One Summer (5 page)

“I’ll call you as soon as I get there, Dad,” said Cory, who wouldn’t look away from his father.

“Me too!” chimed in Jackie.

Jack took several deep breaths as he prepared to do what had to be done. His kids would be gone forever in a few minutes, and he was determined to make these last moments as memorable and happy as possible.

“Got something for you,” said Jack. He’d had Sammy bring the three boxes to him. He slowly took them from the cabinet next to his bed and handed one to Cory and one to Jackie. He held the last one and gazed at Mikki. “For you.”

“What is it?” she asked, trying to seem disinterested, though he could tell her curiosity was piqued.

“Come see.”

She sighed, strolled over, and took the box from her father.

“Open them,” said Jack.

Cory and Jackie opened the boxes and looked down at the piece of metal with the purple ribbon attached.

Mikki’s was different.

Fred said to her, “That’s a Bronze Star. That’s for heroism in combat. Your dad was a real hero. The other ones are Purple Hearts for being… well, hurt in battle,” he finished, looking awkwardly at Cory and Jackie.

Jack said, “Open the box and think of me. Always be with you that way.”

Even Bonnie seemed genuinely moved by this gesture, and she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. But Jack wasn’t looking at her. He was watching his daughter. She touched the medal carefully, and her mouth started to tremble. When she looked up and saw her dad watching her, she closed the box and quickly stuck it in her bag.

Cecilia was the last to leave. She sat next to him and patted his hand with her wrinkled one.

“How do you feel, Jack, really?”

“About dying or saying good-bye to my kids for the last time?” he said weakly.

“I mean, do you feel like you want to let go?”

Jack turned to face her. The confusion, and even anger, seeping into his features was met by a radiant calm in hers.

“I’m in hospice, Cee. I’m dead.”

“Not yet you’re not.”

Jack looked away, sucked down a tortured breath. “Matter of time. Hours.”

“Do you want to let go?” she asked again.

“Yes. I do.”

“Okay, honey, okay.”

After Cecilia left, Jack lay there in the bed. His last ties to his family had been severed. It was over. He didn’t need to pull out the calendar. There would be no more dates to cross off. His hand moved to the call button. It was time now. He had prearranged this with the doctor. The machines keeping him alive would be turned off. He was done. It was time to go. All he wanted now was to see Lizzie. He conjured her face up in his mind’s eye. “It’s time, Lizzie,” he said. “It’s time.” The sense of relief was palpable.

However, his hand moved away from the button when Mikki came back into the room and held up the medal. “I just wanted to say that… that this was pretty cool.”

Father and daughter gazed awkwardly at each other, as though they were two long-lost friends reunited by chance. There was something in her eyes that Jack had not seen there for a long time.

“Mikki?” he said, his voice cracking.

She ran across the room and hugged him. Her breath burned against his cold neck, warming him, sending packets of energy, of strength, to all corners of his body. He squeezed back, as hard as his depleted energy would allow.

She said, “I love you so much. So much.”

Her body shook with the pain, the trauma of a child soon to be orphaned.

When she stood, Mikki kept her gaze away from him. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “Good-bye, Daddy.”

She turned and rushed from the room.

“Good-bye, Michelle,” Jack mumbled to the empty room.

Jack lay there for hours, until day evaporated to night. The clock ticked, and he didn’t move. His breathing was steady, buoyed by the machine that replenished his lungs, keeping him alive. Something was burning in his chest that he could not exactly identify or even precisely locate. His thoughts were focused on his last embrace with his daughter, her unspoken plea for him not to leave her. With the end of his life, with his last breath, the Armstrong children would be without parents. His finger had hovered over the nurse’s call button all day, ready to summon the doctor, to let it be over. But he never pushed it.

As the clock ticked, the burn in Jack’s chest continued to grow. It wasn’t painful; indeed, it warmed his throat, his arms, his legs, his feet, his hands. His eyes became teary and then dried; became teary and then dried again. Sobs came and went. And still his mind focused only on his daughter. That last embrace. That last silent plea.

The nurses came and went. He was fed with liquid, shot like a bullet into his body. The clock ticked, the air continued
to pour into him. At precisely midnight Jack started feeling odd. His lungs were straining, as they had been when Jackie had pulled the line out of the converter at home.

This might be it,
Jack thought, button or no button; not even the machines could keep him alive any longer. He had wondered what the moment would actually feel like. Wedged in a mass of burning metal in Iraq after being blown up in his Humvee, he had wondered that too: whether his last moments on earth would be thousands of miles away from Lizzie and his kids. What it would feel like. What would be waiting for him.

Who would not be scared? Terrified even? The last journey. The one everyone took alone. Without the comfort of a companion. And, unless one had faith, without the reassurance that something awaited him at the end.

He took another deep breath, and then another. His lungs were definitely weakening. He could not drive enough oxygen into them to sustain life. He reached up and fiddled with the line in his nose. That’s when he realized what the problem was. There was no airflow. He clicked on the bed light and turned to the wall. There was the problem; the line had come loose from the wall juncture. The pressure cuff had not come off, however, or he would’ve heard the air escaping into the room. He was about to press the call button but decided to see if he could push the line back in himself.

That’s when it struck him.

How long have I been breathing on my own?

He glanced at the vitals monitor. The alarm hadn’t gone off, though it should have. But as he gazed at the oxygen levels, he realized why the buzzer hadn’t sounded. His oxygen levels hadn’t dropped.

How was that possible?

He managed to push the line back in and took several deep breaths. Then he pulled the line out of his nose and breathed on his own for as long as he could. Ten minutes later, his lungs started to labor. Then he put the line back in.

What the hell is going on?

Over the next two hours, he kept pulling the line out and breathing on his own until he was up to fifteen minutes. His lungs normally felt like sacks of wet cement. Now they felt halfway normal.

At three a.m. he sat up in bed and then did the unthinkable. He released the side rail and swung around so his feet dangled over the sides of the bed. He inched forward until his toes touched the cold tile floor. Every part of him straining with the effort, little by little, Jack pushed himself up until most of his weight was supported by his legs. He could hold himself up for only a few seconds before collapsing back onto the sheets. Panting with the exertion, pain searing his weakened lungs, he repeated the movement twice more. Every muscle in his body was spasming from the strain.

Yet as the sweat cooled on his forehead, Jack smiled—for good reason.

He had just stood on his own power for the first time in months.

The next morning, after the hospice nurse had come through on her rounds, he edged to the side of the bed again, and his toes touched the floor. But then his hands slipped on the bedcovers and he crumpled to the floor. At first he panicked, his hand clawing for the call button, which was well out of reach. Then he calmed. The same methodical, practical nature that had carried him safely through Iraq and Afghanistan came back to him.

He grabbed the edge of the bed, tightened his grip, and pulled. His emaciated body slipped, slithered, and jerked until he was fully back on the bed. He lay there in quiet triumph, hard-earned sweat staining his hospice gown.

That night he half walked and half crawled to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror for the first time in months. It was not a pretty sight. He looked eighty-four instead of thirty-four. A sense of hopelessness settled over him. He was fooling himself. But as he continued to gaze in the mirror, a familiar voice sounded in his head.

You can do this, Jack.

He looked around frantically, but he was all alone.

You can do this, honey.

It was Lizzie. It couldn’t be, of course, but it was.

He closed his eyes. “Can I?” he asked.

Yes,
she said.
You have to, Jack. For the children.

Jack crawled back to his bed and lay there. Had Lizzie really spoken to him? He didn’t know. Part of him knew it was impossible. But what was happening to him seemed impossible too. He closed his eyes, conjured her image in his mind, and smiled.

The next night he heard the squeak of the gurney. The patient next door to him would suffer no longer. The person was in a better place. Jack had seen the minister walk down the hallway, Bible in hand. A better place. But Jack was no longer thinking about dying. For the first time since his death sentence had been pronounced, Jack was focused on living.

The next night as the clock hit midnight, Jack lifted himself off the bed and slowly walked around the room, supporting himself by putting one hand against the wall. He felt stronger, his lungs operating somewhat normally. It was as though his
body was healing itself minute by minute. He heard a rumbling in his belly and realized that he was hungry. And he didn’t want liquid pouring into a line. He wanted real food. Food that required teeth to consume.

Every so often he would smack his arm to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. At last he convinced himself it was real. No, it wasn’t just real.

This is a miracle.

Two weeks passed, and Jack celebrated the week of his thirty-fifth birthday by gaining four pounds and doing away with the oxygen altogether. Miracle or not, he still had a long way to go because his body had withered over the months. He had to rebuild his strength and put on weight. He sat up in his chair for several hours at a time. Using a walker, he regularly made his way to the bathroom all on his own. Another week passed, and four more pounds had appeared on his frame.

Things that Jack, along with most people, had always taken for granted represented small but significant victories in his improbable recovery. Holding a fork and using it to put solid food into his mouth. Washing his face and using a toilet instead of a bed pan. Touching his toes; breathing on his own.

The hospice staff had been remarkably supportive of Jack after it was clear that he was getting better. Perhaps it was because they were weary of people leaving this place solely on the gurney with a sheet thrown over their bodies.

Jack talked to his kids every chance he got, using his old cell
phone. Jackie was bubbly and mostly incoherent. But Jack could sense that the older kids were wondering what was going on.

Cory said, “Dad, can’t you come live with us?”

“We’ll see, buddy. Let’s just take it slow.”

With the help of the folks at the hospice, Jack was able to use Skype to see his kids on a laptop computer one of the medical techs brought in. Cory and Jackie were thrilled to see their dad looking better.

Mikki was more subdued and cautious than her brothers, but Jack could tell she was curious. And hopeful.

“You look stronger, Dad.”

“I’m feeling better.”

“Does this mean?” She stopped. “I mean, will you…?”

Jack’s real fear, even though he did believe he was experiencing a true miracle, was that his recovery might be temporary. He did not want to put his kids through this nightmare again. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t talk to them. Or see them.

“I don’t know, honey. I’m trying to figure that out. I’m doing my best.”

“Well, keep doing what you’re doing,” she replied. And then she smiled at him. That one look seemed to make every muscle in Jack’s body firm even more.

One time Bonnie had appeared on the computer screen after Mikki had left the room. Her approach was far more direct, as she stared at Jack sitting up in bed. “What is going on?”

“I’m still here.”

“Your hospice doctor won’t talk to me. Privacy laws, he said.”

“I know,” Jack said. “But I can fill you in. I’m feeling better. Getting stronger. How’re things working out with Mikki?”

“Fine. She’s settled in, but we need to address
your
situation.”

“I
am
addressing it. Every day.”

And so it had gone, day after day, week after week. Using Skype and the phone, and answering all the kids’ questions. Jack could see that more and more even Mikki was coming to grips with what was happening. Every time he saw her smile or heard her laugh at some funny remark he made, it seemed to strengthen him even more.

It was on a cold, blustery Monday morning in February that Jack walked down the hall under his own power. He’d gained five more pounds, his face had filled out, and his hair was growing back. His appetite had returned with a vengeance. They had also stopped giving him pain meds because there was no more pain.

The hospice doctor sat down with him at the end of the week. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, Jack, but I’m ordering up some new blood work and other tests to see what we have. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, though.”

Jack simply stared at him, a spoonful of soup poised near his lips.

The doctor went on. “Look, if this continues, that’s terrific. No one will be happier than me—well, of course, except for you. All of my patients die, Jack, to put it bluntly. And we just try to help them pass with dignity.”

“But,” said Jack.

“But your disease is a complicated one. And always a fatal one. This might just be a false remission.”