The Girls from Ames (28 page)

Reading Christie’s journal day after day, Sally eventually came to a realization: The entries, with all the descriptions of Karla’s devotion, were turning Sally into a better, more patient, more loving mother. As a fifth-grade teacher, Sally noticed something else. She was becoming a better, more patient teacher, too. The kids in her class were “the most important people in the universe,” Sally would tell herself, simply because each one of them was someone’s child.

By May 2003, doctors considered Christie to be in remission. She went home and eventually rejoined her soccer team, with what she called “a very cute, short short haircut.” In her journal, she remarked about how far she’d come. “We were all getting lined up and ready to play, and that’s when it really occurred to me: I had cancer and I had beaten it.”

For the girls from Ames, that entry was a great relief. Kelly decided to mark Christie’s improved health by using frequent flier miles to get a plane ticket for Karla to fly to Maryland for an Ames girls get-together. Karla at first agreed, then tried to back out. She called other Ames girls, saying she didn’t want to leave Christie. But because Kelly already had the ticket, she eventually felt compelled to go.

When Kelly came to Karla’s house to pick her up for the trip, Christie was home, standing on the front lawn in her soccer uniform. Her hair, short and very fine, was blowing in the breeze. It’s amazing, Kelly thought, how strong she looks in that uniform. Christie told her mom to have a great time, and as Karla and Kelly drove away, Christie waved good-bye with this giant smile on her face. Maybe she’ll be OK, Kelly thought.

They spent the weekend at Jenny’s house in Annapolis—Angela and Jane came, too—and they all celebrated their fortieth birthdays and the fact that Christie was in remission. Karla was weary but grateful—for her old friends and for her daughter’s good news.

They talked about very serious things: Angela opened up to the other girls about her younger brother, who in 1999 died of complications from AIDS. She explained how he was on his deathbed and the family minister came by to suggest that he still had time to repent for his homosexuality. Kelly, who had a close gay relative, was empathetic. She knew well what it’s like to have a gay loved one in such a conservative part of the world.

It seemed to Kelly as if Christie’s illness had opened all of them up, brought them closer.

There was plenty of laughter, too, at the gathering. One night, while talking about sex, the girls laughed so hard that they all needed to use the bathroom at the same time. “I was actually crawling to the bathroom, trying to get there before Karla,” Kelly wrote in an email to the girls who couldn’t make it. “We were laughing so hard we could hardly function. Next time, I’m bringing my Depends!”

The weekend also had moments that hung in the air in frightening ways. At one point, Jane talked about how thrilling it was that Christie was in remission. What incredible news! Karla spoke but didn’t smile. “It’s all so fragile,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her.” Hearing the fear in her voice left the other girls feeling collectively crushed.

As usual for these get-togethers, Karla and Kelly were roommates. They shared a queen-sized bed in Jenny’s guest room, and the bond between them was strengthened. After they returned their rental car at the airport, they were heading to the terminal on a shuttle bus and Karla snuggled up next to Kelly and said, “I’m going to miss sleeping with you.” The other people on the bus stared at them, taken aback by what they’d just heard, and Karla and Kelly couldn’t contain their laughter.

 

 

E
ven after Christie was feeling better and had moved home, she kept writing in the online journal, detailing what she considered “regular kid stuff.” Then came the entry on June 16, 2003: “About a week ago, my mom started to notice I had a lot of bruises, more than a regular kid. I, of course, had an explanation for it. I had fallen down on my roller blades. But I think I secretly knew it wasn’t because of that. Yesterday, I was talking to my parents while reading my new ‘Chicken Soup’ book. I was wearing shorts, and I had a lot more bruises than earlier in the week. Then last night, when I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a black mouth sore. I told my mom and she called the doctor. The doctor said she wanted me in at 9 A.M. today for a complete blood count and a bone marrow test. I knew this all a little too well. After they got my blood back, the doctor told us my platelets were low and my white count was very high. I have relapsed.”

Scheduled for surgery the next day and then a new round of chemotherapy, she typed the entry from her hospital room: “One of my good friends, Jessie, came down to the hospital today. After tears and silence, we were 13-year-old girls again. We read magazines, played games, and did what we do best, talk and laugh. Thanks, Jessie, for coming down. You are a great friend.”

As Christie got sicker, confined to the hospital, she wrote about getting “fidgety” in her room. She longed to breathe fresh air, to walk her dog. “The walls are closing in around me,” she wrote. It was another echo of Anne Frank, who was unable to leave the secret annex where she was hiding.

Christie’s relapse weighed heavily on the Ames girls, especially Kelly, who decided that she couldn’t handle visiting Christie anymore at the hospital. Overwhelmed by what she came to call “the sadness of it all,” she stopped calling or emailing Karla, too. “We’re used to Christie being a girl with this frail, luminous beauty, and now her body has just swelled,” Kelly told the other girls. “It’s hard for me to see her.” She was terribly upset with herself: How could she break off contact at a time like this? “But I was literally unable to find words to tell Karla it would be OK,” Kelly later explained. “I didn’t think it would be OK, and I couldn’t face Karla—or Christie—and pretend.”

Christie, meanwhile, remained upbeat. After a seven-week hospital stay in the fall of 2003, she got to go home for a while. She typed out her entry on the home computer and ended it by writing: “Well, got to go. My parents are making something in the kitchen that smells pretty good. Ahh! A home-cooked meal at home, where a kid should be. Life is good, and you just need to take it day by day. Be thankful to see the sun rise and set each day. Thank you for your love and support.”

On December 31, 2003, back in the hospital, she wrote that she had much to be grateful for. Her family had come to be with her. They ate popcorn, shared a bottle of sparkling cider, and toasted the new year.

Her fourteenth birthday was January 9, and she described it as “a great day” even though she had a temperature of 100.7° and a two-hour nosebleed. Three days later, she still had a fever. She wrote of having a scan on her lungs and a scope up her nose. On January 14, she wrote of being “tired and weak.” She ended the entry, “Thanks for checking in on me. Love, Christie.”

From then on, Karla and Bruce took over posting updates. They explained that Christie had developed fungus in her lungs, a very serious condition. She was on oxygen to help her breathe. “The doctors are very concerned with Christie’s current condition, and have told us not to give up hope. However, they have prepared us for the worst. We ask again for your thoughts and prayers.”

By February 1, Christie had been heavily sedated for days. “She’s unable to give us any response,” Bruce wrote. “We still talk to her, read to her and play her favorite music. We’ve got a nice window to watch the snowstorm from.”

On February 12, Karla wrote that Christie was awake, but perhaps due to the morphine, she seemed “scared, confused and very agitated. She screams a lot of the time. She doesn’t know her name, age or the rest of our family. She talks a lot of nonsense, which is very hard for us, because we were so excited to ‘have her back.’ ”

On February 16, doctors found blood clots in her bladder and urine. The painful procedure to irrigate her bladder didn’t go well. “She screamed in agony for about 36 hours,” Karla wrote. “It was excruciating to watch.”

At 11:47 A.M. on Friday, February 20, Karla posted this entry: “Christie has taken a critical turn for the worse. She has multi-system failure. Bruce, Ben, Jackie and I are all here with her. Please pray for answers and comfort for her.”

At 8:07 P.M. that night, all Karla could bring herself to type onto the Web site was this: “Christie Rae Blackwood, 1/9/1990-2/20/2004.”

 

 

A
t her home in Northfield, Minnesota, Kelly saw the online posting and touched the words on her computer screen. It was an impulse, she later thought, to wipe the words away.

In Massachusetts, Jane had been monitoring the site all day. When that final posting went up, she mouthed the words “oh my God,” and was soon calling the other Ames girls. She, too, described her response as an instinctual act, as if she were a bird calling out to other birds that they all needed to return to their nest. The girls began calling their bosses to say they wouldn’t be coming to work the next day. They tracked down babysitters for their kids. They called their husbands. And one by one, they made plans to head for airports. They were going to Minneapolis to be with Karla.

Angela was the only one who didn’t think she could make it. But when an email finally came in that she, too, would be there, Kelly again found herself touching the computer screen. (As she later put it: “It was like I was feeling the power of my friendship with these women.”) Through tears, she allowed herself to smile. “We’re all going to be here,” she thought. Because Marilyn had a big house and lived just a half hour from Karla, she invited all the girls to stay with her.

Later that night, someone wrote on the Web site that families in Christie’s neighborhood in Minnesota had lit candles in the Blackwoods’ yard. They also turned on lights in their homes, as a way to honor Christie. Thousands of miles away, in different corners of the country, the Ames girls turned on lights in their homes, too.

Of course, it was the least they could do. And some were already feeling guilty for not having done more while Christie was alive: Why hadn’t they flown to Minneapolis more, sent more money, asked Christie how they might make her happy, told Karla they loved her? The responsibilities of friendship are not easily defined, especially in traumatic times. How much is too much? How little is too little? They had trouble talking about these guilt feelings in the days after Christie’s death. But the feelings were there, unspoken, in all of their heads.

All of the Ames girls arrived within hours of each other on the day before the memorial service. Jenny, flying in from Maryland, was the last to land at the airport. At age forty-one, she was pregnant with her first child, and the sight of her was such a thrill for the other girls that, for a brief moment, it overshadowed their grief.

All the girls, except Karla, of course, camped out at Marilyn’s house the night before the funeral. It was a tremendously sad evening, and yet, like always, the girls reminisced and found themselves giggling. “I feel guilty laughing,” Jenny said, and that was a trigger for all of them, so they’d get teary again. That’s how it went all night.

The conversation turned to how sex-toy parties were being run like Tupperware parties in some of their neighborhoods. One of the girls—they’ve sworn not to say who it was—talked about using a silver bullet during sex. It was all surreal. Talking about sex toys. Grieving for Karla. Crying, then laughing, then crying, then laughing.

It was perhaps the most intense bonding they’d ever done, and Jane said aloud what all of them were thinking: “I wish we could call Karla. I wish she could just come over. She’d want to be here with us.”

 

 

C
hristie’s church memorial service was attended by 750 friends, relatives, classmates and medical staffers. Karla, of course, sat with her family. But the other Ames girls filled a pew. It occurred to Kelly, as they sat there in shades of gray and black, that it was not unlike their school years, when they’d all sit in the same row for assemblies.

Dozens of Christie’s middle-school classmates entered the church together, and because the pews were already filled, they sat three across in the aisles. Almost all of the Ames girls began crying at the sight of Christie’s girlfriends, all of whom had decided to dress in pink as a way of honoring her. The Ames girls were reminded, of course, of their middle-school years together. They knew how profound the loss would be for Christie’s friends.

At one point, though, Kelly found herself feeling almost elated. She looked over at Jenny, pregnant and healthy, about to become a mother. Yes, they had lost Christie, and that was awful. But there was new life coming into their lives, too. “I was feeling joy in that moment,” Kelly later said.

After the service, everyone went back to Karla’s house. There were more than a hundred people there, and though the Ames girls mingled for a while, they naturally gravitated toward each other. One by one, they ended up in the master bedroom, until all ten, including Karla, were sitting on the large king-sized bed.

Someone closed the door, and there they were. They could hear the muffled noise from all the people in the kitchen and living room, but it was as if no one else existed. They noticed that they were touching each other. Everyone had a hand on a shoulder, an arm, a hand. It was a physical connection they hadn’t planned, but it felt natural and inevitable.

Someone asked Karla if she wanted to talk about the last moments of Christie’s life, and it was comforting for her to share those details with all of them. Jane stroked Karla’s arm as she spoke about Christie’s final hours—and then about her final minutes.

Karla used so many complicated medical terms as she spoke. Her eighteen months at Christie’s bedside had left her sounding like a medschool graduate. Kelly marveled at her command of the details. “I’ve never heard Karla sound so articulate,” she thought. “I’m so proud of her.”

The girls found a few reasons to smile and even to laugh. They reminisced a little, too, about the eleven girls they were, when Sheila was a part of them.