The Sickroom: A Novella Page 2

  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.

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

  And the boy in the bed was me.

  But that was still a week away. Hours later, when I woke up properly, Macon was gone. Aunt Vera had left a tray of food by my bed and I nibbled at it, playing with it more than eating really, stirring the mashed potatoes and gravy into a soup, then torpedo-bombing the pot roast with it. (This was just the sort of thing that would send my mother into a frothing fury and which Aunt Vera let me get away with easily, clucking her tongue when she took away my plate and bringing me a heaping serving of coconut-cream pie as a reward. Being ill and away from home certainly has its perks.) When I bored of my annihilation of the roast, I put on my slippers and brought my plate to the little table by the door (where, later, on a covert visit to the attic, Collin would accidentally slap his hand into the gooey mess and react with girlish horror, and Handle would turn to me with a smile of perfect delight). As I turned back to my bed I caught sight of Macon’s newest painting out of the corner of my eye and felt a faint stirring of interest.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped into the other side of the room for the first time.

  I still had half a roll clutched in my hand and I found myself mashing it compulsively. I was nervous. Though I’d never been told I wasn’t allowed in Macon’s side of the room, it seemed like an unwritten rule. What if I disturbed something and it ruined one of her paintings? I crouched down in front of the sheet of canvas then raised my head to peek at my side of the room from Macon’s point of view. The bed seemed awfully close, much closer than I’d imagined, as though the dimensions of the attic had changed when I’d stepped onto this side. Or maybe I was just delirious.

  I turned my attention back to the painting. It looked like an aerial photo of Aunt Vera’s
house. There was the front lawn and the porch and the roof and the backyard. She’d done the neighbouring houses too. The colours were vibrant, much brighter than they were in real life, and she’d painted the streets purple. One backyard led into the other all the way to the library. I wondered how she’s figured it all out, if she’d actually walked all the streets and made sketches, or if she’s just made it up. It was detailed and absorbing, but I didn’t like it, just as I didn’t like most of the paintings on the walls.

  I sighed, disappointed. I muttered, I guess this is what genius looks like.

  I was about to heave myself back to my feet when I noticed a pile of canvases leaning against the wall just under the window. They were half-wedged behind an armoire and it took some effort to squeeze them out, but I did it. I pulled until they suddenly popped free and I fell backward on my butt, just like in the movies. I shot a furtive glance at the door, worried that someone might have heard, but nobody called, nobody came. It occurred to me to wonder what time of day it was and where Macon might be at that moment. With my erratic sleeping pattern and only intermittent interaction with the rest of the family, I’d sort of given up on time.

  The canvases had fanned out like a pack of cards and I shoved them roughly into a pile, leaning heavily on my wrists. I was fading fast. I shuffled through the paintings quickly, already regretting the whole escapade. They were mostly half-finished attempts or early versions of the ones hanging on the wall. I felt I’d wasted my time and energy. The last thing I wanted was to be caught red-handed, lying asleep on this very spot. It seemed frustratingly possible.

  Then I came to the last painting and knew it had been worth it.

  It was an underwater painting of a lake. The water was beautifully done in greens and blues. I thought it must have taken Macon the longest time to get it right, and it was; it was perfect. It looked just like lake water looked when you opened your eyes after you dove, when you were swimming for the surface. Dotted through the water were six fish (well, eight if you counted the back fins of two on the left side). I didn’t know their names, but they looked real. I thought one might be a carp, and I made a mental note to look up the others. My favourite one had orange spots. I liked the clueless expression on his face. Then (and this was the part that made me catch my breath with wonder), at the sandy bottom of the lake, between the rocks and seaweed, Macon had painted a little war. A battalion of green men faced off against an army of grey, their size dwarfed by the gigantic fish swimming peacefully above. They looked amazingly real, not like real soldiers, but just like the plastic army toys. She’d arranged them just as Collin would have while playing: The captain at the rear, urging them on; the grunt on one knee, firing. One figure was peaking out of a sandy foxhole. Another was diving for cover behind a rock.

  It was marvelous.

  I sat their, giddy and grinning, for a good fifteen minutes. (It was the most heartrending experience I’d ever had with a piece of art, and to this day it remains my favourite painting, not just of Macon’s, but of all. I only wish I’d thought to take a picture of it right then. The painting wouldn’t survive the summer.)

  I put the other canvases back where I’d found them, but I couldn’t bear to hide the lake painting away. Instead, I leaned it against the wall beside Macon’s painting area then flung myself into bed and fell right to sleep.

  When I woke up the lake painting was hanging on the wall at the foot of my bed.

  I became obsessed. Looking back on it now, I think my mind was ripe for an obsession just then, silent and unused as it had been for nearly two whole weeks, eager to be distracted from thoughts of home. It might have turned out differently if, say, Uncle Charlie had gotten me All About Birds from the library, as I’d asked him to. I might have spent the summer staring out the window with a pair of binoculars, stalking blue jays and cardinals. But he brought me the book two days too late, and it sat unopened on my bedside table for the next month, ignored.

  Instead of stalking birds, I stalked Macon.

  My first matter of business was to catch her in the act. I wanted to know her patterns, when she set brush to canvas, and why. That way I could be ready to spy when the moment came, instead of sleeping through it as I’d been doing so far. The problem was, Macon didn’t seem to follow any sort of schedule that I could see. The paintings kept appearing (I was keeping close watch at this point, and none of them took my breath away as the lake painting did), but Macon herself never seemed to be around. This paradox had me befuddled for a full day until the obvious answer hit me: She was doing the painting somewhere else.

  It was a bit of a letdown. I was confined to the attic and my great hope had been to have the opportunity to watch her painting up close. In my fantasy of this (there was a lot of time for fantasizing in the sickroom, and as puberty hadn’t yet taken a firm hold on my mind, fantasies of watching my little cousin paint were plentiful and detailed), I could see every stroke, could watch the picture come to life as though it were projected on a screen in front of me, but Macon couldn’t see me. (The impossibility of this scenario hadn’t yet occurred to me.)

  It was the paintings that fascinated me, not Macon. She was still nothing more than an afterthought.

  Then one day, a gift.

  I was approaching the stairs up to the attic after an illegal trip to the kitchen for a handful of Aunt Vera’s chocolate coconut balls (which we kids weren’t supposed to eat if we hadn’t finished our dinner, and I certainly had not) and a mug of tea with honey for my throat, when Macon appeared in the doorway from the hall, also aiming for the stairs. As soon as we noticed each other, we stopped in our tracks. I glanced down at the generous helping of desert in my napkin, shamefaced (I’d taken seven of the balls, more than half of the container). Macon, on the other hand, stared openly at me, as though it didn’t occur to her to look anywhere else. This was the first time we’d come face to face, alone, since she’d hung the lake painting by my bed.

  I didn’t quite know how to talk to her. What did you say to a prodigy cousin you’d only just accepted as talented? What did you say to girls anyway?

  In the end, the moment didn’t need any words at all. Macon’s gaze turned longingly to the stairs, and then back to me. I gave her a nod, an indication that she should go first, and the two of us trooped up to the attic, our footsteps in unison.

  That’s when I took the risk.

  Instead of turning to my side of the room as Macon crouched in front of her canvas and began to mix the paints, I set my food on a shelf by the door, grabbed my blanket from my bed, and plopped myself down at the head of the painting.

  Macon stopped what she was doing and looked up at me, startled.

  It was a dramatic moment, and I really didn’t know how she would react. I knew it was possible she’d ask me politely to go away. I also considered that she might get upset and cry, or throw a tantrum as Handle had done at breakfast (his father had eaten the last of the Mini Wheats). I thought she might give me a dirty look.

  She did none of those things.

  After a moment, she lowered her eyes to the canvas and paused, as though thinking it through, then carefully continued mixing. I was ecstatic. This was as close to my fantasy as I could get! A perfect view of the painting and Macon all but ignoring me.

  When the colours were ready, she put the palette aside and picked up her brush. I was breathless with expectation, practically leaning over the canvas to see what her first stroke would be. But instead of beginning to paint, she said, Why’d you leave it out?

  She raised her eyebrows and glanced at the lake painting. I stiffened. I felt as though I’d been caught in some dreadful forbidden act and I was angry with her for bringing it up. Hadn’t we agreed not to talk about it? Then I realized we’d never agreed to any such thing. Macon and I had never really had a conversation before, at least not while I was fully conscious.

  I-I… I stuttered, flustered, but there was no accusation in Macon’s face. She just seemed curious. It looked like I
might get away with it after all. I discarded the lies that sprang to my lips, the nonchalant dismissals, and opted to tell her the truth.

  I said, It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

  (I was thirteen and had spent my life with my nose in a book. I hadn’t been anywhere yet. I hadn’t seen much. At that time, and at that time only, it was the absolute truth.)

  Macon’s expression brightened, though she didn’t quite smile. She seemed more interested than happy. I had caught her attention, just as she had caught mine.

  She stood up and got my tea and dessert from the shelf, handed them to me. I cupped my hands around the mug and took a sip.

  This is it, you know, she said as she kneeled down.

  It? I asked.

  Jacob So Tired, she said, busying herself with the paint again. Or maybe I’ll call it The Sickroom. I haven’t decided.

  I glanced down at the painting, surprised. There was the outline of a bed, a table and a door, that was all.

  Where am I? I asked.

  She said, You’re a silly boy, like all boys.

  What did that mean? My forehead creased with insult, and she smirked (the first time I’d ever seen her smile).

  She went on, Even though you’re tired, you haven’t gone to bed yet.

  I let out a little snort of appreciation.

  She examined the canvas for a few quiet moments, then she said, Jacob?

  I looked at her reluctantly. I figured this would be the moment she would ask me to leave. I was sure of it. But she surprised me.