“Joy.” He came to my bedside and knelt, not taking avail of the chair. “You’re awake.”
“You’ve been here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said and reached beneath his spectacles to wipe at the tears that had risen in his own eyes. “I’ve been here.”
“You didn’t have to leave school . . .” My voice trailed off.
Jack rose and brought the chair to sit and face me. “Is there pain now?”
“The medicine the nurse just shot into my arm says no.” I tried to smile but could not. “What happened, Jack? I know I fell and then spent the night at home, but since they’ve brought me here . . .”
“You don’t remember?”
“On and off, like broken puzzle pieces. I know there was an X-ray machine, and medicines and hushed voices. So much fuss for a broken leg, Jack. Too much fuss. Let me get the plaster and go home.”
Outside came a great whoop of laughter from a group of students walking through the grass. Life was outside these walls and that window. I looked to Jack with a desperate plea. “I want to go home.”
“There’s news, Joy. The doctors have asked me if I’d like to keep it from you, but I cannot. Lies must not be told, not to you, not to anyone.”
Fear engulfed me in a toxic fog, closing my throat and filling my chest with that familiar wing-flapping anxiety. I reached for Jack’s hand and took it in mine, held to it as if to a life raft. “What is it?”
“They will come talk to you.”
“I want you to tell me, Jack. What do you know?”
“It’s either leukemia or another cancer.” The two diagnoses scattered about the room like dark dust, like evil.
“Not the real kind,” I said with some depth of understanding that there was no such thing as an “unreal” kind. “It’s rheumatism. That’s what they kept telling me. It’s fibrositis, they said.”
“They were wrong. Whatever it is, Joy, it’s in your leg.” Pain twisted Jack’s face. He held so fast to my hand that I did not want to tell him that it hurt. “The doctors say the X-rays show that your femur looks as though it has been eaten by moths.”
“Well then, maybe it has,” I said, but a sob broke free. “Maybe Old High Street has a moth epidemic and we don’t know and . . .”
Jack leaned close to me, wiped at my tears, and kissed me as gently as one can in a hospital bed. If I could have fallen out of that bed into his arms, I would have. If I could have dropped to my knees, I would have been on them already. Instead I clung to Jack, his hands tangled with mine. “No. It can’t be something so bad as that. Not now.”
He kissed me again and then, resting his hand gently on my cheek, said, “I can’t lose you, Joy. I love you so much. I’ve been such a fool, such a bloody fool. I should have been loving you and saying it every day for as long as I’ve known.”
“Jack . . .” My voice was quiet, as if I might scare away his confession. “You love me?”
“With all I am,” he said.
“Because I’m dying? Is this a consolation gift?” I wiped at his tears and then at mine.
“Joy, you are not dying. And even if you are, this love has been here all along. Sometimes it takes a great shake from God to awake me from my insolence, to make me admit feelings that exist.”
“Pain,” I said and closed my eyes. “God’s megaphone.”
Tears were in the corners of his soft and full lips, and he kissed me again. I tasted his grief as he spoke, his breath then whispering in my ear. “Who knows when friendship crosses that borderland into love, but it has. Long ago it had, but it’s just now that I can give words to the truth.”
He lifted his head, and I touched his cheek. “I’ve loved you for so long, Jack. And here I am at my worst and you proclaim your love? God does work in mysterious ways.” I kissed him again and tasted the tobacco, the warmth.
“At your worst?” He shook his head and his spectacles fell from his face, landed on the worn cream blanket covering my diseased body. “You are beautiful to me, Joy. You are all that is beautiful.” He tucked a stray hair back from my face. “All of my life I have thought of love in a literary sense, part of a story or fairy tale. But love is really true; I know that now. Eros—I haven’t loved completely until now. I know that.” His voice held the truth of every word spoken, a man broken by death’s threat.