Meredith hands me the hose. “Just hold it, okay?” She and Juliann are on opposite sides of the van, stretching to soap the roof and having trouble covering the whole area.
“Do you have a ladder somewhere?” I ask.
“Behind the garage,” Juliann says.
“I’ll get it.” I walk backward so I can get a better look at Meredith’s legs when she doesn’t know I’m looking.
Mrs. Rilke’s face appears at the window and she shakes her head, eyebrows raised. How can she know what I’m thinking?
After I drag the ladder around to the front yard, being careful to keep the ends from scarring the lawn, I snap it open by the driver’s-side door. Meredith climbs up and grins back at me.
“Can you stay for lunch? We’re having homemade pizza.”
“Mom won’t…” I shrug my shoulders. “We’re headed out on the boat, actually.” I wish I could ask her to come with us, but that is hardly what Dad had in mind. If he’s going to keep up this chumminess for long, it’s going to get old. It’s already old when I think of how much more fun it would be to show Meredith the river than play cards with Nick.
As she leans to the right, the ladder quivers. Foot out as a prop, I grab the sides to steady it.
“Easy, easy. No more injuries. Your mom will think I’m accident-prone.”
“She already does.” But she laughs again and flips her hair back. Does she have any idea what that does to me?
Mom and Mrs. Rilke come out on the front stoop in serious conversation.
“Hey, look who’s getting to be buddies.” Meredith waves the soapy sponge and sprays all of us.
“Could be dangerous,” I say. “They’ll want to hang around whenever we get together.”
“More like they’ll keep each other busy.”
Juliann flips her sponge over the roof in our direction. “Daniel, you’re distracting the help. We need to get this job done and move on.”
“Oh, listen to that.” Meredith makes an exaggerated frown. “She has a hot date with Mack tonight and suddenly she doesn’t have time to hang around with us.”
The question I want to ask beats a drum roll in my head. If Juliann is going to Mack’s, what is Meredith going to do?
Mom’s jingling the keys. “Okay, Daniel. Time to go.”
Mrs. Rilke hands her a paper bag curled over at the top. “Nice to see you, Daniel. Bet you don’t miss that ankle cast.”
“No, ma’am.” No point in mentioning it was only a brace. With my eyes averted, I wait at the bottom of the ladder for Meredith to climb down. “Hey, I wanted to ask you if you’d go out on Halloween with me—us—Mack and me. He does a great party, costumes and stuff.”
Her feet are on the ground, the ladder behind her, and I’m in front so she can’t go anywhere. I can smell lotion and soap and damp hair. A quick glance at the mothers and even though they’re halfway to our car, they’re head to head, back into something serious again.
Meredith kisses me so quickly it feels like a puff of wind on my face. I kiss her back harder but all in a flash because I’m not sure whether she wants her mother to know she does that kind of thing.
“Yes,” Meredith says and I don’t know if she means yes to the party or yes to the kiss or yes to something more. As much as I’d like to kiss her again, I can’t because my mother is stationed by the car and staring over the hood at the two of us.
“I’ll call you,” Meredith whispers as I walk across the squishy grass to the car.
It’s only on the way home, once the Rilkes’ yard is out of sight, that I remember we’ll be away on the family cruise all weekend and I still have no idea what Meredith’s doing during Juliann’s hot date.
Once we’re home and the anchor’s up, Mom starts in all over again, listing potential disasters and pouting. Dad nods, silent. He must have decided she needs to get it all out. When I offer to make the sandwiches, she looks surprised.
“Nick can do it.”
Nick swallows the mouthful of leftover milk he’s just slurped from his cereal bowl. “Me? I’m barely thirteen. I can’t make sandwiches.”
“I’ll help you.” Not that I’m such a nice guy, but the constant debate is wearying. Every little thing has to work itself around to me and The Disease and how useless I am.
Mom gets up, even though she just sat down with the newspaper out of the wind. “No, you rest. I’ll help Nick.”
“Nick.” Dad’s commander voice erupts from out on the deck. “Make the sandwiches.” He signals Mom to come with him up to the bridge. When he pinches her rear on the way up the ladder, she bats his hand away, but at least he’s gotten her to laugh. Together they stand by the steering wheel, Dad’s arm around her waist, his baseball cap on backward, a little boy on an adventure with his buddies. You gotta like my dad.
Although he’s lowered his voice, they’re shoulder to shoulder. I stand in the cabin’s shadow, next to the ladder where they can’t see me. Their words drop down like rainwater in a gutter spout.
“Let the boys work it out,” Dad says.
“But Daniel needs to rest before Monday. Maybe I should tell him so he knows why it’s important for him to save his energy.”
“He’ll just worry, maybe not sleep well. Let’s wait.”
“It’s going to be a shock either way.”
My brain is whirring, that famous imagination going crazy. What the hell are they talking about? What’s the big secret? What news could be worse?
Mom lowers her voice. “At least until then I can make this easier for him. I can make the sandwiches.”
“You can’t do everything.”
“I’m not doing everything. If I were, I’d take the damn chemo instead of letting them drag him off against his will.”
So that’s the big secret. Chemo on Monday, countdown forty-eight hours. I ought to be shocked, scared, but it’s actually a relief. Something’s being done. The debate is over. All the doctors think it’s the right thing to do, the judge agrees, even the Great Wizard himself, Attorney Walker.
The little bit about leukemia I’ve managed to read always lists chemotherapy as the remedy of first resort. I mean, I like Miss T. Undertaker, I love my parents, but what can they really know from their little corner of Essex County, Virginia? They’ve never lived through chemotherapy. How bad can it be? I’m already puking up my guts and banned from school and stuck on this moving island. Plus Meredith thinks chemo is a good idea, and she’s lived other places besides this hole-in-the-wall.
As Mom is backing down the ladder, I’m scrambling to get myself back into the cabin and into a chair. Lucky for me, she doesn’t come in, only looks in the window and then turns. I watch her grab the rail, though the water is as seamless as ribbon. Never letting go of the railing, she follows it to their cabin until she disappears, her head bowed. Under the weight of a dying son.
A minute later, music blasts out. One of the old tapes of their favorites. The songs take her back to an easier time, I guess. Before kids, before bills and a houseboat without a dryer, and before the constant possibility that her son won’t get the full twelve months they promised if she doesn’t let them poison him in the meantime.
Mom’s oldies tape competes with the lean pitch and moan of the engine as the houseboat chugs downstream. We’re passing houses I’ve only seen once or twice from a motorboat. In every half-moon bay little pockets of cottages huddle together. If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mor-or-ning croons from the back of the boat. Whole words hang on the wind and then fade as the boat plows forward.
Honestly, I’m not a snob about music, but it’s painful to hear most of those tapes. Outside of the guitar’s repetitive strumming, which is down, up, down in continuous threes, song after song after song, the tapes are ancient and they sound ancient, all scratchy. These are songs that only show up in Disney movies for first graders about the history of music. My parents do listen to Coltrane and some other more relevant stuff, but she’s punishing the three of us with Peter, Paul and Mary when what she really wants is to punish the judge and the Social Services witch for forcing chemo on me.