Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  Farley just looked at me for a moment, and even though his expression was serious, I liked that his eyes always seemed to be smiling. I didn’t even feel self-conscious like I usually would have if someone else had looked at me for that long.

  ‘You are the quirkiest person I have met, Jane. I don’t think you could hide that behind mundane clothes if you tried.’

  ‘It takes one to know one,’ I said, as if I were five, and dipped my head to zip my coat so he wouldn’t see just how widely I was smiling.

  Weekends in our house, when Emma is in the hospital, which seems like all of the time, follow a pretty regular pattern. We have our routine and it doesn’t just keep the house from falling down, it keeps us from thinking about what we are missing in our ‘life before Emma got sick’.

  Here is the thing. People think that when something really bad happens, you will be lost, not know what to do. ‘Everything falls apart,’ is what people think. But that isn’t true at all. Sure, maybe there’s a moment or so when you aren’t sure what you should do – and I’m thinking here more about when Grandad died, not when Emma was first diagnosed – but it doesn’t last. What happens is, you just find a new routine in the chaos. You find a new way to cope. Things are not upside down at all; habits just shift a little sideways.

  Instead of running Emma around to dance practices and recitals, Mom started running her around to doctors’ appointments. Instead of spending his time in the garage doing some sort of wood working stuff, Dad worked overtime at the mine. Instead of lying around the house moaning about how everyone should get off my back, I got a boyfriend and lay around his house eating bags of potato chips and racing cars on his console. It was all the same, only less.

  So when Emma was in the hospital, our new weekend routine kicked in. Dad spent Saturdays at the hospital with Emma, while Mom tried to get the house in some sort of order for the week again. I was supposed to help her. Then Sunday morning we all went to Red River, and I went in to spend time with Emma first, while Mom and Dad went out for breakfast and to discuss whatever it was that ‘the kids’ were not supposed to overhear. I bet you it’s money they talked about. Or lack of it.

  The envelopes marked ‘urgent’ filling the letter box seemed to be multiplying weekly. I tried not to think about those envelopes; they were just another reminder that life was not getting any better. I mean, it wasn’t getting any worse either. There weren’t any big guys in black showing up at our door to carry away the television.

  But if I really thought about it, there probably was a lot to worry about. I knew that it had cost a lot for Mom to do her law degree, though most of it was by distance education. Even before Emma got sick and Mom couldn’t work at all, I had woken up more than once to Mom and Dad discussing how Mom playing solitaire in an office all day wasn’t going to pay the bills. Discussing may not be the right word, but you get the picture.

  That is the other thing about Bad Things That Happen. It isn’t the Bad Thing itself that you think about most of the time. It’s all of the little things that didn’t seem so bad before, that slowly get bigger and wear you down. But because of the Bad Thing, you can’t really stop just carrying on. And the worst thing is that everybody only wants to help you with the Bad Thing, when they can’t help you one bit with it. People ask what they can do, but only for the first while, because after you say oh thanks, nothing really a few times, they get bored and get on with their lives. But what they want to do is fix the Bad Thing, which is impossible. And what you really need is help with the little things, which are getting bigger, like the paint that continued to peel off our house and the dishes that never stopped piling up in the sink.

  Once, when a teacher asked me if there was anything she could help me with, I suggested she give me the answer sheet to the next quiz. I was joking of course, but she didn’t think it was so funny. I’m sure it took her ages to work up the courage to even say anything and she was probably expecting me to cry. Then she could have given me a big hug and felt like she had done something.

  I’m rambling a bit. I do that sometimes. What I meant to say, was that this weekend was the first weekend in ages that I noticed our Weekend Hospital Routine, particularly how utterly boring it had become. Maybe I did notice it before, but I just hadn’t been able to find the energy to care.

  This weekend was different. I don’t know why, but I felt like I could do something about it. After the hospital scene and the horrible necklace thing, I should have felt like crawling into bed and sleeping all day. That’s pretty much what I usually did after a reasonably good week.

  Maybe Farley was right. Maybe I had just needed to change my perspective to make my life better, because that Saturday seemed to be the best in a long, long time. Even though there wasn’t really anything different about it.

  Well, my new camera was different. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of getting one before. I know it sounds completely ridiculous, but looking through a camera window was like seeing the world for the first time. Normally, I see too much. There are too many details in the world – lines and colours and textures and shades and shadows, not to mention how they all form actual things. It’s hard to take it all in sometimes. But with a camera, there’s a frame around one bit of it. Move the frame, and you have another bit of it. It’s like you can create a billion little universes just by shifting that frame.

  And then, what you think you saw and froze in a photo, might be totally different when you download it. After I helped Mom with the chores – and for once I really did do that, two loads of laundry, and both bathrooms cleaned, sort of a peace offering I guess, after embarrassing her so badly during the week – I started to look through the photos I had taken on Friday afternoon.

  Farley had given me a photo program to load on my laptop too, so I started to play around with the images. That gave me the tools to create fifty billion more universes. Time just seemed to melt away. One minute it was six o’clock in the evening and the next minute it was four o’clock in the morning.

  I wasn’t looking forward to waking up after the meagre four hours sleep I was going to get.

  Mom was in the kitchen before I was ready for her to be awake. I’d woken up thinking that I must have overslept and that the time on my phone was wrong. I’d went downstairs to check the time there, and it was only seven am, so I thought I’d just have a drink of water and go back to sleep. But when I turned from the sink, there was Mom – up. Too late.

  Mom had been kind of quiet with me all the previous day. I guess she hadn’t exactly forgotten my tantrum, but she hadn’t mentioned it either. To be honest, I’d been too distracted by my own thoughts to really notice.

  Now, she gave me a hug before taking the orange juice from the fridge. She knew better than to speak to me yet though. Neither of us are morning people and we had silently agreed years ago to keep any conversation for at least half an hour after first seeing each other. This was probably an even better agreement now that I had barely gone to bed.

  Going back to bed now would just be weird, and I felt more buzzy than tired, so I proceeded to make coffee in the machine. Apparently that was just as weird, judging from how elevated Mom’s eyebrows became. Okay, I had never drank coffee before, and I actually didn’t know how to make it, but I was sixteen now, wasn’t that what I was supposed to do? And I needed something to get me through. People were constantly espousing the merits of caffeine for just these kinds of days.

  I had drank half a mug of the thickest, blackest, bitterest liquid I had ever ingested, and Mom had read half a Sunday paper before she thought it safe to say anything.

  ‘Jane, I am so, so sorry that your birthday was a disaster,’ she said, and I could see that it really was killing her. One thing about my mom is that she always means what she says one hundred per cent, which is good when she’s saying good things, but doubly guilt-inducing when you are in the bad books. ‘I mean, from our end. I hope the night with your friends was fun.’

  ‘It’s all
okay, Mom,’ I said, and even though I shouldn’t have meant that, I did. I should have felt hurt and sad; I didn’t. It was the most amazing feeling to not feel that, even though there was this part of me that worried I was cheating by not feeling it.

  All I could think of was my new camera, but maybe a part of me did want to hurt her because I didn’t say a word about it. Instead, I just said, ‘Thanks for the money. It was perfect.’

  Mom had this strange look on her face, an expression that was kind of frozen between a smile and a grimace. I thought it was probably a good time to exit and get ready for the hospital, before her computer rebooted and decided which it was.

  ‘Hey, sis,’ Emma greeted when I entered her room, in the same way she always did, erasing the hurt I’m sure I had inflicted. She hated it when Mom and I fought, and I hadn’t exactly said nice things about her either.

  ‘Hey,’ I countered.

  I sat down, not sure how we were going to fill the time we had until Mom and Dad came back. I was never comfortable in this building, but today it seemed worse. The smell of the hospital was making me feel ill. Was it always this medicinal smelling? It was like the place had been dipped in TCP. I got back up to open the window, but the latch was just there to make it look like an ordinary window, instead of a hospital one designed to keep even the very air inside. It wouldn’t budge. I looked around for something to pry it open with. I’m not sure what I thought I would find. It isn’t like there were screwdrivers lying around hospital wards.

  ‘Jane, can you stop pacing around, you’re making me dizzy,’ Emma said.

  ‘I’m not pacing. I’m trying to get you some untainted air.’

  I was trying a butter knife from Emma’s breakfast tray now. It seemed like the window frame had been painted from the outside or something. I could feel it starting to give.

  ‘I can’t believe they fucking forgot!’ Emma exploded, just as the knife snapped in two. I’d never heard Emma swear before. I let the piece of knife I still held clatter to the floor.

  ‘Forgot what?’

  ‘Your birthday! I was furious at Mom.’

  ‘Is that what was going on between you and Mom the other day?’

  ‘Jane, they wouldn’t have remembered at all if I hadn’t shown Mom my present for you.’ I held up my wrist, to show her that I had it on.

  ‘I didn’t even want to be part of Mom’s stupid, last-minute party, but what could I do? I’m kind of stuck here.’ Emma was never belligerent. I sat down. ‘Is that your present from Mom and Dad anyway?’ I had my camera slung over my shoulder.

  ‘Money,’ I said. ‘I’d say Dad went to the 7-11 ATM on his way home from work. He didn’t even pick me up some cheese nachos and a Slurpee to go with it.’ I told her about the card with the hand-drawn ‘16th’ on it. It felt weird to talk to Emma this way; weird-normal though. I just wasn’t used to her saying anything bad about anyone.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ she sighed, and when she did I swear she looked like she was old – wise-old.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’ There was a list forming in my head of reasons I should be sorry. I could think of dozens already. But there was never a reason for Emma to feel regretful.

  ‘For stealing every bit of Mom and Dad. For being such a wimp that I can’t ever say what I mean.’

  I took out the camera and started taking pictures of her. I had that feeling again, like something wasn’t quite right. I mean, more than usual. My sister didn’t talk like this.

  ‘Strike a pose for me,’ I said, sticking out my tongue at her so she would laugh. She didn’t.

  ‘You have to listen to me for once, because I swear if I don’t tell you this stuff, I’m going to crack up.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to try to be the daughter Mom expects me to be, day after day?’

  ‘I kind of only know the opposite,’ I said. I really didn’t want to hear any of this. I kept moving, snapping pictures of Emma from different angles.

  ‘I’m like her project,’ she said, arms crossed across her chest now.

  ‘What do you mean?’ What was she going on about?

  ‘I’ve always been her project, but it’s worse being her sick project. At first, I guess I was that sick little kid who needed her mommy.’

  I remembered the first time she had been in the hospital. Mom would have slept in the bed with Emma if the nurses had let her.

  ‘But now, it’s like I can’t get out of being that little kid.’

  ‘It’s highly overrated, growing up.’ I kind of knew that I wasn’t saying what she wanted to hear, but I also didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do while she told me things I didn’t even want to hear about. ‘Besides, nobody can do Cute in a Tutu like you can, Emma. You can’t just throw that away.’

  ‘Please, Jane.’ When I looked over at her there were fat tears rolling down her cheeks, with more poised to follow. She had gone white – even more pale than usual.

  ‘Do you need the nurse?’

  ‘I need YOU.’ The words came out as a sob. ‘I’ve lost me before I even get to find me; I can’t lose you too.’

  ‘It’s okay, Emma,’ I tried to hug her, because it seemed to be the thing to do, even though she was being a little melodramatic, but she shoved me away, and angrily wiped her wet cheeks.

  ‘It is not okay.’ Her expression was so fierce and intense I couldn’t resist taking a picture.

  ‘Would you put that thing away?’ she said, before she threw the closest thing at me, which was her stuffed elephant. I threw it back at her harder and then she threw a pillow.

  There’s nothing like a good pillow/elephant fight to change the mood. It didn’t take long to get Emma smiling again. Crisis averted.

  I ignored the swirling in the pit of my stomach that was trying to tell me that all I had done was shut her down. Whatever crisis was going on for Emma, I hadn’t made it go away. I’d basically told her not to bother me with it.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there for her. It’s just that my feelings were so knife-edge sharp lately and the thought of letting her talk felt dangerous. It was kind of an instinct, to stay away from that, like if I let myself feel for Emma, I wasn’t going to be able to stop – and I had this jumpy feeling that if that happened it was going to be bad.

  By Monday I had avoided Dell as long as I could. When I thought about facing him, it made me feel like throwing up. Because I honestly didn’t know how I felt. It had always been so easy to spend every spare moment at Dell’s – and except for the disaster of a birthday night nothing had changed.

  Only – it had. Everything was changing, and the longer I stayed away from Dell, the less real he felt. But nothing else felt totally solid either.

  So I lied and I didn’t even do it to his face. I sent him a message. SORRY, NOT MYSELF, DELL. LOTS OF FAMILY STUFF GOING ON. YOU KNOW, WITH EMMA. AND EXAMS COMING UP. LOVE YOU, BUT NEED A LITTLE TIME TO SORT IT ALL OUT. I’LL SEE YOU FRIDAY K? PROMISE.

  Technically it was all true. There was something up with Emma and Mom. I was pretty sure I had some tests coming up, though I couldn’t seem to remember in which subjects. The sorting things out part was completely made up though. I wasn’t sorting out one thing.

  Lying aside, it felt fantastic to get rid of my guilt by pressing the ‘send’ button. I’d forgotten how good it was to be free.

  I tried to go to classes. I’d woken up feeling full of energy on Monday and ready to make a new start with school. And the two classes I made it to went really well. I’d even caught up on all of my homework for them on the bus in.

  The camera took over in the end though. I had chosen a bunch of pictures of Emma that I wanted to get printed and then find a place to hang out and sketch them. Maybe at The Good Earth. Kaitlin seemed to be tolerant of people hanging around all day. Well, Farley anyway. But I think I was starting to be an extension of him.

  He wasn’t going to be there. He’d already sent me a message t
o say that he was going to be gone for a couple of days, to meet his dad. His message had made me smile. WISH ME LUCK. OFF TO MEET THE FATHER IN VANCOUVER. I TOLD YOU HOW MUCH HE LIKES ‘ALTERNATIVE CULTURE’, RIGHT? THINK I SHOULD LOSE THE GUATEMALAN HOODIE? IS THAT A GOOD COMPROMISE? HE’S PAYING FOR THE FLIGHT. SEE YOU WEDNESDAY. He’d sent another one after that. PS. BY ‘SEE YOU WEDNESDAY’ I MEAN IF YOU WANT TO, NOT ‘YOU MUST’. And one more: OH, AND: GO TO SCHOOL. NOT BECAUSE I CARE – IT WAS YOU WHO POINTED OUT THE FACT THAT YOU DO INDEED ATTEND AN INSTITUTE OF LEARNING (THOUGH EVIDENCE WOULD SUGGEST THIS FACT IS QUESTIONABLE).

  ‘You’re taking the bus home?’ Tracey was sitting behind our usual seat, beside Brenda when I got on.

  ‘Guess I better spend some time studying.’ It was what I was telling everyone now. I’d told Mom that I probably wasn’t coming into the hospital this week because I was studying for tests. She had seemed to like hearing that. I don’t know if it was the thought of me actually applying myself at school, or not having to see me much that made her happy.

  Tracey, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable with seeing me on the home bus. She always shared a seat with me on the way in, and now she didn’t know whether to change seats, or stay sitting beside Brenda.

  ‘It’s okay. Stay there,’ I helped her out. ‘I’m going to use the time to get a jump start on memorising math formulas. Exciting times.’

  I had sketched twelve pictures of Emma by Wednesday morning. Some were better than others, but when I laid them all out on my bedroom floor I could see that I was getting better. A few of them were particularly good.

  It was like there were years of sketching pouring out of me. I couldn’t seem to stop now that I had properly started. It didn’t even seem strange not to be going to Dell’s house every day. I couldn’t wait to get home to start drawing.