ONE MORNING A FEW DAYS later Joelle is called out of her first period class and told to go to the principal’s office.
She’s quite sure this has to do with her cutting school and expects to see Carlos herded in beside her. The school has detected the forgery in their absence notes. Or perhaps someone did see them, as Carlos had worried, in a place where they shouldn’t have been that day. Whatever, Joelle needs a few minutes to marshal her defense before turning herself in, and she takes a short detour into the girls’ bathroom.
There she decides to use Aunt Mary Louise’s bad health for her excuse. Carlos will have to fend for himself. She stayed home to watch over Aunt Mary Louise, she’ll say, and forged her own note so Aunt Mary Louise wouldn’t be bothered. Joelle will claim she was scared that “something might happen” to her aunt that day. You can argue scared feelings and get away with it. Besides, it’s not a complete lie. She really is worried about Aunt Mary Louise and lately has been going upstairs to check on her before leaving. Aunt Mary Louise has scoffed at this new show of concern, of course.
“Get out of my sight!” she’d told Joelle yesterday with a half smile. “Can’t a person have any privacy?”
“You can’t if you’re going to fall over and knock yourself stupid,” Joelle had said. There have been other dizzy spells since the one reported to Carlos.
“If I’m going to do that, I’ll let you know,” Aunt Mary Louise had replied. “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know.”
It’s their usual game. If Joelle has learned anything from Aunt Mary Louise, it’s how to joke around when you want to cover something up.
When she finally walks into the school office, Joelle is primed and ready to defend herself, but from the first minute, she sees that something else is going on. The secretaries keep glancing over with sympathetic smiles as she sits, waiting for Mrs. Lincoln, the principal, to call her in. One secretary even offers her a cup of water. Joelle says, “No, thanks,” and glares at her.
When Mrs. Lincoln appears, she doesn’t ask Joelle into her office. With an arm around Joelle’s back, she guides her out to the hall, where they walk toward the front entrance of the school.
“Honey, there’s been an accident at home,” she says with such terrible kindness in her voice that Joelle’s heart takes a leap and begins to pump. “Your aunt has gone to the hospital. Now, don’t worry. Someone will be here to pick you up in a few minutes. You don’t have to come back today if it’s not possible.”
“What happened?”
“I think your family can tell you better than I. They’ll know the details.”
“What details?” Joelle exclaims. “Did Aunt Mary Louise fall?”
“I think so,” Mrs. Lincoln says. “I believe she did.” Her forehead is wrinkled with concern. Her arm squeezes Joelle’s shoulder, then drops off as they approach the door. “Let’s just wait here a moment. I understand someone’s on the way.”
Almost instantly, Vernon’s pickup appears across the parking lot and rattles toward them. This is such an odd sight that Joelle forgets for a minute to be frightened. Vernon has, literally, never been on the school grounds. He’s always at work. Joelle wonders if it really could be him driving or if someone has stolen his truck. Is it a trick?
But when the pickup pulls closer, she sees Vernon’s slouching bulk through the windshield. Mrs. Lincoln gives her shoulder another irritating squeeze before Joelle can fend her off. Then the truck pulls up, and she’s getting in.
“What’s going on?” she finds herself shouting. “Why are you here?” And Vernon, being who he is, doesn’t answer. He puts the truck in gear, steps on the gas, and starts off without even looking at her.
“Where are we going?” Joelle yells, though she already guesses where. They are pulling onto the main road, heading out of Marshfield toward the highway. The hospital is in Westerly, a few exits down. She’s been there herself, for stitches one time when she cut her foot on a piece of glass. Vernon is trying for every bit of power in the old pickup. His messy turkey-farm boot is hard down, grinding the accelerator into the mat.
“She called Emergency. She couldn’t breathe,” he says, speaking for the first time as they pass a car. “They came and got her.”
“When? I was just there!” It’s only nine thirty in the morning. “She was okay when I left, just getting up. What happened?” Joelle asks, remembering how she’d planned her silly lie about Aunt Mary Louise. Now, in a most frightening way, the lie has come to life.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Vernon mutters. He mops his big hand over his face and hunches toward the windshield.
Sometime later, as they’re entering the hospital parking lot, he begins to pound his fist against the steering wheel.
“What?” Joelle cries.
“She wouldn’t see a doctor,” he chokes out. “I told her to go, but she wouldn’t. I should have made her. I should have taken her there myself.”
“You didn’t know she was this sick,” Joelle says.
“Yes, I did! I knew!”
They park and race on foot for the entrance that says emergency patients only. When they get inside, Vernon talks to someone in a glass booth. He goes off with a nurse, so Joelle finds a chair, but she immediately has to stand up again and walk around to keep her stomach down. It’s rising, threatening to turn over. To calm herself, she tries to think back to what Aunt Mary Louise looked like when she left this morning. She was on her feet, making the usual remarks. It was going to be “Italian night” that evening, she’d announced. Joelle was supposed to pick up some dry pasta and French bread on the way home.
“You want French bread for Italian night?” Joelle had kidded her.
“Well, what’s the difference? There’s no difference that I can ever tell.”
And Joelle had explained that French bread was long and skinny while Italian bread was short and fat, and that there was a tremendous difference to people who knew bread.
“I’m not one of those!” Aunt Mary Louise had declared cheerfully. “All I know is how to make a good American tomato sauce, which I’m going to pass on to you tonight. It’ll come in handy someday when you get hitched.”
This was another joke between them. “Getting hitched” is Aunt Mary Louise’s phrase for getting married, which, as she’s well aware, is positively the last item on Joelle’s list of things to do.
Suddenly, Vernon is back. He wanders out into the waiting room and looks vaguely around for her. Joelle is beside him in a flash.
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
He shakes his head.
“Why not? How is she?”
“She’s gone,” Vernon tells her in a bewildered voice.
“Gone! Where?”
Vernon waves a hand, aimlessly. He looks over at the glassed-in office where a nurse hovers, shuffling a pile of documents.
“Just . . . gone,” he repeats. Everything in his face is sagging. The whites of his eyes have turned pink.
Joelle stands very still. She stares at him and tries not to understand what this means.
“Where did they take her?” she asks in a dumb voice.
“Not yet,” Vernon answers, just as dumbly. “I have to sign some papers first.” He wanders toward the nurse behind the glass.
“Are you all right?” Joelle hears her ask him. “Can we give you something? The doctor will be here in a minute to explain. I know it must be a shock for you.”
Since he apparently has to fill out and sign a large number of forms, she kindly invites him to come in and use an empty seat in her office.
“Is this your daughter?” Joelle hears the nurse ask.
And Vernon answers, “Yes, it is.”
“She can come in too.”
“She says you can come in too,” Vernon turns and tells Joelle, as if he’s translating from a foreign language. And it might as well be, because Joelle can’t understand one thing that’s going on. She’s standing and staring at the nurse in the glassed-in office and at the papers that need to be signed and at Vernon, who has just called her his daughter. And nothing is real. It’s like a dream you half wake from in the middle of the night and it’s too bizarre to even try to figure out.
“Come in, dear,” Joelle hears the nurse say again. “You can sit over there.”