The Bones of Me

I don’t know which I wish more -- that I’d never gotten bone cancer, or that I’d never met the one person who loved me more than anybody else ever has.

***

Sonora, Texas in the 1980s was too small a town to have more than one high school. I don’t know if it’s like that anymore; I left decades ago and never went back. But back then, that meant the rich ranchers’ kids, the cattle princes and princesses, had to share classrooms and showers and oxygen with the poor kids who lived in the trailer houses sprinkled across one side of the tiny town that was hugged on one end by the dry bed of the Devil’s River.

We all grew up together in the series of schools, each feeding into the next -- from Sonora Elementary to Sonora Middle to Sonora High School. We learned one another’s secrets over the years and became a sprawling, mosaic culture unto ourselves. We raced bikes down the paved and packed-dirt roads, we loved and fought and rose and fell, and we lined up to take turns playing Donkey Kong at the Piggly Wiggly.

***

I met Billy when he was eight and I was six, and his infatuation with me grew from obvious and strange to subtle, perhaps-not-even-there and oddly enjoyable over the next ten years. I’d see him circling his bike endlessly on my cul-de-sac and delighted at knowing he was desperate for me to make an appearance. I never enjoyed not coming out of the house more than when I knew Billy was hoping for me to come out.

***

My sixteenth year, or most of it, is a blur now. The days blended into one another, round after round of treatment, fear, vomiting, pain ebbing and rising to the rhythm of doses of medication, all the pills of different shapes and colors, all the haunted expressions glimpsed before people could fix their expressions, all the brave words expressed in faltering voices.

The one thing that I remember above everything else was my mother’s face when she told me that some nameless person, my “guardian angel,” had donated $20,000 so that we could afford my bone marrow transplant. She looked like I’d been pardoned seconds before I was due to be executed. At the time, I was only tired; ready to die, maybe. I wasn’t sure I wanted someone else’s marrow in my bones. I wasn’t sure I could take anymore, but I did, more for other people than for myself.

***

When I returned to school, three months into what was supposed to be my senior year, students -- no doubt prompted by teachers and coaches -- applauded me like a hero returning from an overseas war, and I actually felt like that. I was a curiosity in the hallways and classrooms and nobody really knew how to talk to me.

Nobody, apparently, but Billy.

He looked at me with joyful, greedy eyes like he’d never expected to see me again, like a flower he’d watered just before it could wilt. Like I was a treasure beyond imagination. Even though my hair was still really short.

He talked to me like every second in my company was precious, and he talked about himself and his family and their Circle 8 Ranch on the outskirts of town. But mostly he asked about me, as though he was one of those old explorers and he was determined to draw the definitive map of me. And I answered each of his questions, grateful for him and his interest, grateful for how I could tell him anything exactly the way I felt it, and he would accept each of my answers as though I was honoring him with them. And I became slowly more and more sure whose family had made the anonymous donation to my parents.

***

I had rubbed my head over the bristles that were just starting to emerge from my scalp and said that I felt “so ugly” when he told me, shyly and with a shaky voice, that I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever known. Not seen, but known. I wasn’t quite sure how to understand that, but I liked the way he put it.

And when he asked me to be his girlfriend, looking like I held his existence in my skinny hands, I looked into Billy’s eyes and found that I couldn’t lie to this beautiful boy who’d held my skinny hands and listened to every ugly thought and feeling that poured from my mouth. He was perfect. He deserved, demanded, nothing but my pure truth.

“I love you, Billy,” I said softly.

“But not that way. I’m sorry.”

***

On the morning announcements at school, the principal told us he died in an accident at home. She left it at that.

When I got home, I found a small black notebook in my mailbox. It was filled with cramped masculine handwriting, and it was about me, and Billy.

In its pages, we were children discovering love for the first time, and elsewhere, we were old, sharing textured memories from decades of marriage.

We were passionate and gentle in those pages. We fought, only to fall violently, chaotically, exhilaratingly back into one another’s arms and beds.

Sometimes he saved my life, and sometimes I saved his. Sometimes we grew apart and split up, only to realize that we couldn’t live without each other.

I loved Billy, and he loved me, in every way lovers can love, within the pages of his notebook.

As I was sliding toward death, in my sixteenth year, so was Billy, I realized.

What do you do with all that love, all that obsession, when you have nowhere to put it besides a little black notebook?

I wish I could give it, the notebook and everything else, back to him.