The Calling Read Online Free PDF

 
    It never stops.
    The whistle.
    The sound is hollow, rising from a cork ball enclosed by red plastic. His mother no longer has the strength to blow had---the cancer has made certain of that---so the sound comes out as a soft song, like the chirring of a cricket somewhere off in another part of the house, just barely audible. But there. Always unmistakably there.
    Blair buries his head beneath his pillow. He feels like a little boy again, trying to close out the world because he just isn’t ready to face up to what is out there. Not yet. Maybe never, he thinks. How do you ever face up to something like cancer? It never lets you catch up.
    It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning now.
    And just across the hall …
    Even with his eyes closed, he has a perfect picture of his mother’s room: the lamp on her nightstand casting a sickly gray shadow over her bed, the blankets gathered at her feet. Behind her, leaning against the wall, an old ironing board serves as a makeshift stand for the IV the nurse was never able to get into mother’s veins. And the television is on. In his mind, Blair sees it all. Much too clearly.
    He wraps himself tighter in the pillow.
    The sound from the television is turned down, but he still thinks he can hear a scene from Starsky and Hutch squealing from somewhere across the hallway.
    Then the whistle.
    A thousand times he had heard it calling him … at all hours of the night … when she is thirsty … when she needs to go to the bathroom … when she needs to be moved to a new position … when she is in pain. A thousand times. He hears the whistle, the whirring call, coming at him from everywhere now. It is the sound of squealing tires from the street outside his bedroom window. It is the high-pitched hum of the dishwasher, of the television set, of the refrigerator when it kicks on at midnight.
    Everywhere.
    He has grown to hate it.
    And he has grown to hate himself for hating it.
    An ugly thought comes to mind: why … doesn’t she succumb? Why hasn’t she died by now? It’s not the first time he’s faced himself with this question, but lately it seems to come up more and more often in his mind. Cancer is not an easy thing to watch. It takes a person piece by piece …
     
    “ My feet are numb.”
    “ Numb?”
    “ Like walking on sandpaper.”
    “ From the chemo?”
    “ I don’t know.”
    “ Maybe …” Blair said naively, “maybe your feet will feel better after the chemo’s over.” He had honestly believed that it would turn out that way. When the chemo stopped, then so would her nausea and her fatigue and her loss of hair. And the worst of the side effects had stopped, for a while. But the numbness in her feet … that part had stayed on, an ugly scar left over from a body pumped full of dreadful things with dreadful names like doxorubicin and dacadbazine and vinblastine. Chemicals you couldn’t even pronounce. It wasn’t long before she began to miss a step here and there, and soon she was having to guide herself down the hallway with one hand pressed against the wall.
    “ Sometimes I can’t even feel them,” she once told him, a pained expression etched into the lines of her face.
    She knows, Blair had thought at the time. She knows she’s never going to dance again. The one thing she loves most in the world, and it’s over for her.
     
    The heater kicks on.
    There’s a vent under the bed where he’s trying to sleep. It makes a familiar, almost haunting sound, and for an instant, he can’t be sure if he’s hearing the soft, high-pitched hum of the whistle. He lifts his head, listens. There’s a hush that reminds him of a hot summer night when it’s too humid to sleep. But the house seems at peace, he decides.
    She’s sleeping, he tells himself in a whisper. Finally sleeping.
    For too long, the endless nights have haunted him with her cancerous likeness. She is like a butterfly: so incredibly delicate. She’s lying in bed, her eyes half closed, her mouth