Here’s the journal I wrote on the sixth day after my mom and Jeffrey went away, the day before they came back:
If I could say anything I wanted to, to anyone in the world, right now, I would be all over Annette.
Who died and left you Sherlock Holmes? Why is it your business if I don’t do my math homework? AND even if that somehow, in some way that only you can understand, is your business, how is it your business WHY I didn’t do it? First of all, you’re not my mother, and second, even if you were my mother, you wouldn’t care. You’d be in Philadelphia, buying soft pretzels and Italian ices for your baby son, not checking in with your microwave-oven maintenance son. Second of all, this is a free country. I have a God-given, American right to avoid homework if that helps me in the pursuit of happiness. Don’t you pay ANY attention in social studies? I swear to God, Annette, I haven’t even read the chapter for this week yet, but I know more than you do. You should move to Cuba. Immediately.
And don’t get me started on my father, Mister Personality. If you ask me, he could use a good, stern talking-to as well.
Dad, how about sometime this week, just for kicks, you try making eye contact with me? Would that be so painful? And how about you ask how my day was—and then actually listen while I’m telling you? Here are some sample questions you can try until you get good at this: Son, what did you learn in school today? How’s the drumming going? Are you at all worried that your mother and brother have disappeared into thin air and nobody’s telling you Thing One about what’s going on with them? How about them Yankees? I think they might win the Series this year! Any supposed father who doesn’t even address his son say, once a day, isn’t even a father, in my opinion. So thanks for being my sperm donor, Pop.
Ooohhh, and then there’s my egg donor. Why hasn’t she checked in with me this week? Am I so drastically unimportant? Is Philadelphia such a remote region of the planet that her cell phone won’t work? Also, has she not noticed that there are these things called “pay phones” that one can use for long-distance communication when all else fails? Jeez, she could have sent a pigeon with a message banded to its leg and it would have gotten to me by now. Bang on a log, send me a smoke signal, SOMETHING!
Finally, there’s Mr. Raccoon Face himself—Jeffrey. I’m sure that by now his face is looking better, whatever little virus he had that gave him the fever is gone, and he’s thoroughly enjoying his steady diet of high-fat, high-sugar street-vendor food that he doesn’t even have to microwave for himself. Unlike his heroic older brother, who is gradually dying of freezer-burned-food poisoning. By now, he probably has every single nurse there wrapped around his finger, waiting on him hand and foot, rushing over to get him the remote control for his 300-channel satellite TV so he doesn’t have to exert himself. Plus, all the nurses probably look like older, even better-developed versions of Renee Albert. And they’re scurrying about, fluffing Jeffrey’s pillows, while I’m stuck here, getting lectured daily by Annette, just because I’m skipping an assignment here and there while the rest of my family is ON VACATION!
You can see how folding the pages down was a good call on my part.
The climax of the week actually came that afternoon. It was an All-City jazz band rehearsal day, and when I got to the high school, I found out that Brian was at home sick. Because of that, I got to play the drum set for an hour and forty minutes straight. I was smokin’, too. I always play well when I start out in a bad mood, for some reason, plus I had been practicing so much that my wrists were just super-quick. We played through some of our usual repertoire, like the theme from this old 1970s TV show called Barney Miller, some old jazz standards from the 1940s, and a Disney medley, which was actually far, far cooler than it sounds. Then we got into one of the new Latin pieces, a Dizzy Gillespie song called “Manteca.” Without two drummers, I had to play crazy fast to make the percussion parts sound full enough. My right foot was pounding out accents, my left foot was clicking the hi-hat cymbals on beats “two” and “four,” my right hand was going back and forth between the cowbell and a crash cymbal, and my left hand was flying from the snare drum to the tom-toms and back. Suddenly, a rare and amazing thing happened to me: I was in the Zone. You know how baseball players sometimes talk about games when the ball seemed to be coming at their bats in slow motion, looking like a gigantic freeze-frame cantaloupe just waiting to be pounded? That’s how this felt, like I could do no wrong. I was so far up inside the beat that I wasn’t thinking at all—my body just did everything, perfectly, almost by itself. Mr. Watras, who usually grades papers while a student conducts us through practice, stopped what he was doing to watch me. I could see a huge grin on his face, but I wasn’t affected too much by that until I remembered it later—I was just grooving on drummer autopilot.
Then Renee walked in to visit her boyfriend, Biff the Guitar Wonder. She must have come straight from varsity cheering practice—she was one of only three eighth graders who got to practice with the high school squad—because she was wearing her uniform. I hope to God she had been watching for a while before I noticed her, because as soon as I looked up, the shock of seeing her there, wearing only small amounts of Lycra and spandex, and looking right at me, knocked me out of the Zone. Far out of the Zone. As in, “Oooohhh, Pez, you dropped a stick—right in the middle of a song! And it went tumbling across the room at about 90 miles an hour! And it smashed into the bell of some senior’s trumpet! And who knew brass was so flimsy, anyway?”
By the way, the sound of a high school jazz band falling apart in mid-tune, while one of the trumpet players is screaming at the drummer at the top of his lungs and the piano player is in the throes of a mad laughing fit, is just not something you want to hear. And it’s certainly not something you want the hottest girl in eighth grade to hear. Renee looked away, but there was definitely a hint of a pleased smirk on her face for a split second. Then I was distracted by the senior trumpeter’s raging, top-volume, spit-spewing barrage of verbal abuse in my face. By the time Mr. Watras had stopped this guy from busting me open like an overstuffed piñata, Renee was gone, I was mortified, and Annette was still kind of snorting and giggling. Which made for a fun ride home, although at least she couldn’t snicker uncontrollably and bug me about my homework record at the same time.
The next morning, my mom and Jeffrey returned from Philadelphia.
NO MORE VACATION
If you’re like me, you wake up on a nice Saturday morning in the autumn, and you want to smell the crisp fall air, sit halfway up, stretch, and then go back to sleep until about noon. But if you’re like me on this particular Saturday morning, you also want to wake up so you can see your mom and brother when they get home.
Somehow, at least half of me believed that my mom and Jeffrey would come hopping out of the car, run into the house, and share a good laugh with my dad and me about the little false alarm they had been through. You know, like, “Ha-ha. Those silly doctors. Can you be-LIEVE they mistook a nosebleed for leukemia? It’s just so ridiculous!” And then I’d pout for a while about how my mom hadn’t called me all week and tease Jeffrey about how chubby he was getting from all the cheesesteaks and soft pretzels down in Philly, and then go back to sleep for a nice lazy Saturday nap.
When my mom finally pulled into our driveway, though, I saw that Jeffrey was asleep in the backseat, and I started to get nervous. Jeffrey never, ever used to sleep on car rides. I am a big car-ride sleeper, maybe the biggest. But Jeffrey was usually just blabbing away for hours on end on any kind of road trip. Once we drove to the Outer Banks for a vacation when Jeffrey was three, and he stayed up until after midnight on the way down. At about 10 p.m., while he was giving me a lecture on the various Rescue Heroes, and why a Voice-Tech Rescue Hero is completely different from a Body Force Rescue Hero, my parents pulled off the highway into a Cracker Barrel restaurant and rented a Charlotte’s Web book on tape to shut him up. But even then, he made my mom stop the tape every fifteen minutes so he could ask long strings of questions. Have you ever
tried to sleep while a pint-size maniac is rattling off hundreds of detailed inquiries about the web-spinning mechanisms of the common barn spider? Granted, it was strangely amusing to watch the accountant and the English teacher attempt to explain arachnid biology, but overall, I was about ready to strap myself to the roof rack by the time Jeffrey finally nodded off—just in time for us to arrive at our rental house, so he could wake up again and ask a million new questions about the locale, the sleeping arrangements, which pajamas he should wear, and why Steven always gets to sleep on the couch when all HE gets is a stupid bed.
Anyway, that’s why a sleeping Jeffrey didn’t strike me as a reassuring sign. My mom left him in the car and walked up to the door to hug us. When she took off her sunglasses, I couldn’t believe how old and tired she looked. After my hug, she stepped back for a moment, and I made a pretty major social blunder.
So, Mom, everything’s OK, right? This whole cancer mistake is all sorted out?
She looked at me like I had just asked her for a cigarette. Steven, this is no time to joke. Your brother is a very, very sick boy.
He is? I just figured it was all a big mistake.
Mistake? MISTAKE?
Well, you know, when you didn’t call and all, I assumed that…
What do you mean, when I didn’t call? You know I spoke to your father every single night.
Well, no, actually Dad never…
YOU DIDN’T TELL HIM THAT I CALLED? Didn’t you tell him anything? He at least knows about Jeffrey’s condition, doesn’t he?
Honey, I…ummm…
Oh, boy. There was something going on here, for sure. But I wouldn’t find out much about it right then, because Jeffrey woke up right at that instant and knocked on the car window. My mom immediately jogged back out to him. My dad gave me a sheepish look and started off slowly after her. I could tell by the slouchy way he was walking that he didn’t exactly relish the thought of arriving at the car and facing his angry wife and sick son, but on the other hand, he certainly couldn’t just stay in the doorway because then he’d have to face me.
I stayed inside while my dad made a big show of grabbing the bags from the trunk and my mom carried Jeffrey in. Jeffrey looked really beat, too, although his black eyes had faded to yellow and his nose had gone back to normal. I was afraid of what I would say to him, but as usual, I was worried about the wrong thing. I should have been afraid of what he would say to me. He started right in, and although his voice was kind of gravelly, the words came out at lightning speed.
Steven, Steven! You should have seen it! The hospital was HUGE! And I had a real BED! And you could MOVE it! The head sat UP, and the FEET did, too! And the doctors came and put a needle in my BACK! And then I couldn’t move for an HOUR! But Mommy got me a cool book about KNIGHTS IN SHINING ARMOR. She sat on the floor and read it to me upside down so I wouldn’t be BORED! But I was anyway. And they gave me sleepy medicine and put a special TUBE in my chest called a catheter. And another time they put a needle all the way in my HIPBONE. It HURT! Then they took out some inside bone stuff called BONE NARROW. And my BONE NARROW is sick. So they put another needle in my back yesterday with the THROW-UP MEDICINE! And I had a needle stuck in my chest for FIVE DAYS!
He paused to look at my mom for confirmation.
FIVE days, right, Mommy?
When he pushed up off of her shoulder to look at her, I looked, too. I couldn’t believe it—she was crying silently. Her voice came out all trembly when she said, Yes, baby. Five days.
I was standing there with my head reeling. My brother was really sick, so sick that they had to stick a needle in him to take out the marrow from his bones. He was so sick that they had to stab a needle into his spinal cord. He was so sick that my dad couldn’t bear to tell me about it and that my mom was instantly crying as soon as the details were mentioned.
And everything I had been thinking all week was 100% wrong.
My mom recovered enough to ask Jeffrey if he wanted a snack, but he turned kind of green and said he wasn’t hungry. I found out later that he had begun chemotherapy for his disease, and that one of the many side effects was nausea.
Can you put me down? Can I hug Daddy?
Of course, honey.
Daddy! I missed you!
Despite my shock, I remember thinking, “Well, you didn’t miss much this week, Dad-wise.”
And I missed you, Steven. I thought you might be lonely without me, so I got you a souvenir.
At this, Jeffrey pulled something out of his pocket. It was a box of orange Tic Tacs. I couldn’t believe it—in the middle of this horrible experience, Jeffrey had thought of me and had even managed to find me a box of my favorite candy. I thanked him, and I really meant it, which wasn’t always the case when I showed gratitude to Jeffrey. I remember when he was maybe a year old, Jeffrey went through a phase of picking up random objects from the floor and giving them to one of us—usually me. I’d be right in the middle of building a gigantic Lego space station or whatever, and he would come toddling over and present me with that month’s copy of Better Homes and Gardens or the TV remote or a used tissue. And my mom would make me stop what I was doing and say thank you. I hated it at the time, and my annoyance had blinded me to just how generous my little brother really was.
OK, before this turns into some kind of weepy lovefest, I will tell you what happened next. I took out the Tic Tacs, popped one into my mouth, and offered one to Jeffrey. He held out his hand, pinched the Tic Tac between his thumb and pointer finger, flipped it into his mouth—and promptly threw up onto my sneakers.
My first reaction was to shout, Jeffrey! Mom!
Jeffrey looked up at me with the hurt-little-deer eyes he gets when I yell at him and ran to the bathroom. Mom told me not to move, got a white plastic kitchen garbage bag, made me step onto it, and then took my sneakers off of me as I stepped off of the bag. My dad was just kind of staring at everything with a baffled expression, until my mother told him to go after Jeffrey. Then she turned back to me and told me to stay still—even though I was dying to take off my favorite sweatpants, which now had gore-spattered cuffs. She was dialing her cell phone at top speed, which I couldn’t figure out until she started talking into it.
Hello. This is Mrs. Alper, Jeffrey Alper’s mother. He’s a patient in Clinical Trial Number 366. They told me to call if he…OK, I’ll hold.
Mom, what’s going on? Why do you have to call…
Is this the nurse? OK, Jeffrey left there two hours ago, and he just vomited. What should we do?
I was thinking a quicker cleanup might be a great place to start, but nobody was asking me for guidance here. In fact, my mom was leaning way down by the garbage bag, examining the vomit, and any interruption of this bizarre task seemed unwise.
No, there’s no blood in it. Well, my older son gave him a Tic Tac. Orange. Do we have to adjust his meds? Yes? And you’ll fax the adjustments to Doctor Purow here? I should call him in about…an hour? OK, thanks. She hung up and turned to me. Steven, we have to be really careful with what Jeffrey eats for a while.
As I took off my sweats and my mom started in on my sneakers with some paper towels and a can of carpet cleaner, I muttered, Now you tell me.
My mom stopped, looked up at me, laughed a little, and surprised me with a quick hug. I missed you, Steven.
I missed you, too, Mom.
Now go tell your brother you’re not mad at him, OK?
And I realized I actually wasn’t mad at him. All in all, this had been quite the morning for surprises. I went into the bathroom, threw my socks in the hamper—they looked clean, but just in case—and put my arms around Jeffrey. My dad was there, sitting on the closed toilet seat, trying to be comforting, but he really hadn’t gotten his bearings yet with this cancer situation. I think he was relieved when Jeffrey leaned right into me. I started my old, trusty “Hush, Jeffy” chant, my dad tiptoed out, and after a while Jeffrey calmed down.
I looked right into his huge blue eyes and said, Jeffy, it?
??s OK. I’m not mad at you for throwing up on my shoes. Can you do me a favor next time, though?
What?
Please aim for my dress shoes. I hate ’em!
Hee-hee-hee…’K, Steven.
Now let’s brush the taste out of your mouth and go…I don’t know…ummm…how about a drum lesson?
Yay! Drum lesson!
We went down to the basement. Jeffrey banged around on my drum set for twenty minutes or so and things felt normal again, for a little while. Then Jeffrey told me he wanted to take a nap, which he hadn’t done for at least six months. I figured he was probably tired after the week he’d had, so I took him up. Mom and Dad were clearly having a very intense discussion in the dining room, so we just went right past them to his room. He wanted to wear his PJs, so I got them out for him. He took off his shirt and pants, which left him standing there in his Star Wars: Episode I underwear. As I handed over the pajamas, I saw that his lower back had a fairly massive bruise on it from the bone-marrow aspiration (although I didn’t know the name of the procedure yet). When he put the shirt over his head, I got a quick glimpse of bruising along his spine, too. I didn’t say anything about the bruises, though. I read him two chapters of The Trumpet of the Swan, tucked him in with his stuffed-animal pet dog—cleverly named Dog-Dog, by the way—and walked downstairs to the dining room.
I was somewhat sure I wanted to know what was going on with my little brother.
When I walked into the room, my parents were both clearly agitated. They both jumped in at once, my mom trying to tell me how she had called every night, my dad trying to explain why he hadn’t told me. I shocked myself by telling them I didn’t care about any of that, that they should just give me the medical report on Jeffrey.