Free Leather Wings by Marilyn Duckworth Page B

scarcely look at the little girl without a sting of apprehension and sorrow. Remorse too. It is as if Prue has come back into their lives again, scowling at Esther, her mother, crooning at Jania, her child, demanding action. Even Martin, the child’s father, has made his voice echo in the house, repeating over and over that phrase in the letter she doesn’t want to think about.
    They have to think about it. Rex has organised himself to ring the hospital and set up tests. Suddenly, in this situation he is the strong one, which is a surprise. He wants to know the worst, can’t wait. Of course, Esther will recover, she will be strong again soon and tell everyone if they are doing it wrong or too slowly. She has worked too hard at being efficient, at managing, to let it all slip now. How long before a result can be expected? She thinks she remembers hearing it was two weeks. She’ll wait no longer. It seems an awfully long time. You could die of fright in two weeks. At least she knows enough about AIDS to feel quite secure about her own and Rex’s health. They don’t make a habit of sharing toothbrushes or floss. Will she have to tell the school? Will Jania have to know? If she develops AIDS tomorrow, how long will she have? There are two kinds of virus, Esther saw this in the paper recently, one is a lot worse than the other. Would Jania have lived after the accident anyway without the blood transfusion? How many cases of infection have been reported from that hospital? Why couldn’t she have had that accident closer to a decent hospital?
    Last night they had tried to ring Martin, but he wasn’t answering his telephone. Perhaps he has deliberately gone out, away. He has typically chosen the coward’s way of conveying the poisonous news, what you could call a poison pen letter. He claims to be checking out the possibility offlying to New Zealand, but Rex and Esther know Martin and will believe this only when he arrives on their doorstep.
    It is illogical but she can’t quite put it out of her head that Martin is in some way responsible for the danger threatening his daughter now. If he had dressed differently, washed his hair more often, been a plump respectable assistant bank manager, would she have felt like this? She isn’t being fair, she certainly isn’t being scientific. It is not Martin’s blood that might have contaminated his daughter’s. But.
    She guessed Martin was trouble when he came over that first time, for the wedding, with his hair in a pony tail. He dressed like a Mexican rather than a Canadian; a fine line of blond moustache above all those long teeth, and his thin yellow hair trapped in that greasy ribbon. Black trousers, too narrow, and then the boots. He wasn’t as tall as he wanted to be, obviously, or he wouldn’t have needed those expensive tooled boots with heels. Esther has nothing against unconventional dressers, nor against long hair on a man, although it seems pathetically dated, surely? She thinks she could have forgiven him his style of dress if he had had a better effect on Prue. She and Rex couldn’t stand the way Prue gazed at this creature, how she kowtowed to him, giggled at his unfunny puns. It was dreadful. She can’t remember one conversation with Martin that wasn’t larded with smart-aleck humour; how could you believe there was a real person living in there? Even at the funeral and on the days that followed he mimicked a wind-up wooden doll. When the jokes had fallen off his face it was as if he had no other expressions available. His mouth moved, his thin moustache went up and down as he spoke, but where was the real grief? Sometimes he wiped his cupped hand from his nose down over his chin, perhaps there was grief under his hand, who knows? At other times his big round eyes stared at you while you were talking, stared so hard you knew you weren’t really there in his line of vision at all.
    “Perhaps he doesn’t trust us?” Rex had asked Esther once.
    “Trust us