The Black Book

It dropped onto her toes and flopped to the ground from the collection of flowers, balloons and tote bags full of bright flyers and toys from well-wishers and cancer charities. She set the gifts to one side on the unit underneath the hospital television and went back to find it.

It was a little black book which had come to rest underneath Zach's hospital bed. Marsha dragged away his long, wheeled bedside table and negotiated the nurse call button and television control cables to reach it. Straightening up with the book in her right hand, she took another look at her son. His breathing shallow but controlled, eyes locked shut. His bruised head swaddled in bandages with drip lines, clips and safety pins sticking out from just about everywhere. He lay there the muted light of that hospital room, waiting for the move upstairs to the main cancer recovery ward.

The machines churned, measured, pinged and kept rhythm. Occasionally one would intone with a strident boop bop that something had moved out of normal range. This was always as she was starting to find that elusive sleep.

To pass time, she'd been sifting through the gifts. Some useful, others not so much. The former taking the form of grocery shopping vouchers from several paediatric cancer charities. Marsha filed these away in her purse for later; she already knew they was going to have a hell of a time paying for all of this somehow. The latter a collection of comforters, teddies, balloons and Keep Cups amid a mountain of forms and paperwork.

This whirlwind 48 hours had become their new abnormal. A permanent life-flipping culmination to a fortnight of vomiting, headaches and fudged gastric diagnoses for her 5 year old before an eagle-eyed ophthalmologist had looked into his pupils and ordered a CT scan; which had led to an MRI scan and then the emergency removal of a tumour the size of a ping pong ball right next to Zach's brain stem.

The surgery had gone well they'd said, but he might have something they called Posterior Fossa Syndrome. Everything was terrifying and she feared and revered these people. These experts in their circle of chairs, with their boxes of tissues and their pamphlets and contrast scans and appointments talking about her boy. She constantly shook from fear and adrenaline bordering on hallucinations, this was all she and her husband knew nowadays.

She looked back over to it. Something about this black Moleskine intrigued her. Called to her. Lying across the improvised hospital sofa bed she examined the A5 sized black book as a break in clouds allowed the afternoon sunlight to cleave the room in two. Unlike everything else it carried no extra charity branding and looked far from new. It bulged from scrapbooking, from being read and journaled in. An elasticated band held it in place. Perhaps a nurse had misplaced it? But Marsha couldn't resist a peek, she peeled back the elastic.

But upon opening the book, she gasped and goggled, wide-eyed and open mouthed. She inhaled her own spit and had to remove her mask and cover her mouth as she choked herself back to equilibrium, with it sitting open next to her. It wasn't possible. It couldn't be possible. Tears defied exhaustion and dehydration and she began to find herself weeping, hand over her mask, struggling to keep her sobs contained lest she somehow woke him.

For on the inside cover, written in neat black cursive writing were the three words "Zach's Medullo Diary". And there, glued underneath, a photograph of her and her son. laser printed and crookedly cut out. 'Day 6' was written underneath. Zach was awake and forcing a smile for the camera as he sat propped up to a backdrop of cuddly toys and balloons. Opposite, written in a smaller version of the same hand which she didn't recognise was a simple message "Made by Zach Barnes, age 19". Marsha pulled down her mask, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose into a clump of disposable tissues.

She could hardly dare turn the page but something inside drove her on. Leafing forward and there they were again, sometimes it looked like she had taken the picture, sometimes Bret, her husband. Others were selfies with the likes and shares left visible underneath. On one spread he looked spaced out in a wheelchair from radiotherapy, the next in chemo. That wavy, dark hair replaced by a beanie, with a feeding tube band-aided to his right nostril as he gingerly gave a thumbs up and tried forcing a smile. All along, annotations described how he'd gone through something called the St Jude's protocol. How he'd had thirty shots of radiation to his cranium and spine under general anaesthetic followed up by seven vomit-stained, transfusion filled, months of chemotherapy.

"I HATE THE TAST OF EVRYTHING" he'd scrawled in red capitals across one page with a Sharpie. Three spreads later a picture of him, sitting in a wheelchair ringing a golden bell to celebrate the end of chemotherapy with Bret. Then came school pictures. High school. She turned the pages excitedly - nervously - seeing her older, greyer self standing next to him on prom night. The tears were chasing each other down her face and onto her shirt now. A glimpse into the future? But how?

Then abruptly, pictures and notes gave way to nothing. Blank pages. Marsha turned them over with mounting anxiety until right at the end was something else. A handwritten note. This time she recognised her own handwriting.

"It was the relapse which opened it up, mum. With the headaches and the tiredness came strange dreams about travelling to the past as the person I could have been. I planted a box in one and after I woke you and dad, you guys wheeled me to the park and we dug it up, our first time capsule. You thought we were going crazy. "

"I remember the shock on your face and having to convince you that the twenty thousand dollars had come from betting my ten year old self's pocket money on a football match I already knew the result of. And we all thought Zoey had stolen it at the time. Sorry Zoey! In another I told dad to work from home the day of the big car pileup. They said it was inoperable, that it had come back stronger and faster growing. But the more it progressed, the further I was able to travel back in time and the longer I could stay there."

Tears fell onto the book as Marsha turned over the final page. A single photograph. It was them with Zach, outside an expansive and beautiful white Californian bungalow in a glossy seven by five. There were two young girls too. They looked like their mum as they beamed for the camera. Zach sat in a wheelchair covered with a check covered blanket while His father stood behind him, looking pensive and pale, putting on a happy face. Beside them, his hospital stand laden with palliative medicines, liquid food and saline. Attached to the bottom was a pink Post-it, containing a few lines of writing in a very loose scrawl. Possibly his last written words. They read "It all works out in the end - Z ."

Marsha closed the book and looked up from it to her five year old boy hooked up to his army of monitors and machines. Outside, the buzz of conversation as nurses chattered and occasionally laughed and went about their business. A repetitive pinging summoning them to somewhere else in the bowels of this hospital ward.

And then it happened. A figure appeared at the door and it swung open inwardly. He was wearing only hospital towels but had the most excited look about him. She knew it was her Zach right away. Yet he looked so tall, so handsome and healthy albeit draped in hospital blankets. This Zach looked at the boy in the hospital bed and smiled a grin so wide and bright. Then he looked across to her.

Zach strode over to his mother and threw his arms around her and they embraced. She clutched herself so tightly to him, conscious of not pulling off the blankets, shaking with the emotion. A wailing noise welling up in her throat as she sniffled underneath her blue mask. What the hell, she tore at it, snapping one of the white threads from her ear and letting it fall to the floor as she kissed him on the cheek.

"How?" was all she could say.

"Tell them I enjoyed every minute, mum" he said, choking back tears himself suddenly, as she held him, smelled him, felt his warmth and life. He squeezed her back, her boy in her arms, her boy whose cancer had unlocked something in his brain. Her boy over there on the hospital bed.

"I love you mum. I love dad, Zoey and Zena. Always will."

Then in that second his warmth was gone and she opened her eyes to find herself clutching at nothing, the air escaping from the hospital blankets as they sank to the polished floor around her feet. The door swished open once more and in walked Bret, here to take watch over their son.

'What'd I miss?" he asked, glancing down at the pile of laundry between them, before he saw the look on her face.