For Kelly, those Wednesday experiences were life-changing. She saw the loving bonds between Karla and Bruce, and between the couple and their three children. Seeing their strength and closeness, especially given the awful circumstances, made Kelly reconsider her own home life, her own marriage. It was on those Wednesdays that she began to think seriously about the possibility of ending her marriage.
Kelly’s hospital visits had a different effect on Karla, however. Each time Kelly stopped by, her reporter’s instincts kicked in, and she’d have a barrage of questions about Christie’s care or how Karla was holding up. She meant well, but Karla found it annoying. After a while, Karla began to view Kelly’s visits as intrusions, and the questions as “the interrogation.” Once, Kelly came with her entire family, and Karla felt churned up inside. “They’re making small talk,” she thought to herself, “and all I can think about is germs.”
Karla had been sleeping night after night, on a pull-out bed in the hospital room, and Kelly was amazed by her commitment to be by Christie’s side twenty-four hours a day. Kelly later wrote out her impressions: “How can Karla be there every night, with all the sounds, the glowing lights, the smells of that place? I would not be able to do it. God forbid if it was my kid, I would have asked my parents or friends to take a shift.”
On her visits, Kelly sometimes would ask Karla to take a break, to walk with her down the hall to the visitors’ lounge for a few minutes. Invariably, Karla declined to go. “I want to be with Christie,” she said.
When the other Ames girls called Karla and asked if they could visit, Karla turned them down. Visitors were hard on Christie, who was often so weak, and they threatened her immune system. If friends were going to be there, Karla decided, they ought to be Christie’s friends, not Karla’s friends.
Diana came from Arizona to visit, but Karla asked that she just go to the house, not the hospital, and see Bruce, Ben and Jackie. Karla stayed at the hospital. Bruce seemed to be doing OK. He was able to joke around. He said the neighbors had sent over yet another care package dinner of “pity pitas.” It all seemed surreal to Diana, so unlike the easy visits of the past.
Karla found herself contemplating the fact that she didn’t know the whereabouts of her own biological parents. She couldn’t help but wonder: What insights to Christie’s illness might be revealed in their medical histories? Was the woman named on Karla’s birth certificate the same woman Mrs. Derby had phoned years later? Mrs. Derby had come upon the woman because of the article she wrote about the high prevalence of cancer in her family. The cancer connection was concerning at the time. Now, given Christie’s plight, it was frightening. Would this woman have medical information that could help Christie?
Karla was too overwhelmed with Christie’s care to pursue any efforts to find her biological parents. But she thought about them. They had let her out of their lives on that spring day in 1963 with nothing but a cloth diaper. OK, that was the choice they made. But now Christie, their biological granddaughter, was very sick. And Karla felt that her other two children were also entitled to crucial answers about their genetic backgrounds.
Karla didn’t bother Christie with any of these details about the genetic history that may have led her to that hospital room. And in any case, Christie was a realist. She believed in playing the cards she was dealt. Rather than crying over her bad hand, she wondered how she might improve it.
She decided to try cutting-edge treatments. Her antinausea medicine wasn’t working, so her oncologist had her trained in the relaxation technique of guided imagery, where she used her five senses to imagine visiting “a happy place.” Her family had once lived in Seattle, so for her happy place, she chose Seattle’s Pike Place Market. She’d imagine herself at that market, tasting the fruit, smelling the flowers and watching all the fish being thrown around and loaded onto carts. Often, when she used guided imagery, she wouldn’t throw up.
A reporter from Newsweek who, doing a story on alternative therapies, learned about her from the hospital and interviewed her. She was so excited by the possibility of being quoted in the magazine. In her online journal she continually reminded people to look for the story, but the news cycle kept getting in the way. First, the piece was bumped to make room for coverage of the Washington, D.C., sniper attacks. A week later, Christie wrote, “Don’t go out and buy Newsweek . I got bumped again, because of the election.” Finally, the story ran. “Two exciting pieces of news!” Christie wrote. “I’m in this week’s Newsweek and I get to go home for Thanksgiving. It doesn’t get any better than this!”
Workers at Pike Place Market in Seattle saw the Newsweek story, and a month later, two of them surprised Christie by flying to Minneapolis. They brought gifts for every kid on her floor at the hospital. They had real fish, fruit, T-shirts, flowers, hats. They even brought stuffed fake fish to the hospital playroom, and they threw the fish back and forth, just like they do in Seattle. Christie wrote about the thrill of seeing her “happy place” come to life right there in the hospital.
Christie’s journal was also a document of what the early teen years were like, circa 2002/2003. When she was out of the hospital and got to see movies (often wearing a mask to avoid infections), she’d review them in her journal. She found that Legally Blonde 2 wasn’t as good as the original, “but I still thought it was cute.” She also got a kick out of Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan. (The Ames girls took note, and in a parallel universe where life was still normal, sent their healthy daughters to the same movies.)
Christie’s writing was conversational. She took to calling the hospital “the Ritz,” as in: “My brother, Ben, and mom slept over here last night at the Ritz.” Her sense of humor came through in most every entry. She called the anesthetic she’d taken before surgery “milk of amnesia.” When her hair eventually grew back after chemotherapy, she described what it felt like to use shampoo again and the thrill of walking around with a head that “smells like fresh fruit.”
From the time Christie was in fourth grade, she and Karla had been in a mother/daughter book club with six of Christie’s friends and their moms. The club continued even after she got sick. Christie sometimes felt self-conscious, given her condition and the fact that she needed to wear a mask over her mouth and nose to avoid other people’s germs. She wrote about one book-club meeting: “Of course my mom made me wear my mask.” Then, as usual, Christie turned positive, with a happy face emoticon as punctuation: “I have established quite a talent, through all of this, where I’m able to eat and drink with a mask on!! ☺”
Reading Christie’s journal day after day, Sally eventually came to a realization: The entries, with all the descriptions of Karla’s devotion, were turning Sally into a better, more patient, more loving mother. As a fifth-grade teacher, Sally noticed something else. She was becoming a better, more patient teacher, too. The kids in her class were “the most important people in the universe,” Sally would tell herself, simply because each one of them was someone’s child.
By May 2003, doctors considered Christie to be in remission. She went home and eventually rejoined her soccer team, with what she called “a very cute, short short haircut.” In her journal, she remarked about how far she’d come. “We were all getting lined up and ready to play, and that’s when it really occurred to me: I had cancer and I had beaten it.”
For the girls from Ames, that entry was a great relief. Kelly decided to mark Christie’s improved health by using frequent flier miles to get a plane ticket for Karla to fly to Maryland for an Ames girls get-together. Karla at first agreed, then tried to back out. She called other Ames girls, saying she didn’t want to leave Christie. But because Kelly already had the ticket, she eventually felt compelled to go.
When Kelly came to Karla’s house to pick her up for the trip, Christie was home, standing on the front lawn in her soccer uniform. Her hair, short and very fine, was blowing in the breeze. It’s amazing, Kelly thought, how strong she looks in that uniform. Christie told her mom to have a great time, and as K
arla and Kelly drove away, Christie waved good-bye with this giant smile on her face. Maybe she’ll be OK, Kelly thought.
They spent the weekend at Jenny’s house in Annapolis—Angela and Jane came, too—and they all celebrated their fortieth birthdays and the fact that Christie was in remission. Karla was weary but grateful—for her old friends and for her daughter’s good news.
They talked about very serious things: Angela opened up to the other girls about her younger brother, who in 1999 died of complications from AIDS. She explained how he was on his deathbed and the family minister came by to suggest that he still had time to repent for his homosexuality. Kelly, who had a close gay relative, was empathetic. She knew well what it’s like to have a gay loved one in such a conservative part of the world.
It seemed to Kelly as if Christie’s illness had opened all of them up, brought them closer.
There was plenty of laughter, too, at the gathering. One night, while talking about sex, the girls laughed so hard that they all needed to use the bathroom at the same time. “I was actually crawling to the bathroom, trying to get there before Karla,” Kelly wrote in an email to the girls who couldn’t make it. “We were laughing so hard we could hardly function. Next time, I’m bringing my Depends!”
The weekend also had moments that hung in the air in frightening ways. At one point, Jane talked about how thrilling it was that Christie was in remission. What incredible news! Karla spoke but didn’t smile. “It’s all so fragile,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her.” Hearing the fear in her voice left the other girls feeling collectively crushed.
As usual for these get-togethers, Karla and Kelly were roommates. They shared a queen-sized bed in Jenny’s guest room, and the bond between them was strengthened. After they returned their rental car at the airport, they were heading to the terminal on a shuttle bus and Karla snuggled up next to Kelly and said, “I’m going to miss sleeping with you.” The other people on the bus stared at them, taken aback by what they’d just heard, and Karla and Kelly couldn’t contain their laughter.
Even after Christie was feeling better and had moved home, she kept writing in the online journal, detailing what she considered “regular kid stuff.” Then came the entry on June 16, 2003: “About a week ago, my mom started to notice I had a lot of bruises, more than a regular kid. I, of course, had an explanation for it. I had fallen down on my roller blades. But I think I secretly knew it wasn’t because of that. Yesterday, I was talking to my parents while reading my new ‘Chicken Soup’ book. I was wearing shorts, and I had a lot more bruises than earlier in the week. Then last night, when I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a black mouth sore. I told my mom and she called the doctor. The doctor said she wanted me in at 9 A.M. today for a complete blood count and a bone marrow test. I knew this all a little too well. After they got my blood back, the doctor told us my platelets were low and my white count was very high. I have relapsed.”
Scheduled for surgery the next day and then a new round of chemotherapy, she typed the entry from her hospital room: “One of my good friends, Jessie, came down to the hospital today. After tears and silence, we were 13-year-old girls again. We read magazines, played games, and did what we do best, talk and laugh. Thanks, Jessie, for coming down. You are a great friend.”
As Christie got sicker, confined to the hospital, she wrote about getting “fidgety” in her room. She longed to breathe fresh air, to walk her dog. “The walls are closing in around me,” she wrote. It was another echo of Anne Frank, who was unable to leave the secret annex where she was hiding.
Christie’s relapse weighed heavily on the Ames girls, especially Kelly, who decided that she couldn’t handle visiting Christie anymore at the hospital. Overwhelmed by what she came to call “the sadness of it all,” she stopped calling or emailing Karla, too. “We’re used to Christie being a girl with this frail, luminous beauty, and now her body has just swelled,” Kelly told the other girls. “It’s hard for me to see her.” She was terribly upset with herself: How could she break off contact at a time like this? “But I was literally unable to find words to tell Karla it would be OK,” Kelly later explained. “I didn’t think it would be OK, and I couldn’t face Karla—or Christie—and pretend.”
Christie, meanwhile, remained upbeat. After a seven-week hospital stay in the fall of 2003, she got to go home for a while. She typed out her entry on the home computer and ended it by writing: “Well, got to go. My parents are making something in the kitchen that smells pretty good. Ahh! A home-cooked meal at home, where a kid should be. Life is good, and you just need to take it day by day. Be thankful to see the sun rise and set each day. Thank you for your love and support.”
On December 31, 2003, back in the hospital, she wrote that she had much to be grateful for. Her family had come to be with her. They ate popcorn, shared a bottle of sparkling cider, and toasted the new year.
Her fourteenth birthday was January 9, and she described it as “a great day” even though she had a temperature of 100.7° and a two-hour nosebleed. Three days later, she still had a fever. She wrote of having a scan on her lungs and a scope up her nose. On January 14, she wrote of being “tired and weak.” She ended the entry, “Thanks for checking in on me. Love, Christie.”
From then on, Karla and Bruce took over posting updates. They explained that Christie had developed fungus in her lungs, a very serious condition. She was on oxygen to help her breathe. “The doctors are very concerned with Christie’s current condition, and have told us not to give up hope. However, they have prepared us for the worst. We ask again for your thoughts and prayers.”
By February 1, Christie had been heavily sedated for days. “She’s unable to give us any response,” Bruce wrote. “We still talk to her, read to her and play her favorite music. We’ve got a nice window to watch the snowstorm from.”
On February 12, Karla wrote that Christie was awake, but perhaps due to the morphine, she seemed “scared, confused and very agitated. She screams a lot of the time. She doesn’t know her name, age or the rest of our family. She talks a lot of nonsense, which is very hard for us, because we were so excited to ‘have her back.’ ”
On February 16, doctors found blood clots in her bladder and urine. The painful procedure to irrigate her bladder didn’t go well. “She screamed in agony for about 36 hours,” Karla wrote. “It was excruciating to watch.”
At 11:47 A.M. on Friday, February 20, Karla posted this entry: “Christie has taken a critical turn for the worse. She has multi-system failure. Bruce, Ben, Jackie and I are all here with her. Please pray for answers and comfort for her.”
At 8:07 P.M. that night, all Karla could bring herself to type onto the Web site was this: “Christie Rae Blackwood, 1/9/1990-2/20/2004.”
At her home in Northfield, Minnesota, Kelly saw the online posting and touched the words on her computer screen. It was an impulse, she later thought, to wipe the words away.
In Massachusetts, Jane had been monitoring the site all day. When that final posting went up, she mouthed the words “oh my God,” and was soon calling the other Ames girls. She, too, described her response as an instinctual act, as if she were a bird calling out to other birds that they all needed to return to their nest. The girls began calling their bosses to say they wouldn’t be coming to work the next day. They tracked down babysitters for their kids. They called their husbands. And one by one, they made plans to head for airports. They were going to Minneapolis to be with Karla.
Angela was the only one who didn’t think she could make it. But when an email finally came in that she, too, would be there, Kelly again found herself touching the computer screen. (As she later put it: “It was like I was feeling the power of my friendship with these women.”) Through tears, she allowed herself to smile. “We’re all going to be here,” she thought. Because Marilyn had a big house and lived just a half hour from Karla, she invited all the girls to stay with her.
Later that night, someone wrote on the Web site that
families in Christie’s neighborhood in Minnesota had lit candles in the Blackwoods’ yard. They also turned on lights in their homes, as a way to honor Christie. Thousands of miles away, in different corners of the country, the Ames girls turned on lights in their homes, too.
Of course, it was the least they could do. And some were already feeling guilty for not having done more while Christie was alive: Why hadn’t they flown to Minneapolis more, sent more money, asked Christie how they might make her happy, told Karla they loved her? The responsibilities of friendship are not easily defined, especially in traumatic times. How much is too much? How little is too little? They had trouble talking about these guilt feelings in the days after Christie’s death. But the feelings were there, unspoken, in all of their heads.
All of the Ames girls arrived within hours of each other on the day before the memorial service. Jenny, flying in from Maryland, was the last to land at the airport. At age forty-one, she was pregnant with her first child, and the sight of her was such a thrill for the other girls that, for a brief moment, it overshadowed their grief.
All the girls, except Karla, of course, camped out at Marilyn’s house the night before the funeral. It was a tremendously sad evening, and yet, like always, the girls reminisced and found themselves giggling. “I feel guilty laughing,” Jenny said, and that was a trigger for all of them, so they’d get teary again. That’s how it went all night.
The conversation turned to how sex-toy parties were being run like Tupperware parties in some of their neighborhoods. One of the girls—they’ve sworn not to say who it was—talked about using a silver bullet during sex. It was all surreal. Talking about sex toys. Grieving for Karla. Crying, then laughing, then crying, then laughing.
It was perhaps the most intense bonding they’d ever done, and Jane said aloud what all of them were thinking: “I wish we could call Karla. I wish she could just come over. She’d want to be here with us.”
The Girls from Ames Page 20
