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When Jason first hears that Whizzer is sick, the adults try to play it off. Whizzer didn’t show for dinner, and when Jason inquires after his absence his mother only offers that he is “a little under the weather, there’s nothing to worry about.” But Jason is too smart for his own good. Mendel glances briefly up at Trina from his plate before staring back down. Marvin’s eyes can’t seem to settle anywhere, and, trying too hard to look uninterested and casual, Jason’s father keeps chewing but does so at such a regular rhythm that it seems unnatural if you’re really paying attention. And Jason is paying attention. And there is something to worry about.
He knows from the beginning that it is more serious than his parents let on. Whizzer has more than a cold or flu. He can see the grimness of the situation in his father’s posture, and the crease between his mother’s brows.
Whizzer doesn’t go to his next baseball game. Ever since the first one of Jason’s baseball games he attended, Whizzer has become such a regular presence that even some of the other boys on the team asked why he isn’t there. And Whizzer doesn’t show up with Marvin when Jason is being picked up from his mom’s house for the weekend. Nor is he waiting at his father’s apartment when they arrive. He isn’t in the park playing chess with Jason the next Saturday, or at Cordelia’s birthday party a few days later even though it is at Cordelia’s and Charlotte's apartment, which is only just across from his father’s and Whizzer’s.
Somehow, however, it doesn’t occur to Jason that Whizzer might never be in those places again. It’s just a matter of time.
Until one day, when his mom and Mendel are trying to get him to make decisions about his bar mitzva. Jason tells them he wants to wait until Whizzer gets better. To which Mendel replies that Whizzer might not get better.
Might. He might not get better, but maybe he will.
Maybe he will. Maybe he will. Maybe he will. Lying in his bed, night after night, Jason tries to convince himself that there is a chance for Whizzer. “He might get better. Whizzer can still get better.” Jason whispers to himself until he is too tired to say the words, and then he just mouths them instead. When he is too tired to mouth the words he thinks them. But when he’s too tired to think, he is left only with what he knows.
They are trying to prepare him by mentioning the possibility that Whizzer is going to die. Ease him into a truth that they’ve all known. Known and not told him for so long, trying to protect him. Jason knows his family. He knows that they would still be trying to shield him from the thought of death unless they are absolutely sure it will be the outcome.
So, when he’s too tired to think, Jason weeps hot, angry tears into his pillowcase. He doesn’t want to play in baseball games where Whizzer isn’t trying to coach him from the sidelines. Or attend family dinners without quick witted comments being fired off to dissolve the tension any time it grows too thick between his mom and dad. Jason doesn’t want to visit his dad and see him sad like he had been before he and Whizzer got back together.
His family only started coming together after Whizzer showed up at that first baseball game and came back into their lives. Sure Whizzer had been one cause of its falling apart in the first place, but things can’t just go back to how they were before Whizzer. Things can’t go back, and they won’t stay the same, and what if nothing will be okay without Whizzer around?
He is much older than Jason, and not what Trina had meant when she wished for Jason to get a friend, but Whizzer is the friend he had gotten. Jason didn’t want to think about losing a friend. Whizzer definitely isn’t what anyone expected would be the missing piece necessary to bring their tight-knit family back together, but no one can deny now that he is as much a part of the family as anyone. He has grown to be a father figure to Jason just as Mendel has. Jason doesn’t want to think about losing a dad.
So Jason keeps telling himself, all the way until the very end, that maybe, maybe, maybe.
But Jason is too smart for his own good, so he thinks the words “Whizzer might get better,” but he never believes them to be true. He just thinks them and thinks them and thinks them until he can’t anymore. Until he’s too tired to lie to himself. And then he hopes for sleep to come as quickly as it can, because he doesn’t want to face what he knows, and because all the crying makes his head hurt.