We Own the Sky(76)

“Daddy,” Jack said, putting his camera down on the blanket on his lap, and his voice sounded strangely lucid—the Jack I remembered from a few weeks ago.

“It’s very high here.”

“It is, isn’t it? Do you like it?”

Jack nodded and smiled. “When I’m better, are we going to climb more tall buildings?”

“Of course we are.”

“The Ivor Tower in Paris?”

“Yes,” I said, putting my arm around him.

“And the one in Oompa-Loompa?”

Anna laughed gently, put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Yes, sweetheart, Kuala Lumpur.”

“Yes,” Jack said, looking down the Thames. “Kuala Lumpur.” I knew what he was thinking about now: all the tall buildings, the ones he had seen in his books, in the pictures on his wall.

“And the one in Dubai? Because that’s the biggest one in the whole world, Daddy.”

I paused, fighting back my tears, because I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t let him see me cry now. “We can go up all of them, Jack, every single one,” I said, my voice beginning to crack.

“Because you know, Daddy, you know, when you’re so high, you go up past

the clouds, and it’s like being in an airplane and then you can see the spaceships and the sun and all of the stars...”

As Jack’s words tailed off, a bolt from the setting sun lit up the cabin, like the light from a distant, silent explosion. We crouched down and listened to the clinks and clanks of the gears, our arms wrapped around Jack’s shoulders, staring at what was left of the sunset. And then, without warning, Jack slowly pushed himself up out of his wheelchair. He wobbled a little, steadied himself on the handrail, and started taking photographs again. The dim flare of city lights against the velvet-red sky. Peaks and troughs, luminous mountains of clouds. He made sure he got it all.

  *

We decided that Ashbourne House was a good place for Jack to come to die. We had chosen it in the same way that we had chosen Jack’s school. We looked through the brochures and then went to tour the facilities. We discussed the various merits of the staff, the size of the playroom, the communal dining options.

While it was a Victorian-era institution, it did not give a foreboding

impression. Its brickwork was light, with a reddish tinge; the gardens were lovingly tended, full of flowers and curiosities; the corridors were light and airy, bedecked with the residents’ own artwork, wide enough for several wheelchairs to pass each other at ease. In our room, we had a double bed artfully separated from Jack’s by a removable division. We slept there, as a family, the way we once had when Jack was born.

Jack had mostly withdrawn from the world. As the tumor pressed on the vital parts of his brain, he became more detached, less able to express emotions. Now there was no more chemotherapy, his hair had grown longer, a little unruly once again. He had a haunted, faraway look in his eyes, a look that should never be seen on a child.

The art classes, the wake-’em-up karaoke, the superhero day, were all lost on Jack. He didn’t even recognize his pictures anymore: the buildings, the panoramas, we had taped around his bed. It was the speed that shocked me. The cavalier way his own body betrayed him.

Then, something else changed in Jack’s brain. The tumor shifted, or grew, or colonized a new lobe, and suddenly, while we thought he still understood what was being said to him, Jack could no longer speak. Now he just slept, his body already in death’s custody.

To watch a death, to see it close up, to see the pallor of Jack’s skin change, his hair mat into greasy knots despite our best efforts with a sponge. All the body’s outer signs of decay—the sourness of his breath, the flaking of his skin, the horizontal lines appearing on his fingernails—were just prim reminders of the horrors that were taking place within his body.

How long, how long? That was what we asked the doctors, the ward nurse,

anyone who might know, anyone who would listen. I felt like we were betraying him.

I didn’t know how I knew it was coming, but I knew. We both knew. I put my head on Jack’s chest, encasing his small body with my arms, and then I felt Anna’s arms fold around me, or perhaps Anna had been there first, and we stayed like that for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, our bodies, like wings protecting a young bird.

I would like to say that Jack held out his hand and reached over and traced the outline of mine, my knuckle, the curve between my thumb and forefinger. Or that he looked up at me with loving eyes, but he did not. His hands were like clammy ice. His eyes glassy and opaque, no longer of this world.

And then we heard a soft rasp, like an echo of a breath, and our arms tightened around him, and we waited, waited, held our own breaths so we could hear his and we waited, waited, hoping he would and hoping he wouldn’t. I listened again and again, and this time I knew that his breath was not coming; this time I knew he was gone.

I removed myself from Jack’s body and looked around the room. People cling to their death stories: their cozy myths of seeing the soul depart the room. But at Ashbourne House, everything was still the same. There was no beam of light or gentle rattling of the windowpane. The day was still gray outside. Jack’s Minions water bottle remained undrunk on the table. I could hear the chirp of hospital bells in the distance, and I thought for a moment that their frequency, their pitch, was somehow different. I listened again. No, it was the same.