Wish (2 page)

Up in the air, though, flying toward California, she was all smiles as she tossed her head back and laughed and Businessman Bob ordered little drinks in little bottles, and everyone passing them had to turn sideways to get by and people trying to sleep shook their heads and tried to find a comfortable position against their headrests.

Meanwhile, the attendant leaned against the rear of the seat in front of me and bent toward me. She had a ton of makeup on, swirls of it back by her ears, but she was pretty, too, in the kind of way a motel room might be pretty if you saw it in the right light. She smelled of moisturizer and perfume. I knew that all her chatter was meant to cover for my mom. In other words, she knew my mom wanted to chat up that guy, but she also seemed interested in the whole shark thing. Her name tag said
Charlene
.

“Your mom said this is your first flight,” she said to me when Tommy finished bombarding her with shark facts. “For both of you? That’s exciting.”

“It’s fun,” I said. “So far so good.”

“And you’re in school, of course. How do you like it?”

“I like it okay,” I said.

“I bet you’re a good student.”

“She’s class president,” Tommy said, which was not true exactly. I had been class president in ninth grade and was running for it this year. “She never even gets below an A-minus.”

“Impressive! So are you thinking about college, Bee?”

I nodded. “I want to go to Dartmouth. It’s in New Hampshire.”

“She does the
New York Times
crossword puzzle every Sunday,” Tommy said, enjoying putting me on the spot.
“And she writes for the school paper. And she can peel an apple in one continuous peel and do crow pose for about five minutes. That’s a yoga position: you have to lift your whole body up and tilt forward and stay in a handstand.”

“I know crow pose,” Charlene said. “Wow, that’s not easy.”

“It’s not that hard, either,” I said, giving Tommy a look.

“Maybe for you,” Charlene said. “I have trouble with downward dog. I’m just a beginner. Anyway, sounds as though you have a plan for your life, Bee.”

“On the last day of school, Bee knew what she was wearing for the first day of school the following year,” Tommy said. “I’m not kidding, either.”

When she asked about Tommy, he gave her the little speech he had been giving since he heard from the Blue Moon program that he would be able to go into the water with great whites. A bunch of people who “mean well” find out about sick kids and they go to a lot of trouble to give the kid one big experience before the kid gets so weak and screwed up that he can’t appreciate anything any longer. My mom applied on Tommy’s behalf, and because she’s a single mom, and because Tommy has cystic fibrosis, the foundation wrote right back. Then the local pastor, Reverend Pael, called to say he had been contacted to verify “our situation” and he had given the thumbs-up, which is the kind of phrase Reverend Pael uses because he’s a dork and doesn’t know it.

“Well, that’s just terrific,” Charlene said to Tommy and only partly to me. “That’s just so exciting. But won’t you be scared to get into the water with a great white?”

“I’ll be in a dive cage,” Tommy said.

“Still.” Charlene pretended to shiver. “You’re brave.”

People always said that kind of thing to Tommy, as if saying he was brave or smart and daring somehow covered the fact that he had cystic fibrosis. They figured the teeter-totter had dipped so far down against him that they could put anything on the other side and he wouldn’t notice it was phony. I simply nodded, trying to let Tommy have the limelight, but I also saw my mom writing down something on a piece of paper. She handed it to Businessman Bob and then looked down the aisle at me. She waved a little finger-scrunch wave. I scrunch-waved back.

TOMMY SHARK FACT #1:
A great white will tilt its head out of the water so it can see seals on land or people on boats. It’s the only shark known to exhibit this behavior.

Somewhere over the Rockies the plane started bouncing in turbulence. I suppose I had fallen asleep, because when I woke, Tommy had his head on my lap and his breathing was lousy. His face pointed toward the nose of
the plane, so I couldn’t see his expression, but his lungs sounded like a water pump looking for pressure. I listened, trying to gauge how bad he might be. His lungs routinely fill with mucus that is stickier than normal human mucus. It makes his lungs perfect for breeding bacteria, and it makes it almost impossible to clear them. I couldn’t remember a time his lungs didn’t sound as though they were searching for something they could never find.

The plane lights had dimmed and when I looked at the seat in front of us I didn’t see my mother. I leaned into the aisle to see if she had slid in beside the businessman, but I couldn’t see her there, either. The plane took a nice bump, one of those shuddery kinds of things that make you wonder if your belly has a bottom, and Tommy lifted up from my lap, a glistening string of drool running like a silver scar on his right cheek.

He shook his head at me and looked in my eyes.

That meant he couldn’t breathe.

“Use your inhalant,” I said.

He shook his head again.

It meant he had misplaced it. He always misplaced his inhalant. He was eleven and he lost everything you handed to him.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the one I always
kept on me.
Pulmozyme
. To make his sputum less sticky. I had a dozen stashed around the house, but I always had one in my pocket for him. Sometimes I worried he depended on me too much for the inhalant because he knew I would cover him. But he still had to have the stuff one way or the other.

“Here,” I said.

He tilted it into his mouth, pressed down, breathed in. The plane dipped and shuddered again. He coughed a quick, ugly cough, then breathed three times fast through his nose. He nodded and inhaled off the Pulmozyme again. The plane steadied. I studied him.

“Better?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Clear?” I asked.

“Pretty clear,” he said. “Thanks, Bee.”

I stood and fished around in the overhead for his vest. He has to wear a special vest at least twice a day. It massages and shakes his chest, loosening the mucus. It’s gross to think about, but gross doesn’t really figure into it when you’re around Tommy for long. Either you take care of him or he dies.

I helped him slide into the vest, Velcroed it shut, then turned it on. It made a buzzing sound like the sound of a hair dryer as it’s turning off. But it never turned off. It just kept going. The vest cost about ten grand. My mother
always mentions the price to impress people. But she didn’t pay for it. Her wages from her job as a hostess at the Morningside Restaurant in Bristol didn’t come close to buying a ten-thousand-dollar vest. It was welfare, or Medicaid, or some government program for sick kids that covered the expense.

I sat and watched Tommy for a minute to make sure the vest worked properly. I tried to imagine what it must be like to know you needed your lungs shaken just to breathe. Whenever he wore the vest he looked straight ahead, his eyes focused on nothing, his arms out as if he wanted to block someone from coming through a door. As if he wanted to tell the whole world to step back. I wondered if he felt his lungs loosening, or if he felt like a snow globe, his liquids jostling and moving until he could be still again.

TOMMY SHARK FACT #2:
Female whites grow larger than males. No one is quite sure why. Whites hunt mammals, seals, and sea lions primarily. Whites—also called pointers in Australia—patrol like sentries near seal colonies. When the seals take to the water, the sharks swim beneath them, waiting and gauging the right time to attack. Like most predators, sharks ambush their prey. Their coloring is darker on top so that they blend into the ocean floor. When they rise, or breach, they come full force to the surface and hit a seal with the impact of a truck. Usually they
inflict one lethal bite. Frequently they decapitate the seal and leave it to bleed like a punctured tube of paint into the water. That’s when the whites circle, giving a classic fin-cleaving-the-water show that people both love and hate to watch. They devour the seal in a few bites once it has ceased struggling. Blood spreads on the water and gulls dive in to get scraps of flesh.

My mother says Tommy’s fascination with sharks is really a fascination with his disease. She says Tommy sees himself as the seal, and the shark as the quick bright thing coming up from the sea bottom. Sometimes I like Mom’s metaphors; other times they seem like pure rot. Tommy doesn’t have a metaphoric shark in his chest. He has a clogged filter, but Mom doesn’t like seeing it that way.

Dad was the practical one, I guess. He could fix anything and people always called him on the weekends to do quick chores. He never charged his friends, which drove my mother crazy. If you study pictures of him, he looks like one sort of person on a Sunday—cleaned up and a little uncomfortable in his decent clothes—and another sort of person the rest of the week. Mostly he wore a blue coverall and a Boston Red Sox baseball hat. He whistled,
too. I liked hearing him whistle and it’s one of my only memories of him. He whistled sharp and you heard him coming and going, his truck banging around with tools, his keys jingling, his boots solid on the floor. Mom might float away, but Dad stayed anchored. Now and then I hear a man whistle and I think, Maybe that’s Dad, but it never is. Mom thinks he went to Florida, which is a strange place for a furnace installer to go.

Mr. Cotter, the point person for Blue Moon, met us at the San Francisco airport.

He looked to be about a thousand years old, until you checked his eyes, which were bright blue and alert, like a swimming pool on a hot day. He wore a grandpa hat, a kind of brimmed straw thing, and his shirt opened a little near his chest. I saw his T-shirt, a wifebeater, and dog tags. He had a baseball hat for Tommy. A shark fin stuck up from the top of the hat, and when I glanced at Tommy, I knew it broke his heart. He hated people turning his shark interest into something stupid and gory, but Mom grabbed the hat as soon as she saw it and popped it on Tommy’s head. He looked like an idiot. I’m not sure why, but my eyes filled seeing him like that, and I had to look away, because at last the kid was where he wanted to be, a kid who couldn’t breathe a decent breath his entire life, and in this
one moment of pure happiness he had to put on a stupid hat that cheapened everything. Mr. Cotter hadn’t meant anything wrong by it—he probably thought he was being lighthearted and fun, and Tommy, a frail boy who weighed less than eighty pounds and whose chest stayed packed with mud and puke half the time, thanked Mr. Cotter politely and wore the hat like a champ.

“You folks excited?” Mr. Cotter asked.

“Oh, yes,” Mom said. “This is all we’ve been talking about for a month at least.”

“Well, we have quite a trip lined up for you,” Mr. Cotter said, leading us away from the baggage claim the way old guys do, his hand out as if showing you a fine carpet. “The weather is supposed to be clear tomorrow, so the captain thinks we should have a good day. You’ll be with a group, some other kids, so it should be fun.”