The lights in Bob Evans dimmed, then brightened. The muzak changed to something else equally dour and lifedenying. Abruptly, the military boys got up without ordering. They unconsciously formed a line and strolled past us again, their boots squeaking virginally. After watching them pivot past the dessert refrigerator and out the exit, Stella turned to me, peeled one end of the wrapper off her straw, and blew it in my face. It hit my nose.
I sighed and removed one end of the wrapper from a spare straw at the table and blew it back at her. It missed her, and instead careened across the aisle onto the old woman’s plate of eggs. The old woman jumped back, as if a tarantula had climbed onto her plate. Her husband, who was sitting next to her and not across from her, leaned over to inspect the straw. He put on his glasses for a better look.
The waitress with the pink-striped hair stared at us from the register. Stella looked at me and I looked at her and we both burst out laughing.
The key card that opened the door to our squat, stale-smelling motel room had an advertisement for Dunkin Donuts Munchkins on the back. Inside the room, heavy green curtains blotted out the light.
I unzipped my bag and pulled out all Stella’s medicine. The day’s doses were doled out in one of those Monday through Sunday plastic organizer kits. There was Ondansetron and Dexamethasone for nausea, various medications for pain including morphine, and vitamins. Stella wordlessly unscrewed the top of her Mountain Dew bottle and swallowed Saturday’s pills one at a time. I sat down on my bed and pulled out the Cheveyo pamphlets. On the cover was Cheveyo himself, and the Verdana-font words The Magic of Healing. As the true healer is God himself, Cheveyo acts only as a mediator. Visa, MasterCard, Discover accepted.
It wasn’t a scam because he accepted credit cards. Because he’d put together glossy pamphlets and a professional-looking website. And anyway, Western medicine had turned out to be a scam itself, doing nothing to halt Stella’s cancer, which had proceeded stubbornly on. Why not try something else? The only thing we hadn’t been scammed out of was time-when I rescued Stella from the hospital after her fender-bender, her doctor gave her a year to live, and we’d already outlasted that prognosis. A nurse once tried to turn it into something positive as she stuck yet another needle into Stella’s arm: At least you have time to say things you need to say. As the nurse turned away, I saw a flicker of outrage cross Stella’s face.
I helped Stella settle into her bed. The evening stretched before me, blank and dull. Stella shut her eyes, nestled under the covers. ‘Skip and I visited the jackalope together. We hadn’t meant to. We just stumbled on it.’
Here we go again, I thought.
She took a breath. ‘It’s beautiful, Summer. I remember going in there with Skip and just thinking, Well now, this is what life’s all about. Beautiful and strange. A huge mess, everything smashed together. Real and crazy and worth believing in.’
‘Mmm.’ Stella had done an amazing job keeping the nature of the jackalope a surprise. Whenever I closed my eyes, I had a different mental picture of what a jackalope was. A jacko-lantern skull, maybe, its head pumpkin-shaped and its teeth scraggly. A type of plant that swallowed dogs whole. A rock that had naturally formed in the shape of a deer. Perhaps it was all those things, depending on what we wanted, or depending on the day we visited. Maybe the mutability of the jackalope magically altered everything else around it, too, like an activator ray in a science-fiction movie. Cancer would walk into the room as a mass of purple, pulsing, murderous cells but then, after seeing the jackalope, it would morph into a long, intricately woven carpet. Or a truck full of diamonds. A piece of anise-flavored candy, about the size of a Nerd.
I changed the TV channel. On the screen, the two Williams sisters were playing in the US Open final. Mid-set, the program broke to a commercial for a Lincoln Navigator, a commercial for American Express, a commercial for a Mercedes SUV-Samantha’s car. The car navigating the twisty California roads was even the same battleship gray.
‘Has Samantha ever seen a therapist?’ I asked.
Stella’s sheets rustled. ‘A what?’
‘You know. A shrink.’
‘Why on earth would she do that?’
‘For her parents. To deal with it. Or something.’
‘Now, do you honestly think that nonsense works?’
We watched the TV in silence. I felt confused. Stella’s question seemed to end in an ellipsis. Was she waiting for me to say something? Comment, perhaps, that therapy had worked for my father?
After a while, Stella curled her legs into her chest. ‘I think I might take a nap.’
‘Okay.’
She turned. ‘I want to go see the jackalope tomorrow morning.’
The US Open was back on. The blimp circling Arthur Ashe broadcast a view of the New York City skyline. I felt the familiar ache. There was my mother’s old office. There were the jutting buildings on the Upper East Side-somewhere up there was the hospital where my father had had his treatments. My father was somewhere in the city, and so, apparently, was Philip. My whole past was compact and bite-size, fitting in just one TV screen shot.
‘All right,’ I whispered into the darkness. ‘We’ll try and squeeze it in.’