Ms. Miller and the Midas Man (18 page)

“Mother,” she said, hurrying to get dressed for school. “Please. Scotty has to leave school early to pick Chloe up, then drive all the way back in time for dress rehearsal. He’ll be too tired to do anything after dinner, number one. And number two, you don’t need to keep toadying up to him. He likes you. So does Chloe.” Was that galling, or what? She turned her back and, lifting her hair, waited for a zip. “And three, don’t you think that would be a little obvious?”

Wanda zipped. “Don’t be silly, number one. Number two, I don’t toad, I owe him a favor. And three, no more so than the two of you.”

Gus had to take the time to mentally line up the answers and came up with, “What favor?”

“Delivering all my rain forest pamphlets,” she said, going back to her coffee and the morning paper. “He said he knew all the best places in town to take them for the best distribution.”

“Mother. You didn’t. Not now. Not when he has so many other things on his mind. Chloe. The play. The high school. The house. The...”

Wanda looked up with a frown. “I know what that boy has on his mind and believe me, delivering a few hundred pamphlets isn’t going to cool it any.”

Gus tsked. “Mother.”

Wanda tsked. “Augusta.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. So is he, for that matter. I’ve never seen a man more in love with someone than he is with you.”

“You think?” she asked after a brief hesitation.

“I know.”

She sighed and left the room, wishing she had a fraction of her mother’s confidence. Wishing she knew if a powerful love could defeat shame and disillusionment. Wishing the test of their love would come before
she
ended up on drug therapy...

“All the
DRUG FREE SCHOOL ZONE
signs will have to come down now,” Carrie Mutrux said, slipping into her train of thought as she fell into the seat beside her. “These kids are on something. Look at them. The Munchkins look as if they’re sitting on anthills. Dorothy can’t remember half her lines. The Tin Man keeps falling over his own feet, and the Lion isn’t a coward, he’s an idiot. He hasn’t caught a cue yet.”

“And yesterday we ran through the whole thing without a hitch. Maybe they are on drugs...or maybe they’d look better if we were on drugs.” The two of them laughed and shook their heads. “Let’s just hope that what they say about horrible dress rehearsals is true and tomorrow night will be perfect.”

Scotty and his three assistant directors were milling about in the crowd onstage, talking to this one, reminding another to do this or that, rearranging props, shouting out lighting orders.

“At this point anything would be an improvement,” Carrie said, curling a finger at a Munchkin who belonged to her personally. The rest were sitting—squirming and bobbing really—in the first eight rows of seats to the left of the stage in front of them. “What’s the matter with everyone tonight?” she asked her solemn little first-grader—a miniature of his older brother Stevie—straightening the pink and yellow daisy hat perched on his head. “Are you tired of sitting? Getting hungry? I think we’re almost finished, if you could just sit still a little—”

“I am sittin’ still, Mom,” he said, looking back at his classmates.

“Honey, you were moving from seat to seat. I saw you.”

“That girl’s gonna hurl, Mom. She’ll get my costume dirty. And I don’t want to get it on me anyhow.”

“What? What girl?”

“Chloe. Ms. Miller’s friend from the other school. She’s all red in the face, and she says she’s thinkin’ ’bout getting sick.”

Frowning at each other, the two women were on their feet and heading for the middle of Munchkin Land. In seconds they spotted Chloe drooping over the arm of her seat like a limp begonia, the seats around her having been cautiously cleared. Her face was indeed flushed almost as red as her hat, and her eyes were closed.

“Chloe?” Gus said, making her way through short, busy legs to get to her. “Chloe, honey? Are you sick?”

Brown eyes looked at her, dazed, glassy, and watery. Without a doubt it was the most pathetic thing Gus had ever seen. Her heart twisted painfully in her chest as she sat down beside her and wrapped her arms around the listless child.

“Baby, you’re burning up. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I want to be in the play.”

“I know, sweetie. But not if you’re sick. Come on. Come with me, Chloe. We’ll tell your daddy, and then one of us will take you home.”

“But I want to stay in the play. Will I be better tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see. Come on now. Aw, you just don’t feel good at all, do you?”

Hanging her head, she shook it no and followed Gus into the aisle. Carrie, knowing a sick child when she saw one, had gone to fetch Scotty, who was coming at them with long, purposeful strides.

“What’s this? We have a sick Munchkin, do we?” he said, a sympathetic smile on his face as he went down on one knee beside his daughter. Putting his hand on the most obvious symptom, he asked softly, “Can you tell me what’s wrong, Chlo?”

Again she shook her head and let her face fall into the curve of his neck. Automatically he picked her up and held her in his arms, rocking gently back and forth.

“I’ll take her home,” he said, casting a quick glance over the entire proceedings, running down his mental list to be sure everything else he was responsible for was being taken care of.

“Or I can,” Gus said, worried and wanting to stay with them. “Or maybe she should go to a hospital. She’s so hot and she looks so...Actually, I can handle everything here for you, so you take her to the hospital and I’ll come as soon as I can.”

“No, no. I’ll take her home for now. But I’d appreciate it if you’d hang around here and keep an eye on my directors. They know what’s going on and what’s needed, if you’ll just help them out.”

“Yes, of course. Go. Call Mother over if you need her, she’s good in a crisis. And call me...well, no...I’ll be home as soon as I can. Don’t worry about anything here. Dress rehearsals are always terrible. Everything will be fine. Chloe’s what’s important now and she—”

To everyone’s amazed delight, he leaned over and silenced her babble with a quick kiss on the lips.

“She’ll be fine,” he said, as much for his sake and Chloe’s as for hers. “Kids get suddenly sick and suddenly better all the time.
You
call me if you have any trouble, and I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” she said, watching them walk away. Chloe opened her eyes to look back and flap an arm good-bye, and Gus blew her a kiss. She stood there even when they were gone from sight, worried and wondering and realizing that he’d just left with two huge chunks of her heart—and if she wanted to continue to live, she needed to be with them, close to them, remain connected with them somehow.

“Come on,” Carrie said, draping an understanding arm across her shoulders. “The sooner we get this comedy of errors whipped into shape, the sooner we can go home.”

“Do you think she’ll be all right? I know next to nothing about children. I feel so...”

“Helpless?” she asked, turning her back toward the stage. “Well, welcome to motherhood, Ms. Miller. You may as well get used to that feeling. When they’re little you can fix every toy they own with superglue, heal their wounds with a bandage and a kiss. You’re their hero. But the older they get, the more helpless you become. And not just when they’re sick. When you can’t mend friendships for them or protect them from cruel words or from failure and disappointment, that’s when you feel helpless. Chloe will be fine. You make her some gelatin, give her a hug, and read her stories till she feels better...that’s easy. But there won’t be much you can do about the unhappiness she’ll feel when she realizes she won’t be in the play tomorrow night. That’s when you feel helpless. When there’s nothing you can do to fix it, and no way to make her feel better inside,” she said, thumping her chest lightly with her fist. “That’s when you’re truly helpless, and it can be very painful.”

With those wise and not so reassuring words, she dashed off to break up a bickerment in the Emerald City.

Gus sighed and began to think of all the ramifications her idea of involving Chloe as a Munchkin was having on the people she loved. It was all her fault. Granted, it was an innocent suggestion, but if she’d kept her big mouth shut, none of this would be happening. Chloe would still be with her mother and maybe she wouldn’t have gotten sick at all and...Oh! Chloe’s mother had gone off for a romantic Thanksgiving vacation with her boyfriend thinking Chloe would be just fine, being in the play and celebrating the holiday with her father afterward. But what if Chloe was seriously ill? Could she be reached in time? Or...or what if it was something minor, but enough to keep her out of the play? Would their sympathy be enough to console her sadness? Would she for an instant believe she’d failed or disappointed her father, or Gus, if she couldn’t participate? It was important that she know her illness couldn’t have been prevented, that the suggestion had been made with her happiness in mind, that any pleasure Gus received from it was in seeing her happy—that any sorrow she might see in the faces of those who loved her was simply a reflection of what they were seeing in her. It was empathy, an understanding, an attempt to share in her unhappiness.

Scotty had been so excited for her, so pleased to be able to involve her in his life—it would be supremely important that he let her know his disappointment was
for
her, not
in
her. Chloe was always so eager to please him, to impress him.

She remembered the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, time after time, failure after failure. Her heart twisted in pure misery at the thought of Chloe seeing it in Scotty’s face.

All the way home she thought about it. Being helpless. Being tossed about by fate, in spite of all the efforts you’d taken to control your own destiny. What was the point? Why bother? What difference did it make? she wondered. It was as futile as trying to catch the moon in a bushel basket or building sand castles at low tide.

Failure after failure, and she’d gotten back up, dusted herself off, and gone after the next best dream—only to fail again and again. All that work. All that pain. And for what? To have providence slap her down, kick her into a corner, leave her wounded and bleeding, to die in Tylerville?

Crazy thing was, she didn’t really feel wasted. She thought about Scotty and Chloe and the children at school. With no effort at all she relived the contentment she felt playing the music she wanted to play, when she wanted to play it—just for the love of it. The rare moments when she saw the awe and wonder in a pupil’s face when they discovered they could make their violin sing, when an accidental movement was right on and then became something purposeful. She smiled. Once again she had one of those overwhelming sensations of knowing she was happy.

Sooo...maybe fate wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe her destiny had been in Tylerville all along. Maybe providence knew her better than she knew herself.

And what about her free will? What about the dreams she’d had, the efforts she’d made, the few great accomplishments she had attained? They weren’t a waste either, she realized. It was interesting to think of all the things she’d learned from her various teachers. Chilling to recall the sense of being special and unique as a child, without being so gifted as to make her feel like a freak of nature. Maybe there was some sort of mystic balance between one’s free will and one’s destiny. Maybe true greatness was achieved only by those Fate believed could handle it well—or by those who couldn’t handle it but needed to know that for an entirely different purpose in life.

Perhaps, just perhaps, she’d reached the pinnacle of her talent at a young age with the certain knowledge that she’d never achieve more. And then lost it all, because she was meant to do something else—yet would never have been happy at it if she hadn’t gone as far as she could in the other direction?

Yes, maybe Tylerville and Scotty and Chloe had been her destiny all along—but she wouldn’t have known how happy she was if she didn’t know how
un
happy she’d been somewhere else...

“How is she?” she asked, having gone directly to Scotty’s house, knocking and calling out her entrance. He’d called her up to Chloe’s room. “Did you call the doctor? Is her fever down?”

She was leaning over the little girl, caressing her cheek with the backs of her fingers before he could get two words out.

“I gave her some Tylenol and your mother was over here for a while. She says you’ve had chicken pox.”

“Chicken pox?”

He nodded. “In the time it took me to get a hold of Janis and find out she’d been exposed, your mother was up here putting calamine lotion on the spots all over her body. She says there’ll be more tomorrow.”

“Aw, poor baby,” she said, watching Chloe’s eyes flutter open. “How are you doing?”

“Your hand feels good,” she murmured. She was lethargic and flushed still, and looked to be totally miserable.

“Nice and cool from outside, huh?” She used the hand she hadn’t heated up on the child’s face to cool her brow. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going home to change my clothes and then I’m coming back here to do something very special to you, that my mommy used to do to me when I was sick. Would you like that?”

She shrugged, too sick to care one way or another. But since it was one of the fonder memories she had of her own mother, Gus decided she’d definitely come back and bathe her face with cool rose water and a supersoft cloth.

“Is her mother coming?” she asked in a whispered voice when her eyes slowly closed again. “This must be awful for her.”

He smiled and gave a soft laugh. “Not really. In fact, I think she’s sort of relieved,” he said, hanging an arm across her shoulder and leading her out of the room. “She apologized for letting her come here after being exposed, but the incubation period from the first exposure was up two days ago, and Chloe was fine then. She assumed they’d missed her this time. And she did offer to come home and take care of her, but I told her I thought I could handle a childhood disease—that maybe it was my turn. So we agreed that she’d stay where she was for now and we’d see how things went. And Chloe doesn’t seem to be upset that she isn’t here, so maybe we won’t need her this time.”