Читать книгу The Pink House - Trish MacEnulty - Страница 14

Friday, June 9

The office Lolly shared with a woman named Sue was on the ninth floor of the Department of Education building. Sunshine poured into the room, and through the windows Lolly could see the tops of oak trees, their branches like green capillaries covering the city, and the black roads generally filled with cars. To her left she could see the towering Capitol Building where the budget-cutting trolls lived.

Sue came in the office, carrying a stack of papers to be filed. The two of them were in charge of various webpages for the department, and they also helped devise computer programs for distance learning. It was a good job. The pay was decent enough for a single person, but best of all, over the years the department had become a haven for a number of artsy types who needed work after a decade or so of college. The halls of the DOE building were filled with overqualified, underpaid people who were generally happy to have benefits and be able to wear their Birkenstocks on casual Fridays (and many other days of the week as well). Conversations around the break room tables were often about the latest art opening at Railroad Square or poetry reading at the Warehouse or the new independent film that you just had to see. Sometimes, especially this year, the conversation drifted toward politics. They were generally a liberal bunch, and many of them didn’t think it was an insult to be called a “tree-hugger.” They liked trees.

These were also people who had interests outside of the job. Sue owned a coffee shop with her husband. Others were artists or poets or short story writers. One man in the office next to her edited one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the southeast. Of course, he didn’t get paid for it. So most of them knew about Lolly’s work with the women prisoners. “Lolly’s women.” They had read the poetry the women wrote, and her supervisor turned a blind eye when she needed to use the copier to copy some materials for her women.

“Hey, are you going out for lunch?” Sue asked.

“No, I need to do some personal research on the computer,” Lolly said. “So I’m going to use my lunch hour.”

“Oh, okay. Can I bring you something back?”

“No, I’m not that hungry,” Lolly said. “I’ll get some fruit from the cafeteria later.”

“You seem happy today,” Sue said. “I mean you’re always happy, but what a bright smile you have.”

She walked out of the office. Lolly hadn’t even realized she was smiling. No, she thought, that smile just means I’m absolutely terrified. All week she’d had this nagging uncertainty, this amorphous fear lurking in the back of her mind; the words “what if?” softly echoing.

Lolly sat down at her computer. She typed in the word “osteosarcoma” and hit “search.” There it was: “more common in young people ages 10 to 25.” About two in one million people a year get it. How nice to be so special. None of this information was new to her. She had lived it. She had lived those symptoms—the way her leg had turned red and thick. The pain that kept her awake at night, and her mother’s assurances, “probably nothing, but let’s go see the doctor anyway.” They x-rayed her and biopsied her and then left her lying on the exam table, the doctor in his white coat and serious voice saying he needed to talk to her mother alone. And the look on her mother’s face as she came out of the doctor’s office as if every good thing had been wiped off the earth. Seeing her mother’s face, forlorn and foreign, Lolly had experienced an unspecified terror to add to the pain, and she tasted it in her mouth—dry and metallic.

Then there had been months of doctors, tests, hospitals, her body like something that didn’t belong to her, just something to poke, prod, scan and shoot radiation at, something to dump chemicals in. So that when the doctor stood in the hospital room as her mother clutched her hand and said, “We have to remove Lolly’s leg,” she was tingly with numbness. She turned and smiled – smiled! – at her mother and said, “Don’t worry, Mama. I’m brave.”

Looking back on it, she understood that she had no other way to separate herself from the horror that was happening to her and that worse than anything was the anguish of her mother. It must have been a terrible thing indeed to face the possible loss of her child.

So she smiled at her mother and later she smiled at the kids at school when they whispered about her. She smiled at the adults who for some reason treated her as if she were somehow at fault, somehow to blame for not being perfect. They had. Not all of them, of course, but too many. Before high school, she thought she’d follow in her sister Jen’s footsteps and go into drama. She had gone to see Jen in all the high school plays, and Jen was usually the lead role. Jen was pretty and even popular in high school though she wasn’t one of that elite clique of rich kids. Still she was accepted by everyone and her daredevil exploits gave her a certain cachet in the school. Teachers liked Jen and ignored the smell of pot smoke or the fact that she sneaked off campus to be with one of her boyfriends. But treatment for Lolly was sharply different. When Lolly auditioned for the school production of Oklahoma, the theater teacher had grimaced and said to her, “I’m sorry, but what were you even thinking? You can’t be on stage.”

Lolly remembered the feeling, like a sucker punch, her breath hard to find, but still she smiled. She smiled all the way to the girls’ bathroom where she broke down and sobbed in a stall by herself until someone knocked on the door and asked if she was all right. Lolly opened the door, preparing to smile, and saw the school cleaning lady, and instead Lolly fell into her arms and wept. That day Lolly made her alliance, not with the blessed people who strode the earth obliviously crushing anything in their path, but with the invisible ones who cleaned up their toilets and swept their debris.

The Internet yielded no answers as to whether osteosarcoma could come back in some other form. It made no sense anyway. They had cut off the leg, removed the shin bone where the cancer had spread to the blood vessels. The cancer was gone. Lumps in the breast could be anything, a benign fibrous something caused by caffeine. She got up from the computer and took the elevator downstairs to the lobby to go outside and sit in the fresh air for a few minutes before her lunch break was over.

The lobby of the building was filled with light from large plate glass windows overlooking Gaines Street and the floors of the building sparkled. A security guard named Frank sat behind the desk in the lobby and waved at her.

“Hi, Frank,” she said. On the walls were bright colorful paintings by school students. She loved working here. She loved her life. It had taken a long time, but she had overcome the emotional ravages of her early years. She liked the person she had become. She liked the way she laughed, the way she felt curious about everything, the way most people warmed up to her slowly but permanently.

She went outside and crossed the busy street to a park where she liked to sit on a bench underneath an oak tree. But as she came closer to the bench, she saw someone was already there. Oh, it was Rusty, a friend of hers who worked in the investigations department. Rusty was lanky with longish dark hair. On weekends he played bass guitar in an alternative rock band. He was always kind, and she enjoyed his friendship. It had been so sad last year when his wife died in a car accident. She hoped he wouldn’t mind if she came over and sat with him. She approached him and smiled.