Girl in Landscape Read Online Free PDF Page B

obliviously.
    “Boys,” said Clement.
    “Don’t talk to us,” said Raymond, looking up quickly. “We’re household deer.” He tittered. Grinning at the floor, the two boys crawled in a tight circle around Clement’s legs, then Pella’s.
    “Go back to Caitlin’s room,” said Pella.
    “We’re pretending because she
told
us to,” said David, voice rising in a lunatic laugh at the end, his head still ducked almost against Raymond’s buttocks as he crawled.
    “Yeah, anyway, household deer are almost invisible,” said Raymond.
    Pella saw the distance, the unreachableness in Raymond’s eyes.
    “Well, you’re
hospital
deer, and you’re completely visible,” said Clement. “Go back to Caitlin. Come on.” He scooted them back toward her room. He seemed grateful for the interruption, though, his own unbearable giddiness justified by the moment of child’s play. “We’ll be back in a minute.”
    The boys crawled away and through Caitlin’s doorway. Pella imagined Clement crawling off after them.
    “What great kids,” said Dr. Flinch, shaking his head, his expression tortured. Men want problems to be theirs alone, Pella thought. The doctor seemed to want pity, as though this young mother’s illness was difficult for doctors in a way the family couldn’t understand.
    The same way Clement wanted the election to be his private loss, when it belonged to all of them.
    “Yes,” said Clement.
    “What happens to people with that?” said Pella again, demanding the doctor acknowledge her. Clementwas currently useless to Pella. Probably to anyone. Pella knew this version of Clement, the hopeless one who bumbled in a group of three or four people at one side of an auditorium, before stepping up to the podium to deliver a speech that four thousand found riveting and brilliant.
    Except there was no podium, no four thousand now. Just the bumbling.
    “What?” Flinch straightened his face, tried to smile at Pella.
    “Stain in Jell-o,” she insisted. She stared at Dr. Flinch’s hands. His forefinger was covered with tiny pen-marks, little hatches. He will reach into Caitlin’s head, Pella thought.
    “She is a little grown-up, isn’t she?” said Flinch, grimacing at Clement, looking for help.
    Clement didn’t reply.
    “Yes, well, I want to be perfectly truthful,” said the doctor. “Everything depends on the specifics, and the specifics are what we don’t know. Many people with your mother’s illness fight it again and again throughout their lives. No drug or radiation can ever completely eliminate the cancer. But people live years …”
    Or they don’t, Pella understood.
    It would forever be linked for Pella to the collapse of the subway. The tunneling devices that had hollowed out too much of the city’s bedrock, the failed surgical incursion that had destroyed Caitlin, taken too much of her with the tumor, left her half-paralyzed and inarticulateand dying anyway. Hollowed. Why couldn’t she go on reading to them about the Planet of the Archbuilders forever? That would have been a reasonable compromise. They could have moved into the hospital, moved into the dayroom with the crossword puzzles, barricaded Caitlin’s room against the doctors. Instead, when she was returned to the ward everything had mysteriously changed in the unseen operating room, a corner had been turned without any explanation, and now they were supposed to say goodbye and it was to a Caitlin who wasn’t herself, wasn’t even whole. Her smile drooped. Her words were thick, frustrated. Clement took them out of school, and every day for ten days they came in the morning for Caitlin’s dwindling minutes of clarity, to hold her hand and hear her try to say she loved them. The Planet of the Archbuilders was never mentioned, though Pella saw that Clement was still quietly making the preparations. The four of them were hypnotized by Caitlin’s fall in slow-motion. Every day she had a little less time. Every day there was less said,