How long, how long? That was what we asked the doctors, the ward nurse, anyone who might know, anyone who would listen. I felt like we were betraying him.
I didn’t know how I knew it was coming, but I knew. We both knew. I put my head on Jack’s chest, encasing his small body with my arms, and then I felt Anna’s arms fold around me, or perhaps Anna had been there first, and we stayed like that for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, our bodies, like wings protecting a young bird.
I would like to say that Jack held out his hand and reached over and traced the outline of mine, my knuckle, the curve between my thumb and forefinger. Or that he looked up at me with loving eyes, but he did not. His hands were like clammy ice. His eyes glassy and opaque, no longer of this world.
And then we heard a soft rasp, like an echo of a breath, and our arms tightened around him, and we waited, waited, held our own breaths so we could hear his and we waited, waited, hoping he would and hoping he wouldn’t. I listened again and again, and this time I knew that his breath was not coming; this time I knew he was gone.
I removed myself from Jack’s body and looked around the room. People cling to their death stories: their cozy myths of seeing the soul depart the room. But at Ashbourne House, everything was still the same. There was no beam of light or gentle rattling of the windowpane. The day was still gray outside. Jack’s Minions water bottle remained undrunk on the table. I could hear the chirp of hospital bells in the distance, and I thought for a moment that their frequency, their pitch, was somehow different. I listened again. No, it was the same.
In the quietness of the room, my breathing suddenly seemed very loud. Anna was still lying on the bed with Jack, her arms cradling his head and neck. He had come from her body, and she would stay with him for as long as she could.
I looked at Jack. Sometimes people spoke of the body after death looking empty, as if it was neutered by the absence of a soul, like the discarded skin of a snake. But it was still him; it was still Jack. He didn’t look to be at peace—that was just the delusion of the living—but his face was mostly without expression. The only thing I could categorically say about his expression was that it was his. It was him; it was still him.
I rang the emergency bell after that. For Anna, not Jack. Because after she pried herself away from Jack’s body and fell to her knees, and after I put my arms around her, to encase her like we had done Jack, she broke away and slammed her head against the wall, again and again, so hard that her nose started to drip blood onto the yellow tiles.
* * *
The balloons had been Lola’s suggestion. After the reception, just before dusk, we would all gather in the garden and let off helium balloons into the sky. Each person would write their own tribute to Jack, in colored marker, and then on the count of three, we would all send them up to the heavens.
The idea had not appealed to me. There was something ostentatious about it, cloying even. The idea that every dying child had to have something, something that defined them—as if his love for balloons was the final way that Jack would be remembered, as if that was it, that was the sum of his existence: a balloon.
Jack would definitely not approve. He would have thought that was messy, somehow improper—why would you write on a balloon like that? Balloons were not meant to be scribbled on.
“Perhaps we should do it without the messages, the writing,” I said to Anna. “Or just get some from Carphone Warehouse, he always loved those.”
“It’s just balloons,” Anna said. “It doesn’t matter where they’re from. And I think the writing is a nice idea.”
I was sullen, silent.
Jack’s funeral. I don’t remember much about that day. The banal sea of people, the way they clasped my hand. Anna’s mother, a specter in a wheelchair, and how I resented her presence, her very living, that she was given a second chance.
The day passed in a haze of Xanax and whiskey. A church on a hill—“lovely setting, so Jack, so very Jack”—a service where everyone, except the elderly, were expected to wear color, “because that’s what Jack would have wanted.” Laughs when the Spider-Man theme came on. Laughs at a little boy’s funeral. “He would have loved that, Oh, Jack would have loved that.”
“He loved to smile, your Jack, didn’t he?” They were wrong. They knew nothing about Jack. He was frugal with his smiles, as if he thought they were being rationed. He didn’t dish them out for anyone.
Jack was buried because we could not bear to have him cremated. It was a ritual fitting for the old but not for the young. And he was always terrified of fire. When he was little, we had taught him to be scared of the pot bubbling away on the stove and, dutifully, he was. He took comfort in the blinking red light on the smoke alarm in his room.
I watched as he was lowered into the ground, the earth tipped over him. All I could think was that there was Jack in that wooden box, dressed in his Spider-Man pajamas with Little Teddy, his flashlight, all of
