They were tired the next day. Tabitha had promised Eleanor that she could sleep in the car, but she couldn’t. Her mother dozed for half the drive, but Eleanor hadn’t closed her eyes since she heard the footsteps in the snow the night before.
After the Venns left and Eleanor recovered her senses, she collapsed into a hysterical fit of laughing and crying. Tabitha made some warm milk and sat with her until she couldn’t stay awake any longer and fell asleep on the couch. Eleanor watched her mother sleep and envisioned the far off Canadian tundra she had almost fled to that night.
In the morning, she cleaned up and made herself some breakfast, then helped prepare Tabitha for the long drive and the doctor’s visit. At eight fifteen, a state van pulled up in front of their house, crunching the spent fireworks tubes under its tires. The driver honked, and Eleanor led her mother outside and into the back seat.
The driver tried to make small talk. He offered to stop for a drive-thru coffee or a breakfast sandwich, but Eleanor responded with such terse monosyllables that he shut up and drove in silence, leaving her to her thoughts and her mother to sleep.
Riverton was not a large town. Eleanor had read about large towns, cities, actual cities with millions of people. Riverton was the largest human habitation she’d ever actually entered. She had skirted around larger ones, Denver in fact, but she’d kept to the fringes and gone a long way around.
She was of two minds now about cities. There was the old distrust of people, the concentrated danger for her and her kind that cities represented. But now she imagined also a marvelous melting pot where she could hide unnoticed among the throngs of city dwellers. Cities promised an anonymity not shared by small towns like Jamesford or Riverton, where everyone knew and watched and judged everyone else.
The Riverton Oncology Clinic was a modern glass-and-steel construction that tried to conjure feelings of modern miracles and capable technology. None who visited it more than once kept that feeling long. To Eleanor it was a glistening tombstone. It smelled of lingering death and the wicked thing inside her mother that teased and tortured, and now, growing tired of the game, had set itself to her final destruction.
Tabitha told Eleanor that the day they met, she’d meant to die. She’d checked herself out of a Salt Lake City hospital by simply walking out the door. No one stopped her. She drove home, changed clothes, let her dog out, and never went back to her apartment. She drove north at speed. She’d crossed into Idaho before she knew where she was going and why.
Turning toward Yellowstone, the most wonderful place she’d ever been, she conjured happy childhood memories of bears and fishing with her father, her mother sweeping out a rented camper with a borrowed broom. That was where she’d die.
She knew the diagnosis was fatal. She was a nurse. She knew the odds, and no one pretended there was a chance of recovery. She might stay alive a year or ten, but the cancer would kill her as certainly as night followed day. Her doctor told her bluntly that the only way it wouldn’t kill her was if she died sooner by another, less horrific means. She’d worked as floor nurse long enough to know what was ahead of her and to despair.
She knew a place by the lake on a beach—a special spot where she had seen the rabbits so many years ago when her parents were still alive. There she would eat her pills. She’d wash the entire bottle down with cheap whisky she bought in West Yellowstone. And then, when her head grew dizzy, she would swim out into the cold mountain water and never look back. She would cross the lake or she would die. She would die.
It had been a bright beautiful day as Eleanor remembered. She’d watched Tabitha from behind a thick pile of deadfall past the parking lot. Eleanor had felt exposed. She glowed like a fish’s underbelly in the light, and felt a need to hide, but something about the woman in the little car interested her.
Tabitha tossed her keys onto the seat, and, carrying only a purse, left it with a certain finality Eleanor found alarming. She’d followed the woman to the lake, hurting her feet, still woefully soft and inadequate for the forest.
She watched her sit down and stare out over the lake for a long time.
Tabitha did not know Eleanor was there until the girl called out. Eleanor was sure she’d heard her clumsy footsteps in the pine needles, but Tabitha later swore she hadn’t.
When she was right behind Tabitha, Eleanor said, “Asdzaan.”
Tabitha was surprised to see the naked girl standing so close behind her. She was covered in dust and dried mud, briars and twigs in her hair, cuts on her legs, mosquito bites everywhere.
“Asdzaan,” she repeated.
“I’m sorry, dear,” Tabitha had said. “I don’t understand.”
“Woman,” she translated.
“Yes,” Tabitha said.
“Bidin,” she’d said then shook her head. “Need,” she said. “Alone me.”
“Oh, baby girl,” said Tabitha standing up and opening her arms. “Come to me.”
And Eleanor had.
When she retold this shared story the many times over the many years, Tabitha would often say that at that moment, when the little girl had run into her arms, Eleanor had saved her and given her the strength to live.
She had fought ever since to stay alive. “To repay the favor, if for nothing else,” she’d say.
The van dropped them off and they arranged for a short shopping trip before heading back to Jamesford. The driver was in no hurry. He was there for the duration with nothing waiting for him at home. Tabitha thanked him and wished him a good lunch.
The waiting room was bright and cheerful. Arrangements of fresh flowers masked the scent of desperation. A professional decorator, fond of yellows and pinks, had tried to conjure feelings of spring mornings, healthful breezes, and enduring life with swirling colors and wavy lines. He had done the best he could, but the atmosphere in the office still weighed heavy with misery.
The staff busied themselves and avoided direct eye contact with the patients. Under orders, they forced pleasant, hopeful expressions onto their weary, spent faces. Eleanor knew they had seen death a thousand times and were tired of it. They did not want to know Tabitha. They refused to even remember her name and had to look it up each time even though she’d come here every other month for over seven years. By their calculations, surely Tabitha was a miracle, a long-time cancer survivor beating the odds if only by one day, one month, one year. But it was only delay, and they couldn’t allow an emotional investment in her or her daughter. It would only lead to sorrow when the inevitable happened.
Eleanor waited on a bench and tried to ignore the neutered, upbeat music filtering down from hidden speakers. She waited while Tabitha was radiated, scanned, probed, and stabbed. She’d be strapped to a gurney for an hour while one-eyed robots stared through her skin, determining the cancer’s advance. They’d promised to bring her back to sit with her mother when the tests were done—about an hour. Of course they lied. She knew it was two at least, likely three.
Eleanor also knew what the doctors would tell her. They’d say it in their most compassionate voices, using their carefully chosen vocabulary that kept hope alive when none should. The cancer had spread. Eleanor had smelled it on her mother’s breath, heard it in her stiffening bones, seen it her mother’s weak steps and uneaten food. She’d seen it in her mother’s eyes and knew that Tabitha also knew.
“The goal will be to get some meat on your bones,” the doctor said. “Bread, chocolate, ice cream, and high fats. Go for it,” he said like he was letting a child out for recess. “Get a few pounds on you and we’ll try more ‘aggressive’ therapy.”
He handed Eleanor a stack of prescriptions. “Take these to the pharmacist for your mother,” he told her.
“Are these the same as before?” she asked him.
“I increased the pain medicine and added something to perk up her appetite,” he said. And then he looked at Tabitha. “If you know anyone who knows anyone, you could also try that other thing,” he said and winked.
Tabitha nodded. “Are these expensive?” she asked.
“They should be the same,” said the doctor. “Are they too expensive?”
“No, just curious,” said Tabitha.
The doctor opened a drawer and took out a box of pills individually packaged. He checked the expiration date. “Perfect. Okay, when you run out of these, fill the prescription,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get you some more.”
“Are you sure?” asked Tabitha.
“They expire at your next visit. It’s perfect. I won’t have to send any back.”
“What about your other patients?”
“I’ll call the drug rep. He’ll be here in an hour with more samples. Trust me. He will.”
Eleanor helped her mother dress. When they were done, the doctor came in with two more boxes. “There,” he said. “This should tide you over until next time.”
Eleanor took the boxes.
“That’ll save us a bunch of money,” Tabitha said when they were in the van. “We have enough for a prom dress now.”
“What?” Eleanor said. She’d entirely forgotten about the dance. She’d focused entirely on her ailing mother. “No,” she said. “We can’t afford a new dress.”
“Okay, then let’s see what’s at the secondhand.”
When they stopped, the driver offered to unfold a wheel chair from the back for Tabitha, but she refused it. She leaned on Eleanor for support, and together they shopped for a dress.
“Of course I’m assuming you’ll go with David,” said Tabitha.
“Do you think I should?” she asked.
“Of course I do,” her mother said.
“But you’re sick.”
“I’ve been sick for a long time.”
“What if you—”
“Then I do,” she cut in. “Live, Eleanor. Live. This is life. Grab it. Dance. I’ll be fine for one night. I survived without you for a week, didn’t I?”
“I’ll be noticed,” she said, thinking she should tell her mother about the new gossip. Tabitha had forgiven her for what she’d done, helped her recovery, and even, finally, when Eleanor was still in pain, barely able to move, but finally herself again, her mother had kissed her forehead ever so tenderly and told her she was proud of her. She called her “the bravest little girl she’d ever known with a heart as big as a bear.” It was something her real mother had once said to her, or something like it. She couldn’t remember telling Tabitha about it, but it made her happy, and she recovered faster for it.
“Eleanor, you’re a beautiful girl no matter what you look like. People are going to see that, the good people especially. You’re going to be noticed. Let’s stretch a little bit, come out from under our rock and live a little.”
Eleanor wasn’t sure. Survival instinct told her to remain in the shadows, dart out, scavenge, and run for cover. It was that instinct that had kept her alive. It was the same instinct that had nearly driven her from this woman’s side the night before into a frozen wasteland, never to meet again. She realized then that she had made this decision last night. By taking that step into the house instead of out the back door, she had given herself up to trusting Tabitha. She had overridden a millennium of instinct, decades of practice, and her own personal fear, for trust in Tabitha, the dying woman she’d met at the lake.
“I think I’d like something in blue,” she said to her mother. “Maybe something with puffy sleeves, you know, like Anne of Green Gables wore?”
Tabitha laughed. “Do you even know what that looks like?”
“No,” Eleanor admitted.
“We’ll just see what they have.”