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  “What? Why?”

  “To kill your sex drive. I think they got a deal on that from the Army surplus, too.”

  Sister—obviously trusted not to croak, bolt, or screw a boy-friend—is permitted to keep her door closed. She only comes out to babystep her way to the bathroom, clinging to a nurse. Her nightgowns come up to her ears and down to her toes and out to her fingertips. She wears a soft little white hat. She stares at the cracks in the tile floor.

  “She’s a bit depressed,” said OFN. “She was supposed to go to Africa to join a mission there, but she failed the medical. It was a terrible disappointment for her. Try to be friendly whenever you see her. She needs cheering up.”

  Black-veiled Sisters, wearing grey wool skirts and cardigans, white blouses, and massive crucifixes hung round their necks, and priests in the usual black-on-black and Leonard Cohen haircuts come to comfort her. Occasionally you can hear low moans coming from her room. But she keeps her door closed, always, and never looks any of us in the face. Makes being friendly quite a challenge.

  “Good morning, Sister,” we chirp when we see her, and she sometimes makes a muffled little bleat into her collar in return.

  Across from Sister was Louise, until last week. She was thirteen and she was from a reserve on the mainland. She didn’t look sick; she was plump and—until you heard the brutal, bladed cough she dragged up from the basement of her chest—you’d have thought she’d been misdiagnosed. Mary extracted most of her life story the first day she was here. Took her about ten minutes and most of my chocolate nut clusters.

  “She says she’s only staying for a couple of months, until the weather warms up some. Then her parents are taking her to some island off the coast where she’ll be magically cured.

  She says it only works for natives; it’s some special deal with the Virgin Mary. She says lots of her relatives have been cured there.”

  “So why won’t it work for us?”

  “Power of faith, baby. You got to believe.”

  “I believe she’ll be back here next year hacking out the rest of her lungs.”

  After some thought, though, I reconsidered, and I tried— shamelessly—to cozy up to Louise to get a little more information. I was curious about this Lourdes of the Island, but she’d obviously run into too much skepticism because she clammed up on me. I’d ruined my chances with my narrow-minded attitude; a mistake, I’ve decided, I will not make the next time something like this comes along. There was quite a little scene when her grandparents walked in, packed up her stuff, and took her home. The doctor was furious, the nurses cluck-clucked and fussed. Seems Louise wasn’t testing positive anymore so they couldn’t send the cops to drag her back. Her local doctor had promised to see that she continued to take her pills.

  “We’ve had this problem before,” a nurse’s aide confided.

  “Do they always end up back here?” I wanted to know.

  “Well—not always.”

  “So what, so they die?”

  “Oh, no. Heavens, no!”

  “Then sometimes they get cured, right?”

  “Well, they were probably on the mend anyway. I don’t really know. I’m not a Catholic.”

  “Neither am I, but I think there’s something here the medical profession should look into. Why should I spend another six or seven months of my life here when Louise is gone off to be cured? If what’s-his-name of Navarre could convert to get his hands on Paris, I could surely do it for an early release.”

  “We don’t know she’ll be cured.”

  “Louise does. Her family does. You should be researching this. I’m willing to volunteer right now.”

  No one took me seriously.

  It was at that point that I started my research into cures for tuberculosis—other than the accepted-party-line cures, that is.

  The guy who invented the saxophone, a Belgian by the name of—naturally—Sax, claimed that playing his invention strengthened the lungs and should be used to treat TB. His son, Sax Jr., wrote and published a booklet called “The Gymnastic of the Lungs, Instrumental Music Considered from The Hygienic Point of View” in 1865.

  Where can I lay my hands on a saxophone? And do you have to have some innate musical ability? That could be a problem.

  Next door, to my left, is cranky old Mrs. Cyr. She’s deaf and it drives her crazy not to know everything that is going on; to make herself feel better, she tries to drive everybody else crazy, too. She lassoes passersby into her room with her bullwhip of a voice, she yells out questions and then can’t hear the answers unless you yell back. She can’t read so you can’t even write things down for her.

  “WHO’S THAT BIG UGLY WOMAN IN THE BLUE HAT JUST WENT INTO SISTER’S ROOM?”

  “I DON’T KNOW.”

  “MY GOD, SHE’S SOME BIG, AIN’T SHE? NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE.HAVE YOU?”

  “NO.”

  “GO ASK NURSE WHO SHE IS.”

  “Okay” and bolt, glad to have escaped so easily this time.

  “DON’T YOU MAKE THOSE GIRLS YELL,” shouts the nurse. “IT’S NOT GOOD FOR THEIR LUNGS.”

  “GOOD FOR THEIR LUNGS! I GUESS! STRENTHEN THEM UP SOME GOOD!”

  Her room is between me and the bathrooms so I try to time my trips to coincide with her naps, or I walk past her door (always WIDE open) reading a book and pretending I am far too absorbed to hear her.

  “GIRLIE! GIRLIE!” she screeches.

  “Can’t hear you,” I mutter, and turn a page.

  No one comes to see her. She’s ninety-seven, fifty years a widow, no children, friends long since dead.

  Just once, I’ve been told, she had a visitor, a grand-nephew, a minister from Boston who dropped in during his summer holidays to say hello. She was so shocked by his madras Bermuda shorts that she lectured him quite rudely on the appropriate attire for a minister. He didn’t come back. I suppose if she’d been pink and sweet and quavery-voiced and called him “Dear” he’d have made a few more duty calls before his vacation was over—but she was yellow and mean and cranky and one visit seems to have been plenty for him. Poor old bat. Somebody must have loved her once.

  Mrs. Cyr is a bitchy old bird, but Mrs. Charmichael just makes me want to slap her. One door further along the hall, she’s the fluttery, whiny sort, with a voice just on the dreary edge of tearful—the tears being all for guess who? She feels so thunderously sorry for herself that no one else feels obliged to join her. All she ever talks about, all day long, are her x-rays, needles, medication, bronchoscopes, bronchiograms, gastric washings, constipation, and enemas. We all like to obsess from time to time, but who wants a sixth hearing of how somebody else gags and retches every time a nurse sticks a tube in their nose, pushes it down to their stomach, and sucks up the contents? Three mornings a week, once a month, we all suffer through it. I just blank out my mind and concentrate on not puking. I certainly don’t go on about it in public.

  Whiny Mrs. Charmichael lives with her son—he’s old, close to forty—who is “a dear boy, a perfect son.” Perfect Leander comes to visit for three hours, almost every night, and any time he misses she snivels all night and all the next day. She worried for months that he wasn’t eating properly, maybe even putting his shoes up on the chesterfield, God help us all.

  Actually, perfect son Leander showed a little more imagination than his mother gave him credit for. Dizzy and reckless with unaccustomed freedom, he met a girl, knocked her up and got married in a rush. They came in the Saturday before last, Leander in his best blue suit, the bride in a lace maternity tent with embroidered lapels, lugging a three-tiered wedding cake. A couple of innocents bearding the lioness in her den. The lioness threw a fabulous tantrum—all the nursing staff was in attendance, half the visitors were hanging about the door eavesdropping. The bride came all over faint and had to lie down on one of the empty beds and Leander cried buckets. By the time they’d got Mrs. Charmichael calmed down (horse tranquilizers) and shooed the weeping bridal pair off to their honeymoon, it was long pa
st lights out. Mary and I sat on the window ledge in one of the bathrooms and toasted marshmallows over a small fire we’d built in a metal ashtray.

  “At least dear Leander has given her something new to think about,” we agreed.

  Our conversation drifted, as it often does, in the direction of sex. Mary made cynical comments like, “Never met a man who wasn’t an easy lay,” and I tried to wheedle details out of her. She’s had at least four steady boyfriends and I’m sure she’s had sex or something so close as makes no never-mind. She says she’s a virgin, but she’s such a good liar, I never know when to believe her. She plans to get married as soon as she gets out of here and finds a suitable candidate. Not me, I want to write novels and plays and have tragic love affairs. She’s decided to collect a husband, a split-level ranch, and two children. She’s so smart and funny—how can she want such a pedestrian life?

  Sometimes, the days get so long, I think the planet must have slowed down. Got stuck in space debris or something. I’m allowed up for most of the day now, which is better, but up or down, life just crawls. It’s enough to make you crazy, this coasting in neutral.

  The grass is starting to get green; after school the little kids are wild in it, rolling and screaming and playing scrub ball. The light is so bright and the sky so blue I feel if I don’t get out of here soon the ache in my chest will crush my ribs and my lungs will be of no use, healed or not. I will die of boredom and misery. What kind of an idiot would perceive consumption as a romantic disease? Maybe it’s only romantic when someone else has it, or after you’ve been dead a century or two and are nothing but an outdated hairstyle in volume six of the encyclopedia. It’s just a damn disease. Families get splashed all over the map, lives get skewed and broken. Outside the window life goes on, seasons change, buildings go up and get torn down, kids get taller, flowers bloom and die. The visitors wash in and out, week after week, the smell of fresh air clinging to their clothes, small gift-wrapped condolences in their hands. Relief in their eyes when visiting hours are over. No wonder Sister Clare is a fruitcake. No wonder men go home on passes and stay drunk for three days. No wonder girls go home and stay out all night and get themselves knocked up—whatever it takes to pretend you are a normal person with a normal life. We’re all just holding our breath until we can get out for good, not wanting one detail outside to change, so we won’t have missed anything.

  CHAPTER 3

  It’s too windy today for kites. The wind is from the southwest, and fierce. The clouds are flung across the sky and you expect to hear muffled thumps as they bump into each other and then merge. Yesterday two little boys were flying a delta-wing kite on the big, empty lawns between us and the sea. Red and black, with two blue-and-white painted eyes—kites need to see where they’re going. The boys had quite a bit of trouble getting it up, it kept diving earthward and then they’d get their boots tangled in the string. Boots are no good for kite flying, you need sneakers so you can run with it. Finally it took a good bite of wind and reached for the sky, a “homesick angel,” as Robert would say when the kite would start to pull up so fast my fingers would get burned trying to hang on. Its longing for heaven thrumming back down the string.

  On my sixth birthday he built me my first kite, in the garage, me watching, handing glue and the ball of string to him as needed. The kite was made of butcher paper, a shiny brownish-pink like old blood washed down a drain. There was no bridle, just the kite string poked through a tiny hole and tied to where the keel and spar crossed and were lashed together with twine and glue. The tail was string with bits of wrapping paper from my presents tied in bows along its length. It was like a rainbow, with fragments of flowers, and bunnies in bonnets, and candle-lit birthday cakes crinkling in the wind. We took it to Dominion Beach and he ran along the sand in his bare feet, stubbing his toes on rocks and cursing, glancing back over his shoulder to see if it had taken off yet. Eventually it went so high we had no more string and I couldn’t hold it, we had to hang on to it together. It flew out over the hungry licking ocean. I was screaming with excitement, scared it would fall in the water and be eaten by the waves.

  “Imagine the view!” he kept yelling. “Imagine what it looks like from up there, Gwennie! You could see for hundreds of miles!” Then he stumbled, and there was only me to hang on. It lifted me off my feet.

  “Let go! Let go!” shrieked my mother from where she sat, sideways in the front passenger seat, feet on the ground, stockings rolled down and her dress lifted past her knees to let the air circulate. I let go, and the earth smacked me and the kite twisted out of sight.

  “Gone to heaven,” he said, before I could think about crying. “It’s taking all the bad luck away, Gwen. In China they have a special ceremony called Driving Away the Devil; they fly kites and then turn them loose so they carry away all the bad luck.”

  “You shouldn’t have made such a big kite,” my mother came puffing up, cross as blazes. “Gwen might have been dragged into the water and drowned!”

  “Horse feathers,” he said. “She’s too lucky for that. We’ll make another one,” he added, sensing that I wasn’t quite ready to trade good luck for my wonderful kite.

  Gradually we acquired a shelf of kite makings: scraps of spinnaker cloth tightly woven, as brilliant as my favorite crayons; bamboo that he split into lath; softwood dowelling an eighth of an inch thick and as straight as could be found. Glue, X-acto knives, fine twine he got from a fishing supply outfit, an eyeleter and a box of silver eyelets I liked to stir up and trickle through my fingers. He made me a butterfly kite for my seventh birthday, and a bird with chimes for my eighth. He made box kites, double-bowed kites, a series of circles in a row to make a caterpillar. We sent payloads up the string: parachutes on a paper clip that popped off when they hit a knot close to the top and drifted back to the ground; bags of confetti that burst apart and scattered to the wind. I took pieces of paper with my birthday wish written in invisible ink and attached them with tiny pieces of Scotch tape, so the wind could pluck them off and send them to heaven.

  That was Robert, that was him, back when he was my father.

  A few months before my eleventh birthday we went to the Bell museum in Baddeck and gazed spellbound at the huge photographs and the tetrahedral bits and pieces hung from the ceiling. Then we went home, in a kite-making fever, and started making cells to have the best, biggest kite ever ready for my birthday. But his quiet sits in the dark got longer and longer and then he went into the hospital for a rest. I finished the kite myself, then hung it in my room. It took up too much space and collected dust. My mother nagged about it every time she came in to clean, but I wouldn’t let her take it down. I guess I was waiting for him to come back. He came home after a month, with a lot of pills, and went to bed to rest some more. The man who flew kites never came back, and then the kite was too big and in the way and covered with dust and I needed the space to hang my mobile of beach glass and sand dollars. I took the kite down, I don’t know where it went.

  CHAPTER 4

  Doctor Robichaud is sitting behind his desk, protected by walnut veneer, piles of papers, his white coat, and a rack of coloured pens. He clears his throat and says, “We think you originally contracted tuberculosis when you were a small child. We’ve got hold of the x-rays from when you were hospitalized for pneumonia—there’s evidence of some tuberculosis activity. It wasn’t picked up at that time, so of course you weren’t treated with the appropriate drugs. You recovered and the disease went dormant for some years, but without proper drug therapy…” He spreads his hands and shrugs. “Reactivation was always a possibility. So. Here you are.”

  Just one of those things.

  They didn’t pick it up? What does he mean—didn’t pick it up? What kind of clueless fools were reading my x-rays? Who can I sue for gross incompetence? Who can I kick in the shins? Punch in the nose? I want names and addresses.

  I was four years old when I was hospitalized with pneumonia. I’d been miserable and feverish for a week, a
nd the doctor came by the house one night and suddenly they were packing my suitcase and bundling me into the car. I’d been a trouble, I thought. I’d been bad to get sick, and now they were punishing me by sending me away. They put me in a small white room, in my pyjamas, gave me new books and a pair of red velvet slippers with bells. Then they left me.

  When I was alone I cried a little—softly, so no one would hear. I wasn’t a baby and I wouldn’t let them see me cry, even when they gave me monster needles full of milky white penicillin. There were lots of those, too. I thought I’d die. After a week of torture, they sent me home.

  “What would have made it reactivate?” I ask Dr. Robichaud.

  “Well, there are any number of causes. Primarily it’s the result of a depressed immune system. You get run down, and the disease takes hold again. The bacilli are just waiting for an opportunity, a bad cold, fatigue, stress…” He pauses, then hurries on. “Any number of things.” He’s uncomfortable, and well he should be. Stress—he didn’t mean to say that, how indelicate of him. Yes, I’ve been under a hell of a lot of stress. The Family Tragedy. Poor Little Gwen MacIntyre. There, I’ve said it, but not to the indiscreet doctor. For all I know he could have been trying to trick me, to get me to “talk about it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  She comes for you at dawn.

  She calls your name, taps you on the shoulder. Shakes a little harder when you don’t respond, or try to shrink deeper into the mattress. Open your eyes, and she’s standing there, all in white: white dress, white shoes, white stockings, white hat with a black band, white sweater draped over her shoulders because the windows have been open all night and it’s cold, as usual, in your room. In China they wear white for funerals, I’ve read. The wheelchair is pulled up to the side of your bed.She’s in a hurry; there will be others she must hunt down and haul off before breakfast.