One Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

her.
    He struggled to say, “As soon as you can.”
It won’t be long,
Jack thought.
Not now. Not with Lizzie gone.
    When she turned to leave, Bonnie froze. Mikki and Cory were standing there.
    Bonnie said nervously, “I thought you were upstairs.”
    “You don’t think this concerns us?” Mikki said bluntly.
    “I think the adults need to make the decisions for what’s best for the children.”
    “I’m not a child!” Mikki snapped.
    Bonnie said, “Michelle, this is hard on all of us. We’re just trying to do the best we can under the circumstances.” She paused and added, “You lost your mother and I lost my daughter.” Bonnie’s voice cracked as she added, “None of this is easy, honey.”
    Mikki gazed over at her father. He could feel the anger emanating from his oldest child. “You’re all losers!” yelled Mikki. She turned and rushed from the house, slamming the door behind her.
    Bonnie shook her head and rubbed at her eyes before looking back at Jack. “This is a big sacrifice, for all of us.” She left the room, with Fred obediently trailing her. Cory just stood there staring at his dad.
    “Cor,” he began. But his son turned and ran back upstairs.
    A minute went by as Jack lay there, feeling like a turtle toppled on its back.
    “Jack?”
    When he looked over, Bonnie was standing a few feet from his bed holding something in her hand.
    “The police dropped this off yesterday.” She held it up. It was the bag with Jack’s prescription meds. “They found it in the van. It was very unfortunate that Lizzie had to go back out that night. If she hadn’t, she’d obviously be alive today.”
    “I told her not to go.”
    “But she did. For you,” she replied.
    The tears started to slide down her cheeks as she hurried from the room.

8
    The room was small but clean. That wasn’t the problem. Jack had slept for months inside a shack with ten other infantrymen in the middle of a desert, where it was either too frigid or too hot. What Jack didn’t like here were the sounds. Folks during their last days of life did not make pleasant noises. Coughs, gagging, painful cries—but mostly it was the moaning. It never ceased. Then there was the squeak of the gurney wheels as the body of someone who had passed was taken away, the room freshened up for the next terminal case on the waiting list.
    Most patients here were elderly. Yet Jack wasn’t the youngest person. There was a boy with final-stage leukemia two doors down. When Jack was being wheeled to his room he’d seen the little body in the bed: hairless head, vacant eyes, tubes all over him, barely breathing, just waiting for it to be over. His family would come every day; his mother was often here all the time. They would put on happy expressions when they were with him and then start bawling as soon as they left his side. Jack had witnessed this as they passed his doorway. Allhunched over, weeping into their cupped hands. They were just waiting, too, for it to be over. And at the same time dreading when it would be.
    Jack reached under his pillow and pulled out the calendar. January eleventh. He crossed it off. He had been here for five days. The average length of stay here, he’d heard, was three weeks. Without Lizzie, it would be three weeks too long.
    He again reached under his pillow and pulled out the six now-crumpled envelopes with his letters to Lizzie inside them. He’d had Sammy bring them here from the house before it was listed for sale. He held them in his hands. The paper was splotched with his tears because he pulled them out and wept over them several times a day. What else did he have to do with his time? These letters now constituted a weight around his heart for a simple reason: Lizzie would never read them, never know what he was feeling in his last days of life. At the same time, it was the only thing allowing him to die with peace, with a measure of dignity. He put the letters away and just lay there, listening for the