Fleabrain Loves Franny (8 page)

There had only been a few snow flurries, and it still rained every now and then, but Franny felt a silent shiver in the air. Winter had arrived. Winter meant storm windows closed to the biting chill, and windows closed meant blocking out the friendly noise and bustle of Shady Avenue.

But then, one dreary Friday in mid-December, the missive appeared in her journal.

My dear Franny,

READY?

I am!

HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS:

Set your charming alarm clock to 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning
.

We will attempt another rendezvous at

Alf's tail
.

Bring Sparky's Finest, your handy-dandy monocle!

Yours,

FB

Franny knew she'd be too excited to fall asleep as she waited for the alarm to ring. She asked Nurse Olivegarten to help her take a bath. Baths always made her drowsy.

They were alone in the house. The movie
Lost in Alaska
with Abbott and Costello was playing at the Manor Theater, and her parents had gone to see it. They'd asked Nurse Olivegarten to stay, for “time and a half.” It was the very first time her parents had gone out together alone since Franny had come home from the hospital.

Parents needed time together to rekindle their love, Franny knew. A comedy wasn't exactly romantic, but laughing together was a fine thing to do. Her parents used to go to the movies quite a bit. Before.

And Min was at an event for teenagers at the synagogue.

Nurse Olivegarten had left the bathroom to make a quick, important phone call, but Franny didn't mind. She'd never been left alone in the bath before, and it was certainly a sign of her progress.
Anyway, it was embarrassing to be naked in front of Nurse Olivegarten, even though Nurse Olivegarten was a nurse and had probably seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of naked bodies. It was good to be alone in the tub, counting the purple and pink tiles lining the bathroom walls by twos, and then by tens. Three hundred and twelve. Three hundred and twelve, just like always.

The bathwater was warm and soft, enveloping Franny like a soapy quilt. In the water, Franny felt like her old self again. No braces and crutches. No wheelchair. Just a girl floating in a bathtub. An ordinary floating girl who could, at any moment, climb out of the tub and dry off. All by herself. At any old moment, yes, she could do that.

Franny wriggled her fingers. She shrugged her shoulders. She looked down at her belly button and clenched her stomach muscles.

Then she closed her eyes. The imaginary part came next, the part when she bent her knees, and they poked up over the bathwater like two small, shiny hills. Next came the part when she stretched out her legs, then drew them up once again. And after that, she would wiggle her toes.

There.

Franny's eyes flew open.

She'd wiggled one left toe, but in real life! She was looking right at it, wiggling away. Her toe bobbed above the water, then under, then up again, like a dancing toe-fish. Or a puppet. And she, Franny, was the puppeteer!

“Nurse Olivegarten!” Franny yelled.

She could hear Nurse Olivegarten on the telephone in the hallway. “Such hanky-panky, eh?” Nurse Olivegarten was saying. “Was
Hazel wearing that silly beret? Did Billy dance the buck-and-wing?”

“Nurse Olivegarten! Come here, please!”

Franny wished her parents were home. She wanted them to be the first to see this wonderful miracle. Her toe! Her wonderful, wiggling left toe! Hope, hope, hope. What didn't destroy her, made her stronger. Fleabrain and Nietzsche had been right. Soon she'd be herself again, better than ever.

“Nurse Olivegarten!”

Now Nurse Olivegarten was listening to the other end of her conversation. “M-
mh
. M-
mh
. M-
mh
. Isn't she, though? M-
mh
. Report
that
to Emily Post! Now, tell me about the food. Rubbery chicken, I'm guessing. M-
mh
.”

The other person went on for minutes and minutes. Wasn't Franny's wiggling toe more important than rubbery chicken and Billy's buck-and-wing, whatever the heck that was? Nurse Olivegarten herself would be the first to agree, especially since her professional expertise had helped make it happen.

“Nurse Olivegarten! I moved my toe!” Franny yelled, louder now.

The water was hardly warm anymore. Her fingers were wrinkly. Franny grasped one side of the big white tub and pulled herself to a sitting position. She stared at her left toe and tried to wiggle it. She tried again, glaring angrily, willing her puppet-toe to move. It didn't budge. That's when she felt the muscle spasm, like a blow to her thigh. She gasped and fell back into the water.

“Nurse Olivegarten! Please!”

The pain, the pain! It was a howling monster swimming up
from the Allegheny River and rising from the drain. Franny breathed deeply, just as she'd been told to do during a spasm, great gulps of air that didn't help at all. She tried to sit up, but the angry pain pinned her down. Purple and pink tiles shimmied on the wall. She heard the gurgle of bathwater in her ears and, from far away, the river-monster screaming and screaming.

Nurse Olivegarten burst into the bathroom. “What's all the yelling in here?”

“I have a cramp. Can't move,” Franny whispered between sobs.

Nurse Olivegarten pulled her from the tub, wrapped Franny in a big pink towel, and laid her on the bathroom floor.

“Where's the cramp? Where? Stop crying like a baby, for goodness' sake!”

“Thigh,” said Franny, pointing. “Here.”

Bending down, Nurse Olivegarten pressed hard on Franny's thigh and massaged the spot for several minutes. “Better?”

“A bit,” said Franny. Her chest was heaving, and the sobs kept coming.

“I was gone for only a few seconds! How did it happen?”

“I moved my big toe. It was like a miracle. I was trying to make it move again. And then I got the cramp. I called and called you.”

Nurse Olivegarten loomed above her, suddenly grinning. “Well, now,” she said. “Of course. But it was no miracle, young lady! Didn't I tell you my treatment would work, if you'd just be patient and stop fussing all the time? Didn't I?”

“Yes,” Franny whispered. She wanted to get off the cold floor.

“Now,” Nurse Olivegarten said. “Do we have to go potty?”

“No,” Franny said, looking away in embarrassment.

“You sure? I didn't like the looks of your bowel movement this morning.”

“I'm sure. But will it happen again?”

“The cramp? I have no idea.”

“No, the toe. I moved it.”

“Oh, the toe!” said Nurse Olivegarten, making Franny sit up and rubbing her hair with the towel. “You bet! More than the toe. But remember, it's only a toe, eh? You have a long, long way to go. It will take a fair amount of time, but I'll get you skipping around downtown Pittsburgh eventually.”

Nurse Olivegarten carried Franny to her bedroom and dressed her in her pajamas.

“You were gone for more than a few seconds, you know,” said Franny. “I might have drowned.”

“Don't be so dramatic! Completely your imagination. I stepped out and came right back.”

“Was moving my toe my imagination, too?” Franny began to cry again.

“Well, let's see,” said Nurse Olivegarten. “Which toe was it? Your left?” She reached over and jerked Franny's toe hard, moving it up and down. “Now you do it. Go ahead. Do it!”

And Franny did. Not only her toe, but her entire left foot. She began laughing and crying at the same time.

Nurse Olivegarten leaned very close. She smelled of perspiration, cologne, and cigarettes. “You should be moving more than some toes. You are just not working hard enough, fighting me all the way.
Although it's my professional duty to get you well, it is exasperating to work with you. Don't you want to walk again?”

What a dumb, dumb question! Franny closed her eyes and wished with all her heart she could jump out of bed and waltz around the room. She would be singing “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” that beautiful song from the
Cinderella
movie, a song that made her shiver with hope every time she heard it because it promised that dreams could come true.

No matter how your heart is grieving

If you keep on believing

Grieving. Believing
. A surprising rhyme. A perfect rhyme. No matter how frightened and unhappy she felt, she would never give up!

Franny opened her eyes. “I'll try to work harder, I promise. I do want to walk again.”

“Well, I hope I can stay long enough to make that happen,” said Nurse Olivegarten. Her olive eyes narrowed. “But my patience is wearing very thin.”

The Meeting

F
ranny was dreaming of Nurse Olivegarten's “Patience,” a thin, dingy shawl full of gaping holes. Nurse Olivegarten poked her nose through one of the holes, flaring her nostrils. “See?” Nurse Olivegarten cackled. “My Patience is wearing thin! Wearing thin! And you'll never, ever dance the buck-and-wing as well as I!”

Ludwig van Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
tinkled in Franny's ear. Nurse Olivegarten wrapped her torn shawl around her shoulders and began to dance. Her long legs jerked like a giant marionette's, each foot pointing in a different direction. It was not a pretty sight. Even Alf whined in annoyance—and that's when Franny woke up.

The cheerful ballerina in a sparkly, flared tutu was dancing on the face of Franny's alarm clock, endlessly inspired by the
Moonlight Sonata
. The dancer never moved her graceful arms, held high above her head, but her leaping legs and pointed toe shoes kept excellent time. Now the toe shoe of her bent leg pointed toward the two, while the toe shoe of her outstretched leg pointed toward the twelve.
Franny reached over, clicked off the musical alarm, and turned on her bedside lamp.

Alf clambered across the bed to her. He licked Franny's face, his tail wagging furiously.

“Come closer, Alfie,” said Franny. “Lie down and let me look at your tail.”

Alf was an intelligent mutt. He understood many words.
Come, Lie down
, and even
Tail
were among them. But the manner in which he showed his bottom to Franny at that moment had a specific purpose to it. He was not merely following her command. He was acting out a mission.

Franny secured the bottle cap behind one lens of her eyeglasses like a monocle, then closed her other eye and focused on Alf's hairy tail. The hairs seemed to leap out at her, each one as thick as a tulip's stem. It was as if she were looking through a powerful microscope. Closer still, and they thickened into brown, sturdy twigs.

And there he was, clinging to one of them.

Fleabrain.

He waved a long, shapely hind leg. His flat body shone in the lamplight, as brown and polished as the leather of the most expensive shoes from Katzenback's Footwear. Sparky's Finest apparently magnified sound waves, too, and when Fleabrain spoke, his voice was small, but Franny heard him clearly. Her ears tingled. Fleabrain's voice was pleasant, like the ringing of chimes.

“Franny,” said Fleabrain. He sighed a high-pitched sigh. “Franny. Franny. Franny. My first word heard by human ears. A word as lovely as
Ophelia
or
Juliet
or any other name penned by Shakespeare.”

“My full name is Francine,” Franny said. “But everyone calls me Franny.”

“I am not everyone,” Fleabrain said. “For that reason, I'll call you Francine. Even lovelier.”

“But how do I know you're real?” Franny asked.

Fleabrain crossed several of his six legs and leaned back comfortably upon his hair hammock. “Oh, Francine, I have so longed for a conversation such as this with you! As the French philosopher René Descartes, born March 31, 1596, died February 11, 1650, has written, ‘
Je pense, donc je suis'
!”

“I don't speak French,” Franny said. “I think we've discussed this before.”

“Right,” said Fleabrain. “My sincerest apologies. Bug it! My memory is usually as sharp as a bee's stinger, but I suppose I'm in quite a tizzy, meeting you for the first time. ‘
Je pense, donc je suis.'
Translation: ‘I think, therefore I am.' I also expound, argue, sing a cappella, compose an elegy, recite an ode, and solve algebraic equations. As well as jump incredibly high and drink blood. Therefore, I am.”

“Well, I'm glad
you
know you're real,” said Franny crossly. It was 2:15
A.M.,
and her head hurt. “But how do
I
know you are?”

“Oh, bug it. I suspected you'd ask that. I hate to do this to you, but—”

Fleabrain leaped gracefully from Alf's hair onto Franny's arm. Six small bites and the job was done—bites on Franny's arm in the shape of a tiny
F
, an exact replica of Fleabrain's distinctive signature.

“I can do the
B
for
Brain
if you need more convincing,” he said,
jumping back into his hair nest. “I'm sure you recognize the penmanship. Or ‘mouthmanship,' as it were.”

Fleabrain laughed, then stopped abruptly in mid-giggle.

“Don't worry, Francine. I used one of my gentlest venoms. The bites shouldn't itch for long, but they will still be there as proof at daybreak, before they fade away in a day or two.”

“That's OK,” Franny said. “I just needed to be sure.”

“And don't worry about Alf. I only need a repast from my host every fortnight to stay alive these days. Sometimes less. I seem to be getting most of my nourishment from books. Much more fulfilling, not to mention slimming.”