The Empty Chair

"Justine?" The nurse smiled at the child sitting in the waiting room of the clinic. "Your mom's here, honey." Justine looked up at the nurse and got to her feet slowly. She steadied herself with her hand on the seat of her chair. It was just the right height for a hand rest.

Justine was four years old.

She paused a moment, taking a few deep breaths before letting go of the chair and starting down the hall. She ran her hand over her short black hair. It felt funny. It used to be long, like the princesses in fairy tales. But the chemotherapy had taken her long hair and it was growing back slowly. She used to love it when her mom had brushed and braided her hair. But her mother had seldom had the patience to braid Justine's hair.

Now she never had to bother.

Justine shuffled her feet along the edges of the clinic's corridors, making a game out of seeing how closely she could follow the seams in the flooring.

"Justine!"

The little girl's head snapped up at the sound of her mother's voice, startled, her green eyes wide.

Leah swooped down and caught Justine by the arm. "Hurry up," she said. "I have an appointment in half an hour and I have to drop you off at Sarah's house." She began half dragging, half carrying Justine down the hall. Justine amended her game to seeing how far she could be carried if she took her feet off the floor and pretended she was flying.

"Would you stop that!" Leah dropped Justine's arm. "We're going to be late. Come on, you can walk by yourself."

Justine ran after her mother's rapidly moving feet. She barely made it through the front door behind Leah before it crashed shut. Once in the parking lot, Justine slowed down to look around at the other cars. Cars were interesting to her. There were so many colours and shapes, and then there were the people inside the cars. She never saw any two the same.

Leah took her car keys from her pocket, then stopped short as she realized Justine was no longer behind her. A glance told her that the child was gazing around at nothing again. Lord knows what goes through that kid's mind, she thought. Aloud, "Justine!"

Jerked from her observations, Justine ran as fast as she could to the car. Leah opened the door, put Justine in the seat, snapped the seatbelt into place, slammed the door.

"Thank God for small favours;" she muttered aloud as she walked around the back of the car. "If she wasn't mute, she'd be talking my ear off." Leah couldn't even remember what the doctors had told her when they had first discovered Justine was mute. Just that she was, and always would be.

Leah opened her door, got in and turned the key in the ignition, put her seatbelt on and reached in front of Justine to open the glove compartment. Her fingers explored the contents of the compartment for a moment before closing on an unlabeled pill bottle. She popped the bottle open and carefully shook three pills into her open mouth. Justine watched her.

The fifteen minute ride to Sarah's house was silent until they pulled up in front of the house. Leah leaned over, unbuckled Justine's seatbelt and opened the passenger door. "Tell Sarah I'll be back at five." She glanced over her shoulder for oncoming traffic on the road behind her, putting the car back in gear as Justine climbed out of the car. The car pulled away from the curb just as the little girl pushed the door closed.

Justine watched her mother drive away, squinting against the sun until Leah turned the corner. Then she turned and picked her way slowly up the steps to Sarah's house, dragging her toes along the cracks in the sidewalk and up the front steps. She knocked on the door as hard as she could and waited.

When the door did open a crack, it wasn't a smile that greeted Justine. A scowling teenager peered through a heavy forelock of hair. "You again," Sarah groaned. "Did she say what time she'd be back?"

Justine nodded and held up five fingers. "Five o'clock," Sarah mumbled. "Yeah, right." She was used to Leah showing up hours later than the expected time. She opened the door wider.

Justine stepped into the house and scurried into the living room and sat down on the couch, looking up at Sarah expectantly. Sarah didn't disappoint her. She disappeared for a few moments, then emerged with a stack of children's books and magazines.

"I think you've already read most of these," Sarah said, only half apologetically. "I haven't had time to get more since last time." She piled the books on the coffee table in front of Justine and left the room.

Justine immediately filled her hands with as many of the books as she could hold and retreated as far back into the couch as possible. Justine's old baby-sitter had read to her all the time, pointing to the words as she read them, so Justine had eventually learned to read by herself, more through word recognition than knowledge of the alphabet. But her old baby-sitter had moved away.

Justine didn't see Sarah again until seven o'clock, when Leah returned to collect her. There was no word of apology from Leah for being two hours late and no complaint from Sarah.

A curt thank you from Leah, and they were out the door. "Did you eat?" Leah asked Justine once they were in the car. Justine shook her head as she watched the trees swaying in the wind. Leah reached for the pills, now on the dashboard.

"Chrissake," Leah mumbled under her breath. "What the hell am I paying that girl for, anyway?" she askedout loud as she manoeuvred the small car up to a fast food drive-through. After ordering Justine a hamburger, she hit the accelerator hard and sped back onto the street.

Leah glanced at Justine sharply. "You weren't sick today, were you?" Often after her weekly treatments, the little girl felt nauseous and the wrong food could make her throw up.

Today, however, Justine shook her head meekly.

"Good. I just had the car cleaned and I don't need a mess in here." She tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling as Justine's eyes rested on her.

The phone was ringing. Leah reached for it with one hand and the bottle of pills on the table with the other as Justine joined her cat on the easy chair in the corner. The cat stretched and reached out an inviting paw to Justine. Christened by Leah, the cat was simply "Kitty." Justine watched her mother spill several pills into her hand.

"Hello?"

"Hello? May I speak to Ms. Nasselaine, please?" A pleasant male voice greeted her.

"Speaking," Leah replied coolly. She deftly tossed the pills in her hand into her mouth and swallowed them withouth the aid of water. "Who is calling, please?"

"This is Dr. Kelly calling from the clinic. I'm calling about your daughter, Justine?"

"Yes?" Why didn't the man just get to the point?

"I think it would be a good idea if you came down for a conference with me as soon as possible, Ms. Nasselaine."

Leah sighed and sat down heavily in the chair next to the phone. She suddenly felt very tired. "What for?" She toyed with the nearly empty pill bottle.

"I'd prefer to talk about that when you come down to see me, Ms. Nasselaine."

"To hell with later!" Leah snapped in sudden anger. "There's no reason you can't tell me now, is there?"

There was a short silence on the line before she heard the doctor's clipped tones, no longer friendly. "Your daughter's blood work has been showing signs of an elevated white count."

"So?" Leah had never pretended to understand the technical nonsense the doctors had been feeding her ever since Justine was first diagnosed. "So what does that mean? An infection?"

"No." Another silence. "No, Ms. Nasselaine. It means she is out of remission. It means her leukaemia is back. I want you to come down as soon as possible so we can discuss a treatment for her, a treatment which you will have to authorize. Now, when would be a good - "

"Now," Leah interrupted. "I'm a busy woman, doctor. Just tell me what treatments are available and which would be advisable. Couldn't you just do the chemotherapy again?"

"We could," the doctor acceded reluctantly. "But achieving second remissions with chemo is difficult. What we often try in cases like this is a bone marrow transplant. We look for a donor, preferably within the family, since the chances of finding a compatible donor are higher."

Leah shuddered. Within the family. That meant her. She couldn't stand hospitals. Aloud, she said "I don't like the idea of my daughter being operated on . I'll be down tomorrow morning to authorize the chemotherapy." There was silence from the other end of the line. "Oh, and Doctor? It's MRS. Nasselaine." She hung up the phone.

She stared at the phone for a moment, then turned to face Justine's questioning look. She forced herself to speak casually. "You have to go back to where the doctors are tomorrow, Justine. You got sick again, and they're going to make you better." Making a concentrated effort to avoid Justine's gaze, she bent down to the coffee table, busying herself rearranging the magazines on top.

Like the cat, Leah thought involuntarily. Ever since she had allowed Justine to keep the cat, she had noticed a strange affinity between the two. The green eyes weren't the only thing they shared. Leah had never heard the cat utter a sound, not even when she had accidentally stepped on its tail. It had simply waited for her to remove her foot, then walked calmly off to a safer corner.

Leah stole a glance at her daughter and the cat from the corner of her eye. They both sat comfortably in the corner chair watching her. The black cat with the green eyes and the little girl with the black hair and green eyes.

For an instant, Leah felt a pang in her chest. They made such a lonely picture, the two of them. But as suddenly as it had made itself manifest, the feeling disappeared.

She looks so much like her father. The knowledge made her angry and she reached for the pill bottle.

Leah seldom came to the hospital anymore. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing there anyway. The last time she had come, she had brought a stuffed black cat for Justine. "Kitty went away," she told Justine as she set the toy on the bedside table, not bothering to explain. In fact, Leah had become tired of the animal only a few days after Justine went back into the hospital. She had taken the animal to the SPCA. Justine looked at her mother for a long moment, searching her face. Finally, Justine turned away and refused to have anything to do with the stuffed toy that bore no real resemblance to her friend.

Leah shrugged as she left the hospital shortly afterwards. No one could say that she hadn't tried. She had - and Justine had rejected her. Besides, she had a business meeting out of town and she couldn't afford to spend all her time with Justine. She still had to make a living, after all. Hospital bills were expensive. Where were her pills?

Justine looked at the toy on her bedside table, then at the door her mother had just left through. She looked around the empty room.

And started to cry.

The chemotherapy wasn't working this time. All the nurses knew it. Justine was wasting away in her bed. She was so thin. Even her shiny cap of hair was gone now, and her veins were visible through the pale skin on her head. The nurses brought her a silk scarf with rainbows on it to wear over her head and she smiled whenever she wore it.

Justine could barely walk anymore. The nurses tried to keep smiling whenever they saw her, but they were losing hope for the child whose mother never came to see her.

They knew they were going to lose the little girl with the green eyes.

"I got your message," Leah said as she walked through the door of Dr. Kelly's office. "What's the problem?"

Dr. Kelly looked up from his desk in surprise. He had nearly given up hope in contacting her. "Where have you been, Mrs. Nasselaine?" Dr. Kelly's voice was very quiet.

Leah eyed him coolly. "I've been on a business trip, Doctor. It was unavoidable. Why does it matter? Your hospital has been paid. Did something happen while I was gone?"

"Yes," he snapped. "Something 'happened'!" He took a deep breath and seemed to remember that he was doing this the wrong way. "Sit down," he forced himself to say gently. Leah obeyed, crossing her legs automatically. "Justine has been going downhill since this treatment started," he began. He searched Leah's face for some emotion, found none, continued. "She slipped into a - a coma, last week. We tried to contact you, but there didn't seem to be anyone at your company who knew what number to reach you at." He paused for a moment, but not for Leah's benefit. He had become attached to this little girl himself and he was having a hard time controlling his voice. "We were unable to detect any brain activity this morning. We had to connect her to life support." He stared into Leah's impassive face.

"So?" Leah asked blankly. "What does this mean?"

Disbelief coloured Dr. Kelly's face. "It means," he bit the words out, "that Justine's brain has died. If we keep her on this machine, her body will eventually deteriorate as well. You are her mother," he pointed out. "It is your decision whether to keep her on life support."

"Oh!" Leah had never expected it to come to this. Of course, she had known that Justine might die. She understood how deadly cancer could be. But she had never thought she would be the one to decide whether her child lived or died. She fumbled in her purse, her hands shaking, searching for her pills.

Justin's child.

"Disconnect the machine," her voice shook. "She's already gone."

The apartment was silent.

No cat.

No Justine.

Not that either of them had made any noise anyway. They just sat in that chair and watched her.

Things wouldn't be so different, really.

The only thing to notice would be the empty chair in the corner.

THE WAITING ROOM

The bleeding man stumbled into the waiting room, one hand over his belly, the other holding onto the edge of the doorway to support him. The receptionist sat quietly at her desk, reading.

"Help?me?" the bleeding man groaned, "Doctor?I?need?doctor?"

The receptionist continued reading.

"Please?help?me?" said the man, painfully shuffling his way toward the receptionist's desk, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. "Doctor?they?shot?me?I? need?doc?tor?now."

The receptionist continued reading.

"Doc?tor?" he said again, as more blood trickled out of his belly, "they? shot?me?took?my?wal?let?please?!"

"Sh!" said the receptionist, without looking up. "Gotta finish this chapter."

"Help?" the man groaned again, hardly able to stand on his feet. "Please?get? me?doc?tor!?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," snapped the receptionist. She slammed her book shut and looked at the bleeding man.

"You think you're the only one with problems?" she said coldly. "You think the whole world revolves around you, waiting to leap at your beck and call? Wake up, mister. Look around you, for once. You've got to take some responsibility for yourself, you know. We can't be your babysitters all the time."

"But?they?shot ?me!!?" said the bleeding man. "Took?wal?let?I'm? in?pain?help!!?"

"Would you like to hear about my day?" said the receptionist, her arms crossed. "Hm? Would you like to hear about what I've been through today?"

The bleeding man winced and clutched his belly.

"OK," said the receptionist. "Here's the thing. I get up this morning, 7:30, already miserable enough that it's Monday and I've got to go to work again, the last thing I want to do after a late night movie, and I find we're out of eggs. 'Rob,' I said to my husband, 'didn't you remember to get eggs yesterday?' But he forgot, as always, he's so useless. How am I supposed to have bacon and eggs without eggs? Hm? Can you tell me that?"

"I?don't?know?" replied the bleeding man, down on one knee.

"So I have to have one of the kids' junk cereals for breakfast. When I'm all ready to go to work I see the mailman, and you know what he's doing? Walking right across our lawn! Imagine. What kind of a sick person walks across somebody's front lawn? All the work we'd done, all the money we'd spent on pesticides, just to get it looking perfect. It was the best lawn on our whole street, I can assure you. Just gorgeous. But this jackass of a mailman just goes and ruins it all. 'Hey you,' I say to him, 'do you see that long strip of pavement in front of our garage? The one with the two cars on it? This is called a driveway. See the string of cement blocks imbedded in the ground over there, closer to the street? That's called a sidewalk. Ever heard of them? Hm?' I swear I'm gonna call the post office and make some noise. I hope they fire him. I mean, the grass is just ruined!"

"I'm?sor?ry?" said the bleeding man, now on both knees. "I?did?n't? know?"

"So thanks to my little chat with the idiot mailman, I'm already running late for work. And it's rush hour, too, and I have to sit there in my Porsche and wait for all the cars ahead of me to move. Even when the light's green for a long time, they just sit there. I've never understood this. 'Just move, for God's sake,' I'm saying. 'What's stopping you all? There's no brick wall. There's no cow lying in the middle of the road.' But they just sit there, leaving me waiting and waiting and waiting. That's the most useless thing God ever invented, waiting. And even when the traffic clears, you still get the red lights. I swear, the lights wait for you. They really do. They lead you on and then hit it red right when you get there. Just more meaningless waiting. Do you have the slightest clue what that's like?"

"Sor?ry?" said the bleeding man, lying on his side.

"So I'm a half-hour late for work. By this time I'm just dying for coffee. You know what I mean? Just dying. And you'll never believe this. My God, I swear, why do I even bother? The coffee machine's broken. First I can't have eggs, then I can't have coffee. How in hell am I supposed to work without coffee? I just can't function properly without it. So I send the new girl out to the Coffee Time down the street. I told her, very clearly, 'Large coffee, three milk, one sweetener.' Not cream, not sugar, but milk and sweetener. It really isn't a very hard thing to do. A lot of three-year-olds could get it right. But can our administrative assistant? Can she? Do you think she did? No. It was cream and sugar. And I even think there were only two creams in it. I swear, a little brunette head's gonna be rolling soon. Is it really too much to ask to have a decent coffee in the morning? Well, is it?"

No answer.

"Well," said the receptionist, "I guess I told him. Apathetic little crybaby."

And she went on with her reading.

Pill Propelled

We live in an age of instant answers. Whatever your problem, there is a neatly packaged little pink, blue or white solution. Feeling kind of tubby, can't pop a chubby, hair falling out in clumps, down in dumps, smoking like a stack, addicted to smack, terrified of all things social? - take a pill. Pop one down and all your problems vanish. I never thought that I was a pill person, one to tumble head over heels into the Valley of the Dolls. I only take aspirin when I think my head is going to fly off my shoulders. And then I take only one. But I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep, and then I still couldn't sleep. I tried hot milk, soothing baths, meditation before eventually ending up with a prescription for Temazepam. In clinical terms, Temazepam is a short acting Benzodiazepine, normally prescribed to people who have trouble sleeping, although it's occasionally prescribed to reduce anxiety. In street lingo it is referred to by various other names: Tems, Temazzies, Green Eggs, Green Jellies, Norries and Rugby Balls.

According to the literature, if you have a normal dose of Temazepam you should feel less anxious, then start to feel relaxed and sleepy. At higher does the effects are similar to alcohol - you may feel less inhibited. Your behaviour may be exaggerated (people who are using Temazepam are often very talkative or over excited, sometimes even hostile or aggressive), and your judgement is impaired. You may have a false sense of confidence or even believe you are invincible. Since Temazepam has a hypnotic effect, patients are warned against driving, operating dangerous machinery (like the dishwasher or the computer) or engaging in other activities requiring mental alertness and physical coordination. Which for me includes things such as getting dressed, and making it out the front door.

I was dubious.

Images of Hollywood Babylon floated before my eyes, a bloated Liza Minelli shielding her face from the camera, Betty Ford's toothy grin, me being found with my invincible head in the toilet. I resolved I would only take them in dire emergency. But in a week without sleep, almost anything can happen.

Day 1 - stay up most the night in dread fear of taking Green Jellies. Finally pass out at around 5:00 in near-psychotic state. Next day, look like death warmed over, do a bad Tallulah Bankhead imitation, smear on too much crimson lipstick and lurch dementedly down the street with eyes like black holes. Scare little children. Accidentally catch glimpse in mirror and scare self.

Day 2 - Resolve to try herbal remedies, drink a bucket of Sleepy Time Tea, eat an entire turkey and sucked on a warm cow - Gained 30 pounds, but still cannot sleep.

Day 3 - Decide to use excess time wisely and profitably. Try to rearrange tax receipts, but end up watching reruns of I Dream of Jeanie at 4:32 AM. Throughout the next day crying jags are interspersed with the urge to smash things.

Day 4 - At 3:30 AM have a Hunter S.Thompson moment, don dark glasses and gilligan hat, mumble unintelligible things and shoot at golfers. Call lawyers in the phone book at random and leave shrieking messages on their machines. Pass out in a pool of what looks like either Jack Daniels or pee.

Day 5: In desperation, read all the literature on Green Jellies. Side effects include dizziness, lethargy, drowsiness, confusion, euphoria, ataxia, and falling down, weakness, anorexia (!), horizontal nystagmus, vertigo, tremor, lack of concentration, loss of equilibrium, dry mouth, blurred vision, palpitations, faintness, hypotension, depression, shortness of breath, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, genitourinary complaints, pruritus, skin rash, urticaria, anterograde amnesia and believing you are invisible. Scoff and then cram down some pills. It's like stepping off a cliff, hanging briefly in the air. The next moment, I'm gone.

Day Six: Spend the evening creeping about the house, giggling "you can't see me."

Day Seven: Lapse into drug-induced stupor in the middle of workday. Sent home. Lapse into depression, and sleep all day long. Decide to look for a new drug to combat depression.

Turn on TV and Discover a vast array of new and wonderful little helpers (advertised mostly on American stations), that will combat just about every problem. Drugs for every type of loss - hair loss, weight loss, sleep loss - with lovely sounding names that slip off the tongue with ease: Propecia, Viagra, Zyban, Meridia.

If you are a shy, balding, overweight man with erectile dysfunction and a three-pack-a-day habit - today is your lucky day! But each potential wonder drug comes with a price tag. Like the Monkey's Paw, you may get what you wish for, but you might also get some grisly thing pounding at your back door in the middle of the night.

Which brings me to Xenical.In the words of our sponsor, Xenical is an oral prescription weight-loss medication used to help obese people lose weight and keep this weight off. Xenical works in your intestines, where it blocks some of the fat you eat from being absorbed. This undigested fat is then eliminated in your bowel movements. One possible side effect: Gas with discharge. The ads start with a bright and cheerful voice: Xenical helps users to lose up to 20 percent of their body weight. "Some users have lost as much as 16 percent of body fat!" Then, in a slightly less enthusiastic tone: "Because Xenical works by blocking the absorption of dietary fat, it is likely that you will experience some changes in bowel habits." A list is then recited that includes such potentialities as orange stools and an inability to control bowel movements. It's a long list. Eat at MacDonalds, and it's reasonable to assume you will spontaneously explode. With North American obesity rates doubling like chins, it seems that a desperate population will swallow just about anything that promises an answer to swallowing everything. But it is not just our imperfect jiggly bodies that we want to change; we also want new and improved personalities. My TV also tells me about Paxil, which unlike our old friend Temazapam, which belongs to the Benzodiazepine family, is a seretonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI. Side effects include headache, abnormal ejaculation, drowsiness and nausea, which sounds like a barely fair trade for becoming the life of the party. I call a friend who was on drugs for depression, which caused him to crave Chicken McNuggets. I begin to suspect a global conspiracy of epic proportion.

Say you start out feeling somewhat blue, you take pills to offset your depression, which causes you to eat too many Chicken McNuggets. Embarrassed by your ever expanding waistline, you develop social anxiety disorder. Now not only do you need Exercise in a Bottle to combat your bulges, you also need Paxil to aid you in all things social. Everyone Wins.

Day Eight: With all these new worries, not even Green Jellies will make me sleep. But Hey! I'm invisible, so what does it matter.

True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway (Editor) Simon & Schuster Trade July 1999

The problem with True at First Light is that unlike the other posthumous works, which were edited with great restraint, this book likely bears little resemblance to the untitled manuscript from which it was derived. Patrick explains in the somewhat bizarre introduction that the manuscript was two hundred thousand words long, and the edited book is only about half that length. As a result, Hemingway's voice is often lost behind the editorial license of his son.

Perhaps because of the removal of so much of the original material, Patrick feels compelled to burden the book with the introduction (which purports to be a background explanation of the Mau Mau conflict in Africa that plays a fairly minor role in the story, but is often reduced to strange and irrelevant reminiscences, and is often incoherent) as well as a "Swahili Glossary" and a "Cast of Characters." Any novel that needs a printed Cast of Characters to help the reader along has clearly not done its job. But like the Introduction, the Cast of Characters seems more than anything to be a venue for Patrick to make long editorial comments and tell self-advancing stories, like the one about himself and "the daughter of the last governor general of the Belgian Congo," which appears under the entry on, of all people, the safari cook.

It is unfortunate that Patrick, a self-proclaimed "amateur" editor, was given the authority to so heavily edit the work of one of the great literary masters of the twentieth century simply because he is that master's son. Patrick Hemingway's version of True at First Light makes one wonder if perhaps he never read his father's other works. But there are moments where Hemingway's voice makes its way though the slash-and-burn editing of his son, and the book is therefore worth reading, if somewhat disappointing, for all true Hemingway fans. For those, however, who are simply looking for a good read, this book is one that is better left on the shelf.

Reviewed by Christina Newberry