Fierce (14 page)

Some guys like girls who are, you know, kind of…small. At least, they don’t mind. Necessarily. That’s what my friend Sean says. 

I’d told myself to check out what she’d meant by that, and I hadn’t. I’d been wrapped up in my own problems, my own desires, and had failed my sister. Again. 

Hemi wasn’t making it any easier. “Would she?” he asked. “Would she really, knowing how you feel about it? Don’t you know that’s how it happens? That it’s the girls like her it happens to, the ones who don’t have enough care?”

I stepped back as if he’d slapped me. But this wasn’t about me. “I’ll get a kit,” I said again. “I’ll make her check.” 

“No,” Hemi said. “The
doctor
will check. Whether it’s that, or something else. We’re here to do it. Fill out the forms.”

“I can’t…” I said again, and then I put my head back, took a breath, and looked him in the eye. It was nothing to be ashamed of. “I can’t afford it. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’ll be a hundred fifty dollars just for the visit, and if they do blood tests…I can’t, not unless we have to. If she’s not better tomorrow, I’ll take her. But I can’t do it now.”

“Don’t you have insurance?” 

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “Yes. But not through the company yet, and it’s the highest-deductible policy. I’d have to pay all of this, and I can’t.”

“Ah.” He walked away, and I sat down beside Karen and put an arm around her. “How are you doing?” I asked her.

“Not too bad,” she said, but that wasn’t how she looked. She’d leaned back into the chair with an arm over her eyes against the light.

I hesitated. “OK if we go home?” I asked, battling the guilt. “See if this passes?” It was a reasonable decision. It had to be.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. I just want to lie down. I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry I wrecked your day.”

I didn’t have a chance to answer that, because Hemi was back. “That’s sorted,” he said. “Fill out the form.” 

“What’s
sorted?” I asked.

“You won’t pay the bill. Fill out the form.”

“I can’t let you—”

“No?” His voice was suddenly furious. “You’re going to let your sister be this ill for your pride? Because you don’t want to be obligated to me? A couple hundred dollars doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I spend it on a tie. Fill out the bloody form.” 

I filled out the form. He was right. Obligation or no. Pride or no. He was right.

I cursed myself, during the hour that followed, for not following my first impulse and calling my own doctor. I hadn’t done it because I’d thought Hope wouldn’t want to be under that kind of obligation to me, and I’d been right. But in the end, it hadn’t mattered. I’d had to help her anyway, and she’d hated it as much as I’d known she would.

I stood up when they came out from the back at last. Hope looked a bit less fraught, but Karen just looked exhausted. 

“Migraines,” Hope said. “That’s what he says. She’s got a prescription.” She lifted a weary hand with the bit of white paper. “And a shot for the nausea, and a prescription for some pills for that, too.” 

I already had my phone out to ring Charles. “One moment,” I said, and went to the counter to take care of the bill. Hope had been right, I saw. Over three hundred dollars. 

Hope went next door and got the prescriptions filled while I sat with a silent Karen, and at last, we could leave.

Both of them were quiet on the drive back to the apartment, and when the car pulled to a stop, I got out to give Karen a hand. She stumbled a bit along the way, and I asked, “What floor are you on?”

“Fifth,” Hope said, and I nodded and picked Karen up again. 

“I don’t—” she said faintly, but I’d heard that enough today. Seemed it ran in the family. She didn’t have the strength to keep it up anyway. She relaxed against me with a sigh that got past every defense I possessed, and something twisted hard inside my chest.

I was a bit blown by the time we got up the shabby carpeted stairway and into the apartment, however hard I tried to conceal it, and Hope was casting me anxious looks as if I’d drop her sister. As if that were a possibility. At her direction, I carried Karen into a small bedroom and set her down on a double bed. 

“Could you wait for me?” Hope asked me, her voice low. “It could be a little while, though.”

“Course.” I left the two of them there, went out into the living room, and sat down on a faded green fabric couch.

Hope had tried, I guessed. The beige walls were hung with framed prints of the type I might have expected. The Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. Flowers, mostly. Of course. There was a shawl thrown across the back of the couch, and everything was tidy. But Karen had been right. The bathtub
was
in the kitchen, and the only view was of an air shaft and the building across it.

It was, in fact, nearly half an hour before Hope came out of the bedroom again, shutting the door gently behind her. She looked so weary, and my earlier anger had evaporated. 

Don’t you get how close to the edge I am?
she’d asked me at the restaurant. I hadn’t, but I got it now.

“You get her settled?” I asked her as she sank into a chair at right angles to me. “She feeling better?”

“Yeah. Asleep.” She ran a hand through her mass of fine blonde hair and sighed. “And now I need to settle with you. I’ll pay you back, of course. It just might take a while.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

“I will. And there’s something else I need to say, too. Thank you for helping today, for everything you did. It was kind of you.”

The doorbell rang, and she sat up straight with an obvious effort. She was knackered. “Huh.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’ll be lunch.” I went to the intercom and pressed the button. “Yes?”

“Delivery from King Tsin,” I heard.

“Buzzing you up.” I did it, pulled out my wallet, and, when the fella puffed his way up the stairs, took a couple white plastic bags off him in exchange for a fair number of bills. 

“Forks and plates? Glasses?” I asked Hope, who’d been making some…noises behind me. Frustration, maybe. Maybe even anger again. I had to smile a bit. At least anger was better than worry and defeat. I’d always thought so, anyway. 

She lifted her arms out from her sides and let them fall. “Well, sure.” She went to the kitchen for them, which really meant that she stepped across the room for them, and I set the bags on the coffee table and followed her. 

“Wine glasses,” I said. “Corkscrew.”

“What? I’m sorry, I don’t have any wine. Let alone the kind you like.”

“But you see—I do.”

She pulled out a couple juice glasses and a corkscrew and handed them to me. “Sorry. I don’t buy enough wine to make the special glasses worth it.”

By the time she’d come back, I’d opened the bottle and poured. “Not as cold as it should be,” I said, “but we’ll pretend, eh. It’s a Riesling. Good with Chinese. See what you think.” When she hesitated, I added, “Don’t you think you’ve earned a bit of indulgence today?”

She smiled for the first time in hours. “You know what? I think I have. Our day out didn’t go so well, did it?”

“Oh, I dunno. It had its moments. The one where you almost slapped me again was pretty special.”

This time, she laughed. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

“Mm. Not quite right. But go on. Try the wine.”

I waited and watched as she sipped, tasted, enjoyed, and, finally, sighed. “Really good,” she said. “Really, really good. But how did you get the guy to pick up your wine?” She caught herself, then, and laughed. “Oh. Duh. Money.”

“It has its uses. Can’t buy you, of course, but could be it can buy something I can watch you enjoy. That works for me.”

She looked a little flustered at that, got busy searching out a bowl and dumping ice into it to chill the wine. Then she was opening cartons, exclaiming as if I’d done something special, something luxurious, instead of just calling for Chinese takeout. Taking not a bit of it for granted. 

She went back to the topic, though, once we were eating, when she had her pretty legs tucked up under her in the big chair and her plate in her lap. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes at every sip of wine, though, and I couldn’t resist watching her. 

“Thank you for this,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was. And for what you did today. For helping Karen, and helping me. I know it didn’t turn out the way you expected, and still—you helped. You did so much. You did
more
than so much. Carrying Karen and everything? I wasn’t very…gracious about it, and I know it. So I need to be gracious now. Or at least…” She laughed under her breath. “I need to try.”

I shifted a little at that. “Nah. It was what anybody would have done.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was kind. And I have to say something else, too.” She was clearly steeling herself. “That you were right. The person who’s been wrong, who’s been offering mixed messages—it isn’t you. It’s me. If I hadn’t wanted to go out with you, all I had to say was no. I said yes, and then I…kept backing off, and blaming you for it. And I realize that isn’t fair.” 

Her eyes were steady on mine, and she wasn’t a butterfly now. But then, she never had been. 

“Of course it’s fair,” I found myself saying. “Of course you’re scared. You have too much to lose. Maybe I thought you were just…teasing, but you’re not. You’re scared, because you’re on the edge.”

Her eyes were shining a bit now, and she was taking another of those deep breaths. Keeping herself back from that edge, because there was nothing and nobody on the other side. 

“Why?” I asked. “Why is it you and Karen?”

She shook her head, her hair moving with her. “You don’t want to hear all this.”

“Yeh,” I said. “I do. Tell me.”

I hesitated for a minute. Could I really talk to Hemi about this? I took another bite of beef and broccoli while I thought, and then followed it up with a swallow of wine that, once again, had clearly come from wherever they hid the good stuff.

I did tell him, in the end, precisely because he didn’t press me to. Instead, he sat with that stillness of his and waited. 

He wasn’t a patient man; I knew that by now. That wasn’t where the stillness came from. It came instead from his self-discipline, from a nearly iron self-control. But how would somebody like that judge me and my less than perfect life?

“I guess,” I began at last, “I don’t want to tell you because of what you said today. About the girls who don’t get enough care.” I looked at him squarely, needing to face this. The thought that woke me up in the middle of the night, that made me sweat. And the reminder that helped me fall asleep again. “I know I can’t give Karen everything she needs. But I can give her more than she’d have otherwise. I know my best isn’t enough, but it
is
my best, and it’s what we have.”

He shifted a little again on the couch, for once not looking quite so perfectly calm and focused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I was trying to convince you, and I don’t always…”

“You don’t play fair,” I finished. 

“No.” 

“Why don’t I believe that?” I asked. I smiled at him, and he looked startled. “Come on, Hemi. What have you done today? Let’s see.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Taken Karen and me to look at roses, let Karen be incredibly rude to you, let me yell at you about fairy tales, taken care of us when Karen got sick, and paid the doctor’s bill instead of leaving me in disgust.” I held up my hand, palm facing him. “That’s five. And, hmm. You also let my little sister throw up on you, carried her up the stairs, which I
know
was exhausting, because I saw you, and bought me lunch. Plus, let me tell you, some pretty amazing wine. I believe you’re a ruthless businessman and the terror of the boardroom, but you’ll have to forgive me if I’m having trouble believing you’re a horrible person. Even if you wouldn’t let me slap you.”

“I didn’t let her throw up on me,” he pointed out. “I carefully held her over the grass.”

“Close enough,” I said, and he looked at me and waited.

“So.” I took another sip of wine for courage. Which helped, or maybe it just tasted delicious. Either way, I needed another sip. “Our story’s not that interesting, and not that uncommon, either. And anyway, everybody’s got a sad story, right?”