HIS
The next week Fish tried hard to throw himself back into his routine. He strictly avoided reading John Keats, but otherwise he studied and worked as usual. Don’t think about her, he directed himself. It’ll only lead to more grief.
But it was useless. The Indian summer weather and blue skies brought her to mind, as did the swirl of flamboyant red leaves on the sidewalk. And he was in the wrong field insofar as avoiding topics relating to women, beauty, or love. Even the most ponderous and clunky modern poetry seemed to be about Rose, if only in the negative sense, demonstrating what she was not. After a few days, it seemed as though everything in his world was conspiring against his attempt to forget her. Things that normally he had never paid much attention to seemed to shout out at him, and point to Rose.
Like it or not, he was on an emotional roller coaster, feeling surges of wonder and pleasure followed by the unholy trinity of disturbing resentment, cold harshness, and then morose depression.
How much worse was it going to be when he actually saw Rose?
There was no way he could avoid seeing her, unless he wanted to be a jerk and break his spoken promise to see all her plays. In addition, Blanche and Bear were coming up Friday, and he had already committed to seeing them. There was nothing to do but suck it up and go through with it.
Hers
Friday, Rose sang all morning because Bear and Blanche were coming to see her. When she finally saw them driving on campus at noon, her happiness bubbled over in excitement. She sprinted over to their car and hugged Bear through the rolled-down window.
“Oh I’ve missed you both so much!” she gasped. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
Blanche laughed at her. “We’ve missed you too!” she leaned over and kissed her sister, and Rose patted her sister’s stomach.
“And a baby! I just can’t get over it!”
“Neither can I,” Blanche confessed.
“I suppose I should let you park!” Rose glanced out the window and saw cars behind them on the campus drive. “You can come to class with me! I have theology and medical ethics. They’re both super classes!”
“Sounds great,” Bear said.
Every normal activity was a bit more exciting, having Bear and Blanche along, explaining things to them and showing them things and introducing them to the wide gamut of people she now called “friends.” Up until that moment, Rose hadn’t realized how proud she was of her school and how happy she was to be there. Of course, no place on this earth was going to be perfect, but she was learning why Alex had asked her, as a matter of course, if she thought life at Mercy College was heaven on earth. Just a fragment of what’s to come, she told herself. That’s good enough for me. Probably all we mortals can bear.
They ate dinner at the cafeteria just for the experience of it, and then sat around the student lounge and talked until Rose had to get ready for the play.
“How are you doing with Fish?” Blanche queried.
“I’m fine,” Rose said significantly. But she didn’t want to say any more. She had already decided that if anything of import were going on in that area, her sister, with her keen observational powers, would discover it on her own.
HIS
Duty calls. Friday night he showed up at the theatre and met Blanche and Bear in the lobby. They both looked good, as usual, and Blanche, who didn’t look as though she were expecting a baby at all, seemed to have an additional glow about her.
When he greeted them, he noticed that his sister-in-law looked at him twice, as though she had noticed that his nose had grown three centimeters longer. He attempted to be blithe and normal in their presence.
“Is this your first time up here?” Fish asked his brother as they sat down in the theatre before the play.
“Yes,” Bear said. “Backwater place, isn’t it? But Rose showed us around the campus this afternoon. They could use better buildings—even the new ones are atrocious in terms of design—but the students are really something.” He chuckled. “Kateri Kovach cracks me up. I’ve met some of her older brothers and sisters before and thought they were wild, but she really takes the cake.”
Bear and Blanche enjoyed the play, although Blanche said it was really almost unbearably depressing at parts. “I keep wishing that Cordelia could have escaped somehow,” she said at the end. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”
“I know,” Fish said, getting to his feet to clap for Rose at the curtain call. You almost needed the curtain call after a play like this one. It was a sort of miniature resurrection from the dead, seeing as half the characters of the cast had died in the course of the performance.
“Touches on something greater,” Bear said to Fish, apparently having similar thoughts.
When Rose joined them after the play was over, she was jubilant, her face all aglow. “Let’s do something!” Rose exclaimed as they emerged into the night air.
“Do you want to go out?” Bear asked.
“Yes!” she said. “Let’s go for a walk in the woods in the moonlight.”
“There’s not really a moon out tonight,” logic compelled Fish to point out.
“Then the starlight,” Rose said, refusing to be flustered.
Fish looked critically up at the smog-filled sky and sighed. “All right,” he said.
“There are woods near here,” Rose explained, “that are the perfect sort of place to go when it’s nighttime. Of course, I don’t go all by myself—but with two strong men to accompany us, we can brave the forest even at night, sister.”
Blanche laughed at her. “If one of us twists an ankle, can we blame you? All right. After a day in the car, it sounds wonderful. I need to exercise for the baby anyhow.”
So they trudged up the hills, across the soccer fields, and onto the trails surrounding Mercy College. As they went, they talked, and time slipped into timelessness for a while.
Fish found he had a respite, drawing upon the strength of their past associations. Here they were, the four friends, together again. Sure, Bear was a bit more relaxed and public about his affection for Blanche now that they were married—Fish noticed the two of them stayed much closer together, and that Bear had nonchalantly kept his hand on Blanche’s knee during the play, something he had never done when they were dating. Their married companionship had begun to weather their affection so that they seemed to be even more than ever, a couple, two people who fit together. As for Blanche, she looked as serenely lovely as ever, and more tranquil than Fish had ever seen her. But aside from that, the four of them—two sisters, two brothers, four friends—were the same jovial companions. And Fish found to his relief that his mask of normality wasn’t needed for now. He could treat Rose as he had always treated her.
But despite the fact that he still baited her and argued with her as he was used to doing when the four of them were together, Fish found himself being quieter in Rose’s presence. Her constant chatter had always slightly annoyed him—now he found himself listening to it, conscious that he might have missed something.
Unfortunately, he had difficulty looking at her. That beauty of hers was particularly worrisome. Tonight, on a ramble in the woods, Rose, being Rose, was wearing a black wool turtleneck sweater and an orangish skirt of some thin floating crinkled material (which now had burrs and prickers stuck to the hem). He noticed again that she was always wearing bright colors like red, pink, teal, purple—or black. He had never been sure they were the best tones for her fair freckled skin. Her skin—in the turtleneck, the only skin that showed was her face. Rose wasn’t the type of girl who showed much of her skin, or who flaunted her beauty with tight clothes and short skirts. Hers was always hidden behind something soft and draping, but it was there. He studied the back of her head in the spots of moonlight as she walked ahead of him, talking, and observed that her neck was quite delicate. The fact that so little of her skin showed made its occasional appearance—as now, when she shook her pony tail—more alluring.
“Fish,” Blanche said from behind h
im, and startled, he recognized that his sister-in-law had been speaking to him. He glanced over his shoulder. There was an almost knowing expression on Blanche’s face.
“What is it, Mona Lisa?” he asked, hiding his discomfiture.
She gave him a slight smile as she came up beside him while the company paused beside a scenic overlook. “I asked how the teaching was going.”
“Oh, it’s going,” he said, relieved to talk of familiar academics.
“How have you been doing recently?”
“Well, thank you. Why do you ask?”
“You look much better than the last time I saw you.”
“Oh,” he was surprised.
“Less stressed,” she said.
“Well, I guess I am,” he admitted, unsure of what to say.
Blanche gave him her slight smile, and turned her perceptive eyes away from his.
Embarrassed, he wondered how long he had been watching Rose under Blanche’s gaze.
As the four of them started back towards campus, Fish dragged behind the other three, hands in his pockets, slouching and solitary. Blanche and Rose were walking ahead, together, talking about usual sister things. Bear was humming to himself as he strode along. Only Fish felt alone. As they headed for the campus, he looked up at the cloud-streaked night sky, and reminded himself to stay balanced. Regardless of any passing attraction he might have for Rose, he had to watch her closely, and protect her, from Donna or from whatever menace the old nun had warned him about so enigmatically.
About all I’m fit for.
Hers
“So where’d Bear go this morning?” Rose asked her sister.
“Rock climbing, with Fish,” Blanche said, sitting in Rose’s dorm room in the comfortable chair. “Fish picked him up at the bed-and-breakfast and they took off. Bear left the car with me, so we can go shopping or antiquing or flea marketing or whatever we desire to do, to our heart’s content.” She gave her sister a wily smile. “I thought that was very clever of Bear.”
“Excellent men. Now, I am yearning to go investigate some of the thrift stores around here, but would you mind very much if I did an interview for my paper first?” Rose was daubing concealer on a zit that had emerged on her forehead, probably due to stress.
“An interview?” Blanche queried.
While brushing her hair, Rose explained about her long paper on the care of comatose patients. “One of the people in the nursing department here suggested I contact this woman who actually takes care of a comatose man at home. If you don’t mind, I thought I could run by and do that this morning. That way I can get some schoolwork done even while enjoying myself.”
“Sure. That actually sounds interesting,” Blanche said.
“Good! Let me call her and see if it will work out,” Rose said, opening the door to the room. She halted, speechless. A curtain of rainbow tissue paper hung from the door and a big sign: Happy Birthday, Rose! It was signed by Kateri, Nannette, and most of the girls on her dorm floor.
“Oh…my!” she finally said. “How did you get through that?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Blanche said, laughing. “Kateri warned me in the hall that you hadn’t yet opened the door this morning and not to spoil the surprise. Happy Birthday, Rose!”
“Thanks!” Rose recollected herself. “Okay, let me make that phone call!”
Lucille Johnson was happy to speak with Rose briefly at ten. So Rose and Blanche drove down after breakfast to the private home where Nurse Johnson worked.
The house was almost a small mansion, a brown brick edifice on the crest of a hill overlooking the town, in a nicer neighborhood than Rose had thought could exist in run-down Meyerstown. Rose knocked at the door and a sturdy blond woman with a creased brow and hurried manner answered the door.
“Are you Rose Brier?” she asked. “I’m Lucille Johnson.”
“Very pleased to meet you,” Rose said, automatically, juggling her yellow notebook and extending her hand. “This is my sister Blanche, who was visiting for the weekend. She wanted to be a nurse at one point,” she said, in a half-hearted explanation for her companion.
“Oh?” Nurse Johnson looked at her as she led the way down a nice but dark paneled hall and into a sitting room.
Blanche smiled, apparently not anxious. “I took two years of the coursework before I dropped out.”
“Well, what happened?” the nurse asked, indicating two tapestry chairs. She sat down on the very edge of her own chair.
“I got married, and now we’re expecting a baby, so I guess I’ll have to put things on hold,” Blanche said, adding, “if I go back to school at all.”
“Oh,” the nurse said, with some disapproval, as though Blanche had behaved irresponsibly.
“Well,” Rose said, “I’m awfully glad you could spare some time for me. Like I told you on the phone, I’m doing a paper for my medical ethics class on the care of comatose patients.”
“An ethics class? Why is that a subject in an ethics class?”
“Well, because there have been cases where the personhood of people in comas has been questioned, I guess, and they haven’t been treated as people.”
“So you’re looking to investigate whether or not I treat my patients as people or not?” the nurse’s eyes snapped.
“No, no, no,” Rose hastened to explain. “I’m just trying to find out about their treatment in general. I’ve found some articles about cases where abuse has happened, and I want to balance that out by providing some cases where the patients are well cared for.”
“Why did you choose this topic?” the nurse asked.
“Well, because...well, actually, my dad was an investigative reporter in this town once and he did some interviews on the abuse of patients, so that’s what got me interested in the topic.”
“Abused? How? Where?”
“I expect at the hospital in town,” Rose said carefully. “I don’t really know what exactly went on because when I went out to the barn where my father kept his notes, I couldn’t find them anywhere. My dad’s dead,” she added. “So I couldn’t ask him myself.”
“I still don’t understand—why are you writing a paper on comas?”
“I think because I was in a coma once,” Blanche spoke up quietly. “So our family has a little bit of experience with that kind of tragedy.”
“Hmph,” Nurse Johnson softened a bit. “Well, my patient here has been in a coma for the past three years. It’s been very hard on his family. His wife died last year, and so I’m the only one here with him now.”
“How did he go into a coma?” Rose asked.
The nurse looked at her hard. “Meningitis.”
“I see,” Rose ducked her head and wrote quickly in her notebook as the nurse talked. She wanted to avoid offending this choleric woman any further. For the rest of the interview, she tried to handle the woman with kid gloves.
“Well, that was quite a test!” she said to Blanche as she got back in the car. “She seemed to think I was there to question her credentials as a nurse.”
“Her attitude certainly was odd,” Blanche agreed. “Perhaps she just had a bad day.”
“She liked you,” Rose said, a little resentfully. “Some people just don’t like talkative people like me.”
“And others can’t stand quiet people like me,” Blanche smiled. “Well, you handled it fairly well, I think. It should make your paper more interesting to write, I think. Did you get all the information you needed?”
“I did,” Rose said. “Only two more interviews and then the writing and I’m off the hook! Thanks for coming with me, Blanche.” She glanced at her older sister, feeling warm inside. “I’m glad you were there.”
“I hope your other interviews go off much better than this one,” Blanche said.
“Now,” Rose said, grinning as she switched gears. “Thrift stores. The real hunt begins! Sister, the game is afoot! We must find an interesting material object of a reasonable price and bring it home before sundown—or else ou
r honor is forfeit!”
Blanche giggled uncontrollably. “Take me where you will. I’m in your hands, and we have a full tank of gas. And I want to buy you a birthday present.”
“In that case,” Rose chortled, “Bear and Fish may not see us for several days.”
“But we have to get back for your play tonight,” Blanche reminded her.
“Ah yes,” Rose sighed.
“What did you girls do today?” Fish asked her at dinner that evening. They had met the men at a local Italian eatery that Bear thought looked promising. Dinner was early because Rose had to get back for the show, her last evening performance, and Bear and Blanche were to leave directly afterwards.
Rose, flushed from the fun of a good day of hunting treasure, recounted their shopping expedition with relish and in detail while Bear and Fish listened patiently. “Plus, we talked,” she said. As most of their conversation had been about members of the opposite sex, including some of those present, she passed over that subject with a mere generality.
“So, what did you two do?” she asked.
Fish and Bear exchanged glances and chuckled. “We climbed rocks,” Bear said solemnly.
“Was that all? Didn’t you talk?” Rose asked.
“When we had to,” Fish allowed. “But words were barely necessary. When inarticulate grunts sufficed, we used those.”
“Guys,” Rose said in disbelief, shaking her head at her sister, who instead of agreeing, winked and raised her glass of wine.
“Vive le difference,” said her married sister.
To her surprise, Bear had ordered a chocolate cake from the restaurant. Rose submitted to having “Happy Birthday” sung to her by the wait staff and her family, and gleefully opened her presents: a matching creamer and sugar bowl that she had helped Blanche pick out that afternoon, and a silver necklace with a polished rock on it from Bear. (Of course, there were inevitable jokes about rocks.)
Having had such a good time, Rose was saddened by the thought of Bear and Blanche leaving. During the play, she managed to persuade Blanche to sit backstage with her so they could chat some more. Her happiness prolonged, she noticed that she had less nervousness than usual around Donna, who occasionally skulked by on some errand for the stage manager. Tara and Rose had repaired their relationship to the point where they could be pleasant with each other, and Rose introduced her to Blanche.