Bursting Bubbles

by Dyan Sheldon

  Sadie brings the same elephant story to every session. Both of them know it so well that Marigold could recite it in her sleep and Sadie, when she’s willing, can read it without hesitation. Possibly with her eyes closed. Today, however, Sadie isn’t willing. She read two sentences and stalled like a car that ran out of gas. Sometimes she stops because she has a headache. Or she has a stomachache. Or her eyes hurt. Today she can’t read any more because she’s tired. If she doesn’t stop yawning Marigold’s going to take the apple left over from lunch and stuff it in her mouth.

  Not really, of course. She can’t do that. What would the others think? What would Marigold think if she saw someone stuff an apple into a yawning child’s mouth? She’d think the apple-stuffer had lost her mind, that’s what.

  A second verse forms itself in Marigold’s head. I sit here with Sadie, she stares at the floor, I wish that a wizard would stroll through the door…

  Marigold sighs. It doesn’t have to be a wizard. That’s only one option. It could be almost anything as long as it’s spectacular and fun, not frightening or dangerous. Jugglers, or a giraffe, or a nursery of baby orang-utans. It could even be someone on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam and whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. Anything to shake things up a little. Anything rather than sitting here with the black hole that is Sadie Hawkle beside her, arms folded, mouth a straight line. Marigold has yet to see Sadie really smile.

  “Come on, Sadie,” she coaxes, sounding as far away from being annoyed as she is from the moon. If nothing else, living with her mother has given Marigold an enormous amount of patience. “Why don’t you finish reading? There are only a couple more pages.”

  Sadie looks at her out of the corner of her eyes. “I don’t want to.”

  Last week Bonnie Kupferberg waylaid Marigold as she was leaving to ask how she and Sadie are doing. “How’s it going with you two? You making any progress?” Marigold said yes. Which actually isn’t a lie. Progress has been made. Sadie is reading, even if it’s only the one book and she reads it with all the enthusiasm of someone digging her own grave. And sometimes Sadie will speak. No one could accuse her of talking too much – she usually limits her conversation to things such as “yes”, “no”, “don’t mind”, “OK” and “don’t know” – but she has been known to make whole sentences.

  As if to reward Marigold for her fortitude, she makes one now. “What’ll you give me if I do?” asks Sadie.

  Marigold, however, has progressed even more than Sadie. Besides being upbeat and positive, it is also her nature to stick to things and persevere. As it has to be. Anyone as determined as Marigold is to keep her mother happy and make the world a place where everything always turns out all right would have to have the willpower of the Roman Empire just to get out of bed in the morning. And Sadie Hawkle, the Mount Everest of children, has made that resolve even stronger. There will be no golf clubs or expired caviar this time, but to the sweetness and patience that make up her arsenal of weapons Marigold has added bribery. A candy or a pack of gum; a novelty pencil or some stickers. Bribery and the intransigence of a dictator.

  “I have an apple in my backpack. If you finish the book it’s yours.”

  “I don’t want an apple.” Sadie is a master of stubbornness herself. “I want potato chips.”

  “I’m not a store, Sadie. All I have today is the apple. But if you finish the story maybe I’ll bring chips next time.”

  “It’s boring.” Sadie’s heels bang against her chair again. “It’s always the same.”

  So are you, thinks Marigold – but continues to smile. “Well, we can’t just sit here like we’re waiting for a train.” Which is totally untrue; it’s something they do very well. If it were an Olympic event they’d be famous. “Why don’t we try a different book?” One that she hasn’t read two hundred times might be an idea. “Why don’t we see if we can find something new to read? Something really fun.”

  Sadie looks as if Marigold’s suggested that standing on one leg in the rain would be fun, but she shrugs, which, loosely interpreted, means “OK”. “And next week you’ll bring chips? Mesquite?”

  “Deal.” Marigold pushes her chair back. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Marigold goes through the books on the shelves one by one. They might as well be looking for fish in the desert. They all seem to be either too young or too old; either too easy or too hard. Some of them have been scribbled in or have pages missing. Many of them would make the nutritional panel on a box of cereal seem exciting. Everything Marigold picks, Sadie rejects because they have too many words. Everything Sadie chooses, Marigold rejects because they have fewer words than Mr Liotta’s business card. In the last fifteen minutes of the afternoon they finally reach a compromise, and return to their desks to read the book about the family of elephants for the two hundred and first time.

  Marigold is going to be late getting home. Again. Although Half Hollow is only some fifteen miles north-west of Shell Harbour as the crow flies, the bus doesn’t follow the route of a crow. It weaves and winds and backtracks as if it’s trying to find the longest possible way; or possibly never arrive at all. To make the journey even longer, it stops whenever someone suddenly steps out of a clump of trees waving, or whenever someone on the bus shouts out, “Hey, could you pull over by those mailboxes?” Last week she forgot to text her mother with an excuse and Eveline was wringing her hands with worry by the time she got back. Where was she? Why was her phone off? Why didn’t she call her to come and get her? Marigold is ungrateful and doesn’t appreciate all her mother does for her. She thinks about nobody but herself. She doesn’t realize how upsetting it is not to know what’s happening, to be left to imagine the worst. One voice was raised, and many tears were shed.

  That isn’t the problem tonight. When Marigold texted on her way to Half Hollow to say she was hanging out with friends after school, she got her mother’s voicemail. This either means that she’s at the gym or the health spa and isn’t taking calls, or it means that the day has proved too much for her and she’s gone to bed. Either way, Marigold doesn’t have to feel anxious about being late. Nor does the slowness of the journey bother her as it often does. Her mind is so occupied that if it were a motel the No Vacancy sign would be lit up. She can’t stop thinking about Sadie. There must be some way of reaching her. Marigold has seen enough movies and TV shows, and read enough books and magazines, to know that kindness and determination always win in the end. Children aren’t eggs. Children who have been abused, or abandoned, or disliked by their parents – even children who have been left by the side of the road or locked in a closet for years – have been put back together again because somebody cared. Marigold doesn’t love Sadie – indeed, it’s hard enough to try to like her – but she remembers what Bonnie Kupferberg said to her that first afternoon. If we lose these kids now … chances are we’ll never get them back. If Sadie gets any more lost she’ll simply disappear.

  When Marigold does finally arrive home, although Eveline’s car is in the garage, the house is quiet and dark when she steps inside. There is a note on the kitchen table, propped up against the salt and pepper shakers: Have a really bad migraine. See you in the morning. Love, Mom.

  Marigold isn’t sure if her mother really gets migraines or not. When things get too much for her and she’s depressed she says she has a migraine and goes to bed. But the migraine may only be an excuse. It sounds better than writing: Clinically depressed. See you in the morning if I can face getting out of bed. Whatever the reason, Marigold has learned that the best thing to do is to leave her mother alone when she’s like this. Don’t ask if she’s all right or if she needs anything; don’t offer to get her a cup of tea or something to eat. Just leave her be. Let people with serious mood disorders lie.

  In much the way that a hunter will know it’s going to snow, Marigold knows her father won’t be coming home tonight. She makes herself a sandwich and goes to her room. She does her homework and checks her emails; she calls first Byron and then
Claudelia. All the while she’s doing these things, part of her brain is still thinking about Sadie. Marigold put a reminder about the mesquite chips on her phone, but mesquite chips aren’t a solution. What to do about Sadie, that’s the problem. Sadie is difficult, surly, pricklier than a rosebush, not as cute as a chicken, and far less charming than a sinkhole. Why does Marigold care? That isn’t a question she can answer. But she can’t give up on Sadie the way everyone else has. She just can’t. Even if it means spending the rest of the year with the elephant family and their difficulties with furniture.

  Marigold gets into bed and takes the book she’s reading from the bedside table. Reading for fifteen or twenty minutes before she turns out the lights is something she’s been doing for as long as she can remember. It’s as that thought comes into her head that Marigold finally has a useful idea. Her books! The books she loved when she was little. The books she’d turn to when her parents were fighting to make everything all right. She’ll bring her own books for Sadie to read.

  As she falls asleep the thought in Marigold’s head is: So now I know where that verse came from.

  Chapter Ten

  The Kilgour Wakes

  Georgiana offers Claudelia a ride home after school. “It’s on my way,” she says. “I’m going to St Joan’s.”

  “Again?” laughs Claudelia. “Didn’t you go last week?”

  Georgiana nods. “Yeah. I go every week.”

  Claudelia smiles like someone who ordered a chocolate ice-cream cone and was given a cow. “Really? You? Every week?”

  “Yes, me. Every week. I don’t see what’s so astonishing about that.”

  She doesn’t? Claudelia is still smiling at the cow. “I guess I figured you’d wait till the end of the year and then do the whole thing in a couple of weekends.”

  “It’s only an hour a week,” says Georgiana. “It’s not really a big deal.”

  “Oh right. Of course it isn’t.” Has Claudelia’s smile always been so sarcastic, or is Georgiana only now noticing? “What happened to working at the nursing centre being like stoking the fires of hell with a teaspoon?”

  “I never said that,” says Georgiana.

  “Maybe not in so many words…” And the eye-rolling. Has Claudelia always rolled her eyes as if she’s in some amateur play? “But you definitely gave everyone the impression that you’d rather stock shelves in Walmart for eternity than spend time with your old lady.”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t happy about it. Everybody knows that.” Georgiana shrugs. “But I guess maybe Marigold’s onto something with her making-the-best-of-it thing. Because, you know, once I started it turned out not to be as bad as I thought.”

  “Really?” Claudelia looks at her as if she’s committing every detail of Georgiana’s face to memory so she can go home and paint her portrait. “Even with all those old people falling like bowling pins at a league championship?”

  Georgiana can do a sarcastic smile, too. “It doesn’t stress me, Claude, because I keep away from them. I just deal with Mrs K, and pretty much stay in one room.”

  Which makes it sound as if she stays with Mrs Kilgour in her room, keeping her company. But she doesn’t. The one room Georgiana stays in is the bathroom, while Mrs Kilgour dozes in her chair by the TV. On that first afternoon, abandoned by Mr Papazoglakis and thinking about the lack of ocean, Georgiana finally noticed that there are three doors in the old lady’s room. One leads to the hallway, one is a closet – and the third? If only it were the portal to a parallel world, thought Georgiana, one where she could do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted and no one ever died. Which, oddly enough, it almost was. It opened onto the bathroom, an oasis of quiet with a lock. Even if someone came looking for her (and, really, who would do that when everyone is so busy with people dying and complaining?) they’d just think she was using the facilities, not taking up residence.

  “And you’re OK with your old lady?” Claudelia sounds dubious. She’s been friends with Georgiana long enough to know that she doesn’t really do patience. “She doesn’t crash to the ground or nag or get on your nerves or anything like that?”

  “She’s an angel.” How could she not be? She’s always asleep. “She doesn’t really walk much and she has one of those canes with the feet, so she can’t fall down, and she never gives me any trouble at all.”

  “So what do you do with her?”

  “Oh, you know… She doesn’t have many visitors, so mainly we just hang out. Talk. Watch TV. Sometimes I read the paper to her.”

  Georgiana sits on a cushion in the bathroom, plugged into music and checking out her friends on Facebook while Mrs Kilgour snores and snorts in the bedroom.

  “Wow.” Claudelia’s smile is no longer sarcastic, now it’s almost envious. “That sounds great. It’s a lot better than what I’m doing at the mayor’s office. Which is mainly answering the phone. Snoring boring with bells on! I mean, really, if I wasn’t so bored I’d probably think I was dead.”

  “It’s better than walking rescue dogs, too,” admits Georgiana. Which, of course, it definitely is. “I don’t have to go out in the rain or the cold or anything, and I don’t have to worry that Mrs K’s going to chase a cat or get into a fight with a German shepherd.” Also, dogs are awake and demand attention, and although you can talk on the phone while walking most dogs it’s difficult to text, surf the net or watch video clips or movies. It is because the St Joan’s placement has worked out so well that Georgiana has committed herself to coming every week. The few extra hours this involves aren’t a waste of precious time – she does exactly what she’d be doing at home, only in the bathroom between Rooms 10a and 12a – and it looks good on her college applications. Even Georgiana is aware that “chair of the dance decoration committee” might not clinch her a place at a decent school. Not that she mentions any of these things to Claudelia.

  “I’m impressed,” says Claudelia. Shocked and awed might be a more accurate description. Georgiana is not loved for her reliability or selflessness. “I really am.”

  Claudelia isn’t the only one. Dr Kilpatiky has been keeping an eye on how the new system is working, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Georgiana Shiller not only had a glowing report from St Joan’s but is putting in more time than she has to as well. Dr Kilpatiky commended Georgiana on this only last week. The principal is rather pleased with herself, too; she thinks it’s proof that she was right.

  When they pull up in front of Claudelia’s, she says, “Thanks, George. And have fun this afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry.” Georgiana smiles back. “I will.”

  Which turns out to be, if not a lie, a misconception.

  Life may not always be a party, but Georgiana can’t help thinking that, if you try and, yes, let’s use a word more normally found in Marigold Liotta’s vocabulary, persevere, you can make most days the run-up to the party – when you’re full of plans and anticipation (before you ruin your favourite dress or catch your date flirting with another girl).

  As proof of this theory, Georgiana is humming a catchy, upbeat tune from the radio as she pulls into the parking lot at St Joan’s. It would be an exaggeration to say that she’s been looking forward to this afternoon the way a hungry girl looks forward to lunch, but she is far from unhappy. It certainly isn’t the torture she was expecting. If all her classes could be like her community service placement, Georgiana would never complain about school again. Not ever. (Or not much.) Indeed, if she could get credit for sitting at the back of history or language arts while on her phone, she’d be one of the best students Shell Harbour High has ever known. This is the life. It’s almost as good as getting paid to go shopping.

  Georgiana gives Alice at reception a cheery wave as she strolls up to the desk. She fills in her time of arrival on her sheet, and, with another cheery wave, heads down the corridor to Mrs Kilgour’s room, smiling at everyone she passes, no matter how decrepit and likely to fall over they are. She takes hold of the doorknob to Mrs Kilgour’s room, an
d, without bothering to knock or call out, walks in, her phone already in her hand.

  Georgiana screams. It is an attention-grabbing scream. If Georgiana were in a movie she would have screamed because there was a scene of blood and horror or a mob of zombies behind the door. But she isn’t in a movie, she’s at St Joan’s, and behind the door is Mrs Kilgour. She is sitting in her chair in front of the soap opera playing on the TV, wearing her pink robe over a white T-shirt and red plaid flannel house pants, and her Yankees baseball cap. An unsuccessful attempt has been made to apply lipstick to her mouth and rouge to her cheeks, making her look like a very old doll. A very old doll that has come to life. Because instead of facing the set, Mrs Kilgour is facing the door; and instead of being sound asleep, Mrs Kilgour is wide awake. Being awake does nothing to improve her looks.

  She points the remote at Georgiana as if it’s a gun. “Who the hell are you?” Her voice is surprisingly strong and clear for a woman of her age. “Who said you can just barge into my room like the FBI?”

  Georgiana has as many faults as anyone else, but rudeness isn’t one of them. “I–I’m sorry,” she quickly apologizes. “I–I thought you were sleeping.”

  “Do I look like I’m sleeping?” No, she certainly doesn’t. “Although it is obviously a disappointment to you, I am very much awake. The question is: who in creation are you?”

  “I–I’m your volunteer visitor.” Georgiana is far from recovered from the shock of finding Mrs Kilgour wide-eyed and angry, but does manage to shut the door behind her so the old lady’s shouting doesn’t bring a nurse or aide rushing to her rescue.

  “My what?”

  Georgiana may have no experience with the elderly, but she does know that you have to speak to them slowly and loudly. Slowly and loudly, she repeats, “Your volunteer visitor, Mrs Kilgour.”