Chapter 31

Jon chased his lawn mower around the lawn, eagerly cutting grass that seemed to have sprouted another two inches in only a few days. Hannah wandered aimlessly through the house while I sorted Andrew’s daily medications. Without thinking, she picked up and set down artifacts around the kitchen that included a set of car keys, a receipt for the cleaners, and a dog leash left haphazardly on the counter next to the treat jar.

“What can I do? We can’t go anywhere, and Andrew doesn’t want to do anything. I’m so bored I could die!” she said.

I watched her throw her teenage self onto the sofa and flop backwards in exasperation. Too consumed and overwhelmed by my nursing duties, I didn’t bother to answer.

“Mom, didn’t you hear me?” she called from the couch.

Glancing in to the family room, I saw my daughter’s legs pointing straight up, moving in an air ballet.

“I did. What do you want me to say? I can’t get him interested in anything, either.”

Andrew was under strict quarantine for a year. No visitors, no outings—except for the unauthorized kind, like our brief visit to the park on the way back from a medical appointment. He was not allowed contact with Frightful for at least six months, so when she caught sight of him downstairs, we all had to endure her constant tapping at the window—a beak-sized jack hammer.

I stepped over the cat and headed toward the playroom with Andrew’s 11:00 a.m. assortment of meds. Our house had become a tomb filled with nothing but pills, medical supplies, X-Box, Netflix, and the Food Network channel. Andrew had been watching the same, ten-minute segment of Dinner Impossible over and over again until it was etched into his memory. Currently he was watching the episode, “Spring Training Triangle.” No wonder Hannah was going crazy.

Hannah forcefully entered the room. “Can’t you watch something else? Why do you keep rewinding it to the lamb shoulder? You’ve already seen it a billion times!”

“I like it. See how they make the marinade?” he paused the recording with the remote, “I think the truck in the background is from Sysco. They’re a national restaurant supplier. I wonder if they will deliver here?” he rambled on without taking the time to look at her.

In a huff, Hannah left the room. I followed her, and saw Frightful sitting in the wicker chair on the porch. I knew the chicken was looking for her human friend.

I slipped out to join her. “Be patient, girl. You’ll be together soon.”

With the exception of watching Frightful roam the yard from his bedroom window, Andrew had only spoken to her using gestures through the playroom windows. Doctor’s orders.

Frightful allowed me to scoop her into my lap, probably out of desperation for human contact. “How old are you?” I asked absently, calculating the years that had passed. It occurred to me that she had been a part of our family for what felt like a lifetime. She had outlived our original clutch of chicks and now queened over six new adolescents. “You’re about nine, I think.”

I continued talking to her, wondering if all chickens lived that long. Frightful paced my lap, leaving micro-showers of dust on my legs before finding a suitable spot to sit. She tucked her scaly dinosaur legs beneath her, easing her body into an egg shape of feathers. A comforting presence settled over me.

“Thank you for showing up when Andrew needed you most,” I said. “Thank you for searching him out in the darkness, for singing to him, for being his hero, and leaving gifts in the form of beautiful sky-blue eggs. But most of all, sweet girl, thank you for loving him.”

She regarded me with hooded eyes, and spoke, steady and even.

“Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck.”

It’s easy to love him.

Sue arrived when Frightful and I were still on the porch. I watched her walk in through the garage, knowing Andrew would be thrilled to see her.

“The stories are in my head, Sue. I need you to read them to me just like that,” I heard him say. Andrew was on the sofa, eyes closed, waiting for the words to drop out of the sky like manna. Two minutes into the story he opened one eye. “You forgot that Frightful has to carry Shadow. He’s too weak to walk.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” she said.

He let out a puff of air. “Well, he just is.”

Looking back at the pages Andrew had asked her to read, Sue adjusted the story, and without missing a beat, the pages morphed into the pictures of Andrew’s imagination. Characters floated in and out of his version of the Hunger Games, new districts were created, and hand-drawn maps were translated into words to soothe his mind and take him away from this feeling of the unfamiliar.

Andrew flashed his medical bracelet at Sue, begging her to ask him a question. He fingered the black caduceus on the front, two snakes intertwined around a short staff. “You know what this is?” he said. “It’s my superhero signal.”

Sue leaned in to get a closer look. “That’s right, I forgot. It’s pretty cool!”

He handed her a stack of tattered Judy Blume books, bracelet forgotten. “It’s time for Fudge to meet Frightful.”

While Sue thumbed through the old books, Andrew held out a folder of tissue paper drawings. “These are my drawings of Shadow. Thirty-two drawings, to be exact. They’re all the same.”

“I see Shadow has a new cape and an IV pole,” Sue said.

“Yep. And a Hickman line. See?” He pointed to a squiggly black line dangling from Shadow’s chest.

When Sue had finished looking through each one, he took the tissue drawings back, carefully sliding the stack between the pages of a Calvin & Hobbes comic book. “Let’s read that one,” he said, pointing to Fudge-a-Mania. He caught sight of me hovering in the doorway. “You can leave now, Mom. Sue and I are reading.”

Hannah found me sorting pills again in the kitchen after Sue left. “Andrew won’t do anything but study weird recipes on the Cooking Channel, and he still won’t eat. I don’t get it,” she said.

I tucked a stray hair behind her ear as she practiced her scowl. I was always surprised at how much it bothered her when her brother didn’t do things the way she would like. That was supposed to be my job.

Leaving to deliver the pills, I slipped into my studio to catch up on email. A half hour later, I smelled garlic and what I thought was rosemary wafting up the stairs. I realized I hadn’t thought about dinner yet. Grocery shopping for the required neutropenic diet was a nightmare.

Andrew couldn’t eat anything from the deli or bakery department, pickled or fermented foods, food that hadn’t been cooked, or any fruit that could not be peeled. Every perishable item had to be bagged separately, boxed items and cans in the far side of the vegetable cart. Leftovers were sketchy. The process required for storage was so daunting that I usually tossed it.

Sitting in my studio, mentally scanning the pantry, I figured I had the fixings for spaghetti. That would have to do for tonight.

“Here, brother!” I heard Hannah say.

I wandered into the hallway to see that she had dropped a single plate on his lap, artfully arranged with long slices of sautéed zucchini.

“Now eat! I sautéed it in marinade like they used in ‘Spring Training Triangle.’”

When he hesitated, she gave him the same scowl she had been practicing downstairs. “I’m not leaving until you eat it.”

Andrew, who had only eaten SpongeBob mac and cheese for the last week, ate the entire plate of garlic zucchini without argument. Smiling, I headed back to my studio, knowing Hannah had found her role again.

At our next visit to the SCCA, Dr. Burroughs was thrilled to hear about Hannah’s zucchini dish. “You’ve got to eat more of your sister’s cooking,” she said.

Andrew grunted. He still was barely eating, and despite his quick wit, he still experienced nausea, and exhaustion.

“I want to hold Frightful. What do you think of this Hazmat suit?” he said, thrusting a stack of papers at her. “There are eleven good ones on Amazon, but this one is the best.”

Startled, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, but then I figured this was his solution to the ban on bird-to-boy contact.

“You can also purchase gloves, an oxygen tank, and a fully equipped helmet with its own filtration system,” he said expectantly.

I rubbed my hand across my eyes, trying to conceal my embarrassment.

Dr. Burroughs laughed, enjoying his perfectly logical solution. “Soon, buddy, I promise I’ll let you know when you and Frightful can be reunited.”

Our next appointment was with the endocrinologist. She asked me when Andrew had gone through puberty. “With such a long history of prednisone use, it can delay things. I want to get an accurate sense as to whether or not we can expect him to grow more.”

I studied Andrew on the exam table, his long legs crisscrossed awkwardly underneath him. Kinky patches of red-gold hair stuck out from his newly fuzzed scalp, and his skin was a translucent shade of pink. He was wearing headphones, hunched over his iPhone laughing at something on YouTube.

“Put it away, Andrew,” I said, irritated.

“I can hear everything you say. I just don’t want to. Too boring for words,” he replied.

“Andrew, have you shaved yet?” the pretty doctor asked him.

I figured she was barely thirty-five, yet already she was one of the most sought-after endocrinologists in the city.

“My dad did it once.” He ran a finger across his upper lip, absently rubbing at a few downy hairs. “I think I might be sprouting some pinfeathers though.”

I felt my cheeks redden, and stifled a laugh. I knew what he was proposing.

“You are not part-chicken, Andrew,” I said.

“Hannah says I am!”

“Since when did you start believing what Hannah says?”

He squinted his eyes at me in a mock sneer. The doctor looked from me to Andrew. “Pinfeathers, huh?”

“Yep. My chicken gets new feathers after she molts. I think I molted.”

“I’d say you’re getting whiskers, buddy. That’s pretty cool.”

Andrew scowled.

As we left the clinic, I could see him still rubbing at his lip from the corner of my eye.

“Pinfeathers?” I asked.

He refused to look at me. “You’re both wrong.”

* * *

On Day 54, Andrew was so bored he thought he might go berserk, so I decided to take him to the grocery store—incognito, at six o’clock in the morning. The grocery store is someplace you wouldn’t think was very exciting until told you weren’t allowed to go, and then it all becomes really interesting. It was our second unauthorized outing, and Andrew was dressed like he was planning to rob a bank. Except for a hospital facemask and blue latex gloves, he was wearing all black, including a stocking cap pulled down over his missing eyebrows and a worn pair of motorcycle boots. This was our attempt at keeping him protected from germs. I was in my uniform—a fleece pullover, yoga pants, flip-flops, sunglasses and one of Jon’s baseball caps.

We stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of plenty, the sliding doors whooshing shut behind us. Shimmering, saturated colors filled our vision. Produce displays drew us in, begging us to pick up, smell, taste. I reveled in the vapor of an orange peel when I pushed my fingernail into its flesh and the hollow sounding and heavy watermelon that fell into the bottom of my cart with a clunk. I felt like we had entered Narnia for the first time. Under the excitement of color was the faint buzz of fluorescent lights and soothing music meant to encourage us to buy, buy, buy.

Our mission was to get all kinds of pseudo-junk food that was chock full of preservatives so it couldn’t possibly have any contaminants in it, go bad, or need to be properly handled for an immune-compromised diet. I figured ice cream was a shoo-in, and cereal, chips and crackers were a close second. But Andrew had other plans. With an apple in one hand, he jerked his head to the side, extracted a handwritten list from his shirt pocket, and took off down the cereal aisle. With gleaming eyes, he grabbed a basket and headed straight for the meat section and didn’t even slow when I waved a box of Reese’s Puffs in his direction.

“I would like the rack of lamb in the case,” I heard him say to the butcher.

Oh hell no! I started to jog down the aisle, slowing only to shove the Puffs on a shelf next to a box of gluten free granola.

“Thank you, but we can’t buy that today,” I told the butcher as he put the dinosaur-like carcass on the scale.

Andrew pointed to the back counter. “I sure like the brown paper you wrap it in,” he said brightly.

I looked the butcher in the eye, shaking my head. “We’re not buying it.”

The butcher cocked his head in question, leaving the lamb ignored, its bony white fingers pointing to the ceiling. Red digital numbers flickered on the front of the scale as if unsure whether or not to land on the weight.

“I’m making dinner tonight,” Andrew said, as if it were a fact I was unaware of. “Robert Irvine has some excellent ideas for lamb and roasted potatoes and asparagus because they make your brain smart.”

I didn’t give a damn what Robert Irvine thought, and I really hated the Cooking Channel. I glared back at my smiling bank robber. Then Andrew turned to me and did the most extraordinary thing. He kissed me. A quick press of his lips to my mouth, his breath steamy through the fabric of the mask. I raised my hand to my face as if to catch it. It was the single most affectionate thing he had done. Ever.

Without another word, the butcher wrapped the lamb, slapped a sticker on the front and handed it to Andrew. “I’m sure your mom will enjoy that dinner, young man,” he said, winking at me.

We ate a fifty-five dollar dinosaur skeleton for dinner that night. In his own words, Andrew rocked it.