I'm Not Your Other Half (9 page)

I wasn't a friend to him, I thought. Anybody's first line of defense is a best friend. Mom is Dad's best friend. Lynn is Ben's best friend. I should be turning into Michael's best friend.

It caught at me.

Michael, not Annie, was to be my best friend. Michael—or some other boy—would last forever. Not Annie.

“It was my fault,” I said. “You put a lot of work into that. Don't you think Eliza is going to turn out to be fascinating? But listen, I can worry about Eliza another time. Once when we were in the computer store, the salesman was working out everybody's first name in huge fat block letters. You remember that? Each letter took up a single page. He filled in the blocks with little
s
's. I'd love to have your name written out like that. I'd hang it on my bedroom wall.”

Michael said it was a cinch to do that and would take only moments. The moments lasted longer, because I put on some rock music and we kept interrupting the programming to dance. Finally he had a perfect M-I-C-H-A-E-L, seven feet long. He did not make the letters black with
s
's. He filled them in with tiny
fraser-fraser-fraser-fraser
's.

When school began Monday, Chapman High had never seemed so large. I was too tired for the stairs, too worn out for the classes. I could barely remember what my schedule was, and when Mr. McGrath asked for the history paper outlines, I realized with a sinking heart that Michael and I had partied all weekend. I had never gone to any library at all.

There are some good things about being known as a brain. Even Mr. McGrath assumes that Fraser MacKendrick is about to get 800 on her college boards any minute now. Sure enough, he accepted a very feeble excuse and agreed that I could have another week to do my outline. I felt slightly sick at misrepresenting myself, especially when he refused the excuses of two other kids whose reasons were doubtless more valid than mine.

We had a substitute in gym, and because the heating system wasn't working properly and the sub was a hundred pounds overweight, we didn't have to dress out. I sagged on the locker-room bench while the talk of the other girls swirled around me.

Connie had broken her New Year's resolution 83 times in two months. Everyone giggled. “Chocolate,” explained Connie. “I wasn't going to eat it again.”

“You should have resolved that in reverse,” said Julie. “If you'd resolved to eat chocolate daily, you could have kept your resolution. Now you've got both chocolate and guilt.”

“Speaking of guilt,” said Smedes, “we had to put my grandfather in a nursing home last week. We can't keep him with us any more because of his medical condition. He's angry at us and thinks we don't love him any more. He cried when we left him at the nursing home. It was horrible.”

Smedes, like me, bears an ancient maiden name. (I must say I find Fraser more acceptable than Smedes, however.) Everybody sympathized with Smedes, and we talked of families and their duties to each other. Connie broke in to say that she was having a chocolate attack, so we thoughtfully ate her chocolate kisses for her, to prevent another lapse.

Julie said she had read a terrific book called
Ordinary People
where the teen-age boy is trying not to attempt suicide a second time. “Julie,” said Smedes, “how could a plot like that possibly be good?”

“Really, it was,” said Julie. “It was a high school just like Chapman and kids just like us, and parents just like ours. You should read it.”

Ordinary People,
I thought. I can remember that title. I haven't read much in months. If Julie recommends it, it's good.

Somebody had lost an earring. Somebody else found it for her. Smedes had to borrow a dollar for lunch money. Connie said, “Did you hear about the kid who fell downstairs and is in a coma?”

“No,” I said, horrified. “Somebody at the high school?”

“No. Younger, I think. Just an ordinary fall downstairs, you'd expect a few bruises, but she fell head first and she's been unconscious for quite a while.”

“The poor parents,” exclaimed Smedes. “Think how guilty
they
must feel. Letting their kid horse around near the stairs. They must be going through hell right now.”

I hate hearing about injured children. I hate hearing the sirens of ambulances, and whenever I have to pull over to let an ambulance pass me I start to feel sick myself. I don't know if it's identification with the victim inside, or guilt that I'm okay, or fear, or what. Connie was toying with her last chocolate kiss. She didn't eat it, and nobody asked for it. I suppose we all half felt that you couldn't go around happily chomping on chocolate when other people were dying. Smedes said, “How's your research project going, Fraser?”

“I love it. A fantastic exciting girl named Eliza Lucas Pinckney.”

“Just think,” said Smedes. “If your ancestor or mine had been Pinckney, we'd be named Pinckney instead of Smedes or Fraser.” Smedes looked at me carefully. “Yes, I think you'd be an ideal Pinckney,” she said. “Hereafter, I'm going to address you as Pinckney.”

“Not if you value your life,” I said.

After school I rushed to the library to concentrate on Eliza. It felt queer to be there without doing Toybrary. I felt as if I were taking wrong turns, doing something illegal, heading into adult reference.

I looked up
indigo
in a book on natural dyes. There was a page of color photographs and for the first time I saw the color of indigo. A wonderful blue. Suddenly I saw Eliza, sixteen and slender, like me, but wearing a dress of indigo blue, sweeping past her white-pillared mansion, ducking under a wisteria vine, going to check her live oaks and her silk worms, her flax and her hemp. Oh, Eliza! I thought. What a woman you were!

“Fraser?” said Miss Herschel.

I looked up. She was visibly upset. I forgot to tell people not to call me at the library, I thought. But it isn't Toybrary day. Nobody knows I'm here.

“Did you hear the news, Fraser?”

“No, what?” Good. She wasn't mad at me about phone calls. Probably some new donation for Toybrary. I could not care less what anybody gives Toybrary, I thought. I have outgrown it. I have to apply myself and find another girl to run it.

“Kit Lipton,” said Miss Herschel. “Remember that cute little girl with the brown hair who always bounced?”

“My favorite patron,” I said. “A Barbie Doll fiend who recently turned to Science instead.” I smiled to myself, wondering how the Sun Graphics Kit had worked out for her.

“She had a terrible fall. She's in a coma. She's probably dying.”

H
OSPITALS OVERWHELM ME.

It seems impossible that I ever cared about term papers or hairstyles, boy friends or Madrigals, when I smell that peculiar sick scent of newly washed hospital floors, see the orderlies pushing a stretcher down the hall to X-ray, watch an elderly sick man attempt to maneuver a walker, listen to nervous families in the waiting room aching for news.

I don't think I want a medical career. It must be very consuming, because I don't see how you would ever get over that feeling that nothing else matters. Your whole existence would be so many iron filings drawn inexorably to the magnet of the hospital.

And yet, once I'm inside hospital doors, all I do want is a medical career, because what else matters, except pain and death and healing?

I took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked slowly down the hall to the nurses' station to check in. Kit's room was not open to casual visitors. I had had to phone her parents to ask them to put me on an allowed-visitors list. It was a horrible phone call. Mr. and Mrs. Lipton could not speak without choking up. They told me how Kit had been dancing. She had gotten a tutu for Christmas and was pirouetting all over the house, and they had even said to her, “Don't go close to the stairs,” but they didn't actually move to stop her, and she lost her balance and fell as they watched, head first to the bottom floor.

The nurse smiled at me. “Kit's having some treatments now,” she explained. “You wait in the sitting room. Mr. and Mrs. Lipton are there. They'll be relieved to have company.”

Oh, no. Would we sit awkwardly in those ugly red vinyl seats, flipping through ancient magazines? Would I tell them about high school this year while we all tried not to think of Kit? But there was no place else to go, and the nurse was watching, so I trekked another fifteen feet down the hall and turned into the tiny ugly visitors' room. It really felt like a trek. It might even be easier to walk across a veldt than to approach the parents of a dying child.

They were both weeping.

“Hi,” I said, and the syllable felt too light and carefree, but I could not think of the proper greeting. “I'm Fraser MacKendrick.”

“Oh, Fraser!” cried Mrs. Lipton. She was a little woman and rather dumpy. When she hugged me I had to bend over so that her face wasn't in my sleeve. She used a wrinkled Kleenex to dry her tears. “I'm so glad to meet you at last, Fraser. Kit came home every Thursday from Toybrary and told us about you, and of course when you phoned and wanted to visit Kit, we wanted you to, even though she isn't aware of anything right now.”

“Has she improved any?” I said anxiously.

Mrs. Lipton bit her upper lip. It was a thin lip and lacked color, and it was chapped. “No,” she said in a voice like her lips, and we all began crying.

They told me every medical detail, but not in order of chronology or anatomy—in the order of its shock to them. They told me what it was like at home, with Kit's little brother still an infant and needing sitters, responsible sitters, every time they drove the thirty miles into the city medical center.

Their pain poured out of them like liquid. Neither of them could stop. If Mrs. Lipton took a breath, Mr. Lipton began. He was a very plain man. I could not imagine Kit—laughing, joyous, celebrating Kit—as the daughter of these two dull and dumpy people. Maybe Kit was the light of their lives, I thought, and without her there's no spark to them at all.

“And the money,” said Mrs. Lipton. “Oh, dear God in heaven. I don't know what we're going to do about the money.”

“Surely there's insurance,” I said. There would be tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills if they had no insurance.

“For the medical bills, yes,” said Mr. Lipton. “My company has an excellent policy for that. Kit's completely covered. No, it's our expenses that we're not going to be able to meet. Do you realize that just driving in and out of the city uses half a tank of gas? That parking fees for an entire day in that lot are as much as we usually spend on food? That we have to hire a babysitter for Jonathan, and adult sitters charge a fortune? We just don't have that kind of extra money. I'm not some lawyer or physician. I drive a delivery van for a bakery. They're being good; they're letting me take all these days as sick days, so I'm still getting paid. But we just aren't going to be able to afford to visit Kit.”

Both my parents had good jobs, and they had only me left to support, and yet we were still trying to figure out how to buy another car. What would it be like, dealing with the added expenses like Kit's visitation, on what would have to be a very low income as a driver for a bakery? I drove Sunday mornings for the florist. They couldn't possibly be paying Mr. Lipton very much.

“That's terrible,” I said. “Isn't there some way—some loan—some group in town? Maybe your church or something?”

“You don't want to beg for money,” said Mrs. Lipton. “It makes you sick. And anyway, the money isn't really for Kit. Kit's taken care of. It's for us. For stupid things like parking-lot fees. I can't ask a charity for that.”

We talked for an hour. I should say, they talked. I have never been with people who needed a listener as much as they did.

In the end I caught only a glimpse of Kit. Her parents began crying again the moment they saw her in bed; white and thin and already corpselike, but with the horrid additions of tubes everywhere, and her eyes closed and bruised. Mrs. Lipton began talking in a quavery voice, as if Kit could hear, “And on television last night, honey, on your favorite show, guess what happened? Well, first—”

I slipped out. The tears were coming so hard for me I could hardly navigate down the hall. The charge nurse handed me a few Kleenex and said, “Now don't start driving home until you're under control. We don't want a second body in here.”

A body. That's what Kit was. A body.

“You went by yourself to see that little girl?” said Michael. He was very quiet. We were in Vinnie's, and the only booth available was near the door, so constant blasts of chilly air and the ring of the cash register and the laughter of the waitresses bothered us.

“You didn't know her, Michael. But she was very special to me.” I'm using the past tense, I thought. Oh, Fraser, stop it, she's not dead yet, she might live, sometimes they come out of their comas, you could jinx it. I thought, nonsense, there's no such thing as a jinx.
“Is
special,” I said.

Michael sipped a Pepsi. He wasn't looking at me. He was staring down into his glass. “I'd have driven you, Fray.”

“I didn't think it involved you. It was something I had to do alone.”

“I enjoy doing things with you,” he said.

I snapped at him. “There was nothing enjoyable about visiting a little girl who's still unconscious after a week and will probably die.”

“I didn't mean that. Fraser, please don't—please relax. I'm not your enemy, okay? I meant that I'd have gone along. Don't you think it would have been easier with company?”

“No,” I said.

Michael still didn't look at me. He picked up the paper mat in front of him that said Vinnie's and listed the menu and the local sights of interest, and he folded it into a paper airplane. “I wish I knew why you keep getting so irritable with me,” he said. “I almost asked Judith to tell me about hormones and stuff, but I decided not to.”