“On my honor.”
“I like music. I play guitar.”
“So?”
“Not rock stuff. Classical.”
“Who’d laugh about that?”
“It’s not macho.”
She let out a moan. “That is so juvenile! Will you play for me sometime?”
“If you want. Do you play anything?”
“The radio,” she confessed, and he laughed.
“You’re funny, Carrie.”
“That’s what Hella says too.” She didn’t want him to know that she used humor to cover up her fear. “Someday I’m going to do a stand-up routine about cancer.”
“Like what?”
“What’s soft and white and covered with hair?” she asked.
“I give up.”
“Your pillow after two weeks of chemo.”
Keith groaned.
“Why did Dracula ignore the boy with cancer?” She didn’t wait for his answer, saying, “Bad blood between them.”
This time Keith chuckled. “Okay, so you can go on Johnny Carson and warm up the audience before I come on and wow them with my music.”
At the hamburger place they ordered only milk shakes and shared a plate of fries. “My stomach’s been bugging me,” Keith said, when she told him that he wasn’t eating his share.
“You’re still pitching for our side at the picnic aren’t you?”
“You bet. Tonight at the meeting Dr. Fineman was bragging that he’d hit a homer off me.”
“Well, we certainly can’t let him get away with that,” Carrie announced, thumping the table.
Keith asked, “Do you and Bobby want a ride to the park? I thought we’d better get there early to help set up.”
“That would be nice,” she said calmly, afraid of sounding too anxious. “My mom’s out of town, and my dad’s never liked hanging around all this cancer stuff. Lynda was going to drop us off.”
Keith broke into a smile. “Then no problem. I’ll pick you up and bring you home afterwards.”
She nodded, self-conscious about making it sound as if no one in her family cared about the event. Deep down she knew that Lynda would have come if her father could have been persuaded. But he’d never participated in anything having to do with the hospital. Even when she’d been first diagnosed and he’d visit her on the oncology floor he’d stand fidgeting at her bedside, and leave as quickly as possible. He’d told her, “I got my fill of sickness and death in Vietnam. You just get better, baby, and come home quick.”
Unfortunately, her mother hated hospitals too. No matter now, she thought. All that was behind her. She looked across the Formica table at Keith. “Thanks for the offer. Without Dad to control him, Bobby may act wild.”
“No problem. My sisters can handle him.”
“They’d do that?”
“In my family it’s all for one and one for all.”
Carrie almost blurted, “In mine it’s every man for himself.” Instead, she shoved a french fry into her mouth and told him, “Tell your sisters they’re on, and don’t forget your guitar. I want to hear if your playing is as good as my stand-up material. I don’t plan to go on national TV with just anyone.”
Chapter Five
The morning air smelled sweet, like new-mown grass mixed with honeysuckle and lilies. The cerulean blue sky had changed to a bright, vivid hue of cornflower by the time Carrie, Keith, and Bobby arrived at the covered pavilion in the park. Members of the hospital staff were already setting up tables for food, and washtubs of ice for drinks and watermelons, and had started a charcoal fire in the massive stone grill.
When they found Hella, she said, “It’s about time some of the guests arrived. Got those games organized?”
Carrie set a bowl of Lynda’s potato salad on one of the tables. “We have to fill the water balloons, but that won’t take long. Did you get the pillow cases for the sack races?”
Hella glanced about with a conspiratorial expression. “Don’t let anyone from housekeeping hear you ask that. They’ll have my head.” She scurried off to help set up the food table.
“Don’t you love the smell of the outdoors?” Keith asked, closing his eyes and inhaling. “There’s nothing better to me.”
“How about charcoal-broiled hamburgers?”
He shook his head. “Not even close.”
Carrie had never been one to love the outdoors, but seeing Keith’s enjoyment added to hers. People began to converge on the pavilion. He pointed toward a very tall, slim blond man and a short, plump black-haired woman. “There’re my folks. Come meet them.” He grabbed her hand. “Hey, Mom, Dad!”
Carrie met his parents, Gwen, April, and Jake. “Where’s Holly?” Keith asked.
“Still bringing food,” his father said.
Keith eyed the table already heaped with two ice chests and a wicker basket. “Cripes, Ma, there’s enough here to feed a small country.”
His mother patted his hand. “Don’t be silly. It’s better to have too much than not enough.”
His father hugged his wife’s shoulders. “We certainly don’t want anyone to go home hungry, do we?”
Carrie noticed that Keith’s brother and sisters had brown eyes like their father, but Keith’s brilliant green eyes were the same color as his mother’s. Mrs. Gardner studied her son. “I brought extra because you didn’t eat any breakfast.”
Keith shrugged. “I wasn’t hungry.”
April squealed, “You’re always hungry.”
Keith tugged on her ponytail. “Make yourself useful, short stuff. Carrie’s brother Bobby is around here someplace. Take Jake and Gwen and go find him. You have to get ready for the relay races.”
Carrie expected the girls to complain, but they agreed willingly. “He’s wearing a red T-shirt and a Dodgers baseball cap,” she said. They ran off, almost colliding with another girl who she knew at once was Holly. She resembled Keith but had brown eyes and light brown hair.
Holly set down a large chocolate sheet cake. “So you’re Carrie.”
“Guilty,” Carrie said.
“Watch out,” Keith told her. “She’s about to bombard you with nosy questions.”
Holly stuck out her tongue. “Just mildly curious, that’s all. Like what’s a nice girl like you doing with a geek like my brother?”
Keith chuckled. “The CIA is only mildly curious compared to my sister.”
“Oh, shut up,” Holly said, grinning. Carrie realized that they probably always teased one another that way. She turned to Holly. “Ask me anything you want to know.”
Holly peeked around her toward her brother. “Is it true what Keith says about his being able to do better in the three-legged race tied to a tree than to either one of us?”
“He said that?”
“Scout’s honor.” Holly looked the picture of innocence.
“She lies like a rug!” Keith protested.
Carrie ignored him. “I think we should make him eat his words, Holly—and our dust.”
“Is that a challenge?” asked Keith. The other kids ran up, with Bobby in tow. “How’d you like to run in the three-legged race with me, kid?”
Bobby agreed instantly, and in minutes Keith had grabbed Dr. Fineman’s bullhorn and announced the first event. At the starting line Holly asked Carrie, “Have you ever done this before?”
“Nope.”
“Neither have I.”
They burst out laughing and at the blast of the whistle started for the finish line at the far end of the field. They fell three times, got turned around once, and were laughing so hard by the end of the race that they could scarcely stand. Keith helped untie their legs saying. “At least Bobby and I won our heat.”
“We’ll do better in the water-balloon toss,” Carrie assured him. An hour later they had won that event. Dr. Fineman announced that the burgers were ready on the grill, so Carrie lined up behind Keith, heaped her plate from the food tables, and followed him to a blanket spread under a tree where his family had
gathered. Midway through the meal Gwen handed Keith his guitar, and he played songs that people could sing. As she watched him play, Carrie decided that Keith made everything fun.
Finally he called the concert quits and whispered, “Let’s go for a walk.”
“How about the ball game?”
“In an hour.”
He slung the guitar over his shoulder, and they started down a winding trail through the park’s woods. The sounds of the picnic faded, and the noise of humming insects and crunching leaves took over. She watched sun-dappled patterns play across his hair and shoulders while the heavy woodsy scent smelled sweeter than any perfume.
The air grew thick, damp, and humid. Keith stopped and sniffed deeply. “It’s going to rain,” he told her.
“No way. The Farmer’s Almanac said—”
“Who are you gonna believe? Me—the great outdoorsman—or some silly old book?” He took her hand. “We’d better find some shelter, or we’re gonna get drenched.” The sun vanished, and a breeze stirred the leaves. It felt cool, and even she could smell the moisture. Keith spotted a rock overhang and stooped beneath it, pulling Carrie and the guitar behind him. The shelter was deeper than Carrie had first thought, but low. She sat, Indian style, and rested her back along the smooth, cool granite.
Thunder clapped and rain came down in huge, fat drops. “It wasn’t supposed to do this,” she told Keith in exasperation. He’d pulled his guitar across his lap and was plucking at the strings.
“I think you should sue the publishers of that almanac,” Keith said. The notes he chose were beautiful, haunting, and she told him so. “Classical Spanish guitar is my favorite,” he said. The melody was so pretty that Carrie’s eyes filled with tears. “What’s wrong?” Keith asked.
“Nothing. It just sounds so sad.”
“Lonely,” he countered. “To me it sounds lonely.”
“When did you learn to play?”
“During my second round of chemo and radiation. It was a bad time for me. I thought I had the disease licked. When it came back, I felt sort of betrayed. I got really bummed out. Then one day my dad brought me this guitar. He never let me give up when I was trying to learn to play it, even when my fingertips got raw from the strings.”
“It hurts to play?”
He held up his hand where she saw calluses on the ends of his fingers. “Until the calluses form, you hurt.” He pulled plaintive notes from the instrument. “And as I got the hang of this guitar, a funny thing happened inside me. I started caring about getting well. If it hadn’t been for my dad …” He let the sentence trail.
Carrie hugged her knees. “You have a nice family, Keith. I really like them.”
“Thanks. Your stepmom seems okay. I’ll bet you’ve got a good family too.”
“I have parents,” she said wistfully. “Not a family.”
She was grateful that he didn’t ask any questions about them. “My mom gets a little fanatical about food sometimes,” he said, “but she was there for me during every treatment, every blood test, every spinal tap.” He leaned toward Carrie. “At one point she got it into her head that maybe I’d respond better to the treatments if I ate health foods. Man, she had the whole family chowing down on brown rice, tofu, and bean sprouts. We almost starved to death. Holly used to hide Twinkies in her room, and late at night we’d pig out.”
Carrie laughed. “It wasn’t that way for me,” she said. “My parents were blown away when the doctors told them I had leukemia. My dad could hardly look at me. My mom hung around for a while, but the hospital gave her the creeps, and then she and Dad were having problems between them.”
Carrie stared into the rain. The air had turned cooler, and she shivered. “I was lucky because I responded well to the induction phase of chemo and went into remission. ‘Course I still had to do maintenance for two years, but now”—she shrugged—“now all they do is keep tabs on my bloodwork and hope that it never comes back. I—I don’t want to go through it all again.”
She didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t want to do any of it again. Not just the chemo, but the family breakup either.
“I guess that’s why I hate being anemic,” Keith said, setting his guitar against the stone wall. “It makes me worry that the cancer’s coming back. There’s so much I want to do.”
“Like play baseball and the Johnny Carson show?”
A smile turned up the corner of his mouth. “I never used to think about living long. I’d see an old guy and think, ‘Hurry up, old man.’ Now I think, ‘It must be good to have your joints ache because they’re old and not because they’re eaten up with cancer.’ ”
Carrie listened to the rain, to its slowing rhythm. She plucked one of the guitar’s strings. “Could you teach me to play?”
“Would you like to learn?”
“Yes,” she said.
His green eyes were bright, like the color of new spring leaves. He ran his knuckles along her cheek gently, and her heart fairly leapt into her throat. “I’ll teach you,” he said, “I’ll teach you whatever you want to know.”
Chapter Six
The rain stopped, and the sun broke out from behind its prison of clouds. Keith put the guitar strap over his shoulder and helped Carrie crawl from under the overhang. Keith inhaled, saying, “Just smell that air, Carrie.”
She closed her eyes and sniffed the aromas of wet grass, rich, damp earth, and moist, clean air. She would never have noticed their distinct and separate fragrances if he hadn’t been with her, and she wondered how the world could seem more colorful, more sweet-scented whenever she was with Keith. “Yes, Nature Boy,” she joked, because her feelings were making her embarrassed. “Maybe we should all live in tree houses and drink rainwater.”
“Just for that wisecrack we’re gonna do the tug-of-war right over the biggest mud puddle I can find. But first, I think we should get the baseball game under way.”
When they got back to the picnic area, Keith grabbed the megaphone and said, “All right everyone! I want to see your faces at the baseball diamond. We have a game to play!”
Carrie and Holly decided to escape before the game started, to use the park rest room.
“You get along pretty good with your brother,” Carrie said, once they were inside. “You seem to really care about each other.”
“We’re all pretty close. Keith’s the oldest, and we’ve always sort of looked up to him. When he went in the hospital the first time, I was only seven, and we’d had a fight the day before. You know, I thought it was my fault that he got cancer.”
Carrie wondered what Bobby had been told when she’d been diagnosed. Until now she hadn’t considered what he might have been thinking and feeling. “Come to think of it, Bobby got tummy aches whenever I went for chemo.”
“So did April. Every time Keith got sick from the drugs, she’d be right in the bathroom barfing alongside him.”
Carrie shuddered. “I still hate to go into the chemo room at the clinic, because I know how sick you can get after the treatments.”
“Keith says that all that’s behind you now.”
Carrie nodded. “Forever, I hope.”
“The second time Keith went into the hospital was worse,” Holly confessed. “I was eleven then, and I’d done a lot of reading about cancer, so I knew more. I was so scared for him.”
“He told me that he got pretty depressed the second time.”
“Yeah, it was a bad time for the whole family. I think because we really believed that he was going to be one of the lucky ones who beat the statistics, and then suddenly, BAM!—he’s right back where he started from.”
Carrie washed her hands and doused her face with cool water as Holly talked. “It was worse for him too because he was thirteen and had a crush on this girl named Amanda.”
The mention of a girlfriend made Carrie’s mouth go dry. Holly continued. “She was the prettiest girl in the middle school. They were both eighth-graders, and everyone thought they were so cool togethe
r. But then Keith got sick. You know, she never once called him or came to see him. He got so bummed out about it. He got behind in his schoolwork too. Keith’s always had to study extra hard to make good grades, but he couldn’t concentrate. It was all Amanda’s fault. If only she’d stood by him.”
Holly paused, then said, “Later I found out that Amanda dropped my brother because her parents made her. They were afraid she’d catch cancer from him. Wasn’t that dumb? Everybody knows you can’t catch it.”
Carrie remembered how her friends had treated her at the time. Many had stayed away from her, acted snobby. Now she wondered if they had thought the same thing. “I guess that’s why I like support group so much,” she told Holly. “Everybody understands what you’re going through, but they don’t treat you like you’re gonna break either.”
“Hey, that’s what Keith says. Are the two of you friends at school or just in support group?”
“He says hello when he sees me in the halls, but us lowly freshmen don’t mingle much with sophomores.”
“Well, next year I’ll be a freshman at Martin. Will you mingle with me?”
Carrie couldn’t help but grin. “Sure I will, Holly.” And she meant it. “We’d better hurry up—wouldn’t want to miss that ball game.”
At the baseball diamond teams were being chosen and positions assigned. This time Carrie and Holly both ended up on Keith’s team. He sent Carrie to left field and his sister to first base. “What about me?” Bobby asked.
“Shortstop,” Keith told him.
Moments later Carrie stood in the outfield watching Keith deliver his famous fastball to a hapless batter, who struck out quickly. Yet when a ten-year-old girl with a leg brace came to the plate, he walked her. One of the radiologists stepped to the plate. Keith licked his fingers, tugged at the bill of his cap, and wound up for his pitch.
Carrie saw the ball leave his hand. She heard the bat crack against it, saw the ball head straight toward the pitcher’s mound and strike Keith hard in the shoulder. She heard Keith’s wail of pain and saw him collapse onto the dirt mound like a broken doll.