Ray of Sunlight (11 page)

“CJ.” I stood, looking at the blank wall. “I don’t know how to draw a picture that big. I’ve never done it before.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t do it now.” CJ stood beside me, smiling. “Come on, Russ. You’ve got this. I have faith in you.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

He chuckled, but I wasn’t so sure I was kidding.

When I just stood there, he continued. “You simply need to start. Pick a spot. And let’s start.”

The ladder was already there; I had the marker in my hand. All I had to do was pick a spot and start. And I think I’d still be standing there if it wasn’t for CJ. He stood there with me and encouraged me—something I hadn’t had for a long time—until I picked a spot and started drawing. The rest flowed almost effortlessly.

It took me almost a week to finish the sketches on the walls. Meanwhile, we were lining up volunteers to help paint the flat colors, and I’d come back and put in the shading and stuff later. We’d already lined up several off-duty staff, but we got some surprise help too.

Pete struck again. The whole youth group showed up to help.

“Pete?” I asked when I saw him lead in a whole crowd of people on the day he knew we were going to start with the actual painting.

“You needed help, right?” He looked very pleased with himself, and the twelve or so youth with him looked ready to work. They had paint clothes on, and do-rags, and had brought their own brushes and small buckets for paint.

Pastor Roy was with them, of course. “Hey, son.” He greeted me and CJ at the same time, so I guess we were both “son.” “I wasn’t sure if you’d need rollers and pans or not, so we brought them, but left them in the truck.”

I was still dumbfounded, so it was CJ who answered. “All of this is so thoughtful, pastor. Thank you. We certainly can use all the hands we can get.” He gestured around the halls. “Did you get a chance to look at all the gorgeous drawings Russ made?”

“I’ve seen some of them, but I’m looking forward to watching all of them come to life.”

“They really are spectacular, Pastor Roy,” Pete piped up. “My brother is quite talented.”

My first inclination was to hear sarcasm in that statement, but I actually didn’t think there was any there. Pete truly sounded proud of me. I was surprised by that. And we’d never really referred to each other as brothers before, but he sort of sounded proud about that too.

“I can see that,” the pastor said, then turned toward me. “They really are beautiful, Russ. I love the idea of a battle scene, especially since you did it so it wasn’t violent at all.”

“That was CJ’s idea, actually,” I said proudly. CJ was just grinning widely, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me giving him credit. He was proud of me too, and for some reason, that mattered more to me than any of the other praise I was getting.

“So, Russ,” the pastor continued, “where do you want us to start? And what color does everything need to be?”

I must have had a comically confused look on my face, because CJ laughed hysterically while I was saying, “I have no idea where to start.”

“Well….” The pastor somehow managed to offer his opinion without sounding like he was taking over. “Why don’t you just walk around and tell us what color everything should be, and we’ll go from there.”

“Hey, Russ, wait here,” CJ said. “I’ll be right back. We have your colored plans, remember? I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring them. We can assign a small group to each wall and leave the drawing, and they can use those colors to go by.”

One of the off-duty nurses chimed in. “I’ll go with you, CJ, and we’ll make colored copies so everyone has some.”

They did just that, and everyone got to work. Pastor Roy suggested that I just roam around and make sure everyone was painting things the way I wanted. I sort of wanted to paint too, but he had a point. It would be much easier to fix any mistakes as they happened instead of waiting until we were finished and realize a whole wall was painted the wrong color or something. And, he also pointed out that I’d have plenty of opportunity to paint when we got to the shading and shadowing stage. As it turned out, it was an all-day job to just go from wall to wall and advise everyone. It also gave me an opportunity to talk to everyone while they were working. I wouldn’t have thought that would even be anything I wanted to do, but it was actually fun. And with all the help, we made short work of getting everything done. Everyone made plans to come back as many days as necessary to finish, and the main halls in Oncology were painted with gigantic murals by Christmas.

M
EANWHILE
, I
helped CJ with his clown shows when he was up to it. He always entered with a flourish, no matter how bad I knew he felt.

“It’s showtime!” he’d announce, and the kids would cheer. No matter how many other volunteers came and went, CJ seemed to be their favorite.

He got the bright idea, though, that I needed a clown persona too. I skipped the face paint, but he came up with an over-the-top artist outfit for me, and I would still draw the kids whenever they wanted. But I started teaching them how to draw various things too and branched out to doing some magic tricks with CJ. It seemed to be really important to him that I could run the show, even without him, when absolutely necessary.

I asked him about it once. He told me that he wanted to make sure the kids still had someone to count on… when anything happened to him.

I found I really didn’t like to hear him talk like that. I didn’t want to think about him… leaving. I didn’t want to think about life without him in it.

S
OMEWHERE
IN
that month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, parents started coming to me, asking if I could do a portrait of this person or that so they could give it as a Christmas present. Most of them had either seen me draw the kids at the Thanksgiving party or had seen pictures I drew of them at the Halloween party. I accepted, of course, and told them I’d do the best I could, but I had really thought I was just doing it for free. I was surprised when the first one gave me fifty dollars. Fifty dollars for a portrait that took about an hour to do. I couldn’t believe it.

More and more parents wanted me to do portraits, and then it even branched out to people at Pete’s church. Most paid me fifty dollars apiece. Some paid more if there was more than one person in the portrait. I never actually set a price. They just paid whatever they wanted. I had made six hundred dollars by Christmas.

I got an even bigger surprise when we finally declared the mural on the oncology ward finished. The staff had apparently gone to the board to ask them to pay me a little something for my time. I hadn’t expected it, but they gifted me with three hundred more dollars and told me they’d pay the same for each of the other wards and wanted me to design a mural for the front hall.

I found out later that the requests for portraits didn’t stop at Christmas. People contacted me at home asking if I could draw them this or that, and some even asked if I’d appear at some event or another to draw. I got paid for all of that, either by the people I drew at the event or by the event coordinators.

I had stumbled into a relatively well-paying job, without even trying. And without expecting it. And that brought up something to think about. I had been doing a lot of stuff lately, without expecting something for my trouble. That wasn’t like me. It was out of character. I didn’t care about anyone but me… hadn’t for a long time, but here I was….

I decided it had all been CJ’s influence. He denied it when I said as much. He said it was the me I was supposed to be all along… the me he had seen immediately. I wasn’t sure if I believed that. But it felt good to know that he did.

A
FTER
THE
reception, or lack of same, earned by the idea of CJ coming to my house on Thanksgiving, I didn’t even bother broaching the topic of Christmas. There would be no Christmas blowout for the kids that I could hide behind, because, as great as I was starting to believe Pete’s church was, no one was going to want to give up their Christmas.

The church did remember the children, however. Two days before Christmas, a large group of people came through all three wards, caroling and bearing gifts. There was even a guy dressed up as Santa, carrying a large sack. He came with three, actually… one for each ward, but, of course, only had one at a time as far as the kids could see. CJ and I tagged along. We just had to see what they were going to do.

They decided not to have the kids gather in the playroom, but went around room by room, asking each child what their favorite Christmas carol was, and they sang that for them, asking the child and any visitors they may have to join in. CJ and I were told that if we were going to walk with them, we needed to sing. I tried telling them they didn’t really want to hear me sing, but they insisted. CJ had a ball, and just seeing him laugh and smile was enough to make me willing to endure the humiliation.

While in each room, Santa gave out the present with that child’s name on it. The present was picked out with care too. Each child got something they truly wanted. I had assumed at the time that the nurses had probably told the church people what to buy for each child, but I never knew for sure. And, of course, many of the people in the caroling group were the same ones who had been volunteering with the kids since Thanksgiving, including Ms. Barstow, Mrs. Thompson, Mr. Mackey, and Mr. North. So I had to allow for the possibility that they just actually knew what the kids wanted.

The kids loved the one-on-one attention, and the parents truly appreciated the effort. There were kids lining the doorways up and down the hallway by the time the group got two or three rooms in on each ward. Everyone was excited for a personal visit from Santa, and they loved the singing.

There were a couple of church people who knew sign language, so when they were on the neuro unit, where some of the kids had to sign because they couldn’t talk, the volunteers signed the Christmas songs so that the kids could sign along. They wouldn’t have had to sign to the kids, most of them could hear, just not speak, but it sent them the signal that they should sign along with the songs, and they seemed to enjoy that a lot.

On the oncology ward, one of the kids was especially sensitive about her bald head and refused to come out from behind her mother. All the carolers had been wearing Santa hats, so one older lady took off her hat and put it on the little girl. They both beamed, and that was fun to watch in itself. The little girl came to life after that, though, and she sang all the songs with the carolers and ripped into her present with gusto.

When it came time to leave, the little girl reluctantly reached for the hat and started to duck behind her mother again.

“No, honey,” the older lady said, “you keep that. It’s a Christmas present.”

She beamed, and I thought CJ was going to burst into tears, he was so happy and touched by the thoughtfulness everyone was paying to his kids.

There were several kids who didn’t celebrate Christmas, so they didn’t have a favorite carol. I was really impressed with the group of singers. In each of those cases, they asked the child what their favorite song was… not holiday song, just song in general.

Several asked them to sing various childhood favorites…. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for one of the five year olds; “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” for one of the older boys, whom CJ was convinced just asked for that to see if the people knew it; and “BINGO” by a little boy in Neuro who could only sign and finger spelled the song title.

But, among my favorite moments was when Cissy, on the burn unit, asked them to sing “What Makes You Beautiful.” I was sure no one in the group would know a One Direction song. They were mostly older people… thirties and such. CJ, Pete, and I were by far the youngest and we certainly weren’t going to admit knowing a song by a boy band. But several people said yes, they did know it, Ms. Barstow included, so they sang it with Cissy. But not only that, they sang it
to
Cissy. She was being held by her dad and reached out for Ms. Barstow. The two of them had spent a lot of time together during the last month. Ms. Barstow gathered Cissy into her arms and sang right to her, thoroughly meaning every word, while dancing her around the room. It was emotional. The song was about a girl who was insecure and didn’t think she was beautiful, and the singer assured her she was, and for reasons other than purely physical beauty. It would be a nice song sung to anyone, but when sung to a child horribly disfigured by burns… there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. I flashed back to that conversation they had had when working with the clay, and I teared up even more. Of course, I insisted that the only reason
my
eyes weren’t dry was because I was standing next to Pete who had had an onion sandwich for lunch, and his breath was so awful, it burned my eyes. Pete hit me for the comment, but CJ just laughed uproariously. For some reason, I didn’t really think he bought my excuse.

I
SPENT
Christmas morning at home with Mom and Allen and Pete. We had a tradition of waking up at sunrise and opening one present before breakfast. Then we each picked one thing we wanted for breakfast and ate the meal together. Eating together was important to Mom, and she didn’t think we did nearly enough of it, so I indulged her for Christmas.

We finished breakfast and opened the rest of the presents. The rest of the day was normally spent just watching TV or “playing with” our Christmas presents. When I was younger, we used to go to my dad’s mother’s house. She was the coolest grandmother ever. She was the one I had told CJ about the day I met him. She was into all the cool old rock and roll bands and was really active in a lot of very ungrandmotherly things. She bought me a skateboard one year for Christmas… and one for herself. And, after we opened all the presents, she and I went skateboarding around the neighborhood for the rest of the day.