But the worst news had begun unfolding a few months prior. Sometime during the summer of that year, my mother had become very ill. It was a strange time for me because my parents never openly mentioned it to me, preferring instead to smile through the symptoms as if nothing serious was happening. The first time my mom went into the hospital, my dad said she was getting her appendix removed. The next time, it was a minor cosmetic procedure. Every time her energy sagged, they explained that she’d had a tough day or was coming down with something or just needed a nap. I was caught up in the rituals of my own twenty-something life, so I didn’t question any of the symptoms. I assumed a new diet might’ve been the reason for her weight loss and thinner hair.
Then, on a day that was already strained to the point of breaking, I got a call from my older brother, Michael. “There’s something you need to know. And you’re going to want to sit down.” He explained that our mother was very sick. She had a deadly form of cancer known as lymphoma, which was already in the late stages by the time they detected it.
I couldn’t understand a lot of his medical jargon, but I got the gist. Because lymphoma was based in the lymph nodes, the lymph was carrying the cancerous cells though the bloodstream to every organ in her body. Could they remove the lymph nodes? It was too far along. Could they treat each organ? It was too pervasive. In essence, there was no center of operations; hence, no easy surgery to remove the cancer.
Our parents had known about the diagnosis for months, but they didn’t want to bother me with all the messy details. Mom and dad had asked him not to tell me, but he thought I should know.
My guts turned to acid, then to worms, then to acid again. Instinctively, I looked for my shadow, but I was inside, naked. The words fought their way out. “Is she okay?”
“Not really, no.”
His scientific formality burned like frostbite. “Is she in pain?”
“Yes.” He added, “A lot.” At that moment, I hated him as much as I ever had. He was talking about our mother the way he used to describe med school cadaver research over dinner—distant, cold—relishing my obvious discomfort. The asshole. Still, he was being honest with me.
“Why didn’t they tell me themselves?” I asked.
“You know how Mom is.”
“I’m calling her.”
“No!” he snapped. “You can’t tell them I told you.”
I considered this. “You want me to pretend I don’t know?”
“Only until she mentions it.”
“Any idea how long that might be?”
His voice became brittle, his paper-thin patience disintegrating completely. “Maybe never. Just do me a favor. Promise me you’ll wait for Mom to bring it up first.”
I promised.
I was crying even before I hung up the phone, childish tears I thought I’d outgrown were cascading down my cheeks. My mother had always been my champion. When my dad was working late or hidden behind his books, it was my mom who was there arranging McDonald’s French fries on a crayon-drenched placemat to explain the wonders of addition and subtraction; acting out character voices from The Jungle Book story while music rambled out of the living room record player; and dropping me off, picking me up, then dropping me off again at the beach. They were enchanting memories, but they were just snapshots, dusty sepia recollections, brittle and cracked with age. From the past ten years, I had nothing. I wanted to blame her for disappearing from my life, but I knew it wasn’t true. I was the one who had disappeared. I had skated away and never looked back.
That night I lay awake in bed sweating, my head crowded with fears of mortality and questions about betrayal. In just three months, my entire wonderful life had fallen to pieces, and I didn’t have a single person to confide in. My brother and I had a fairly tempestuous relationship so our conversation made me feel, if anything, resentful that they had trusted him with the diagnosis. True, he was a doctor, but he was a pediatrician, not an oncologist, and he wasn’t that much older than I was.
I was in a sort of suspended animation, gagged by my vow of silence, bound by my own sense of stubborn pride. I felt helpless to do anything for her, weak. And I was humiliated by what I was certain was my parents’ recognition of that weakness. It was a selfish and self-centered reaction, the response of a thoughtless child, but in my disoriented state, it made sense. Unable to run to her, I ran away, desperate only to run, to find a Never Land filled with Lost Boys like me who lived in a world without mothers.
As a child, Disney had always embodied the promise of a better life, a pure world where good guys were noble and villains wore black, and the difference between the two was clear. Of course, I was older now and educated, too skeptical to believe in a land of Magic and pixie dust. But at that moment, I was desperate, and a desperate person can justify anything. What I needed, I rationalized, was a happy, hopeful place, a safe harbor with a group of people I could trust, people who would dive into a dirty lagoon to save an innocent life. Friends, family, a job—if this was going to work, I needed to start from scratch with only the purest influences.
“What can Disney do for you?” Orville asked again.
I felt the seconds tick away, but still, my mind was blank, and so I blurted out the first words that came to me. “I didn’t know where else to go. I never planned what I’d do if everything went to hell. And so when everything did, in fact, go to hell, I panicked and ran and here I am.” My fingers were clenched in my lap, palms aching from the serrated edges of my unevenly chewed fingernails. “I don’t want anything from Disney. I’m just trying to find…some Magic.”
And just like that, the word was out there, hanging in the air between us, shiny and clean and fragile like a bubble. I had crossed a line, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a godless bastard requesting a reprieve from St. Peter. Orville nodded and leaned back in his chair, and for a moment, there was just the sound of the rain on the roof of the trailer. Then he said, “How soon can you start?”
I signed the contract right there in the photo lab using a Minnie Mouse pen. During the course of my interview, the rain had abated so that by the time Orville ushered me outside, the sky was clear and the air had a damp, clean scent like when you stick your head in a dryer before the load is finished. I felt lighter than air. If somebody had cut me loose, I would’ve floated up, away from the trailer, beyond the magical kingdom and into the Caribbean sky.
Orville cheerfully pumped my hand, then turned his attention to a stack of books and papers by the door. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’re gonna get you started at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.”
“So I’ll be shooting animals?”
His eyes went wide as wheels. “Oh, my ears and whiskers, no! Animals don’t buy pictures.” He motioned for me to hold out my hands, then started dispensing papers and booklets, thick manuals of information. “Your job will be to work with the characters. You’ll take pictures of Mickey and Minnie and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger and anybody else our beloved guests wish to meet. And you’ll try to capture a moment on their faces that doesn’t look like desperate misery, and then you’ll sell the photos back to them at a very reasonable price.”
By this time, my arms were full, and the stack of information was getting heavy. “That doesn’t sound very magical,” I mumbled.
“Magic,” he said, “has nothing to do with it.”
When You Wish Upon a Star
Walter Elias Disney died alone. According to the reports, there was a physician on duty and some hospital staff nearby, but neither his wife nor his two daughters were present when he finally