Chip
Two days after the Fourth of July picnic, Vicky picks him up for another transfusion.
A nurse at Pocono General named Brenda, tall with bright eyes and red hair, always recognizes him, and she tilts her head to the side the way his mom used to whenever he was sick, and he feels good to be in her care.
“Back again?” Brenda says. “We’ll get you feeling right as a rooster.
” She leads him to the treatment room. Vicky is waiting in the car with her giant real estate book and a stack of notecards.
She’s studying to get her license at the end of the summer, an idea her dad had for her to make extra money.
“Cookies, too. We have cookies?” She looks hopeful.
“I’m good,” he says, and smiles at her. Brenda nods and walks away.
He closes his eyes and swears he feels stronger already, Popeye eating his spinach. He feels cool and comfortable, and he thinks of her.
He walked for hours with Nancy the other night, and he liked the way she kept looking at him, listening to him.
He liked her stories, too. He liked hearing about the saltwater aquarium her younger sister keeps, her grandfather’s blouse mill he used to take her to when she was little and show her off to the ladies at their sewing machines.
They’d offer her candy from their workstations, and she’d marvel at all the different colors of thread.
One time her grandfather put her in a canvas bin and rolled her around, and she giggled and giggled.
Chip listened to every story and told her about baseball, about Birdy Girl, about his parents and sister and grandparents and fishing and vacations in Ocean City. He told her about his mom’s chicken parm, his dad’s customized quoit boards.
He saw an occasional bat over their head; he thought he heard an owl once. They walked like they were a couple on vacation here, and her sandals shuffled as she stayed by his side, brushing her hair out of her face, occasionally squeezing his arm to punctuate something.
And she laughed. He loved her laugh. It felt like he entered that evening one person and in just seconds, he was a whole other person.
Like George Jetson getting dressed for work, stepping into a machine.
He felt something so strong for her. Stronger than the initial attraction when she taught him how to dance.
Something big and specific and exclusive to her eyes and smile and her painted fingernails.
He felt every worry dissolve when they talked. He was so comfortable that he turned to her as they got near the recreation building and said without thinking, “I hate being sick.”
Her eyes. Her perfect green eyes. She looked alarmed. “You’re sick?” She held her hand to her heart.
He paused for a moment. Did he want to go to this place with her? But he felt he could trust her.
“Leukemia.” He pushed his hand through his hair. He swallowed and shook his head. He wished she’d say something. “If there’s a good kind, I didn’t get it.”
“Chip.” Her eyes welled with tears, and he wanted to punch himself for ruining the moment. The whole point of coming here was that no one would know. The whole point was not to be sick.
She reached out and touched his face. He expected her to tell him to go home and listen to his parents and let the doctors try a new treatment, anything, instead of doing nothing.
But she just asked him to tell her the whole story and he let it all out. He told her every single thing, up to the transfusions and Vicky. “I guess I’m hoping it somehow isn’t true,” he said. He didn’t feel like talking anymore.
She took his hand and put it up to her face and closed her eyes. She kissed it, and he could see she was crying. “Nancy,” he said, “you don’t have to.”
“Shut up,” she said. She kissed his hand again and again, and she pulled him closer to her.
She smelled like an Easter hyacinth, and her face felt smooth against his.
The pain in his body was nothing when their lips met.
“Let’s pretend doctors don’t know shit,” she said, even though she was still crying. “Okay?”
He nodded, and they kissed and kissed. Her lips were like the best summer fruit: a good plum, the perfect nectarine.
She kissed him and he kissed her, and their hands were everywhere, and at one point she buried her head in his neck and he could feel her tears.
He started crying, too, but they kept kissing, and she told him don’t worry, don’t worry.
She took his hand, and she led him down a path to a small building he’d never seen.
Now in the hospital, he’s sure he can feel the new blood pulsing through him and for just a moment, he feels better than okay.
“I brought you a cookie anyway,” Brenda says, sliding it toward him on his tray.
A few days later, after he and Nancy call bingo, after they lead adult hide-and-seek, all the guests giggling, after the two of them escape to the boathouse yet again where they are young and loud and unrestrained, he walks up the hill by himself to the place he and Vicky found Rhonda’s purse.
Nancy said he could stay at her apartment tonight, but he doesn’t want Phil or Hawk to ask questions. “I’m pretty tired,” he told her, and they kissed goodbye.
He comes upon the small pond with marsh grass and ducks, and the swing that reminds him of the one on his grandparents’ porch. He loves how summer evenings are endless, but already the longest day of the year has passed, and each day will have a bit less light.
He walks to the edge of the small dock and takes out his harmonica and starts to play. He’s not sure of the song, but it’s a tune that makes him happy, soothes him. Maybe it’s a song his mother used to sing to Maggie? Yes, he can feel it.
A shadow behind him now, elongated in what’s left of the sun. He turns to see Rhonda standing there, her hands clasped. She looks poised as always, but she stands there and listens to his harmonica and something about her reminds him of the sole survivor of a shipwreck.
He feels his breath on each exhale. He plays the tune with such a somber, easy tone that he doesn’t know where it comes from. It feels like a gift, like someone in the universe is giving him the right notes. He can still smell Nancy’s perfume on him, taste her lips as he is playing.
When he can’t think of anything more, after tapping his foot and looking at the reflection of the sun on the small pond, after seeing the ducks stay still as if he’s called them, he holds the last note, and Rhonda smiles gratefully.
“Beautiful,” she says. “I’m sorry to disturb your peace.” She exhales. “But I’m glad I heard it. I didn’t know you had yet another talent, Chip Bishop.”
“Thanks,” he says shyly. He looks down at the small harmonica, tarnished. He slides it into his shirt pocket and sighs.
Rhonda walks to the edge of the water and picks up a small flat stone. She flings her arm in a perfect motion, and the stone skips across the water, the ducks making an alarmed sound but settling again. “What brings you up here?”
“It helps me think.” He watches the breeze tickle the grass and cattails. A dragonfly hovers nearby, and then a few fireflies start to blink.
She points to the flashing yellow of a firefly.
“They’re what I came up here for.” She takes a breath.
“It won’t be long before they’re gone for the season.
I used to tell my… my girls ‘Go out every night with the fireflies. Watch them light up the yard. Firefly season doesn’t last.’ ” She shakes her head.
“Of course, they used to squeal when they’d catch one.
They’d name each one. This is Herbert, they’d say and then, Goodbye, Herbert.
They’d giggle if it blinked after they released it.
They said it meant he liked them.” She starts to choke up.
“And if it didn’t blink they said, Well, some nerve.
How dare they, right?” She looks at Chip, and her eyes are helpless.
He thinks of Maggie and the fireflies they used to catch.
How he’d see them from his bedroom after they were settled at night, but he’d call to her and say, “Tiger, it’s lightning bug time,” and she’d scramble out of her bed, Birdy Girl wagging her tail and following, and they’d go outside, and their small little world, their house in the middle of not much, was lit up briefly.
“I didn’t know you had kids,” he says. A firefly gets so close to him he reaches out and catches it. He keeps his hands cupped around it and feels the bug tickle his palm. He peeks inside and sees it there. He looks up at Rhonda. “Want to name him?” he asks.
She nods. “How about Herbert?” She touches her hair.
He opens his hand, and the bug—its little eyes, its black wings, its perfect stripe, its scraggly antennae—crawls to the tip of his finger and lifts its wings.
“So long, Herbert,” he says, and they watch it fly off together, a blur of fluttering momentum.
It hovers for a moment, then blinks at them.
“Ah.” She grips the back of her neck. “They used to call this place the top of the world,” she says.
“I guess this was the highest point around, but it’s not even that high.
” She swallows and doesn’t look at him. For a moment, she doesn’t say anything.
She closes her eyes. “Chip, I’m waiting for the hurt to stop.
” She clicks her tongue. “All these years, but it never does.”
He doesn’t want to ask, but it can’t be good. As if she can read his mind, she says, “I lost those girls ten years ago.”
He looks into her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Simmons.”
She nods. “Rhonda.”
He wants to tell her he hurts, too. But this is her moment, her pain. “I don’t have any wisdom I can give you, Rhonda,” he says, “but if I were gone, if something happened to me, I’d be glad I was being remembered, that someone couldn’t forget me. It would mean so much.”
She studies him. “Yeah?”
He nods. Toads croak, and a few more fireflies blink. The sky slowly darkens. “But I’d also want to know there were still things making you laugh and smile. That would be important to me.”
She looks over, almost in disbelief, and tells him what happened to her daughters and why she can’t forgive herself and why time has meant nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. He takes a breath.
“That was a bad thing that happened. A terrible thing. And it wasn’t your fault.
I saw your husband, and he seems like he loves and forgives you.
I know your, um, girls would forgive you.
So you need to forgive you. Otherwise, the pain will eat you until you’re nothing. ”
Rhonda looks out at the water.
Near them crickets are chirping, and far off, Chip can see cars driving the roads that surround the resort, their headlights like occasional stars in the sky.
Chip swears he can feel his pulse in his neck and wrist, his new blood thumping through him and doing what his normal blood can’t.
They talk and talk until they can no longer see each other’s faces, and Rhonda says she’ll try.