24. February 21, 2015: Cambridge, MA

Marko never had any siblings, but if he had, he imagined it would have been a sister and that having her would feel like how it felt to be with Jen, his mentor. She had been in a car accident when she was only five years old. She emerged paralyzed from the waist down. Like Marko, Jen grew up in a wheelchair. When Marko met her, she was twenty-one and had just graduated from college. She was applying to graduate schools. Marko hoped she would not leave Boston. Even though Marko loved to be around Jen, he didn’t ever know what to say to her. One day, in the car on the way to pick up Jen, Marko’s mom tried to coach him, prepping him with socially appropriate things to say.

“Act interested,” she said. “Ask questions about her. She went to New York last week, so make sure to ask about her trip.” Marko felt nervous. He didn’t know how to have conversations with people. It was a challenge at school, and it was a challenge with Jen. He could talk to his mom and to his grandma, but everyone else made him nervous. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and be laughed at. Nobody had ever actually laughed at Marko for saying the wrong thing, but sometimes, when he heard people laugh, he believed they were laughing at him.

They arrived at Jen’s house to find her waiting in the driveway with a bag and two sled hockey sticks across her lap. She was going with Marko to hockey for the first time. “She has her own stick,” Marko said as they pulled up.

“Yes, it looks like she does,” his mom said, her voice smiling. Marko didn’t know why, but this made him even more nervous.

Marko watched his mom get out of the car and take Jen’s bag and hockey stick. His mom hugged Jen and he saw them both smiling. This made Marko smile but it also made him feel nervous. When his mom helped Jen into the car next to Marko in the back seat, Jen said, “Hi, Marko!” Marko tried to say hi back, but it came out a hoarse whisper.

“Say hi, honey,” his mom said. He said it again, louder this time, and too loud. He shouted it. An awkward silence followed while Kali loaded Jen’s wheelchair in the back of the Subaru. When she got back into the driver’s seat and pulled away, Marko felt her eyes bore into him by way of the rearview mirror. He took a shallow breath.

“How was your trip to New York?” Marko asked Jen, turning away from his mom’s stare. His heart beat so fast it vibrated.

“Oh, it was really nice. I love New York,” Jen said.

A few moments passed in silence and then Marko’s mom asked, “Were you looking at graduate schools there?”

“Yes,” Jen said, “I interviewed at NYU. It went really well.” Marko felt sick with dread. He looked wildly at his mom in the rearview, and her calming gaze was there to meet him. She shushed him with her eyes.

“Well that’s great, how exciting! Of course, Marko and I would hate to lose you, but you wouldn’t be too far away if you ended up in New York.”

Marko blurted, “Yeah, we would hate that if you left.”

Jen smiled and said, “I would hate to leave you guys, too! But yes, it’s close. And also, Harvard is my first choice, so if they let me in there, I’ll be here in Boston for at least five more years.”

Marko was awash with relief. Of course they would let her in. As though reading his mind, Marko’s mom said: “Of course they’ll let you in!”

Marko wished he had said it, so he added, “Yeah, of course they’ll let you in.”

Jen laughed and said, “Hope so.”

“What’s that you’re doing?” Jen asked Marko, pointing to his arms. They’d been doing their nervous dance again. Marko felt a rush of feeling number fourteen, embarrassment, burn his face with its red heat.

“Oh, I can’t help it, it just happens,” he said. “It’s unconscious,” he added, which his mom had called it before.

Jen said, “It’s pretty; I like it. Do you mind if I do it, too?” Marko said he didn’t mind. Jen began to move her arms in a similar wave-like pattern out in front of her face. She also bobbed her head, as if to a beat.

Marko said, “It’s actually a move that my mom does in yoga. She says it takes the kundalini, or life energy, and moves it up the spine to the higher chakras.”

“That’s right! Marko has a lot of life energy to move,” Kali said. Marko glared at her in the rearview but she wasn’t looking.

Then Kali put in a CD and played a yoga song. She drove with one hand and moved her free arm in the same motion. The rhythm of the music gave them a pace to move to, and Marko discovered that he was doing it consciously now, moving in time with the music.

When they arrived at the hockey building, the music was blasting from the windows and all three of them were dancing to it with arms in the air.

The car rolled by other kids in wheelchairs, who stared into the windows with confused smiles. Kali parked and got the chairs from the back. Marko, who had been feeling so good just moments before, was now filled with anxiety again. He didn’t want other kids in chairs to be there. He didn’t want Jen to pay attention to them and not him. He had been picturing going to hockey with just Jen and his mom, and now they were all here and Marko would be left alone and forgotten in a crowd of kids. Without being able to stop it from happening, Marko was gone inside the dark body when his mom lifted him from the car and put him into his wheelchair.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” his mom asked. But Marko couldn’t hear her. His eyes were glazed over and he was crying. Kali watched as he rapidly pummeled his face and head with his fists while he screamed. But inside the dark body, Marko was still and holding his breath. He knew if he breathed in, the dark body would rush into his lungs like soot and he would choke. Being in the dark body was like being held under water—quiet and calm and weightless, but also smothering and airless. If he held his breath long enough, the dark body would let him go. Just when his lungs started to convulse, he surfaced, gasping for air.

His mom’s face was very close to his and he heard her steadying voice in his ear: “Calm down, honey, take a deep breath, everything is fine, just breathe . . .” He took deep breaths the way his mom had taught him: counting to ten in, counting to ten out. He opened his eyes and wiped the tears from his face. There they were surrounding him: Jen, his mom, and a few other kids and adults. They all looked sad and expectant.

“Sorry,” Marko said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say or do. They all tittered and smiled and shrugged, excusing him, and then they made their way toward the entrance together.

Marko hung his head, embarrassed. He had never been able to control these episodes. And they were unpredictable, even to him. At the slightest provocation, he might fall too close to despair, where the sucking quicksand dark body would quickly consume him. He could not begin to articulate its real source. It came over him like ice water every time. At first, it was always shocking. But then it subsided and it was just cold, merely tempering.

He knew he sometimes hit himself when he fell in, but he couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t as though he didn’t care. He cared very much, both in terms of how others saw him and the well-being of his own psyche. But the way that he was supposed to be, a way that was intended for the consumption of others, in a manner that was consciously entertaining, conspicuously user-friendly—it wasn’t something he could always do. It was performing. He could do it sometimes, maybe most of the time, but the despair was always nearby. When he slipped inside the dark body, he didn’t know what he looked like from the outside, but he could feel in his body that it was different. It was uncontrolled, untethered to any responsibility for pleasing others.

Once inside the building, Marko kept his eye on Jen, wanting to see her reaction to the team. A small crowd of kids moved from wheel chairs to skate platforms, donned shoulder pads, pulled on jerseys. The space was tight, glutted with gear and parents and kids and coaches, but it started clearing out rapidly as kids were lifted and carried onto the ice. Jen took it all in quickly and then fell in among them, moving herself from her wheelchair to the floor deftly, and gracefully accepting help being hoisted onto a skate platform that fit her. She secured her own straps and pulled on the gloves. She gripped her two hockey sticks, which were used to maneuver on the ice as well as push around the puck.

Jen was ready to go and was carried off before Marko was even out of his chair. His mom was having trouble finding gear his size. All of the other kids had gotten there first, leaving little to work with. Eventually, his mom found him a platform and some gloves just a little too big for him. Marko thought this was fine at first, but once he was out on the ice, he quickly realized he was having a hard time holding onto his sticks with the oversized gloves. When he dropped one stick on the ice, he wasn’t able to pick it up with his gloved hand. Just when he was about to pull off the glove to pick up his stick, Jen appeared.

“Can I pick that up for you?”

Marko nodded and blushed and Jen picked up his stick. He took it from her and smiled. “Thanks,” he said.

“Follow me,” Jen said, and she skated off to the side of the rink. Marko followed, but couldn’t keep up with her speed. The platform was heavy and his gloves were cumbersome. All the other kids were skating around warming up and a few of them moved into his path. When he made it to Jen, she was laughing. Marko’s stomach burned. Was she laughing at him?

“This is so fun,” she said. Marko tried to smile but couldn’t. He was too nervous. He wanted too much for her to like him.

“When you push yourself forward on the ice,” Jen said, “start with your sticks here, not up here.” She demonstrated what she meant, placing her sticks at an angle to the ice and a bit behind her hips. Marko saw how this provided more leverage to push the weight forward with force. He tried it and followed her in a circle a few times. He found he was able to move faster when he copied her techniques. Then she showed him how to turn and stop quickly. Marko had a bit of a harder time with this because it involved some hip movements that he wasn’t capable of. Still, he was happy to be moving faster.

When a game started, Jen proved herself a quality athlete. She was easily the most skilled player on the ice, moving fast and keeping command of the puck at all times. When she passed it off to others, she positioned herself near the goal where someone could pass it back and she could shoot it into the net. This happened several times before the other team could score even one goal.

Marko couldn’t keep up with them. Although he was moving faster than he had been, he was still the slowest one. After a few times pushing himself across the rink after the group, his arms were aching. Just as he was about to move off for a rest, he heard Jen call out to him. He lifted his head. She passed the puck directly to him; it stopped against his stick. He scooted it a few inches before someone from the opposite team swiped it cleanly away from him. He gave Jen a worried, apologetic look, but Jen only winked and shrugged and then flashed him a reassuring smile. Marko moved off to the side where he rested for the remainder of the game.

Later, when Marko was alone with his mom again, she asked him to talk about what had happened in the parking lot and why he cried. “I don’t know,” Marko said, “I just cried.”

His mom sat in front of him on the floor and leaned close. He thought the brown and orange in her eyes looked melty, like she was about to cry and if she did, the tears would leave watercolor streaks on her face. But she didn’t cry. She wouldn’t. She always held it together. Marko worried that his mom was secretly ashamed of him for not being able to always hold it together, too. “Okay, I won’t press you,” she said and leaned back. Marko sensed that she was about to look away, about to get up and do something else, and he scrambled for something to tell her that would keep her there.

“I like Jen,” he said.

His mom smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I like Jen a lot, too,” she said. Then she got up and walked out of the room. There wasn’t anything else Marko could think of to say at the last second that might hold her attention. He looked around on the floor. There wasn’t anything within reach for him to occupy himself with. His chair was in the dining room or entryway, and he needed help to get back into it. He dragged himself to his room and closed the door.

Inside his room, he found a pencil and a pen. He wrote: “Dear Mom,” paused, and then wrote a letter explaining, as best he could, why he had cried that day in the parking lot. He wrote about the dark body, how it was like an open doorway that was always close, and how at any moment he was capable of stumbling into it without warning. He wrote his worst fear: that his mom really wished she had a normal son who could walk and act normal. Just writing it down nearly made the dark body close over him. When he finished the letter, he folded it up and put it in his pocket.

Later that day, with his mom, Marko asked if he could burn some paper outside. His mom looked surprised. “What paper?”

“It’s something I wrote down, just some sad feelings I was having. I thought if I burned it, they would go away.”

His mom made a face like a frown, but Marko could tell she was not unhappy. She was surprised, proud, and a little sad all at the same time. Marko saw it all in the clear window of her face. In certain unexpected moments, Marko’s mom was transparent. “I think that’s a great idea, honey. I’ve done things like that before, myself. Hey, how about if we do it together? I’ll go write down a few things that I’m sad about and we’ll burn the papers together. How does that sound?

“It sounds okay,” Marko said, “but I don’t want you to read my paper.”

“Deal,” his mom said and smiled. She patted Marko’s shoulder, then went away to write her sadness down. Marko knew what she would write, that it would be about his dad leaving, and about her own father leaving.

Marko’s mom came back with her paper along with a bowl and a lighter. She gave these things to Marko and then pushed him out to the front patio. There, she placed the metal bowl on the small square table and put her folded paper inside. She looked at Marko and raised her eyebrows. Marko pulled his letter to his mom out of his pocket and put it in the bowl.

She lit the papers in the bowl and they were suddenly ablaze. Pieces of paper ash floated hotly up in the breeze and suspended for a moment before falling, leaf-like, to the ground. By the time they touched the ground they had disintegrated completely. Black ash scattered along the porch floor and off onto the stairs and into the bushes. The fire in the bowl died down and was gone. The bowl itself was charred brown and black and held most of the paper ash still inside it. Marko looked up at his mom to see her smiling. Marko smiled back, but he didn’t feel any better. In fact, he felt 27 percent worse. The feelings he had written down and addressed to his mom seemed to burn hotter inside him and to push him further away from her.

“Wow, I feel great! How do you feel?”

Marko gave a weak nod and then wheeled away to the edge of the patio. He looked out at the street: a chain of cars lining each side, people walking dogs, a person riding a bike. A little farther down, he saw what looked to be a mother and a son. The son was tall, almost as tall as the mom, but had the skinny body and ambling gait of a kid Marko’s age. They brushed hands as they walked and turned their faces toward each other from time to time. Marko strained his ears and heard the muffled sounds of their conversation. He watched their backs as they moved away and as they walked, their legs.