking back into the room where the young girl and the old girl taught each other songs. “Sometimes, there are other medicines, for other kinds of hurts.”
I seek no more the fine and gay,
For each does but remind me
How swift the hours did pass away
With the girl I left behind me.
They are all gone now. All gone. Mae, Dee-dee, all of them. Consuela was first. Brenda’s partnership arrangement with FitzPatrick—telecommuting, they called it—left no place for her at the house. She came to visit Dee-dee, and she and Brenda often met for coffee—what they talked about I do not know—but she stopped coming after Dee-dee passed on and I have not seen her in years.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 39
