Poster Boy (4 page)

I was, in short, on top of my game.

* * *

Having finished my last exam, namely trig, boo yeah, followed by a celebratory platter of nachos, I was in my sweet, music shaking the walls, logging on to MSN to see who wanted to partay the next night. I didn't ace the exam or anything, but thanks to one jumbo-sized Caramilk bar, I was sure I'd passed. Parm wrote back that he was in and was going to try and get Chrissy to come.

got the hots 4 her, do ya?

pilot light's lit.

Natalie came on line.

turning sweet sixteen and never been…

My entire body flushed with heat. Did she mean what I think she meant? I was about to write back, “me, too,” but then thought that sounded unmasculine.

i'm urs.
I wrote instead.

my parents r going out of town in a few weeks. we'd have the house 2 ourselves to…celebrate.

I fell back in my chair, covered my crotch with both hands and just stared at the screen for a minute, then wrote,
let's hook up.

She sent me a smiley face.

I laughed out loud.

“We're going in, self ol' buddy.”

Mind racing, I tried to recall pertinent sex info I'd picked up over the years. Namely from
South Park
and
Family Guy
. I knew the clitoris was super important. Finding it, for starters. I mean, I wanted it to be a decent first experience for her, too. I knew it was going to rock for me no matter what, and I hated to think that twenty years from now she'd be talking about her first time as some lame joke. And birth control was important. Like I'd have to get a condom somewhere. Two. In case the first one broke. Was buying condoms like buying cigarettes and you had to be nineteen? Did they come in sizes? If so, how did you know what size you were?

how about i take u out 2 dinner first.
I thought I should be a little romantic about this and not just horny.

really? that's so sweet.

Good move.

u pick the place. someplace nice.

The phone rang. Probably wasn't for me but Mom was in her studio working. She purposely didn't have a phone out there. Dad was out of town for some prosthetic conference. Maggie, I knew, was in the kitchen working on her science project. Like any good science nerd, she tuned out all distractions.

I turned down my music.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Fallon, please.”

“This is Mr. Fallon,” I said, deepening my voice. Anyway, I wasn't lying. My English teacher regularly called me Mr. Fallon.

talk later
, I typed to Nat, who was signing off.
love ya
, I added, just because. I'd never ever said that to a girl before.

“This is Dr. Astley's office. I'm calling with the results of Maggie's X-rays.”

Just to be safe, Mom had taken Maggie to our family doctor, who'd ordered an X-ray of her sore leg.

“Uh, yes?” Mr. Fallon here is losing his V-card in a few weeks, I wanted to tell her. Got any helpful tips?

“Your daughter's X-rays have come back positive with signs of rhabdomyosarcoma.”

What the… I grabbed a pen, rummaged for a scrap of paper.

“Dr. Astley wants Maggie to see an oncologist who can order further testing.” The woman spoke in a steady, driving voice that didn't leave room for questions. I didn't understand what she was saying, yet my mouth had gone dry. “It'll be with Dr. Michael Bender, 1528 6th Avenue near Prince Street, tomorrow at 9:45 in the morning.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes. 9:45. 1528 6th Avenue, which is near Prince.”

She gave a tiny pause as if I might have more questions.

“There's amazing advances in therapies these days,” she blurted into the gap. She sounded nervous. “I'm sorry,” she added, and now I was nervous.

She was about to hang up when I stopped her.

“Can you spell that big word beginning with R?”

She spelled it.

I wanted to confess that I wasn't Maggie's father when she said good-bye and hung up.

I put down the phone, went on the net and typed in
rhabdomyosarcoma.

5
Black Mold

Maggie was sitting at the kitchen table staring at her rice and carefully taking notes. Though I'd eaten a giant plate of cheese-slathered nachos with sour cream and salsa, my stomach felt weirdly hollow.

“Hey,” I said.

It was like I was seeing her for the first time. She looked young for twelve and, unlike some of her friends, still undeveloped. Needless to say, Mom had yet to have her little celebration. Maggie was lanky like me. Too gawky to be pretty, she had a cute thing going on with her round face and eyes.

Sitting there all erect posture and intense focus, she reminded me of Ciel.

“Wanna see something cool?” she said, waving me over.

“Okay.” I was hit with a rush of love for my little sister. But it may have been fear. I noticed she was writing with her left hand.

“Since when are you left-handed?”

“My right hand's really sore.” She shook out her right hand as if, in thinking about it, she suddenly realized it hurt. “I bet my writing's already better than yours.” She held up her notes.

“Yeah, it is,” I said.

“Yeah, it is,” she repeated and if I didn't know what I knew, I would have slapped her.

“Look at my rice.”

A month ago, she'd put her cooked rice in three different jars. On one jar she pasted the word LOVE in hot-pink letters, on another the word HATE in black letters. The third jar had nothing on it. Each day she said kind words to the Love jar, verbally abused the Hate jar and deliberately ignored the third jar.

“See the mold spot in the Hate jar?”

I saw one black spot glowing gray under the white surface of rice.

“Well, check this out.” She picked up the unlabeled jar. “The ignored jar has three mold spots. See? Which proves that negative attention is better than no attention at all.” The proud scientist smiled.

Normally I would have said something cynical.

“And,” she picked up the third jar, “the Love jar hasn't any mold yet. Neat, huh?”

I nodded. This was the sort of thing she'd normally share with Dad, assuming rightly that I could care less.

“That is cool,” I said.

“Yeah it is.” She looked at me to see if she could continue. I stood there staring at her. She picked up her book. “Dr. Emoto says there's ancient power in words because words come from natural vibrations in the environment.”

I thought of the word rhabdomyosarcoma written on the scrap of paper in my hand. What sort of vibrations did that word came from? I knew what it meant now. Soft tissue sarcomas — meaning cancerous tumors — found in muscles used for motion, and affecting young children and teens.

“And all matter,” she continued excitedly, “including us, is made up of rapid vibrations of particles. There's nothing actually solid about matter. It's just constant motion. Which means all things, including us, are in a continual state of change.” She looked at me, eyes wide. “That's wild, huh?”

“Wild,” I agreed, thinking of that bump in her calf. It wasn't a ganglian cyst you could Bible thump away. It was a cancerous tumor.

“Which is why the vibrations of words can affect things. Dr. Emoto says even our intentions create energy fields that affect matter.”

I remembered saying that she'd better be really sick, and my stomach did some slow flip.

“I have to take a message out to Mom,” I said.

Maggie didn't respond. She was too busy carefully writing with her left hand.

Nervous, I knocked on Mom's studio door. The door was the color of an eggplant. The former shed now had a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, a skylight, plumbing, a dark room added on. Its shingle siding was painted. She called it her sanctuary.

“Come in,” she said.

The place, as usual, had the smoky smell of inks and dyes. Today there was the tang of turpentine.

“How's it going?” I said.

“I'm great because I finally came up with the design for the last banner. I'm going Oriental, putting mahogany brown Japanese characters along the border which I'll box in so they could also pass for Celtic.” She was talking more to herself than me.

“And look at the pillowcases Maggie's done. Beautiful, huh? Birthday gift for her friend Sasha.” Two pillowcases were hanging on a clothesline in the corner in shades of plum and blue.

“Nice.” I took a breath.

“She does it all herself now. From coming up with the design to applying the ink — everything. Even does her own wash-ups, which I'm very thankful for. Did you ever see the ties she did for her teachers?”

“No.” Okay, just say it. “We got a call from Dr. Astley's office. Maggie has an appointment with another doctor tomorrow at 9:45.”

“Oh? What kind of doctor?” Eyes on her drawing, she wasn't fully listening.

“Well… an oncologist.” I'd looked that up, too. It meant cancer doctor.

Mom's head jerked up. She was off her stool and moving toward me, her body suddenly rigid.

“Who called? Are they still on the phone? Why didn't you come and get me?”

“I… I… some receptionist just gave me the information. Thought I was Dad, I think.”

She was a pacing animal now, back and forth along her cutting table, breathing through an open mouth.

The spacious, light-filled room was feeling real small.

“Bring me the phone.”

I left, bounding across the lawn to the house and crumpling the note in my fist. Maggie was drawing a picture of her moldy rice and didn't even look up as I grabbed the cordless.

When I got back, Mom's face was flushed.

“Where's Maggie?” she asked.

“In the kitchen.”

“Okay.” She caught my eye, hanging on, as if she was expecting me to give her some kind of reassurance.

“They don't know anything yet,” I lied and moved toward the door. “It's probably nothing.”

“Yeah,” said Mom, starting to dial the number. She turned her back to me and I was free to go, back to my music and organizing tomorrow's party.

Once I got downstairs I felt weird, like I'd abandoned Mom or something, and immediately went back up to watch through the sliding glass doors.

Framed in the studio windows, she paced as she spoke on the phone. I watched her stop, run a hand through her hair. Then she picked up a pen and wrote something down. A big word maybe.

Behind me Maggie said to her Hate jar, “You're stupid and ugly. And I hate you.”

* * *

Maggie not only met with the oncologist the next day but also had an MRI. She lay on a table and got shoved into a metal capsule, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine. She got to put headphones on and pick out music. The music choices were either classical or old bands she'd never heard of. She didn't know what to choose so Mom chose for her — the Beach Boys. But it was so loud in the machine, she couldn't really hear it anyway.

I know all this because Mom insisted I be tested, too. So I was inside the same roaring, thumping white tunnel, squinting to try to hear the guitar lines from the Grateful Dead.

It was weird. You had to take off anything metal because it would get ripped off your body, whip around the machine and beat you up. And you couldn't have any metal pins inside your body like holding a broken bone together because those would get ripped right out of your skin.

I'd swallowed a dime when I was six but thought that would be stupid to mention. But I was worried for a minute it had somehow gotten stuck in my gut somewhere and would come flying out my butt.

The day after our MRIs, Mom met with the oncologist to discuss the test results. Though Dad wasn't due home from his conference for another couple of days, he arrived late that evening. He didn't say a word when he came in the door, just dropped his bag and briefcase, hung up his coat.

I was there with Mom. Maggie was upstairs in bed. Mom and Dad hugged, Dad squeezing his eyes shut as he laid his face against her hair.

“You okay?” he said in a small voice, and she answered him with a deep breath.

“Where is she?” he asked as they pulled apart.

“Sleeping,” said Mom.

Before he went upstairs to look in on Maggie, he squeezed my shoulder.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Gray.” He couldn't hold my eye. But I was relieved to see him. He was a scientist. He knew about cells and muscles and shit. He'd have some answers.

* * *

The track lighting overhead made three equidistant circles on the rectangular kitchen table. Mom and Dad sat across from each other, a hole of light between them that I imagined was a portal into another dimension. Arms crossed, I stood in the kitchen doorway, neither in nor out.

In a slow, somber voice, careful not to leave anything out, Mom relayed the doctor's words. I learned that there are four stages to cancer. Stages one and two had to do with the size of the tumors, stage three was when cancer cells had spread to the lymph nodes, and stage four was when it had invaded the rest of the body. My MRI results had scored a big fat zero. Maggie got the highest score possible.

I was waiting for Dad to interrupt Mom, ask some smart question that challenged the doctors' findings. But he just sat there, elbows on the table, head in his hands, staring dry-eyed into the empty pool of light. His head looked impossibly heavy.

“The oncologist,” said Mom, crumpling up her napkin and then spreading it out on the table only to do it again, “said there was no point trying to treat her at this late a stage.” She shook her head, eyes staring. “Surely there's things we can try, I said to him.” She crumpled the napkin and then ironed it flat again.

From the doorway, it felt like I was watching a movie. Some sucky drama. Just the kind of movie Maggie hated and I secretly kind of liked.