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Chapter 31

Sometime during the night, a nurse had come in and kicked Claire out of Nick’s bed. The nurse had looked appalled; Claire had simply looked annoyed, as she groggily stumbled out of Nick’s bed and into the cot the nurse had brought in for her, muttering something about buzzards.

The next time Nick remembered waking up, it was morning, and a different nurse was standing beside his bed, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his upper arm. “Good morning, Mr. Carter,” she said brightly.

“Morning,” he mumbled back, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. When his hand left his face, he caught sight of Claire stretched out on the cot behind the nurse. He did a double take at first, before the memory of the night before came back to him.

“I didn’t know you were having a guest stay the night,” the nurse commented, noticing where his eyes had landed, upon the sleeping Claire.

“Eh… kind of short notice,” replied Nick, smiling to himself. “She’s my ride home later today – I’m still being discharged, right?” So help him, if they tried to keep him in the hospital another day, he was going to-

“I believe so, yes,” the nurse answered with a short nod, as she jotted his blood pressure down on his chart. “Dr. Robson will have to give you the okay first, of course, but so far everything looks good.” She went on to stick a thermometer in his ear, and when it beeped, she checked the reading and nodded in confirmation. “Your temp’s down to normal.”

“That’s good,” murmured Nick. “When will the doc come by?”

“Probably later this morning, depending on his schedule. I’ll save your bandage change for later, after he’s had a chance to check on the ulcer.” Nick nodded; that was just as well with him. He hated having people poking at his stump all the time. It was still swollen and sore, and the pain didn’t seem to be going away with the infection, much to his annoyance. He was sick of lying around in bed, and he hated having to rely on crutches to get anywhere. Maybe he’d just get a wheelchair and make Claire push him around all day. Oh, she’d love that. He smirked to himself at the thought.

Claire woke just as the nurse was leaving. Moaning throatily, she inhaled deeply into her pillow before lifting her head, her tousled hair falling into her eyes.

“Morning,” Nick called to her, as she clumsily pushed her hair out of her face and blinked over at him, bleary-eyed.

“Morning,” she echoed through a yawn. “Where-? Oh.” She looked around briefly and then rolled over, the cot quivering beneath her as she jerkily shifted her weight. “Remind me again why I chose to sleep on a dinky little cot in a hospital room instead of in a king size bed with satin sheets in a mansion?” she said, sitting up and rubbing the small of her back.

“Cause you missed me,” Nick replied with a cheeky grin.

“Ugh… what was I thinking?” Swinging her legs over the side of the cot and stretching her arms above her head, she shot a smirk in his direction. Then she stood up and moved over to the chair that sat beside his bed. Slumping down into it, she asked, “So… what time is it?”

Nick looked up at the small clock on one of the walls. “Seven-thirty.”

“Have you had breakfast yet?”

“No,” he said. “A nurse just left a menu though.” He picked up the slip of paper the nurse had left on his bed tray and waved it at her.

“Oh fun… what’s on the menu for today?” They both read over the items listed on the menu card. It contained many of the standard breakfast dishes, but Nick had learned to avoid those and go for the cereal. He circled Rice Krispies, wishing they had Lucky Charms or Cocoa Pebbles instead, and set the menu back down on his tray.

When his breakfast was brought later, he dumped a carton of milk into the bowl of Rice Krispies and listened to them “snap, crackle, pop” while Claire picked apart the muffin she’d bought in the cafeteria downstairs.

After breakfast, it was just a matter of waiting. Nick grew impatient, wishing his doctor would hurry up and get there to discharge him.

Finally, around ten-thirty, Dr. Robson showed up. Nick held his breath as the doctor carefully peeled back the gauze bandages covering the end of his stump. The ulcer there was in no way healed yet, but it did look better than the last time Nick had looked at it. Some of the redness had gone away, and the swelling had definitely gone down. He looked up at the doctor hopefully, waiting for his professional opinion.

“This looks good,” Dr. Robson nodded, causing Nick to wince as he poked at the skin around the open wound. “How does it feel? Are you still in a lot of pain?”

“Eh… it’s still pretty sore,” Nick replied honestly, swallowing.

“When you go home, you can take ibuprofen for that… Advil, Motrin, something like that. If that doesn’t do the trick, call me, and I can prescribe something stronger.”

Nick nodded, perking up at the word ‘home.’ “So…” he started cautiously, “can I go home today then?”

“I see no reason to keep you here any longer. I’ll write you a scrip for more antibiotics that you can take orally. If you take the pills as prescribed for a course of ten days, you should be fine. I’d like to see you in here for a follow-up after that to make sure the infection is gone and the ulcer is healing as it should, and if you have any problems, you should come in sooner than that.”

Nick nodded diligently and paid attention as the doctor gave him instructions for dressing the sore and wrote his prescription. Then, standing up, Dr. Robson said, “Well, I’ll have a nurse come in to take out your IV and bring discharge papers for you to sign. Be sure to stop by the admit desk on your way out to schedule a follow-up appointment for sometime in the next week or two.” With that, the doctor leaned forward to shake Nick’s hand and wish him well, and that was that.

As soon as he was gone, Claire let out a huge sigh. “Thank goodness,” she said with relief. “I’m so glad you don’t have to spend another night here.”

“Me too,” Nick said emphatically. “Now you can take me home and treat me like a king.”

She smirked. “Normally I’d say ‘fat chance’ to that, but I guess you do deserve it. Your wish is my command, your majesty.”

Nick chuckled, rather enjoying those words, even with the sarcastic tone. “I think I could get used to that.”

“Eh, don’t get too used to it,” said Claire, playfully nudging his shoulder. “As soon as you’re back on your feet, no more royal treatment.”

Nick pretended to look wounded, but as much as he liked the sound of “royal treatment,” he hoped it would end sooner, rather than later. This helpless feeling was getting old fast.

***

At home, Claire set up a makeshift bed on the couch for Nick. Then she drove to a nearby deli to pick up bread, lunch meat, and cheese for sandwiches. She and Nick ate lunch, and once the kitchen had been cleaned up, she turned to him and asked, “Feel like giving me a hand?”

“Uhh...” Nick hesitated, wondering how much help he’d be, when he could barely get around.

“You might not have seen yet,” Claire explained, “but I have boxes of my crap piled everywhere. I just need help figuring out where it’s all going to go… I didn’t want to start junking up your place yesterday, when you weren’t around.”

“Oh,” said Nick, nodding. “Yeah, ‘course I’ll help. Where do you wanna start?”

“Hm… how about your office? I know I stuck a lot of stuff in there.”

“Okay,” Nick agreed and boosted himself out of his seat. He reached for his crutches, which were propped up against the kitchen table, and adjusted them under his arms for the short walk to his office. The room, which held his desk and computer, as well as various files and records, his small book collection, his larger comic collection, and his drawing supplies, looked more crowded than he’d ever seen it, with Claire’s neatly-labeled boxes piled in the center.

“You take a seat and just relax,” Claire said, holding Nick’s large, padded leather office chair steady while he sank down onto it. “I’ll go through all this stuff and put it where you tell me to.”

“Put it wherever you want,” Nick told her, flicking his wrist with a casual air. “Like I said, this is your house too now. You don’t need to ask me about everything.”

“Okay,” replied Claire with a shrug. “Well, you can just keep me company then, as long as you’re up to sitting there.”

“I’m fine,” Nick said quickly. Damn stump hurts just as much when I’m lying down as it does when I’m sitting, he added mentally, but he chose not to say that part aloud.

Claire poked through her boxes, checking the labels on each before she selected one to open. “Books,” she said, pulling out several paperbacks. She turned to eye the tall bookshelves that lined his office; there was plenty of space left. “Any preference where they go?” she asked.

“Wherever,” he shrugged. “Like I said…”

“I know, I know,” she nodded. “Just checking.” She went over to the set of shelves that held his own books and rearranged them a little until she had cleared two shelves below his collection. Then she carried her books over in armloads and systematically lined them up on the shelves. She had more than he did, he noticed, as he realized she was shelving them two deep in some areas. He’d never been big on reading for pleasure, but apparently she was; most of her books looked like fictions. He was sitting too far away to be able to read their titles, but he found himself wondering what kind of books she liked. It was funny, the little things they still did not know about each other.

Out of another box, she pulled still more books, although these were different. “Yearbooks?” Nick asked, catching a glimpse of one.

“Yep,” said Claire, holding up a stack of six of them. “Seventh grade through my senior year of high school.”

“Can I see one?” Nick asked with mild interest. He’d looked through one of Brian’s old high school yearbooks once, years ago, when he should have been in high school himself. He hadn’t known any of the students pictured in it, except Brian, of course, but he’d been rather fascinated by it just the same, wondering how his life would have been different if he had gone to high school, rather than been tutored in a hotel room on the road, as he was through most of his teenage years.

“Sure,” said Claire, handing him one from the bottom of the stack. “This is my senior yearbook.”

He took the large volume and opened it up, briefly scanning each page as he leafed through them all. He found the section with the individual photographs of the whole senior class. Class of 1998, it said across the top. That would have been his class, he realized, had he gone on to high school and graduated with his class. His eyes sorted through the pictures, picking out the faces he recognized – Claire… Dianna… Jamie. They all had a list of activities they’d been in during their four years of school, along with a quote. Many of them were the typical inspirational kind about life, and a few were movie quotes or song lyrics. He didn’t bother to read most of them, but he did look at the one below Claire’s name.

“Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words – ‘mank’ and ‘ind’. What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.”
- Jack Handey

Nick snorted as he finished reading the quote and looked up at Claire in amazement. “They let you use a Deep Thought for your yearbook quote?” he asked incredulously, remembering the series of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” from reruns of Saturday Night Live.

She giggled. “Yeah, we could use anything, as long as it wasn’t vulgar.” She shrugged and added, “I thought it was funny, but my parents were slightly annoyed when they saw it. They wanted me to put something deep and meaningful.”

“Like everyone else?”

“Basically.” She rolled her eyes. “What’s the fun in that?”

“Exactly,” he laughed. Eighteen-year-old Claire had apparently been no different from the Claire he knew now. He wished he’d known her back then, although at the time, he’d been so caught up in his relationship with Mandy that he probably wouldn’t have given Claire the time of day, had he met her then. She’d come into his life at a perfect time, five years later. A horrible, perfect time.

Nick continued to flip through the yearbook, as Claire filled his bookcases with her things. When he had finished with the yearbook, she was just tearing open another box. “What’s that?” he asked, watching as she lifted out two smaller boxes, one bright yellow, the other bright pink.

“Scrapbook stuff,” she replied, taking the lid off one of the boxes and tilting it in his direction. Inside, he could see a variety of supplies – scissors, glue sticks, a paper cutter, and other tools he did not even recognize, along with brightly colored pens and markers, stickers, and stencils.

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “My drawing stuff is over there, on the bottom shelf,” he said, pointing at one of the bookcases. “Maybe you can put your stuff down there, with mine.”

“Good plan,” she agreed, carrying the boxes over and wedging them next to his large box of art supplies.

“I haven’t seen your scrapbook,” he commented, as she went back to unpacking.

“This is it,” she said, pulling out a huge album. “You wanna look at it now?”

“Sure,” he replied, curious. He’d heard her mention her scrapbook before, but he’d never actually seen it. He took the large album from her and immediately almost dropped it, surprised by how much it weighed. He set it down in his lap and winced at the pressure it put on his wounded limb. Quickly snatching the book up again, he swiveled around in his chair and placed the album on the desk in front of them. He opened its plum-colored cover and was immediately greeted with a picture of Claire on the first page. His breath caught in his throat as he gazed down at the photograph. It was a beautiful picture, an extreme close-up of her face, developed in black and white. Its simplicity was what made it so gorgeous, and he tore his eyes away just long enough to turn and ask, “Who took this?”

Claire looked up from her unpacking and came over to the desk, smiling sheepishly when she saw the photo he was pointing to. “A friend from college, Jenn. She was an art major with a focus on photography. She took this the summer after our sophomore year… I’d been on chemo for a few months, and all my hair had fallen out.”

At her words, Nick looked back at the picture. He could just see the line of one of her bandanas cutting across her forehead, and below that, he realized her eyebrows were gone, as well as her lashes. Her face looked thinner than it was normally, making her cheekbones more prominent.

“You look beautiful here,” he said softly, sincerely. “I mean it.”

“Thanks,” she said with a little laugh, and he glanced back to find her blushing slightly. “Jenn thought I’d look like Sinead O’Connor… like in that one video of hers, where it’s just a close-up of her face as she’s singing.” Nick nodded, knowing which one she was talking about. “Yeah, but Jenn was the one who looked more like Sinead. There’s a picture of her like this somewhere more towards the back… she shaved her own head when my hair fell out.”

“Really?” Nick asked in surprise. “AJ did the same thing, for me. That’s a good friend.”

Claire nodded. “She was. I mean, she is. I just don’t see her much anymore… she lives in France now, right outside Paris.”

“Oh, France, that’s cool,” said Nick.

“Definitely,” Claire agreed. “I’d love to go over there sometime.”

“You ever been overseas?”

“Just once. I went on a school-sponsored trip to the UK during spring break of my senior year of high school… toured England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was beautiful.”

Nick nodded. “The UK’s nice. We should go to Europe sometime. I’ve been there lots of times on tour, but usually we’re so busy that we don’t get a lot of time to see the sights, so it’d be nice to go on a little vacation over there, travel at our own pace, do our own thing.”

“That would be really cool,” Claire smiled, and as she went back to her unpacking, Nick made a mental note to himself to keep such a vacation in mind.

He turned the page of the scrapbook and found a page with a light yellow background that was filled with baby pictures of her. By herself in her bassinet; in the arms of her mother and father, grandparents, even a little boy version of Kyle; on her stomach on a blanket on the floor, her head raised to the camera. Smiling, he turned the page and found toddler pictures. With fiery red hair and a mischievous grin, she looked like quite the little terror, he thought.

The Claire in the pictures grew as he turned the pages, and soon he was finding pages devoted to kindergarten graduation, first Communion, and children’s birthday parties. Elementary school friends soon turned to junior high ones, and he smiled at pictures of her from those early adolescent years – braces on her teeth, freckles on her cheeks, long hair that was crimped and frizzy. She’d been a pom-pom girl in junior high, he discovered, looking at a picture of her with the squad and another of her at a basketball game, arm-in-arm with a thirteen-year-old Dianna, who had apparently been a cheerleader. There were lots more pictures of her and Dianna, with numerous other friends he did not recognize, in the next few pages, her high school years. He frowned at the many pictures that included Jamie, especially the ones labeled “Prom ’98,” where they looked especially close, he in a tuxedo, she in a long, pale blue gown.

College came next, and after that, he turned to a page with a cheerful blue and yellow striped background and several pictures of Claire with a little boy. He knew exactly when and where these pictures had to have been taken, for Claire was gaunt and hairless again, her head adorned by a bright yellow bandana with a smiley face on it, and the bed she was perched on was unquestionably a hospital bed, in what was unmistakably a hospital room. She wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, just regular clothes, but the little boy sitting up in the bed beside her was.

“Hey, Claire,” he spoke up, “who is this?” He pointed out the little boy when Claire came over to look.

“Oh,” said Claire, “that’s Casey. I got to know him the first time I was in the hospital, right after my diagnosis. I was taking a walk down the halls one night, and I heard him crying… his parents weren’t around, and he was scared... maybe of the dark, maybe of the hospital, maybe of everything, I don’t know. Anyway, I popped my head in his doorway just to see if he was all right, and somehow I ended up sitting with him and reading a story to him because no one else had to the time to do that. He calmed down for me and fell asleep, and when the nurses found out, they let me come back to do the same thing the next night. His mom had just had a baby, see, and his dad worked night shift a lot, so neither of them could stay overnight at the hospital with him.”

“So you kept hanging out with him at night,” Nick finished for her knowingly.

She nodded. “Yep. He was a cool little kid. Only six years old, but he’d been through a hell of a lot already. He had leukemia, like me, and knowing him kind of helped me in a way, ‘cause I told myself, if he can make it through all this stuff, then so can I.”

Nick smiled a little. “So… what happened with him?” he asked, with an air of caution. He knew all too well that the answer may not be a good one.

“Last time I heard anything from his family, he was great,” Claire replied with a smile. “He underwent a bone marrow transplant that same year – he was kind of one step ahead of me in everything – and he hasn’t had a relapse since. I haven’t seen him in awhile, but I got a Christmas card from his parents last Christmas, with a picture of him and his little sister… he looks really good. He’s eleven now.”

“That’s great,” Nick said, smiling in relief, glad to hear a happy ending to this story. His smile grew as he turned a couple more pages in her scrapbook and found pictures of himself with her. There weren’t many, for as long as they’d known each other, but that was his fault more than hers – he was still trying to get over the camera shyness that had been brought on by the changes to his appearance. Still, she had a nice bunch from the previous year’s VMA’s, which he’d brought her to, and some nice photos from their trip to Hawaii, as well as a few of them just hanging out.

“This is really nice, Claire,” Nick said, as he closed the scrapbook with a dull thud. “You must have put a lot of time into this.”

“Yeah… I can do this for a couple of hours without even realizing how much time has passed,” she said. “It’s a good hobby.” With a grin, she added, “I can show you how, if you’d like to give it a try sometime.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “No thanks,” he said with a chuckle. “If I want a scrapbook of myself, I’ll ask a fan to do it – they’re good at that kind of stuff.”

Claire laughed and then looked around the room. Except for a pile of empty boxes she’d stacked up near the door, it looked back to normal again, only even better, because now the bookshelves were filled, with her things as well as his. The way it should be, Nick thought.

“Well,” said Claire, “I think that’s it for this room. Shall we be moving on?”

“Sure,” replied Nick, using the desk to push himself up on his one good leg. He reached for his crutches again and hobbled out of the room behind her, as she led the way to the next one.

***