Read Online The Mourning After by Rochelle B. Weinstein - Free Book Online

close to him.  He is ruffled by her instinct and wonders if she, too, has been snooping through his journal.  “Hey, kiddo,” he smiles at her.  “You doing okay?” he asks.
    Chloe reminds him so much of Punky Brewster.  Not only the short brown hair and freckled face, it’s her wholesome smile and impish eyes.  She is a fireball and a clown and Levon’s hero all rolled up into one genetically imperfect but spectacular body. 
    Chloe knows the seriousness of her disease.  This wise, precocious child spends hours every day composing lists of what she wants to accomplish—and she always does.  Clearly, the whole family is bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Yet, Chloe remains a champion.  She never complains about the needles and the injections, and she never cringes when she’s told she will be hospitalized and will miss big chunks of school.  Rather than exhibit impatience and annoyance by her mother’s cloying reassurances and pervasive doting, Chloe handles her mother with ease.  Levon would have punched her by now.
    Chloe knows what death means.  And because of her fragile condition, it doesn’t confuse her to learn that her loving older brother has been taken away.  Having learned of a fellow GSD patient—the one she befriended at the lavish fundraiser in Boston last year—pass away from complications, the contradiction of children dying wasn’t foreign to her.  Not experiencing apathy or denial, Chloe has spent the last week traversing between Levon’s bed and her parents’, where the physical closeness made David’s absence less imposing.
    Chloe is giggling.  Once she starts, she usually can’t stop.  Levon knows all her secret tickle spots and wiggles and jiggles her until she is vibrating with laughter.  These belly laughs are potentially dangerous since Chloe’s feeding tube is located in her stomach.  “Don’t make me laugh so hard, Levvy,” she says, jumbled words that come out in bursts of snorts and gurgles.  His fingers are tickling the back of her neck and under her arms and behind her knobby knees where the pale patch that never sees the sun is the most sensitive to his touches.  Levon begins to laugh, and Rebecca does too.  This is a good sign because Levon was convinced that he had forgotten how. 
    “Stop it, Levon!” she shrieks.  “I’m going to pee in my pants…”
    This is no joke.  She has been known to do that.  She’s done it before.  Levon lets her go, and the three of them are staring at each other with great anticipation. 
    “I’m going to go,” Rebecca says, breaking the silence and standing up.
    “You don’t have to,” says Levon.
    “Yes, I do,” she says.
    They were all there, except for David. Levon wanted her to stay.
    “Bye, Chloe,” she says with a smile, leaning down to kiss her on a speckled patch of cheek, patting her head with fingers that had minutes before sent risky signals throughout Levon’s entire body.
    “Bye, Levon,” she says with a shrug, unable to meet his eyes.
    Levon doesn’t answer.  He has said goodbye to too many things he loves this week:  reading the sports section aloud to David at the breakfast table; watching Friday the 13th marathons late into the night; playing boxball in the street.  He’s incapable of forming the words that will mark her leaving.  And without those words, the finality of their dismal reality will transform into a sleep-induced nightmare where Levon will be roused to find David smiling up at him, having listened to their voices through the air vents.
    “ Good going, bro, ” he’d say, taking him by the shoulders and lightly shaking him.  “ Way to defend your brother’s honor. ”
    Levon would swell with pride.
    “Mommy says I have to go to school tomorrow,” says Chloe in a tone that is neither pleased nor objecting.  Levon leads his baby sister toward his bed and positions her by his side.  The opaque skin on her arms hides the mess that is complicating