From Ant to Eagle(43)

Sammy didn’t seem overly excited about this but Mom was looking over her book with a smile so I knew she must have liked the idea.

“Oh,” Sammy said. “Six, I guess.”

“Six,” I repeated, then wrote the number six on the paper. Above it I wrote the date and time.

Six was almost always Sammy’s answer when he hadn’t got his pain medicines in a while. A seven was when his tummy was really bothering him and he’d only given an eight once when he was keeled over the toilet grabbing his tummy. That had looked more like a ten to me but Sammy wasn’t very good with numbers so he’d given it an eight. After the pain medicines his pain would usually go down to a two or three or four, but never a zero.

“Okay, and do you have pain anywhere else?”

Sammy shook his head.

“Good.” I wrote, ‘No pain anywhere else’ next to the six. “How many times have you thrown up today?”

Sammy thought for a minute then held up two fingers.

“And do you feel like you need to throw up right now?”

Sammy shook his head again.

“Okay,” I said, scribbling more notes.

I finished up my report and was pretty happy with how it looked. Very official, I thought. Then I grabbed The Secret Garden from under my bed and held it up.

“Want me to read a chapter?” I asked.

Sammy looked at the book for a second then shrugged.

Good enough—I started to read.

After Mom left for her meeting, Dad took Sammy and me to the games room. We played air hockey for a while—taking turns against Dad—but then Sammy said he liked watching better. I could tell by the way he winced every time he leaned over to hit the puck that it was because of his tummy that he didn’t want to play, not because he liked watching better. I guess Dad noticed too because he asked Sammy if he wanted to go back and lie down and Sammy didn’t answer, which we both knew was a yes. So after only fifteen minutes in the games room we went back to our usual prison and I sat watching TV while the nurses came in and gave Sammy more pain medicines. Or maybe they were sleeping potions because within five minutes Sammy’s breathing had become the regular, rhythmic in and out that meant he was asleep.

I thought about asking Dad if we could go back to the games room but I knew we couldn’t leave Sammy alone. So I waited for Mom to come back from her meeting. But I guess it went late because when she arrived Dad stood up and said he needed to get home.

So I just watched TV, remembering back to the beginning of summer when I’d complained about not having a TV in Huxbury. Right then I would have been happy to never see another TV as long as I lived.





CHAPTER 27

IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING AND WE WERE WAITING FOR DAD. There was a chapel in the hospital and Mom wanted to go to Sunday service but Dad was late and Mom was angry. It didn’t bother me—I’d rather have gone to the games room to see if Oliver was around, and it definitely didn’t bother Sammy (he was half asleep on his bed watching cartoons). Still, I hoped Dad would show up soon because I could feel the tension in the room mounting every time Mom looked at the clock.

When Dad finally strolled in I braced for impact.

“How ya’ feeling, sport?” he asked Sammy; his usual routine when he arrived.

Sammy said, “Fine.”

Dad stood watching the TV for a brief moment. I think he was collecting his thoughts to prepare himself for Mom. He walked across the room and sat down beside her on the bed.

“It’s 10:30, Harold,” Mom said, her voice surprisingly calm.

Dad didn’t say anything back.

“I wanted to go to the service this morning in the chapel. You had promised you’d be here by nine so we could go.”

“I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t get much sleep again and—”

Mom stood up and walked toward the door. She stopped for a second and I thought, “Okay, here it comes,” but then she just walked right out without saying a word.

I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it all out with a giant whoosh.

“Can we go to the games room?” I asked Dad optimistically.

Dad didn’t answer. I think maybe Mom’s guilt trip had turned him to stone.

ON MONDAY I went back to school ready for another painful week of avoiding Aleta only to find out I wouldn’t have to. When the bus pulled up in front of her house she wasn’t there. We waited a few minutes before driving off and instead of feeling relieved like I should have, I felt sad.

By Thursday, Aleta still hadn’t shown up for school and things still weren’t any better with Sammy. Just like Oliver had said, Cycle 2 was worse than Cycle 1. He barely had the energy to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, let alone to go to the games room or do anything fun. He didn’t want me to read to him, he didn’t want me to get him a warm towel to put on his tummy, he just didn’t seem to want me at all.

This was also around the time he started losing his hair.

I first noticed it when we were lying on his bed side-by-side watching TV. I thought he was asleep until I heard the baseball he’d had in his lap drop to the floor and he moved to try to reach it. I was going to get up and help him when I noticed something. At first I thought it was a dead animal—like he’d just killed a squirrel by sleeping on it—but then I realized Sammy’s pillow was covered in his dark brown hair. I thought back to his reaction at Bingo night when he’d seen the other bald kids and I quickly flipped his pillow over before he turned back around. I thought I could hide it from him but later that night he’d gone to the bathroom and when he’d come back he’d seen his pillow. For a while he’d just stood at the side of the bed staring. He looked like he was going to cry. After needles and nausea and tummy pain—it was losing his hair that seemed to bother Sammy the most.