Nora Jane (41 page)

“Could we possibly call this something other than chemotherapy?” Nieman asked. “In the first place it’s a misnomer.”

“Hopefully cancer-killing chemicals hopefully administered slowly enough to save the patient unbearable discomfort?” Freddy
offered. “How about holding action until gene therapy is perfected.”

“It will be perfected,” Stella said.

“Meanwhile, human prayer.” Nora Jane had come in and was standing in the doorway. “Father Donovan is coming to dinner Thursday
night, Freddy. He just happened to call this afternoon. He said he’d had us on his mind.”

“The more the merrier.” Freddy went to his wife and slipped his arm around her waist. “Where is Henry? You didn’t leave him
alone?”

“He went to tell the children good night. He’s worried about them. He said we have to pay more attention to them. He said
just because they seem to be dealing with this, don’t bet on it.”

“Good thinking,” Stella said. “I’m going to see them too. Then we have to leave. One of my lab assistants is with Scarlett.
I have to let her go home.”

The party was breaking up. Henry emerged from the children’s rooms with Little Freddy by his side. Stella went to the girls’
rooms to talk to them. Nieman took Freddy’s arm and asked to walk outside with him. Nora Jane stood on the front porch watching
people leave.

Then it was ten o’clock and Freddy and Nora Jane began to close up the house for the night. They locked the doors and turned
off the lights and went to tuck their children into their beds and sat beside them while they fell asleep. Then they went
into their own bedroom and got into bed without brushing their teeth and lay in the dark trying not to let each other be afraid.
“We’ve been through worse things,” Freddy said.

“No, we haven’t,” Nora Jane replied. “We just haven’t been through this, so we don’t know how bad it will be.”

“It isn’t bad tonight. Let’s go to sleep.”

“I hope you don’t mind Father Donny coming over.”

“I like Donny. He’s your cousin. How could 1 not like him?”

“I told him. He said he knew something was going on because he hadn’t heard from me.”

“I bet I go to sleep first. Watch me.” Freddy pretended to be sleeping, an old trick he used to play when Nora Jane would
be anxious over something about the children.

She snuggled down into his scrawny, sweet arms and fell asleep because he wanted her to.

Need her, he was thinking. Have her here, and then he went to sleep also. Good old brain, always trying to help out in emergencies.

At nine the next morning they got into Freddy’s Volvo and started off for the hospital. “I don’t want you coming in,” Freddy
said. “I forbid it. It’s going to be a roomful of cancer patients reading magazines and waiting to be poisoned. I’m going
to sit there and read the new Tony Hillerman. He’s coming to do a signing at the store next week. So just let me off and I’ll
call you on the cell when I’m ready to leave. I mean it, N.J. I do not want you in the waiting room. What’s going on this
morning doesn’t change anything. I have leukemia. Hopefully this therapy is going to cure that. If you want to do me a real
favor, go spend some money on clothes or buy the girls something or go check out the new Barnes and Noble and let me know
what they’re up to. Please let me have my way in this.” He stopped the car by the emergency entrance of the great teaching
hospital associated with the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. “This is a safe place where several
thousand of our fellow human beings are trying to achieve miracles and save lives. I’m not going anywhere bad.”

“Then why can’t I go in?”

“Because I don’t want you to. I love you. I don’t want you in a roomful of cancer patients. I don’t want you to think of me
as one.”

“That is ridiculous. I don’t want to shop while they put chemicals into your body.”

“Please. I’ll call if I get scared. Let me be a hero here, okay? Or go over to the bookstore and talk to Francis. Go calm
her down.”

“All right. I’ll leave. I’m coming back at eleven. I’ll be in the front of the building in the parking lot by then.”

“Good idea. Go on. Go buy something yellow to cheer me up. I want everyone in yellow for dinner tonight.”

“I don’t know if I can do that in two hours.”

“Okay, I’m gone.” He kissed her on the cheek and got out of the car. “And don’t wreck my Volvo,” he added. “Be careful.” He
turned away. Nora Jane watched him disappear into the double doors of the emergency room.

She got into the driver’s seat of the Volvo and put on her seat belt and started doing breathing exercises. She drove very
carefully down ten blocks to a parking garage and gave the car to the attendant and started walking in the direction of a
new Saks Fifth Avenue that had opened some months before. She went in the front doors and walked back to the juniors’ department
and kept on walking and went up the escalator to women’s sportswear and picked out a bright yellow sweater set and bought
it without trying it on and then she went to the shoe department and bought some yellow Capezio sandals, and then went back
down to the juniors’ department and bought several skirts and a yellow-and-white-striped shirt and a blue-and-white-striped
shirt and then she left the store and went back to the parking garage and got into the car and drove back to the hospital
and sat in the car in the parking lot. It was eleven o’clock. At eleven twenty her cell phone rang and she answered it.

“I’m still alive,” he said. “Come get me.”

“I’m here. Come out the front door.”

He got into the car looking all right. “I’m supposed to go home and go to bed,” he said. “If it gets bad it won’t happen for
a few hours.Did you go shopping?”

“I spent five hundred dollars. Are you happy?”

“I’m elated. You drive. They said not to drive myself.”

“Don’t act like nothing’s wrong.”

“It’s all right. It wasn’t bad. I met a couple of nice people. They’re on my schedule. I’ll get to see them twice a week.
Okay, I’m going to sleep.” He reclined the seat and lay back in it and closed his eyes. “Keep breathing,” he said. “Don’t
worry, N.J. They don’t give you much the first time.”

“Nieman said he’s sending us some movies in case you need them.”

“I need the wisdom of the gods, the patience of a saint, and you driving me home from battle,” he said, but he was fading
now. He was starting to feel the effects of the chemicals. “You know what I really want at this exact moment? 1 want not to
throw up until I get home, so speed it up, would you?”

“I don’t think I’m going to take you to the hospital anymore. You’re too demanding.”

“I don’t want you to. 1 don’t want anyone I know to do it. I just want a driver and to get to know my fellow sufferers in
the poisoning room.”

M
ITZI OZBURT
had been cutting Tammili’s and Lydia’s hair since they were ten years old. Not that either of them had ever let her do anything
but trim the ends. At first she had cut their hair at the shop, but after she and Nora Jane became friends she just stopped
by in the afternoon and had a glass of wine and cut it in the back hall. She had planned on coming by on Thursday afternoon
anyway, but after she heard about Freddy’s diagnosis from someone at the shop, she took off early and went by St. Anthony’s
to light a candle. She ran into Father Donovan on the stairs and stopped to talk to him.

“I was on my way to Freddy and Nora Jane’s to cut the girls’ hair,” she began. “I just heard the news. So I stopped here.”

“I’m on my way there too,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”

They entered the church together and knelt near the altar and got out their rosaries and began to add their love to the store
of love both in Berkeley, California, and anywhere in the universe where it might be needed at four o’clock on this Thursday
afternoon in October of two thousand and three. Mitzi smelled of roses and Cape Jasmine. The silk jacket she was wearing made
a sound as she moved her fingers, and Father Donovan, who was only thirty-six years old, had to add a few extra Hail Marys
for the way human love sometimes turns into desire.

* * *

“I could drive you there so you wouldn’t have to fight the traffic alone,” he said, later, when they were back on the steps
leading to the sidewalk where their cars were parked.

“Thanks,” she said. “I hate driving on the bridge this time of day. But don’t talk about Freddy. I can’t stand to think about
it anymore.”

“We’ll talk about a project I’m starting,” he said. “A rape crisis center at the church. I really need volunteers for the
late evenings. If you could give me two days a month it would help. Stars in your crown.”

“I might. I don’t know if I’d be any good. I might get too depressed.”

They got into Father Donovan’s minivan and started out down the narrow winding street. Mitzi put on her seat belt and tried
not to look at the good-looking, redheaded priest who was driving her. I’ve already been in love with a priest, she lectured
herself. I am not going to start that again.

“I don’t know what I can do to help Freddy and N.J.,” she said. “It’s terrible not to be able to think of anything to do.”

“Just keep on being their friend,” he answered. “Just do exactly what you were doing. When people get sick they don’t want
other people to start acting like they are more important than they were. I’ve had many people tell me that the worst thing
was being the center of attention.”

“Right,” Mitzi said, and swore she would not think about how strong and fine his hands looked on the wheel. This goddamned
church will never change, she decided. Excuse me, God, but you just make it too hard for normal people, and you know, damn
well, I mean, you know you do. I can’t help it if I curse. My father cursed like a sailor and I learned it from him. “We learn
everything we know from our parents, don’t we,” she said out loud. “I was thinking about that the other day, because this
lady I was doing an oil pack on said she was reading this book about how everything we do is already decided when we are two
years old because of who our parents are. Do you believe that?”

“There’s a long-standing argument about how much is learned and how much is hereditary,” he answered. “I’ve always thought
they never take luck into account. So much is luck, coincidence, being in the right place at the right time, having parents
who protect you, or ones who don’t.”

The sun was moving down the sky. It made the skies above the city into a panorama of color and design. I’ll just look at the
skies and not look at his hands, Mitzi decided. I’m not getting into another of those things with a priest and then he’ll
have me down at the crisis center listening to rape stories and not getting any sleep worrying about them.

“So where did you learn to cut hair?” Father Donovan asked. “Did you go to school out here?”

“Mitzi’s coming over in a while,” Nora Jane was telling the twins. She was sitting on Tammili’s bed watching them do their
geometry homework. Ever since Henry’s pep talk on Sunday, she had been hovering.

“Why don’t you go see about Little Freddy,” Lydia suggested. “I can’t concentrate with you sitting here.”

“Okay.” Nora Jane watched them for a minute, then got up and went in the kitchen to finish fixing dinner. Freddy had gone
to the bookstore to help Francis set up for a book signing. He had insisted he felt well enough to go.

“I’ll be back by nine,” he said. “Tell Mitzi and Donny I’m sorry I missed them. We aren’t going to let this disrupt our lives,
Nora Jane. I refuse to let leukemia become my life. Okay, I’m leaving. I’ll call when I leave the store. About nine, or ten.”
He was wearing an old tweed jacket with pencils in his breast pocket and he looked nineteen and not a day older. He was her
Freddy, pure, original, never to be replaced.

’All right,” she said. “Go on then.”

He started out of the room, then came back in and took her in his arms and squeezed her until the pencils cut into her chest.
She pushed him away and took the pencils and laid them on the table and hugged him again. “I’m not talking,” she said. “I’m
not nagging. I’m not giving advice. It’s your leukemia. You run it.”

“It’s a mistake the system’s making. And the technicians will fix it or they won’t and the universe will still be so huge
we can’t begin to imagine it. One hundred billion light-years filled with galaxies and planets. I am not thinking about dying
until they get a new telescope up there, at least one more before I leave.” He stopped hugging her and put his pencils back
in his pocket.

“What are you cooking?” he asked.

“Baked chicken and mashed potatoes. I wanted to make crawfish bisque but I couldn’t find any crawfish, even frozen.”

“Okay. I’m leaving. I’ll call you by ten.” He walked across the room and out the door. John Wayne, he was thinking. Do the
Duke for this one, and for God’s sake don’t forget to breathe.

It was sundown in Ohio and Sister Anne Aurora was doing a special walk around her prayer circle. She didn’t do it every day.
Just when the spirit moved her. She would try to recite the names of all the people she was praying for in one very slow revolution,
then say them one at a time for twelve revolutions apiece. Frederick Sydney Harwood of Berkeley, California, I send you my
energy and love, I send you strength and wisdom. In the midst of your fear I know joy can grow and flourish. Joy can rise
up from fear and overcome it. Joy is in every atom of creation. It is life. It is wisdom. Let it in. It wants to be with you.
Strength guards you. Strength heals you. You are not alone. You are going to make it.

I might start writing down some of my prayers, Sister Anne decided, stopping at the top of the prayer circle to look down
at the row of crosses, then up into the beautiful skies of sundown. Some of these prayers are pretty good.

* * *

Father Donovan and Mitzi came in the side door and Mitzi went to Nora Jane and hugged her, then began to look at the ends
of her hair. “I’m trimming this while I’m here,” she declared. “This is out of hand.”