This post is for all the Make-a-Wish kids I worked with who still haunt me:
Their sedan was on a narrow causeway just beyond the Ghost Fleet when the already dented delivery truck a couple of cars ahead spun around and hit the guardrail with such force that its rear axle flew off with the tail shaft still connected. Together they twirled high into the air, spinning wildly out of control until returning to the ground and bouncing between the hapless cars. Sara watched from the backseat keenly aware that if it hit the windshield, the consequences would be gruesome. There was no time to duck behind the seat or to say silent goodbyes to her children.
The axle and tail shaft cartwheeled in front of them and then the shaft plunged into a patch of soft asphalt like an arrow shot into the mud, causing the axle to detach, catapult over the guardrail, and roll down the hill toward the bay. Sparks flew as the truck skidded on bare metal to a smoldering ruin, leaving deep ruts in the road. Miraculously the driver of the truck was not hurt nor were any other vehicles damaged.
They drove the final twelve miles to the army base in silence.
“I want a party – a HUGE party,”the girl began. “In a grand ballroom with at least two hundred people. And I want Madonna to be there and Boy George. Oh, that would be so cool. And of course, kids from school,” she stopped to catch her breath, “and they’d come to the party in limos. Or maybe helicopters.” She wore a purple terrycloth bathrobe and her hair was brown and stringy.
Get the dead boy out of your mind, Sara ordered and force a loving look upon your face.
He looked about ten years, the dead boy did, and lay flat on his back just down the hall from the girl’s hospital room. The door to his room had been left wide open.
“Oh my God,” she’d said to the driver pointing to the body. The man took one look and yelled angrily down to the nurses. “Hey! Get down here.”
“How did you know he was dead?” the first nurse to arrive on scene asked.
“I was an Army medic. Hell, this hospital is still a shit hole.” His wife, the other Make-a-Wish volunteer, hushed him.
“You’ve been here before?” Sara asked.
“Nam,” he replied. “There was a tunnel running from the airstrip to the morgue so that no one on base got a good look at the steady parade of corpses. It’s bad for morale, you know,” he said as through it was a very dark joke, “It’s probably still there.”
“I’m amazed you wanted to come back here.”
“I had to keep my sweetie safe. Don’t like her to drive at night.”
The man and wife were now interviewing the foster parents in another room while she transcribed the girl’s wish. There would be purple balloons and flowers and even purple gummy bears. And a band of course, maybe Boy George or Madonna would sing. “Do you think that’s too much to ask?”
Sara shook her head, no. The nurse trying to insert a tube into the girl’s already bruised and frighteningly thin arm, glanced at Sara with wet eyes. Many of the “kids” she interviewed looked so healthy that it was hard to believe the doctor’s reports but this girl could have been mistaken for a victim of the Holocaust.
It’s so much easier to interview children under five, Sara thought. They have no idea what they’ll be missing in life. Dying was the same as going to Disneyland. Maybe better as they’d get to see Grandma or sit on Jesus’ lap. No more needles, medicine that made them puke all night long or worse. No more barbaric excavations into the marrows of their bones that had to be done without anesthesia.
But the teens and the pre-teens want it all. They are vampires, voracious for life, wanting to suck as much nectar as they can before giving way. They go down fighting. Interviewing them, she felt her energy sucked into a useless, self-absorbed past.
After she finished interviewing the girl, and the man and his wife finished completing the legal paperwork with the foster parents and the doctors, they drove back to the Bay Area across the causeway where they’d almost died and past the rusty ships of war whose drunken ghosts saluted them with their middle fingers. They all knew the girl would have her party in the hospital ward. There would be purple balloons and gummy bears. The Foundation might convince a local celebrity to drive out to the base. And she would say “so what” because, in the end, that’s what we all say.
Last but maybe least, Sara’s transcription of the grandest party ever planned would be filed in a cabinet somewhere in the Foundation’s basement. Or maybe tossed or shredded or burned.
Saying nothing in particular 