“Maybe I don’t want to go to college,” Carrie countered. “Maybe I want to get a job and work after high school.”
“And what?” Mrs. Blake snapped. “Be your father’s secretary and marry some jerk who can’t give you the better things in life? No, I want you to know how to do something. You need your own career. Just think what would have happened to us if I hadn’t had a career to fall back on.”
The truth was, Carrie really did want to go to college, so this tack wasn’t getting her anyplace. “Well what about my doctor? And the clinic? They’re all on this side of town. And so’s support group too.”
“You told me you wanted a car. If you have one, I won’t have to listen to your father moan about your riding the bus ever again. And there are other doctors and clinics, you know. We can get a recommendation for others—a referral.”
“So long as I’m well,” Carrie exploded. “But what if I get sick again? What then? I want my regular doctor.”
Her mother brushed off Carrie’s grim suggestion, stood, scooped up her teacup, and crossed to the sink. “You’re perfectly fine, Carrie. Spending a week with that Gardner boy has made you pessimistic. Your cancer’s in remission, and it’s not going to come back again.”
Carrie recalled Keith telling her a similar thing. What’s happened to me won’t happen to you, he said. Yet somehow her mother made it sound different. Keith’s message had sounded positive, encouraging. Her mother’s sounded threatening, as if she was daring Carrie to get sick again. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” she said calmly.
“Well, isn’t that just the point?” Her mother’s voice had turned conciliatory. “Since we don’t know the future, we should enjoy what we have now to the fullest. I have a career—a good one. I have a future and a man in my life who encourages me. I should think you’d be pleased for me.”
Carrie felt unsure of what to say. If she said she wasn’t pleased, her mother would be hurt. Yet to say she was would be a lie. Her mother came over and put her arm around her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have surprised you with the house sale, but Larry knew this realtor, and it all seemed so right. Listen, we’ll drive out to the apartment complex next Saturday. You’re really going to like it. There’s a game room, a sauna, and a pool.”
She hugged Carrie, but Carrie found it impossible to respond. “I’m going to Keith’s on Saturday.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sure you won’t be there for the whole day.”
“He doesn’t have that many ‘whole’ days left. I’m planning on spending every minute I can with him.”
Her mother dropped her arm and walked over and picked up Carrie’s suitcase. “We can talk about it later. Right now let’s get your things upstairs. Incidentally, the realtor has a key, and I told her to show the house whenever she wants. If you’re here alone when she brings a client through, please just stay out of the way.”
Wearily Carrie bent and picked up her other bags. Her mother didn’t have a buyer for the house yet, and therefore, she had hope that no one would want it. She shook her head skeptically. It was one more miracle she had to hope for.
Carrie went back to work on Monday. She almost asked her dad to stop her mother from selling the house, but he was so busy managing construction projects, she scarcely saw him. Besides, if he did say anything to her, it would probably mean another fight. Bobby was away at camp, and Lynda didn’t seem to mind taking her over to Keith’s anytime she asked, so Carrie concentrated on her job and her time with Keith and shoved the other stuff out of her mind. It gave her a headache to think about it too much anyway.
At Keith’s she met the hospice people. A nurse, Judy, and a social worker, Joy, came to check on him every day. Judy recorded Keith’s vital signs—his blood pressure and temperature—and took care of his medical needs. Both women listened to and talked to the family, answering questions and soothing their anxieties. “What happens next?” Mr. Gardner asked. “Is he hurting?” Mrs. Gardner wanted to know. “How much longer will my brother live?” Holly wondered aloud, tearfully.
Because Carrie spent so much time at the house, and because they treated her as one of the family, she heard them assure the Gardners that Keith wasn’t in pain, and that the dying process involved several stages. “His need for food will decrease,” Judy explained. “Toward the end he may act confused and may not recognize you.” Mrs. Gardner winced when she heard that part. “Also,” Joy said, “he’ll spend more and more time sleeping and be difficult to arouse. His body will be cool to your touch, and his breathing will become erratic.” Carrie really liked the honesty of the hospice people and soon realized that they were there to help the family as much as the patient through the ordeal ahead.
The minister from Keith’s church stopped by often, and she found his presence comforting. Twice she ran into visiting kids from the support group. She felt that Keith was nestled in a cocoon of love, and it gave her a sense of peace and acceptance about letting him go. It also helped that family life kept happening all around him, and that there were no IVs, wires, or monitors in his room.
He asked for his study desk to be removed and a lounge chair to be brought in so people could be comfortable when they visited with him. He had his father turn his bed, so that he could look out the window at all times, and he’d asked for a small night table to be placed next to his bed. It held a lamp, his baseball glove, and the terrarium Carrie had given him.
He took pain pills as often as he wanted them. In fact, Mrs. Gardner seemed to be always asking, “Do you hurt, Keith?” and “Can I get you anything to eat?”
Keith was patient, attempting to eat for her sake, but privately he told Carrie, “I’m just not hungry anymore. I mean, my mom’s the type who thinks that everything can be fixed with a good meal and a glass of milk.” He pulled a Twinkie out from under the covers. “Holly too. Take this, okay? I don’t want either one to know I can’t force it down.”
One afternoon Carrie arrived only to be told that Keith was taking a shower. So she sat next to his bed, waiting for him to finish, feeling grateful that he was having a good day. Jake bounded into the room, saying, “Hi! Did you see how I fixed up the frogs’ house?”
She peered into the glass container and saw where he had scooped out one corner and created a pond from an old butter tub. “Do you see the frogs?” he asked impatiently.
The plants had grown thick and lush in the hothouse atmosphere, and at first she could see only the foliage. A philodendron leaf quivered, and finally she saw two miniature frogs crouched beneath it. “Those are from the lake?” she asked. “Why, they’ve grown into regular, real-live, honest-to-goodness frogs.”
Keith came in just then, towel-drying his hair. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and she saw how thin and gaunt he looked. “Jake’s quite the frog farmer, huh?”
Jake’s face lit up with a smile. “I’m gonna enter ’em in a frog-jumping contest next year at my school. They’ll win.” He dashed out of the room, and Keith shut the door behind him.
“It’s crazy how attached he is to those dumb frogs,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone, but so am I. I watch them at night when I can’t sleep, and it reminds me of the cabin. And the lake. We had fun, didn’t we?”
“The most,” she whispered. “I—I wish—” Her voice had grown thick, and she didn’t trust it.
He put his fingertips on her lips. “I wish too. But it doesn’t change things.” His skin and the whites of his eyes had a distinct yellow cast. “It’s nice of you to come by every day,” he told her, easing down on the bed. “You don’t have to, you know.”
She picked at the nap of the carpet with the toe of her sandal. “Sure I do. It’s a good excuse for leaving work early.”
He smiled and pulled on a shirt. “Do you like the job?”
“Dad’s out most of the time, and so it’s just me and Patty—that’s his secretary. She’s nice. Her baby was sick last week, so I had to keep things running without her.”
“I’ll bet you did fine.”
br />
“A piece of cake.”
“You went in for your lab work too, didn’t you?”
It touched her that he could remember such details, especially when he was so sick. “They pronounced me well and fine,” she told him.
“I’m glad. I was hoping you’d get a good report. Any buyers for your house?”
“No offers, but lots of people are looking. The realtor says that this is the best time for it to sell because families want to be settled in before the school year begins.”
“Im sorry you won’t be going to Martin next year. So’s Holly.”
Carrie turned her face, because the mere mention of it made her want to cry. “Yeah, that’s what she told me,” she said. “But she’s pretty outgoing. She’ll do all right.”
“A couple of the guys from the baseball team stopped by yesterday. I could tell they didn’t want to be here. I mean, what can they say to me? But I’m glad they came anyway.” She figured that he must get lonely, but it was tough for kids their age to look death in the face, so she could understand how awkward it must have been for them. “Hella stops by too, not as a nurse, but just as a friend. She’s a really great lady. I hope she marries some guy who’s worthy of her.”
His sentiment surprised her, but then he’d only known happily married people, so naturally he’d think such a feat was possible. He eased back onto the bed, and she saw his eyelids droop. “You’re tired,” she said. “I should let you sleep.”
“I took my pain pills while I was in the bathroom,” he explained. “I wish they didn’t bum me out so bad. I always seem to be fallin’ asleep, and I don’t want to sleep.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid I won’t wake up.” His eyelids closed, and his head lolled to one side. For a moment she held her breath until she heard his breathing coming strong and regular. Slowly she exhaled, pulled a coverlet over him, then bent and kissed him lightly on the cheek and left the room.
Chapter Seventeen
On the Fourth of July, Carrie accompanied her Dad, Lynda and Bobby to the riverfront where they watched a spectacular display of fireworks launched from barges in the river. Brilliant flashes of red, blue, yellow and green sprayed across the dark sky and rockets whistled, then burst with a bang, showering the night with gold dust. Each bang, pop and roar was followed by a dazzling eruption of color. Carrie covered her ears and glanced toward her father, whose tense expression scared her.
His mouth was set in a grim, hard line, and she saw him wince at the sound of the fireworks. It surprised and puzzled her so much that later, when the two of them were back home, sitting on the back porch eating watermelon, she asked him about it. “Didn’t you like the fireworks?”
“Sure,” he said, watching Bobby race around the yard with a sparkler held high. “Don’t I take you kids every year to watch them?”
“You didn’t look like you were having a good time. It was like the noise was bugging you.”
He hesitated, then said quietly, “It’s the sound the firecrackers make. It always reminds me of sniper fire.”
Puzzled, she scrunched her forehead. “What’s that?”
“In Vietnam we’d be on patrol, and suddenly the trees would come alive with this popping noise, and we’d hit the dirt. The snipers sat up in the trees and picked us off, and we never even saw them. And as for the rockets, every time one went off, lots of us died.” He set his slice of watermelon on the porch railing.
“You never told me about Vietnam before. Why?”
“Isn’t much to tell.” His voice sounded gruff. “I went right after high school with four of my buddies. It seemed sort of exciting at the time, marching off to war.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t.”
She racked her brain, trying to remember what they’d discussed in American history class about the Vietnam War, but the facts were a fuzzy jumble. “Didn’t some guys burn their draft cards?”
“Sure. But I did my duty. I did what was right.”
“What was it like?” Carrie asked, fascinated. She’d never thought of her father as having a life before she existed, let alone his having fought in a war.
“Vietnam was a hot, stinking jungle, and I wish we could’ve blown it into the sea.”
“But you didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“Five of us went over there, but I was the only one to come back.”
“Just you? The others were all killed?”
“Gabe Hunter went to a vet hospital. I went to see him, but I picked the wrong day to go. They’d just amputated both his legs, and as I was walking down the hall, I heard him screaming. He never forgave the doctors for doing that to him. He died later.”
Carrie couldn’t even swallow. “I-is that why you hate hospitals so much?”
He flicked a watermelon seed over the railing. “Partly. I went to the hospital to see you once when you were diagnosed with leukemia. They said you were having a spinal test.”
“Spinal tap,” she said, correcting him. “It’s how they check the spinal fluid for cancer cells, to see whether it’s spreading or not.”
“Hearing you say that bothers me, Carrie. You’re only fifteen years old. Why should a fifteen-year-old know about that stuff?”
Gently she told him, “Dad, I have leukemia, and I have to know all there is to know about it. Pretending it’s not there won’t make it go away.”
He scowled and continued talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “I remember walking down that hallway and standing at the door of the lab. I could see what was going on through that little glass window. You were curled into a ball, and some guy was poking a needle into your back. I heard you scream—” He paused; his eyes were unfocused, as if he were seeing pictures from the past. “But you never moved.”
“You can’t move,” she explained patiently. “And I yelled because it hurt. They tell you to scream if you want.”
“I wanted to take that doctor apart,” her father said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of them hurting you.” He shrugged. “I guess that was why it was so hard for me to visit you in that place. I was scared I might start dismantling it.”
His confession stunned her. She’d had no idea he’d felt that way. “But sometimes you have to hurt in order to get better,” she told him. “Whenever I’d get really sick from the chemo, so sick that I was barfing up my toenails, I’d tell myself, ‘This is awful, but at least the cancer cells are suffering too.’ ”
“I know that up here.” He tapped the side of his temple with his forefinger. “But here”—he tapped his chest—“here it’s not so easy.”
Carrie felt tears forming in her eyes and sniffed them back. Keith was right; girls were always puddling up the place. She wanted to throw herself in her dad’s arms. She wanted to tell him she was all right and that she loved him.
He locked his hands behind his head and tipped back in his chair. “I’m real sorry about Keith. I know he’s your friend and all, and I know what it’s like to watch friends die. It never makes sense to me why kids have to die. Didn’t make sense when it happened to my buddies in Nam, doesn’t make sense to me now. It’s got an odor about it, you know.”
“An odor?”
“Death. It smells rank and nasty. Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget.”
Bobby barreled up onto the porch, demanding more sparklers. Carrie watched her father lean over and light two and hand them to Bobby. “Come on, you guys,” the boy demanded. “Let’s light some firecrackers.”
Her father fairly leapt out of the chair and onto the lawn. Carrie remembered what Lynda had told her once. It’s hard for him to show his feelings. Its just his way of coping. She picked up her piece of watermelon, but her eyes never left Bobby and her father as they launched a rocket into the night sky.
By the middle of July, Keith was so weak that he could no longer get out of bed. His pain had increased too, and the pills were no longer effective, so hospice brought in an infusion pump for dispensing Keith’s morphine. Carrie tho
ught the small machine looked out of place in Keith’s room, but the device was a blessing. An IV line, attached to a tiny needle inserted under his skin, kept a steady flow of the potent painkiller flowing into his body continuously.
As his liver failed, his body bloated, and his skin turned quite yellow. But as hard as it was for Carrie to see him so sick, it was harder not to see him at all. So she went to his house as often as possible and sat next to his bed and talked about anything that popped into her mind.
She noticed that even when he was drugged and unable to converse, he responded to the sound of voices. “Hearing is the last of the senses to fail,” Judy explained. “That’s why we always talk to patients, and that’s also why we watch what we say. Talk positively, about happy things, about how much you care.”
Once she stopped by on her way to work and found Mrs. Gardner asleep in the lounge chair beside his bed, holding his hand. The scene caught her heart and stayed with her for a long time. The mother’s plump pink fingers wrapped around his frail ones, as if she might somehow keep him alive if she could only hold on tight enough.
Hella came one afternoon, and after visiting with Keith, they left him with his mother and Holly and went out onto the front veranda, where an old-fashioned swing hung from hooks in the wooden ceiling. Carrie pushed off from the floor. The swing swayed, its chain creaking in rhythm with the movement. “He’s not doing so good, is he?” she finally asked.
“Not very good at all,” Hella confirmed, sending a sickening sensation into Carrie’s stomach. She wanted to ask, How much longer? but didn’t have the courage.
“Being at home is better than being in the hospital,” Carrie told her. “I didn’t think so when Keith first told me about hospice, but now I see that it is.”
“Hospice is a wonderful program, but not all families can handle a member dying at home. The Gardners are pretty special.”
How well Carrie knew that. Even though her father seemed to understand about dying, he was afraid of it. And as for her mother—well, Carrie was certain now that Faye could never deal with the day-in and day-out process.