“She stopped crying,” Deirdre said, her eyes so filled with joy that the tumor thought its host’s wife might burst.
Jared smiled, leaned forward, and kissed Deirdre on the forehead. Then he leaned forward and kissed Baby Jackie in the same spot. Where Deirdre’s skin was rough and covered in sweat, Jackie’s was smooth and smelled of hope and promise. The baby let out a small coo.
In that moment, the tumor knew, the bond formed between father and daughter was unbreakable. It paused to savor that feeling, letting the unbridled happiness envelop it.
Then the high-grade glioblastoma multiforme devoured the memory whole.
***
Jackie’s younger sister, Megan, had a gaggle of her school friends over that Thursday afternoon and had made it clear that Jackie’s presence was not welcome. Jackie was more than happy to oblige. The last thing she wanted was to watch reruns of The Bachelor, or some other moronic reality show, while Megan and her friends clucked at the television like a brood of hens.
After her father had failed to come home at the appointed hour, Jackie retreated to her room to do homework. She stepped around the pile of crumpled laundry in the middle of the floor, patted the oversize Mean Girls poster for luck (as she always did), and pushed aside the textbooks and mystery novels scattered on the desk to get to her schoolbag. She flopped on the bed facedown, her schoolwork resting on the pillow.
A pencil in one hand, a finger twirling her hair with the other, Jackie smiled when she came across her tenth-grade English vocabulary “word of the day”:
fatuous (fach-oo-uhs) 1. Foolish or inane
That summed it up nicely: Megan and her gang of eighth-grade celebrities were certainly foolish, and almost entirely inane.
Not that it mattered. Jackie would have been holed up in her room even if Megan and her friends hadn’t invaded the first floor of the house. Jackie’s room was her sanctuary. It was the only place in the house where she felt completely at ease.
The only place outside the house where Jackie felt comfortable was on the Internet. To be connected to the world, she often thought, was a lot better than actually venturing into it. For one thing, she loved the anonymity. You could lurk on web pages or in chat rooms, and no one cared. No one called attention to you, and if they did, you were gone in a click. It was like she had her own pair of Ruby Red Slippers and could teleport from Oz to Kansas to Hollywood to Tokyo in the blink of an eye.
The only person she ever spoke to online was Max. Jackie wanted to talk to him now but knew he wouldn’t be there so late in the afternoon.
Jackie heard the front door of the house open and close, heard the entire pack of Megan’s friends offer a “Hi, Mr. Stone” in unison and then laugh for no reason whatsoever. That was one of the things that bothered Jackie most about Megan’s friends: the laughter without obvious cause.
But that didn’t matter; her father was home. Jackie was off the bed, out the door of her bedroom, and sitting on the top step in an instant.
Jackie heard her dad say something—she couldn’t hear what—to her mom, and then saw him round a corner and head up the stairs. Her ear-to-ear grin faded when she noticed her father was mumbling to himself and seemed more than a little distracted. Bewildered, Jackie watched as he walked right past her.
“Dad?”
Jared stopped in his tracks and turned around. “Oh, hey, Jax, sorry. I didn’t see you there.”
This was not their normal routine. Far from it. For him to walk by, oblivious to Jackie’s presence, was akin to the president of the United States absentmindedly walking past the podium at a press conference. It just didn’t happen.
“Dad, are you okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, just a lot of work today.”
Jackie could tell it was a lie.
“I’m going to get cracking,” he added before entering his office and closing the door behind him, leaving his daughter staring after him in confusion. He didn’t invite Jackie in.
***
Jared wasn’t ready to say anything to his family. He couldn’t tell them what the doctor had told him; that his episodes of confusion and his headaches would get worse, and that in three months, maybe four, he would be dead.
As bad as he felt about what had just happened with Jackie on the steps, he couldn’t worry about that now. He needed to think.
The doctor had told Jared he could keep the feelings of confusion at bay, at least a little, by reducing the number of “external stimuli” his brain was forced to parse. Jared surveyed his office looking for external stimuli. He turned off the computer, the monitor, and the printer to remove any background hum. He turned off the overhead lights and the desk lamp. Feeling silly standing in the dark, he lay on his back on the floor.
Jared was lying there for several minutes before he said “death” aloud.