I called Scott. We had barely spoken, just a couple of texts, an email around the time I had gone to Prague. He was thinking of me, he said, and I should let him know if there was anything he could do.
So I did. “You know people, Scott,” I said, “all the CEOs in London you used to boast. So please help us, please help us, because we might not have much time.”
Scott called back within an hour. He had a prime slot for us—at sunset on Boxing Day and we had the cabin completely to ourselves.
“Shall we move you around so you can see the other side better?” Anna asked Jack as we climbed farther.
“Okay,” he said, not really listening, frantically taking photographs as if he was paparazzi afraid of missing his prized shot.
We moved him over to the opposite window, putting the brake on the wheelchair. Anna zipped up his coat and tucked in his scarf. We knew he didn’t have long left. His speech had started to change. He forgot things, repeated his words. He was weak and needed the wheelchair if we were going to be out for a long time. As the doctors had warned us, he had become more detached. He did everything slowly and with such caution—walking, picking up a spoon, eating a piece of toast. It was like watching someone walk through a rock pool with bare feet.
“Look, Jack, Big Ben,” Anna said, as we kept rising. We turned to look at the Houses of Parliament, lit up from below, the four faces of Big Ben hanging in the air like ghostly orbs. Jack swung himself around in the seat of his wheelchair and took more photos, zooming in and out, twisting the camera to take horizontal and vertical shots.
Making memories, they said on Hope’s Place, and those two words had never made any sense to me. They would be our memories, mine and Anna’s. They wouldn’t be Jack’s.
I snapped out of it, painted on my smile. Making memories, making memories. We had been at every point in the cabin now, looking down toward Canary Wharf, the Shard, the cozy huddle around St. Paul’s.
“Daddy,” Jack said, putting his camera down on the blanket on his lap, and his voice sounded strangely lucid—the Jack I remembered from a few weeks ago. “It’s very high here.”
“It is, isn’t it? Do you like it?”
Jack nodded and smiled. “When I’m better, are we going to climb more tall buildings?”
“Of course we are.”
“The Ivor Tower in Paris?”
“Yes,” I said, putting my arm around him.
“And the one in Oompa-Loompa?”
Anna laughed gently, put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Yes, sweetheart, Kuala Lumpur.”
“Yes,” Jack said, looking down the Thames. “Kuala Lumpur.” I knew what he was thinking about now: all the tall buildings, the ones he had seen in his books, in the pictures on his wall.
“And the one in Dubai? Because that’s the biggest one in the whole world, Daddy.”
I paused, fighting back my tears, because I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t let him see me cry now. “We can go up all of them, Jack, every single one,” I said, my voice beginning to crack.
“Because you know, Daddy, you know, when you’re so high, you go up past the clouds, and it’s like being in an airplane and then you can see the spaceships and the sun and all of the stars...”
As Jack’s words tailed off, a bolt from the setting sun lit up the cabin, like the light from a distant, silent explosion. We crouched down and listened to the clinks and clanks of the gears, our arms wrapped around Jack’s shoulders, staring at what was left of the sunset. And then, without warning, Jack slowly pushed himself up out of his wheelchair. He wobbled a little, steadied himself on the handrail, and started taking photographs again. The dim flare of city lights against the velvet-red sky. Peaks and troughs, luminous mountains of clouds. He made sure he got it all.
* * *
We decided that Ashbourne House was a good place for Jack to come to die. We had chosen it in the same way that we had chosen Jack’s school. We looked through the brochures and then went to tour the facilities. We discussed the various merits of the staff, the size of the playroom, the communal dining options.
While it was a Victorian-era institution, it did not give a foreboding impression. Its brickwork was light, with a reddish tinge; the gardens were lovingly tended, full of flowers and curiosities; the corridors were light and airy, bedecked with the residents’ own artwork, wide enough for several wheelchairs to pass each other at ease. In our room, we had a double bed artfully separated from Jack’s by a removable division. We slept there, as a family, the way we once had when Jack was born.
Jack had mostly withdrawn from the world. As the tumor pressed on the vital parts of his brain, he became more detached, less able to express emotions. Now there was no more chemotherapy, his hair had grown longer, a little unruly once again. He had a haunted, faraway look in his eyes, a look that should never be seen on a child.
The art classes, the wake-’em-up karaoke, the superhero day, were all lost on Jack. He didn’t even recognize his pictures anymore: the buildings, the panoramas, we had taped around his bed. It was the speed that shocked me. The cavalier way his own body betrayed him.
Then, something else changed in Jack’s brain. The tumor shifted, or grew, or colonized a new lobe, and suddenly, while we thought he still understood what was being said to him, Jack could no longer speak. Now he just slept, his body already in death’s custody.
To
