Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  I’d kept it out of my head since … Did I even ever remember it? It was weird. Now that it was here of course I remembered, but it was like those photos Tracey had given me. Once I made myself stop remembering, I was pretty good at keeping it up. But now that it was back, I couldn’t make it go away again.

  The week before Christmas. Nearly a year ago. It had been my job to check on him by that time, not just a pleading suggestion from Mom. My job, because Dad was at work and Mom had to be there for Emma, who wasn’t in the hospital for once, but was only going to school for half of the day because that is as long as she could make it before she was exhausted.

  Plus, I guess it just made sense, because I was in town for school, and I could just walk up the hill during my lunch hour.

  He wasn’t well. We all knew he was going to die. But no one expected that he was going to die that day. Mom was spending most nights talking to him on the phone, trying to get him to at least consider the hospice. They had a place for him.

  She tried to tell him it was nice place. It wasn’t like a hospital, because there was nothing they could do for him in an actual hospital. It was too late for their toxic drugs. There was nothing they could give him, and if he wasn’t a customer for the drug companies, then he didn’t belong there. Not that he would have gone anyway.

  He wouldn’t leave his house. To be honest, I couldn’t blame him. Why go live in a stinking house filled with other dying people when you could fade away in your own house, brimming with dignity? He had that in spades as long as he was in his house.

  So we had to go there to take care of him, without him actually knowing that we were taking care of him. I had to go to him most of the time.

  I did tell you just how much he liked me, didn’t I? He tolerated me. Barely. I had too many opinions. I was ‘surly’. I showed no ‘promise’. I was not a proper child like my sister was. As if he knew what a proper child was. How could he know? He hadn’t even raised his own daughter.

  But despite the fact that he almost always greeted me with, ‘Humph. You again.’ I didn’t mind going. I could tolerate Grandad too. Because I loved his house.

  I don’t think that people under say, probably Grandad’s age, are supposed to truly love houses. It isn’t a conversation I have ever had with my friends. They might like the idea of their future bungalows, with all the latest, greatest in decorating, but that doesn’t mean that they do, or will, love a house. Same with my parents. My mom spent months picking out everything she needed to have before she would move into our fixer-upper when I was twelve. Finally, she was going to live in a house they owned.

  She didn’t love it though. It had been a stepping stone. She had been so sure that once she had her qualifications and started to build her practice, it was only a matter of time before we would be moving onto some quaint hobby farm, complete with a workshop for dad, which he would need after he quit his job at the mine and started to do art again.

  Houses to most people seem to be tied up with all sorts of other things that are not the houses themselves.

  But I loved Grandad’s house. From the time I was tiny it had seemed like some kind of magical place. There was his office of course, full of books and everything serious, with an honest to goodness fireplace. I only went in there when he wasn’t though. Too intimidating otherwise. With him behind that massive desk. It was only my room when he wasn’t in it.

  And the round room, which you had to climb all of these stairs to get to. Once you were up there though, you had this 360-degree view of Kendal all below you. You could play that you were Rapunzel in the tower room. Or that you were the king and that everyone below you was part of your kingdom.

  But I loved more than anything in the world the little attic room, with the window seat, even though it only looked out into the trees behind the house. I loved sitting there and doing absolutely nothing. Just sitting and soaking up all of the safe comfort of that house.

  It is hard to put into words what I felt for that place. Maybe all of the love that I wanted to feel for Grandad went into my feelings for his house instead.

  But that day.

  I could only do it again – go in that door again through memory – because I could feel the sure, sure of Farley’s heart under my ear.

  I thought that Granddad wasn’t there. He had given me a key to put under the flower pot, so that I could let myself in. I wasn’t even sure that he could have made it down the stairs from his bedroom at that point if he wanted to. But this way, he could acknowledge as little as possible the fact that his daughter was sending me to check on him. All he had to do was pretend that he was asleep. And I knew that is what he did most of the time.

  That is why I thought he was out that day. Usually, when I came in the door I would hear him shuffling to the bed. He’d hear the key in the lock, but somehow it never occurred to him that if he could hear me coming in, then obviously I could hear him. PhD be damned, he wasn’t that smart sometimes.

  But that day – nothing.

  He could have been actually sleeping. Somehow I never thought of that at all. I didn’t hear him and I assumed he wasn’t there.

  So I was happy. I had already cancelled the last two classes in my mind. Straight up to the attic room, that is where I was headed. And no geriatric duty. That is honestly what I was thinking. I was such a cow.

  But what he did to me was worse.

  I got to the first landing, with no sound from his bedroom. None. Even though I just knew that he wasn’t there, I thought I better peek in the door to make sure that he wasn’t.

  Thinking about it now, it didn’t make sense. Where the fuck did I think he had gone? Popped out for a bit of shopping? He had home help every morning and evening to feed him, to give him his pain medication, to wipe his ass. What the hell made me think he had just stepped out the door for a few errands? Somehow, the house felt empty.

  Well I guess it was.

  When I opened the door to his bedroom – without knocking – because I was so sure he wasn’t there – there he was. Sort of. Bits of him were. Everywhere. Red everywhere. Red where there shouldn’t have been red.

  I closed my eyes tighter, pushing the image with all of my might away. Bringing every photo, every drawing I had done in the last week in front of it. Covering it. I wouldn’t let it be true. I’d made it up. Just like thinking the test today had been the wrong test. I had been wrong about that, I could be wrong about this too.

  I tried to tell myself the story I had re-written for that day, making it the story I could bear, with all the blood carefully covered up: I hadn’t checked on him at all that day. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t check and I just said I did. When Mom asked had I checked on him, I’d told her I hadn’t, that I’d had no time. She had believed me, and that’s the truth we had all embraced. If you retell yourself a story enough times, you make it true. That’s what happened.

  It had been Mom who found him. She’d come home and told us. The cancer had beaten him. That is what she told us. That was what I remembered. That was what I remembered. That was what I remembered.

  Farley’s shirt was wet under my head. My ear was filling up with liquid. It made my heart stop for a moment, and then start to beat again faster, but when I put my hand under my head and brought it out again, my hand wasn’t red.

  There were only tears, no blood.

  Farley had to wake me up when we got to Red River. I’d fallen asleep to the rhythm of his heart. But I felt better. Still fuzzy, but better. The pictures had stopped.

  ‘Do you want to go somewhere and talk about it?’ Farley asked. It was the last thing I wanted to do.

  The terrible video in my head was covered tightly now and I wanted to keep it that way. I’d been doing too much drawing and not sleeping much at all. I couldn’t remember when I had slept more than three hours in a night. It was wrecking my head, making all sorts of wild pictures come into my head. That was just one of them.

  I’d make it go away. I remembered
Mom coming home and telling us Grandad had died. I remembered that I wasn’t home that day and she rang me and rang me on her way home, until I finally answered. She had wanted to make sure I was there when she arrived, that she had something to tell us.

  I didn’t want to talk about it with Farley, I wanted it to stay away.

  ‘You have to teach a lesson,’ I said instead.

  ‘But …’

  ‘No, really.’ I willed my head to clear, to put on a proper expression, because I couldn’t seem to tell what my face was doing. He still sat there, and the driver was standing at the front of the aisle, waiting for us to get off. ‘I haven’t been to see Emma in ages. I’ve got to go see her. I’m okay. It’s just … I’m okay.’ It was almost true.

  ‘Jane, we are so far out of polite conversation territory that you can’t possibly think I believe that.’

  ‘Ok,’ I tried again, because I needed him to go. ‘I don’t know if I’m okay. But if we get off this bus, and I go to see if my sister is okay, then I might be okay.’

  He nodded and gave me the briefest squeeze before he got up. He didn’t say a word, just got off the bus. Only when he was gone did I appreciate that I had just sent away the one bit of my life I was certain about. I could count my lucky star for sending him my way. Thinking that, made me glad that Farley couldn’t actually read my mind; he would have never let me live that thought down.

  I forgot that I hate going to the hospital in the morning, when everything is at its most hospital-ness. That’s when the nurses change bedding, and there are piles of piss-smelling sheets in bins everywhere. That’s when groups of interns trail after doctors with their clipboards, looking important and scared all at the same time. And I didn’t need to see scared; I’d had enough of that. I didn’t need to see important either. Important hadn’t done a thing to help Emma.

  Maybe I need to outline Emma’s medical history here. I really haven’t wanted to. This isn’t actually Emma’s story, it’s mine, but I guess it might be important to know what has kept me in limbo for three years.

  It’s a pretty average story I would guess, despite not feeling very average to my family of course. At first, the doctors all thought that Emma had hurt her knee. You would kind of expect that since she was going to dance lessons three times a week and twirling around the house every other day. It can’t be good for you all that exercise. So the doctors just sent her to physiotherapy. And Mom had to ferry her around to those appointments on top of the dancing.

  But I guess it was just getting worse. Apparently she was waking up in the night with pain. Truly, I don’t remember any of this. I wasn’t paying attention. It was just my little sister being kind-of whiney in that way that only makes her seem sweeter because she only does it in a quiet way. At the time, I was thinking more about my own life – and I’ve told you how that was going. I wasn’t exactly joining sports teams and putting my name forward for student council. That time is all a bit of a blur to be honest.

  So eventually she got the cancer diagnosis, a tumour on her knee. That was fine. Well it wasn’t fine, but it didn’t feel too bad at first, as cancer goes. Maybe it was just because I got the watered down version of how things were going to go. Looking back, I’m sure it wasn’t fine for Mom and Dad. What I got told though, was that Emma was going to be in the hospital for a short stay while she got some chemotherapy, then she was going to have surgery where they would take out the tiny, tiny tumour, and then a bit more chemotherapy to make sure every cancer cell was gone. It was going to be a bit of a pity, because Emma wouldn’t be able to dance for nearly a year, but all would be fine.

  I only found out slowly that even in the best scenario that process was probably going to be more than a year. There wasn’t any talk of days in hospital turning into weeks either, when there were complications with infection and only Mom was allowed in the room with Emma. Or of the possibility that the cancer would spread to her lungs, requiring more surgery and stronger drugs.

  I think if doctors told you that stuff, whole families might just decide to drink a jug of poison-laced Kool-aid. The good thing about cancer seems to be that the bad news only comes in drips, so it doesn’t seem too terrible. Maybe all tragic things are like that. Sometimes I wonder if war might be like that. Like if tanks started rolling down our street, I would think, ‘Well, they’re kind of like cars, only bigger. Not that big of a deal.’ And then when people were being shot the next town over, ‘Well, I didn’t know them that well.’ And then, ‘Well, at least it wasn’t us,’ when the enemy started shooting our neighbours. Maybe by the time you start losing your family members, you are too numb to even comprehend that this is really bad.

  And then, just like in war, life has to keep happening. Nobody ever said to me, just take a few months off school. Nobody said that to Dad about his job either. We just have to keep doing it day after fucking day. Doctors don’t talk about that at all. We’re like the civilian casualties of war that nobody wants to talk about. We don’t exist.

  That is kind of what I was thinking about as I forgot to waste time, and walked toward the hospital instead. I was actually having a bit of a private rant about it as I walked in the sliding glass doors of the lobby. I don’t know why I decided to get angry about it all then. Maybe I needed something to focus on, something to keep my mind in one direction, because it didn’t want to do that. I needed to focus on something that wasn’t my fault like the test had been, something that made sense, something I knew. Emma’s illness was something I knew.

  It was definitely not the right day to go into the hospital early. Rounds were in full swing, and worse, the swarm was surrounding Emma’s bed. No one even noticed me come into the room. They were all leaning in to hear the whole story. Mom’s back was to me, but I could see that both her hands were holding one of Em’s, which was the most she could do to shield her from having to hear her history for probably the thousandth time. You’d think they could issue her with earmuffs, or better yet, just write the story out, and photocopy it. The interns could have an interesting book, collecting all these medical stories by the end of their term. I’m sure they’d like that sort of thing.

  ‘… resistant osteosarcoma. While the standard treatment of surgical removal, followed by doxorubin and cisplatin has eradicated the remaining tumour in the left lung, and the left lateral meniscus remains tumour free, we now have the significant complication of the patient’s tertiary sarcoma site.’

  ‘The patient’ did not seem to be even listening.

  ‘Current chemotherapy treatment has been ceased, as the patient was not tolerating side effects, and the patient assessed for her suitability for the clinical trial of Everolimus. In the meantime, IMRT is to be commenced tomorrow morning, and options for limb salvage discussed.’

  I’d slid down to sit against the wall by the door, to stay out of the way, and I had almost been tuning out. But some of the words in the story were new. ‘Limb salvage’? What were they talking about?

  ‘Haven’t studies shown that Everolimus treatment with young women had a significant chance of impacting fertility? Have all other options been explored?’ That was Dr Jonathan. I liked that he was questioning the suggested poison, but I was more concerned about the casual way limb salvage had been thrown out. I thought we’d gotten past that talk at least. Every test in the past two years had shown Emma’s leg to be cancer free. It had been the saving grace. Okay, it wasn’t so great that bits of cancer kept showing up in her lungs, but the doctors kept insisting that there was lots of lung material to spare.

  ‘This is a particularly aggressive tumour, Dr Ballerini,’ the grey-haired doctor, who I kind of recognised, said. ‘It is a sizable tumour in the femur. I believe possible side effects are the least of our worries.’

  I waited for Mom to say something. Wasn’t this a bit of a shock? It was the first I had heard of it. Why was she sitting there, still holding Emma’s hand like he was talking about the weather?

  ‘Prognosis?’ Dr Jonathan
persisted, turning a little red though. ‘For the leg I mean.’ He looked over at Emma then.

  Dr Grey Hair waited a second before he answered, peering over the top of his glasses at his intern. I don’t think he was waiting so that he came up with the right words to spare Emma hurt. I think it was a power thing; he couldn’t let Dr Jonathan get the upper hand.

  ‘Dr Ballerini, we are in the business of saving lives. The prognosis of limbs is secondary. I am afraid we have given too much consideration to complete salvage already.’ He hung Emma’s clipboard up at that, moving toward the door without even saying anything to Emma.

  I had to stand up because if I didn’t I would be on the floor, in the middle of the swarm, as they moved toward the door, but also because I could not believe what I had just heard. And this is a thing I do sometimes. I can’t seem to help it. I don’t keep my inflammatory statements in my head. Not even for a few minutes to think about whether I should – which quite frankly is almost all of the time.

  ‘Dr Whitman.’ I had remembered his name. He’d never actually ever spoken directly to me, but I’d been in the room a few times in the early days, when he explained all the cancereze terms to my parents. ‘You cannot be serious! My sister’s leg is not ‘secondary’. Both of them are pretty much primary to who she is!’

  I was kind of aware that my voice was louder than it needed to be, but it just seemed to want to come out that loudly. Dr Whitman was used to emotional outbursts though, and he had his tactics. He moved toward me and put his hand on my shoulder. Patted my shoulder in fact. And then he moved toward the door before I could say another word.

  ‘Jane!’ My mother wasn’t so skilled in how to handle emotional outbursts. She had let go of Emma’s hand now, but she looked ashen, like she was the one who needed someone to hold her hand.

  ‘Mom, you knew about this!’ I hurled. ‘You think it’s okay? You think that it’s okay to go through three years of this bullshit, only to have the very thing Emma doesn’t want thrown in her face like there isn’t a choice!’