B07FRVD7VN

by Karen Foxlee

  “No,” she said.

  A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. I tried to keep my frown.

  “We’re just fine, us three,” she said.

  “Cindy!” he said. Like that was the stupidest thing he ever heard. How could a woman and two kids be okay?

  “Yes,” she said. “Just fine.”

  “You heard what she said, Mr. King,” said Davey.

  “You keep your great big nose out of it,” said Mr. King. But he didn’t just mean big nose, he meant big, oversized, giant body. Big was Mother’s least favourite word. And that was Mr. King, unclothed, and the wolf out. But he wasn’t even a wolf. That would do wolves an injustice. He was mangy and cunning and he licked his lips.

  “Cindy,” he said, like it was all still solvable.

  “No,” she said.

  He dropped the flowers he was carrying to the ground. He pinched the bridge of his nose again, like he was trying to keep his brain in, that’s how much we pained him.

  Mother seemed glad to meet the real Mr. King. She smiled.

  “Goodbye, Mr. King,” she said.

  Davey had a monumental headache two nights before his bus trip to see Professor Cole. All the other headaches paled beside this one. This one came without warning on a Tuesday night at Mrs. Gaspar’s while Mother was on her evening shift.

  “Ouch,” said Davey. “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.”

  He leaned forward in his chair where he was reading The Incredible Hulk.

  “What’s wrong, Davey?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a pain in my head,” he said. He didn’t sound happy.

  I stood up feeling scared. He held his head in his hands, one hand on either side, hard. “Ouch,” he said, long and slow, gritting his teeth.

  Mrs. Gaspar took off her respirator and blamed the Incredible Hulk.

  “Too much nonsense, too much excitement, too much, too much for little boys nowadays.”

  I touched Davey’s head as gently as I could.

  “Maybe lie down,” I said. “See if that helps.”

  He lay down on his side on the couch.

  “Ouch,” he said and he sprang straight up again. Mrs. Gaspar went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water and two pink pills. She looked worried now too. “Davey,” she said. “Open your eyes.”

  “No, I can’t,” he said, sounding very certain.

  Karl and Karla watched the events like interested spectators. I put the pills in his big hand, and he lifted them up to his mouth. He swallowed the water.

  “Ouch,” he said, as though even that hurt him.

  “What about lying on the cot?”

  “Okay,” he said. He got up with his eyes closed and I walked him there.

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “But it’s just my head really hurts,” he said.

  “Just lie still,” I said. “Stop talking.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  Mrs. Gaspar brought a wet dishcloth. I put it on his head. He sighed.

  “Is that goot?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  His big hand came up into the air and I didn’t know what he wanted, so I took it.

  It was what he wanted.

  “Just lie still,” I said. “Mother will be home soon. Everything will be okay.”

  March 1, 1977

  Apartment 15, 762 Second Street

  Grayford, Ohio 44002

  Dear Martha,

  Thank you for the yearbook and for your kind wishes. I’ve been wanting to reply and thank you for so long now but a lot has been happening here. Davey did well after his operation for almost eight months but now he has had a growth spurt and we’re returning very soon to see the specialist. Both Lenore and Davey helped to raise money for the bus fare. Davey gave all his Junior Sales Club proceeds and they both did odd jobs for a neighbor. Can you believe it? They have contributed nearly ten dollars and I am so proud of them. I really have the best children in the world. I don’t know what this next appointment will bring, but Dr. Leopold said some children have more than one operation. We are prepared for anything and you couldn’t meet a finer boy than Davey, who is so very brave. The children are very excited about the upcoming R issues.

  Thank you again for your letter,

  Cynthia Spink.

  * * *

  March 7, 1977

  Burrell’s Publishing Company Ltd

  7001 West Washington Street

  Indianapolis, Indiana 46241

  OUR GIFT TO YOU IS THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE

  Dear Cynthia,

  We are so sad to hear of Davey’s troubles. What wonderful children you have, though, to be raising money for your bus fares. We certainly hope that Davey doesn’t need any further operations. Please keep us informed of his progress and we are thinking of him at Burrell’s headquarters. In the meanwhile, enclosed is a book that we think he will like very much. It is from our Earth Series, a twelve-volume set that takes a look at the earth’s animals, plants, and minerals. This volume contains the birds! You can subscribe to the whole set for as little as $2.99 per week.

  We hope Davey enjoys the birds very much! There are two whole pages on falcons.

  Yours truly,

  Martha Brent

  General Sales Manager

  * * *

  P.S. I’m thinking of you all so much.

  Searching

  5’ 11”

  MARCH 1977

  The day Davey went on the bus, Mrs. Gaspar shed dog hair and dandruff as she blessed him. He sat on her sofa and took it good-naturedly.

  “Holy Father, we are praying that the news is good, and if Professor Cole does another operation, he has steady hands,” she said.

  “We are praying for Mrs. Spink, for You to give her strength and courage.”

  “We are praying for all the nurses to be goot and kind.”

  “We are praying for Davey to come home quickly and safely and the bus driver is a goot bus driver.”

  “Okay,” said Mother in a gap between all the praying. “We’ve got to get going or we’ll miss the bus.”

  After they were gone, I knew all the blessing would come back onto me. When I was left alone with her, there would be a blessing frenzy. It would be like drowning in quicksand.

  “Stand up, Davey,” said Mother. “Say thank you to Mrs. Gaspar.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Gaspar,” said Davey. “Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, Karla.”

  Mrs. Gaspar threw herself at him when he was up.

  “You are a beautiful boy,” she cried and pressed her head into Davey’s chest. Her faded orange beehive hit him square in the face and he pushed it gently to one side and smiled at me. It made me giggle.

  He laughed in return. The old way. The way we were used to.

  “Be a good girl,” said Mother to me.

  “I will be,” I said.

  She meant, Don’t go and find a weird lady and pretend she is your family. My cheeks caught fire with the shame of it. Mother looked away from me.

  “I know you will be,” she said as tenderly as Cindy Spink could speak.

  Davey had his suitcase and the F volume under his arm.

  Mrs. Gaspar let out a wail and her beehive tilted to one side.

  “Goodbye, Davey boy,” I said.

  “Goodbye, Lenny,” he replied.

  Since Davey’s operation, I had felt like I’d been absent in my mind and heart. I was there in all those scenes of our life, but I was a carbon copy of me, a rock-throwing automaton of me. I looked out from the window at the end of the third-floor hall and I saw them looking up. Davey waved, Mother too. Then the silver bus door closed and they were gone.

  I went back through the volumes looking for where I’d disappeared. Quicksand, quasars, pilot fish, Portugal, oarfish, Annie Oakley standing there with her gun, nitrogen, the Napoleonic Wars. Nefertiti. Nebulae. Neptune. New
foundland dogs and Norwegian elkhounds. All the New things. New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico. New York, New Orleans, New South Wales. All the North things. The Normans, nuclear energy, nutrition.

  Maine.

  Macedonia.

  Malta.

  It was earlier, I knew. It was later. It was nowhere.

  I went slowly.

  Libraries. Lightning. Literature.

  London. Longitude. Love (see Emotion).

  Knights, knifes, kites.

  The street map of Jerusalem.

  Igneous rock.

  Hungary. Horsehair snakes. The human body with clear plastic overlays.

  I located the peanut-sized pituitary gland.

  I placed my finger there as though I could obliterate it with my anger and my sadness.

  Great Britain, Great Depression, Great Falls, Great Wall of China, Great Lakes. Great-Aunt Em.

  “What are you thinking of, dumpling?” asked Mrs. Gaspar.

  The worst thing was, I hated to think of her alone. Sitting there waiting for something. Just skin and bones and memories. Maybe I was the last person she’d ever see. Lonely people needed care. They couldn’t help themselves. They were too lonely for that. They would just sit there and fade. They would droop like potted plants without water. They would wither and dry and turn to dust.

  How could I tell Mrs. Gaspar that?

  “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  “Tell me now,” she said.

  Loneliness was like a town. You found yourself there. You didn’t even know how it happened. And there were no buses out. No trains. People had to come in. Like loneliness rescue teams.

  “That lady who said she was my aunt,” I started.

  “She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Mrs. Gaspar.

  But I didn’t agree. She was wild bright memories in plucked chicken skin.

  “She was lonely,” I said. “She is lonely.”

  “Do I steal children because I am lonely?” said Mrs. Gaspar indignantly.

  I had never thought of Mrs. Gaspar as lonely. Not once, but I saw a film of tears in her old rheumy eyes.

  “She is a bitter pill you cannot swallow,” said Mrs. Gaspar, as though it was the final word on the matter.

  She is a bitter pill you cannot swallow. She is a bitter pill you cannot swallow. She is a bitter pill you cannot swallow. I said those words. I recited those words. I sang those words but my heart answered back, not true, not true, not true. She was skies. She was gulches. She was horses and hair blowing in the wind. She was stars and campfires and long roads. She was long ago. She was bad advice that made me feel alive.

  She was a big fat hurt. She was nothing but lies. She was a glorious blaze of big fat lies. I hated her. And I missed her. She was my chance to find my father, to build him up again from all his broken parts, and now that chance was gone.

  It was my father going. That was when I disappeared.

  My mother told me that Davey was unsteady on that bus and everybody stared. He leaned outrageously to one side. He careered down the aisle and fell into his seat.

  “Sorry,” he said, smiling.

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Mother. “You’re just doing your best.”

  These are the things they did to him:

  They measured him.

  They made him blow in the lung testing machine.

  They tested his heart.

  They took his blood.

  They operated on him again. They went up through his nose.

  They zapped him several times with radioactive rays.

  But he grew one more inch while he was there.

  They took Mother to a small room behind the nurses’ station to speak to Professor Cole. He was waiting there for her, behind a desk, weary and rumpled. Professor Cole did not close the door. He waited until the charge nurse arrived, a large woman, with a steely gaze. She looked prepared, she knew what was coming, and she took Mother’s shoulders.

  “More than anything,” Mother said once to me, a long time later. When I was grown-up and did indeed live elsewhere, when the future had spilled out of me. “More than anything, I just didn’t want to be apart from him. In that office, I just wanted to be back beside him. Their words, I heard them and they were terrible, but not as terrible as being apart from him.”

  The nurse’s hands caressed her shoulders. My mother was not the sort to be caressed.

  “It’s not so good, Mrs. Spink. I tried to get as much as I could but the way those tumours are, he will just keep growing. They’re the strangest tumours and I’ve never seen tumours like them,” said Professor Cole. “Do you understand?”

  “No, not really,” said Mother. “I mean, he would have to stop eventually.”

  There was a silence.

  “There are lots of problems associated with growing so big,” said Professor Cole.

  She was thinking of his pants. Of the seam allowance. Of his bed. Of the size of our little apartment.

  “It’s like a tangled knot, a perfectly tangled knot. I tried as hard as I could, Mrs. Spink. His eyesight will be a problem. He was already losing some sight, right?”

  “He will become blind,” translated the charge nurse.

  My mother stopped thinking about pants. Started thinking about blindness. She couldn’t quite get there. It didn’t make any sense yet.

  “His heart will be strained. Heart strain and organ failure in general are the complications. He already has some heart failure. You would have seen how his ankles swell,” said Professor Cole. “Do you understand, Mrs. Spink?”

  “He will die from this disease,” said the charge nurse.

  Mother looked at them like they were from outer space.

  “I’ve got to get back,” she said. “He might wake up and I have to be there.”

  “We’ve done everything we can,” said Professor Cole.

  “I’d hate him to wake up and I’m not there,” repeated Mother.

  “Of course,” said Professor Cole.

  They were gone three and a half weeks. On the bus home, they had a paper bag of food that a friendly nurse had packed for them. Things stolen from the hospital kitchen because she knew that living in the small hotel across the road from the hospital had nearly run Mother out of money. And also they all loved Davey. He said things like, That’s a pretty bow in your hair, and you’ve got stand-out-from-the-crowd eyes. You look tired, and maybe you should go home to bed, to the cranky ones, so that even they loved him too.

  They left in the afternoon. The bus took forever to get out of the city, which was choked with traffic, but when they were on the outskirts, where the farmhouses were, and then the beginning of the fields, evening came. It came rushing toward them and the sky was filled suddenly with storm clouds and Mother said, “I hope there are no tornadoes.”

  Across the aisle, a woman with a breathtaking array of beaded braids upon her head said, “No, honey, you can feel them in the air, these are just ordinary storm clouds.”

  And Mother smiled with relief because honestly that was all she needed on top of everything else.

  “How’d you get so big, mister?” asked the woman. There was no not-answering her. Her hair rattled on her head while she waited.

  “I have a condition,” said Davey.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. The bus quietened down, all the chattering and the rustling of packets; someone shushed a small child. They all wanted to know.

  “It’s some tumours that keep on growing in my brain and they make me grow real big and now nothing can be done to stop it. No one’s ever seen tumours like mine. They just keep growing back no matter how many times they get zapped with radiation. I’m one of a kind. I’m just going to keep growing, the Professor said. His name is Cole.”

  “Nothing at all to be done?” said the woman.

  “No, I’ll just keep growing up and up,” said Davey.

  He said it kind of joyfully.

  The people on the bus digested that. The clouds and the sky were
black. There were no stars at all. Mother longed for the stars.

  The woman with the braids thought about it too.

  “You seem like a very brave boy,” she said at last. “Maybe you are the bravest boy I will ever have the chance to meet.”

  Davey smiled. His disarming charming smile. Then the rain hit the side of the bus. It slapped into the side of the bus in a great spray, and then, as the bus turned toward the east, it hit it front on, a great clattering of rain that smothered up all the other sounds. It wrapped it up in its drumming, the sound of tyres on wet asphalt, it swallowed up Davey’s story, and the woman reached across the aisle and patted him on the arm. Cindy Spink closed her eyes. She couldn’t keep them open a minute longer.

  She slept, and Davey too, all the way home.

  Growing Pains

  6’ 0”

  LATE APRIL 1977

  R was a straightforward affair. There were no surprises. I ran down the stairs every Friday for the issues and brought them back up to Davey, who lay waiting on the sofa. R contained ravens, the Renaissance, Rhode Island. It contained radio, radar, and radiation. “There is nothing I don’t know about radiation,” said Davey. I sat beside him and read from rocket ships. I read to him about the great rivers of the world. But most of all I read to him about raptors.

  “‘Harpy eagles have a wingspan of up to six and a half feet. They can carry a whole baby deer. Golden eagles can kill bobcats. Birds of prey have the sharpest vision of any animal in the world. Female bald eagles are bigger than males. Sometimes eagle chicks eat their brothers or sisters.’”

  “Davey,” said Mother, exasperated, though she didn’t want to sound mad. “Maybe Lenny could read you something else. Maybe some other kind of birds.”

  “But raptors are the best kind of birds,” he said.

  He fed his imaginary golden eagle, Timothy, an imaginary crumb.

  He grew steadily. A new kind of growing. His joints ached. His feet swelled. They were a long way from the top of him. He was exhausted. We stopped twice on our walk to school for him to sit down. He slept when he got home from school.