Things changed as he got older and not for the better. At first his folks had a certain grim optimism about his chances, but by the time he was seven, I think they’d lost a lot of hope. Oh, his parents did everything they could. Osborn has a great medical facility, and there were tests run regularly to see if there was anything that could be done to stop the progression of his disease, but by his ninth birthday Jack was using crutches and his parents weren’t always willing to believe that he might “grow out of it” as time went on.
Really, who could blame them? They were also the sorts who believed that honesty was the best policy. Jack accepted that he would be dead by the time he was ready to graduate from high school, barring, of course, a miracle.
And me? Well, I was a kid. I made it a point to hang with Jack from time to time, but I’d be lying if I said I saw him as often as I did my other friends. He couldn’t keep up as well as when he was younger and there were a lot of times he didn’t feel up to going out to play. Much as I loved him, I wasn’t willing to give up my whole world just to keep him company.
Sometimes, when he was feeling up to it, Jack would take a walk in the woods back behind our subdivision, and when I could spare the time from my more active lifestyle I went with him, just to make sure he didn’t get himself stuck somewhere. That had happened once or twice, and the second time around, they’d had to call in the police and search for him with bloodhounds. He was fine, but completely humiliated and even worse, frustrated. Who wouldn’t be?
I can still remember him being carried out of the woods on a stretcher, tears running down his face and thin trails of mucus marking his nose and mouth, his blue eyes slit down to the point where he looked like he was sleeping and having a bad dream, and maybe when you think about it, he was. The sort you have when you’re awake, the ones that involve humiliation and degradation by people who are trying to be nice to you. I used to think about how bad it was for him when I was in the right introspective mood. I’d imagine what it must be like to have a body that was betraying you a little at a time. Oh, I understood that it happens to everyone eventually, but it shouldn’t fucking happen when you’re a kid, you know?
Anyway, I was talking about the woods.
He had a couple of favorite places where he liked to go, the creek that ran back there was fast running and just deep enough to do a little craw fishing if you were adventurous, and before the crutches and leg braces came along, I’d do a little of the actual catching and then leave it to him and just be there to keep him company and to help him out if he pushed himself too far. After the disorder got too bad, I’d just sit with him and we’d talk about everything under the sun. Sometimes it was school and the teachers with their unique habits, and sometimes it was girls—he had a thing for Courtney D’Amico, she of the dark brown eyes and freckles, and I had a thing for Leigh Anne Wilmont, of the red hair and sea green eyes—or even just shooting the breeze regarding the latest comic books. Jack read a lot of them. The newsprint adventures were lightweight and he could carry them without exhausting himself. They were something he could do when he was on his own, without asking for help. That wasn't always true of the paperback books. They weighed too much and sometimes the simple pleasure of reading was too exhausting.
In my defense I was a kid, okay? Try to remember that. Maybe I wasn’t there every day and maybe I could have spent more time with him, but by the age of thirteen, we almost never saw each other anymore. Once a week was about what we averaged. Once a week I made it a point to see Jack and spend a few hours with him. It wasn't easy, because unlike him I was into sports. Unlike him I had an active social life and, unlike him, I had my health.
Jack started his descent into depression around the same time puberty first took notice of us. Neither of us was getting ready to start shaving or anything, but we were having growth spurts, our voices were cracking and changing—usually at socially awkward times where I was concerned—and we were changing.
Me? I was getting stronger, my body was developing, and after years of being active, I was in the early stages of becoming a man.
Jack? He was getting worse. The muscle pains he’d had as a child were worsening. He had muscular rigidity and a blood pressure problem that sometimes caused him to black out if he stood up too fast. By thirteen, Jack was wearing grown up diapers, because sometimes accidents happened. Believe me, if you think being carried out of the woods was humiliating, you should have seen the look on his face the first time he pissed himself in school. The first time I had to help him change his diaper, well, that was around the time the wedge got driven between us—partially by me, true enough, but also by Jack. How the hell can you look a person in the eyes and consider yourself an equal when they’ve just changed your diaper for you? Jack actually started avoiding me instead of the other way around. In a couple of weeks, we had a talk about it. I made him understand I didn’t think less of him (which was maybe not completely true if I have to be honest, but I was willing to lie to him on that one, believe it.) and he decided to believe the lie for the sake of our friendship.
Still, the Great Pants Wetting Incident pretty much sealed his fate as a loner and a loser. People didn’t pick on him anymore. They didn’t dare, because there were a few of us who would make sure they took a beating for every negative word they said about or to Jack, but also because it’s one thing to tease a fat kid and another to take it out on someone who’s just not going to ever get better. He wasn't to be ridiculed, not even by the worst assholes in school. He was to be pitied. His coordination, never the best to begin with, was becoming worse and while he’d always spoken slowly and carefully, it wasn't enough anymore. His words became mumbled and slurred. I had known him all my life and the change was slow enough coming around that I could understand every word he said. People who didn’t know him? Well, I had to translate a lot of the time.
I got healthier. Jack started to die. That was what it came down to.
It was harder for me to watch Jack dying than I can make clear. But he was dying, one little inch at a time. That damned nerve disorder. I’m sure it had a name. I remember him saying it a few times and if I’m remembering properly he had OPCA and MSA. I looked them up online recently, before I decided to write all of this down and before, well, we’ll get to that, won’t we? Those initials stand for Olivopontocerebellar Atrophy and Multiple System Atrophy. There were other problems too, but those were the ones I remembered. What are those disorders? They’re the sort of shit that’s supposed to go wrong after you have a major stroke and part of your brain dies. They’re the stuff that happens when you’re older. Jack was lucky enough to win those particular lotteries when he was in the womb and decided to come out four months early.
Really, when you think about it, that he’d lived for thirteen years was something of a miracle in and of itself. The miracle of modern medicine, I suppose. He lived, if you could call it living.
And I started missing out on our weekly get-togethers; only now and then at first because, despite everything, I liked Jack a lot. He was practically my brother. But it wasn't long before my parents had to remind me that Jack could use the company and after a polite lecture or two, I’d do my duty and go see poor Jack. After a while, I guess they took pity on me, because I almost always came home stressed as a man being audited by the IRS. He wasn't the kid I’d known anymore. He was a living scarecrow, and a depressed one at that. I would see him and I could almost feel him sucking away my will to live.
Once a week became once every two weeks and my visits were starting to head toward once a month when the miracle happened.
Jack started getting better.
It was only a little at a time, really. The recovery of his health was so minor and over such a span, that it even took me a while to notice it. Little things at first, like an improvement in his speech patterns. I didn’t have to strain as much to understand his words. I didn’t have to help him with the spittle that sometimes slipped down his slack lips.
That wa
s easy enough to explain to myself. I simply decided that I had exaggerated the conditions in my own head, a part of the growing dread I felt whenever I went over to see my friend. It wasn't a sudden flash of inspiration, not hardly, it was just the sort of thing I thought about late at night, when the lights were off but my mind wasn't ready to drift off to sleep. I started noticing the small victories that Jack had instead of the small defeats.
Those longer spans away from my friend became shorter again. It wasn't something we spoke about, but something that just happened. My parents didn’t come over and pat me on the head and say they were proud of me for sacrificing my spare time with Jack; they just accepted it and were grateful. I’m sure you know what I mean. It isn’t always what’s said with words that you notice. It’s what’s said with gestures and actions. My parents were more relaxed around me, like I was more relaxed around Jack.
It took time, but suddenly, we weren’t waiting for death anymore. We were praying for life, for hope. For a miracle.
By Jack’s fourteenth birthday, he wasn’t wearing the diapers anymore. He didn’t need them. And while I still had to translate for him from time to time, it was less often.
By Christmas of the same year, Jack sometimes managed to walk without his crutches, and the muscles in his face were properly mobile again. He didn’t have to stop in the middle of a sentence and wipe at the drool that spilled from his lips.
Despite the cold, we walked together on New Year’s Day, moving into the woods that had been his solace for years and then had been taken away from him. It was a slow walk, yes, and we had to stop a few times so he could catch his breath, but my God, it was a wonderful thing.
We’d walked almost half a mile, slowly and carefully, and with our heaviest coats, scarves and hats to protect us from the biting cold, before he said anything about the changes.
“Listen. Thanks, Tom.” He spoke the words clearly, and looked my way for only a second before he looked away. I could see the tears shimmering in his eyes as he spoke. The sun reflecting from the fresh snow that day made his blue eyes seem brighter than I’d seen them in years.
“What for?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“For not hating me.” He looked down at his feet in their braces as he said the words.
“What?” I shook my head. “Dude, I could never hate you.”
“I know. That’s why I wanted to say thanks.” He finally looked back at me, and I saw the raw gratitude on his face. It was a look I’d seen before, of course, when I helped him get up, or clean up, or even just stopped him from falling on his ass. The difference this time was that it wasn't diluted by embarrassment or resentment. They were never conscious things on his part, but even as a kid I’d always understood that those feelings were there and as uncontrollable for Jack as the things that were going wrong inside of his body.
I waved my hands around, unsure what else to do with them.
“Jack. You’re my friend. You’ve always been my friend, and no matter what, you always will be.”
He gave me the strangest smile right then. It played around his lips, but never quite made it to his eyes. It was both sad and knowing and I think for the first time, he actually felt pity for me. He didn’t say any of the things that probably went through his head. He didn’t point out that my visits had gotten far less frequent, or that those same visits were often shorter, even a few weeks earlier. He could have, and I would have felt like shit for it. Instead, he just gave me that smile.
And I hated myself a little for it.
Still, I couldn’t let a look like that go unchallenged, could I?
“What’s with the face? You don’t believe me?” I made it a challenge. If he was going to accuse me, I wanted to hear him say it.
“People change. It happens.” He looked away again, almost as if he didn’t quite believe the words. And did he look guilty even then? I don’t know. Sometimes I think yes, and other times, I wonder if it’s something I added in later, a way of painting more guilt on a kid who was innocent at the time.
“Well, we’re still neighbors, we go to the same school, and our parents are friends. I don’t plan on going anywhere.”
He nodded his head and we walked on for a while.
“I’m going to get better, Tom. You just wait and see.” The words weren’t wistful. They were determined, angry little challenges of his own, backed by a confidence I wouldn’t have expected him to have anymore. You can only kick a dog so many times before it stays down, you know? But there it was. That strength that surprised me so much because I thought the fight had gone out of him almost a full year earlier.
“I hope so, Jack. Seriously.” It was my turn to fight back a few tears, because as much as I didn’t like to think about it, I considered him one of my best friends, almost a brother, and I didn’t want him dying any time soon.
I gave him a one armed hug, the sort you only ever give to your friends when no one is around and you’re praying there isn’t a hidden camera around. He turned and hugged me back with both arms, and before I knew it, he was crying against my shoulder, his entire, thin body shaking as the tears fell.
I hugged him back. What else was there to do? I held him and rocked him and after a few minutes, he wiped the tears from his face sheepishly and we went back the way we’d come.
We stopped once. Maybe a quarter of a mile into the woods, we settled down on an old log that was exactly the right height to let him sit down comfortably. When he was perched properly, Jack picked up an old branch that had become glossy on one end and worn on the other. It was one of several that could probably be found with ease if you knew the right spots to look in. Over the years Jack had taken half a dozen similar branches and used them as walking sticks. I was a little surprised to see that I recognized the shape of that one. He’d used it a few times around me on his trips into the woods.
With the stick held tightly in his hands, he leaned over and struck the snowy ground as hard as he could. Something under that snow gave off a loud crack and a second later I could see the glisten of fresh water melting through the frozen moisture and transforming the spot into slush.
“How’d you know there’s water there?”
Jack looked at me and grinned. “I’ve been here before.” Without another word, he reached into his jacket pocket and dropped a handful of change into the slush. The coins sank almost immediately.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a wish.”
“And throwing away money?”
“No. It’s a wishing well.”
“Really?” I know I sounded very doubtful in that moment.
“Yeah.” He brushed the snow back over the spot, and in a moment you could have never guessed that there had been a disturbance. The field of white was almost as pristine as when we arrived.
“Does it work?”
Jack looked at me for several seconds, his eyes studying me carefully, as if he were trying to decide if he could trust me. Finally, he answered, “I’m not wearing diapers anymore, am I?”
I thought about that a lot on our way back home. In the long run, I decided if he believed in his little wishing well, it couldn’t hurt to let him have a small delusion.
It couldn’t hurt to let him have a little faith in something other than his own demise. Faith. That’s a word that has come back to haunt me a million times since then.
The holidays were over, technically, but the next day my family went on a vacation anyway. There were still a few days left before school started again and so we took a trip to St. Simon’s Island, where my family had a vacation home. It was a welcome change of pace from the bitter cold and it let me see some of the friends I usually only got to see during the summers.
It was only a week later when we got home—happily exhausted—but it was closer to two weeks before I saw Jack again. I was out in the back yard, clearing away the snow that had built up on the veranda, when Jack came walking out of the woods. His legs took long, co
nfident strides, his arms moving in perfect sync.
I must have been staring like a tourist, because when he spotted me, Jack smiled and moved over toward me with a smile plastered to his face. A real smile, warm and genuine. It showed his teeth to me, and his perfect, pink gums.
“Hey! How was St. Simon’s?”
I tried to respond, but I was too busy being freaked out. See, one of the problems Jack had always had looks wise was his teeth. They weren’t malformed, but they were crooked. His parents had never even considered getting him braces. One of the other problems was the lack of muscular control in his face and his tongue. He always slurred his words. It was something you got used to.
His speech was perfect.
Before I could answer him, I heard his mother calling. He rolled his eyes in a gotta-go-home-before-I-get-in-trouble expression and waved before he started walking.
I stared after him until he was gone from sight, and then stared at the direction he’d gone in for a long, long time.
I went back inside the house as soon as I was finished with shoveling away the worst of the snow. I was elated, of course. I was thrilled for Jack. I just kept having trouble with the changes I saw. Two weeks wasn’t impossible when it came to his speech getting better. I’d already seen some amazing improvements in his health. But two weeks to have your teeth straightened? Not unless he’d undergone some radical dental surgery. I won’t say it was completely impossible, but I figured the chances of his parents suddenly deciding that he needed cosmetic surgery were about on par with my mom and dad agreeing to a request from me for breast implants.
I might have worked on what was happening with Jack right then and there, but new distractions came my way, in this case in the form of the new girl on the street. While I’d been on vacation a family had moved into the Newsome place down the block. Said family came equipped with a mother, a father, two dogs that yapped a lot more than I liked, and a daughter who caught my fancy the first time I saw her. I think she must have had that effect on a lot of the locals.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 32