Finding Cassidy (15 page)

She frowned. “Boots?”

“The ground’ll be muddy after all the rain. You don’t need to fall again.”

“Oh. Right.”

I suppressed a sigh and headed for the law teacher. Quinn had brains, but not enough smarts to wear the right kind of shoes. Luckily for her, I was around.

“Jason called,” Mom said when I arrived home after four.

I’d spent almost three hours at the library. The homework had taken less than an hour. Trying to find books on how to steal a DNA sample from an ex-boyfriend had taken the rest of the afternoon.

“He wants you to call.” Mom shredded carrots into a bowl.

“Sure.” I had no intention of calling Jason Perdue, a.k.a. Traitorous One Who Might Possibly Share DNA. I tossed my bag onto a kitchen chair and pawed through the fridge for something to eat. “How’s Frank?”

“Okay.” Mom hesitated as if she wanted to elaborate, but then she said, “Dinner’s early tonight. Your father has a council meeting and I’m going back to the store to do the books.”

“Works for me.”
More than you know.
I emerged with a block of cheddar, grabbed the cutting board from the drawer and began to slice. “Did you call Cypress Hills?” After Frank’s little freak-out routine this morning, Mom had walked me out to the car, reassuring me—reassuring herself?—that Frank was fine. “He needs more sleep,” she had kept saying. “That’s all it is.”

I’d changed the subject, partly because I didn’t want to consider the possibility that Frank was already getting worse and partly because I didn’t want her to forget her promise to make the call. “Did you?” I repeated.

“Uh…yeah.”

My heart lurched; the knife stopped mid-slice. Something about Mom’s tone told me this wouldn’t be good. Furiously, her fingers worked the grater. “They refused to tell me anything,” she said.

I slammed through the last few slices of cheese. “I’m not surprised.”

“I’m not surprised, either,” Mom admitted.

I was no closer to finding my real father, to figuring out who I was. QTGYRL’s chat-room post spooled out in my head.
I have a petition on my site. I’m fighting for the rights of donor offspring.
But that was her fight, not mine. All I needed was one name. “So what do we do now?” I asked.

Mom added raisins and cinnamon to the grated carrots. “I called your dad at work immediately. He promised to get the city lawyer to phone.” She dressed the salad with mayonnaise. “He figured a little legal intimidation wouldn’t hurt.”

But the lawyer called and struck out, too. “There’s one other thing we can try,” Frank said later as dinner wound down. His hands were steady; his eyes were focused and determined. “We can go to West Vancouver and meet with the doctor.”

This was the old Frank—taking control, making things happen. Not so long ago, the old fight-for-causes Frank had made me crazy. Now I wished the old Frank would hang around forever.

Mom gathered plates, scraped chicken bones and leftover bits of potato into a pile. “Will it make a difference?”

“It’s worth trying,” Frank said. “It’s easy to brush someone off on the phone, but not so easy to brush them off when they’re sitting right in front of you.”

“What if they won’t agree to see us?” I asked.

A slow, satisfied smile spread across Frank’s face. “They already have. Our appointment’s scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”

When birds get scared, they fly away or scream or get mean. Like the Cassowary in Australia which is five feet tall and if you get close to it, it will kick you in the guts and kill you.

Cassidy MacLaughlin, Grade Four Science Project

I
went to the lake with Quinn mostly because of Jason. I mean, it was mega-dumping rain and I was mega-depressed, and slogging through mud trying to convince a bunch of geese to leave their nests was better than sitting home obsessing about him.

But a funny thing happened in the middle of it all. I started feeling better. Frank claimed that helping others was a good way to forget your problems. Now, let’s be honest—my problems were way too big to forget. Still, the night was a distraction.

“You wanna do one more?” Quinn asked after
we took the eggs from nest number three. “There’s another nest by the dock. We practically have to walk by it to get to the car.”

I pushed up the sleeve of my windbreaker and rubbed the rain from my watch. It was nine-thirty. If I made it home by ten, I’d beat my parents. “Sure,” I said.

We adjusted our hoods, positioned the beam of our flashlights on the ground in front of us and started walking. For a change, Quinn was quiet. Maybe she sensed my mood, or maybe she was watching for security guards. Whatever the reason, the silence gave me time to think.

Jason and I were over. I had to accept it and move on. There was nothing I could do if he ended up with (barf) Yvonne. I’d chosen to break up with him. It hurt, but it was the right decision. The DNA was only part of it. Of course, I wanted to know Jason and I weren’t related—I
needed
to know. But it was his understanding I craved. Without it, I felt even emptier, as though someone had taken a shovel and scooped out my heart.

I couldn’t live that way.

There was a flash of white in the darkness. “It’s a goose,” Quinn murmured when I jumped.

That emptiness—did birds feel it, too, I wondered?
Did they feel a hollow kind of grief when their eggs did not hatch? Something told me they did. The fact that I could give them back a chance for reproductive happiness eased my pain a little.

“I’m glad I came.” I gestured to the addled eggs Quinn had in her backpack. “Doing this feels right.”

“It feels right because it
is
right.” Her voice was low; I had to lean close to hear her. “Nature should always prevail,” she added. “Now it’ll be allowed to.”

Falling silent, I pondered her words.
Nature should always prevail.
What did that say about me? About my conception?

Catching sight of the dock up ahead, I remembered that night less than two weeks before when the others had teased me about my love of birds, when Jason had stood up for me and said we were all allowed one bit of weirdness.

I was way past the one-bit stage.

“The nest is down here.” Quinn shimmied down the bank.

I followed her. Together we chased away the sentinel bird and then rushed the nest. I like to think the geese knew we were helping them, because they kicked up way less of a fuss than they had when I’d addled the eggs with Tom Bradley.

Fifteen minutes later we tossed our dripping wet
windbreakers into the back of my car and climbed into the front seats.

“What will you do with the eggs?” I turned on the heater and wiped the condensation from the inside of the window. We’d collected sixteen of them.

“I’ll crush them in the backyard and throw them out.” Quinn used her plaid scarf like a towel to dry her hair. At the look of disgust on my face, she added, “Don’t worry. They were just laid. The embryos are barely developed. Some of the eggs will be practically empty.” She frowned. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s called rain.” It beat a tinny symphony on the roof of my car.

Quinn shook her head. “Not that.” She lunged for my glovebox. “It’s your cell.” She handed me the phone.

I popped it open. “Hello.”

Mom screamed down the line at me. “Cassidy, where have you been? I’ve been calling you for the last hour. Dad’s been in an accident. Meet me at the hospital.”

“They aren’t sure what happened.” Mom paced between two rows of plastic orange chairs in the emergency room. “A witness said Dad’s car crossed the centre line and crashed into a utility pole.”

Like I’d reminded Quinn before she’d gone off to find her mom in the lab, this was Frank’s third accident in a little over a month. I didn’t want to think about the implications.

“Sit down.” I grabbed Mom’s arm and pulled her into the chair beside me. “You’re making me dizzy.”

“I can’t.” She checked her watch. “He’s been in there almost two hours.” She jumped up and went to the nurses’ station. After a minute, she came back. “Soon. The doctor will be out soon.” She sighed in frustration. “They told me that half an hour ago.”

Forty minutes later, we were ushered down the hall and into an empty examining room, where we were met by a stout, middle-aged doctor with a pencil-thin moustache and a blue Elmo button beside his Dr. Turner name tag.

He waited until we were sitting, and then he said, “Frank is alive, he’s breathing on his own, but he has been seriously injured. Among other things, he has sustained a head injury—a baseline skull fracture.” His words were blunt and matter-of-fact, but his brown eyes were kind. “So far we aren’t seeing any internal bleeding, but he is slipping in and out of consciousness. The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical. What we want to see is steady improvement.”
Dr. Turner paused, his face grave. “But he could slip into a coma—particularly if he experiences internal bleeding.”

A weighty silence fell. Then Mom asked, “What other injuries does he have?”

“A fractured collarbone, three cracked ribs and a broken right arm.” Dr. Turner shrugged ever so slightly. “Unpleasant but fixable.”

Mom fiddled nervously with her watch. “Can we see him?”

“For a few minutes, once he’s settled and stabilized.”

“What happened?” I asked.

The doctor hesitated. “I understand Frank has Huntington’s?” When we nodded, he said, “My guess is he blacked out at the wheel. Have you noticed any periods of vagueness? Or blankness?”

Mom shook her head.

“Yes,” I said. “The other day at breakfast.”

“He was tired, Cassidy. Ridiculously,
brutally
tired. I told you that.”

The doctor smiled gently. “I’m sure Dr. Braithwaite will talk to you. He has been notified about the accident.” After telling us that it would be some time before we could see Frank, he suggested we go to the cafeteria and get something to eat.

How could we eat? We couldn’t.

Mom called people—Frank’s co-workers at city hall, Big Mac and Little Mac, Aunt Colleen.

Now
I
paced—back and forth in the lobby, staring at the nurses and orderlies, the people in wheelchairs, the candystripers. Staring through them.

All I could think about was this: Frank could die. We would all die, but Frank could die sooner rather than later. And if he did get better, I had to face something else: Frank’s Huntington’s was getting worse. It was getting worse way faster than it was supposed to.

At one point as I stared through someone wearing a white lab coat, I realized she was calling my name. It was Quinn’s mother, Mrs. Harper. She patted my arm and said she’d heard the news.

I pulled myself out of my fog long enough to ask, “Where’s Quinn?”

“I sent her home,” Mrs. Harper said. “I didn’t want her to interfere.”

Before I could say that Quinn was born to interfere, she asked for Mom. I motioned her across the lobby to the bank of phones and watched the two of them hug.

Mrs. Harper was on her dinner break from the lab. She stayed with us until we were paged. In fact, she pulled a couple of apple spice muffins out from somewhere under her lab coat and practically forced us to
eat them. (Quinn came by her take-charge attitude honestly.) Then Mrs. Harper made us promise not to leave the hospital without bringing her up to date on Frank’s condition.

As Mom and I followed the nurse down the corridor of the intensive care unit, all the usual hospital sounds and smells faded. All I heard was the pounding of my heart. All I smelled was the sour stench of the fear that walked, like a third person, between Mom and me. And all I could think about was controlling my stomach and not throwing up the apple spice muffin when I saw Frank.

The nurse came to a stop in front of a row of windows. I saw curtained-off cubicles in the room behind her. “Given Mr. MacLaughlin’s condition, we’d ask you to keep your visit to five minutes,” she said softly, “and not say or do anything to upset him.” Her gaze lingered on me.

Under normal circumstances, I might have made some sort of wisecrack. I mean, really. Did I look like I would go in and jump up and down on Frank’s bed or call him a stupid fool for losing control of the car?

But I just nodded meekly and followed Mom. Frank was in the bed at the far end of the room, hooked up to a bunch of machines that bleeped and blinked and whooshed and dripped.

His eyes were shut; he was the colour of snow.

I guess I gasped out loud, because a male nurse with spiky blond hair pushed me gently into the chair beside the bed. “He looks like he’s sleeping, but he’s awake, and he can hear what you say,” he said.

Mom took the chair opposite.

I stared. Frank’s skin was whiter than I thought skin could be. His head was wrapped in white bandages. His arm was swathed in white. Everything about him was white. He was so white, it was hard to tell where he stopped and the white hospital linens started.

Kind of like when I was little and it was hard to know where
he
stopped and
I
started. Back when we were so together, so much a part of each other, that there was practically no line between us, no separation.

We were so separate now I didn’t know what, exactly, he was to me anymore. Or what I was to him, either.

“Frank,” Mom whispered thickly. “Frank, we’re here.” Her hand snaked across the bed and tentatively touched what I think was an elbow. I knew she was on the verge of tears because I heard them in her voice. Besides, I was, too. “You’re going to get better, Frank. You know that, don’t you?”

A flutter of eyes and then, “Ovvv…caaarrrse…gittt…bittrrrr.”
Frank’s voice was raspy and the words were a little garbled, but it was
his
voice.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both, and so did Mom, and I guess we were a little too loud for the ICU because Mr. Spiky Hair returned, and even though he pretended to check Frank’s vitals, I know the only reason he came back was to hold a finger to his lips and signal for us to be quiet.

Which we immediately did.

As much as we were able to.

“What happened?” I asked.

Judging by Mom’s frown, I figured this was one of those questions classed as potentially upsetting. But what did she expect me to do? Ask about the weather?

“Dnnntt…” Frank’s eyelids fluttered shut. After a minute, they fluttered open again. “Dnnntt…memmmbr.”

“Don’t worry, Frank, there’ll be lots of time for questions later.” She squeezed his hand, glared at me. “You just have to get well, okay?” And then she went into a rambling, boring account of who she’d phoned and what they’d said and how many people were rooting for him and why he shouldn’t worry because everything was covered down at city hall.

I don’t know how much Frank heard. His eyes were shut through most of it. But when Mom finished, they flickered open again. He mumbled incoherently. “Vncurvv…llinekk…”

Mom and I exchanged perplexed glances.

“It’s okay, Frank. It’s okay.” Mom tried to soothe him. “Just rest and get better.” I saw the nurse eye us and check his watch. He was going to boot us out any minute.

Frank’s mumbling got louder. “Vnnncurrvvv…llinnek…Casssssdeee.”

The clinic.
After obsessing about it all day, Frank’s accident had completely wiped it from my mind. “The clinic, Mom—he’s talking about me going to the clinic.”

Frank grunted. “Llllinnnekk…goooooo.”

Mom smoothed his forehead with her hand. “Calm down, Frank. There’ll be time for the clinic when you get well. We can postpone the appointment for a few days.”

For twenty-four to forty-eight hours at least. How could I go anywhere when Frank was like this?

“Noooooo.” The machine beside him beeped faster. The jagged lines on the neighbouring machine grew taller, sharper. “Casssdeeee…goooooo…llinnekk.”

“Time’s up, I’m afraid.” With calm efficiency, the nurse moved to the side of his bed and took Frank’s pulse. Mom and I stood.

“Casssddddeeee…gooooo.”

The nurse thought Frank wanted us to leave. “It’s all right, Mr. MacLaughlin. They’re going now.”

But Mom knew exactly what Dad wanted to say. She leaned over and gently kissed Frank’s cheek. “Relax, Frank, I’ll make sure Cassidy goes to the clinic tomorrow.”

The beeping on the machine slowed. The spikes on the second machine softened.

And Frank slowly shut his eyes.