“Rad, you know them? The kids love those stories. I can set you up where Abe left off. This is a good time; just before lunch. We’ll get ’em good and hungry.”
And so Jamie led me into a little room that looked a lot like a classroom, with many bright colors and art supplies and even a little plastic toy box full of musical instruments. He got me a chair and placed Alvin Hatter and the Wild-Goose Chase into my hand, saying, “These books are rad because all the kids like ’em, doesn’t matter how old they are.” And then he left me alone.
But I was only alone for a few minutes.
The kids started coming in one after another. Some of them walked in, some of them were pushed in wheelchairs and accompanied by a parent, some of them had IVs attached to their arms, needles they scratched at vaguely with the tip of a finger. Some looked sick; some looked just a little tired. A few littler ones sat on the floor in front of me. They wore pajama pants and hospital tops, a sea of pale blue. Jamie himself came and took a seat on a folding chair; he let a small boy climb onto his lap. It felt similar to teaching Aunt Helen’s class except I was suddenly completely unintimidated. Unanxious. Unworried.
There was a bookmark in the middle of the Alvin book. I opened to the right page and began to read. I looked up a few minutes later and saw wide eyes, open mouths, anxious expressions. Alvin and Margo were going through their parents’ notes, trying to find a clue that would lead them to the Overcoat Man, and in turn lead them to their missing parents, and every single one of my audience members were completely rapt with attention.
I smiled and kept reading.
Afterward, when the children begrudgingly went back to their rooms to eat lunch, I hung back a moment in the room and tried to imagine my aunt and brother reading where I had just read. Were the children the same, or were these all fresh faces, new victims of a terrible disease they would spend so much energy fighting? It didn’t seem fair, that someone so young would have to go through so much suffering, but I knew that life didn’t play by the playground rules of fairness.
I closed the book and returned it to its bookcase home with the others. When I turned around, Jamie was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, and I almost laughed at the sight of his beard and those pink scrubs.
“This was great,” he said. “Really rad. It means so much to the kids. They said you look just like her.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Don’t be a stranger, you know? These kids, they just spend so much of their day waiting around for people to come and pay them some attention.”
“I definitely won’t be. This was really nice.”
“Your whole family, I swear. Just a bunch of gems,” he said, and with an unexpected hug, we said good-bye.
I drove home slowly, thinking about the last couple of hours, the kids and Jamie, and the day-to-day life of a hospital. I imagined it must take a special kind of person to devote their life to helping sick people find just a little bit of happiness. It made me proud to think that my own mother was a doctor, that my father was the most beloved anesthesiologist in the area (well, as far as he was concerned). I wondered if being a teacher was a similarly noble goal, a way of devoting one’s life to the betterment of others. Wasn’t that one of the reasons I’d chosen to do it, because my own teachers had meant so much to me growing up? Because I wanted to one day maybe mean something to students of my own?
I took the long way home, driving the back roads, missing my street once, twice. I felt both exhilarated and happy, like I had done something good instead of just letting myself float along aimlessly.
When I finally got home, my father was in the driveway, washing his car.
I knew my father. He didn’t wash his car when it was dirty; he washed it when he was feeling sad. He washed it with slow, deliberate movements, making rhythmic circles with his hand and the sponge. I parked and watched him for a few minutes, and he never saw me, just kept scrubbing the same square foot on the hood.
I came up behind him and cleared my throat. He turned around slowly, blinking, as if he were waking up from a dream.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “I’ll do yours next if you want me to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s kind of nice out, don’t you think? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Mental health day,” I said. “I told Mom.”
“Ah. That’s okay. I get it.”
“Do you want some help?”
“Actually, I think I might like just a little more alone time. Nothing serious. I was just enjoying it out here. It’s nice out, isn’t it?”
He looked faraway, repeating himself, not really paying attention. I gave him a hug and went into the house.
I watched him from the foyer, my face pressed against the glass pane in the front door. He was methodical in his cleaning. He would have the cleanest car in the neighborhood before the afternoon was over.
When he’d finished with his, he moved on to mine. I made a pitcher of lemonade and brought it out to him. He took a glass without saying a word, a vague smile on his face, the saddest smile I’d seen in a while. It looked just like Sam’s. I left him alone after that.
Grandpa Hatter was annoyed.
Granted, Grandpa Hatter’s general state was annoyed, but he seemed a little more annoyed than usual to be woken up in the middle of the night by his two sheepish grandchildren who had previously woken him up in the middle of the night only to then disappear without a trace.
“So you’re back,” he said through the crack in the door.
“We made a mistake,” Alvin said.
“Ran off with that good-for-nothing Everlife Society, did you? No brighter than your parents.”
He shut the door in their faces, but they heard him unchaining the many chains and undoing the many locks that protected him from who knew what.
Finally, after much fumbling, he opened the door.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said.
“The Everlife Society are a bunch of jerks,” Margo said, pushing her way into the house. Alvin followed her. They waited as Grandpa Hatter went through the complicated process of locking the door again.
“We didn’t know where else to go,” Alvin said. “We thought you could help us?”
“I can’t even help myself,” Grandpa Hatter said sharply, but then he softened, as if noticing how tired and cold his grandchildren were. “Oh, fine. Follow me.”
He led them through the massive house, down hallways they’d never seen before, past more closed doors than they could count. Again they had the feeling that this house, like the house in the woods, was somehow bigger on the inside than it had seemed from the outside.
Finally, after what seemed like ten full minutes of wandering, they stopped at the dead end of a hallway. There was a bookshelf here, with a wall sconce on either side. The candles were extinguished.
“Your father forbade me to show you this, but I’ve never taken kindly to being forbidden to do something. Plus, maybe you’ll find something useful here,” Grandpa Hatter said.