Okay for Now (31 page)

there on purpose just so I could sign a program for him.

So I did.

"And write something for Horace too," he said.

So I did.

Here's what I wrote:
For Joe and Horace. Thanks. Your friend, Doug.

Joe Pepitone took the program back and looked at it. "Thanks for what?" he said.

"Everything," I said.

Mrs. Windermere drove us back home really late. But you might say that we were both more than a

little happy, mostly because Mr. Gregory had called
Jane Eyre
a smash, and told us it was going to

have a long run, and so Mrs. Windermere was flying high. I was too, but mostly because Mr. Gregory

had promised that if I stayed on as understudy, he would find another actor—actress—to play Helen

Burns until Lil came back. Fine by me.

And you know what Mr. Gregory had given me and was now rolled up in a long tube in the back of

the car?

My mother and Mrs. Windermere and I sang about living in yellow submarines the whole way

back, through Manhattan, across the Whitestone, and all the way up to Marysville. Sometimes when

you keep singing the same song again and again and again, it gets really boring. Really, really boring.

But not on that drive. It got funnier and funnier, so we finally had to stop singing around Middletown

because I thought that Mrs. Windermere was going to drive off the road, that's how hard she was

laughing. My mother was about crying.

When we got back home, all the lights were on in the living room. We opened the door, and when

we came in, Lucas and Christopher were there, sitting and looking at us.

"How did it go?" Christopher said.

"Fabulous." I told them about Joe Pepitone. I told them about the shrieking. And I even told them

about playing Helen Burns, which I hadn't intended to tell them.

"We know about Helen Burns," said Lucas.

"How?" I said.

Lucas looked down.

"Mrs. Spicer called a little while ago," said Christopher. "From a hospital in the city."

"Did she tell you that Lil got a stomachache from eating her pencils?" I said.

My mother took my hand.

"Little brother," Lucas said, "it isn't a stomachache."

And the Yellow Shank finally walked into the full dark.

CHAPTER TEN

The Arctic Tern

HERE IS THE STAT that the doctors gave Mr. and Mrs. Spicer:

One in four.

That's the last stat I'm going to give you, because so what? So what? Stats don't mean anything.

Every time Joe Pepitone steps up to the plate, it's new. It doesn't matter if he's hit five hundred

home runs or if he's struck out five hundred times. It's a new thing. And no one can predict what's

going to happen, except that he's Joe Pepitone, and he's going to try his darnedest, and he's not going

to let anything get him down, and he's going to fight his way through no matter what, and he's got all

his friends behind him, and if you don't think that matters a whole lot, then you don't know how to get

from first base to second.

Because stats don't mean anything.

On the first Saturday of June, I got to Spicer's Deli early, since I figured Mr. Spicer would need my

help because Lil wouldn't be there to load the wagons. I was right. When I got there, the first wagon

wasn't even close to loaded. Mr. Spicer was standing in the back, one hand holding the orders, the

other messing up his hair.

"I can do that," I said.

"Lil usually does it," Mr. Spicer said.

"I know."

I took the lists from his hand.

"Doug," he said, "I'm going to have to let you go. The hospital bills, you can't believe what they're

going to be. I don't have enough to pay you anymore."

"I don't have anything else to do on Saturday mornings," I said.

I know. What a chump.

But Mr. Spicer, he looked at me a long time. Then he nodded. Hand back to hair. He went out front.

I loaded the first wagon.

At Mrs. Mason's house, she handed me an envelope with the money for the groceries and another

twenty dollars. "For the little girl," she said.

Mr. Loeffler was waiting for me with a glass jar full of yellow tulips. "Will you see the little girl

sometime soon?" he said. "Would you mind..." And he handed me the tulips.

All the Daugherty kids were waiting for me when I got to their house, sitting on the front stoop.

They were all holding pictures they had drawn—of Lil getting better. In Ben's she was jumping over a

fence. In Polly's she was riding her bike with the stupid basket in front of the library. In Joel's she was

flying over Washington Irving Junior High School. In Davie's she was reading a huge stack of books

under a tree. And in Phronsie's she was kissing someone. "Who is she kissing?" I said. They all

started to giggle.

Me, I was almost a chump. Almost bawling in front of kids.

At Mrs. Windermere's, she was waiting too. She opened the door into the kitchen, and we put the

groceries away, and I asked how the play was going, and she said it was going fabulous. And I asked

about the girl Mr. Gregory got to replace Lil and she said she was fine but not nearly as good as Lil.

And I asked about the shrieking, which I wasn't doing anymore since if I was going down to New

York City it wasn't to be in a play, and Mrs. Windermere said someone else was doing it now. She

wasn't sure who.

Then she asked about Lil.

I was a chump.

When I got back to the deli, Mr. Spicer was bawling beside the cash register. Just bawling, and not

even trying to hide behind the flowers that were lined up in pots on the counter. All orchids.

We were both chumps. But you know what? It's not so bad when you're chumps together.

At the library, Mr. Powell had spread one of my sketches of the Arctic Tern out on a table—one of the

big sketches, as big as Audubon's. "I thought we might try to work with some watercolors today," he

said. "Perhaps we could start with the background."

A box on the table held maybe fifteen, sixteen circles of paint and a bottle of water.

"Mr. Powell," I said.

"We'll mix the colors until we get them right."

"Mr. Powell, we don't have the Arctic Tern plate anymore. How will we know?"

"We have what we remember," he said.

I sat down. I looked across the room to the table where Lil usually was sitting.

"It will be a surprise for her," said Mr. Powell. He dipped the brush into the bottle. "Let's get the

color of the water first." He swirled his brush in one of the blues, then handed it to me. "What do you

think?" he said.

"It looks like a color from New Zealand," I said.

"Let's see what happens if you start mixing them together, a little bit at a time."

So I tried mixing them together a little bit at a time. And here's what happened: the right color

came. We both saw it at the same moment. Exactly the right color of the cold, smooth, frothy deep

water below the Arctic Tern. Not at all like New Zealand.

"Now draw your brush evenly along the line. Right. Right. Keep on. Now let the brush up from the

paper. Right. Dip your brush again, and start back at the top. Draw down, down—no, it's all right. Let

the paint suggest the texture. Down, down. And again."

That afternoon, I painted in two of the waves behind the Arctic Tern.

"How many times did you mess it up?" said Lil.

"None."

"Doug, you are such a liar."

"You'll see it when you get back home."

Then we were quiet, because we didn't know when that was going to be.

And I'm not lying, you wouldn't want to be where Lil was for very long.

If you took the blue paint for the waves and added some green to make it look like puke, that would

be the color of the walls. And the tiles on the floor. And the curtains by the window. And the tube that

led from a dripping bag into a needle that got stuck in Lil's arm somewhere underneath the tape.

"Does it hurt?" I said.

"How do you think a needle stuck up in your arm would feel?" she said.

"I think I'd start shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many

years."

"That's what it feels like," she said.

"Do you want me to shriek for you?" I said.

She thought about that. "That might help," she said. "You really do shriek pretty good. But then they

might kick you out."

I didn't shriek. She held out her hand, and I took it.

"I loved playing Helen Burns," she said. "I just don't want to
be
Helen Burns. You can sit down on

the bed, you know. It's not going to break. At least, not because of a skinny thug like you."

"I thought..."

"I'm not going to break either. One in four, and I'm the one."

I sat down on the bed.

"When all this is over," she said, "we're going to Broadway and see
Jane Eyre.
And then we're

going to the top of the Empire State Building. And after that we're going to see the dinosaurs at the

Museum of Natural History. And then we're going to walk down Fifth Avenue like we own it."

A nurse came in. "It's time to draw some blood, honey. Just a little poke."

"And afterward we'll go to Central Park and you can sketch people and charge them five dollars a

drawing and then we'll take the money and find a French—oh"—she squeezed her eyes shut—"a

French restaurant and eat stuff that we can't even pronounce."

"Just a few more minutes," the nurse said to me. "She's tired, so just a few more minutes."

Lil opened her eyes. "Someday I'm going to live in New York City," she said.

"I'm pretty happy in Marysville," I said.

Lil opened her eyes really wide, and maybe I did the same, because it kind of surprised me too. But

it was true. It really was. I was happy in Marysville. I didn't even know it until I said it. But it was

true.

"We'll find a way to compromise," Lil said.

"No, we won't. We'll live in Marysville."

Her eyes started to close. "You are such a jerk." She yawned. "It's cold in this room. You can lie

down if you want and get under the blanket."

That's what I did. She had to scoot over a little, and that wasn't so easy because she was attached to

so much stuff. And we had to move the tube going into her arm so that I wouldn't lie down on it. That

wasn't so easy either. But we hurried, because we knew we had only a few minutes before the nurse

came back. And I lay down next to Lil and I put my arm around her and felt her relax into me. And

when she spoke, it was only in a whisper. "Doug," she said, "I sure hope I'm the one in four."

"You are," I said.

"Who says?"

"Me."

A long silence. I thought she was almost asleep.

Then, "All right," she said.

And that's when I knew, I knew, I knew that she was going to be all right. Don't ask me how. But I

knew. I'm not lying. Not about this. Not ever about this.

Stats don't mean anything. But some things mean everything.

And that June, those things that mean everything, they kept coming, faster and faster.

On the second Saturday, after my deliveries, Lucas was waiting for me in front of the Marysville

Free Public Library. I could tell he'd been out looking for work all morning. He had this tired, beat-up

look, and it wasn't hard to figure out what he'd been hearing: "I'm sorry, son." "Nothing for you today."

"I don't think you could handle it." "Don't waste my time."

You'd look tired and beat up too, if you'd been hearing that.

"So you want me to pull you up the steps?" I said.

He looked at me, and his face got hard for a second, like the old Lucas. But not exactly like the old

Lucas. "You don't think I can do it myself ?"

"Lucas."

"You don't think I can handle it?"

"I think you can handle anything," I said.

"Darn right," he said. "Darn right I can handle anything."

He turned around and backed his wheelchair toward the six steps. Then he looked over his

shoulder, leaned back, and pulled up on the front of the left wheel. Then he leaned back even more,

and I'm not lying, the wheelchair started to go up the first step—kind of crooked, but up—and then he

began to fall over.

I started toward him.

But he leaned forward and caught it, and he had the left wheel up on the first step. Then he leaned

again, and pulled up on the right wheel, and with a heft, there he was, on the second step, balanced.