My mom was the patient. I was impatient. I wanted someone—anyone—to do something big.
In principle, I don’t believe in war or violence in any form. In that way, I’m not like Joan—I hardly ever get that kind of hot, bursting feeling in your chest that makes you want to grab a weapon and charge. But when my mother was being held prisoner in that hospital, at the end, and they were doing all those things to her that seemed like pure torture, I did fantasize all the time about blasting open the doors of the receiving area with a blowtorch, and marching down the halls with a machine gun and chains of ammunition strapped across my chest, picking her up out of that hospital bed, and carrying her out in my arms, through the automatic doors into the parking lot. Swinging her up over the back of my horse and riding off with her. Knocking down anyone who got in my way. It was pretty much the only time in my life when I ever wanted to commit a violent act. So I do know that I’m capable of it.
But I never did it, of course. Dr. Moench said, “We have to wait for six months after surgery before we consider a more aggressive course of treatment.” And we all said, “Okay.” Dr. Ratner said, “As soon as the histology report comes in, we’ll know better what our options are.” And we all said, “Okay.” We weren’t bold. We weren’t demanding. We didn’t want to risk making a mistake, and losing everything.
This is the second thing about Joan that makes her different from other saints. Because she got her instructions directly from saints and angels, and because she liked to do big things, she made, like, a ton of mistakes. Most girl saints don’t make big mistakes because they don’t have the chance to. They’re, like, walled up in their cell or hanging out alone in their leper colony or whatever, not really bothering anybody. Joan made big mistakes, and in the end they had big, terrible consequences.
Not at first—at first she was a natural-born genius of war. She defied the wisdom of the older male generals and led her army straight into besieged Orléans, even though no army units had been able to liberate that city for over a year. When the generals were like, “You must wait,” Joan didn’t sit back in her salmon-covered vinyl chair and say, “Okay.” She was like, “No more waiting. Now.” Through a few brilliant, insanely bold moves, she beat back the English and Orléans was freed. Nobody could believe it. It was a miracle.
And for a while she rode the miracle. She won battle after battle, against all odds, and the hungry, hopeful peasants of France called her invincible. But eventually, she overreached. The numbers in her army dwindled, and she worked her men—and herself—so hard that they found themselves in over their heads. At Compiègne, Joan was captured mid-battle, and taken prisoner by the English.
When I was little, the one picture in my Joan book that I couldn’t bear to look at showed Joan in the middle of her last battle, when she got shot in the shoulder and dragged down off her horse’s back by the enemy. In this picture, her horse is writhing in pain, his lips and nostrils flaring, his eyes huge. His front legs are up and he’s halfway through throwing Joan off his back. Joan’s eyes are closed, her hand moving up toward where the arrow has embedded itself in her shoulder, and she’s come a few inches up off her saddle. She’s about to topple into the mud but she hasn’t yet. Her blue standard is on its way down to the ground but hasn’t yet hit. Joan is suspended, floating between glory and defeat.
I used to pinch those pages closed when I read the book to keep from having to see Joan fail. But now I love that picture. I love it so much. I love how Joan kept going right up to the end. It reminds me that sometimes defeat is the price of taking action. If you do something, you become a target. People want to take you down. That’s a risk. But it’s better to do too much, better to try too hard, better to have a crisis of faith and get thrown and climb back up on your horse and keep riding, than to see something wrong in the world and not do anything at all.
Anyway, if you need your heroes to be perfect, you won’t have very many. Even Superman had his kryptonite. I’d rather have my heroes be more like me: Trying to do the right thing, sometimes messing up. Making mistakes. Saying they’re sorry. And forgiving other people when they mess up, too.
16
Jesse
Jesse lies on the living room couch with the morning sunlight stalled over her, warming her afghan-covered legs. She’s in her navy-blue cutoff sweatpants and white men’s undershirt, and she has the props of illness arranged around her: TV on mute tuned to the Home Shopping Network (a woman’s hands silently stroking a trio of fake diamond bracelets), Tylenol, and flat ginger ale with a bendy straw in it on the end table by her head. She managed to convince Arthur, if not Fran, that she was too unwell for school this morning, but she doesn’t have a fever. Only her heart is sick.