***
“Heather.”
I didn’t even look up when I heard the name. I was at TacoTown, two-thirds through a Tuesday night shift, wiping tables in the dining room. It was a place where no one would have ever called me anything but ‘Mack.’ And anyway, people named Heather don’t have the typical reflexive response to the sound of their own, ultra-common name. It’s used to refer to far too many other girls.
“Heather.” The name came again but this time I recognized the voice and raised my head, alarmed. It was Jeff. He was stomping across the dining room wearing his Pizza Paradise visor along with a red apron, dusty with white flour underneath his jean jacket. Somehow, I knew when I saw him here like this that it was time to be afraid.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Carrie – she just called an ambulance to the house to come take Mum to the hospital.” He took hold of my wrist. “We’ve got to get back to Upton. Right now.”
“Crystal!” I called across the empty restaurant.
“Yeah?”
“I have to go,” I said as Jeff towed me toward the exit. “My mom just went into the hospital. Tell Wayne I’m sorry to run out before my shift is over but...”
Crystal came sprinting out to the parking lot with my duffle bag as Jeff was turning on the ignition. I opened the door to take it from her. “Thanks,” I said. “And sorry.”
She waved her hand. “Don’t worry about us. Good luck with your mom.”
We were on the highway, Jeff sweating behind the steering wheel. We drove faster than we’d ever travelled on that road before. Jeff told me what he knew about Mum’s crisis. “Carrie heard a crash upstairs and she found Mum lying on the floor in her bedroom, all buried in the clean laundry she’d been carrying. She was still awake but she was barely able to talk.”
I covered my mouth with my hand and spoke from behind it. “Why? What’s wrong with her? She was fine when we left.”
He shifted in the driver’s seat. “Carrie said they figure it’s some kind of a woman thing – a bleeding thing. No one wants to talk to me about it.”
Minutes later we were trotting past the silk plant arboretum inside the Upton Hospital foyer. Jeff leaned over the admissions desk and told the clerk Mum’s name. “She came by ambulance,” he added.
The clerk nodded. “Looks like she’s still in surgery,” she told us.
We both gasped.
“Have you kids got a father?” the clerk continued.
“Not for thousands of miles,” Jeff moaned.
I jabbed Jeff with my elbow and pushed past him, leaning over the admissions desk myself. “He means, our dad’s away on business right now.”
“Right,” the clerk nodded into her computer screen. “That makes you guys next of kin, for now. We’ll have the doctor come see you when he’s done with your mom. Are either of you eighteen yet?”
Jeff waved his hand.
“He is,” I interpreted.
The clerk waved us to a pay phone on the other side of the foyer. I didn’t know who to call. Until I got home and rummaged through Mum’s purse to find the phone number for Dad’s dorm in Quebec, there was no one to report to. I called my grandparents’ house anyway. Carrie was still awake but she’d got all the little kids to bed. She sounded vaguely comforted to hear we were at the hospital with Mum but a little anxious about not being there herself. I promised to call her again when we knew what had gone wrong. I’d wait until I had the whole story before telling Carrie about the surgery.
Jeff sat slumped in a vinyl covered chair along a wall painted in what was meant to be a soothing shade of pink. It just looked like bare skin to me. I closed my eyes, slouched over in my own chair, and waited.
“It’s the MacLean kids,” a voice sang out in the hospital corridor.
I flung my eyes open and there was Brother Timms from church, known here in the hospital as Dr. Timms.
Jeff was on his feet. “Can we see Mum?”
“Sure, she’s still a little groggy but well enough to chat.”
“I need to know what she’s doing here,” I said.
“Right,” the doctor smiled. “She’d developed fibroid tumours inside her uterus. They’re not uncommon and they’re usually not a problem. But sometimes they can cause excessive bleeding, like they did with your mom.”
“Tumours?” Jeff repeated. “Like – cancer?”
“Oh no,” Dr. Timms boomed. “No, not like cancer at all. They’re usually harmless on their own – especially for women not trying to have kids anymore. But the bleeding can become unmanageable, like it did in your mom’s case. There’s nothing to worry about anymore, though. We got them all removed when we did an emergency hysterectomy just now – that’s when we take out, uh –”
“Her uterus,” I finished.
“Exactly,” he smiled again. “She’s recovering nicely but we did have to top up her blood supply. She lost quite a bit of blood while she tried to just wait it out.”
“Top it up? You mean you gave her a blood transfusion?” Jeff asked.
“Not a big one,” Dr. Timms assured him.
“But – you didn’t even ask any of us for our blood,” Jeff stammered.
Dr. Timms pounded him affectionately on the back. “Well, no. Even with a rare type like your mom’s, we don’t usually have to approach family members about donation. That mostly just happens in the movies.”
Jeff hung his head. I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.
“Come see your mom,” Dr. Timms commanded. “You’ll feel better once you talk to her. She’s still weak and heavily medicated but she’s just fine.”
We found the hallway of the hospital’s only acute care unit. The door to Mum’s room was open and she lay dozing on the bed under a stiff, yellow sheet. “Mum?” I said softly, moving toward the bedside.
“Kids,” she said. Her voice was quiet and woolly. “My two big kids. I just gave up my uterus. But I got some pretty good mileage out of it, didn’t I?” She drawled through the drugs as she reached for Jeff’s hand. “Look at all the nice people it made for me.”
I glanced up at the bags – one full of clear fluid and the other swollen with deep red blood – hanging from a wheeled pole at her side. The bags drained through long, thin tubing into her white arm.
“Has anyone talked to Dad yet?” I wanted to know.
“Oh sure,” she said. “He’s worried, of course. But he trusts you two and he told me he was glad to know the family was in such good hands while he’s gone and I’m sick.” She gathered up my hand and piled it on top of Jeff’s. “We never would have asked for this – the whole terrible year we’ve had – but we agree that it’s making our kids into great people. Still,” she paused, “I’m really sorry about all this, you guys. So is Dad.”
“We know, Mum,” I rasped. “Carrie has all the kids in bed at home. Everything’s under control. Don’t worry about us.”
She closed her eyes with a slow smile. Jeff pulled his hands away from her. “Get some sleep, Mum,” he said even though she already appeared to be drifting off without any coaching from him.
We drove home to where Carrie sat glassy eyed in front of a late night television talk show. I followed her to her room and sat on the edge of her bed while she told her part of the story.
“I’ve never called 9-1-1 before,” she rushed. “It was just like on TV – one of those lady operators asking ‘Police, fire, ambulance.’” Carrie wanted a medical career someday and she’d been intrigued by the professional side of Mum’s ‘rescue.’ It was actually a brilliant coping strategy for not being overcome by the personal side of it. “I tried to roll her into recovery position while the ambulance was on its way but she was awake enough to tell me she didn’t need it. I kept an eye on her though. Her pulse felt scary weak.” This was where Carrie had to pause to clear away the lump in her throat.
I rubbed her shoulder. “It sound
s like you handled yourself really well.”
Carrie nodded. “Yeah, I guess I did. But I hope I never need to call an ambulance to my own house ever again.” She swallowed noisily again. “You should have seen her, lying there, white as a ghost. It was totally awful. I tried my best to keep the other kids from seeing her like that but –”
It was beautiful that she was so concerned about the little kids. Last summer’s move had changed everything about Carrie’s life too. It was something I didn’t remember nearly often enough. She may not have had to take on financial burdens, like Jeff and I had done. But Carrie had become inordinately responsible for the house and the younger kids who needed someone to take care of them while the rest of us worked.
When she and Jeff were both in their own beds, I let myself into Mum and Dad’s bedroom. It wasn’t a tiny cubicle like the rest of the sleeping quarters in the house, but a real master bedroom finished in a way that would have been luxurious in the 1960s, when the house was newly built. I scanned the room in the lamplight and noticed that Mum had been sure to make their bed that morning. She’d used her usual, meticulous tucks and folds even though she’d been secretly bleeding almost to death all the while.
It didn’t seem right to crawl into the perfectly made bed so I sat down on the floor beside it, facing the small cabinet where my parents kept their CD player. Most of their CDs were unlistenable, in my opinion. But I found what I was looking for in a dark yellow case inscribed with ornate, brown lettering – 1970s vintage lettering. At that moment, I wanted to see my Dad more than anything else in the whole world. But it was two o’clock in the morning two time zones away, where he was – not that he’d be sleeping tonight. He was a fretful person, like me – the kind who stays awake worrying in the darkness, getting angrier and angrier at himself for not being able to relax and fall asleep. And I still hadn’t found the number for the communal phone he shared with the whole floor of his dormitory at the government security training college.
Instead of talking to him, I slid my favourite of all my dad’s CDs into the player. The record was made the year before I was born. But somehow, it spoke to me and to my dad in exactly the same way. I sat with my knees pulled up to my eye level, my back against the side of the bed, and listened while the old man sang about promises and changes of plans. I mouthed the words along with him as I bent my neck forward until my head rested on the caps of my knees. And finally, I cried.
I woke up in the morning on top of the covers on my parents’ bed, wrapped in my mom’s bathrobe instead of a blanket. I stood up, smoothed out the wrinkles in the bedspread, and headed into the hallway. It was Wednesday, a school day, so I roused the other kids. I explained that Mum was safe and happy but not strong enough to come home right away. There was a chorus of tortured little moans but the girls still let me launch them into their normal routines. Somehow, we all knew it was the very best way to cope.
I caught Jeff just as he was opening the garage door to leave me to send the little kids off the school on my own. “I’m going over to the hospital, to see how her night was,” he said.
“You’re missing your morning classes?” I raised my eyebrows. Jeff did not share my weakness for skipping school so this was an unusual choice for him.
“Jones’ll cover for me,” was all he said as the car door closed behind him. I stood in the dimness of the garage for a moment, wishing I had a Ben Jones of my own waiting to cover for me on a morning like this one.
I was making my way around the breakfast table pouring milk into cereal bowls when a particularly jaunty knock sounded at the front door – almost like music.
“Well, it’s Miss Heather,” Sister Giles said as the sticky wooden front door jerked open. “Just the girl I wanted to give my emergency lasagna.” She sailed into the house with a large foil pan and carried it right up the stairs to the kitchen full of bleary-eyed, functionally orphaned children. “Just leave it defrosting in the fridge until after school and bake it for an hour at four hundred degrees.”
I smiled as I thanked her – a warm, genuine, grateful smile.
“It’s my great pleasure,” she beamed. “And I’m glad to hear your mom’s going to be all right. What terrific kids you all are to take such good care of each other while she’s away.”
I didn’t even think to wonder how she already knew about Mum’s problems. Sister Giles worked the room, circulating through the ranks of my gloomy younger sisters, smoothing their hair and squeezing their shoulders, cajoling them into good spirits in spite of everything. And she did it all, thankfully, without any singing.
“If anything else comes up, Miss Heather,” she said, treading down the stairs toward the door, “Sister Giles is always ready to pounce. Remember that.”
She bustled out of the house just as cheerily as she had come in. The girls at the breakfast table ate a little more heartily. I stepped back up to the kitchen counter and resumed packing all those bag lunches, trying to remember which of the kids liked their sandwiches cut in rectangles and which would only eat triangles.
I was the last member of the family to leave the house that morning, pulling the door closed behind me without locking it, of course. When I turned to step away from the front step, I nearly walked face-first into the bony chest of a very tall boy.
“Darren!” I staggered backward.
He grabbed my arms both to steady me and to detain me as he apologized. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.
“Well, for future reference, stalking behaviour is always scary,” I ranted, shaking off his hold. “Why are you lurking in my grandparents’ juniper bushes this early in the morning? Aren’t you supposed to be at school in another town right now?”
“Yeah, but you left this at work last night,” he said, holding out my blue canvas wallet. “I thought you might need it, especially if you were in the middle of a family emergency, or whatever.”
I took my wallet from him. “Thanks.” I had noticed that I’d need to buy more milk before tomorrow’s breakfast. “You’re right, I do need it and I wouldn’t have been able to come to town tonight to get it myself.”
He seemed pleased and took a step toward me, closing a hand around each of my arms again. “I want to help you. I like to help you. Let me help you.”
I looked at our feet. “We’re pretty self-sufficient here – Jeff and Carrie and me. And someone already brought us something to eat for dinner tonight.” I raised my wallet. “But thanks for this. See? You already helped me.”
“How’s your mom doing, anyway?” Darren asked. He had turned me around, facing the street, and draped his arm across my shoulders. I let myself be pushed along the front lawn, toward his car.
“Oh,” I choked. “She had some surgery and a blood transfusion last night and she’s going to be fine in a few days.”
“Well, that’s good. Now let me drive you to school.”
“Seriously? The school’s just over there. I can see it from our back porch,” I protested, stepping out from underneath his arm.
“Then I’ll walk there with you.”
“So you’ll be even later getting to your own school?”
“I don’t care about that. I care about making sure you’re okay.”
I sighed. “Fine. You can drive me to school.”
We drove around the long town block, past the seniors’ lodge and the Seminary building. “Stop here,” I said as we reached the edge of the Upton Rockets’ football field.
Darren stepped on the brake. “You want me to stop way back here.”
“Yeah.”
Darren gave an unhappy laughed. “You’re ashamed of being seen with me in front of the Upton people. Nice.”
I sighed hard. “That’s not it at all,” I said. “I’m facing a day full of questions about my mom’s health crisis already. I’m tired and I’m bummed out and I don’t think I could stand it if I had to answer a bunch more questions about
the strange guy who dropped me off at school this morning.”
“They wouldn’t even notice –”
“They would. They notice everything that deviates from their little script. And when they can’t find an explanation they like they just make something up.” I was starting to yell a little bit.
“Okay, okay.” Darren was finally trying to placate me. “It’s not like I came here to make you mad.”
I held the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “I’m sorry, Darren. I’m not mad at you. I know you’re just trying to be sweet. But I’m late. I have to go.”
Darren leaned across my lap and opened the passenger door. “Fine. Go ahead. But remember I’m just waiting for you to think of something else I can do for you.”
I stepped out of the car and headed across the football field. I knew I needed to hurry but I couldn’t bring myself to run the rest of the way to school. I remembered the bag of blood hanging over Mum’s bedside and wondered if maybe it had been mine after all. We had the same blood type – B negative. It looks just like everyone’ else’s but they say it’s rare anyways. And I was so tired this morning I felt a little like I’d been secretly drained dry during the night.
As I walked, my mind turned to something we did need that I couldn’t get done on my own. We needed someone from church to give a healing blessing to my mom. But, as things currently stood, that someone could definitely not be Darren. I’d have to talk to Jeff about it. He knew who to talk to at church to get that kind of thing done better than I did.
The Upton High School hallways were almost empty by the time I got inside. But still, a boy I hardly knew was hovering around my locker. He paced the width of the hall in a black, wool trench coat, his long bangs hanging low over one of his ironically shiny blue, son-of-the-pioneers eyes. He was one of those boys who worked hard at being serious and gloomy. That was all I knew about him – that and the fact that his name was Aaron.
“Heather MacLean, how are you?” Aaron asked more seriously than anyone had ever asked me that kind of question before.
“Pretty tired, actually,” I answered. What did he want from me? Had I finally become tragic enough to imprint on the histrionic, contrived darkness of his consciousness?
Aaron nodded behind his bangs. He looked both ways down the school corridor before he bent his mouth close to my ear – close enough that I could sense his smell. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have jumped away. I might not have heard him whisper, “Look, the Bishop called our place this morning to tell my dad – to ask him, us – to ask us to tell you to let your mom know we’ll be at the hospital at six o’clock tonight to give her a blessing. Okay?”
I bowed my head and nodded into my locker. It was the only response I could make. If I tried to use my voice to answer him, I knew I would start sobbing – right there in the hallway of my high school. In my mind, I repented for thinking so little of Aaron’s character when I first saw him waiting for me. It was exactly the kind of prejudice I usually assumed people were levelling at me – and it couldn’t have been more wrong. It was the light in Aaron – not the darkness – that had moved him to reach out to me. My shoulders started to shake.
I worried I might be embarrassing Aaron with my poorly controlled emotions. But when he reached down and lightly squeezed one of my shoulders with his thin, white hand, I knew he understood and he forgave me. His own voice was husky as he told me, “It’s going to be okay.”
I nodded again, fiercely. If he said one more word I would certainly be crying. Aaron spun away from me, his long coat swirling around him, and stomped down the hallway. As he headed one way, I went the other, feeling for the doors leading to the outside of the building. I gave up on getting to my first class on time. Instead, I sat down on the base of a bike rack in the sunshine, wiping my eyes, and breathing deeply. My feelings were out of control as I tried not to be so overwhelmed by the love I felt – high, holy love for a heaven that saw me and knew me and stooped to respond to my needs.
The door of the school was creaking open. At the sound, I ducked my head so my hair fell in curtains on either side of my face, hiding my teary, streaky complexion from whoever was coming outside. A pair of Doc Marten shoes stepped out the door and stopped on the concrete right in front of me.
“Hey,” a voice said from high above the black shoes. It was Ben Jones.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked the shoes.
“My whole physics class knows you’re here. They’re all sitting right inside that window.” He gestured behind himself.
I glanced up long enough to see the rows of pained faces gawking their sympathy at me from their desks behind the dusty glass pane. “Dang,” I moaned.
“Come on.” Ben Jones held out his hand. “Let’s see if Jeff’s here yet so he can take you home.”
I looked up at the clean, pale hand he offered me. “Jeff’s not coming to school this morning. He’s at the hospital with Mum.”
Ben Jones crouched down in front of me, shielding me from the view of the physics class. “Then I’ll take you home.”
“Thanks.” My voice was hardly a whisper. He was going to see my teary face eventually so I turned it toward him and tried to laugh off my crying. “Look at me, Jones. Isn’t it awful? I get all red and splotchy whenever I cry.”
He frowned. “Not this time. You’re not red at all. You’re white – really, really white. Did you eat anything yet today?”
My thoughts came slowly as I tried to remember. Maybe I’d been so busy making breakfast and packing lunches for the younger kids this morning that I’d forgotten about myself. “I guess I never did get around to eating.”
Ben Jones held out his hand again. “Your blood sugar is probably super low by now. We really need to get you home. Let’s go inside and get your books.”
I put my hand in his as I rose to stand beside him. My nerves had barely registered how thin and cold his fingers were before he’d already let go of me. Even though my fingers couldn’t snatch at him and force him to hold onto me, I could fix my eyes on the back of his head. Everything around him seemed to turn with exaggerated slowness as he moved to open the door of the school for us. The entrance was actually a wheelchair ramp with a handrail running alongside it, bolted at waist level to the school’s brick wall. I walked behind Ben Jones, gripping the railing with one hand, then with both hands. I was moving forward slowly, toward the point where the railing ended as it met the open door. My mind was unmoored – drifting – and I knew I could only keep moving as long as I could he him walking in front of me and feel the railing between my hands. Once I reached the end, I’d have to somehow make the leap across the gap between the railing on the wall and the handle on the door. Here was the end of the railing now. I reached out – but not far enough. The bricks, the concrete, the sunlight, the neat brown hair on the nape of Ben Jones’s neck in front of me – it was all dissolving into blackness, somewhere at the backs of my eyes.
“Letting go,” I think I said before the darkness closed over me.
A voice called back, faraway and muffled but alarmed. I thought I heard it say something to me – a word – was it “parakeet?” And then there was nothing – a few dim, quiet seconds of nothing.
But the world flowed right back in after its ebb, returning my senses with it. There were waves of jumbled voices in my ears before my vision lit up again and I saw that I was no longer standing but sitting on the concrete, leaning against Ben Jones’s outstretched arm. My eyes fixed dazedly on the knees of everyone in the twelfth grade physics class who’d come running outside to see if I had dropped dead.
“Aw man,” I said. “I didn’t just pass out, did I?”
“Yeah, you sure did. But try not to worry about it,” Ben Jones said, still holding me tightly. “And don’t try to stand up yet,” he added, pulling me back as I moved to clamber to my feet. I suppose it made good first aider sense for me
not to stay sitting. But my urge to get off the ground and out of sight couldn’t have been any stronger.
Someone set a plastic chair down next to me and I used both my hands to climb onto it. “Thanks,” I murmured though I didn’t know who I should be thanking for it.
The physics teacher crouched in front of me, filling my field of vision. “Are you okay now?” he asked much too loudly.
I nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
He returned my nod and stood up. “You’re sure you’ve got everything under control here, Ben?” he asked as he started to herd his class back inside the school.
“Yeah, I’ll take her home,” he answered. “Heather’s a good friend of mine.”
“Well, don’t let her stand up until I send someone down from the office with some juice for her to drink,” the teacher said before he left us.
Ben Jones crouched in front of me as we waited, leaning on the edge of my chair. He tried to look relaxed and friendly but he was probably spotting me in case I started to topple over again.
“I fainted – in public,” I slurred. “It was not a great moment in Feminism, was it Jones?”
He laughed. “It happens to everyone eventually – men and women, right?” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “In the next few days you’ll be inundated with everyone else’s story about when and where they were when they fainted.”
“So what’s your fainting story?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m still waiting for mine to unfold, I guess.” He began to raise his glasses back over his eyes.
Everything was still a little cloudy and slow for me. Maybe that’s why I was surprised to see my own hand holding back Ben Jones’s arm, keeping his glasses off his face for a moment more.
“You are the very best one,” I heard my slow, cottony voice telling him. My hand let go of his arm and came up to hold his chin between my thumb and fingers. I wasn’t trying to look deeply into his eyes – not this time. Instead, I was turning his head from side to side as I squinted at him. “There’s not a single dragon scale on you, is there?”
Ben Jones’s cold fingers curled around against my wrist. “Heather?”
“No. That’s not what you call me,” I said. “You call me Parakeet. Remember? And you don’t bring me gold. And your eyes are nothing like Johnny Depp’s. But you’re still the best one.”
The door opened behind him and the school secretary stepped outside with a tiny box of apple juice for me to drink. She seemed to startle a little at the sight of Ben Jones with my hand instead of his glasses on his face. He shook his chin free and quickly propped his glasses onto his nose.
“No, I’m not the best one,” Ben Jones corrected me. “Mrs. Sharpton is the best one. Look, she brought you some juice.”