Say the Word (14 page)

Though my family had been poor, there was a difference between growing up below the poverty line in a city like New York versus somewhere like Jackson. In Georgia, I’d always had neighbors to lend a helping hand, appearing unexpectedly at our door with “extra” casseroles they couldn’t possibly finish, or pies they’d “accidentally” baked by following a double recipe. There’d been no lack of nature or room to breathe as a child, and Jamie and I had both relished the freedom of the outdoors. Here, though, I couldn’t imagine Roza ever finding a space to call her own, or a minute to breathe. She probably shared a room at the very least with Vera — but I’d heard stories of entire families sharing a single
space in buildings like this.

Fae and I traded apprehensive glances as Roza came to a stop in front of an ancient brick walkup.

“Home,” Roza told us, pointing up at the third story window.

“Rozafa!” The woman’s voice cut through the air like a whip, and Roza turned instantly toward the sound. A string of rapid Albanian followed, and we watched as Roza’s cheeks flushed in response to whatever was said. A small round woman stood on the street corner, her hands planted on her hips
as she glared at the seven-year-old. She was flanked on either side by a small group of women, all of whom were staring at Fae and me with varying looks of unwelcome.

I’d bet my last bag of Cool Ranch Doritos that this was Roza and Vera’s mother.

Roza walked over to the woman, who immediately grabbed hold of her shoulders and shook her hard enough to set her teeth rattling. “Mama!” Roza squealed unhappily.

I opened my mouth to protest and started forward, but Fae’s hand clamped down like a vise on my arm and held me in place.

“Don’t,” Fae advised quietly. “Their turf, their rules.” My mouth snapped closed and I cast a glance at her. Apparently, Fae was taking our street confrontation very seriously; that, or she was living out some
Outsiders
-themed fantasy leftover from her grade-school days.

“Whatever you say, Ponyboy,” I whispered, barely containing my laughter.

Fae’s lips twisted up into an amused smirk. “Chill out, Sodapop.”

The five women, who ra
nged in age from a teenager around Vera’s age to a stooped elderly woman who was likely a centenarian, stared at us impassively.

“I’m Lux,” I called in what I hoped was a nonthreatening tone. “A friend of Roza’s.”

None of them responded — either they didn’t speak English, or they really didn’t care what I had to say.

“I just want to know if Vera is okay,” I told them. “I was worried.”

At the sound of Vera’s name, their faces changed. The woman at the front of the pack who I assumed was her mother instantly crumpled, her face shuttering of all expression and her shoulders stooping in defeat. The other women had similar reactions — some looked fearful, casting their gazes around the street at the passerby, while others just looked saddened by the mention of her name.

I felt my stomach clench at their reactions, and Fae squeezed my arm lightly in support. We both knew it wasn’t a good sign — it meant that Vera was in some kind of serious trouble.

“Can we help?” I asked, locking eyes with the girls’ mother. Her own turned from sorrowful to steely as they held my gaze.

“Go,” she spat at me. “Go away.”

“But—”

“We don’t need your help.” The words were spoken in broken English, but their meaning was inescapable. We were sticking our noses into their business, and they didn’t like it.

“Time to go, Lux,” Fae whispered. “There’s nothing more we can do here. We tried.”

“I’m sorry,” I called, backing away a step. “We didn’t mean to intrude on family matters.”

“Go,” the woman repeated, turning on her heel and walking away. Roza waved sadly at me before following her mother and the rest of the women into the building and out of sight.

“What the hell just happened?” Fae asked, turning a dumbfounded stare on me.

“I have no idea,” I told her, equally confused.

“What now?”

“I guess we go hom—” I began to answer her, but my words were interrupted by a tentative voice.

“Excuse me?”

Fae and I turned our heads to find the youngest from the group of Albanian women hovering unsurely several feet from us. She looked ready to bolt at any moment, her eyes restlessly scanning the neighborhood for an unknown threat.

“You speak English?” I asked her.

“A little,” she confirmed in a whisper. “You…you want to talk about Vera, yes?”

I nodded.

“I will tell you what I know, but…” Her fearful gaze met mine and held for one fleeting moment. “Not here. Meet me at this address. Tomorrow, three o’clock. Come alone.” With that, she shoved a small piece of paper into my hand and was gone, vanishing into the building before I could even process her words or formulate a response.

“Well, Alice, you’ve done it now,” Fae said, linking one arm through mine and guiding me back toward the subway entrance.

“Done what?” I asked distractedly, my mind reeling as I studied the address on the paper in my hand.

“Stumbled down the rabbit hole.”

“Did you just call me Alice?”

“Yes,
Alice
. As in, Wonderland.” Fae shook her head. “Bit of advice? Don’t drink the tea. And definitely don’t take directions from a cat.”

I pushed the wheelchair faster as we maneuvered down the sidewalk, hoping we wouldn’t be spotted by a nurse peering out one of the windows.

“What’s the hurry, sis?” Jamie asked.

I winced as the chair went over a particularly big bump and jostled Jamie, but I didn’t slow down.

“Seriously, what’s going on?” His voice was curious, but still largely unconcerned. He was always up for an adventure.

“I’m breaking you out of here,” I said, smiling widely as I wheeled the chair around a bend and the beat up old pickup came into view. Sebastian saw us in the rearview and hopped out, leaving the truck idling by the curb as he jogged around to meet us.

“Are you serious?” Jamie asked, his voice excited. He’d been complaining for weeks about his incarceration — his word, not mine — and begging for more time outside the hospital walls. Initially he’d been satisfied with our afternoon walks, when Bash and I would push him around the grounds for an hour or so, but he’d quickly grown bored with them. He wanted to feel alive again — and that’s exactly what we hoped to achieve with today’s plan.

“Just for the afternoon,” I told him, wishing I
were taking him away from this place permanently. He’d been moved from the hospital about a month ago to the adjacent rehabilitation building, where he could recuperate from his surgery and do daily strength building exercises with a physical therapist.  He wasn’t walking yet — that wouldn’t come for months — but the hospital staff were optimistic he’d get there eventually. For now, he was confined to a wheelchair if he wanted to get around, which he liked about as much as the hospital food he was forced to consume every day.

“You’ll get in trouble,” Jamie warned. “Loretta will be pissed.”

“Loretta loves me,” I told him. “I baked her a cake for her birthday last week
and
I agreed to babysit her kids next weekend so she and her husband can have a romantic night out.”

Jamie winced in sympathy. Loretta’s twin boys were well-kno
wn terrors — two miniature, six-year-old Tasmanian devils in human-suits. Last week on bring-your-kid-to-work day, apparently they’d ripped apart the nurse’s station and had wheelchair races down the hallways of the ICU. Needless to say, volunteering to babysit them put Loretta in my debt for far more than a stolen afternoon off hospital property.

“Jamie, my man!” Sebastian yelled, a happy smile on his face as he leaned down to initiate some kind of bizarre man-hug,
backslapping ritual with Jamie. Boys were so weird. “You ready to bust out of here?” Bash asked.

“Depends,” Jamie said. “Are we going to Vegas for some action on the strip?”

“Ew,” I replied.

“Not today,” Sebastian told him, grinning. “
Don’t think we’d get there and back before the night shift starts.”

“Can we go to the track and bet on some ponies?” Jamie asked. “Oh! Or can we cover
all the trees on Amber’s property in toilet paper? I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“I’d be surprisingly okay with that,” I muttered darkly.

Sebastian cast an amused glance my way, before steering Jamie’s chair closer to the truck bed. He pulled down the gate and turned to my twin, suddenly all business.

“As fun as that might be,” Sebastian said, a wry grin twitching the corners of his lips up. “I’ve got something else in mind that I think you’ll enjoy — even if it doesn’t involve illegal gambling or vandalism.”

Jamie made a regretful
tsk
sound but otherwise refrained from commenting.

“But first, we have to get you up here,” Sebastian told him, nodding his head back toward the truck bed. “If I lift you onto the edge, think you can scoot yourself backwards?”

“Do you see these guns?” Jamie asked, flexing a pathetically underdeveloped bicep. “I’m a champion. I can do it.”

I rolled my eyes, but my amusement faded and my heart flipped in my chest as I watched Sebastian with Jamie. He was so patient with my brother — his hands were gentle but not coddling, his smile was one of understanding rather than pity, and his tone was caring without being condescending. Bash had a unique ability to put Jamie at ease, and it allowed my twin to keep his pride even while accepting help.

I was trying really, really hard not to fall head over heels in love with the boy, but damned if he didn’t make it the toughest thing I’d ever done in my life.

Ten minutes later, Jamie’s wheelchair had been strapped down to the truck bed.
Its wheels were locked in place with two separate ropes, and another strap looped around Jamie’s waist to hold him securely when the truck began to move. I hopped up to stand beside his chair, and turned to watch as Sebastian slammed the gate closed behind me.

“You feeling up for some speed?” Sebastian asked, leaning against the cab and grinning at us.

“Bring it,” Jamie challenged, an answering grin crossing his face.

Bash winked at me playfully before running around to the front seat and hopping in. He’d opened the cab’s back window so we could talk, and he looked over his shoulder at me as he started the engine. “You ready to fly,
Freckles?” he asked, leaning close to the window.

I held my arms aloft by my sides and flapped them up and down in a caricature of a bird. “Make me forget the ground exists,” I whispered, tilting my head forward through the small opening and kissing him lightly on the cheek.

“Will you two get ahold of yourselves so we can get this show on the road?” Jamie yelled over his shoulder at us. “I’d like to actually leave the hospital parking lot at some point.”

I grinned and moved away from the window, landing a light punch on Jamie’s arm in retaliation. Sebastian laughed as he maneuvered the truck out of the parking lot and onto the main road. I settled in facing Jamie with my back pressed against the cool metal carriage, and we chatted as we rode through town. We got a few strange looks from people out walking — it wasn’t every day that Jacksonians saw a boy in a wheelchair strapped down to the back of a truck bed like a bizarre, macabre parade float — but most passerby recognized us and smiled or waved.

Within minutes we’d traveled out of the town proper and were cruising down the back roads. The unpaved, dirt paths on the outskirts of Jackson were lined with towering waxy-leafed magnolia trees that blossomed in the springtime and showered the earth in pale pink petals as the seasons waned. The winding network of densely-forested roads provided local teenagers with an arena for every pastime — from parking for some private time with your special someone to dirt-biking and drag racing.

Turning onto a straightaway, Sebastian yelled that it was time. As the cab picked up speed, I wound one hand through the straps attached to the truck bed for support, and grabbed hold of Jamie’s
chair with the other. He smiled in anticipation — a look I hadn’t seen on my brother’s face in so long, it took me a minute to recognize it.

What most people don’t realize is that cancer takes more than just flesh and blood — it sucks the spontaneity out of life.
Because when someone you love is sick — when their very future is uncertain — it’s hard to look forward to much of anything. Facing the world with a smile becomes the ultimate act of resilience.

It was late March now, and the early blooming trees had just begun to open their petals. They were beautiful, to be sure, but they couldn’t hold my attention. My eyes were trained on my brother’s face, which bore an expression of sheer, unadulterated joy as we barreled down the road,
red dirt flying up in a cloud behind our tires, the radio cranked high to a classic Journey song, and the magnolia blossoms turning to a smeared pink tunnel as we pushed past sixty miles per hour.

Seeing that look on Jamie’s face again was worth any amount of time spent with Loretta’s twins.

“You okay?” I yelled at Jamie.

He nodded without looking at me, his grin never faltering. “Faster!” he yelled back over the strains of
Don’t Stop Believin’
that were pounding from the truck’s speakers.

I passed along his orders to Bash, and watched as the speedometer needle topped seventy.

“Faster!” Jamie yelled again.

Eighty.

I heard Sebastian whoop in exhilaration as we went even faster, pushing the truck to dangerous speeds. He hadn’t been kidding — we were definitely flying, now. The wind roared in my ears and my hair streamed back in a blonde ribbon as we whipped down the roadway. I felt my stomach flip and held on tighter to the straps.

“I thought you promised me some speed!” Jamie yelled at the sky, his words immediately swa
llowed up by the wind as we hurled along.

“I don’t think this rust bucket will go much faster,” I screamed into the air tunnel whooshing between us. “Bash borrowed it from his gardener!” I tried to laugh, but the sound was swept away as soon as it left my mouth.

Jamie’s grin widened but he didn’t respond. His eyes drifted closed and he lifted his arms straight up above his head in a gesture I could only describe as one of pure, unabashed victory. My breath caught as I looked at him.

There, in that pink-smeared, dusty, wind-swept moment, he wasn’t a cancer patient or a sob story whispered about at the town-wide pancake breakfast on Sunday mornings. He was just seventeen again — alive and invincible, untouched by illness or worries about whether he’d live long enough to attend his prom.

There, in that perfect, solitary sliver of time, with his hands fisted in the sky in defiance at the cruel twists fate so often seemed to take, Jamie was flying. Life held a million limitless possibilities.

And he was free.

I only met my grandmother a few times as a young girl before she died. My mother’s mother was the only grandparent left by the time Jamie and I arrived in this world, and she had one foot out death’s door even as we took our first steps of childhood. My memories of her are both scarce in number and dimmed by time’s passing, but I do remember one thing she told me with intense clarity.

“There’ll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. ‘Flashbulb memories,’ some people call them,”
she’d told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. “
Most people don’t recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they’re so busy looking ahead to what’s coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don’t enjoy their present. Don’t be like them, sweet pea. Don’t get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them.”

This moment with Sebastian and
Jamie was one of those moments. A flashbulb memory in the making. I knew I’d remember every detail of it for the rest of my life.

I hoped they would, too.

So, with Jamie’s image burned into the backs of my eyelids, I stopped worrying about his prognosis, my family’s finances, and my unlikely college prospects. I pushed the future away and embraced this moment of jubilant recklessness. Closing my eyes, I crossed my fingers and wished with everything I had in me that thirty years from now, we’d all be sitting around laughing about what dumb kids we’d been on that bright spring day when the world was as new as our dreams for a different kind of future.

One with a happy ending.

“Do you think he liked it?” Bash asked me, linking our fingers together as we walked through the dense foliage. We’d dropped Jamie back at the hospital about an hour
earlier, before returning the gardener’s truck to Sebastian’s garage. I’d worried that Bash might want to go inside his house — I was definitely not looking forward to another encounter with his mother — but he’d surprised me by grabbing my hand and leading me toward the wooded path that led to the old oak.

“He loved it,” I assured him. “Jamie doesn’t do false enthusiasm. If he doesn’t like something, he’s not exactly shy about letting the world know it. Seriously, you should’ve seen him when the new trilogy of Star Wars movies came out — he was quite vocal. I think he even wrote a letter to George Lucas, petitioning him to recall
The Phantom Menace
from circulation worldwide.”

Sebastian chuckled lightly. “Well, I’m glad he had fun today. It was good to see him laugh like that.”

“He used to be like that all the time,” I said, my own smile slipping as I thought of the animated boy Jamie had been before his diagnosis. “Not that he doesn’t still joke around — he’s just a little different. More contemplative. Maybe a little more serious.”

“He’s brave,” Sebastian noted quietly. “I don’t know if I could wake up every morning and face the reality he faces. All the chemo, the surgeries…”

“Jamie believes that everything happens for a reason,” I told him.

“And you don’t?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, shrugging. “What do you think?”

“You can’t laugh,” he ordered, looking at me sternly. “Promise?”