Stephen King - Joyland

Fine with me. I tipped Mike a wave and he sent one right back. He was grinning. Kid had a great grin.

Forty or fifty yards down the beach, I turned around for another look. The kite was descending, but for the time being the wind still owned it. They were looking up at it, the woman with her hand on her son’s shoulder.

Miss, I thought. Miss, not Mrs. And is there a mister with them in the big old Victorian with the seventy bathrooms? Just because I’d never seen one with them didn’t mean there wasn’t one, but I didn’t think so. I thought it was just the two of them. On their own.

I got no clarification from Annie Ross the next morning, but plenty of dish from Mike. I also got one hell of a nice fruit smoothie. She said she made the yogurt herself, and it was layered with fresh strawberries from God knows where. I brought croissants and blueberry muffins from Betty’s Bakery. Mike skipped the pastries, but finished his smoothie and asked for another. From the way his mother’s mouth dropped open, I gathered that this was an astounding development. But not, I guessed, in a bad way.

“Are you sure you can eat another one?”

“Maybe just half,” he said. “What’s the deal, Mom? You’re the one who says fresh yogurt helps me move my bowels.”

“I don’t think we need to discuss your bowels at seven in the morning, Mike.” She got up, then cast a doubtful glance my way.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said brightly, “if he tries to kiddie-fiddle me, I’ll tell Milo to sic ’im.”

Color bloomed in her cheeks. “Michael Everett Ross!”

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look sorry. His eyes were sparkling.

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to Mr. Jones.”

“Accepted, accepted.”

“Will you keep an eye on him, Mr. Jones? I won’t be long.”

“I will if you’ll call me Devin.”

“Then I’ll do that.” She hurried up the boardwalk, pausing once to look over her shoulder. I think she had more than half a mind to come back, but in the end, the prospect of stuffing a few more healthy calories into her painfully thin boy was too much for her to resist, and she went on.

Mike watched her climb the steps to the back patio and sighed. “Now I’ll have to eat it.”

“Well… yeah. You asked for it, right?”

“Only so I could talk to you without her butting in. I mean, I love her and all, but she’s always butting in. Like what’s wrong with me is this big shameful secret we have to keep.” He shrugged. “I’ve got muscular dystrophy, that’s all. That’s why I’m in the wheelchair. I can walk, you know, but the braces and crutches are a pain in the butt.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That stinks, Mike.”

“I guess, but I can’t remember not having it, so what the hell. Only it’s a special kind of MD. Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, it’s called. Most kids who have it croak in their teens or early twenties.”

So, you tell me—what do you say to a ten-year-old kid who’s just told you he’s living under a death sentence?

“But.” He raised a teacherly finger. “Remember her talking about how I was sick last year?”

“Mike, you don’t have to tell me all this if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, except I do.” He was looking at me with clear intensity. Maybe even urgency. “Because you want to know. Maybe you even need to know.”

I was thinking of Fortuna again. Two children, she had told me, a girl in a red hat and a boy with a dog. She said one of them had the sight, but she didn’t know which. I thought that now I did.

“Mom said I think I got over it. Do I sound like I got over it?”

“Nasty cough,” I ventured, “but otherwise…” I couldn’t think how to finish. Otherwise your legs are nothing but sticks? Otherwise you look like your mom and I could tie a string to the back of your shirt and fly you like a kite? Otherwise if I had to bet on whether you or Milo would live longer, I’d put my money on the dog?

“I came down with pneumonia just after Thanksgiving, okay? When I didn’t improve after a couple of weeks in the hospital, the doctor told my mom I was probably going to die and she ought to, you know, get ready for that.”

But he didn’t tell her in your hearing, I thought. They’d never have a conversation like that in your hearing.

“I hung in, though.” He said this with some pride. “My grandfather called my mom—I think it was the first time they’d talked in a long time. I don’t know who told him what was going on, but he has people everywhere. It could have been any of them.”

People everywhere sounded kind of paranoid, but I kept my mouth shut. Later I found out it wasn’t paranoid at all. Mike’s grandfather did have them everywhere, and they all saluted Jesus, the flag, and the NBA, although possibly not in that order.

“Grampa said I got over the pneumonia because of God’s will. Mom said he was full of bullshit, just like when he said me having DMD in the first place was God’s punishment. She said I was just one tough little sonofabitch, and God had nothing to do with it. Then she hung up on him.”

Mike might have heard her end of that conversation, but not Grampa’s, and I doubted like hell if his mother had told him. I didn’t think he was making it up, though. I found myself hoping Annie wouldn’t hurry back. This wasn’t like listening to Madame Fortuna. What she had, I believed (and still do, all these years later), was some small bit of authentic psychic ability amped up by a shrewd understanding of human nature and then packaged in glittering carny bullshit. Mike’s thing was clearer. Simpler. Purer. It wasn’t like seeing the ghost of Linda Gray, but it was akin to that, okay? It was touching another world.

“Mom said she’d never come back here, but here we are. Because I wanted to come to the beach and because I wanted to fly a kite and because I’m never going to make twelve, let alone my early twenties. It was the pneumonia, see? I get steroids, and they help, but the pneumonia combined with the Duchenne’s MD fucked up my lungs and heart permanently.”

He looked at me with a child’s defiance, watching for how I’d react to what is now so coyly referred to as “the f-bomb.” I didn’t react, of course. I was too busy processing the sense to worry about his choice of words.

“So,” I said. “I guess what you’re saying is an extra fruit smoothie won’t help.”

He threw back his head and laughed. The laughter turned into the worst coughing fit yet. Alarmed, I went to him and pounded his back… but gently. It felt as if there were nothing under there but chicken bones. Milo barked once and put his paws up on one of Mike’s wasted legs.

There were two pitchers on the table, water in one and fresh-squeezed orange juice in the other. Mike pointed to the water and I poured him half a glass. When I tried to hold it for him, he gave me an impatient look—even with the coughing fit still wracking him—and took it himself. He spilled some on his shirt, but most of it went down his throat, and the coughing eased.

“That was a bad one,” he said, patting his chest. “My heart’s going like a bastard. Don’t tell my mother.”

“Jesus, kid! Like she doesn’t know?”

“She knows too much, that’s what I think,” Mike said. “She knows I might have three more good months and then four or five really bad ones. Like, in bed all the time, not able to do anything but suck oxygen and watch MASH and Fat Albert. The only question is whether or not she’ll let Grammy and Grampa Ross come to the funeral.” He’d coughed hard enough to make his eyes water, but I didn’t mistake that for tears. He was bleak, but in control. Last evening, when the kite went up and he felt it tugging the twine, he had been younger than his age. Now I was watching him struggle to be a lot older. The scary thing was how well he was succeeding. His eyes met mine, dead-on. “She knows. She just doesn’t know that I know.”