Things Invisible to See (8 page)

A nurse’s aide named Ginny chose Clare for her special project. She wore a pale blue uniform and was planning to lose fifty pounds in the near future. She stopped by every morning to help Clare dress and every afternoon to see what new magazines Helen might have brought. She sat by Clare’s bed, flipping the pages, deciding what ads she’d ask Clare to cut out for her: Merle Oberon or Claudette Colbert maybe, for Woodbury Cold Cream.
Life
always had those nice conversation ads that were so useful for amusing bored patients.

“Here’s one we can do, Clare. You read the general. I’ll be the general’s daughter.”

“Me? The general?”

“Or maybe you’d rather be the daughter.”

“I’ll read the general,” said Clare.

Ginny drew a chair close to the bed and cleared her throat. “The General Joins the Regulars!”

GINNY
: My dad, the general, is a man of few words and strong determination.

CLARE
: When you get into trouble, face the enemy and fight it out.

GINNY
: You and your pitched battles with constipation! Did it ever occur to you to find the
cause
of your trouble? Dad, come down to breakfast; I want to show you something.

CLARE
: Now, what’s the miracle?

GINNY
: No miracle at all, just a crisp toasty breakfast, Kellogg’s All-Bran. If your trouble is the kind that’s due to lack of proper “bulk” in the diet, All-Bran will really correct the cause of it. But you should eat it every day and drink plenty of water.

CLARE
: This tastes like a million. If All-Bran can make me join the regulars, I’m enlisting for the duration.

“There’s a Sanforized ad we could do, if you’re feeling up to it,” said Ginny.

“No, thank you,” said Clare. “But if you want to cut anything out, go ahead. Take the whole magazine.”

To her relief, Mrs. Thatcher arrived with Clare’s braces. She acknowledged Ginny with a curt nod, then knelt and buckled Clare’s legs into place.

“Now, Clare, get up by yourself, the way I showed you.”

Clare twisted around in her chair, shifting her weight to her braced legs.

She took one crutch and hoisted herself up on it.

She reached for the other and tucked it under her arm and adjusted her weight.

Now she was standing, facing the nurse.

“Are we ready to see the world?” asked Mrs. Thatcher, and she glided around to Clare’s right side.

The tip of the crutch edged forward on the smooth floor as Clare put her weight on it. Mrs. Thatcher pushed her foot against the tip to keep it from slipping.

“Right crutch, left foot—left crutch, right foot,” she sang out. Clare’s braced legs clattered across the floor. “Let’s walk to the playroom in the children’s wing. It’s at the end of the hall.”

A large paper turkey eyed them from the door of the glass partition that separated this end of the corridor from the children’s rooms. By the time Clare reached it, the muscles in her arms were trembling.

“We’ll rest a few minutes,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “I’m sure braces don’t have to be so heavy. Someday, someone will find a way of making them lighter.”

Leaning on the door frame, Clare watched a little boy in a blue bathrobe walking up and down the hall, pushing the big metal frame that supported his I.V. The tube from the bottle snaked up his sleeve and disappeared.

“Ready?” said Mrs. Thatcher, taking Clare’s arm.

In the playroom they found Ginny, reading the magazines on the coffee table. Most had lost their covers and some of their pages as well. An empty milk bottle and a scattering of clothespins—oh, who could have left them on the table, these tokens of home?

“Clare, let me help you into one of the straight chairs,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “The settee is like quicksand. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You can ask Ginny if you need anything.”

Ginny grunted and went on combing her short brown hair with her fingers. On a high shelf out of everyone’s reach, behind a sign which said Don’t Touch, the radio played continuously: two women were arguing.

“Ma Perkins.” Ginny yawned. “Doesn’t it play anything else?”

The boy on the I.V. sat down at the table between Ginny and Clare and cleared a little space among the magazines and began to drop the clothespins into the milk bottle, raising his hand higher each time to increase the difficulty.

“Is that fun?” asked Clare.

“It teaches patience,” said the boy. “I have a hole in my heart.” Seeing that Clare was impressed, he asked, “Do you know how big your heart is?”

Clare shook her head, and he held up his fist.

“Your heart is as big as your fist and it grows at the same rate,” he told her.

On his pale chest, just above his half-buttoned pajama top, two gold medals gleamed.

“Did you get those medals in the gift shop?” asked Clare.

The boy shook his head. “My mom gave them to me. I don’t know where she got them. This one’s St. Anthony and this one’s St. Joseph.”

Noting that she wore none, he opened his bathrobe a little wider and showed her a paper medal pinned to his pajamas that read

HERO: I HAD MY SHOT TODAY
.

“Maybe,” he said, “you could get one of these.”

“But I haven’t had my shot.”

“I’ll ask the nurse to give you a medal anyway,” said the boy.

“She can wear mine,” said a voice none of them recognized, and they all turned in surprise.

A young man in a purple and gold varsity jacket was dangling a silver coin strung on a thread of elastic. He was tall, with an open face and blue eyes and reddish blond hair that was all cowlick and no style, and Clare recognized him at once. Everyone at school recognized him. Once when Clare dropped her wallet while she was trying to open her locker, he’d leaned down and picked it up. In the jostle and din between classes, he’d picked up her wallet and handed it to her. “You dropped your wallet,” he said. She was too flustered to say thank you. She managed a quick nod of her head and he disappeared down the hall. For weeks afterward, the sight of him made her tremble. She learned his schedule and looked forward to the few minutes between classes when their paths crossed. She watched him in the cafeteria and remembered what he ate and what he left untouched. She memorized his clothes and fell in love with the way he rolled up his shirt sleeves. Saturdays she watched him play, glad that he did not notice her in the stands. Once she’d stopped at Burney’s to buy a sweatshirt for Davy, and to her alarm Ben came over and asked, “Can I help you?” He looked right at her; he could see she was trembling all over.
Help you?
She turned and ran out of the store. Whenever she saw him on the street, she lowered her head, afraid he could hear her heart pounding. But always his gaze passed through her. Until this moment.

The little boy on the I.V. took the coin and studied it.

“That’s not a medal,” he said. “Gee, what a keen skull.”

Ben took the coin from the boy and handed it to Clare, who was so nervous she could scarcely hold it.

“It’s an antique,” he said. “Very rare.”

He was talking to her just the way he’d talk to anyone. Like we were already friends, she thought. The fluttering in her stomach subsided. In this dingy lounge, it seemed as if they really were friends, and she found herself eager to talk.

“It’s very unusual,” she said. She handed it back.

“Don’t you want to wear it?”

She was dying to wear it. But what good would it do? When he left, he would never come back, and she would look at it fifty times a day and want him to come back. She would tremble and want him all over again, this boy who had spoken to her only twice before:
You dropped your wallet. Can I help you?

“No,” she said, “it’s yours. You keep it.”

Disappointed, he pocketed the coin. Then he glanced around the room and saw, as if for the first time, the paper turkeys taped to the walls in the corridor.

“Well, happy Thanksgiving,” he said, turning to go but not going.

“Today isn’t Thanksgiving,” said the boy. “What’s your name?”

“Ben.”

“I’m Toby. Aren’t you going to stay?”

Ginny put down her torn copy of
Beauty Secrets of the Stars
; she hadn’t turned a page since Ben entered the room. Now she leaned across the table and asked, “Who are you here to visit?”

“My uncle. He’s seriously hurt. He’s got a broken leg.”

“In this place a broken leg isn’t serious,” said Ginny.

“How’d he break it?” asked Toby.

“Hit-and-run accident,” said Ben. “He was left in the road with a broken leg. They never caught the driver.”

“Just like you, honey,” said Ginny, nodding to Clare.

“A car hit you?” asked Ben.

“A baseball,” said Clare.

“If you ever find the guy that did it,” said Ginny, “I hope you take him to court for every penny he’s worth.”

“I bet he’s a Nazi,” said Toby.

“I bet he’s not,” said Clare. “We don’t have Nazis in America.”

“He could be a Nazi spy,” said Toby.

“To wreck somebody’s life and get away with it,” said Ginny. “It’s awful.”

“My life isn’t wrecked,” said Clare. “I’m going to study at home. I got accepted at Michigan for next year. Everybody in our family goes to Michigan.”

“What are you studying to be?” asked Ben.

“An artist.”

“You should get married,” said Ben. “A pretty girl like you.”

Ginny shot him a look: For God’s sake, shut up. But Clare did not flinch.

“It takes five minutes to get married,” she said. “And then what? You can’t just be married.”

“I could,” sighed Ginny. “I—”

A clatter in the corridor drowned her out.

“Dinner’s here,” she said and jumped up. “I’ll get the wheelchair.”

Without a word Toby pushed his I.V. out of the playroom and scooted down the corridor. After Ginny had lifted Clare into the chair, she drew Ben aside.

“You want to wheel her back to room three-fifteen? I think she’d like that.”

In her room Ben watched Ginny swing the arm of Clare’s table over her lap and set the tray on it.

“Enjoy your dinner,” she said and hurried out.

“Guess it’s time to go,” said Ben. He did not move.

“Don’t go,” said Clare. She could not bear to think of the emptiness he would leave behind him. “They always give me enough for two. Pull up that chair—that regular one.”

He pulled up the only other chair in the room, and Clare lifted the silver helmet from the dinner plate and exposed a pale corpse of broccoli and a perfectly round veal patty that appeared to have been rolled in sand.

“Have some fried chicken,” said Clare. She handed him the knife. “I hope you remembered to bring the watermelon.”

He stared at her.

“Mother makes the best potato salad in the world,” she went on, tapping the broccoli with her fork.

“Oh, please. I can’t eat all this.”

She cut the patty in two and gave him the knife and fork and began to cut her half into bites with the spoon.

“We can’t go swimming for at least an hour,” she said.

“That’s all right,” said Ben. “We can sit on the beach and talk.”

“Homemade ice cream for dessert.”

“What flavor?”

She unveiled a watery custard with burnt edges. “Jade.”

Ben laid down his fork.

“You know something? Most people in your shoes—your
situation
, I mean—would be totally depressed.”

“When you leave,” said Clare, “I’ll be terribly depressed. I’ll wonder if you’re ever coming back. Are you coming back?”

“I haven’t left yet, and you’re talking about me coming back,” said Ben with a smile. But Clare was not smiling. He would leave and she would never see him again.

“Please don’t leave. I’ll ask Mrs. Thatcher to bring in one of the comfortable chairs. There are comfortable chairs for the relatives who want to stay all night.”

“I’m not a relative,” said Ben.

“You might be. You might be my distant cousin. You look very distant, sitting over there.”

Ben moved his chair around to her side of the table.

He’s forgotten about visiting his uncle, thought Clare. But only something extraordinary would make him stay.

“You can meet my ghost,” said Clare.

“She does look a little like a ghost,” said Ben.

“You’ve seen her?”

“She was just here.”

“
Who
was just here?”

“The nurse,” said Ben.

“I don’t mean the nurse,” exclaimed Clare. “I mean the spirit-woman who comes at night. She’s the reason I don’t go nuts in this place. We travel together.”

“You travel together?”

“My spirit travels. I leave my body behind.”

“Jesus,” whispered Ben.

“I’m talking too much, I know. Now I’ll be quiet. What about you?”

“Me?”

“You haven’t told me anything about you.”

“There’s not much to tell,” said Ben. He knew he couldn’t invent anything as good as her ghost.

“Start at the beginning,” said Clare. “You wake up. You get dressed and eat breakfast in the dining room.”

“No, in the kitchen,” Ben said.

“All right, in the kitchen. You sit down at the kitchen table with your mom and dad.”

“No, I sit down with my brother. Mom never sits down for breakfast.”

“My mom doesn’t, either. Okay, you sit down with your brother.”

A nurse Clare did not know popped her head in the doorway.

“Finished with your dinner?”

“Yes, thank you. Could you help me back to bed?”

When the nurse left, she seemed to draw the last threads of twilight after her. The room was dark; the sky in the window was dark and starless as a well. On the horizon the city crouched like a strange animal, its hundreds of eyes shining. The bells next door were tolling for vespers.

“Tell me more about you,” said Clare. “I may look like I’m dead, but I’ll be listening.”

She lay motionless, hands folded on her chest, her face so white that Ben was suddenly terrified she really might be dying.

“Do you want me to call the nurse?”

“Don’t call anyone. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

He sat down again and waited for her to open her eyes.