Read Online The Sweet by and By by Todd Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

and over and I think I might lose my mind but I don’t want to tell her to stop because she’s smiling and happy.
    “Who is your valentine then, Bernice?” “Mister Benny.”
    “I know that. Who else?” “Everybody.”
    “That’s not an answer.” I try her out, not knowing whether she’ll keep going.
    “I love some people. They don’t know but I love them.”
    We are silent now. It’s as though she said something meaningless and profound at the same time. I look at her and see my sister. My Callie, whom I would like to tell that I love her. I focus all my atten- tion on the construction paper and glue in front of us. So much paper, as many memories. Bernice and I are making valentines for people we barely know.
    Down the hall, the same hall where we live, there’s a sixteen-year- old boy. He was in a car wreck. No drinking, no drugs, he ran off the road with some friends late at night after a football game. One of them died. Jamie will never move anything but his eyes ever again. He will spend the rest of his life here. I know his brain works fine because I see him respond when his mother takes his hand and tells him “If you don’t get a haircut I’m going to stop speaking to you.”
    I used to wonder why Jamie wasn’t at some other place where there were young people, people like him, rather than in a nursing home with the ancients, but there’s not such a place anywhere close by. This way, his mother is here every day like clockwork, lots of times his father too.
    Once in a while, they put Jamie on something that looks to me like a combination of a wheelchair and a stretcher, and for a change, bring him out into the lounge. Yesterday his preacher came, I didn’t know preachers made visits for Valentine’s Day, but there he was, with his wife and a bunch of red carnations in a green vase.
    “Are any of these nurses f lirting with you?” she said in a real loud voice and then laughed even louder.
    Lorraine looked at me with caution in her eyes. She knew what was going through my mind. I know they mean well, but when I hear something like that I feel like I’m going to cry. I want to scream out the truth that we make ourselves dance around because we don’t know any other way to get through. Jamie will never f lirt with anyone, not in a way that they will know it, and if anyone does with him, it will only be out of pity. That child, alert as he ever was, is trapped in a body, and I would trade my own body for him to get out of that with- ering shell and live like every sixteen-year-old should. He needs to be able to make his parents mad, figure out who he loves, find out what he can do and what he can’t, make mistakes that he doesn’t have to pay too dearly for. Instead Jamie lies still, his boyish skin touched by his parents or a rare visitor, or by the brash arrival of a cheap washcloth cleaning him up because he is authorized to be bathed in bed rather than taken in a heap down to a room where the shower and the tub are, stainless steel like a factory or a morgue.
    “Won’t you be my valentine? I will be your valentine,” Bernice sings. “Honey, I love you, but you have to stop. Please stop,” I say, and
    she does, but I occasionally hear her humming under her breath. I have stopped working on my sixth valentine. I feel like a fool cutting
    paper. Why do holidays have to be parties, all of them? Not every- thing is a party.
    “Bernice, there’s going to be a change of plans. We’re going to dec- orate Jamie’s room. What do you think?” I feel excited, spontaneous.
    “What are we putting up?” she asks.
    I look around us at the crepe paper, hearts, and helium balloons blown up by Ada’s husband using a big metal tank. “All this, every bit of it,” I tell her.
    “The whole party?” she asks, but she’s not really asking because she is already gathering up all the decorations and some things that are not decorations like salt and pepper shakers and bottles of toothpicks in her