Free View From a Kite by Maureen Hull

money to pay her medical bills and support her children after her death. Edgar Allen was three when she died. Twenty years later his brother and best friend, Henry, was spitting blood and wasting away. Henry’s drinking, a well-established addiction, gave him some relief. He died August 1, 1831, the same age his mother had been when the disease took her.
   Edgar Allen’s wife, Virginia (the Annabel Lee of his poetry), suffered a serious hemorrhage while singing and playing harp for some friends in 1842. Poe, well acquainted with various mind-altering substances, responded to her imminent demise by taking his use of alcohol and opium from hobby to professional status. Virginia died in 1847, at the age of twenty-four, of tuberculosis.
   Poe, however, lived past the magic number of twenty-four. He died in 1849, insane and addicted to alcohol and opium. His brain was most certainly destroyed, and it seems probable his lungs were in a like condition.

CHAPTER 13
    â€œWe need some entertainment,” says Mary. “Between the weather and The Witch and the long buss on you I’m about to crack.”
    â€œThat would be entertaining.”
    â€œShut up and get out of bed. We’re going to Rehab.”
    â€œAnd do what? Make doilies out of old pantyhose? That’s your idea of entertainment?”
    â€œGet up.” She grabs me by one foot and hauls until I am half in, half out. I’m still trying to get my slippers on as she shoves me out the door.
    â€œWhat’s your hurry,” I grumble, but I want to go. I’ve been depressed ever since I got back and I am tired of the way my mind spins around and around, up and down stairs, in and out of black holes every time I close my eyes. Nobody is at the nurses’ station, but there is a commotion coming from cranky old Mrs. Cyr’s room. They are trying to give her a sponge bath and she is screeching that they are trying to kill her with newmumia.
    â€œShould we leave a note?” I ask.
    Mary gives me an exasperated look and steers me towards the stairwell. Rehab is in the basement, the other end of the hospital from the library. It has high windows that look out on the staff parking lot. If you stand on a chair and look out you can see a lot of red convertibles.
    â€œWhy,” I muse, “do so many of the nurses drive red convertibles?”
    â€œOne: they can afford them because they get danger pay for looking after this disease-ridden, infectious lot. Two: they’re naturally reckless, otherwise they wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
    â€œEven The Witch?”
    â€œThe most reckless of all. Every day she stalks the corridors surrounded by people who want to kill her.”
    â€œGood point.”
    Rehab has a most peculiar smell. There is cigarette smoke, of course. The two guys who run the place, Rudy and Colum, are both chain-smokers. There is a strong smell of dust from a shelf piled with crêpe paper and construction paper and thin, coloured foam circles. Occasionally one of the women from Ward B makes off with some of the foam circles and uses them to create an elaborate ball gown for a plastic doll whose legs are then to be stuck in a roll of toilet paper and the whole thing used to decorate a bathroom. I’m not making this up, I’ve seen the finished product. You aren’t supposed to use the toilet paper under the doll, ever. If the roll on the holder runs out you’re supposed to search under the sink for a fresh one and if you can’t find one, dig the used Kleenex out of your pocket, fluff them up and use them.
    No one has figured out what to do with the crêpe paper, although in a fit of seasonal joie de vivre the student nurses have been known to hack out bells and trees from red and green construction paper and stick them on the windows in the wards.
    There is a lovely smell of leather. Rudy and Colum make things out of leather, wallets and belts