Frisbee Read online

THIRTY-FIVE

  We hung out in the shade of the Tree for a while longer, letting Frisbee sleep, watching him closely and we talked in hushed tones so we wouldn’t disturb him. Somehow we all knew he had come a long way to find us and that he needed to rest form that journey.

  “What happened with the ambulance?” I asked quietly.

  Steve, turned to me and said, “The what?”

  “The ambulance,” I repeated a bit louder. “The one that stopped up the street last night.”

  “Oh,” Steve said. “Cory found out from his mom this morning and told us what happened before we started playing 500.” He then looked in Cory’s direction. “You want to tell him, Dayborne?”

  Cory only needed a second to think about it. Like his mom, he lived on gossip and loved repeating it. Janeal Osborne knew just about everyone in the neighborhood. Those she didn’t know, she could get gossip about through those who did. She and the telephone were quite fond of one another.

  “My mom talked to Mrs. Stytes, that lives across the street form the Miller’s, this morning.” He paused for a moment. “She said he stopped breathing last night.”

  My eyes went wide; my heart rate sped up a bit. I looked at Steve and then to Jason who were both nodding in conformation.

  Donald Miller. The kid from up the street with Canavan disease had been in slow decline. I thought back to the day in kindergarten two Septembers ago when I had pushed him on the swings and about the braces he wore on his legs to help with his balance and movement, how his parents had had to pull him out of school due to his declining heath. The disease had been unforgiving and had affected his motor skills to the point that not wearing the braces meant not walking.

  Jason and I had looked in on him through his window not more than a week before. He looked like hell then and although somewhere in the back of my mind I knew he was not doing well, the news still shocked me. He was just a child like us, though robbed of his chance at a life. It didn’t seem fair that he had to suffer that way.

  “Did he die?” I asked.

  Cory closed his eyes and shook his head. “I guess he was hooked up to some sort of machine in that room he sleeps in. It tells his parents if he has a seizure or stops breathing and stuff.”

  I didn’t know what a seizure was and I didn’t bother to ask right then. I did know what it meant to stop breathing though and knew it wasn’t a good thing.

  I needed to know more. “What did his parents do?”

  “My mom said that his parents know CPR,” Cory went on. “You know, just in case something like that happened.” He thought to himself for a moment as if trying to recall the details his mom had passed along to him. “They got him to start breathing again and then went and called the operator or something. But before the ambulance got there to help him, he had a seizure.”

  At the mention of the word again, I asked, “What’s a See-Sure?”

  “It’s called a seizure,” Cory corrected. “I guess it’s when you can’t control your body anymore and you just start floppin’ and squirmin’ like a worm on a hot sidewalk.”

  I pictured Donald doing this weird seizure dance, drooling and I felt sad for him.

  Cory continued, “I guess the guys from the ambulance got there just in time to keep him alive.”

  This last part might have been exaggerated. Cory was known to embellish a story from time to time.

  “My mom said that they took him over to the hospital and now he’s probably gonna have to be put on a machine that breathes for him until…”

  I didn’t understand why Cory had stopped mid sentence. “Until what?” I whispered.

  We were all silent for a while and it was Steve who finally spoke the three words I hadn’t really wanted to hear.

  “Until he dies.”