Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (6 page)

“Hey, Big Red,” she shouted. “You trying out for a Gatorade commercial?”

I bent down into the window, exaggerating the pain of my bruised hip, already detecting a note of self-perceived failure in Emily’s attempt to lighten her own mood. My first impression was that her patience had stretched beyond its limit, that in reaction to the dwindling gossip related to her big night with Peyton Chambeau, the reality of his betrayal had now rushed forth to lean on her with its full weight. She waved me into the car. The rain was warmer now, so light that if I didn’t see it bouncing off the windows I might’ve thought it quit. We were hardly up to speed before there were tears dripping from her jaw-line and it all came pouring out.

“It’s not like I want to talk about it all the time, because at home, it’s practically the
only
thing we talk about. But Ashley and Lauren, sometimes I think they don’t even care. I mean, they were
sooo concerned
for those first few weeks after Katie got diagnosed. We were taking her out for ice cream, bringing her movies, playing board games. Then all of a sudden it was old news. Like when they realized there wasn’t a cure, they decided all their efforts to cheer her up were just a waste of time. I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. You at least make an effort, even if you always come up with events at places that would probably never admit us, let alone my sister. Anyway, you weren’t here when it first happened, and you don’t know my family the way Ashley and Lauren do. I’ve got photos with them every first day of school all the way back to kindergarten. They’ve known Katie forever, but it’s like they don’t have enough time just to ask,
Hey, what’s up with your little sister? How’s she doing these days?
Ever since Katie got this stupid disease, it’s like she’s a fucking ghost to them. And it’s really starting to piss me off.”

The tears had mostly stopped by now. They were replaced by anger and frustration, not only at Ashley and Lauren, but at her parents and the doctors and nurses and everyone else who promised Katie would beat this disease that was in fact having its fickle way.

“She was in a
wheelchair
last week,” she said. “Katie’s missed so much school, there’s no way she’ll catch up. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s gonna be doing seventh grade again next year. Jesus, I can’t wait for her to get the news about that.”

Emily’s breath signaled its last stutter of self-pity. She must’ve known how beautiful she was to me, but I don’t know if that made things easier or more difficult. She drove past the hockey arena and my house, gripping the wheel at ten and two, checking all mirrors, trying her best to control her emotions. I swore I could hear every drop of rain and palpitation of the engine, even the hum of the seams in the concrete.

“Let’s pick Katie up,” I said. “We can head over to Gordo’s Mexican and eat for half price. Zach’s working until four.”

Emily was already shaking her head and reaching for the radio, tuning it to the AM sports channel. It was only the first quarter and the Hawkeyes were already down by ten.

“Did you see Zach made the Sports Extra?” she asked.

“Was it in color or black and white? If it was in color, he’s probably already found a frame for it.”

“It was more like a
reference
. Some Valley players were complaining about a St. Pius linebacker singing Johnny Cash before the snaps and in the pileups.”

“We don’t have to hang out with him. We can just order burritos and a bunch of virgin Margaritas and ignore him. I’ll make sure we get the discount.”

“He’s not
that
bad,” she said. “He might be strange, but so what? He finds his own way to win, and it works. If he’s more creative than the other guys, why should he have to play the game the same way as them?”

“I’ve heard complaints that he bites people in the pileups.”

Emily laughed and slapped the steering wheel. She must’ve thought I was joking. A minute later she was murmuring inaudibly, tilting her head and biting her fingertips (a perfect example of a vacillating aside, when everything about her body language made me swear she was a closet smoker).

“Katie’s stuck at Mercy Frederick for a bunch of tests. But if you really want to see her, I guess we could work it out. It’s been a while since anyone good dropped in. You really want to go?”

“Of course. She won’t mind me showing up unannounced?”

“You never know,”
she said, making a sudden turn onto Hickman. A long, whining honk sounded from a truck still cruising down Merle Hay. Somehow this seemed to relax Emily, and soon she was steering again with one loose hand flopped over the top of the wheel.

“I don’t want to piss her off,” I said.

“Oh come on, George. She might pretend to be pissed off, but if you think that means she doesn’t like you, then you’ve got a lot to learn about Katie Schell.”

“Why don’t we pick some B-Bop’s?” I said, pointing at the sign, at which time she made another seat-belt-locking stop, flipped her turn signal, and proceeded for the drive-through.

Just for kicks we strolled into the hospital through the emergency entrance, which proved even more exciting than we expected. At the triage counter a half-crocked fisherman was barking at the nursing staff, waving a right hand dangling with a treble-hooked bass lure. “Ya want me to lose ma thumb!” he shouted. “Gimme some attention! This boiy here with the busted nose, you ain’t gonna fix that. Boiy needs a plastic surgeon!” “Dang straight,” Emily said, cocking her head back and motioning to spit. “Boiy needs a dang boxing coach, too.” After receiving our visitor wristbands we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where the walls were lined with bubble-lettered quotes like “If I’d known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” A diminutive nurse in a cubicle waved to Emily, then sneered in mock jealousy at my B-Bop’s sacks. We found Katie in bed propped up on two pillows, static haired and pale but contentedly absorbed in Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia
. Before troubling to acknowledge our interruption she continued reading to the end of the page, then replaced her bookmark and tenderly pivoted and looked up. Then she whipped the bedsheet over her face and shrieked.

Without the slightest pause Emily plopped herself onto the edge of the mattress and tugged the bedsheet from her sister’s hands. While Katie might’ve taken charge on the ride home from school, it was now clear that Emily held the reins and wasn’t looking to give them up.

“What are you doing! You could’ve at least warned me. Like there aren’t enough people around here already invading my privacy.”

“Sue me,” Emily said, straightening her shoulders, sexier than ever as she laid down the law. “George wanted to hang out with you last week and the week before and the week before that. Today he insisted and I was too tired to fight him.”

“
You’re
too tired. That’s a good one. I about had a hernia lifting the fork to eat a bunch of mushy green beans.” She made a nasty green bean face, then shaded half her face as she pretended to barf over the side of the bed. Next she shook a clenched fist in my direction. “So it’s
you
stinking up the whole hallway.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Emily caught me just after a hockey game.”

Katie burst into laughter. She laughed almost as convulsively as Emily, only it came out in two high-flung hoots instead of one, and didn’t embarrass her at all. “I’m talking about the
B-Bop’s
. I smelled it a mile away and wanted to kill whichever little piggie was so selfish that he didn’t care about torturing the whole eighth floor. But if it’s for me, well, that’s a different story.”

She threw a nod at the dinner tray and its mechanical arm that was stretched out against the wall. Emily cleared her throat, subservi ently bowing as she swung it over Katie’s lap, then passed the burgers around, setting each of them up with drinks and napkins. After eating half of her fries, Katie started telling us about
My Ántonia
, which she claimed as the fortieth book on her fifty-book reading list for a city-wide competition called the “Literary Olympics.”

“My favorite scene so far is when Jim and Ántonia go on a picnic where they run around playing ‘Pussy Wants a Corner’ and eating pickles and getting real worn out.
Weeeeell,
according to Mr. Manrique, a boy narrator is not always a boy narrator, and a simple country picnic isn’t always so simple
because
a pickle’s not always a pickle. So the question is, do you, George Flynn, eat pickles?”

“She’s gunning for your sliced pickles,” Emily said, cutting her burger into neat halves, then quarters. I lifted the top bun and handed them over. Emily pushed the slices to the outer edges of the wrapper, then emptied three ketchup packets in the open space in the middle. (My last girlfriend, on our second date, cut her burger in exactly the same way. Perhaps it’s the reason I was initially drawn to her. Over the following two years I only witnessed her repeat the gesture once, which I find extremely odd.)

“Where’s Mom?” Emily asked, cupping her ear toward the sound of high heels clicking down the hallway.

“Don’t worry. She called an hour ago telling me if I’d ever seen how nasty Mrs. Amato’s kitchen was, I’d know why she had to retrieve her casserole dish this very minute. She’s not coming till the afternoon.”

“It’s technically the afternoon right now,” Emily said, picking up one of her burger quarters. “Okay, George, time to chomp down.”

Katie kept steadily at her fries. Already her cheeks seemed to have brightened and she tossed her pillows aside to sit upright with her legs crossed, soon giving me the scoop on Mrs. Amato’s neighbor, who she introduced as a “formerly esteemed mother of six” married to a “sacrosanct back surgeon” named Roland Hathaway.

“About a week ago,” she continued, half whispering to invoke an element of suspense, “a vagabond named Pike showed up at the Hathaways’ doorstep, claiming to be Mrs. Hathaway’s first husband. Apparently he was all bearded and sunburned, with homemade boots cut out of tire treads. I don’t need to say it was a little shocking, especially for the kids, who all sung in the church choir at one time or another. But the strange thing is that, according to Mrs. Amato, Mrs. Hathaway took it all in stride. She called a family meeting and pretty much told her family the whole story from the beginning. She didn’t apologize even, but just told them what happened, like it was no big deal. Maybe she didn’t
call
it a hippie phase, but you know, that’s basically what it was. When she was eighteen she moved to a commune near a big Indian reservation in South Dakota. Long story short, she married this Pike guy, who was like the founding father of the group. I think they called themselves the Strike Out commune.”

“Strike
Three
,” Emily said, unable to hold her tongue, despite appearing to have heard the story enough times to want to see it hurried along. “And the marriage wasn’t official.”

“Yeah, okay,” Katie admitted. “You want to finish the story?”

“Go ahead. You’ve got George on the edge of his seat.”

“What’s the holdup?” I said, perhaps pouring it on a little heavy considering that I was already leaning on my forearms against the railing at the edge of the bed.

Katie went on to describe Jonathan Pike’s three-week stay at the Hathaway house, which, despite his passivity, resulted in a host of domestic disentanglements. (Mrs. Hathaway must have convinced her husband to let Pike stay with them, at least initially, though this was never clearly stated.) But as soon as Katie started describing Dr. Hathaway’s increasingly erratic behavior, which she’d witnessed firsthand in the hallways of Mercy Frederick, she not only lost the thread of the story, but appeared suddenly oblivious to the topic altogether. There was nothing casual about it. While in one second she was relating details down to units of obsessive hedge-trimming and deliberately off-key renditions of “Gentile or Jew,” in the next she was panning back and forth between Emily and me as though straining for the answer to a question that neither of us had asked. I was positive I would soon witness a second outbreak of hives, even in the face of Emily playing off the lapse as minor and mundane.

“What I want to know,” she said, poking Katie in the thigh, “is where you got all these specifics about this Pike character’s big night camping in the backyard with the twins. Did you say that happened
last
night?”

“He’s been eating them out of house and home for two weeks. Ask Mrs. Amato. Ask anyone.”

Emily balled up her fry container and swiped a napkin across her mouth, appearing to transition from acting agitated to being agitated. “It makes me sick. The whole parish is eating it right up. They love it that Dr. Hathaway’s become some kind of depressive jerk, and they love it even more that Jonathan’s a drifter who can’t even afford a room at the Days Inn. If anyone deserves to be judged, it’s
Roland
Hathaway.”

“His friends call him
Rollie
,” Katie said, smirking slightly, but shoving her tray away and reaching for her pillows again like a cynical soldier sick of his own war stories. “He’s telling nurses and patients and everyone else he meets about how his whole life is a sham.”

“And that he can never trust his wife again!” Emily said, slapping the mattress. “He’s acting like she’s a complete stranger, as if all that Christian volunteer work she does is so different from what she was doing back in the day on the reservation.”

I thought about it, not wanting to align myself with Dr. Hathaway, but knowing that a certain amount of jealousy would be impossible to avoid. “Maybe Rollie just wishes he was the one sleeping on a buffalo mattress with sweet young Sharon.”

“Obviously,” Katie said. But Emily was already shaking a raised index finger like a master debater about to prove that we were all missing the main point.

“Isn’t it possible to love someone and not tell them everything about your life before you met them? Is that what marriage is, an agreement to confess every mistake we ever made, every thought or memory that passes through our heads? I don’t think it’s fair to call Sharon a liar because she never told Roland about her time at the reservation. She’s always been a dedicated mother and wife, and I don’t see any reason to complain.”