Of course, spending time with Jamie also meant doing the things she enjoyed as well. Though I wouldn’t go to her Bible study class—I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her—we did visit the orphanage twice more, and each time we went there, I felt more at home. Once, though, we’d had to leave early, because she was running a slight fever. Even to my untrained eyes, it was clear that her face was flushed.
We kissed again, too, though not every time we were together, and I didn’t even think of trying to make it to second base. There wasn’t any need to. There was something nice when I kissed her, something gentle and right, and that was enough for me. The more I did it, the more I realized that Jamie had been misunderstood her entire life, not only by me, but by everyone.
Jamie wasn’t simply the minister’s daughter, someone who read the Bible and did her best to help others. Jamie was also a seventeen-year-old girl with the same hopes and doubts that I had. At least, that’s what I assumed, until she finally told me.
I’ll never forget that day because of how quiet she had been, and I had the funny feeling all day long that something important was on her mind.
I was walking her home from Cecil’s Diner on the Saturday before school started up again, a day blustery with a fierce, biting wind. A nor’easter had been blowing in since the previous morning, and while we walked, we’d had to stand close to each other to stay warm. Jamie had her arm looped through mine, and we were walking slowly, even more slowly than usual, and I could tell she wasn’t feeling well again. She hadn’t really wanted to go with me because of the weather, but I’d asked her because of my friends. It was time, I remember thinking, that they finally knew about us. The only problem, as fate would have it, was that no one else was at Cecil’s Diner. As with many coastal communities, things were quiet on the waterfront in the middle of winter.
She was quiet as we walked, and I knew that she was thinking of a way to tell me something. I didn’t expect her to start the conversation as she did.
“People think I’m strange, don’t they,” she finally said, breaking the silence.
“Who do you mean?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“People at school.”
“No, they don’t,” I lied.
I kissed her cheek as I squeezed her arm a little tighter to me. She winced, and I could tell that I’d hurt her somehow.
“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned.
“I’m fine,” she said, regaining her composure and keeping the subject on track. “Will you do me a favor, though?”
“Anything,” I said.
“Will you promise to tell me the truth from now on? I mean always?”
“Sure,” I said.
She stopped me suddenly and looked right at me. “Are you lying to me right now?”
“No,” I said defensively, wondering where this was going. “I promise that from now on, I’ll always tell you the truth.”
Somehow, when I said it, I knew that I’d come to regret it.
We started walking again. As we moved down the street, I glanced at her hand, which was looped through mine, and I saw a large bruise just below her ring finger. I had no idea where it had come from, since it hadn’t been there the day before. For a second I thought it might have been caused by me, but then I realized that I hadn’t even touched her there.
“People think I’m strange, don’t they?” she asked again.
My breath was coming out in little puffs.
“Yes,” I finally answered. It hurt me to say it.
“Why?” She looked almost despondent.
I thought about it. “People have different reasons,” I said vaguely, doing my best not to go any further. “But why, exactly? Is it because of my father? Or is it because I try to be nice to people?”
I didn’t want anything to do with this.
“I suppose,” was all I could say. I felt a little queasy.
Jamie seemed disheartened, and we walked a little farther in silence.
“Do you think I’m strange, too?” she asked me.
The way she said it made me ache more than I thought it would. We were almost at her house before I stopped her and held her close to me. I kissed her, and when we pulled apart, she looked down at the ground.
I put my finger beneath her chin, lifting her head up and making her look at me again. “You’re a wonderful person, Jamie. You’re beautiful, you’re kind, you’re gentle . . . you’re everything that I’d like to be. If people don’t like you, or they think you’re strange, then that’s their problem.”
In the grayish glow of a cold winter day, I could see her lower lip begin to tremble. Mine was doing the same thing, and I suddenly realized that my heart was speeding up as well. I looked in her eyes, smiling with all the feeling I could muster, knowing that I couldn’t keep the words inside any longer.
“I love you, Jamie,” I said to her. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
It was the first time I’d ever said the words to another person besides a member of my immediate family. When I’d imagined saying it to someone else, I’d somehow thought it would be hard, but it wasn’t. I’d never been more sure of anything.
As soon as I said the words, though, Jamie bowed her head and started to cry, leaning her body into mine. I wrapped my arms around her, wondering what was wrong. She was thin, and I realized for the first time that my arms went all the way around her. She’d lost weight, even in the last week and a half, and I remembered that she’d barely touched her food earlier. She kept crying into my chest for what seemed like a long time. I wasn’t sure what to think, or even if she felt the same way I did. Even so, I didn’t regret the words. The truth is always the truth, and I’d just promised her that I would never lie again.
“Please don’t say that,” she said to me. “Please . . .”
“But I do,” I said, thinking she didn’t believe me.
She began to cry even harder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to me through her ragged sobs. “I’m so, so sorry. . . .”
My throat suddenly went dry.
“Why’re you sorry?” I asked, suddenly desperate to understand what was bothering her. “Is it because of my friends and what they’ll say? I don’t care anymore—I really don’t.” I was reaching for anything, confused and, yes—scared.
It took another long moment for her to stop crying, and in time she looked up at me. She kissed me gently, almost like the breath of a passerby on a city street, then ran her finger over my cheek.
“You can’t be in love with me, Landon,” she said through red and swollen eyes. “We can be friends, we can see each other . . . but you
can’t
love me.”
“Why not?” I shouted hoarsely, not understanding any of this.
“Because,” she finally said softly, “I’m very sick, Landon.”
The concept was so absolutely foreign that I couldn’t comprehend what she was trying to say.
“So what? You’ll take a few days . . .”
A sad smile crossed her face, and I knew right then what she was trying to tell me. Her eyes never left mine as she finally said the words that numbed my soul.
“I’m dying, Landon.”
S
he had leukemia; she’d known it since last summer.
The moment she told me, the blood drained from my face and a sheaf of dizzying images fluttered through my mind. It was as though in that brief moment, time had suddenly stopped and I understood everything that had happened between us. I understood why she’d wanted me to do the play: I understood why, after we’d performed that first night, Hegbert had whispered to her with tears in his eyes, calling her his angel; I understood why he looked so tired all the time and why he fretted that I kept coming by the house. Everything became absolutely clear.
Why she wanted Christmas at the orphanage to be so special...
Why she didn’t think she’d go to college . . .
Why she’d given me her Bible . . .
It all made perfect sense, and at the same time, nothing seemed to make any sense at all.
Jamie Sullivan had leukemia . . .
Jamie, sweet Jamie, was dying . . .
My Jamie
...
“No, no,” I whispered to her, “there has to be some mistake. . . .”
But there wasn’t, and when she told me again, my world went blank. My head started to spin, and I clung to her tightly to keep from losing my balance. On the street I saw a man and a woman, walking toward us, heads bent and their hands on their hats to keep them from blowing away. A dog trotted across the road and stopped to smell some bushes. A neighbor across the way was standing on a stepladder, taking down his Christmas lights. Normal scenes from everyday life, things I would never have noticed before, suddenly making me feel angry. I closed my eyes, wanting the whole thing to go away.
“I’m so sorry, Landon,” she kept saying over and over. It was I who should have been saying it, however. I know that now, but my confusion kept me from saying anything.
Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t go away. I held her again, not knowing what else to do, tears filling my eyes, trying and failing to be the rock I think she needed.
We cried together on the street for a long time, just a little way down the road from her house. We cried some more when Hegbert opened the door and saw our faces, knowing immediately that their secret was out. We cried when we told my mother later that afternoon, and my mother held us both to her bosom and sobbed so loudly that both the maid and the cook wanted to call the doctor because they thought something had happened to my father. On Sunday Hegbert made the announcement to his congregation, his face a mask of anguish and fear, and he had to be helped back to his seat before he’d even finished.
Everyone in the congregation stared in silent disbelief at the words they’d just heard, as if they were waiting for a punch line to some horrible joke that none of them could believe had been told. Then all at once, the wailing began.
We sat with Hegbert the day she told me, and Jamie patiently answered my questions. She didn’t know how long she had left, she told me. No, there wasn’t anything the doctors could do. It was a rare form of the disease, they’d said, one that didn’t respond to available treatment. Yes, when the school year had started, she’d felt fine. It wasn’t until the last few weeks that she’d started to feel its effects.
“That’s how it progresses,” she said. “You feel fine, and then, when your body can’t keep fighting, you don’t.”
Stifling my tears, I couldn’t help but think about the play.
“But all those rehearsals . . . those long days . . . maybe you shouldn’t have—”
“Maybe,” she said, reaching for my hand and cutting me off. “Doing the play was the thing that kept me healthy for so long.”
Later, she told me that seven months had passed since she’d been diagnosed. The doctors had given her a year, maybe less.
These days it might have been different. These days they could have treated her. These days Jamie would probably live. But this was happening forty years ago, and I knew what that meant.
Only a miracle could save her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
This was the one question I hadn’t asked her, the one that I’d been thinking about. I hadn’t slept that night, and my eyes were still swollen. I’d gone from shock to denial to sadness to anger and back again, all night long, wishing it weren’t so and praying that the whole thing had been some terrible night-mare.
We were in her living room the following day, the day that Hegbert had made the announcement to the congregation. It was January 10, 1959.
Jamie didn’t look as depressed as I thought she would. But then again, she’d been living with this for seven months already. She and Hegbert had been the only ones to know, and neither of them had trusted even me. I was hurt by that and frightened at the same time.
“I’d made a decision,” she explained to me, “that it would be better if I told no one, and I asked my father to do the same. You saw how people were after the services today. No one would even look me in the eye. If you had only a few months left to live, is that what you would want?”
I knew she was right, but it didn’t make it any easier. I was, for the first time in my life, completely and utterly at a loss.
I’d never had anyone close to me die before, at least not anyone that I could remember. My grandmother had died when I was three, and I don’t remember a single thing about her or the services that had followed or even the next few years after her passing. I’d heard stories, of course, from both my father and my grandfather, but to me that’s exactly what they were. It was the same as hearing stories I might otherwise read in a newspaper about some woman I never really knew. Though my father would take me with him when he put flowers on her grave, I never had any feelings associated with her. I felt only for the people she’d left behind.
No one in my family or my circle of friends had ever had to confront something like this. Jamie was seventeen, a child on the verge of womanhood, dying and still very much alive at the same time. I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been, not only for her, but for me as well. I lived in fear of doing something wrong, of doing something that would offend her. Was it okay to ever get angry in her presence? Was it okay to talk about the future anymore? My fear made talking to her difficult, though she was patient with me.
My fear, however, made me realize something else, something that made it all worse. I realized I’d never even known her when she’d been healthy. I had started to spend time with her only a few months earlier, and I’d been in love with her for only eighteen days. Those eighteen days seemed like my entire life, but now, when I looked at her, all I could do was wonder how many more days there would be.
On Monday she didn’t show up for school, and I somehow knew that she’d never walk the hallways again. I’d never see her reading the Bible off by herself at lunch, I’d never see her brown cardigan moving through the crowd as she made her way to her next class. She was finished with school forever; she would never receive her diploma.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything while I sat in class that first day back, listening as teacher after teacher told us what most of us had already heard. The responses were similar to those in church on Sunday. Girls cried, boys hung their heads, people told stories about her as if she were already gone. What can we do? they wondered aloud, and people looked to me for answers.