Jack got sick the spring of his junior year.
It started with him being tired. Then bruises he couldn’t explain. Then a cough that wouldn’t go away, and a lump on his neck that he showed me one morning in the kitchen like it was a funny bug bite.
“Is this weird?” he asked. “It feels weird.”
I touched it with two fingers.
It felt weird.
Two weeks later, a doctor in a gray office told us what it was. She said it gently. She said it clearly. She said the words “very treatable” three times, and I held on to those words like a rope.
Daniel drove us home. Nobody turned on the radio. Halfway there, Jack, in the backseat, said, “Well. That’s annoying.”
And Daniel laughed. A horrible laugh, a laugh that was half something else. And then I laughed too. And Jack grinned at us in the rearview mirror like he’d done it on purpose.
He probably had.
When Jack got sick, Theo returned every favor we’d ever done him, in a way I still don’t know how to describe.
He came over after school. Every day. Without being asked.
He did his homework on the floor of Jack’s bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the rug with his back against the bed, while Jack slept or read or stared at the ceiling.
He watched bad movies with him. Horrible ones. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Jack insisted it was a documentary about his greatest enemy.
He was there for the hair loss. When Jack’s hair started coming out in clumps on his pillow, it was Theo who showed up with Daniel’s electric clippers and said, “Okay. Let’s just get it over with.” He shaved Jack’s whole head in the bathroom while Jack sat on the closed toilet lid making a list of famous bald people.
Then Theo handed Jack the clippers.
“Your turn.”
“What?”
“Do mine.”
“Theo, no. You have good hair. You have, like, shampoo commercial hair.”
“Do it, or I’ll do it myself and it’ll look terrible.”
Jack did it. It looked terrible anyway. They came downstairs together, two bald teenage boys, and Daniel stood in the kitchen with a dish towel in his hands and couldn’t speak.
Theo was there for the steroids. The weeks Jack’s face swelled and he was hungry all the time and angry all the time and threw a lamp once, not at anyone, just at the wall. Theo picked up the pieces and said, “That lamp was ugly anyway, man.”
He was there for the days Jack didn’t want to speak. He’d sit in the room in silence for two, three hours, just doing his calculus, and leave without saying goodbye, and come back the next day.
And he was there for the days Jack couldn’t stop speaking. The days he talked and talked and talked. Capital cities. Movie plots. Long, rambling theories about whether a duck could beat a goose in a fight. I understood later that he talked like that because he was terrified that if he went quiet, everyone else would get scared.
There were weeks Theo saw more of my son than I did.
Daniel and I were working opposite shifts. I was a nurse at the county clinic. Daniel managed the hardware store on Route 9. We were trying to keep our jobs, and our insurance, while practically living at the hospital. One of us was always somewhere else.
Theo was always there.
He never complained. Not once in fourteen months.
I’d come home at eleven at night and find him asleep in the armchair in Jack’s room with a textbook open on his chest. I’d put a blanket over him and turn off the light.
He was seventeen. Just a kid. His own life was falling apart in a yellow house four doors down.
And he gave my son every afternoon he had.
