Without the first warning of danger or flicker of disgust that she might be pretending to be Drew Barrymore, I drop the backpack and copy her by sticking my feet into the balustrade holes. My arms rise up of their own accord. My free will is nonexistent. If she asks me to jump, I will.
“Life is glorious,” she yells into the wind.
It’s almost as if you can hear her words soaring downriver. Over and over.
“Say it,” she says.
“Life is glorious,” I repeat and think how much more meaningful it is than the stupid LIFE IS GOOD T-shirts that are everywhere. “Life is glorious, glorious, glorious.” I’m making my own echo. When I look over at Meredith, she leans close and kisses me.
This is the part I will remember when I’m back on the houseboat. Marissa Bennett’s stage kisses are ancient history. I can hardly remember what she looked like. This single salty salsa kiss from Sorry, a girl who knows my sad story and likes me anyway. It’s worth everything that happens after.
Off balance, I lurch. When I rock backward to try to save myself, I lose my footing. One foot slips and I pitch forward. My sandals stick in the concrete bridge behind me.
Free fall at night is mind-boggling. It’s like driving without headlights in a tunnel. And you’re stuck in slow motion, the end of the tunnel never comes. At the high point of the bridge the clearance is huge, commercial-boat height, so I have plenty of time to prepare. Lifeguard class comes back to me, complete with the numbered illustrations. The idea is to make yourself as thin as possible when you hit the water, which they say will feel like a stone wall, not at all like water. I take a big breath and straighten my body, arms at my side, toes pointed. I order myself to think about sliding up through that water and not about going down. It’s like a test; I’m cramming, deep in concentration. No time to be scared.
After the initial shock, the river is surprisingly warm. I hear Dad saying, “It’s like bathwater,” when we did laps together last week before he left for Chicago. “Enough,” he said after once around the boat, even though he knew I used to do one hundred laps along St. Margaret’s beach last summer. And it’s suddenly clear to me as I’m sliding through solid blackness to possible sudden death that it’s not the fear of my getting weak and sicker that haunts him but his wanting to protect me from the disappointment of missing my life. What was supposed to have been my life. It’s the delivery-room promise all over again.
By the time I’ve run through that whole scene, I’m back to the surface, sputtering and dragging air into my burning lungs. I had no idea the channel was so deep. Meredith must have flagged a car, because there are four faces peering over the concrete rail. They’re all blurry from where I am.
Meredith screams, “Daniel, grab something. Is there anything you can grab? They’ve gone to get a boat.”
“I can tread water.”
“Seriously, Daniel, for how long? The man said it might be twenty minutes.”
But all I can do is laugh. The whole situation reminds me of Bill Cosby’s Noah skit, one of Dad’s favorite shaggy-dog stories. God is frustrated with Noah for giving him a hard time about building the ark. So He asks Noah how long he can tread water. But beyond the joke and the fact that an icy weight is beginning to drag at my feet and my lungs are on fire, I think about the fact that the most beautiful girl in the world is rescuing me. Me, Daniel Solstice Landon, the klutz of the year.
The rescue squad with its frantic blue lights screams into the landing in front of Atkinson Fuel Company, and a Boston Whaler with its green and brown Game and Inland Fisheries seal on the side appears from wherever. After they lasso an old docking post next to the one I’m hugging, they use another cross line to ease the boat up close enough to drag me in over the transom without crushing me against the pilings. I can’t help squealing when my anklebone scrapes the gunwale in the process of being hauled aboard like a prize bluefish.
“Daniel Landon?” The duty officer is Mr. Lassiter, who teaches algebra at the middle school. He gave me a B plus and said I was capable of better. At the time I considered that to be incredibly silly. How could he possibly know that about me, if I’d only ever done B work in his class?
“You okay?” he asks.
I grunt because my chest hurts a lot and my ankle is throbbing like a loose muffler.
“This some crazy dare?”
I shake my head and manage to answer. “Just clumsy.”
Meredith is at the dock by the time Mr. Lassiter in his neon orange vest slides the boat in sideways. I can barely see out of the blanket wrap they’ve covered me with like a straitjacket, but I can hear her breathing hard.
“It was an accident,” she volunteers between gasps.
Mr. Lassiter looks up. “You were up there on the bridge with him?”
“Meredith Rilke,” she says. “We’re friends.”
They won’t let her ride in the ambulance to the emergency room. The rule is only family. When she offers to call my parents, Mr. Lassiter says there’s no need. He’ll drive over in the Whaler to let my parents know I’m on the way to the hospital while one of the squad people fills out the report. My parents can pick me up at Riverside ER. That’s not a scene I’m relishing. Mr. Lassiter and the squad driver move ten steps away, their voices raised and their hands moving in time to the volume. It doesn’t look like anyone’s too keen on the idea of the paperwork.
“Couldn’t you just take me home in the Whaler?” I ask.
“Hospital is protocol, once the squad’s been called in.”
Meredith slips out of sight as the ambulance tech motions everyone clear from the ambulance doors. I hear the boat’s engine spit water. Then it’s over. The doors shut, the rescue squad van streaks off, and all I can think is that Meredith has to walk home alone, knowing she’s just kissed the biggest loser in Essex County.
Much to Mom’s surprise I don’t get pneumonia. She makes three loaves of banana bread and delivers them to Mr. Lassiter, the rescue squad, and the Rilkes. I’m not allowed to go with her, even to Meredith’s. Mom says it’s because I’m under doctor’s orders to stay off my ankle. My foot is buried in a splint contraption, a blue-gray wrap laced with little pickets of hard plastic that line up on my ankle to keep everything stiff. It’s not broken, just sprained from being twisted by my sandal catching on the balustrade on my way over.
In spite of everything, Meredith calls Monday night. Thank you, Mack, for giving her our number. It always strikes me as incredibly idiotic of the cell phone companies not to print a directory of numbers so more people would use their phones and more minutes would be charged. I mean, if they’re in it to make money and all.
“You left your backpack on the bridge,” she says.
“Valuable salsa and chips.”
She laughs. “I liked them.”
“How was the first day of school?”
“Okay. Bev introduced us around and Mack said to tell you Stepford-Hanes graduated to the high school and is still wearing those amazing skirts.”
“Oh, great.”
“Who is she?” When Meredith’s voice tightens, I’m right back there on the bridge with her shouting choruses of “Glorious.”
“Just a teacher. English nine. She’s okay.”
Meredith breathes loudly enough that I can hear the relief through the receiver. “I guess your parents aren’t going to let you come to classes this year?”
“They haven’t said—right now they’re blaming it on the ankle thing—but they’re still looking into possibilities for…the other, deciding. It’s complicated.”
“Last year this kid at Albemarle got hurt playing soccer, and he was unconscious. His parents refused to let the rescue squad take him. It turned out they were Christian Scientists. They don’t believe in germs or medicine. Supposedly Christ heals you.” She’s talking fast, as if she’s afraid someone’s going to tell her she has to get off the phone. “The kid already had had like six concussions. But this time he was bleeding in his brain. The state fi
led charges against his parents.”
“For murder?”
“No, he didn’t die. For child abuse, or something like that. A kid has rights too.”
“So you think I should sue my parents to let me go to school?”
“It’d be more fun if you were there.”
Her argument makes perfect sense to me. Somehow, though, I don’t think it will sway my parents.
Lying on the couch with my foot propped up on pillows, I try to think what Holden would do. Okay, it’s a stretch to draw parallels between a kid who’s been kicked out of school for making a conscious choice not to do his schoolwork and a kid who’s been kept away for something totally beyond his control. HC was the first to admit he hadn’t followed the rules. Still, I’m damned if I know what rules I broke.
My parents, not being rule followers themselves, try hard not to be rule makers. I’ve heard their conversations with Joe. Stuff that most kids don’t talk about with their parents. Even beyond the substance-abuse thing, which, as you might expect, my father is particularly vocal about with his kids.
Being in the middle, though, is different. You listen more than you talk. Joe’s mistakes have all been hashed over in front of Nick and me. The one advantage to being younger, I know a lot of things thanks to Joe that he didn’t know ahead of time. With The Disease though, knowing things ahead of time is starting to feel less like an advantage.
When Mom and Dad first told me about the leukemia, we’d been to a bunch of doctors for tests, blood work, scans, a physical exam where they did things I can’t mention to anyone. No one would go through that kind of stuff if they weren’t sick. I don’t think my parents had any idea how sick I was. I sure didn’t. Once I heard the word cancer I put my hands over my ears and started humming like a brat having a temper tantrum. Not my best moment, huh?
I guess maybe it was a nervous reaction, like people who laugh during a robbery instead of fainting. Of course, Dad let Mom calm me down. Then, almost as if they had planned the whole thing, he talked all around it like he does, about mixed-up cells and the science of it, how they were experimenting, making breakthroughs every day, and how sometimes they get it wrong. It was like he was helping me with another homework assignment, that’s all. But I wondered if they had known ahead of time what the tests showed, if they had secret meetings with the doctors before they decided to tell me.
I got what Dad meant, though. What he really wanted was for me to think I shouldn’t lose any sleep over it. But that convinced me more than ever that the whole thing was a setup. The conversation arranged when Nick was out; Mom and Dad sitting together on the couch, the way coaches try to prop up a losing team with a psych-up when they know the talent is missing. I’d have to have been an idiot not to recognize how serious it was.
The only reason Dad didn’t finish the monologue was because Mom put her hand over his mouth and cut to the chase.
“The doctors don’t know everything, Danny. We can fight this.”
Dad’s eyes closed and he sank back against the cushions like he had a headache so humongous he couldn’t hold his head up any longer. Mom kept looking at me, the magic disappearing son. When I didn’t fall apart, she laid her head on Dad’s shoulder as if she was already wiped out from the effort of it all. A race well run. Another brilliant parenting accomplishment.
I just stood up and walked out, humming again to drown out their pleas for me to stay, to hear them out. We were living in the Jeanette Drive house then, before Mom’s epiphany about the houseboat. I walked right out the front door and left it open. Screw them, screw the mosquitoes. Down the block, down the next block.
It was one of those summer nights when bugs swarm the streetlights, the buzz so loud you can’t hear yourself think. Their tiny wings beat so furiously, as if they’re desperate to be transported to another world. The kind of night when even though you can see people talking in their cars, they’re like mimes. It’s impossible to hear their words with the windows up and the air conditioners running full blast. They’re drowning in their own little worlds while scraps of their lives—a wave, a nod, a glance out the window—fall into the night like shards from a cracked mirror and splinter into smaller and smaller pieces until you have to pull your hands back to avoid getting cut.
Just remembering makes me sweat again like I did that night. The collar of my T-shirt, ringed with sweat, clung to my shoulders and neck. Walking and walking, putting the leather down hard and not paying the least attention to where I was going. I don’t even remember crossing Route 17, but I must have because I ended up blocks away at the high school baseball field. It was totally empty. No cars, no people, just the overhead spotlights glowing like spaceships. The team must have quit playing minutes before I got there. I sat in the middle of the field, out past second base, and yanked out clover as the lights faded. Until it was too dark to see my fingers or the grass.
That night I was a speck in God’s eye, one little speck, like one of those million blades of grass I’d just ripped out by the roots. He couldn’t think of anything to do about the speck except rub it out. Goddamn Him. When it started to rain, I thought, He’s crying. He’s rubbed and rubbed and the speck that’s Daniel Solstice Landon is still bugging Him. So He’s going to cry me out.
My parents had each other. Joe was off living his own dream and Nick had his whole life ahead of him. God was trying to get rid of me and doing a damn fine job of it. It was the worst fucking night of my life.
Now, even with the stupid sprained ankle, Meredith’s around and I have Holden to help me figure out how to deal with the world. I might have stretched the truth a bit on the bridge when I said life is glorious, but I’ve decided one thing. I’m not going to just let Him rub me out or cry me out like a worthless speck. I’m going out kicking and screaming.
Still feeling a little sorry for myself, I decide to take Meredith’s advice and insist my parents let me go to school. What the hell? They grant dying wishes to prisoners, even serial murderers. Why not people whose cells are all screwed up? I can feel the stupid tears behind my eyes, the dam’s about to overflow, when in walks Nick, home from soccer practice after the first day of school with an armload of books. He dumps them on the built-in bench in the front cabin. “Welcome to tenth grade,” he says with this idiot grin like he’s the Easter Bunny.
“Who asked you to bring those?”
He rips open the bag of carrots—carrots for God’s sake—and shoves a few into his mouth. Then he talks with his mouth full of pulp. Disgusting.
“Mom, that’s who. How else are you going to keep up?”
“What’s the point?”
“Don’t give me that. You love school. Science Fair projects, essay contests. Look at all the books you have junking up our cabin. And don’t forget you started the Plato Club last year. You’re a geek.”
What can you say to that? Hard to believe we share the same genes.
“You’re adopted,” I say.
But he’s not done. “Jumping off one bridge doesn’t make you a super jock.”
“I don’t want to be a super jock. I’d just like to know I could jump off another bridge if I wanted to. Or use my library card next year.”
He takes a double swallow from his water bottle. “Fine, jump off any bridge you want. No one’s stopping you. I was only trying to help.”
Holden would have told Nick to shut up and leave, like he did to Ackley, the dorm mate from hell. Give me my goddamn comb back. Or he would have stomped off himself and left Nick to stew. I don’t get the chance to do either one because Mom honks from the shore and Nick has to take the skiff and go get her. My ankle throbs like hell and you can’t stalk off anywhere on a houseboat.
By scrunching over, I can just reach the new pile of books without getting up. Biology’s on top. Heavier than any textbook I’ve had in school so far, it’s full of diagrams and photos. I look for Dad’s name in the credits, but he’s not there. In the middle is a section of plastic overlays for each system of
the human body. Muscles are the first illustration I turn to, and there they are, strapped over anklebone clusters, those pesky little bloodred ribbons that have laid me up before I’m ready to give up the ghost. I forgive Nick. He’s only the messenger.
The table of contents lists twenty-five chapters, including one called “The Immune System.” I’m hooked.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The third week of school my parents get a letter from the Essex County School Board. I had to pick up the mail from the post office box because Mom wouldn’t go in at the last minute. She’s avoiding this witchy woman from the pharmacy who told her Miss T. Undertaker is a quack. On one envelope in our stack I noticed the official gold seal for the county. I figured my parents must have applied for some special school dispensation for me. This letter could be the county’s decision on the attendance issue. Unlikely it’s the county telling us they’ve found money for a tutor or to send me to Timbuktu for the alternative treatment Mom has decided is the preferred way to save her ailing son.
The unopened envelope sits on the counter until Dad gets home. Not that Mom doesn’t pick it up six or seven times and put it right back down again. By the time Dad comes in from using the Internet at the library to send back the newly edited chapters of the latest textbook manuscript, Mom is agitated way beyond normal. She holds the letter up to his face like he ought to know what it is and what she’s thinking. When he doesn’t take it, she rips the envelope open and holds the letter like a medieval royal decree while she reads it. There is a moment of quiet—maybe she’s rereading—and then he moves behind her so he can read over her shoulder.
“Summons,” she says, loud enough for him to step back. “The County School Board ‘summons’ Mr. and Mrs. Stieg Landon? Who the hell do they think they are that they can order parents around? We pay taxes just like everyone else. I’m not going anywhere.”
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