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“Mom said I can’t stay home today,” grumped Jill as she came into Jack’s room. She dropped her book bag on the floor and kicked it.
“Why not?”
“She said the weatherman’s never right. She said the storm’ll pass us.”
“Magic Marti says it’s going to kick our butts,” said Jack.
As if to counterpoint his comment, there was a low rumble of thunder way off to the west.
Jill sighed and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. She no longer looked like his twin. She had a round face and was starting to grow boobs. Her hair was as black as crow’s wings, and even though Mom didn’t let her wear makeup—not until she was in junior high, and even then it was going to be an argument—Jill had pink cheeks, pink lips, and every boy in sixth grade was in love with her. Jill didn’t seem to care much about that. She didn’t try to dress like the middle school girls, or like Maddy Simpson, who was the same age but who had pretty big boobs and dressed like she was in an MTV rap video. Uncle Roger had a ten-dollar bet going that Maddy was going to be pregnant before she ever got within shooting distance of a diploma. Jack and Jill both agreed. Everyone did.
Jill dressed like a farm girl. Jeans and a sweatshirt, often the same kind of sweatshirt Jack wore. Today she had on an olive drab US Army shirt. Jack wore his with pajama bottoms. Aunt Linda had been in the army, but she’d died in Afghanistan three years ago.
They sat together, staring blankly at the TV screen for a while. Jack cut her a sly sideways look and saw that her face was slack, eyes empty. He understood why, and it made him sad.
Jill wasn’t dealing well with the cancer. He was afraid of what would happen to her after he died. And Jack had no illusions about whether the current remission was going to be the one that took. When he looked into his own future, either in dreams, prayers, or when lost in thought, there was an end to the road. It went on a bit further, and there was a big wall of black nothingness.
It sucked, sure, but he’d lived with it so long that he had found a kind of peace with it. Why go kicking and screaming into the dark if none of that would change anything?
&nbs
p; Jill, on the other hand, that was different. She had to live, she had to keep going. Jack watched TV a lot, he saw the episodes of Dr. Phil and other shows where they talked about death and dying. He knew that some people believed that the dying had an obligation to their loved ones who would survive them.
Jack didn’t want Jill to suffer after he died, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He told her once about his dreams of the big black nothing.
“It’s like a wave that comes and just sweeps me away,” he’d told her.
“That sounds awful,” she replied, tears springing into her eyes, but Jack assured her that it wasn’t.
“No,” he said, “?’cause once the nothing takes you, there’s no more pain.”
“But there’s no more you!”
He grinned. “How do you know? No one knows what’s on the other side of that wall.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be something cool. Something nice.”
“How could it be nice?” Jill had demanded.
This was right after the cancer had come back the last time, before the current remission. Jack was so frail that he barely made a dent in his own hospital bed. He touched the wires and tubes that ran from his pencil-thin arm to the machines behind him. “It’s got to be nicer than this.”
Nicer than this.
That was the last time they’d had a real conversation about the sickness, or about death. That was nine months ago. Jack stopped talking to her about those things and instead did what he could to ease her down so that when the nothing took him, she’d still be able to stand.
He nudged her and held out the bowl of cereal. Without even looking at it, she took a handful and began eating them, one at a time, smashing them angrily between her teeth.
Eventually she said, “It’s not fair.”
“I know.” Just as he knew that they were having two separate conversations at the same time. It was often that way with them.
They crunched and glared at the TV.
“If it gets bad,” Jack said, “they’ll let everyone go.”
But she shook her head. “I want to stay home. I want to hang out here and watch it on TV.”
“You’ll be in it,” he said.
“Not the same thing. It’s better on TV.”
