Chapter 31
Sometime
during the night, a nurse had come in and kicked Claire out of Nick’s bed. The nurse had looked appalled; Claire had
simply looked annoyed, as she groggily stumbled out of Nick’s bed and into the
cot the nurse had brought in for her, muttering something about buzzards.
The next
time Nick remembered waking up, it was morning, and a different nurse was
standing beside his bed, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his upper
arm. “Good morning, Mr. Carter,” she
said brightly.
“Morning,”
he mumbled back, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. When his hand left his face, he caught sight
of Claire stretched out on the cot behind the nurse. He did a double take at first, before the
memory of the night before came back to him.
“I didn’t
know you were having a guest stay the night,” the nurse commented, noticing
where his eyes had landed, upon the sleeping Claire.
“Eh… kind
of short notice,” replied Nick, smiling to himself. “She’s my ride home later today – I’m still
being discharged, right?” So help him,
if they tried to keep him in the hospital another day, he was going to-
“I believe
so, yes,” the nurse answered with a short nod, as she jotted his blood pressure
down on his chart. “Dr. Robson will have
to give you the okay first, of course, but so far everything looks good.” She went on to stick a thermometer in his
ear, and when it beeped, she checked the reading and nodded in
confirmation. “Your temp’s down to
normal.”
“That’s
good,” murmured Nick. “When will the doc
come by?”
“Probably
later this morning, depending on his schedule.
I’ll save your bandage change for later, after he’s had a chance to
check on the ulcer.” Nick nodded; that
was just as well with him. He hated
having people poking at his stump all the time.
It was still swollen and sore, and the pain didn’t seem to be going away
with the infection, much to his annoyance.
He was sick of lying around in bed, and he hated having to rely on
crutches to get anywhere. Maybe he’d
just get a wheelchair and make Claire push him around all day. Oh, she’d love that. He smirked to himself at the thought.
Claire woke
just as the nurse was leaving. Moaning
throatily, she inhaled deeply into her pillow before lifting her head, her
tousled hair falling into her eyes.
“Morning,”
Nick called to her, as she clumsily pushed her hair out of her face and blinked
over at him, bleary-eyed.
“Morning,”
she echoed through a yawn. “Where-? Oh.”
She looked around briefly and then rolled over, the cot quivering
beneath her as she jerkily shifted her weight.
“Remind me again why I chose to sleep on a dinky little cot in a
hospital room instead of in a king size bed with satin sheets in a mansion?”
she said, sitting up and rubbing the small of her back.
“Cause you
missed me,” Nick replied with a cheeky grin.
“Ugh… what
was I thinking?” Swinging her legs over
the side of the cot and stretching her arms above her head, she shot a smirk in
his direction. Then she stood up and
moved over to the chair that sat beside his bed. Slumping down into it, she asked, “So… what
time is it?”
Nick looked
up at the small clock on one of the walls.
“Seven-thirty.”
“Have you
had breakfast yet?”
“No,” he
said. “A nurse just left a menu
though.” He picked up the slip of paper
the nurse had left on his bed tray and waved it at her.
“Oh fun…
what’s on the menu for today?” They both
read over the items listed on the menu card.
It contained many of the standard breakfast dishes, but Nick had learned
to avoid those and go for the cereal. He
circled Rice Krispies, wishing they had Lucky Charms or Cocoa Pebbles instead,
and set the menu back down on his tray.
When his
breakfast was brought later, he dumped a carton of milk into the bowl of Rice
Krispies and listened to them “snap, crackle, pop” while Claire picked apart
the muffin she’d bought in the cafeteria downstairs.
After breakfast,
it was just a matter of waiting. Nick
grew impatient, wishing his doctor would hurry up and get there to discharge
him.
Finally,
around ten-thirty, Dr. Robson showed up.
Nick held his breath as the doctor carefully peeled back the gauze
bandages covering the end of his stump.
The ulcer there was in no way healed yet, but it did look better than
the last time Nick had looked at it.
Some of the redness had gone away, and the swelling had definitely gone
down. He looked up at the doctor
hopefully, waiting for his professional opinion.
“This looks
good,” Dr. Robson nodded, causing Nick to wince as he poked at the skin around
the open wound. “How does it feel? Are you still in a lot of pain?”
“Eh… it’s
still pretty sore,” Nick replied honestly, swallowing.
“When you
go home, you can take ibuprofen for that… Advil, Motrin, something like
that. If that doesn’t do the trick, call
me, and I can prescribe something stronger.”
Nick
nodded, perking up at the word ‘home.’
“So…” he started cautiously, “can I go home today then?”
“I see no
reason to keep you here any longer. I’ll
write you a scrip for more antibiotics that you can take orally. If you take the pills as prescribed for a
course of ten days, you should be fine.
I’d like to see you in here for a follow-up after that to make sure the
infection is gone and the ulcer is healing as it should, and if you have any
problems, you should come in sooner than that.”
Nick nodded
diligently and paid attention as the doctor gave him instructions for dressing
the sore and wrote his prescription.
Then, standing up, Dr. Robson said, “Well, I’ll have a nurse come in to
take out your IV and bring discharge papers for you to sign. Be sure to stop by the admit desk on your way
out to schedule a follow-up appointment for sometime in the next week or
two.” With that, the doctor leaned
forward to shake Nick’s hand and wish him well, and that was that.
As soon as
he was gone, Claire let out a huge sigh.
“Thank goodness,” she said with relief.
“I’m so glad you don’t have to spend another night here.”
“Me too,”
Nick said emphatically. “Now you can
take me home and treat me like a king.”
She
smirked. “Normally I’d say ‘fat chance’
to that, but I guess you do deserve it.
Your wish is my command, your majesty.”
Nick
chuckled, rather enjoying those words, even with the sarcastic tone. “I think I could get used to that.”
“Eh, don’t
get too used to it,” said Claire, playfully nudging his shoulder. “As soon as you’re back on your feet, no more
royal treatment.”
Nick
pretended to look wounded, but as much as he liked the sound of “royal
treatment,” he hoped it would end sooner, rather than later. This helpless feeling was getting old fast.
***
At home,
Claire set up a makeshift bed on the couch for Nick. Then she drove to a nearby deli to pick up
bread, lunch meat, and cheese for sandwiches.
She and Nick ate lunch, and once the kitchen had been cleaned up, she
turned to him and asked, “Feel like giving me a hand?”
“Uhh...”
Nick hesitated, wondering how much help he’d be, when he could barely get
around.
“You might
not have seen yet,” Claire explained, “but I have boxes of my crap piled
everywhere. I just need help figuring
out where it’s all going to go… I didn’t want to start junking up your place
yesterday, when you weren’t around.”
“Oh,” said
Nick, nodding. “Yeah, ‘course I’ll
help. Where do you wanna start?”
“Hm… how
about your office? I know I stuck a lot
of stuff in there.”
“Okay,”
Nick agreed and boosted himself out of his seat. He reached for his crutches, which were
propped up against the kitchen table, and adjusted them under his arms for the
short walk to his office. The room,
which held his desk and computer, as well as various files and records, his
small book collection, his larger comic collection, and his drawing supplies,
looked more crowded than he’d ever seen it, with Claire’s neatly-labeled boxes
piled in the center.
“You take a
seat and just relax,” Claire said, holding Nick’s large, padded leather office
chair steady while he sank down onto it.
“I’ll go through all this stuff and put it where you tell me to.”
“Put it
wherever you want,” Nick told her, flicking his wrist with a casual air. “Like I said, this is your house too
now. You don’t need to ask me about
everything.”
“Okay,”
replied Claire with a shrug. “Well, you
can just keep me company then, as long as you’re up to sitting there.”
“I’m fine,”
Nick said quickly. Damn stump hurts
just as much when I’m lying down as it does when I’m sitting, he added
mentally, but he chose not to say that part aloud.
Claire
poked through her boxes, checking the labels on each before she selected one to
open. “Books,” she said, pulling out
several paperbacks. She turned to eye
the tall bookshelves that lined his office; there was plenty of space
left. “Any preference where they go?”
she asked.
“Wherever,”
he shrugged. “Like I said…”
“I know, I
know,” she nodded. “Just checking.” She went over to the set of shelves that held
his own books and rearranged them a little until she had cleared two shelves
below his collection. Then she carried
her books over in armloads and systematically lined them up on the
shelves. She had more than he did, he
noticed, as he realized she was shelving them two deep in some areas. He’d never been big on reading for pleasure,
but apparently she was; most of her books looked like fictions. He was sitting too far away to be able to
read their titles, but he found himself wondering what kind of books she liked. It was funny, the little things they still
did not know about each other.
Out of
another box, she pulled still more books, although these were different. “Yearbooks?” Nick asked, catching a glimpse
of one.
“Yep,” said
Claire, holding up a stack of six of them.
“Seventh grade through my senior year of high school.”
“Can I see
one?” Nick asked with mild interest.
He’d looked through one of Brian’s old high school yearbooks once, years
ago, when he should have been in high school himself. He hadn’t known any of the students pictured
in it, except Brian, of course, but he’d been rather fascinated by it just the
same, wondering how his life would have been different if he had gone to high
school, rather than been tutored in a hotel room on the road, as he was through
most of his teenage years.
“Sure,”
said Claire, handing him one from the bottom of the stack. “This is my senior yearbook.”
He took the
large volume and opened it up, briefly scanning each page as he leafed through
them all. He found the section with the
individual photographs of the whole senior class. Class of 1998, it said across the
top. That would have been his class, he
realized, had he gone on to high school and graduated with his class. His eyes sorted through the pictures, picking
out the faces he recognized – Claire… Dianna… Jamie. They all had a list of activities they’d been
in during their four years of school, along with a quote. Many of them were the typical inspirational
kind about life, and a few were movie quotes or song lyrics. He didn’t bother to read most of them, but he
did look at the one below Claire’s name.
“Maybe in order to understand mankind,
we have to look at that word itself.
MANKIND. Basically, it’s made up
of two separate words – ‘mank’ and ‘ind’.
What do these words mean? It’s a
mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.”
- Jack Handey
Nick
snorted as he finished reading the quote and looked up at Claire in
amazement. “They let you use a Deep
Thought for your yearbook quote?” he asked incredulously, remembering the
series of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” from reruns of Saturday Night Live.
She
giggled. “Yeah, we could use anything,
as long as it wasn’t vulgar.” She
shrugged and added, “I thought it was funny, but my parents were slightly
annoyed when they saw it. They wanted me
to put something deep and meaningful.”
“Like
everyone else?”
“Basically.” She rolled her eyes. “What’s the fun in that?”
“Exactly,”
he laughed. Eighteen-year-old Claire had
apparently been no different from the Claire he knew now. He wished he’d known her back then, although
at the time, he’d been so caught up in his relationship with Mandy that he
probably wouldn’t have given Claire the time of day, had he met her then. She’d come into his life at a perfect time,
five years later. A horrible, perfect
time.
Nick
continued to flip through the yearbook, as Claire filled his bookcases with her
things. When he had finished with the
yearbook, she was just tearing open another box. “What’s that?” he asked, watching as she
lifted out two smaller boxes, one bright yellow, the other bright pink.
“Scrapbook
stuff,” she replied, taking the lid off one of the boxes and tilting it in his
direction. Inside, he could see a
variety of supplies – scissors, glue sticks, a paper cutter, and other tools he
did not even recognize, along with brightly colored pens and markers, stickers,
and stencils.
“Ah,” he
said, nodding. “My drawing stuff is over
there, on the bottom shelf,” he said, pointing at one of the bookcases. “Maybe you can put your stuff down there,
with mine.”
“Good
plan,” she agreed, carrying the boxes over and wedging them next to his large
box of art supplies.
“I haven’t
seen your scrapbook,” he commented, as she went back to unpacking.
“This is
it,” she said, pulling out a huge album.
“You wanna look at it now?”
“Sure,” he
replied, curious. He’d heard her mention
her scrapbook before, but he’d never actually seen it. He took the large album from her and
immediately almost dropped it, surprised by how much it weighed. He set it down in his lap and winced at the
pressure it put on his wounded limb. Quickly
snatching the book up again, he swiveled around in his chair and placed the
album on the desk in front of them. He
opened its plum-colored cover and was immediately greeted with a picture of
Claire on the first page. His breath
caught in his throat as he gazed down at the photograph. It was a beautiful picture, an extreme close-up
of her face, developed in black and white.
Its simplicity was what made it so gorgeous, and he tore his eyes away
just long enough to turn and ask, “Who took this?”
Claire
looked up from her unpacking and came over to the desk, smiling sheepishly when
she saw the photo he was pointing to. “A
friend from college, Jenn. She was an
art major with a focus on photography.
She took this the summer after our sophomore year… I’d been on chemo for
a few months, and all my hair had fallen out.”
At her words,
Nick looked back at the picture. He
could just see the line of one of her bandanas cutting across her forehead, and
below that, he realized her eyebrows were gone, as well as her lashes. Her face looked thinner than it was normally,
making her cheekbones more prominent.
“You look
beautiful here,” he said softly, sincerely.
“I mean it.”
“Thanks,”
she said with a little laugh, and he glanced back to find her blushing
slightly. “Jenn thought I’d look like
Sinead O’Connor… like in that one video of hers, where it’s just a close-up of
her face as she’s singing.” Nick
nodded, knowing which one she was talking about. “Yeah, but Jenn was the one who looked more
like Sinead. There’s a picture of her
like this somewhere more towards the back… she shaved her own head when my hair
fell out.”
“Really?”
Nick asked in surprise. “AJ did the same
thing, for me. That’s a good friend.”
Claire
nodded. “She was. I mean, she is. I just don’t see her much anymore… she lives
in France now, right outside Paris.”
“Oh,
France, that’s cool,” said Nick.
“Definitely,”
Claire agreed. “I’d love to go over
there sometime.”
“You ever
been overseas?”
“Just
once. I went on a school-sponsored trip
to the UK during spring break of my senior year of high school… toured England,
Scotland, and Ireland. It was
beautiful.”
Nick
nodded. “The UK’s nice. We should go to Europe sometime. I’ve been there lots of times on tour, but
usually we’re so busy that we don’t get a lot of time to see the sights, so
it’d be nice to go on a little vacation over there, travel at our own pace, do
our own thing.”
“That would
be really cool,” Claire smiled, and as she went back to her unpacking, Nick
made a mental note to himself to keep such a vacation in mind.
He turned
the page of the scrapbook and found a page with a light yellow background that
was filled with baby pictures of her. By
herself in her bassinet; in the arms of her mother and father, grandparents,
even a little boy version of Kyle; on her stomach on a blanket on the floor,
her head raised to the camera. Smiling,
he turned the page and found toddler pictures.
With fiery red hair and a mischievous grin, she looked like quite the
little terror, he thought.
The Claire
in the pictures grew as he turned the pages, and soon he was finding pages
devoted to kindergarten graduation, first Communion, and children’s birthday
parties. Elementary school friends soon
turned to junior high ones, and he smiled at pictures of her from those early
adolescent years – braces on her teeth, freckles on her cheeks, long hair that
was crimped and frizzy. She’d been a
pom-pom girl in junior high, he discovered, looking at a picture of her with
the squad and another of her at a basketball game, arm-in-arm with a
thirteen-year-old Dianna, who had apparently been a cheerleader. There were lots more pictures of her and
Dianna, with numerous other friends he did not recognize, in the next few
pages, her high school years. He frowned
at the many pictures that included Jamie, especially the ones labeled “Prom
’98,” where they looked especially close, he in a tuxedo, she in a long, pale
blue gown.
College
came next, and after that, he turned to a page with a cheerful blue and yellow
striped background and several pictures of Claire with a little boy. He knew exactly when and where these pictures
had to have been taken, for Claire was gaunt and hairless again, her head
adorned by a bright yellow bandana with a smiley face on it, and the bed she was
perched on was unquestionably a hospital bed, in what was unmistakably a
hospital room. She wasn’t wearing a
hospital gown, just regular clothes, but the little boy sitting up in the bed
beside her was.
“Hey,
Claire,” he spoke up, “who is this?” He
pointed out the little boy when Claire came over to look.
“Oh,” said
Claire, “that’s Casey. I got to know him
the first time I was in the hospital, right after my diagnosis. I was taking a walk down the halls one night,
and I heard him crying… his parents weren’t around, and he was scared... maybe
of the dark, maybe of the hospital, maybe of everything, I don’t know. Anyway, I popped my head in his doorway just
to see if he was all right, and somehow I ended up sitting with him and reading
a story to him because no one else had to the time to do that. He calmed down for me and fell asleep, and
when the nurses found out, they let me come back to do the same thing the next
night. His mom had just had a baby, see,
and his dad worked night shift a lot, so neither of them could stay overnight
at the hospital with him.”
“So you
kept hanging out with him at night,” Nick finished for her knowingly.
She
nodded. “Yep. He was a cool little kid. Only six years old, but he’d been through a
hell of a lot already. He had leukemia,
like me, and knowing him kind of helped me in a way, ‘cause I told myself, if he
can make it through all this stuff, then so can I.”
Nick smiled
a little. “So… what happened with him?”
he asked, with an air of caution. He
knew all too well that the answer may not be a good one.
“Last time
I heard anything from his family, he was great,” Claire replied with a
smile. “He underwent a bone marrow
transplant that same year – he was kind of one step ahead of me in everything –
and he hasn’t had a relapse since. I
haven’t seen him in awhile, but I got a Christmas card from his parents last
Christmas, with a picture of him and his little sister… he looks really
good. He’s eleven now.”
“That’s
great,” Nick said, smiling in relief, glad to hear a happy ending to this
story. His smile grew as he turned a
couple more pages in her scrapbook and found pictures of himself with her. There weren’t many, for as long as they’d
known each other, but that was his fault more than hers – he was still trying
to get over the camera shyness that had been brought on by the changes to his
appearance. Still, she had a nice bunch
from the previous year’s VMA’s, which he’d brought her to, and some nice photos
from their trip to Hawaii, as well as a few of them just hanging out.
“This is
really nice, Claire,” Nick said, as he closed the scrapbook with a dull
thud. “You must have put a lot of time
into this.”
“Yeah… I
can do this for a couple of hours without even realizing how much time has
passed,” she said. “It’s a good
hobby.” With a grin, she added, “I can
show you how, if you’d like to give it a try sometime.”
Nick rolled
his eyes. “No thanks,” he said with a
chuckle. “If I want a scrapbook of
myself, I’ll ask a fan to do it – they’re good at that kind of stuff.”
Claire
laughed and then looked around the room.
Except for a pile of empty boxes she’d stacked up near the door, it
looked back to normal again, only even better, because now the bookshelves were
filled, with her things as well as his. The
way it should be, Nick thought.
“Well,”
said Claire, “I think that’s it for this room.
Shall we be moving on?”
“Sure,”
replied Nick, using the desk to push himself up on his one good leg. He reached for his crutches again and hobbled
out of the room behind her, as she led the way to the next one.
***