“We’re almost there, Jonah.” Stormi’s eyes were pure light. “The spot is right ahead.”
She bounded across the river, turning to wait on the far side. I took a deep breath and approached the moss bridge, some twenty feet above the water. My head lightened. It would be a bad site for a seizure.
The river hadn’t always caused dread.
Not when we were young. Second-grade young.
Strange that our parents let us wander as they did; seven years old and we had the run of town and beyond, though how far we strayed remained our secret. We loved the moss bridge for the elven realm we were certain lay across it, hidden deep in the forest. Like all kids in Gullary, we were fantasy junkies, dreaming of worlds far away. We watched The Fellowship of the Ring until we could recite the lines, until they were no longer fantasy, until they became our own. Stormi was Arwen from the House of Elrond, and I was her Aragorn.
I saved her from a thousand restless orcs, rescued her from Sauron’s clutches time and again. And once, while splashing about in the river, my heel brushed against a small, smooth object in the sand. I dived down and emerged with a ring.
It was rusty, but we scrubbed it until it glinted silver in the sunlight.
“You found the Ring.” Stormi’s eyes grew. “The ring of power.”
My thoughts always tilted a bit more toward reality. “I think it’s just an old ring.”
“No.” She shook her head solemnly, and reached the prize back toward me. “It’s yours to keep. When you’re in trouble, you’ll need it.”
“Nah. Take it.”
She thought a moment, and slipped it over her thumb.
The next day, Stormi arrived at the bridge and held out a necklace. “I’m giving this to you.” It was her shark’s tooth on a leather string.
“Why are you giving me your—”
“It’s in the movie, stupid. Arwen gives Aragorn her necklace. It’s like a heart.”
“It’s like a tooth.”
She kicked my shin and tied the leather string around my neck. It never did come off.
After the discovery of the ring, our Hobbit dramas became more extravagant. Stormi would toss the ring from the bridge, and I would dive in after it, reviving hope and saving Middle Earth.
And then, July five happened. Stormi was eight, and I was late to our adventure. Ma had me cleaning my room, and I reached the bridge in time to hear the splash. Stormi had jumped.
I dove in after, because for all Stormi could do, the girl could not swim. I found her a foot beneath the surface and dragged her to shore.
She coughed and sputtered. “Get my ring!”
And I did. I saved both her and the world, which were basically synonymous.
In time, our Hobbit games faded, until last month.
“Remember when I used to throw my ring.” Stormi had leaned over the bridge’s edge. “You always found it.”
“Yeah,” I called up from the bank.
Stormi bit her lip, removed the old band from the finger it still rounded, and tossed it in. “Save me, Jonah. For old times.”
“Seriously?”
She gave no answer.
I exhaled, stood, and waded gingerly into the river. Three steps, and the seizure took me, threw me back onto the bank. When I came to, Stormi had not moved. She stared down at me, her face disappointed.
“I’ll get it.” She dove and soon swam toward me, ring in hand. She never wore it again.
How far I’d fallen.
But now, eager to forget recent failures, I followed her. Old Rickety had mercy, and once again Stormi laughed and took off running. I set out in hot pursuit, a term you’d deem mighty generous had you seen my lurch. I stumbled around the bend and barreled into her.
I tried gamely to both keep her upright and hold myself vertical, but it was an either/or. My spine landed hard on a gnarled tree root.
Stormi knelt, wincing at my misfortune. “That was very sweet.”
“Oh,” I groaned. “The part where I crushed you or the part where I crushed me?”
“Both. But more than the crushing, you kept me standing.”
There are few conditions that render a body more infantile than a bad back. Should you hear of someone complaining of the ailment, it ought to immediately draw forth all manner of sympathetic prayer. The pain is akin to a knife, plunged deep into bone and marrow, and then twisted, once and again. I tried to shift, to rise to an elbow, but the blade twisted, and I rejoined the earth. Stormi laid a hand on my chest. “Don’t. Stay there.” She lifted my head onto her lap, and gently stroked the dirt from my arms, my shirt. Her hair swished across my face while her hands paused above my heart.
Had this been the first time I’d felt her healing touch, I’d have endured agony and flipped over quick so as to hide the sudden and dramatic effect she had on certain personal parts of me, but I had spent considerable time with my head on her lap in the past, recovering from a seizure’s sudden arrival.
This is because of her “knowing,” and perhaps here is a good time to clarify. There is a knowing borne of experience. Old Gantry used fifty years of this variety of understanding to turn fishing on Lake Gullary into a pitiful affair. Those fish had no chance. Stormi possessed no such insight; she owned foresight, a frightening ability to see beyond experienced time. Her mind’s reach into the future extended into most matters, but when it came to me, it stretched farther. She knew when Old Rick was coming, knew where I was, knew how to find me. Stormi saved my life multiple times after my brain threw me down in places wild and remote. Stormi was my soldier, the one battling the creature caged in my skull. Though I wanted her more than life itself, maybe it was best not to disturb our delicate friendship balance.
Even if her smile filled every pleasant dream.
Minutes later, the grip on my lumbar eased, and I hauled myself up. “Well, lead on. I don’t know where we’re going.”
“We’re here. This is it. This is where I wanted to celebrate. With you.”
“On this path?” I lowered myself back down to my knees.
She glanced around, shrugged, and nodded.
“But we fell by chance. This can’t be what you had in mind.”
“I don’t believe in chance.” Stormi dug into the front pocket of her cutoffs. “You know what I want? What I’ve never had?”
No, but I’m willing to oblige.
She yanked out her hand. In it, a pink candle and a book of matches. “I want a wish. I’m eighteen, and you know my mom’s paranoia about celebrations, and I can live with that, but a girl can’t live without making a wish.”
I grinned. “No, I’d say that’s mandatory.” I grabbed a stick and twisted it into the dirt, pressed the candle into the hole, and mounded dirt around its base. “Allow me.”
Soon Stormi’s eyes glinted in the light of a tiny flame.
“Now close your eyes,” I said. “That’s right. And make your wish. But you can’t tell me what it is.”
“Thank you for the tutorial.” Stormi cracked an eyelid. “Did you really think I was going to?” She squeezed her eyes shut and blew.
Flame out.
“Can I tell you my wish after it comes true?” she asked.
While that seemed unnecessary, I acquiesced. I sat and watched the wisp of smoke rise from the candle and circle around Stormi. A minute later I risked her gaze. She stared at me and my eyes darted.
“Hold me.”
I raised my brows and pointed at myself.
She nodded slowly.
I started to scoot near and then paused. “Have you ever knocked down dominoes?”
“What?”
“You know, set them up in a row and pushed the first over and then watched all of them tumble?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“That may be the problem. See, in dominoes, there is a trajectory. Things go down in a specific direction. You set ‘m up, push the first, and the others fall in order. I think what you and I are missing is trajectory.�
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“Trajectory,” she repeated.
I repositioned my spine, summoning all the courage I owned. “We’re together a lot, you and me. A lot. But it feels like maybe some dominoes haven’t been knocked down, some key relational dominoes.”
“Relational dominoes.”
“Yeah, relational dominoes. It’s as if we’ve been playing a chance game like Yahtzee, when we should have been playing dominoes. It seems, at least from what I can tell, when a guy and girl spend this much time together there usually comes a first push, a noticing—you know, interest. That starts the trajectory.”
“Fascinating analogy.” She reached out and stroked my hair. “So first the push of interest. And then?”
“Well, then might come a more tangible event between them, maybe an event that makes the interest very, very clear.”
“Hmm.” She leaned forward, crawling slowly toward me. Her arms rounded my shoulders and she eased in, whispering, her lips brushing my ear. “Next domino, please.”
I wriggled. “This is the problem. The next domino might be a bigger deal, you know, that they would remember for a long time. Sort of a key—intimate, if you want to use the word—only-between-them kind of domino. But between us, this domino won’t fall over. And I get it, I mean . . .” Her warm breath caressed my neck and I gathered my thoughts, lost them, and picked up what I could.
“Why should you want to knock over a domino with a bloody, peanut-butter-covered me? It’s just that when you say stuff like ‘hold me,’ this stupid domino can’t figure out what you want from it, er, him, I mean me.”
“I see. How about this? When she says ‘hold me,’ she wants you to hold her.”
“And uh, that’s it, right?” I bowed slightly, resting my forehead against hers. “Hold you. Our game ends in a holding pattern. Nothing falls after that?”
Stormi thought for a moment. “How long does it usually take for all the dominoes to fall?”
“Normally, it happens pretty quick.”
“That’s the problem,” she said softly, and caressed my chest with her cheek. “Wait for me.”
This was not fair. This was agonizing. If you’ve ever been banished to the friend zone—which holds confusions similar to the twilight zone—and the perfect object of your desire presses into you, you know this wasn’t fair, not even on a birthday. But I didn’t dispute. Right there on that path, for the first time, a piece of my own wish was granted, and I reached my arms around Stormi and drew her tight. As the sun stretched long shadows over the Ozarks, and the evening breezes brought with them the scent and rustle of hickory, I still held her. We lay on that dirt path, every now and then her body shifting against mine.
For a deformed epileptic, I guess this is as good as it gets.
Stormi nuzzled my neck and whispered words imperceptible. With anyone else, this would be a beginning, but with me it marked an end, and no matter how much my heart ached, I would not ask for more. She was at peace; I felt it, though I did not know why, and I daydreamed into a memory.
CHAPTER 3
I recalled last December’s annual spinal measurement. One of the few times I’d ignored Stormi. The doctor had placed his hands on my twisted, leafless trunk.
“Twenty-one degrees forward, ten degrees to the left. The bend is accelerating. It’s like I’ve been telling you.” He scratched his chin and then his balding scalp, likely pondering all manner of delicate words. But he was speaking to Dad. No gentle message would do. “Jonah’s back is a sight to behold. Never seen such a dramatic case of scoliosis.”
That word always sounded sinister. Maybe the Latin name for a dying tree, like E. deforma monstrus freakosis, or some ancient curse like Forevis Screwediosis Bendicus.
“Please. Take the young man’s warped back to Mayo.” Dr. Only-Doctor-in-Gullary-Who’d-Never-Before-Seen-a-Back-Like-Mine exhaled hard in Dad’s direction. “And best sooner than later. My guess? They’ll crack it, rod it . . . who knows, maybe fuse it. I’ve heard young bone grows fine around rods and bolts.”
Mom teared up and Dad frowned down and I tried my darnedest to sit straight. Screwediosis Bendicus? A rotten lot, but survivable. The thought of young bone—my young bone—fusing around parts from Lurvy’s Hardware?
Pretty much the end of the world.
Turned out, Armageddon was quick in coming. The operation schedule was determined. And so was Stormi, right up until the night before the trip.
“Don’t let him take you.” Stormi pressed into my shoulder, shivering in the night. From where we sat on my family’s front step, the moon hung orange and low, a glop of color clinging to a black canvas. It looked about to fall.
“Why are you telling me this the night before?” I peeked down at her face. My, Stormi had turned out beautiful.
“Because if you go tomorrow, if you go through with this, everything will get worse.”
“Pretty cataclysmic sentiment, Stormi. You see the curve. I’m not thinking worse is possible.”
She drew a breath and rose, lingered on the top step, staring across the lawn at her trailer. “Why do you think I landed here?”
“I was pretty young. I didn’t get a chance to ask the tornado. But I’m not sure why we’re talking about you right now. Can’t we focus on my trip and how everything’s going to be fine, and my spine is finally going to be straight—”
“It’s not your stupid back I’m worried about.” Stormi’s voice was flat, emotionless.
“What then?” I jumped up and grabbed her shoulder. “Are they going to screw up some procedure and leave me vegetated?”
She turned, faced me, reached out, and held my cheeks in her hands. “Procedure? Oh, Jonah, you won’t make it that far.”
“Okay, this time I need you to explain your little premonition, ’cause you’re talking death language, and if there’s one thing I do not need to hear, it’s death language, not the night before.”
She squeezed me tight. “It’s my turn to wait for you.” Stormi backed down the steps, turned, and stepped slowly toward her trailer home. “Someday you’ll return the favor.”
I cupped my hands and called, “You’ll wait for a happy, living me or a not-so-cheery, dead-type me?”
Stormi paused at her door. “Both.” Her door clicked shut behind her.
From anyone else, I’d have chalked up her concern to over-protection. But when Stormi gave a prediction, you didn’t bet against her, and you certainly didn’t risk it.
Not after she brought flowers to Jason Murphy’s house ten minutes before two military officers arrived to give the tragic news of Jason’s sacrifice.
Not after she invited Ashley for a sleepover the same night a gas line explosion leveled her friend’s double-wide.
You didn’t question Stormi. I, especially, should’ve known.
Yet, pain tilts otherwise reasonable thought. Under duress, I understand why prisoners spill their secrets to the enemy. Unrelenting agony overshadowed Stormi’s words, and I climbed into bed after she left, falling asleep to thoughts of flagpoles and skyscrapers—proud, straight things. I would soon be counted among them.
On Christmas Day, Ma kissed both my cheeks European style, and Dad and I climbed into the 1984 Ford F-150. We chugged six hundred mostly silent miles north to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
That trip to Minnesota was cold. Stupid cold. Inside and outside the truck.
My “correction” began with what hospital folks called a work-up—or, better put, Testicus-up-the-Butticus. There were CAT scans and PET scans and MRI scans. After all that scanning, we consulted with ten different doctors, none with a sense of humor, and each with the word neuro in his or her title. Meeting with neurosurgeons—people who sawed skulls and poked brains—made me want to vomit.
Those doctors put their humorless heads together and developed my “treatment plan.” That term sounded so gentle, so nurturing.
Don’t believe it. It’s code for freaking surgery, likely the first of many. Turns out Dr.
Only-Doctor-in-Gullary was dead-on. My treatment plan included a violent spine crack, five vertebra shaves, cartilage rips, a hip bone harvest, and finally a white-knuckled fusion. Add a few rods and pins and, in three months, I would be titanium straight.
Hallelujah.
The afternoon before found me lying in bed, fiddling with my 35mm, taking random shots of the bedpan and flower arrangement on my bedside table.
“Jonah Everett the third . . . that’s a fancy name. You rich?”
A pleasant looking blond in green scrubs stood in the doorway, leaning on the handle of her mop.
“Sure,” I said dryly. “Why not.”
She smiled and peeked back out into the hallway. “I’m supposed to say ‘Housekeeping.’”
“If I have my own housekeeper, I must be rich.” I waved her in. “Feel free to keep house.”
She moved easily about my hospital room, beautiful, effortless. She smelled good and paused often, most disconcerting. I felt her presence—not intense or weighty like Stormi’s, but light, light and free, like so much fluff. It would be lying to say that scrub had no effect on me.
“I’m going to ask.” She eased nearer the bed. “Why are you here? You don’t look like the ones I usually see.”
“How are we different?”
She quickly moved toward the door, shut it, and leaned her back against it before hurrying to my side. I instinctively made room on the bed and she plunked down.
“Well, for one thing, they don’t have this.”
And here she stretched out her hand and worked it through my blond hair. Honest. She touched me.
“And they sure don’t have these.” Her hand slipped down, stroking the contour of my shoulder, pausing on my bicep. “You’re not hospital-typical.”
“I’m not sick. But I’m here.”
“You are.”
At this point, I forgot my personality. Blame it on the fear of death. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
“Go ahead. Wait, with that?”
“Yeah.” I raised my 35mm to my eye. “Much better than a phone selfie.”
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