Chapter III
Thursday
Jack is a liar when it comes to pain. He’ll say it’s a two when it’s a five, a five when he can barely speak. If it’s really bad, he’ll hand over his book and let one of us read it to him. It’s been bad for a week straight now.
Harry is doing his algebra homework at the kitchen table, headphones clamped tight, and Silas is making things sizzle and smoke in the wok.
Jack and I are on the couch we moved in here for days like these.
He leans heavily against me. I’d prefer to read him stories with no peril and happy endings, but he wants facts.
I hold the book with one hand and rub his head with the other and read from a chapter about the mass extinction of mammals on each continent soon after the arrival of the first Homo sapiens.
‘When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today,’ I read.
Among these were saber-toothed cats and eight-ton ground sloths as tall as twenty feet.
And despite thriving for more than thirty million years, most of these large mammals would be gone forever in two millennia, obliterated by us.
Jack is wearing a hat Claudette knit for him with three magnets stitched into it, one at the forehead and one at each temple.
She’s read a lot about magnetic therapy.
He says it helps. As he listens, he presses the right-side magnet hard to his skull.
I feel it happening before it happens. I feel it on my skin and Jack’s skin, a sudden squall, everything dimming.
Silas, I think I say but I’m not sure. Jack’s body goes soft as if he’s just dozing off, then every muscle clenches hard all at once, his arms and legs stiff as wood, and I hold him close to me as he bucks and jolts, his head knocking my jaw, catching my tongue, and I am saying we are on the couch, we are on the couch, because the last time he was alone in the bathroom but here we are okay, we are okay, I am saying, and everything is electric but dark and Harry has pulled his headphones down around his neck and Silas is on the couch with us, holding us both and wiping the blood from where it has dripped out of my mouth.
Jack is limp again in my arms. He opens his eyes.
The scene is familiar to him, the pallor of our faces, the afterfeeling.
He once compared it to Pompeii, waking up and seeing us covered in ash.
For it is we who are stunned in place now, he who must wait for our return.
His seizures are a response to the pain, and a relief from the pain.
He will be an actual two for at least a few days.
‘It’s all right. I’m good.’ He lifts his head up slowly from my lap. I can feel the small aftertremors in his muscles. He reaches for the book that has fallen to the ground. ‘Let’s keep going, yeah?’
Harry swings his headphones back up and Silas gives us a few more squeezes before he rescues the food on the stove. I try to find my place in the book.
‘I want that surgery,’ Jack says.
Just after his eighth birthday, Jack began to lose his balance.
He said his legs felt weird. They found three gliomas in his brain.
He’s had three surgeries, but they haven’t been able to remove all the tumor tissue.
What remains still causes pain and seizures.
It’s pressing on the brain stem. The doctors down in Boston have recommended we go to Houston for this next one, to a surgeon who specializes in this particular high-risk procedure.
We’ve been on her wait list for five months.
We’ve spoken to her once, this surgeon. On the phone she was brusque.
She preferred to speak directly to Jack, even when Silas or I asked a question.
She made lame jokes that Jack loved. ‘Now I hate to tell you, but you won’t be able to drive a car for six months.
’ Jack is twelve. I don’t have a good feeling about it.
But I don’t have a good feeling about much of anything these days.
‘I know,’ I say.
He knows the risks. He has seen it all online. It doesn’t matter to him. He is certain he will be fine.
‘When they call, I want the first opening. The very first.’
Across the room my phone dings in my bag. We all look at each other.
Harry reaches in, reads the text.
‘Who’s Sam Gallagher?’