“That’s how it progresses,” she said. “You feel fine, and then, when your body can’t keep fighting, you don’t.”
Stifling my tears, I couldn’t help but think about the play.
“But all those rehearsals . . . those long days . . . maybe you shouldn’t have—”
“Maybe,” she said, reaching for my hand and cutting me off. “Doing the play was the thing that kept me healthy for so long.”
Later, she told me that seven months had passed since she’d been diagnosed. The doctors had given her a year, maybe less.
These days it might have been different. These days they could have treated her. These days Jamie would probably live. But this was happening forty years ago, and I knew what that meant.
Only a miracle could save her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
This was the one question I hadn’t asked her, the one that I’d been thinking about. I hadn’t slept that night, and my eyes were still swollen. I’d gone from shock to denial to sadness to anger and back again, all night long, wishing it weren’t so and praying that the whole thing had been some terrible nightmare.
We were in her living room the following day, the day that Hegbert had made the announcement to the congregation. It was January 10, 1959.
Jamie didn’t look as depressed as I thought she would. But then again, she’d been living with this for seven months already. She and Hegbert had been the only ones to know, and neither of them had trusted even me. I was hurt by that and frightened at the same time.
“I’d made a decision,” she explained to me, “that it would be better if I told no one, and I asked my father to do the same. You saw how people were after the services today. No one would even look me in the eye. If you had only a few months left to live, is that what you would want?”
I knew she was right, but it didn’t make it any easier. I was, for the first time in my life, completely and utterly at a loss.
I’d never had anyone close to me die before, at least not anyone that I could remember. My grandmother had died when I was three, and I don’t remember a single thing about her or the services that had followed or even the next few years after her passing. I’d heard stories, of course, from both my father and my grandfather, but to me that’s exactly what they were. It was the same as hearing stories I might otherwise read in a newspaper about some woman I never really knew. Though my father would take me with him when he put flowers on her grave, I never had any feelings associated with her. I felt only for the people she’d left behind.
No one in my family or my circle of friends had ever had to confront something like this. Jamie was seventeen, a child on the verge of womanhood, dying and still very much alive at the same time. I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been, not only for her, but for me as well. I lived in fear of doing something wrong, of doing something that would offend her. Was it okay to ever get angry in her presence? Was it okay to talk about the future anymore? My fear made talking to her difficult, though she was patient with me.
My fear, however, made me realize something else, something that made it all worse. I realized I’d never even known her when she’d been healthy. I had started to spend time with her only a few months earlier, and I’d been in love with her for only eighteen days. Those eighteen days seemed like my entire life, but now, when I looked at her, all I could do was wonder how many more days there would be.
On Monday she didn’t show up for school, and I somehow knew that she’d never walk the hallways again. I’d never see her reading the Bible off by herself at lunch, I’d never see her brown cardigan moving through the crowd as she made her way to her next class. She was finished with school forever; she would never receive her diploma.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything while I sat in class that first day back, listening as teacher after teacher told us what most of us had already heard. The responses were similar to those in church on Sunday. Girls cried, boys hung their heads, people told stories about her as if she were already gone. What can we do? they wondered aloud, and people looked to me for answers.
“I don’t know,” was all I could say.
I left school early and went to Jamie’s, blowing off my classes after lunch. When I knocked at the door, Jamie answered it the way she always did, cheerfully and without, it seemed, a care in the world.
“Hello, Landon,” she said, “this is a surprise.”
When she leaned in to kiss me, I kissed her back, though the whole thing made me want to cry.
“My father isn’t home right now, but if you’d like to sit on the porch, we can.”
“How can you do this?” I asked suddenly. “How can you pretend that nothing is wrong?”
“I’m not pretending that nothing is wrong, Landon. Let me get my coat and we’ll sit outside and talk, okay?”
She smiled at me, waiting for an answer, and I finally nodded, my lips pressed together. She reached out and patted my arm.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
I walked to the chair and sat down, Jamie emerging a moment later. She wore a heavy coat, gloves, and a hat to keep her warm. The nor’easter had passed, and the day wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been over the weekend. Still, though, it was too much for her.
“You weren’t in school today,” I said.
She looked down and nodded. “I know.”
“Are you ever going to come back?” Even though I already knew the answer, I needed to hear it from her.
“No,” she said softly, “I’m not.”
“Why? Are you that sick already?” I started to tear up, and she reached out and took my hand.
“No. Today I feel pretty good, actually. It’s just that I want to be home in the mornings, before my father has to go to the office. I want to spend as much time with him as I can.”
Before I die,she meant to say but didn’t. I felt nauseated and couldn’t respond.
“When the doctors first told us,” she went on, “they said that I should try to lead as normal a life as possible for as long as I could. They said it would help me keep my strength up.”
“There’s nothing normal about this,” I said bitterly.
“I know.”
“Aren’t you frightened?”
Somehow I expected her to say no, to say something wise like a grown-up would, or to explain to me that we can’t presume to understand the Lord’s plan.
She looked away. “Yes,” she finally said, “I’m frightened all the time.”
“Then why don’t you act like it?”
“I do. I just do it in private.”
“Because you don’t trust me?”
“No,” she said, “because I know you’re frightened, too.”
I began to pray for a miracle.
They supposedly happen all the time, and I’d read about them in newspapers. People regaining use of their limbs after being told they’d never walk again, or somehow surviving a terrible accident when all hope was lost. Every now and then a traveling preacher’s tent would be set up outside of Beaufort, and people would go there to watch as people were healed. I’d been to a couple, and though I assumed that most of the healing was no more than a slick magic show, since I never recognized the people who were healed, there were occasionally things that even I couldn’t explain. Old man Sweeney, the baker here in town, had been in the Great War fighting with an artillery unit behind the trenches, and months of shelling the enemy had left him deaf in one ear. It wasn’t an act — he really couldn’t hear a single thing, and there’d been times when we were kids that we’d been able to sneak off with a cinnamon roll because of it. But the preacher started praying feverishly and finally laid his hand upon the side of Sweeney’s head. Sweeney screamed out loud, making people practically jump out of their seats. He had a terrified look on his face, as if the guy had touched him with a white-hot poker, but then he shook his head and looked around, uttering the words “I can hear again.” Even he couldn’t believe it. “The Lord,” the preacher had said as Sweeney made his way back to his seat, “can do anything. The Lord listens to our prayers.”