A Walk to Remember - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,51

to keep from losing my balance. On the street I saw a man and a woman, walking toward us, heads bent and their hands on their hats to keep them from blowing away. A dog trotted across the road and stopped to smell some bushes. A neighbor across the way was standing on a stepladder, taking down his Christmas lights. Normal scenes from everyday life, things I would never have noticed before, suddenly making me feel angry. I closed my eyes, wanting the whole thing to go away.

“I’m so sorry, Landon,” she kept saying over and over. It was I who should have been saying it, however. I know that now, but my confusion kept me from saying anything.

Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t go away. I held her again, not knowing what else to do, tears filling my eyes, trying and failing to be the rock I think she needed.

We cried together on the street for a long time, just a little way down the road from her house. We cried some more when Hegbert opened the door and saw our faces, knowing immediately that their secret was out. We cried when we told my mother later that afternoon, and my mother held us both to her bosom and sobbed so loudly that both the maid and the cook wanted to call the doctor because they thought something had happened to my father. On Sunday Hegbert made the announcement to his congregation, his face a mask of anguish and fear, and he had to be helped back to his seat before he’d even finished.

Everyone in the congregation stared in silent disbelief at the words they’d just heard, as if they were waiting for a punch line to some horrible joke that none of them could believe had been told. Then all at once, the wailing began.

We sat with Hegbert the day she told me, and Jamie patiently answered my questions. She didn’t know how long she had left, she told me. No, there wasn’t anything the doctors could do. It was a rare form of the disease, they’d said, one that didn’t respond to available treatment. Yes, when the school year had started, she’d felt fine. It wasn’t until the last few weeks that she’d started to feel its effects.

“That’s how it progresses,” she said. “You feel fine, and then, when your body can’t keep fighting, you don’t.”

Stifling my tears, I couldn’t help but think about the play.

“But all those rehearsals . . . those long days . . . maybe you shouldn’t have—”

“Maybe,” she said, reaching for my hand and cutting me off. “Doing the play was the thing that kept me healthy for so long.”

Later, she told me that seven months had passed since she’d been diagnosed. The doctors had given her a year, maybe less.

These days it might have been different. These days they could have treated her. These days Jamie would probably live. But this was happening forty years ago, and I knew what that meant.

Only a miracle could save her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

This was the one question I hadn’t asked her, the one that I’d been thinking about. I hadn’t slept that night, and my eyes were still swollen. I’d gone from shock to denial to sadness to anger and back again, all night long, wishing it weren’t so and praying that the whole thing had been some terrible night-mare.

We were in her living room the following day, the day that Hegbert had made the announcement to the congregation. It was January 10, 1959.

Jamie didn’t look as depressed as I thought she would. But then again, she’d been living with this for seven months already. She and Hegbert had been the only ones to know, and neither of them had trusted even me. I was hurt by that and frightened at the same time.

“I’d made a decision,” she explained to me, “that it would be better if I told no one, and I asked my father to do the same. You saw how people were after the services today. No one would even look me in the eye. If you had only a few months left to live, is that what you would want?”

I knew she was right, but it didn’t make it any easier. I was, for the first time in my life, completely and utterly at a loss.

I’d never had anyone close to me die before, at least not anyone that I could remember. My grandmother had died when I was