IGMS Issue 17 (6 page)

"I don't need nutrition," said Matt. "I got vitamins and my medicine."

Steve felt he had a moral obligation not to cave in on the important stuff -- like grapes -- just because the fear of losing his only son made him want to break down and cry. He pulled the ultimate Dad card instead: "No grapes," he said. "No dessert."

After cookies and milk, there were video games while Steve looked over Matt's homework -- the bird drawings, and a detailed explanation of how much bird seed Big Bird would eat if he, like the sparrows and jays at the birdfeeder, chomped down on seven times his body weight every day. Matt and Leah had put together some alphabet work in a bold, red crayon, and Matt showed off his skill with a new math puzzle, racing the clock and winning. It was good. Outside the rain fell and the wind rattled the fire escape, but inside, it was all light and warm. They sat on the sofa and watched one of Matt's DVDs. Matt dug in with bony elbows and knees every time the bad guys took a punch. Steve was sure he'd be covered in dollar-sized bruises in the morning. If only Sharon had been there . . . if only bath time hadn't been followed by medicine time . . . it would have been perfect.

Matt got tucked in. Then, it was story time.

Cinderella, the very grim, Grimm version, because that was what Steve could tell out of memory. There were other versions, cleansed of violence. They sat wrong in his mind, twisted and somehow false. Liars on the page. Now, he told the story to Matt the way that felt right. The book, as always, sat unopened on his lap. He didn't need it, except as a place to put his hands. He knew the story. It was the version he liked best, the one with golden slippers instead of glass, and a golden gown shaken down out of the leafy, salt-watered, graveside tree. With the ambitious sisters limping on bloody, mutilated feet, and Cinderella's rescue coming on the wings of dozens of birds. No godmother fairy at all.

Matt's medicines kicked in and he fell asleep before the end. Steve sat for a long, quiet moment, just watching his son's narrow chest rise and fall with each laborious breath. He could set the storybook aside then, and reach out to touch Matt's hair, his cheek, his hands. It wasn't to check for fever, but just to touch, to remind himself of what was real, what mattered.

Steve rose then, tucked the blankets carefully up around Matt's narrow shoulders, crossed to the window, and opened it.

There.

The junkie stood as if she'd been waiting for him, a slim figure hunched against the fire escape, while the wind grabbed and tossed at the oversized, black coat she wore, so the tails of it flew out into the night like wings. She looked strangely as though she'd been both hoping and dreading he would appear. The two emotions beat back and forth across her face with the give-and-take of a pulse, as though she couldn't hold on to either feeling long enough for it to settle.

He thought at first she was the teenager he'd expected, but there was something in the way she moved, the glance of her eye that said otherwise. She might, he thought, be any age at all. Her unlined face did not speak of youth. No, she looked as though she had been sitting in the winter dark since before there was winter.

She looked, he thought, like something carved from memory, something that had been extravagantly beautiful once. But the unending rain and wind had worn everything away to bare essentials. She had a long, thin nose centered in a pale, thin face in which her eyes gleamed, overlarge, out of skull-dark hollows, and over which fair hair was plastered in long, lank, streaks.

She looked cold and wary and very much alone.

He did not invite her inside.

It was dark out but for the streetlight and the light coming from his own window, and cold. He could see the warm air spilling out in rolling clouds all around them while they stood on opposite sides of the barred window. She did not shiver -- in a very deliberate way that implied steely pride rather than immunity from the cold.

There was something unquestionably inhuman about her, and Steve did not want this beautiful, ageless woman-thing to set one ice-cold toe in Matt's room.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I am the evening shade," she said. Her voice was soft, but the wind carried it to him. His ears seemed to quiver, animal-like, trying to stretch themselves to catch that sound. A husky, low-pitched voice that reminded him of water, though not of rain, or of music in some undefined way that had very little to do with singing. "I am a haunted melody half-remembered. I am summer's regret. I am the last hope of an unlucky man. I am a bishop's curse and a beggar's blessing. I am the dream of flowers in winter. I am the woken nightmare. I am moonlit laughter and starlight tears. I am seen with the eyes and believed with the heart."

Steve rolled his eyes, feeling a surge of irritation at her nonsense, at his own fears. She was high, he thought.

"Tell me who you are," he said.

"A sparrow, living off the crumbs you let fall."

"What are you doing here?" he made his voice harsh. "What do you want?"

"Tell me a story," she said.

Steve shook his head and backed away. He closed the window. Locked it. He made sure of the bars, and drew the curtains. His hands were like ice, but they didn't shake until he turned round and saw Matt, still sleeping, undisturbed.

He believed her.

"Tell me a story," she said on the next night, when he only stared at her through the window. He watched her through the glass and did not even open it. Her lips moved. The sound was muffled, but Steve could tell what she said.

"Tell me a story."

He started moving the bedtime rituals to the living room, away from that big, benighted window and the harmless-seeming shape that lurked just outside it. Steve made sure all the curtains were shut, that not a chink of darkness could get inside. He tried giving up on story time altogether, but Matt rebelled.

"I liked it better the old way," he said, his face flushed in a way that presaged a tantrum . . . or a fever. "Why do you always have to change everything?"

Steve didn't have the heart to keep it up after that. There wasn't anything left in his life but Matt. Maybe there was a little pride left, too, enough to keep Steve from admitting his fears, even to himself.
A woman on the fire escape.
It was easy, in the warmth and light to remember she was small and thin. Matt still slept in the same room. That was only a problem if Steve believed that what waited outside the window was a monster.

Steve believed in monsters. He did not think the junkie was one.

He tucked Matt into bed, and told him the story of Mother Holla. Matt thought the heroine, who dropped diamonds and pearls from her mouth like an exploding jewelry box whenever she spoke, was liable to choke to death if she talked in her sleep. He laughed hysterically at the fate of the unkind daughter, too. For Matt, it was a short jump from imagining frogs and snakes falling out of his own mouth, to demanding a burping contest. Matt won, shortly before the night meds kicked in again, and he settled into the pillow, closing his eyes in drowsy triumph.

Steve set the unopened book aside and reached over. He touched Matt's cheek and hand, both too warm, but what could he do? The chemo had hollowed Matt out, eaten away the good with the bad. All they could do was wait and see which would come back strongest, but in the mean time, Matt was prey to every germ, every chance infection. They couldn't live inside a bubble . . .

"Tell me a story," said the junkie on the fire escape.

Steve didn't remember crossing the room or even opening the window, but he must have.

The night was clear and very cold. He was standing in it, watching the frost form on the fire escape, while the thin, pale junkie huddled in the wings of her thin, dark coat.

She, too, had not been well. Her skin was stretched like tissue over the bones beneath, and her lips were dry and chapped. There was nothing alluring about her; he could all too easily believe she was dying of addiction and neglect. His insides twisted in a strange mix of pity and anger.

"What happens then?" he asked. "Tell you a story, and what then? How is that going to help anything?"

Her shadow-filled eyes opened and shut. She moved her head a little from one side to the other. It was not negation, but rather like the way a bird moves when it considers a choice of seeds on the ground.

"I could help him," she said. She lifted one long, bony finger, and, instinctively, Steve stepped in her way, blocking Matt from her line of sight. Her eyes flickered, bright and dark together, and searched Steve's face. "There is sickness in him, and he is weak. I could keep the fever at bay. I have that much power."

Steve could feel his heart plunge and shudder, so that his ears rang with the sudden, eager beat. Power. It was hard to connect that word with this fragile, frostbit woman; yet he could sense the strength of her will beneath the brittle ruin of her body. Power? He believed her. He believed the universe had in it some force -- call it miracle or magic -- which could do what medicine alone had not. There would be a price, though. In the stories, there was always a price. Steve believed in those stories.

"You will keep . . ." he wouldn't give her Matt's name, "my son from getting sick?"

"I will drive away the fever," she said.

"And all I have to do in return is . . ."

"Tell me a story."

Night after night, he did just that. He gave her Snow White and Rapunzel, the Frog Prince, King Thrushbeard, and the Six Swans. Every night, Matt would go to bed listless and feverish, and every morning, he would awake with the heat and sickness gone, all bright eyes and boundless energy. He thrived, until bedtime, when whatever spell had been cast seemed to falter, and Steve found himself watching the window, waiting for that shadow to reappear.

While Matt slumbered and the junkie worked her spells, Steve told her of princes who could not remember their lovers' faces, and of princesses whose riches were stolen away. When inspiration for fairytales ran out, he gave her movie plots, and she laughed at him, knowing in an instant which stories he believed, and which ones he only told to make the time pass.

Hours later, he would close the window, and his mind would be reeling. In the morning, while chasing after Matt and getting ready for work, Steve found he could not really remember which stories he had told her, as though in the telling of them, he had dropped each of those stories down some deep and bottomless well from which they could never be drawn back out again.

In fact, he told her more than he meant to. But she listened to him so deeply, drawing stories from him one after another with such smiling patience, and the words spilled out like vomit.

"The other driver was drunk," he said. "At four in the afternoon, he never stopped for the light. His blood was twice the legal limit. Sharon had just called me a few minutes before. She was taking Matt to sign up for T-ball. When the police called me at work," he said, "I thought it would be Sharon. I thought she was going to ask me to pick up milk at the store on my way home. She was dead by the time I got to the hospital. The funny thing was," he said. "The funny thing. Was. That was the day they found Matt's tumor. He never had any symptoms. If they hadn't been in the accident, it would have been too late to operate."

"What happened to the other driver?" the sparrowjunkie asked.

Steve blinked and gave her a broken half-smile. "Probation," he said. "And his driver's license was suspended. He had to take the bus for a few months, and clean trash off the side of the highway."

"Do you wish he were dead?" she asked, her head tilted a little to one side. She listened, always, with intensity, and Steve hesitated, remembering too many days when Matt had been in the hospital, the world crazily tipped on its axis and he'd been on the verge of losing everything, remembering how easy it would have been to swerve, to take out one or two of those orange-vested figures on the edge of the highway. He had resisted the urge. In the same way, he resisted the tidal pull of that question for one heartbeat, and then another.

"I try not to."

Sometimes Steve wondered how much Matt overheard of these late-night conversations. He never mentioned them. It was as though, for Matt, the world simply stopped when the night meds kicked in.