The bell rang and the class ran out, Ann yelling: Bye Intra! in her flattest, meanest voice, and while Lisa was packing her bag I called her to the back of the room. She half-skipped up to me, crowned, the lightest I’d seenheryet. I asked her where she’dgotten an IV. in the first place, and that’s when she told me about her mother. She’s got really bad cancer and wears a red wig, she said, doing little kicks with her feet. Lisa’s hair was so ratty it barely moved when she did.
She’ll die in less than a year, Lisa said. Is that it?
Ayear? I said. She nodded vigorously. She’s got no hair left, she said.
Are you doing okay? I asked.
Lisa started puffing her cheeks, in and out.
What kind of cancer? I asked.
She smiled a little. Guess, she said.
Lung? She shook her head. Skin? I said.. No. Brain? No. Bone? No.
Mouth? No. Breast? No. Colon? No. Throat? No. Blood? No.
Liver? No. Pancreas? No.
What’s left? I asked.
She leaned in, conspiratorially. Eye cancer, she said, winking.
I’ve never heard of that, I said.
Lisa nodded. It’s brand-new, she said. My mom is one of the first. They’re doing lots of tests. It spreads really fast.
Is there anything I can do? I asked.
She let all the breath out of her cheeks, leaned in, and looked at the skin around my eyes. Your eyes are like little blue zeroes, she said.! - o = 2, she said.
My eyes aren’t blue, I said. They’re more gray than blue. They’re more blue, she said.
I put my knuckles on the chair seat.
I like the name Intra, she said. I hate Ann DiLanno. Are you sick? she asked. Her face was bright.
It took me a second to catch up with her sentences, and then I did another knock on the wooden chair seat. What do you mean? I 3 said. I’m fine, I said.
She told me my class was already her favorite class and that if I really wanted to do something for her, then I should not get sick, ever.
But sometimes I get a cold, I said. People get colds.
She adjusted the IV. and glued her eyes on me. I never get colds, she said.
And even though the plastic on her head was fogged and dirty, and her hair was a nest, and she was not yet four feet tall, she was hard with poise right then, and I felt myself shrink in my chair.
Oh, I said. Well. Intra is a perfectly good name, I mumbled.
I didn’t know what else to say and now I wanted her to leave so I thanked her again for being such a good starting act for Numbers and Materials and told her to go to recess. She said she loved Numbers and Materials more than anything in any class, even more than Hands-on Health in Science, and ran out of the room.
I blew my nose and knocked some more and kept knocking and thought: she wears the news on her head.
Welcome back to school. My summer vacation was bad.
I had been ten years old and quitting nothing at the time when my skin-doctor father walked into the living room one day in August with death perched on his shoulder as high and pleased as an organ grinder’s monkey.
His voice was quiet. Help, he said.
The rest of us-three-were on the living-room couch, I was sitting with my rich aunt, my mother’s sister, looking at a sports wear and lingerie catalog she’d brought for her visit. My mother was cleaning out her purse. At the sound of his overwound voice, we all looked up.
Arthur, said my mother, fingers laced with gum wrappers, what’s wrong?
His face was gray. Truly, actually gray. All six eyes, the female majority in the house, fixed onto his, which were tight with fear and glittering silver.
That first time, even my clearheaded aunt got worried. She was the head of a hotshot metal corporation in the big city, and very directive. She said: Go to the emergency room. She said: Do it.
The force in her voice pushed tears to my eyes.
My mother, lips together, led my father to the car. Just the day before, he and I had gone to the big green high school track, sang to the radio together in the car, and raced each other. I watched the way his feet hit the ground-heel, earth, toe-and he was so quick but I was faster than I’d ever been before and one time, I almost, almost won. He laughed when he saw me chasing his heels, and afterward we had orange drinks at the diner and he told the waiter my name was Miss Speedy.
I pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and joined my aunt, who sat there with her catalog. We tried to focus on the clothes. She pointed out a skirt-long and straight and dark red-and I nodded but have since felt a wave of terror in stores when I’ve seen any relative of that skirt hanging on the racks. My tears were big and splat ted directly on the models, fat drops that made their paper stomachs buckle.
My parents were gone for four hours. One hour. Two hours.
Three hours. Four hours.
My aunt, overworked, fell asleep on the catalog.
Four hours and ten minutes.
Four hours and eleven minutes.
Four hours and twelve minutes.
I held my knees and watched the clock over the stove shuffle and restructure its red digital lines.
Both my parents returned from the hospital at the tail end of the fifth hour, and my father still looked gray and now my mother, too, looked grayer. My aunt was still asleep on her catalog, but I was wide awake and I went over and hugged my mother because I was too afraid to hug him. He looked like he might be leaking.
That ashy stuff, smoking out into the air. But he was upright, he was walking, and he was alive.
Your father’s okay, my mother said. He didn’t look over at me and left the room. I heard the mattress in their bedroom sigh and sink as he lay down.
It wasn’t a stroke? muttered my aunt, shaking awake.
It wasn’t anything, said my mother. The doctor did a lot of tests and he’s fine.
What do you mean? I asked.
She shook her head.
What was it? my aunt asked, standing.
My mother opened the refrigerator, and stuck a spoon in a jar of peanut butter.
So, she said. What did you two do while we were gone?
My aunt marched out of the kitchen, and I heard her low voice speaking to my father who, as far as I could tell, wasn’t responding. I lifted the catalog from the table and ran a hand over it, bumpy from my tears. A record of four very bad hours. I held it up to my mother, to show her, to shove it in her face, but her eyes were focused somewhere else. She took a second spoon from the drawer and made me a peanut-butter lollipop too.
Is he dying? I asked, in the smallest voice possible.
She put down her spoon. No, honey, she said, touching my hair. I don’t think so.
I nodded. I smiled. That’s good, I said.
3 She poured two glasses of milk into two wineglasses.
We drank. Her eyes, over the top of the wineglass, rain-colored against milk foam, looked sad and tired.
4 What is it? I said to her, putting down my glass.
Are you keeping something from me? Tell me the truth, I said. I am ten years old.
But my mother just shook her head again.
They complimented his cholesterol levels, she said. His blood pressure is low.
What’s wrong with him? I asked, leaning forward, gripping the glass stem.
Nothing, she said.
By the next evening, my father was still alive and walking and he seemed to be in a slightly better mood, but I didn’t see him regain brightness and color, ever. We never went back to the track. He stopped singing with the radio. I walked so much faster than him now that the name Miss Speedy felt disgusting in its rightness. My aunt stayed a few more days, even going to the doctor’s office to drum up more information, but she returned with nothing but a dinner date. She took me shopping that week on the street of stores and bought me a turquoise jacket that she said was so cute and matched my eyes but halfway home I said it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. The rest of the walk was silent and deadly. She decided to cut her stay short. Judy, she asked my mother, do you really need me here? My mother shook her head, using a toothpick to spear kernels from a tin can of corn.