Prologue

Sue walked into a scene right out of a nightmare. Vomit covered the walls, soaked the bed, and was dripping onto the floor as fast as the IV pump could push formula through the feeding tube. I was shouting, Andrew was gagging, and the dogs were fighting in the hallway.

“Please stay down, Andrew!” I begged, pushing my sixteen-year-old son back onto the bed. Having thrown up with such force, the bottom end of the feeding tube had come out of his stomach and now hung from his mouth. The other end was still threaded through his nose and taped to his face where it attached to the pump. I detached that end from the pump and went about trying to peel the tape off his face. He jerked, grabbing for my hand.

“Please,” I asked softly this time, tucking him in between two dry towels and aiming the fan directly at his hot skin. He had taken all his clothes off in an attempt to get cool—an escape from the fever that burned in him day and night. His usual lean body had become anorexic, bony, and dry, and his skin sagged on wasting muscles.

Sue stood in the corner while I picked at the tape again.

Andrew exploded off the bed. “I have to get up now! I’m gonna be sick!”

Sue reached for him and led him to the bathroom where he lay on the cold tile, naked. Deep guttural moans ricocheted off the bathroom walls, ripping me to my core. We’d been doing this for months, for years actually, and it was only getting worse. I wondered how much a person could take before they said, “That’s it, I quit!”

Andrew screamed again and I heard a splash on the tile.

Sue waved an arm in my direction. “I can handle this. I want you to leave, take the dogs for a walk, and don’t come back for a while.”

I obeyed without protest, barreling out the door with two jacked up dogs at my heels. I would get as far from the house as I could, far enough away that even if I had bionic ears, there would be no way I could hear the sounds of pain coming from my home. I clipped a leash to each dog and took off at a dead run, down the block and to the next, until I couldn’t breathe and my own pain felt like ecstasy.

An hour later I came back, tear-streaked and sweaty, ready to walk back into my life. I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the door, but I didn’t expect this.

Sue was sitting quietly on a low-slung IKEA chair next to Andrew, the rumble of laundry in the next room was music to my fried brain. Andrew was passed out on the downstairs playroom floor on a makeshift bed. Figuring it was the only place in the house cool enough to survive the July heat, Jon and I had fashioned a bed out of sofa cushions and sleeping bags, topped with an old foam bunk-bed mattress, which we shoved next to a north-facing window. I noticed Andrew’s feeding tube had been removed and his face was washed. Sue was praying, or what I took to be praying, because her eyes were closed and her lips moved as if she were having a secret conversation. She told me once she prayed for Andrew, prayed for mercy, grace, and healing for this boy she’d grown to love. Conversing with God wasn’t new to her, but this level of misery was, and it pained her in a way that broke her heart.

Andrew stirred and opened one eye.

“Should we read a new book now, Andrew?” Sue asked, leaning forward to pull a thin cotton blanket over his legs.

Andrew didn’t respond, but she could see his eyes were open now, unblinking, staring out the window. She sat quietly, and waited.

The day Sue arrived as our respite care provider, Andrew’s pain had been so intense that he could barely speak above a whisper. When she asked what he liked to do, he’d replied, “I like hero stories.”

So she began to tell him made-up stories using characters from old Judy Blume books she found in Andrew’s closet. But her stories weren’t regular stories. These stories included superheroes Andrew had fashioned in his own mind. These stories transported him to an imaginary world where he could escape the nightmare that had become his life. And Sue was the one who took him there, to the only place he felt safe.

After a moment, Andrew raised a quivering hand in which he clutched a mini SEGA action figure named Shadow.

“Okay. Let’s put Shadow in this book instead,” Sue said.

She settled back into her chair and opened Judy Blume’s Super Fudge, to the place where Fudge was teaching his mynah bird, Uncle Feather, to talk.

“This reminds me a little of you and Frightful, right, Andrew?” she asked.

Andrew nodded, then sighed and kicked the blanket off his legs. Moments later he began the slow grind of pedaling his feet up and down the mattress against the pain.

Sue placed a hand across his thin, wiry legs. “Be still, my friend. What are Shadow and Fudge doing? Describe it to me.”

Andrew remained still, but made no effort to talk. Outside, a brood of hens scratched at Jon’s newly planted flowerbeds, sending showers of fresh mulch across the walkway. A small, bronze and black colored hen hopped up on a broken flowerpot that had been pushed against the window.

“Tick. Tick.”

I am here.

Andrew groaned and rubbed at his chapped and swollen face. At sixteen, he was tall—nearly five foot ten—but he weighed little more than one hundred pounds. For months, sudden fevers, pain, and nausea had become constant companions that we battled with a combination of anti-emetics, narcotics, Advil, and Tylenol. During the night, another fever had fingered its way up his body, leaving his skin dry and splotchy and bathing his cheeks and lips in a deep crimson. Even his usual shimmery red hair seemed faded and dull, plastered to his face in salty clumps.

“Tick. Tick. Tap.”

Look at me.

Frightful, the bronze-colored hen, pressed her body next to the window and turned her head to the side, regarding Andrew with one yellow raptor-eye. Although she was a petite hen, she queened over the others, puffing her feathers to appear larger, while throwing back her head in a loud squawk! if any hen dared to challenge her. She reminded me of the red-tailed hawks we frequently saw circling the tops of the evergreens in our yard, and she had an attitude to match. A low rumble came from Frightful’s chest as she rocked from foot to foot before mashing her chest to the windowpane.

“Tap-tap-tap…KACK!!”

Look at me…NOW!

Andrew turned to face the window. With a slender white finger, he circled the chicken’s gold, caramel, and black feathers, tracing the areas where the little hen had left a trail of chicken snot in her attempt to get his attention. He pressed the dirty pane with the pad of his pointer finger, saying, “I hear you, Frightful.”

The chicken backed off, shook violently, and settled her feathers back into place. She made an elaborate show of easing her body down on top of the broken flower pot where she perched, while never breaking eye contact with her best friend.

“I’m here, Frightful,” Andrew repeated again before falling back into sleep.

While Sue read her newly formed story starring Fudge and Shadow, I crept down the hallway into Jon’s office and crawled under the desk. A litany of horrors tackled me as I thought about what was happening to our lives. Would we survive? How many blows could a person take before they curled up and died? I wondered. Although Sue came for a few hours each day to provide me respite, the truth was I was almost always too scared to leave the house. Fear had pinned me to the floor.

Sue’s gentle voice broke into my thoughts.

“I’m leaving now, Andrew. I’ll see you in the morning. Think about what we should read next. Maybe some Harry Potter?”

I listened as she gathered her things, dreading the hours I would be alone with Andrew until Jon came home from work. When I heard her footsteps in the hallway, I ventured out of my cave only to knock my head on the corner of Jon’s desk. I waited for her to leave before taking her spot in the chair next to Andrew, where I stared at my son for a long time, feeling terrified and helpless. Flipping through a stack of books on the windowsill, I wondered how Sue did it. What magic did she have that drew Andrew back from wherever he was? She even seemed to take away his pain, or at least make him forget about it for a little while.

I thought about all the specialists Jon and I had taken him to over the years, and still we had no answers. Our son was desperately ill. Besides Sue, his only friend on this earth was a chicken named Frightful. As I sat there for what felt like eternity, Frightful continued her flowerpot vigil. She occasionally flicked a beady bird-eye in my direction as if to say, “DO something!”

Crawling onto the floor, I squeezed next to Andrew’s frail body on the little twin bed—my desperate attempt to protect him from the darkness creeping into the room. He was dead still, his breath barely a whisper on my bare arm. A sudden wave of anxiety assaulted me, penetrating deep into my bones, making me feel as if my whole body was freezing over. I squeezed Andrew hard in terror.

Frightful shrieked and flew at the window.

“Kuh-kuh-kuh-kuh-KACK!!”

Do SOMETHING!!

Startled, I reached for the phone in my pocket and dialed Jon at work. “You have to come home. NOW!”