The Fiennes (pages 38-42)

 In between this excerpt and the preceding one, Helen's English teacher noticed that her academic performance is declining, Helen started donating platelets (cells that help the blood clot), and Helen started to show signs of caregiver stress. This section is set in December 2005.

            Helen turned around and saw her father fumbling around with the vacuum cleaner, his feet slumping forward and back. She rushed into the hallway and took the vacuum from his hands. He almost tripped over his own feet, until she grabbed his arms. Her biceps had gotten noticeably firmer from steadying him during these dizzy spells.

            “Dad, sit down and relax.”

            “I’m alright, Leni.”

            “You need to get some rest.”

            “I’m alright,” he stressed.

            Helen cringed. “You’re not,” she insisted, continuing the vacuuming in the hallway and then moving into the kitchen.

            “I thought… fine,” Reuben sighed, dragging himself over to the living room couch. He sank into the couch like a rock dropped into a pond, collapsing into a lump of flesh and cloth. Helen turned off the vacuum and stepped back into the living room. She threw a blanket over her father, and placed her hand on his forehead. It was still warm to the touch. The phone rang. It was Dr. Kutzner. Helen took a deep breath. He had promised to call back as soon as her father’s lab results came back.

            “The urine culture came back positive,” he told Helen.

            “What do I have to do?” she asked frantically. A week ago, Dr. Kutzner had stressed that Fludarabine lowered the immune response, sometimes dangerously so. When she got home, Helen cleaned the kitchen and bathroom with diluted bleach, and wiped almost everything down with Clorox wipes. It left the house smelling too much like a doctor’s office for her father’s liking, but she insisted on doing everything she could to keep the house clean.

            “I put in a scrip for Bactrim at the pharmacy. You can pick it up tonight. Give him the first dose at his next meal. And make sure he drinks lots of water.”

            “Okay.” No, not okay, she thought as she hung up.

            Just as she got back from the pharmacy, Helen opened the fridge door in search of something for them to eat for dinner. All that she found were a half empty bottle of orange juice and random condiments. There were a few slices of bread sitting in the freezer, and a box of cereal in the cabinets. Suddenly, Helen realized that between her father’s infinite fatigue and her lack of free time, no one had gone grocery shopping for a month. Normally, the pantry would have been filled with canned vegetables and soup, the cabinets lined with cereal boxes, the fridge and freezer overflowing with ingredients, ready-to-cook meals, and beverages of every imaginable variety. She decided that a mayonnaise sandwich would give her father the most calories, pathetic as it looked, and urged him to drink extra water after dinner.

            After eating a mustard sandwich washed down with the remaining orange juice, Helen went downstairs and realized that there were at least four loads of laundry still unwashed. Normally, Helen would have excused herself out of doing laundry on a weeknight because she always had so much homework to finish. Today, however, was horrible, and doing simple housework seemed like a feasible way to make the day merely miserable. Helen felt strangely elated sorting each article of clothing into a different pile, each according to its color and material. All the pairs of jeans lay together in harmony before being thrown into the wash, just as her bras resembled a modern art piece, colorful but simple, before being placed into individual laundry bags. Against her father’s long-standing custom, she mixed their laundry to reduce the number of piles. 

            While she poured in the detergent, Helen recalled the day her father first decided to keep their laundry separate. She was almost eleven, old enough to understand how to do her own laundry but too young to appreciate the significance of her period. Thinking back on those first several months, Helen could understand her father’s awkwardness in trying to explain how hormone cycles related to days-long bleeding and cramps. Especially when her hormones didn’t follow the textbook 28-day cycle, at one point giving her two periods that were only a week apart. In time, she learned to recognize the sharp twinge in her belly just after she ovulated, how to manage the pain and, at times, how to scrub out the blood stains from her underwear at three in the morning. At the time, it surprised her how her father wouldn’t explain the fine details of these things, but in the end she was glad she figured them out herself.

            As she threw the first load into the washer, it struck her that doing the laundry had made her feel so happy. For the first time that day, she finally felt in control of something.

***

            The next day at school, she walked past the art students’ table. Lydia had been welcomed back to the cheerleaders’ table, but Helen couldn’t remember why she would want to sit there. Without cheering, she had almost nothing in common with those girls, and as the weeks passed, she felt herself running out of things to talk about with most of her peers. It was increasingly difficult to complain about the smell of pot in the bathroom, or Mr. Griffin’s demanding workload, when she had to track her father’s weight every day to make sure he was getting enough calories to withstand the chemo. Pete had finally granted him paid leave when he saw her father struggle to make scrambled eggs and toast, but they had to take money out of her college savings to cover the gaps. Insurance co-pays. The medicine. Extra gas money. Even the cases of Ensure, which Dr. Kutzner promised would keep her father from losing weight (they didn’t).

            Helen searched for an empty table, even a half-empty one, despite knowing that was impossible. She was tempted to take her lunch to a little-known stairwell between the student art gallery and the science corridor. Sam had showed it to her; he used to sit there with his bags of ground Midol waiting for Max. But the last time Helen went there, she found two freshmen making out in between puffs of pot smoke. So she carried her lunchbag (a barbeque sauce sandwich and a can of Ginger Ale) to the corridor that lay below the cafeteria, where the art and cooking classes met, and perched on the side steps down from the cafeteria. Sam joined her about five minutes after she had settled in.

            “Is that all you’re eating?” he asked, his voice low.

            “Yeah. I haven’t had time to go to the grocery store.”

            He held out a turkey sandwich with cheese. “My mom always packs two in case I get hungry.”

            “Oh, I’m not…” Her stomach growled after she swallowed the last bite of her sandwich.

            “You deserve it.”

            Helen bent over and buried her head in her arms. Her quivering shoulders betrayed her.

She stammered, “God. I can’t even remember to buy food.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I should have gone earlier, but… but things kept coming up.”

            “Leni, what’s going on?”

            She looked up and down the hallway before whispering, “my dad has leukemia.”

            “Shit.”

            “Yeah, it sucks.”

            “Don’t you want my turkey sandwich?”

            “Yeah.” When Helen took the first bite, she almost said something that would have embarassed her. Instead, she hugged Sam. “You have no idea what this means to me.”

            He hugged her back warmly. “I think I have an idea.”           

            At the grocery store, Helen saw Lydia and her mother in the cereal aisle. She waved to Lydia, but she didn’t wave back. Lydia kept walking, passing in front of her mother and ducking into another aisle, leaving Helen wondering what she had done wrong. Placing a box of Cream of Wheat in her cart, she sidled up to Lydia’s mother.

            “Mrs. O’Connor?” she called out.

            “Leni,” she answered coolly. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

            “Is Lydia okay?”

            “No thanks to you. She says you’ve barely spoken to her since you quit the squad.”

            “It’s just that… she doesn’t really talk to me anymore.”

            “I don’t think she wants to talk to you anymore.”

            Mrs. O’Connor continued walking down the aisle, only pausing to pick up a box of Cheerios. Helen turned around and finished picking up the rest of the items on her list. What else could she do? She slowed down her steps, and made a circuit around the whole store, looking at her watch after each aisle. She knew she had to be home soon, to check on her father and start her homework. But the shining fluorescent lights and neatly ordered food displays provided a beautiful contrast to the messy confusion her life had turned into. After adding a case of Ensure to her cart, she threw in a chocolate bar, thinking it would be a nice afternoon snack. Five minutes later, she put it back. She would treat herself when her father got better.

***

             Only two months has passed since the diagnosis, but to Helen it had felt like two years. She would find herself staring at the classroom clocks, at her watch, aching for respite. The alarm clcok no longer just aroused her from her sleep. It had come to be the slap in the face that reminded her of their new reality. Instead of hearing her father’s booming voice echo through the hallway, singing motown and Broadway ballads, she heard the shuffling steps of an old man. The clinking of his morning pills and vitamins into a glass custard dish. She had to get out of her warm, soft bed, which had become a more intimate familiar to her than even Sam.  Out of her tightly wound cocoon, in which she was still the headstrong, sassy cheerleader, and her father worked the grill at Pete’s with the agility of a boxer and the gentle warmth of an old friend.

            Some mornings, she awoke in the middle of hauntingly sweet dreams of her father cooking savory omelets while she practiced her steps in the living room. The shift from her past to her present was not unlike being pushed off a cliff. She scrambled to grip onto fragments of her dreams, unsure if they would ever come true again. Praying that she wouldn’t wake up alone one day.