Good to a Fault (2 page)

“You belong to me,” she said, and it took Clara a minute to realize that she was filling in the line of the song, not telling Clara that her life was no longer her own.

While their dad was buying cigarettes, not paying attention to them, Darlene tugged Trevor’s hand and pulled him into the stairwell. Flights of grimy metal steps wheeled endlessly upward and downward, making her dizzy. But they were going to get in trouble if they were always hanging around in the lounge by themselves. If they stayed out of sight they would not be kicked out, they could stay close to their mom.

“You be Peter and I’ll be Penny,” she said. “If anybody asks us.”

This was 3. They climbed up to 7, and then up the single longer flight to a dead end, with one door. That probably led to the roof.

Quiet up there. The stairs were not too dirty. Somebody had tossed a brown paper bag with a banana skin and a whole apple in it. Darlene washed the apple carefully with spit and polished it on her T-shirt. Trevor’s legs were shaking. Darlene pushed up against him, anchoring him to the cool concrete wall so he could calm down. She and Trevor ate the apple, bite for bite, and sat without talking.

Lorraine and Clara were still alone, reading magazines, when an orderly arrived. There was some small inconvenience getting Lorraine onto the gurney. Clara helped by holding the baby’s head away from the belt. He had downy hair, and a pale red birthmark almost faded at his nape. His neck was small. The skin was smooth there; her fingers traced the mark.

“You come too,” Lorraine said.

The attendant seemed to think that was normal. Clara hesitated, but someone would have to hold the baby during the test, and the grandmother had vanished. They wheeled along corridors and into a different elevator, down a few floors, more halls. The orderly left them parked outside an unmarked door and went inside. He came out, and left.

There was a considerable wait.

“Jesus, I could use a cigarette,” Lorraine said, her voice distorted from lying flat.

“I’m afraid you—” Clara stopped, hearing herself sounding like her mother, sweetly domineering.

“Well, I know that! They don’t let you smoke in hospitals, I know that. I don’t let them smoke around the baby anyways. It’s no good for them, second-hand smoke.”

“Smokers in my office building have to go around the back now. There’s a dirty overhang where they leave the trash, and you’ll see six or seven people huddled under there in a snowstorm.”

“Got to have their smokes, though.”

“I smoked myself,” Clara said. “Then my father had cancer, and it was easier to quit.”

Smoke seemed to be winding around them in vapourish tendrils. The possibility of a long drag, breath you could see. Proof of life. Clara had not wanted a cigarette so badly for years. She could feel her fingers falling into place as if they held one.

“I don’t smoke much any more,” Lorraine said. “Late at night I’ll have one of Clayton’s.”

“Well, if I could do that, one or two a day, I’d still be smoking,” Clara said. “Yeah, lots of people can’t.”

They fell into silence.

A few minutes later the baby woke. He did not cry, but he moved restlessly, his mouth pursing and his fist searching. He gnawed on his curled fingers till they were wet, until Clara asked if she should run and find another bottle.

“Don’t go,” Lorraine said. “I can nurse him, it’s okay.” Her eyes stayed on Clara, rather than straying to the baby. She knew where he was.

“I’ll stay,” Clara said to reassure her.

The door finally opened, and a technician in a lead apron came out to steer the gurney through. She gave Clara the baby to hold and said it would be a few minutes.

Clara stood there in the hall, suddenly alone. No nurses, no station.
She began to walk back and forth along the windowed hallway near the closed door, jiggling the baby slightly up and down. He liked up and down better than side to side, she found. She found it astonishing that the baby did not cry, or find her frightening or frustrating. He seemed to have forgotten his hunger. His fist closed around her fingers and he brought her hand close to his mouth and then stared, transfixed, at the size or shape or texture of her skin. The smell, she thought. Probably mostly soap. Different from his mother, at any rate.

At the end of the hall a low windowsill looked like a good place to sit. She let him stare, first at the glass, and then, his focus visibly altering, out at the courtyard garden below. He held on to her blouse with one hand, his perfect miniature fingers clutching the silk into even gathers.

No one came down the hall, no one disturbed them. Far in the distance, Clara could hear machinery rumbling and whirring. She could imagine the scan moving over Lorraine, and Lorraine trying to lie still, trying not to be afraid. Pearce put one hand on the glass, looking at the empty garden.

Darlene left Trevor sleeping on the stairs and went down alone. At each landing shiny linoleum halls ran away in every direction. Picking a floor, she wandered quietly along. Every room she passed held people in flimsy gowns coughing or lying suspiciously still. On TV when they knew people were dead a blue light flashed on and off.
Code Blue.

She was mostly invisible, but one nurse at a desk asked her, “Are you lost?”

“No,” Darlene said, not quite stopping. “My dad is having an operation to his heart, I’m just waiting to see how it turns out.”

The nurse looked at her. “What’s your name?”

“Melody Fairchild,” Darlene said. “I’ll go back and wait with my mom. She’s pretty upset. I was looking for a place to get juice for my baby brother.”

The nurse rolled her chair backwards to the little fridge for a couple of boxes of apple juice and handed them over the counter, then added a pack of cookies from her drawer. A bell rang somewhere so she stopped paying attention to Darlene. Maybe it was a blue light going off.

The lobby? She could check the payphones for quarters and look in the shop. But she should go back for Trevor. She found the stairwell and ran up all those spiralling, echoing metal steps. But the landing was empty, he was gone. Or this was the wrong set of stairs.

A doctor—too young and pretty to be real—arrived to talk to Lorraine. The husband had come back from the lounge with the little boy trailing cautiously after him, wanting to see Lorraine, but when the doctor entered the husband edged toward the door, an awkward beetle trying to scuttle away without being seen.

“Why don’t I take the children downstairs for some supper?” Clara asked Lorraine. It was after six.

Lorraine said, “Clay?”

“I’ll give the baby to Mom,” the husband said, taking him, and out he went.

They couldn’t all leave her, Clara thought, but the doctor must have been used to avoidance. “We just have a few questions,” she said, making it mild. “Dr. Porteous will come by too, in a few minutes. He’s the consultant.”

Lorraine’s eyes were slightly too wide open, the whites of her eyes showing. But to the little boy she said calmly enough, “Go get some supper with Clara, that’s a great idea. You’ll be fine with her.”

The little girl hung at the door, a shadow. She glared at the boy like he’d done something wrong.

Clara did not try to take their hands. She went to the door and let them follow. In the elevator she said, as if she knew what to do with children, “Darlene, can you push the one marked
L
? Trevor can push the button on the way back up.”

In the cafeteria line-up the little girl snaked out her hand to Clara’s wrist. Without volition, Clara’s hand pulled back. The girl’s eyes rose sidelong, diamond-edged, to check what she was thinking.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, almost accusing. It was a bracelet, six or seven strands of beads in different colours, pretty.

“I got it—oh, in some store, I can’t remember which,” Clara said, forcing herself not to turn away, not to be cruel.

“In the Saan store, I bet,” the girl said, triumphant. “I saw it there!”

Clara wanted to give it to her, but couldn’t find a way to do it that would make up for having pulled her hand back. Suddenly everything made her so tired! She must have a vitamin deficiency. Or it was the trauma. She never shopped at Saan.
Shoddy goods
—her mother’s voice rang in her ears.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it was Saan.”

The children ate their French fries. She had to go back to the counter three times for ketchup: twice for Trevor and once, separately, for Darlene. Trevor put mustard on his, too, but he had already filled his pockets with mustard packs himself.

“It’s a pity to waste those chicken nuggets,” Clara said.

“Oh, we won’t
waste
them!” Trevor said, his voice squeakier than she’d expected.

“We’ll take them up for Dad and Gran,” Darlene said, patient with her rich ignorance.

Clara jumped up and went back for roast chicken dinners for the husband and the grandmother. The children loved the stainless steel hats meant to keep the dinners warm. They begged to carry one plate each, so she let them. Trevor dropped his right in front of the elevators.

“Better than dropping it
in
the elevator,” Clara said, pleased with how calmly she took it. They told the morose kitchen helper about the spill, and got another dinner.

Upstairs, Lorraine was alone in the room. The lights were out, except a small bulb over the sink. Red from the sun’s low angle streamed in the window.

Clara said, “Trevor, will you carry it very carefully?” He nodded, glad to be given a second chance. “Take these down to the lounge to your father and your grandmother, then.” Darlene walked behind Trevor so he would not be distracted.

Lorraine was lying on her side in a fresh hospital gown, with the bed lowered.

“The doctor came in,” she told Clara. Forgetting that Clara had been there, or maybe having no other way to begin telling it. “They think, they’re pretty sure, I’ve got cancer.”

She had the fortitude to say it right out like that, no hesitation. What kind, was all Clara could think to ask. “I’m sorry,” she said, instead.

“It’s not your fault,” Lorraine said, and almost laughed.

It was the second time she’d said that to Clara.

Down in the lobby the booth selling stuffed animals was closing for the evening. A little cat caught Clara’s eye, with a beaded collar like her bracelet, for Darlene, and a small mottled-green pterodactyl for Trevor. She didn’t have the gall to go back up and disturb the family again, so she shoved the toys into the bottom of her bag.

At home, Clara called Evie, the office manager. Easier to deal with Evie than Barrett, the Regional Director, whose petty vanity required constant coddling. “I’m sorry to bother you in the evening like this, but I’m going to be away for a few more days,” she said.

“Are you hurt? Is it worse than you thought?” Evie asked, relishing catastrophe.

“It’s not—I’m fine, but—” Rather than explain the whole thing, and have Evie talking it over with Mat and the others, Clara said, “I am a little shaken up. I think I’ll need a few days. The Curloe inspection was put off till the nineteenth anyway, and otherwise…”

“Oh, no, you stay home. You get some good rest. You’re no good to us if you’re a nervous wreck, are you? What a thing to happen. How are the other people?”

“Oh, they’re fine, they’re fine, no one was badly hurt.”

“But it could have been. A baby, too, you said?”

Had she said that? Why go into any detail at all? Because she had been buzzing from the accident still, frantic with dreadful possibilities, words spilling over.

“Evie, I’ve got to go, I’m going to lie down now.”

She lay in bed wakeful, the accident replaying in her mind. She said her prayers, naming each of them, and prayed that Lorraine’s cancer would be healed, as far as she could reach to God, knowing that it would be no use.

E
arly Saturday morning, Clara gave up on sleep and went back to the hospital. The husband and the children and Mrs. Pell must have slept in the visitors’ lounge. Clara had brought a box of muffins, and juice for the children. Underneath a stack of magazines she’d packed some puzzle books and an old etch-a-sketch from the hall closet, which Trevor was happy to see.

The children were grubby. Clara offered to wash their faces, but Clayton declined. In a huff with her, or in some permanent state of huff he lived in.

He took Trevor off to the men’s room. Darlene went by herself to the women’s. Ten minutes later Clara found her there, sitting on the sink counter with her legs folded under her, ferociously reading a home decorating magazine. Clara backed out—but then, remembering the toys in her purse, pushed the bathroom door open again, and set the little white cat on the counter beside Darlene.

“This cat reminded me of you,” she said, shy about giving a present.

Darlene looked at it but did not touch it.

“I thought you might like the bead collar,” Clara said. So Darlene
wouldn’t have to speak, she held out the other toy, Trevor’s. “And will you give this one to Trevor?”

Darlene unfolded her stick-thin legs. She put the magazine down, carefully away from the splashes by the sink. “It’s a pterodactyl,” she said. “I’ll tell him what it is.” She got down, sliding the cat along the counter, and took the pterodactyl. Clara held the door open for her, and Darlene ran down to the lounge, her bare feet making no noise, the hospital already home.

Lorraine’s bed was rumpled and she looked ugly and uncomfortable. A nurse was settling an older woman back into the bed to the left of the door. Lorraine strained herself upwards, trying to get into a half-sitting position.

“Some kind of lymphoma is what they think,” she said.

Clara nodded.

“It’s weird to say it out loud,” Lorraine said.

“I know.”

“It’s a shock. They tried to tell me about it last night, they sent in an older doctor in the evening. The little bruises, those are petechiae. I just thought they looked kind of pretty, like a brooch of moles.”

They were pretty. Little constellations, a sweet dark splatter of paint on Lorraine’s arm, another patch on her leg just above the knee. Now they seemed hostile as snake bites.

“I hadn’t heard of them before,” Clara said.

“Me neither. Or I’d have known to go get looked at.” Lorraine moved fretfully in the bed, tugged at her pillow. “These are lumps of dough. I wish I had my little pillow out of the car.”

They were silent.

“I’ve got this fever,” Lorraine said, after a moment. “They left me a bunch of pamphlets.
Your Cancer and You
.” The stack of papers sat, radioactive, on the night table.

“You look a little flushed,” Clara said, hating the sound of her own voice so falsely, unspontaneously cheerful.

“They want me to stay in till they can get it down. There’s—a bunch of more tests to do, there’s—” Lorraine stopped talking.

The woman in the other bed moaned behind the curtain. Then she was silent too.

“Ovarian,” Lorraine whispered. “She had a rough night.”

Clara’s head was aching badly. She couldn’t seem to stop hearing her own words, and Lorraine’s too, repeated in her mind during the silences. Fever,
fever
, fever,
more tests
, more, a little flushed,
a little flushed.

“I think they’ll probably let us stay here—them, I mean—one more night, but it isn’t too good for the kids, in the lounge. I want them to go. There’s some kind of a—some accommodation, Clayton’s getting the details, if there’s room.”

Clara murmured something, one of those noises which encourage further conversation without committing the speaker to an exact opinion.

“They shouldn’t of seen any of this.”

No. Clara could see the dark circles under Trevor’s eyes. Even the baby Pearce seemed lethargic, less comfortable and safe than right after the accident. Lorraine’s distress infected them all, she thought. And nothing to do all day but wander from the TV lounge to the room.

“It’s hard on everyone,” she said. Innocuous enough, but the husband, coming in, took exception to it anyway.

“Hard on you?” he sneered. “Hard to sit and watch the results of what you did?”

Lorraine pushed him with her pale hand. “Quit it, Clay,” she said. “She didn’t give it to me.”

“This whole thing,” he began, and then petered out, his face pulling down in the chin. He had a sharp face, almost good-looking, with smooth beige skin. His chin was as small and rounded as a girl’s, and he could look defeated in an instant. It must make him seem vulnerable, Clara thought, trying to make out what Lorraine had seen in him. He was not big, but had a springy build with muscles stretched over his bones. He looked strong but unhealthy, surly and eager at the same instant. A dog who’s been badly treated, and has gone vicious, but wants you to fuss over him anyway.

The minutes stretched by in a silence that Lorraine seemed to want.

He sat quietly enough on the end of her bed, but couldn’t settle. He shifted and re-crossed his legs every few seconds, until Clara found her own legs tensing, watching him. His eyes darted too quickly, checking Lorraine, checking the clock, the window, Clara—to see what mischief she was making?—back to his own hands, flexing and fisting on whichever pant leg
was uppermost at the time. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, Clara noticed, but many men did not. Lorraine had one, and an engagement ring, nestled close together as they were made to do. People’s Jewellers, Clara thought, before she could stop herself. Or Wal-Mart.

But just when she had dismissed their marriage and their whole lives this way, Clayton leaned forward on the bed and grasped Lorraine’s hand. He bent his mouth to her curled fingers, and then bent his head farther forward, over her sheeted lap, and said, “No.”

Lorraine brought her other hand to curve over his head through his dirty hair. She said it too. “No, I know. It can’t be.”

Clara got up without making a sound, and left the room.

The landing at the top of the stairwell was cold, the second evening. She should go steal Trevor a blanket from an empty bed, Darlene thought. It was probably warmer out on the roof. The big metal door had one of those release bars. She leaned on the bar, feeling it give. If she pushed it all the way down the alarm might go off. There was no sign, though.

She pushed it anyway. No sound. The heavy door swung open. She nudged Trevor with her toe and took his little springy fingers, and they stepped out into the evening darkness, and the warmth. Tarry black gel oozing up through the pebble coat of the wide expanse of roof. The wall all around was too low, be careful!

Darlene got Trevor to hold her waist while she leaned over to see cars and people like ants, toy ambulances going into the garage door down there. If she fell, someone would scoop her up and put her in bed next to her mom, her legs strung up to the ceiling in white casts.

She was going to throw up. She twisted up and backwards and grabbed Trevor’s arm, almost yanking them both over,
whoo!
But not quite.

They were okay. They sat there. The soft black tar smelled good. And it was warmer out in the air.

On Sunday morning, after a second sleepless night, Clara found herself in tears during the Hosanna. She hated crying in church and had stayed away
for months after her mother’s death. But here she was again, eyes raised up to the wooden rafters of the roof. No heaven visible up there. Some water spilled over, before she got angry enough to stop.

After coffee hour, not knowing what else to do, Clara stayed to talk to the priest, Paul Tippett. His own life seemed to be a shambles; she didn’t know how he could help, sitting in his poky office with a cup of weak coffee in front of him. Clara held hers on her lap.

“What is the worst of it?” he asked her, when she had explained about the accident. His large-boned, unworldly face was kind.

“The worst? Oh!” Clara had to look away, her eyes half-filling again.

“Take your time,” he said, his gentle expression undisturbed. He must be used to tears, of course; but not from her, she’d hardly spoken to him before now.

He listened.

“I see what they need,” she finally said, “But I am unwilling to help.” But that was not it, she was not unwilling—she was somehow stupidly ashamed of wanting to help.

It was probably part of his training not to speak, to let people go on.

“The mother, Lorraine, is very ill. From before the accident, nobody knew about it. It’s cancer, lymphoma. Advanced. Her family has nowhere to go. They were living in their car, and the two older children are—and the baby, ten months old, too young to be without his mother—how will they cope with a baby in a shelter? The grandmother, I suppose, because the father is not a—but she’s not—”

Clara stopped babbling.

She had worked in shelters, serving supper, making beds, setting up the cardboard dividers that shut each person off from the next, two feet away. It was not possible for her to send them to a shelter. During the Hosanna, in the high cascading descant, she’d known what she had to do. If any of this was true, if there was God. She had wanted useful work; this was it. And if there was no God, then even more, she had to do it.

“I don’t want them in my house,” she said. But maybe she did.

“No one could plausibly expect you to take them in,” the priest said. “There are agencies…”

“It’s not what’s plausible, it’s what I ought to do.”

“You’ve visited them,” he commended her. “Many would not think to do as much.”

Many would not think to do as much,
she thought, almost laughing. What a convoluted construction. A life in the pulpit. Except there was no pulpit in their church, he just stepped forward, with his tiny chest-hung microphone waiting to catch every word as it dripped from his lips. She stood up, needing to move, and put her coffee cup down on his overflowing desk.

“Visiting the hospital is—nothing! My life does not seem very worthwhile,” she said. “Or even real.” And that just sounded stupid and self-involved.

He looked thoughtful. Or was honest enough not to argue with her assessment.

With a sudden welling of defeat, Clara left.

The priest shifted her cup to a more stable spot, and rubbed his thumb along his smooth desk-drawer ledge. Her dress, deep indigo or iris purple, seemed to stay hovering in the room, filled his eyes still.

Clara Purdy: single, childless of course, took care with her appearance; fortyish, and not in good spirits for some time since her mother’s death. He’d never had to deal with the mother. English, some cousin of an earl’s, wasn’t she? A piece of work, by all accounts. (
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
) Her funeral had been his first duty at St. Anne’s, the week he and Lisanne had arrived. In parish archive photos the mother was aloof, fine-boned, with a 30s filmstar glamour even in old age. Clara must take after her father. Odd to think of a middle-aged woman chiefly as a daughter. Pleasant enough, quiet, careful. Insurance, at Gilman-Stott—but then the contradiction of that flower-petal colour. Lisanne admired her clothes, or envied them, depending on the mood of the day. Almost-Easter, true violet, perfect purple. Porphyry, periphery, preface…He drew back from the precipice.

Carnelian, or more than red—true coral for Lisanne, who would be waiting for him at home, fretful muscles sharp behind her black-wire eyebrows. The hospital chaplain was away all summer in England, locum at a parish in the Lake District. Maybe Lisanne would have liked that. Cerulean. Paul wondered how he could bear another hospital visit.

He took both cups and emptied them in the meeting hall sink. All the other cups had been bleached and dried and put away. He rinsed these last two and stacked them in the cupboard damp—rebellion.

Clara walked through her three-bedroom bungalow, working out where to put everyone. The grandmother in the guest room, the baby with her, in a wicker laundry basket padded and lined with a flannel sheet. The father: the pull-out couch in the small bedroom that had been her own father’s den. The grandmother couldn’t sleep on that thing. Nowhere left to put the children but her own bed. She cleared the soul-help books off the bedside table and piled them in the garage; she pulled off the linen cover and replaced it with a striped one, made up the other beds, and found towels for everyone, as if they were guests.

She looked around at her light, orderly house. Then she went back to the hospital to pick up the family. What was left of them.

Trevor was not in the lounge, but Darlene knew where to find him. She ran up all the stairs and let herself out onto the roof. Where was he? There, around the side of the little hut. She ran across the melty roof floor, pebbles oozing sideways under her feet.

“Look,” Trevor said when she caught him. “This door’s open.”

He slid his fingers into the crack and pulled it open. Black inside there, and a glimmer of light. A bare bulb on the wall inside. They stepped through onto a metal cage floor, suspended over darkness. A chain ran across, blocking steep metal stairs.

Then they heard a grinding noise. “Down there,” she said. “It’s the elevators.”

Their eyes adjusted to see that they were right on top of the elevators, a huge hole, with metal cables going down, down, seven floors. One elevator was coming up. Trevor craned out to watch, holding on with one hand and leaning out under the railing.

“Don’t!” Darlene said. “It will come up and cut your head off.”

“No,” he said. “It has to stop down there.”

It cranked and cranked and cranked, until with a sigh and a jerk it stopped.

In the silence, Darlene said, “We’re going to the woman’s house.”

“Mom too?”

“Of course not.” She did not say, “Stupid.”

The father came into the kitchen while Clara was making a bedtime snack for the children. They were safe, sitting in front of the television in the den, blankly watching
The Jungle Book
with Mrs. Pell the grandmother.