Dear Diary,
Mr. and Mrs. Morris took Jimmy into Halifax this morning, to the Children’s Hospital. He has to have another operation. I asked Mom if it was an emergency, and she told me no, that they’d known about it for a couple of weeks, that it was because of Jimmy’s hydrocephalus - that’s the word I was trying to remember before - that was filling up his head with some kind of fluid and making him sick with headaches and stuff, ’cause it put too much pressure on his brain. He has something in his head called a shunt to let all that liquid drain away, and I guess it wasn’t working any more because he had to get a new one.
I asked her if Jimmy knew about having to go to the hospital yesterday when we went flying, and she said he did, but he didn’t tell me about it. I guess the plane ride was because he was going to have an operation, and his parents wanted to give him a special treat before he went, just in case he…
I’m going to scratch that out. I don’t want to think about that.
Maggie’s kittens are three days old today. They’re getting really wiggly, and they must eat a ton, ’cause they’re always hanging onto Maggie’s nipples. They’re kind of big now, the nipples I mean, not the kittens, although I think they’re getting bigger too, and Mom and I talked about how cats and people are both mammals, which means we can feed our babies milk from our own bodies. The world is amazing, you know? People don’t look anything like cats, but we have all the same equipment, eyes and ears and hearts and tongues and even breasts, which I don’t have yet but I will soon. I’ll need them if I ever have babies of my own.
Jimmy has a fish tank full of guppies. Did I ever tell you that? And sometimes the guppies have babies, too, only when they’re born Jimmy has to take them out real quick because the mother fish eats them. Gross! He puts them in another bowl where they’ll be safe until they get too big to eat. You wouldn’t believe how small they are, only a couple of millimetres long. But Jimmy says they have all the stuff inside them that we do, all the important stuff, anyway, like bones and eyes and a heart and a stomach and muscles to make their fins and tail move. All that in a little fish that you almost can’t even see. It’s like a miracle.
Jimmy said something really strange once when he was showing me some new guppy babies. He said that life is the cheapest thing there is on earth. I asked him what he meant, and he said that people can buy life in a pet store or even in Wal-Mart for a dollar ninety-eight. They buy fish to take home with them, and most times they don’t really know how to take care of them, so after a few days they just die. He looked really sad.
I thought about the baby fish in the bowl, how they wouldn’t have anything to eat or clean water or be safe from their mother eating them if Jimmy didn’t look after them. Then I thought about Jimmy in his wheelchair, how he’s something like the baby guppies, ’cause if somebody doesn’t take care of him, he can’t do it for himself. That made me sad, too.
Dad doesn’t care about the kittens. He came upstairs to look at them the first day, but he didn’t say anything and just went away to his den, and he hasn’t been back since. He seems kind of sad lately. He’s home almost all the time now, but he doesn’t talk much, except this morning when I was eating breakfast and he came into the kitchen and sat down. He asked me if I wanted to go to the hardware store with him, that he had to buy a new saw for a project he was planning. I haven’t gone anywhere with Dad in a long time, ’cause he stopped asking me when he and Mom started fighting. I should have said yes, I guess, but I didn’t, and he went away from the table without eating any breakfast, and Mom kind of looked at me funny, and I said, “What?” She shook her head and went back to what she was doing, and a couple of minutes later I heard the garage door open. I hurried to the back door, but by the time I got there, Dad was already out the driveway and heading for New Minas.
Jimmy’s at the hospital. I wonder what’s happening to him right now.