From Ant to Eagle(40)

After that the atmosphere in the room changed. Anticipation, a low din of excitement, smiles and eager eyes—even Sammy looked a lot happier once he realized that there were tangible goods to be won.

Three Bingos later and it was my turn. I practically leapt from my chair as I screamed the word, “Bingo!” After Marribeth had agreed it was true, I raced to the toy caravan and began looking over all the goods. After a short while I settled on a Lego airplane that looked awesome but I would later learn was nearly impossible to put together.

As I walked back to the table I saw Sammy beaming with excitement for me. My heart sank a little. Sammy still hadn’t won. Sammy and his darn luck.

With each passing Bingo it became more and more apparent that Sammy wouldn’t win. And then Marribeth announced that it would be the last game and one of the tiny kids who couldn’t even play but whose parents played for him won. They carried the kid up to the cart and he grabbed the nearest stuffy because it was soft, not because he understood what it was. As they walked back toward their table the kid dropped the stuffy and probably wouldn’t have noticed if they’d never picked it back up.

I felt sad for Sammy. More so, I felt angry with myself. I should have told him he could go up and choose something instead of taking the Lego airplane. I couldn’t bear to look at him despite the fact that he was still smiling. My selfishness had reared up again and I hated it. I felt as if every person in the room were looking at me. “That’s the boy who didn’t let his brother get anything,” they must be thinking. “And he’s not even sick.”

“Okay, that’s the end of Bingo night,” Marribeth croaked and I thought I saw Sammy sink a little in his chair. “Anyone who didn’t win a prize may come up and choose one from the cart.”

Sammy jumped from his chair, forgetting about the IV attached to his arm, and started toward the front. Mom barely had time to catch him with the pole before he tore it out. When he returned he had plastic-wrapped walkie-talkies.

“Awesome!” I said, looking at them. “I didn’t see these!”

We had gotten a pair of walkie-talkies a few years back for Christmas but they were much smaller and barely worked from one end of the house to the other. These ones looked heavy duty. They were big and black with lots of buttons and knobs on them and the moment Sammy and I got back to the room we asked Dad to open them. While Sammy sat in his bed I proceeded to walk down the hospital corridor periodically asking, “Can you still hear me?”

In the end it turned out they worked further than the hospital would allow me to walk. Even at the cafeteria I could clearly make out what Sammy was saying, his crackly voice echoing, “robber that,” after everything I said because I couldn’t explain to him over the walkie-talkie that it was “roger” not “robber.”





CHAPTER 25

THE WEEKEND WAS OVER AND I HAD TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL. I’D spent the night before in my own room, tucked into my own bed and in the morning brushed my teeth in my own bathroom and ate at my own kitchen table, and yet something about it all felt foreign and unfamiliar. Maybe it was that Sammy wasn’t right next to me spilling his milk everywhere, or that Mom wasn’t there telling me to stop being mean when I called him a pig, or that Dad slept in and I had to get myself ready for school.

When it was almost time to leave Dad walked down the stairs into the kitchen rubbing his eyes.

“Sorry, Cal, I must have slept through my alarm,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I replied through a mouth full of Cheerios.

He sat down next to me at the table and for a moment looked as if he was going to say something. Instead he just stared blankly through me, as if I weren’t there or he had x-ray vision, before grabbing an old newspaper and opening it. His beard had grown more and he had a hunch while he sat, like he’d become an old man overnight. It was sometime around then that I realized Dad was having the hardest time of all of us dealing with Sammy’s cancer.

Outside the air was cool and the leaves were starting to show the changes of autumn. A hurried breeze blew through the grass around our house and it tickled my nose as it went. After summer, autumn was my favourite season. I liked the smell of damp leaves and the yellows and oranges and golds of the maples. When we’d lived in London we used to drive through the country just to see the trees and pumpkin patches. Then we’d stop somewhere and choose the biggest, orangest pumpkin we could possibly find. Now that we lived in the country, it was all around us. Only I’d never really appreciated it before.

When I saw the familiar yellow school bus kicking up a cloud of dirt down County Road 11 I felt a wave of anxiety pass through me. By now, every kid at school would know about Sammy’s cancer. We hadn’t gone to church the day before but I knew that Reverend Ramos would have asked everyone to say a prayer for Sammy, and then people would have talked at length over Sunday dinner about the sick boy who had collapsed on the playground and been diagnosed with cancer.

They’d probably have some sort of fundraiser at the church like they always did when something bad happened. Like when the Maxwell’s farm flooded or the Granger’s house caught fire, people were always willing to help if something bad happened to someone else. I remember wondering if I’d be able to get a new bike with the money—just for a second—but yeah, I actually had that thought.