We Own the Sky(104)

tender and so full of love, it makes me gasp.

There are two videos remaining that I don’t think I have ever seen. They are from the house in Hampstead, taken in the summer, the year before Jack’s diagnosis. We were buoyed with wine and good friends, and kids were running madly and perilously around the garden. Jack was being boisterous, and Anna wanted me to have a word with him. So I did, but with perhaps a little too much wine, I started tickling Jack and soon he was laughing hysterically, and we were both rolling around on the grass.

A tear falls, then two, three, and they do not stop, but I don’t care who can see me crying on the train, because I am watching us all, sun-kissed with happiness, nothing tainted in our little world. This was our before. Our wondrous before.

I click on the second video and the time stamp shows it is from the same

night, after the guests were gone, as the sun was going down. It was a holiday and our neighbors were doing the same and having a barbecue. They were louder, younger, without children, and it sounded from the noise like they were a little drunk.

Jack was shouting at the moon, charging around the backyard with Little

Teddy and a toy plane. There was suddenly a huge burst of laughter from next door and Jack looked at me, wagged his finger and said, “naughty, naughty” and narrowed his eyes, just like he did when he saw a dinosaur with bared teeth or a knobbly scary tree in a book.

Jack ran back to the patio and pressed his head onto my knees and then looked up at me and asked who was making the noise.

“They’re our neighbors,” I said, “they live next door.” Then a pause, Anna saying something inaudible off camera.

Jack looked up at me with his big wide eyes and asked what neighbors were and I said, “Well, we own this house, and they own the one next door.”

And then he asked, “But what about the yard, who owns that,” and I said,

“Well, we own our yard and we own the house and the patio and everything you can see around us.”

“Everything,” he said, opening his hands wide as if he had caught the biggest fish.

“Yes, everything,” I said. “The trees, the walls, your bedroom window, the roof with the birds.”

The camera shakes slightly, as Anna, out of sight, attempts to stifle a laugh.

Jack looked up at the sky and then at me. “Dad,” he said, pointing at the red sunset and the moon and the streaks of airplane dust, “do we own the sky, as well?”





Epilogue

The sky is tenuous, as if it is going to break, and I know that I will have to leave soon. For now, though, the garden at The Rockpool is too inviting. The sunlight is blazing, and it is the first time in a long time that it has felt this hot.

The benches and tables are full of people, scattered haphazardly under the trees. Children run in through the wide-open doors, dodging, running rings around the bar staff. Bags of potato chips are fanned open on tables for families to share.

I am taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to work on my new project. One day, I was reading an article in the  Guardian. It was about a little boy with a terminal disease who was using a camera to document his last few months. I remember looking at this boy’s photos and thinking just how much they reminded me of Jack’s. It was their sense of wonder about ordinary things, the shapes and colors we had become so accustomed and indifferent to: the vivid, bright blue of a pen lid; the ribbed texture of a teddy bear’s nose; the digital red glare on the display of an infusion pump.

So I started Sunflowers—the name had been Anna’s idea—and I asked tech

companies to donate high-end cameras to children who were terminally ill. We offered free photography lessons to the children, at their homes, on the wards, so they could learn the fundamentals of form and technique.

I started small but was soon overwhelmed. Parents, relatives—sometimes

dying teenagers themselves—emailed, asking if we could send them a camera.

When they wrote, they always said the same thing: they wanted to document and capture their worlds, the worlds they knew they were leaving behind.

They knew how people saw them: bald-headed, sickly, dependent on others.

And that wasn’t how they wanted to be remembered. Because even though their worlds had shrunk, to the confines of their bedrooms, a hospital ward, there was still so much life they wanted to capture, to breathe in: a flock of seagulls zooming past their window; a board game lovingly laid out on their hospital bed; the day they sat with their family and watched the crimson sunset set the sky alight. These were the things they wanted to leave behind. And these were the things they wanted us to never forget.

I finish my coffee, zip up my coat and leave the café. The wind is getting

stronger and people are starting to move inside, and I know it is time to go. I put my backpack over my shoulder and head up the path toward the cliffs. The air is almost intolerably muggy now, the storm threatening on the horizon. In the distance, there are flashes of lightning over the ocean and, as the wind picks up, I can hear gentle rumbles of thunder.

At the top of the hill, I leave the path and walk toward the cliff edge. In the distance, I can hear an engine stutter, failing to start, and somewhere, on one of the farms, the frenzied, infectious barking of dogs.

At first it seems like it might be a light shower, that the storm will just graze us, but then there are two giant claps of thunder and the downpour begins. The rain beats down on my head, slaps my skin raw, my raincoat sticking to me in the heat.