The Sickroom: A Novella Read online

  Openers

  Copyright © Shayna Krishnasamy 2010

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 9780981335223

  Cover Photography: Jot

  Contents

  Excerpt from The Sickroom

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Sickroom

  One morning, about a week and a half into my lying-in (as Aunt Vera called it, though I didn’t understand why it made her hunch her shoulders and giggle), I woke up with a burning fever. Sweaty and furious, I kicked off the covers and wiped at my face and neck, my fingers coming away greasy and wet. At first I thought it was nighttime as the sun had still been up when I’d collapsed into sleep at eight the night before, exhausted from nothing more than an evening of sitting in bed playing Monopoly with the boys. (They couldn’t enter the attic, so they’d set the board up at the bottom of the stairs. There’d been a lot of calling out of which square I’d landed on, and throwing of dice up and down the stairs, and I was pretty sure Collin had been stealing from the bank.) Only as I gazed through the window at the sky growing increasingly blue did I realize, with pitiful dismay, that it was early morning and I’d slept nearly twelve hours without feeling the least bit rested.

  I curled on my side, one arm stuck awkwardly beneath me, my legs flung one over the other, and stared miserably at the worn rug. The room would only get hotter as the sun rose and my fever would spike and Collin would annoy me and swallowing a gulp of water without crying out in pain would be the big achievement of the day. As much as I’d loved my sickness the week before, as much as I’d clung to it, I had to begrudgingly admit the truth: I was bored out of my mind and there was no end in sight.

  Reluctantly I set my feet on the ground. I had to pee and I was hungry for the first time in days. I’d hardly eaten dinner the night before and Aunt Vera had wrapped it up for me (for later, dear, she’d said, patting me on the cheek sympathetically, as though to miss out on her pot roast was the worst thing that had ever happened to me). A fly buzzed around my head as I tried to gather my strength to make the ambitious trek downstairs. I swatted at it in annoyance, swinging my arm violently through the air, but it kept at it. It landed on my arm and I gave it a generous slap, but missed. Then it crawled up my back. It really had it out for me, this fly. It wouldn’t let me be, and I was in no mood!

  Tripping to my feet in my pajama bottoms and undershirt, I fought at the air like a tiger, whipping at the fly with the first and last of my strength until I was left panting, and still it flew, still it buzzed. I jumped. I swung. I would squash that fly if it took everything I had!

  Only when I finally nailed it right between my palms (an exalted yes! escaping my lips in a lunging rush), only then did I notice the furry blonde head bobbing in and out of view behind the table and hear the faint slap-stroke of paintbrush on canvas.

  Macon.

  Swallowing (and wincing), my palms still clasped together, I stood in the middle of my side of the room, wondering vaguely if I ought to smuggle back to my bed or keep on as though I hadn’t seen her, filling quickly with that gnawing, uncomfortable feeling of having thought you were alone when you weren’t. I looked down at my clothes. Was I decent? Had I said anything out loud that could be used against me? And what was she doing here anyway, while I was sleeping? Wasn’t that a little creepy?

  I was sure she hadn’t noticed me—that would be just like Macon. I was positive I could just sneak down the stairs (though my ability to do this had long since depleted), until all of a sudden she stood up. She hadn’t looked my way this whole time. She’d been crouching in front of her canvas, painting away. Now she wiped her fingers on her shirt over and over (at least twenty times she wiped, as though she’d forgotten she was doing it), and said, Should I get my mother?

  I looked down at the fly smeared on my palms. It had grossly expanded in death and one of its legs was twitching. It was pretty disgusting. If Handle had been here I would have showed it to him and he would have been thrilled to pieces. But Handle wasn’t here.

  I took a defiant stance. What? I asked contemptuously. (I sounded a bit like Collin when he was speaking to Handle. Like, what right did Handle have speaking in his presence? Like he should know his place and stay in it.)

  Macon looked at me and blinked. She didn’t seem to have heard the tone. She was still wiping her hands but more lightly now, winding to a stop.

  Do you need help getting down the stairs? she asked.

  Excuse me? I scoffed. What do you think I am? I don’t need help getting down the stairs! Geez! Then I laughed what was meant to be a haughty chuckle but came out more like a nervous twitter. I was already so tired, just from standing, that I thought my legs might give out again. (Maybe this time I would land on Macon.)

  Oh, okay, Macon said and turned back to her painting.

  (Oh, okay, would become the classic Macon response, one I would come to tease her about. She said it whenever she couldn’t figure out what the other person meant, or what to do, or what to say. One time in the middle of an argument, after I called her a particularly vicious name, her face flooded red and she screeched, Oh okay! at me, and we both burst out laughing. But that was all ahead of us.)

  I swayed on my feet, trying to convince myself that I ought to go back to bed. Downstairs I could hear the house waking up—Handle rattling through the drawers looking for his cereal spoon, Uncle Charlie running his shower. Maybe I fell asleep a little.

  Next thing I knew Macon was standing right in front of me, hand on my wrist. I stared down at the top of her head. She was a lot shorter than me, more so than I’d realized. She was small for her age and I’d just started the first of many growth spurts I would have to suffer through (earning me such nicknames as string bean and totem pole and CN Tower. Kids I knew were pretty unimaginative). There were red paint splatters in her hair, even all the way at the back, almost buried in her bun. I wondered how they’d gotten there. Was she throwing paint in the air? Doing handstands on the canvas? I felt my eyelids drooping closed again.

  Then I felt Macon prying my hands open and wiping gently at my palms with a rag. She was getting the fly off. I’d forgotten it was there.

  She led me to my bed and put the cover over me. I found that I was shivering. She stared at me for a few minutes with her intense blue eyes. Only in this strange state between waking and sleep would I have allowed such a thing.

  Jacob, she said, you look so tired.

  I nodded. I was so tired. So, so tired.

  She shook her head sadly, as though it broke her heart. She said, Maybe I’ll paint you: Jacob So Tired.

  I really liked that idea. It almost woke me back up.

  She turned her attention to the rag and the fly, bringing the dirty fabric right up to her face. The fly was all smushed in with the dirt and the million colours of paint. Later, when I woke up again, I would find those same colours all over my palms.

  A fly in the paint, I mumbled, as I turned over and drifted back to sleep.

  About a week later, when once again I awoke feverish and hungry, I drifted over to the stairs. Leaning against a table leg by the door was a painting of a boy sleeping in a disheveled bed, his arm flung over his head. There were French doors hanging open to reveal a view of the sea, and in the corner, on the table, a can of paint had overturned, spilling its bright blue contents over the dull brown floor. If you looked closely you could see the fly.

&
nbsp; In tiny letters at the bottom, Macon had written The Sickroom.

  And the boy in the bed was me.

  Part 1

  During a baseball game on the first day of my visit I collapsed on my cousin Handle who was trying to steal second. I was a last-minute stand-in for the second baseman who’d woken up with the chicken pox and who, I was reassured, wasn’t much good anyway. I wondered if they knew I’d likely be even worse. Handle, who was only eight, couldn’t quite heave me off him and was left squirming for a quarter of an hour as the game went on without us (my enormous head, he later told me, was the problem. Jesus, Jacob, he said. Your brain weighs about a ton and a half! I’m not kidding. Handle was never kidding). Handle’s best friend Remmy, also the umpire, laughed so hard he cried and the tears made moist salty trails down either side of his dirty face. Handle described this to me—as well as the perilous adventure of carrying me back to the house without the use of the wagon he’d recommended—as I lay in bed hours later, swaddled in blankets, yearning desperately, equally, for three things: My father’s voice on the other end of the line; my mother’s purple lambswool sweater, which always made me feel better, even in the heat; and a room with a door that locked.

  The three things I could not have.

  I had mono and the majority of my time for the rest of the summer would be spent in bed, in the attic—the sickroom—of my aunt Vera’s house in Christie, Ontario, while my parents considered sending me to a less conservative school, a place where the bullying wouldn’t follow me. While my father tried to come to terms with everything that I might be under my mother’s reproachful gaze.

  The visit to see my cousins had been planned for months and for the entirety of that time I’d been dreading it. Collin and Handle weren’t like any boys I was friends with, or any I wanted to be friends with. At lunch that first day (a mere thirty minutes before my humiliating collapse and exile) they were shoving and yelling, talking with their mouths full, scrambling in and out of their chairs, burping and fighting and back out the door before they’d finished chewing their last bite, their chairs rocking into place long after they’d disappeared. They were always talking, questioning, but never really listening, which was comforting and also irritating. They were the type of boys who assumed (no, knew) that all other boys were like them—interested in sports and winning and getting away with things—and that I must be too, however scrawny and serious I looked. I must be too because that’s what boys were like, period.

  Before that summer we’d only ever seen each other at weddings and funerals, and very few people in our family had gotten married or died in my thirteen years. We hardly knew each other at all and yet they acted like they knew me completely, and since I hadn’t protested right off the bat I was forced to go along with it. Just that one day of pretending to be like them had left me so exhausted I wasn’t surprised I’d collapsed. It seemed inevitable.

  Aunt Vera said I shouldn’t have been out on the field at all, weak as I was, and chastised the boys vehemently, swatting at their limbs and ignoring their protests that they hadn’t know I was sick ahead of time. How could they know ahead of time? Were they psychic? Did they read minds? Did they have eyes in the back of their heads (Handle’s contribution, which made no sense, though only I seemed to notice)?

  She had Uncle Charlie carry me up the stairs, though I probably could have made it myself with a few breaks to catch my breath. She was awfully concerned that I’d be unhappy with the attic room, so far removed from everyone else, and the daybed so lumpy, and all of Macon’s clutter. But it had to be done. They couldn’t very well let me sleep on the cot in Collin’s room and risk my infecting him and the others (though that didn’t stop Handle from coming up to visit me several times that night, to check if my eyes had rolled back in my head, or if I’d barfed up blood, or if my tongue had turned black. Handle seemed to think having mono was like dying very slowly, which made me a great favourite. He’d waited his whole life to see death up close, he told me. He wasn’t about to miss it).

  The attic was a long rectangular space, the same size as the entire first floor of the house, with large dormer windows on either end, one just above my bed. When I woke up from one of my extended blackouts (I was unconscious so constantly that it couldn’t really be called sleeping) I would hear my cousins calling and laughing outside and feel safe in the assurance that no amount of their insistence could drag me from this bed to play some game I barely understood and wouldn’t enjoy. Aunt Vera—her thick body blocking the doorway, hands on hips—would never allow it.

  My sickness had saved me from a summer of torture and for that I coddled it, allowing it to grow. I loved my sickness like it was my only friend (which, for a short time, it truly was). The last thing I wanted was for my friend to leave me healthy and alone.

  I couldn’t bear to be without it.

  The daybed had been used as a sickbed before, as well as a guest bed and makeshift fort and place of banishment for the punished child. There was a side table on which I stacked my books (though there were more under the table and in my suitcase at the foot of the bed, and Uncle Charlie had said he would get me any book I wanted from the local library, a kind of dream offer for me), and a little dresser mostly full of old clothes and odds and ends. There was a rug on the floor and a mirror and a floor lamp. There were old toys and games lying around (I’d sat painfully on a metal racecar when Uncle Charlie had first put me down, though I’d masked my screech of pain in a cough). It was all set up like a little room, though there weren’t any walls to close it off. It was a sort of haven from the storm.

  The other side of the room was the storm.

  The other side of the room was Macon’s.

  As little as I knew of Collin and Handle, I knew even less of Macon. I’d never really taken much notice of her. She was a girl, after all, and at twelve Collin was closer to my thirteen than she was at ten. She was nothing like her brothers; pale and blonde to their tan and dark, silent where they were loud, slow where they were fast.

  And there was the matter of her name. My mother had always wondered (aloud, as she liked to do) why they hadn’t just replaced the K sound with a G and called her Meagan. The two were so close, as if Macon had been so close, at birth, to being normal. But instead Vera and Charlie had gone with Macon (not even a girl’s name, really, according to Mom), a name that rhymed with “bacon”, and ruined her.

  Macon was a lost cause if ever I’d seen one. She wore mismatched shoes and her hair was constantly falling out of its tail. When she spoke her words came out so reluctantly it was like pulling teeth. She never looked anyone in the eye. She was a little pudgy around the middle, with solid, round limbs like a boy, and she was always hunching her shoulders, making it seem like she had no neck. Her gaze often wandered about, distracted by something in the air only she could see, and she had only one interest in the world.

  Macon liked to paint.

  I’d always known this about her. There was a family story that was brought out whenever we all got together about Macon picking up a brush for the first time when she was two and painting a horse. She was a prodigy—brilliant—and there’d been a great fuss about her one year when Aunt Vera entered a painting of hers in some contest without telling her age, and she won by a landslide only they wouldn’t give her the prize. The judges couldn’t believe a four-year-old could paint like that. Every year or so they did a feature about her in the paper (the paper we read at home, not just the Christie Gazette), and every year she was still a prodigy, still brilliant. I wondered when that would run out, when she’d be old enough that her talent would have to be measured against painters her own age and it would really be about the art, and not the novelty of it. I wondered then what the papers would say, and what would happen to Macon.

  I assumed she was full of herself. I assumed this because I knew I would be, if it was me.

  The other side of the attic was full of Macon’s art. There were huge painted canvases covering the walls, right
up to the ceiling and surrounding the window. A big space on the ground was covered in a spattered white sheet; Macon painted directly on the floor. There were also two long tables covered in brushes and paints and cups and sponges and all kinds of other tools I didn’t know the names of. And beyond that were all kinds of things, items of interest it seemed Macon had dragged up herself to provide inspiration for her creations.

  There was the bottom half of a mannequin, and a mannequin head, but no body; a lamp shade with a picture of the world printed on it; a bowl full of shells; a box full of wool in various vibrant colours; an old trombone; a jagged piece of a blue wooden door; a dollhouse; a red tricycle; a ski boot; some broken frames, gold, silver and brown; and art books (which shocked me. Could you be called a prodigy if you studied at it? Was that allowed?) with paint smears down their fronts. It was clear that Macon turned their pages with paint-covered fingers (Macon was always, always, covered in paint). There were even drops of paint on the glossy pictures themselves, inside the beautiful expensive books. I was appalled.

  When I’d been carried into the room, I’d caught a glimpse of a blank canvas sitting primly in the middle of the mess, and that was all. For days afterward I was so weak I couldn’t even sit up, let alone venture across the room to inspect Macon’s chaos. I wasn’t even all that interested. It was my weird little cousin’s space, and she was a genius. So what? I was more intrigued by my book about the Hundred Years’ War. I figured at some point she’d probably come up here. I didn’t think much about it.

  One morning, about a week and a half into my lying-in (as Aunt Vera called it, though I didn’t understand why it made her hunch her shoulders and giggle), I woke up with a burning fever. Sweaty and furious, I kicked off the covers and wiped at my face and neck, my fingers coming away greasy and wet. At first I thought it was nighttime as the sun had still been up when I’d collapsed into sleep at eight the night before, exhausted from nothing more than an evening of sitting in bed playing Monopoly with the boys. (They couldn’t enter the attic, so they’d set the board up at the bottom of the stairs. There’d been a lot of calling out of which square I’d landed on, and throwing of dice up and down the stairs, and I was pretty sure Collin had been stealing from the bank.) Only as I gazed through the window at the sky growing increasingly blue did I realize, with pitiful dismay, that it was early morning and I’d slept nearly twelve hours without feeling the least bit rested.