by Karen Foxlee
“Well, it was a tricky one,” said Professor Cole.
He touched Davey’s head, remembering.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked Davey and he smiled his big gap-toothed smile.
“I sure did,” said Professor Cole. He didn’t really look at Mother so much for this version, just concentrated on Davey. “They were big and a little unusual. But I’m sure I got them all.”
Like he was talking about fish he’d caught.
“I would like you to try some experimental radiation,” said Professor Cole.
“Radiation,” said Davey slowly, his eyes wide. “Like what happened to the Incredible Hulk?”
It made Professor Cole laugh.
“We’d give you a little less than the Incredible Hulk,” he said. “Aim it at the right spots in your brain.”
“Holy Batman. I’m gonna be zapped,” Davey whispered.
“I’ll have a chat with your mother later, Davey, you need to rest right now,” said Professor Cole. “Resting is good. Put your feet up and rest.”
My mother told me the version for her was different. Professor Cole packed his smile away. Outside the office Mother had been taken to there was a steady procession of patients and nurses and carts bumping and rumbling. The charge nurse came and stood beside her.
“That’s one fine boy you have there,” was how he started.
Mother exploded into tears.
“Now, Mrs. Spink, the operation went well, but they were unusual tumours, and in fact, I’m going to be honest with you, the strangest tumours I’ve ever seen,” said Professor Cole. “In most children I’ve treated these tumours look a certain way but these were different. The lab test will show us one way or other. Whatever it is, it’s a rare thing we’re dealing with here, I believe, and while I’m pretty sure I got it all I think some radiation would be good. We’ll start as soon as possible.”
Later, my mother told me all she could think was how fine her boy was. How it showed. How everyone who met him was charmed by his smile and kindness. She just couldn’t quite take Professor Cole’s words in.
“Yes, I’d like to try some radiation,” Professor Cole said, “With your consent of course. It’s a new and exciting field. We zap him with some radiation. Zap any tiny little remainders of tumour cell. Then we watch and monitor. But there are side effects. Sometimes brain damage, sometimes seizures, sometimes we go the other way with hormones, not enough, not enough of the boy hormones.”
“How are you doing, sweetie?” said the charge nurse.
“I’m okay,” said Mother.
“You’re doing great,” said the charge nurse.
“Does he really need the radiation?” Mother asked. She couldn’t quite fathom it.
“I believe he does,” said Professor Cole. “And then we’ll see. We’ll wait and see. This first year will tell us, we’ll see how much he grows this year.”
“How do I know what is a right amount?” asked Mother, like she was measuring a thimbleful of something.
“A little is fine, a lot is not,” said Professor Cole.
“A lot of girls nowadays never get to feel the wind in their hair,” said Great-Aunt Em. “Riding a horse ought to be something they teach in schools.”
“Much better than math,” I agreed.
We were eating bacon sandwiches and it was my third visit and Mrs. Gaspar thought I was doing her laundry at Bubbly Betty’s Laundromat. I’d put her delicates in the washing machine and fed it coins and run out of there as quick as I could. I’d run through those spring streets like I was an Olympic sprint star and so that when I got there I had to bend over with my hands on my knees and Great-Aunt Em said, “Whoa, pull up a pew and catch your breath.”
“Let me look at you,” she said. “Yes, I see your grandmother in you. I see her there, all right. She was a pretty girl, Ez, oh, she was pretty with her golden hair, everywhere she went people saw fit to comment on how pretty she was.”
I had to try and breathe over the size of my heart.
“What can you tell me about my father?” I asked on my third visit. I had to work up the courage. I tried to say it casually, like I was asking for some more ketchup. But I wanted to know things. In between Em with her dimples and me with mine, there was Peter Lenard Spink, an empty hole. I wanted to know what he ate for breakfast when he was a boy, if he rode a bicycle, if he did his homework.
“Well, I’ll have to think on that,” said Great-Aunt Em. “In the meantime, what do you think about running an errand for me to the grocery store?”
“Of course,” I said.
I thought of Mrs. Gaspar’s undies, not even dried yet.
“Your mama won’t be worried, will she?” she asked.
“No, she’s still away with Davey. He has to have radiation on his brain,” I said. Those undies never needed long in the dryer.
“Radiation,” she cried. “Oh Lord, don’t be telling them about me then. They don’t need any shocks, certainly not Davey.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” I promised.
Mrs. Gaspar was angry when I got home, and with her delicates still damp.
“What?” she cried. “Le-o-nor-a.”
“I’m sorry, I went to the comic shop and then the time just flew,” I pleaded. I’d bought a whole basket of groceries for my secret great-aunt. Mysterious things like denture adhesive and coal tar soap and powdered milk. I smiled at Mrs. Gaspar, just the way Em would, a little wicked. I felt sneaky and sneaky didn’t feel too bad. Sneaky made me feel alive. “Let me make you some tea, Mrs. Gaspar. It was just an accident.”
When Davey came home from the hospital, I was allowed to meet him and Mother down at the Greyhound bus station. I thought he might walk with crutches and have bandages on his head, but he didn’t. I was never more relieved to see him. He looked thinner but no taller. His head had been shaved for the radiation therapy. He came down the bus stairs a little unsteadily, but carrying his F volume and grinning. Mother came after him, small and rumpled-looking.
“Lenore,” she said and hugged me so hard I felt winded.
“How are you feeling, Davey?” I asked. They’d been gone five whole weeks.
“I’m not too bad,” said Davey, and he held out his arms and looked at them, and then down at his body, as though to check he was all still there. We laughed. I told them to look up and there was Mrs. Gaspar at her bedroom window, waving and even from there we could see her ecstatic smile. I knew there would be talk of miracles.
In the stairwell, I told them about the letter from Martha Brent.
I told them how we already had all the Hs and that some of the I issues had arrived too.
“Hawks, Davey,” I said.
“Hawks!” shouted Davey.
“Hawks,” I said.
“Are you kidding me!” shouted Davey. I loved his face like that.
“I’m not kidding you!” I shouted back.
We were shouting and laughing so much and Mother was shushing us so much that we didn’t hear the footsteps behind us in the stairwell.
It was Mr. Petersburg, again, one level down. He must have been moving slowly to avoid us. We mightn’t have even noticed him at all if he hadn’t accidentally dropped a letter on the floor. Davey looked over the railing.
“Mr. Petersburg!” he cried.
“Davey,” whispered Mother.
Mr. Petersburg looked deeply embarrassed to have been discovered. Frightened too. He bent down to pick up his letter. He said something, but we couldn’t make it out. He wore his powder-blue suit and his white hair was combed back severely over his white skull. The letters trembled in his very white hand.
“Hello, Mr. Petersburg,” said Mother and she was pulling Davey by the arm away from the railing. She was pushing me in the back to make me keep walking. I craned my neck to catch another glimpse of him. He was pretending to look for another letter, as though he’d dropped two, not one.
“Oh man,” said Davey when he’d been tugged in fro
nt of Mrs. Gaspar’s door and Mrs. Gaspar was opening it and shouting out a hallelujah. Davey was being enfolded into her arms just as Mr. Petersburg made it to the landing. I looked back, before Mrs. Gaspar’s door closed, to see him gliding silently across the floor.
Our eyes met for just a heartbeat and then the door was shut.
“Did you see him?” I said to Davey, to Mother, to Mrs. Gaspar.
“Oh man,” mumbled Davey, from Mrs. Gaspar’s shaggy bosom, “I saw him. I saw Mr. Petersburg again. I think this is the best day of my life.”
Mother told Mrs. Gaspar the story in the shrine-to-the-Apollo-landing kitchen. The shrine to Neil Armstrong. The shrine to the moon. She told the story while Davey slept on Mrs. Gaspar’s sofa. He fell asleep just like that, about ten minutes after he got in the door. I bit my bottom lip and watched him.
Mother picked at a piece of tape holding a newspaper article to the wall. Smoothed it down, picked again. She explained the operation to Mrs. Gaspar. She explained the tumours. “They were unusual, he said. He thinks he got them all.” She explained the radiation as best she could. “They shaved his head and drew an X in marker pen, so they knew where to zap him.”
“They zapped him!” shouted Mrs. Gaspar, who read The Incredible Hulk comics when Davey was finished with them. “Oh, Cyn-thi-a, I do not like to hear such things.”
I sat listening on the floor, my back against the door frame, my legs stretched up, examining my holy trinity of warts. Davey slept on.
“Yes,” said Mother, finger up to her lips. “Zap.”
“I don’t like this zap,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
“He had three zaps,” said Mother. “And he might need more. He needs his blood tested in three months. The zapping didn’t affect him so much. The professor was pleased. It’s just made him mighty sleepy but sleepy is normal.”
The next day, Mother discussed it with Mr. King. He couldn’t wait to get up to our apartment the minute he knew they were back. His eyes needed to goggle all over her. He listened absentmindedly, holding three large Valencia oranges.
He listened to the word tumours and the word operation and the word radiation, but they didn’t much affect him. They pinged off him like he was wearing armour.
“So we just watch and wait now and he has his blood checked again in three months,” she said.
“You need me to take you out to dinner,” I heard him say. “Somewhere special. You need a break from all this worrying.”
I felt Mother bristle. I could feel it even from the living room. My bristle radar was highly tuned. I saw her relieve him of his oranges and put them down, rather hard, into the fruit bowl. Mother was making meatloaf. The house had a meat-loafy smell that forever after would remind me of Mr. King. Davey was looking at inventions. I was itching for insects but he wouldn’t hand over the issue.
“Come on,” I said quietly. “You’ve been on that page forever.” It made him stay on it even longer.
The I issues had been a mixed-up affair. I contained some exciting things. Igneous rock, for instance, which meant fire rock. It came from volcanoes. Most moon rock was igneous. I contained thundering impalas and of course insects. But mostly it was severe and no nonsense. It contained Iceland and Ireland and Iowa. Immunity. Irony. Indianapolis.
“You leave him alone, Lenore,” said Mother, because she had a new fully operational anyone-being-mean-to-Davey radar. “He can stay on inventions as long as he likes.”
Mr. King came to the kitchen door. He smirked under his bristle brush. I stared straight through him like he was just a speck of dust.
Davey looked at inventions: tinned cans and pneumatic tyres and thermometers. Muskets and wheels and steamboats and telegraphs. He perused them slowly, closing his eyes from time to time to think. He looked at adding machines and a spinning jenny and a rotary printing press.
“Are you messing with me?” I said under my breath. He ignored me.
The radiation had not just made him super-sleepy, it had also made him super-annoying.
“You hitting school again when summer vacation is done, Davey boy?” asked Mr. King.
“Sure am,” said Davey.
“Well, that will depend,” said Mother, “on how you are feeling.”
“Whether I need more zapping,” said Davey and he put his fingers to his head and made the sound of a Space Family Robinson laser gun.
He really made me laugh sometimes.
“Stop that right this instant,” cried Mother.
“I can’t wait for school,” he said, mostly to calm Mother down. “I hope that Miss Schweitzer is my teacher again, and I’m in a class with Teddy and Warren. Even Fletcher.”
Teddy had sent him a letter in the hospital. He’d included a photo of his grandpa’s Golden Jubilee tractor. Davey put it on our dresser right beside my jewellery box which contained no jewellery, but the unstuck sticker my father gave me from Buffalo, Wyoming.
Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink.
I said it quietly in bed at night. I wondered what Great-Aunt Em had remembered about him. She would remember something good about him, I knew it. She’d remember a story and she’d tell me that story. I couldn’t see his face anymore but it didn’t matter now because in the darkness I could see her face. I saw my great-aunt. I thought of my great-aunt. I didn’t tell Davey.
I:
Insects
7 years
5’ 6”
SUMMER 1976
The I issues were clicked into the I volume cover. Iambic meter to Ivory. I gave the insects entry ten out of ten. It set out the major classifications of the Phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta: the beetles, the mantids and cockroaches, the true flies and mayflies and dragonflies, the butterflies and moths and ants and bees and stick insects.
I caught a carpet beetle in Mrs. Gaspar’s apartment. I looked it up in the beetle issue, but also reconfirmed its identity in American Beetles at the library. I didn’t want to tell Mrs. Gaspar that there were probably larvae in her closets or her linen chest munching away on her tablecloths from Hungary. I kept it in CJ’s bug catcher, knowing full well it wouldn’t live long.
Davey watched me watching the carpet beetle.
“What if Mother finds out?” he said.
That question made me jump inside my skin, but then I realized he was only talking about the beetle.
“She never will,” I said. And Great-Aunt Em was heavy inside me. The sneakiness didn’t feel so good now that Davey was home.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Davey about our great-aunt. I did. I had it all there, aching to tell him. It’s one thing to keep a normal secret. I was a small-scale secret-keeping expert. The perfume bottle in the doll-shaped bottle sent to me by Nanny Flora that I poured down the toilet. That was going with me to my grave. Mrs. Gaspar’s yellow tea that I’d grown adept at tossing down the sink when her back was turned, that was an easy quick secret, no problem at all.
But an entire great-aunt. An entire person, all bony and angular and whiskery and filled with cackling laughter. All nylon stockings and strange orthotic shoes. All stories and sizzling bacon fat and radio violins. That secret was huge. Each time I looked at Davey, I knew I had to tell him, but each time I went to tell him, my thoughts clogged up. The secret sat on my tongue like a spoonful of peanut butter.
CJ saw it when I went to her house for a sleepover.
“What in blazes is wrong with you, Lenny?” said CJ.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re thinking about something, all right,” said CJ and she raised her pale eyebrows.
“What’s up with you, Lenny?” Mother said at the dinner table and I jumped.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Mrs. Gaspar in her living room.
“I’m not thinking anything,” I said. But I was. I was thinking up excuses for why I needed to go somewhere in the afternoon without Davey. Why I needed to be absent for two hours. I went with CJ
to the park. I needed to go to the library. I really wanted to go to the comic-book shop. Davey’s asleep, I’ll just go for a little while.
Really, I was running, the moon-rock-coloured buildings flying past me. I was running and I was running and every step felt like parts of me were flying off, parts of me I didn’t like, parts of me I didn’t need, the wind was taking them and throwing them behind me. I was pressing the buzzer and rushing up the dim staircase and I was telling Great-Aunt Em about my day.
“Something is going down with you,” said Mrs. Gaspar, using the words of Starsky, and she looked at me very suspiciously.
My carpet beetle died. When Mrs. Gaspar wasn’t watching, I searched in her closet for the woolly bear, which was the name of the larvae. I didn’t find any, although I found a fur coat that was so thick and heavy it must have been a real complete bear. I whispered to Davey to come see what I found. “Holy Batman,” he said. “Is that a grizzly?” We’d never seen Mrs. Gaspar wear it.
While Mother was at work, we walked to the park together, even Mrs. Gaspar, and I wished I could break loose from them and see Great-Aunt Em. I tried some excuses. I said, “Maybe I’ll just go to the library instead, I’ve got a headache.”
“Nonsense, dumpling,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “A beautiful summer day is good for headaches.”
“I forgot my matchbox, in case I find a beetle. I’ll just run home and get it.”
“Nonsense, dumpling,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “We will put this beetle in my handbag.”
I breathed deeply and tried not to think of Great-Aunt Em, all alone.
In the park, Davey lay in the sunshine on the grass. He watched the sky. I could tell he was imagining Timothy, his eagle. “How does your head feel, dumpling?” asked Mrs. Gaspar.
“It feels just fine,” smiled Davey.
“I think you have stopped growing,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
Davey said, “I sure hope so.”
I found a stick insect in the park and with much ceremony and concern I placed it inside Mrs. Gaspar’s handbag. I didn’t know if it would survive the cigarette smell in there, but when we were home I gently extracted it and placed it in the newly vacated bug catcher. It was the biggest insect I had kept so far.
