The Peace Project

By Denise Mathew

Seventeen-year-old Marilee Mackie has everything going for her, beauty,money and a bright future. But when she’s diagnosed with cancer her world falls apart. Instead of finishing her senior year she begins the fight of her life.

Nineteen-year-old Jax, an enigmatic hospital orderly, lives on the Strip, the proverbial other side of the tracks. With his sleeves of tattoos and rocker look, he’s the kind of bad boy that Marilee has always steered clear of.
strips her bare, she searches for meaning in her life. Seeing that Marilee has lost hope, Jax steps in and helps her find purpose, a reason to live another day. From devastation the Peace Project is born.

With Marilee’s money and Jax’s knowledge of the Strip, the teenagers embark on an unforgettable journey. Marilee learns that happiness is a choice, small acts of kindness can change lives forever, that a little good goes a long way, and that love can grow even in the darkest places of your life. But more than anything she learns that rainbows can follow storms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780993629150

Book preview

Denise

They say that your whole life can change in a second. Good or bad, destiny spares no one. Before that day in Dr. John’s office I thought that kind of moment, where everything that you believed defined you was tugged away from you in a quick snap, wasn’t real. In my opinion those kinds of things happened to old people, people who didn’t have their whole life planned out meticulously, people who weren’t me.

But suddenly in less time than it had taken me to draw in a breath and exhale, a door into darkness had swung wide open and something horrible had entered my world. Something ugly, the kind of thing that seventeen-year-old girls weren’t supposed to get, had decided to take over my reality.

One six letter word made my life stand still.

Cancer. Hodgkins Lymphoma Stage 3 to be exact.

How can she have cancer? Kids don’t get cancer.

Mom’s voice cut into my thoughts, bringing me back to the too hot and cramped office of my pediatrician, Dr. John.

I cast my gaze around the room, making it a point to avoid looking at Mom and Harold who were completely focused on Dr. John. I just didn’t have it in me to deal with Mom having a panic attack, or Harold asking too many questions like it was the Inquisition. I couldn’t cope with my parents since I was doing all I could to keep myself from collapsing into a heap of fear.

I never really looked at much of anything in Dr. John’s office before now, but suddenly I found myself noticing every detail. Brightly colored prints of cartoon Disney characters covered the sky blue walls. An oversized glass jar, filled with assorted lollipops sat next to a container of tongue depressors and cotton balls. There was a child-sized blood pressure cuff pinned to the wall, I wondered if my arm was too big for it now. The stacks of paper gowns and the assorted bottles of liquids and concoctions that my doctor used to heal people, seemed so much more important than they had ever before. And all I could think was that I wanted to go back to when the worst thing I got was a shot and a red lollipop afterwards.

Well Luanne, there are types of cancers that…well, Dr. John started to say. Before he could finish his sentence, Mom stood up and swayed.

Here it comes, I said under my breath. I shook my head, hoping for something other than what I knew would happen.

Harold knew Mom as well as I did. He jumped into action like a super hero ready for battle. The only problem is Harold is no super hero, he’s your typical uptight accountant who spends all his days looking at the past not the future. He did manage to catch Mom before she face planted on the navy Berber carpet.

Luanne, honey…? Harold said.

He gave Mom a shake. True to form she remained catatonically still. It amazed me how she could go the color of a bleached out sheet of paper on command. Nobody could deny that she had a talent for being histrionic.

When Mom didn’t respond, Harold fanned her with his hand, as if the flutter of air that he had produced would fix everything. Watching Harold preen over Mom made me really notice how mismatched they were. It was almost laughable, that was if I was in a laughing mood.

Harold, the only father I had ever known, was slight of build and petite for a man at 5’6. He clocked in at a little less than one hundred and twenty pounds, a full forty pounds lighter than Mom. Not that Mom was fat, because she wasn’t. She was curvy in all the right places, and if you looked really hard you might have said she had a slight resemblance to Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe is Mom’s all time favorite idol and who I’m unfortunately named after. I still don’t get why Mom would name me Marilyn Monroe Mackie, seriously did she give any thought to the fact that my initials were going to be triple M? Even though I could have changed my name to Lawrence when Mom had married Harold, call me crazy but I had decided to keep my triple M status anyway. I can’t say why, only that my name was as much a part of me as my face was.

Other than the unfortunate state of my initials I still didn’t get why Mom would have named me after a screen legend, who from all accounts had an extremely tragic life. Despite Mom giving me that moniker on my birth certificate, no one other than Mom and Harold called me Marilyn. I was Marilee, and had been since I was in pre-school when I had decided that it was the coolest name I could get from Marilyn. Lucky for me it stuck.

At six feet with flowing bottle blonde hair, big blue eyes and a full mouth, Mom was still beautiful, albeit in a little trashy way. Even without asking, Mom was always too happy to tell everyone who would listen that she used to be a runway model. That little fact wasn’t exactly true, since she did precisely four shows when she was nineteen before getting pregnant with me. The rest as they say is history. But in Mom’s mind her modeling life wasn’t really over because at least once a week she would tell me about the career that she should have had, could have had…

Luanne darling, come on sweetheart, wake up…

Harold pushed his black framed glasses up the bridge of his sweaty nose. They promptly slid back into their former spot at the tip again. Poor Harold had terrible vision. In fact he was legally blind without his glasses. The lenses in his glasses were so strong that they made his eyes look like Yoda’s. Coupled with his too-small nose and thin lips he wouldn’t have been considered the most likely candidate to be Mom’s husband, but as Mom always said, beggars couldn’t be choosers. In her opinion the fact that Harold, a highly successful accountant and all around good guy had been willing to marry her, even with a two-year-old child in tow, was beyond gracious.

I cut my eyes to Dr. John. He was a smallish Indian man, balding at the crown with skin the color of caramel. He could always be counted on to calm Mom, but when I studied him I realized that he had fallen under Mom’s spell too and looked more than a little stressed.

He had been my doctor as long as I could remember and I had to confess that I had never seen him this off kilter, but then again he had never had the full Luanne Lawrence treatment before now either.

Susan can you come in here for a moment, he said into the intercom on his desk. I watched the chaos unfurl its wings and the only thing that rang true was that I was the one with cancer. I shook my head, stunned and in disbelief, that even though I had just received the worse news of my life, Mom was the center of attention. I backed into the corner so everyone could fawn over her. Mom played the part of the tortured soul perfectly. With her hair fanned out and her fake eyelashes resting peacefully against her milky white high cheekbones it was as if she had choreographed the whole scene.

And right there, despite the fact that Dr. John had just told me I had Hodgkins Lymphoma, laughter bubbled out of me like a soda bottle that had been shaken up too much. Before I knew it tears were streaming down my cheeks, yet I giggled so hard that I could barely catch my breath. That’s when the realness of it all sunk in. No matter what was going on with Mom, or how comical the whole scene was, I was sick. And it wasn’t like Mono like my friend Selina got for a whole year, where she missed so much school that she had to take courses in the summer. I was sick enough to die, long before I had a chance to live.

With that reality firmly lodged deep in my brain my laughter died away and numbness took its place. Tears continued to stream down my cheeks, but that’s all they were, tears, salty drops of water. I felt so empty and alone. For the first time in my life I didn’t have it all figured out. And I wanted to be normal, and have parents that could handle this kind of news because I wasn’t sure if I could go it alone. I couldn’t be a support to Mom and Harold and get through whatever I had to deal with too.

Without another thought I left the office. In the midst of all the pandemonium it was easy enough to slip out and away from them. As I made my way through the packed waiting room it seemed as if every eye was on me, like they somehow knew I had been just handed a death sentence. I tugged my iPod out of my Prada purse and plugged the ear buds into my ears. I blasted the dance music that usually brought me up after something major happened. It did nothing to make me feel better this time.

Since Mom and Harold were my only mode of transport, and I wasn’t about to go back inside Dr. John’s office, I decided to take a public bus. I had always hated public transport. The buses seemed chock full of weird people who liked to stare. I hoped that since it was the middle of the day it would be fairly empty. I wasn’t wrong because when I boarded the bus I noticed that besides an old man with a black fedora hat and a sable colored cane, tight in his gnarled hand, I was alone. I sat in a seat closest to the front and shut my eyes, trying to process everything that had just occurred. It felt impossible.

I got off at my stop, walking the block or so to my house. Multi-colored leaves were already falling off the trees, helicoptering around me. When a few of them got stuck in my hair it made me remember that I had just had my hair permanently straightened, and that now there was a good chance that I would lose it all. I was sure that I would probably look like a bald alien. Just thinking about losing my hair made me feel pissed. Why had cancer picked my life to screw with?

Didn’t the universe know that I’d had everything worked out. At seventeen I was already ahead of the game because I had skipped grade five. So next year I would have been off to college to get my undergrad, then I was going to apply to law school. Then after I had written the Bar, I would land the job of the century. Next would have been to find the perfect guy, someone who was gorgeous with a ton of money, but who had eyes only for me. Maybe someday we would have kids, a girl and a boy, both would have my blonde hair and blue eyes and…

A few seconds later I spotted my house, a massive two story grey brick, European manor style mansion that was by far the biggest on my street. We all knew that the house was too big for just the three of us, but since it was in the best neighborhood in town, Mom had insisted Harold buy it for us, despite its size.

I sighed with relief when I saw that our black Mercedes SUV wasn’t parked in the driveway, meaning I didn’t have to face them yet. Just as I put my key in the front door I felt my cell phone vibrate in my purse. Rather than grab it like I normally would have, I ignored it. It was a first for me.

When I walked into the house everything was exactly as it had been when I had left for school in the morning. Seeing that nothing had changed made my trip to Dr. John’s office seem like a bad dream, not reality. I tossed my purse onto the coffee colored leather sofa. Before I retreated to my room I heard a key in the lock. The door swung wide and Harold strode in. He caught sight of me, in a flash his face pinched like he had bitten into a lemon.

Oh there you are Marilyn. We’ve been worried sick. After everything that’s happened already the last thing your mother needs is added stress, Harold said. He wagged his finger at me. I stared back at him incredulously. I guess being diagnosed with a life threatening illness wasn’t enough to garner any sympathy. Obviously in Harold’s opinion all the attention went to my melodramatic mother.

I… I started to say.

A lump formed in my throat so rapidly that I couldn’t utter a word in my defense. He closed the distance between us, raking his hand through his thinning dark hair. Although there was not much left on his head, what was there, had been dyed black, according to Mom’s specifications. The last thing she could cope with was Harold’s grey hair. It was a wonder that she hadn’t already hooked him up with a hair transplant doctor since she couldn’t stand bald men either. I wondered if that sentiment held for bald daughters too. I tried to swallow but it seemed impossible, so I just stared blankly at him.

I’m going to bring her in now. I expect you to be on your best behavior.

Me? The word came out in a squeak. Once again I couldn’t believe that Mom had hijacked a time in my life where I should have been the one supported, not the other way around.

Harold laid his delicate hand on my shoulder. I recognized the pity in his gaze and it almost unhinged me. Yet I knew that whatever sympathy he felt for me would never supersede his commitment to his Luanne. The way he hovered over her made me think that he was actually grateful that she had married him.

You know your mother. She doesn’t do well with bad news. Try to understand.

I’ll try Harold but did you forget that I’m the one who has cancer not Mom?

The word cancer caught in my throat. I fought to hold back the tears ready to overflow. He stared back at me. I knew by his expression of resignation that I didn’t have a snowballs chance in Hades of making him see that I deserved as much care as Mom did. I shrugged. What else could I do?

She just needs time, Harold said. He released an extended sigh. I’m going to get her now. Dr. John gave her a sedative, so she’s going right up to bed.

He turned and moved toward the door. When he did I couldn’t help but notice that his usually crisp button down white shirt was uncharacteristically rumpled, and one tail dangled over the back of his black wool slacks. Oddly in some strange way his slightly disheveled appearance made me feel like he was actually as thrown by my diagnosis as I was.

Minutes later, Harold returned with Mom. If it was possible to cling to someone who was six inches shorter than you and still manage to appear frail, Mom did. Her bleached blonde hair was in an atypical tangle. Her mascara was a mass of scraggly black trails on her cheeks and her lipstick was smudged all around her lips. I had seen her have more than her fair share of emotional meltdowns, usually over trivial things like a bad haircut or when she had broken a nail. I had never seen her quite as bad as she looked right then.

She glanced over at me with her watery bloodshot eyes then dabbed at her nose with a crumpled pink tissue. I was sure it was from her personal stash. She always had tissues available since she cried at just about anything, maybe even a stop sign. Of course in her world tissues always had to be colored and scented.

My poor baby, Mom wailed. She waved a hand weakly, as if it was too much effort to reach for me.

Now, now, Luanne, she’ll be all right, Harold said. Mom buried her head in his shoulder and once again I was struck by how strange they looked together, like an Amazon warrior and a gnome.

Damn, I breathed.

Mom broke into a fresh set of hysterics. I did the only thing I could, I tore up to my bedroom. I pushed into my room, a place that had been my refuge for more times than I could remember. I had always felt safe there but now it was too pink and fluffy. I couldn’t understand how everything could be so artificially cheery when my whole world had fallen apart. I wanted to rip the petal pink and lilac duvet off my four poster bed and burn it. In fact I wanted to torch the whole place because the decor wasn’t even my style, it signified that once again I had given in to Mom’s dreams. I had always been the perfect and dutiful daughter, always working to make everyone happy. And look how that had turned out for me.

Since I could remember I had lived my whole life by a code that said that it was my job to make sure that I was perfect in every way possible. Now none of that mattered. Not one moment of my time spent on the Prom committee or my hours studying for tests to bring up my GPA, could do anything to change that I had cancer, and I might never make it to my eighteenth birthday.

Sirens pealed and flashing lights strobed through my bedroom window. It was time to get up. Years before, I had stopped wondering who had been shot, killed or mugged on the sidewalk below our apartment building. There was nothing I could do about it. Florescent yellow police lines, blood on concrete and chalk drawings were just another day of my life on the Strip.

Jackson? Are you up yet dear? Gran yelled.

She was the only person in the world who still called me Jackson, my full name. To everyone else I was just Jax.

I stared at the red numbers on the clock and groaned, 6:00 am; it was downright inhuman. My head ached and my eyes were sandy with sleep. Three hours of z’s just didn’t cut it after a long night of sets at the dive of a bar that my band did gigs at. But it wasn’t odd for me to be burnt out since I worked three jobs; all of which I loved.

It didn’t matter to me that the only reason we had been hired to play in the club was because we were the cheapest act in town. Nor did the odor of stale smoke that clung to me for what seemed like days after a gig, get me down, because the club was the one place where I got a chance to sing with my band.

Yeah Gran, I said, throwing the patchwork quilt Gran had made me aside. It was supposed to be my day off, a rare occasion when I didn’t have to work at my paying job at a retro record store called Vinyl. Unfortunately I’d had a moment of weakness and had agreed to do a shift at my non-paying job at St. Martins Hospital for Children. A choice I was already beginning to regret.

I sat at the side of the bed like I did every day, taking a second to stare down at the track marks on my arms, and the tattoos that were slowly covering them. I stood up and moved to the cracked window in my bedroom facing the street. From the looks of the sheets of rain pelting the Strip, it was going to be another shitty day. That meant I was going to get drenched in a few seconds flat, probably as soon as I stepped out the door to go to work.

I hiked up my boxers, pulled a wrinkled Led Zepplin t-shirt over my head and strode down the hall of the two bedroom apartment that Gran and I shared. The scuffed beige linoleum was cold on my bare feet. I knew if Gran caught me without my socks on again she would skin me alive, literally. I chuckled to myself, thinking that an elderly woman as skinny as a stick and only half my height, scared most of my so called tough friends into submission.

She just had to give them a look, one that said just try and mess with her, and she would set you and your world right. But as tough as Gran could be she also had a soft side, like gooey marshmallow, and all my friends loved her for it. Gran loved to take care of people and she usually never picked a fight unless, in her words, it was warranted. Like if I skipped a meal or went out in the winter without a hat. Major offenses in her opinion were ones that involved the possibility of someone getting sick. In her youth Gran had been a nurse and had seen too much sickness and death not to worry about people.

The bacon and eggs are already on the table, the toast is coming, Gran said without turning around. She was positioned in front of the two burner hotplate, bobby-pinned curls covered every part of her bluish-grey hair as usual. It was Gran’s ritual to put her hair up every night in pin curls.

Bacon, what’s the occasion? I said, tugging one of the metal and plastic chairs out from under the wooden table. Bacon was expensive and as far as we were concerned, a luxury reserved for special times. But as soon as I had said the words I remembered that it was four years already since…

I grinned. You have a memory like an elephant, I said.

Gran spun around quicker than I had expected. She shook a spatula my way. A wide smile spread across her face, putting even more creases at the corners of her eyes and showcasing her pearly white dentures. So far all her teeth were intact since she hadn’t dropped her dentures in the sink yet. Gran had snapped more teeth off her dentures than I thought possible. It was an odd experience to see her with a perfect set, how long that would last was anybodies guess.

And because it’s such a special day I want to turn the cards for you, she said, giving me the beady eye.

I heaved out a huge sigh. Before I could protest she cut in.

Please Jackson, just do it for me this once, it won’t take but a minute. Her blue eyes twinkled in a way that I couldn’t resist. I shook my head and shrugged.

Fine, but it has to be quick I have to work at the hospital today… I started to say.

Gran passed me a few slices of buttered toast. She placed an arthritic hand on her waist. I didn’t think you were working there today.

I wasn’t supposed to be but…they were kind of stuck so I offered. I stuffed a fork full of fried eggs into my mouth and bit off a piece of toast.

Jackson you’re too good, you work yourself to the bone… she started to say but then seemed to reconsider. Her voice trailed off. I know, I know…I just worry that you’re working yourself too hard, I couldn’t bare it if you got sick… she said before I had said a word. Sudden and unexpected tears shimmered in her eyes and seeing her like that made me swallow a few times more than was necessary to get my food down.

I couldn’t help but remember how much I had put her through over the past few years. I wished with all my being that I could take away her fear that she would somehow lose me. But I knew I couldn’t, she had seen me at my worst and she knew. Sadly once you knew something there was no way to unknow it. Desperate to divert the conversation away from a time in our lives that neither of us wanted to recall, I did the only thing I could, I bit the bitter bullet.

So are you going to do my cards or not? I said, shoveling more food into my already stuffed mouth. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but if Gran reading my cards meant that she would get some sort of peace about my future, then it was the least I could do.

As expected Gran jumped on the offer. The tears that had filled her eyes miraculously dried up. She was up and off to our poor excuse for a living room in a flash. She moved toward the one piece of furniture that she had kept from our old house, a hand carved teak armoire, that my grandfather had built for her not long after they had been married. The piece was almost fifty years old and was the one bit of memorabilia that Gran had managed to hold on to over the years. My grandfather had died from a massive stroke when I was too small to really remember him much. From what Gran had told me about him, he had been a great man who had done everything he could to take care of his family.

Gran said that I was the spitting image of him, only a Goth version. I laughed because it was funny that Gran called me Goth, something I wasn’t even close to. As far as Gran was concerned anyone with tattoos, of which I had two sleeves, was Goth. Although lately she had taken to calling me Emo, obviously a word she had heard somewhere. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Emo wasn’t actually my style either, since my hair was too short and I didn’t sweep it to the side to cover one eye like a twisted Cyclops.

Sure I had shoe black dyed hair and piercings, but I didn’t have enough to rate, not to mention that I hated Screamo music. It also didn’t matter to Gran that I was the lead singer in a three man band that played cover pop music, that was a million miles from Emo. She had no idea that those two types of music resided in different zip codes. The bottom line was that I preferred not to be labeled. I was just Jax and with the crap that I had lived through, being just me was more than enough.

Gran eased out the third drawer of the armoire. She pulled out a dark wooden box with a brass inlay of the Eye of Horus that she kept her tarot cards in. Gran was what people called a sensitive, intuitive, or the name she hated the most, a psychic. Whatever you wanted to call her, Gran told peoples fortunes. Usually she did it for fun and didn’t charge, but if people insisted that they pay her she never took money. Instead she usually did a trade for something else, like a gift card or a dozen eggs or pretty much anything someone wanted to give her. The oddest thing that she had gotten was a brass thing that looked like a miniature birdbath with a spike coming out of the center. Neither Gran or I knew what it was, even so she had it on display with all her other knick-knacks. Something Gran had a crap load of.

After she slid the drawer closed, she ran a hand over the ornately carved front panels of the armoire. I had seen her do that more times than I could count, as if she were somehow caressing a living person not an inanimate piece of furniture. Every time Gran touched the armoire, a dreamy expression crossed her face for just a second. When that happened I knew she was remembering my grandfather Pat and the life that they’d had together. Watching her like that made me never want to love anyone that much, because I knew more than anyone else that death was always waiting for us especially when we least expected it.

Before Gran came back I cleared my dishes from the table and put them in the sink, already filled with warm soapy water. I picked up the scrub and started washing the dishes.

Jackson leave those alone, I’ll do them later. Come here and shuffle the cards before it’s time to go to work…

I grinned again, Gran knew me too well. She was well aware that by doing the dishes right then and there I was trying to put off the inevitable. I dried my hands and peered out the micro-window over the kitchen sink. Rain still pelted the world outside, making the pavement shiny black. Once again I dreaded that I had to go out into the onslaught on my crappy excuse for a bike that had one speed, painfully slow.

Even before I had sat in the chair across from Gran she had the stack of cards in my hands.

Shuffle, she ordered.

I shook my head without comment. Any protests at this stage of the process would fall on deaf ears. I shuffled the oversized cards. Though my hands, much like the rest of me, were large, since I was just under six foot four, I always found shuffling tarot cards an awkward proposition. After I had done what I could, I passed the deck back to Gran. With expert efficiency that never failed to impress me, she laid out what she called the Celtic spread in mere seconds.

Did you make a wish? she asked.

You should know by now, I always make a wish… you know that million dollar lottery ticket I’m waiting to get, I said with a chuckle. Gran was too busy studying the cards to be bothered by my comment. If I knew anything it was that Gran took her tarot seriously. Nothing could pull her focus away when she was in the middle of a reading.

Here you are Jackson, she said, pointing at the card that had a guy sitting on a horse in a suit of armor.

The Knight of Wands…a passionate and liberal guy who doesn’t like to be told what to do, yep that sums me up just right, I said.

Gran brought her gaze to me. Her grey eyebrows hiked up in obvious surprise because not only was I paying attention, I had even known what the card meant. Contrary to my best intentions, it was hard not to pick up some of it, I had seen Gran do tarot cards so many times that there was no way I couldn’t know some of the cards and their meanings.

Well, maybe you should be doing this reading, she said after a few beats.

I shrugged, grinning. She brought her focus back to the cards, flipping them over. As she did she