The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (29 page)

Priscilla blinked at him. The nearest swimming pool was ten miles away, and she didn’t have a car. Her cottage had a garden the size of a postage stamp, and the only people she knew who would be interested in a reading group were the remaining friends of Estelle Crane. For the first time in her life, Prissy could see her days floating in front of her as empty and useless as children’s party balloons. She didn’t know whether to pop them or just let them rise and disappear.

Priscilla sucked in her gut. “Yes,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. Of course.” She climbed off the table, got dressed, and went home, where she made herself a cup of tea, retrieved a forgotten deck of cards, and dealt herself a winning hand of solitaire. She reached for a tattered notepad and scratched another tick on it, adding the forbearance of sorrow to the paltry list of her life’s accomplishments.

Everyone has a personal breaking point, and the day Priscilla Sparrow woke up to find her hair falling out in clumps was the day she decided she was fed up. Clusters of hair fanned over her pillow when she lifted up her head, and most of the rest of it came out in the shower, sliding off her scalp like rain off a roof before clogging up the drain.

Alarmed, Prissy turned off the water and stepped onto the bath mat, bald and wet. When she finally got up the courage to peek in the mirror, she was shocked. Without hair, she finally saw what all of us had been looking at for years and years. Her brows were spindly and uneven. Her mouth was a ragged gash. And her nose—her nose was a pointy beak. Had she always looked like this, Prissy wondered, or was it simply age playing a trick, enchanting her mirror to reflect all her fears and miseries?

She reached for a tube of lipstick, drew on a smile, then put her hands over her face and wept. Her bones throbbed. The corners of her eyes always felt as if they were filled with sand, and her heart buzzed and banged in her chest like a furious bee.
It’s just a matter of time,
the doctors all said.
Time will take its toll.
It was their answer for everything, but they knew about as much as a barrel of chimpanzees. For Prissy, time and pain ruled like two competing queens, the map of her body rolled out between their feet.

She wound a chiffon scarf around her head, then removed it and tried her winter hat, but it was too warm for a felt cloche. She knotted on the scarf again and added a brooch—something Dick had given her. A mermaid in gold and pearls with two emerald eyes. She’d pinned it to her lapel the afternoon he’d presented it to her but then had taken it off almost immediately and never worn it again. It was too girlish, she told herself. And secretly, she was afraid Estelle had one exactly the same. It would have been like Dick to buy them identical baubles, then turn hangdog when he got found out.
Shoot,
he would have said, grinning
. It was too pretty to buy just one.

Forgetting to lock her door, she rounded the corner, relieved to see the doctor’s house looming at the far end of the street. She put her head down and made for it. Come hell or high water, she vowed, this time she wouldn’t be leaving empty-handed.

When I answered the doctor’s door, I could tell right away that Priscilla Sparrow barely recognized me. I was about three sizes bigger than I’d been on Bobbie’s first day of school, for one thing, and no longer wearing men’s clothes. My hair was bundled up in a bandanna, my feet were bare, and in my eyes there were pinpricks that Prissy had never noticed before. She put a self-conscious hand up to her turban and adjusted the mermaid pin. “Hello, dear,” she said.

To be fair, I almost didn’t recognize Priscilla Sparrow. Her voice was the only unadulterated thing about her. High and clear, it still rang with authority. She fixed me with her cloudy stare. “May I come in for a moment? I have something to discuss with you.”

In the front parlor, Priscilla Sparrow perched on the spindled edge of the Victorian sofa and glanced around the room. Almost no one ever came into the main house, and I could tell Prissy was surprised by the austerity of it. Plain wooden planks shone under her feet. The duck-egg walls glowed, and bare windows let in the sunlight.

Prissy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. If she had been by herself, I thought, she might have been tempted to slip off her orthopedic shoes, stretch her legs on the sofa, and take a nap. Instead, she interlaced her knobby fingers, making a temple out of her hands for luck, knelt as best she could on the waxy floor, and started begging woman to woman.

It’s strange to see what time does to your adversaries. Here I had the indomitable Miss Sparrow kneeling in front of me, but with a couple of teeth missing, yellow eyeballs, and a head as bald as a plucked goose. As she spoke, I remembered the day she’d confiscated my mother’s cracked mirror and the sound it made hitting the metal trash can, the tinkling of the glass splintering. Even now, that was still the noise I imagined a heart made when it gave up on life. For a moment, I wished I had that mirror back so I could hold it up to Priscilla Sparrow’s face and invite her to take a good long look.
See,
I would have said,
ugly fits into anybody’s skin. Size doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.

The truth of it is, though, size has plenty to do with forgiveness. Staring down at the measly-boned Priscilla Sparrow, I realized for the first time that maybe my enormity was an unintended gift. All that fat and muscle hanging off my frame—the very same flesh that Robert Morgan seemed so determined to chip and whittle away at—was like a suit of armor laid overtop my spirit. And so far, I’d taken all the misery thrown at me and absorbed it like salt sucking up water.

Without taking my eyes off Prissy, I leaned close to her. Gently, as if persuading a mean dog into a better temper, I took her clawed hands into my own. “I’ll take care of it,” I whispered, my voice as supple as the surface of Tabitha’s quilt. “I promise. One way or another, I’ll take care of it.”

The doctor was not exactly congenial to seeing things in my fashion. I’d decided to try him first. “Absolutely not,” he sputtered when I informed him about Priscilla Sparrow’s visit. “I’ve told her I won’t. It’s completely unethical.” He worked a bit of ham gristle out from between his teeth. It was after dinner. Bobbie was upstairs doing homework. For supper I’d made all the doctor’s favorites—cola-glazed ham, two-fried potato hash, and sour patch tomato salad—but it wasn’t helping. He was crabby, and dangerous, and not inclined to agree with me about anything, especially when it involved his work.

“But maybe it’s more unethical to prolong her life.” I slid a cup of overly bitter coffee across the table, trying to ignore the image of Sentinel’s pinched gray muzzle going slack in the moonlight.

“It’s murder.”

“It’s still an option.”

“Which is murder.”

“Or peace.” I eyed the doctor. After putting up with his pronouncements and orders, it felt like liberation to voice an opinion of my own, even if he was shooting it down. I put my hands on my hips. “Listen, you may know a lot about how the human body hangs together, but you don’t know doggone about the soul. People get tuckered out. They get tired of hanging around waiting when the finish line’s in plain sight. You ought to know that better than anyone.”

The doctor shut up and slurped at his coffee. His hair was beginning to thin out, and what was left of it stuck up in tufts off his head. For a moment, he looked just like Bobbie. “It’s illegal,” he snapped, accusatory and mean, just like his old self.
But maybe he can’t help it,
I thought. Maybe his cells were just programmed that way.

“Well now, that all depends.”

“On what?” Robert Morgan was not a man who appreciated the easy morals of August Dyerson, but I was pleased to note that they were still alive and kicking in me—just like one of his hobbled old racehorses.

I raised my eyebrows. “On not getting caught.”

I was preparing to make my grand exit, sweeping out of that kitchen with all the dignity of the Queen of Sheba, but the doctor was a man who’d never lost out on the last word, and he wasn’t about to start now, even if it came at the cost of tarnishing his honor.

“Not so fast. Sit,” he ordered. He kicked a chair out for me, then licked his lips and spoke with the sweet slowness of a man who had all the time in the world. “I didn’t want to have to do this now,” he said, running his hands through his hair, “but you’re leaving me no choice.” He looked back over at me. “Tell me, Truly, if it was you sitting on the other side of the fence, do you think you’d be making the same argument? Because what I’m about to say to you may change your mind.” I hesitated, a bad feeling rising in my chest. “Now, do you have any idea of the name of what afflicts you?”

I refused the seat. When I’d decided to go to bat for Priscilla Sparrow, I hadn’t counted on nitpicking my dimensions, but if the doctor wanted to go that route, I figured, it was one I could follow. “Well, I’m guessing the word
giant
is in the title somewhere,” I said, “and if it isn’t, I’m sure you’ll petition to put it there.”

Robert Morgan drummed his fingers on the tabletop, unperturbed. He appeared to debate something inside himself for a moment, then he nodded, satisfied, and continued speaking. “The precise term is
acromegaly
. You’re a kind of giant, Truly. Do you know what that means?”

I sighed. How many times in my life, I wondered, was I going to have to have this conversation? I thought back all those years to my first day of school and Miss Sparrow’s incredulous assessment of me. It made me feel as dull and heavy inside as a rusty old barrel. Maybe I would take that chair, after all. I sank into it before answering, “It means I’m bigger than average, Robert Morgan.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. How did my father explain it to you when you were a child? A little clock?”

“Yes. A clock.”

“Well, that’s not technically accurate. It’s more like a stopwatch, or a kitchen timer. Most people’s pituitary quits sending out hormone after puberty, but yours never has, probably due to some kind of tumor. Your timer is infinite. In other words, you’ve never stopped growing, and you probably never will.”

I sat back in the chair, absorbing this new information, wishing I had some more coffee to go with it.

“There’s more,” the doctor continued. “I never told you before, but given our topic of conversation tonight, I believe now is the time. You need to know that there’s a high probability that this condition will be terminal for you, Truly.”

“What?” The word
terminal
flapped in my throat like a duck trapped in lake ice. I tried to take a breath and found I couldn’t.

The doctor lowered his gaze, slipping into professional mode. “Your heart won’t be able to keep up with your growth. Your organs will become enlarged and stressed. Inevitably, your vital systems will start to fail.”

I shifted on my chair, aware for the first time of precisely how much the wood was bending and bowing under me. More than last week? I wondered. Much more than a month ago? I put a hand on my chest. “Oh. Oh my.”

Robert Morgan folded his hands. “I realize this must be a shock.”

He had no idea. My mind swirled with questions. How big would I get? How long would it take? How would I know if my organs were failing? But there were a few questions that were larger than any of the others and one in particular that couldn’t be ignored. “How could you keep this a secret all these years?” I finally blurted.

Robert Morgan sipped his muddy coffee and considered. “I was always going to tell you. You have a right to know, of course.” He hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat roughly. “I was waiting for the right time. A better time.”

I slammed my hands on the table. “Better than what?”

To give him credit, the doctor didn’t even flinch. “Better than now,” he replied, calm as cabbage. He ran his fingers through his hair and elaborated. “Look, Truly, it’s always tricky giving someone bad news, and it’s even more so when that person is a member of your household. I suppose I didn’t like the idea of rocking our little boat. Not while you were still healthy, and not after everything Serena Jane put us through.”

“But what if something had happened to me in the meantime? What if, what if—”
What if I died?
I couldn’t say it.

Robert Morgan held up his empty palms as if he were offering all the blame back up to the universe. “Then it wouldn’t matter that I’d never told you, would it?” That sounded about right, I thought. Plus, it gave him a few hidden benefits. If I didn’t know about my condition, Robert Morgan would be able to watch me like a lion getting ready for a kill, tail twitching, eyes all narrow and tight. He would be able to keep measuring every inch of me right up until the end, notating all the changes, and when I was gone he would be able to write all those numbers up in a nice, fat medical article with his name signed in red.

“What about treatment?” I finally asked. “Can’t you do anything?”

The doctor shook his head slowly, almost a little sadly, it seemed. “Under ordinary circumstances, yes, but in your case, our options are limited. Surgery, I am almost certain, would be futile and far too dangerous. Radiation has its own drawbacks, which leaves only medication. I’d like to start you on a series of pills and injections right away.”

“And what if I say no?”

The doctor shrugged. “Then you’ll die sooner rather than later.”

I pushed my chair back from the table, my stomach queasy. Was that a symptom? I wondered. The beginning of the end? And what about all my headaches? But when it came down to it, none of it mattered, I decided. All I wanted was to get away from the doctor’s house. I longed to go back to the farm and lie in my old room, the itchy weft of a horse blanket scratching my hips and knees. I wanted never to see the doctor again.

Just then, Bobbie came stumbling into the kitchen, skinny arms pocked with insect bites, his tongue poking in between his teeth. He had just crossed the brink between boyhood and adolescence but hadn’t entirely left youth behind. “Aunt Truly?” He blinked, confused to see that the dishes hadn’t even been cleared yet. “I have a question about my history homework.”