Friendswood (18 page)

“Okay.” She couldn't say no.

They knelt next to each other, hands folded, and leaned against the edge of Willa's bed. “Dear Lord, please . . .” Her mother's voice was raspy. She smelled like dish-washing soap. “Willa . . . my girl . . . she needs—” Her voice wavered, and audibly she took in a breath, as if she'd lost her balance. “We're putting our trust—” When Willa opened her eyes, her mother wept, pressing her fingertips to her eyelids. “I'm sorry, I can't. I'm so sorry.” She got up from the floor and went out of the room.

W
ILLA'S
PARENTS AND THE COUN
SELOR
had agreed to put her on home study, and the substitute teacher would come to the house once a week to go over the lectures and assignments. The rest of the work Willa could do at her own pace. Usually, people only went on home study if they broke their leg or if one of their parents had died, and the only person she knew who'd done it before was Tonya Harp, who'd had to have an operation on her spine. But Willa was glad not to have to go back to school, which seemed now like a building full of booby traps catching those who fall through them in little, dark closets.

Willa stared down at her hands: bony, long fingers like her mother's, each nail bitten down to a sliver of painful red skin that showed above the edge. The nails themselves looked like fragments of shrimp shells, the
blue veins between her thumb and wrist forming a shape like a wilted
Y
. It seemed if she studied her hands closely enough, she might understand, but the hands themselves were inscrutable, the whorls of wrinkles at the knuckles and joints, the red callus on the third finger of her right hand.

She could feel the weight on the mattress. When she looked up, the lamb beast sat at the end of the bed. Its body was now covered with perfect almond-shaped blue eyes, and it smelled like shit. There seemed to be a radio caught in its throat, a raspy clip, “Fifty-two killed in a car bomb attack. Fifty-two killed in a car bomb attack, suicide, suicide, suicide.”

S
HE VISITED
P
ROFESSOR
S
AMUELS
at his house, over near the community college, and his wife brought them lemonade to drink in the living room, where he sat in a leather-upholstered wing-backed chair. He could speak again now, but only slowly, and sometimes the aphasia turned around the words. His hair and face were more gray than when she'd seen him before the stroke, his body slighter and crooked now in a way she couldn't exactly place. The slowness of his speech, as she watched his mouth, kept giving her the impression that he was deaf. John, the graduate student, had just sent him the new findings from her samples.

“The benzene is bad,” he said. “It's probably even worse than the tests show. Also the toluene and the styrene.”

His wife, short haired and minx faced, was on hand to translate. “Did you get that?”

Lee remembered the course she'd taken with him at the community college, just trying to find out for herself what had happened in Banes Field, how he lifted slightly to his toes whenever he mentioned the name of an environmental stressor, the diagrams he drew on the chalkboard using pink and green and yellow chalk. He didn't like to use the computer for his presentations, he said, because he didn't have enough to do with his hands then, and he got nervous in front of a crowd of people, so he scrawled on the board and taught with these mapped-out, messy, impromptu pictures.

“I just wish I knew how to communicate to the right people what that increase means,” Lee said. “Hypotheticals don't seem to matter much around here.” He was an expert, but he was not an advocate.

Professor Samuels scowled and awkwardly punched at the air. “Let it blow cake.”

“What honey?” said his wife. “Say it slowly.”

“Let it all blow in cake.”

She took his hand, leaned in closer. Lee was aware, suddenly, of her own apartness, her aloneness in the world. He whispered in his wife's ear and then nodded.

She pulled away from him. “He said, ‘Let it all blow up in his face.'”

“Sooner or later, it will,” Lee said. “Someone from the EPA's been going around talking to people who lived on Crest Street. Actually, I was thinking we could call him now. We've got the documents, and if I get something confused, well, I've got you right here to back me up, don't I?”

Professor Samuels gave her a half smile, and a weak thumbs-up.

His wife stood. “You'll want to use the landline, right? I'll go get the phone.”

Lee sat next to Professor Samuels, the folders of data on her lap, the cheery oranges and apples in a bowl on the table. The phone rang, and she asked for the general operator. “Lloyd Steeburn, please.”

There was a pause. Professor Samuels patted her hand, then put on his eyeglasses. The operator said, “I'm sorry, but that person no longer works here.”

“Oh,” said Lee, defeated. “What happened to Mr. Steeburn? Is he at another office?”

“We can't give out that kind of information.”

She finally spoke to someone who'd been assigned to their district, and it was a moment before she realized it was the same woman who'd appeared at the city council meeting last month, Ms. Dawson.

“Oh,” said Lee, defeated. “I know you asked to see this report. We're just about to send it. What's the correct address?”

She drove back to work. The billboards suddenly erected at opposite sides of town advertised for Taft Houses, and “coming soon” Pleasant Forest, at the end of Veemer Road. One billboard, next to the Children of Paradise church, showed a beefy-faced Avery Taft, smirking, wearing a string tie, his hair slicked back as if for a special occasion, a photograph of a large house and a pool dangling next to the text. The other billboard, in a field on the way out to Alvin, read
TAFT PROPERTIES—WE'LL MAKE YOU AT HOME
, and the photographs of houses, each in its blurred, dreamy cloud, constellated around the words.

D
OC LEFT EARLY FOR
THE DAY,
but they had to keep the office open until 6:00. Lee looked out at the orange plastic chairs in the empty waiting room, the pebbled linoleum floor. In the beginning of Jess's illness, she'd waited in so many stark rooms like this one, rooms that clarified boredom and anxiety—stacks of magazines on the tables, vases of silk flowers, a TV. Jess's illness began with the sore throat that wouldn't go away and then more grisly nosebleeds and a fatigue that overtook her, so that Lee would find her asleep on the easy chair, asleep at the kitchen table, or curled up at the foot of her parents' bed, snoring softly on her old tattered baby blanket. They'd waited two whole hours that day before they saw the oncologist, and by the time they got into his office, Lee was nearly numb from sitting and the strain of not showing worry. Jess had chewed down her fingernails, intermittently turning the pages of fashion magazines, and she seemed to want to pretend Lee wasn't there, so Lee indulged her. When the nurse in her teddy bear–print scrubs came to call them in, Lee took Jess's hand, and she could feel her hanging back, walking slowly. The doctor was bearded, bright-eyed, a bearish man in a white coat that barely fit him. “If I could just have Jess there go with Sally.” He nodded to the nurse. “I'll be in to examine her in a little while.” He snapped his fingers a couple of times.

Jess got up from her chair, looked sideways at Lee, then, with a slight shrug, followed the woman down the hall.

The doctor's hands formed a small steeple in front of him on the desk. “Now,” he said, “I don't want us to panic, but I have to tell you. Her counts are way down.” He went on to explain the way healthy blood worked, but every time he said “platelet,” Lee had an image of a machine missing its part. If only they could find the part and put it back, Jess would be fine.

“It looks something like leukemia, maybe, in the family of blood cancers.”

The word
family
sounded obscene. “She has a kind of myelodysplastic syndrome. You may find bruises on her skin soon or tiny purple marks. And she will be mighty tired.”

“How did she get this? I mean, she's just a teenage girl. It seemed like it was the flu. That's what we thought, right?”

“It presents itself that way at first a lot of the time,” he said. His plump mouth pushed up and then to the side, and only then because she could tell he was uncomfortable, was Lee aware of her fear.

“It's those chemicals they found in the dirt, isn't it?”

His office was twenty miles away from Rosemont, in the heart of Houston.

“I don't believe I know what you're referring to.”

“It's been in the news, our subdivision. It's right next to an old oil refinery and they just dumped all the chemicals . . .” It frustrated her that she wasn't better informed, that she couldn't explain it objectively, scientifically. “All those babies born with birth defects.”

He nodded. “Well, we don't know yet. We just don't know, do we?” And then he took out a pad of paper and began writing down the tests Jess would need, the possible treatments, talking all the while in this language of
cytopenia
,
myelogenous
,
and
hematopoiesis
, and the words formed a fence around him.

“What do you mean?” she kept asking him. “What does that mean?”
It was as if she'd suddenly been transported to a foreign country, and had to learn the language right away in order to avert disaster. It wasn't fair, but she had to study it fast, learn the pronunciations and grammar of it, and it seemed if she could only say the words correctly, the doctor would have to let her into the country, so that if he couldn't cure Jess, she'd have the means to find the one who could.

When the doctor left her in his office while he went to examine Jess, she called Jack. “Jess is real sick. It's a blood disease, the doctor thinks.”

He didn't say anything at first, but she could hear him breathing.

“You have to come get us.”

By the time Jess came out of the examining room, Lee had dried her face, and drunk some water. She was relieved to see that Jess only looked tired, with purple marks pressed around her eyes, her just-brushed hair long and glossy on her shoulders. “Hey, Mom,” she said, unfazed, hauling the strap of her gigantic purse over her shoulder. They waited outside the office building, and Lee made an excuse about their car not working, so she could explain why Jack was coming to get them.

Weeks later, at the hospital, in the chemotherapy room, Jess would hold Lee's hand while the poison—an alien fluorescent orange color—dripped into the port in her arm through a clear plastic tube. Jess wore earphones to listen to music, which sounded tinny and faraway as Lee tried to read or stared out the window. The doctors and nurses were always in a hurry—they wouldn't look her in the eyes but called them both by pet names. “Hon,” “Sweetheart,” as if Jess's cancer had made them all kin. When they got home, Jess would eat ice cream with M&M's on top, French fries. The steroids, with all the other medications, the antibiotics, the antinausea pills, made Jess gain weight. Her face turned puffy, and she cried when she could no longer button her jeans. Lee bought her all new clothes two sizes larger and reassured her the weight would come off. The doctors wanted her to eat potato chips, hamburgers, nothing with too many vitamins because it might help the cancer to grow. Jess's toenails turned black and fell off. Her skin turned to a thin, white leather,
and when she scratched it, the red marks stayed there for days. All that time she sat with Jess in those rooms, Lee could practically feel her own skin stretching, phantom folds of flesh growing in Jess's direction, wanting to take the punishment away from her daughter's body.

One day Lee was vacuuming and she found a black tress lying on the floor half under the couch. At first she thought it was the horse's mane from an old stuffed animal that Jess used to play with, but then why would it be in the living room? As soon as she picked up the bunch of hair, she went to the desk, found an envelope, and sealed it inside there, thinking Jess might need it later.

She had a lot of rituals those days for keeping away catastrophe. She called the labs to follow up on every blood test, to make sure nothing was lost or confused. She read the literature the doctor gave to her in flimsy mimeographed packets, and then she followed up to research what she didn't understand at the library. She learned the language:
lymphocytes, monocytes, petechiae
. She tried to explain what she knew to Jack, but when she did, his eyes went slack with fatigue. “Now why do that to yourself? That's what we have the doctor for.” Every week, she went to each of Jess's teachers to pick up her homework, and she organized visits from Jess's friends, with ice cream and movies. She bought a lap table, bright silk pillows, stuffed animals, and a new comforter for Jess's bed. Their friends and family sent hats, scarves, board games, fruit baskets, lip gloss, lotions, perfumes, quilts, a giant stuffed giraffe, and a pink dog, so many gifts they crowded Jess's room. Lee bought guidebooks to Paris, for the trip they'd all take when Jess got better. “So what do we do next?” she asked the doctor.

They'd moved away from Rosemont and into the house Jack's parents' had left him, but even then, Jack didn't think Jess's illness had been caused by Banes Field, and Lee, though she knew it, buried her certainty. She kept up the march of pills; she memorized the regimen of shots; she begged Jess to eat; she scanned the guide for TV movies Jess might watch. Rush helped when she could. Once when Rush asked Lee if she'd eaten,
all the blood rushed to her head. “Who the hell cares? That won't move things forward one bit.”

Rush said, “Sweetheart,” and put a sandwich on Jess's nightstand. Lee hoarded all of her strength to nurse Jess, and at the time, the protestors around Banes Field seemed frazzled and distant. She saw the grainy flyers for community meetings pasted up at the grocery stores, heard reports on TV and in the paper, all so much noise as she sat in the bedroom, looking at Jess, while the sun came in at a certain slant over her face, just across the lovely curve of her cheek.