Part 2: A 55-Year-Old Biker Walked Into a Pediatric Cancer Ward to Read One Story to One Little Girl — Five Years and Twelve Funerals Later, He’s Still Coming Back
He came back every Tuesday.
Not once a month like most volunteers. Not twice a month. Every single Tuesday at 2 PM, rain or shine. He parked his Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in the visitor lot. He took the elevator to the third floor. He signed in at the nurses’ station. He walked down the hall and into the playroom.
The kids would already be waiting for him by 1:55.
Sophia was always in the front row by the third week. She had claimed a small wooden chair directly in front of his big chair — Bear chair, she called it, because only Bear is big enough to sit in it — and she would climb into Mason’s lap halfway through every story and lean her bald head against his beard. He would adjust his arm around her IV line without ever interrupting the story.
She made him read The Little Engine That Could every single time.
He had other books in his backpack. Picture books, chapter books, a battered copy of Charlotte’s Web. Sometimes a different child would request a different book and he’d read that one first.
But the last book of every Tuesday — every single one, for six months — was The Little Engine That Could. Because Sophia asked for it. Because Sophia said the little engine sounded like her. I think I can, I think I can. She would whisper it along with him as he read, her cracked little voice from chemo making the words sound like a prayer.
On the fifth Tuesday — this was March 2019 — she had made him promise her something.
She had been having a bad week. Her counts were low. She had been throwing up since Monday. She was tired in a way seven-year-olds should never be.
She climbed into his lap as usual. He started to read. She put one small hand on his beard like she always did and she said, real quiet:
Uncle Bear. Promise you’ll come back.
He looked down at her.
He said: I promise, kid.
She said: No. Promise you’ll come back even if I’m not here.
He stopped reading.
He told me about this conversation three years later, sitting at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night, and his hands were shaking when he told me. He said he had not known what to say to her. He said he had wanted to lie. He said he had wanted to tell her she was going to be fine. He said he could not get the words out.
So he said the only true thing he could think of.
He said: Sophia. I promise.
She nodded against his chest. She made him spit-shake on it — finger to finger, the way kids do — and then she said okay, you can keep reading now, and he read her The Little Engine That Could for the fifth time.
Sophia died on a Sunday morning in August 2019.
I was on shift. I was the nurse who pronounced her at 4:47 AM. Her mother Sara was holding one of her hands. Her grandmother was holding the other. The room was quiet. There was a small blue stuffed train on her pillow — Mason had given it to her on the Tuesday before, the last time he saw her — and her small hand was wrapped around it.
I knew Mason was scheduled for Tuesday at 2 PM. Two days later.
I didn’t know how to tell him.
I tried to call the volunteer coordinator on Monday to ask her to call him. She was on vacation. I tried to call him directly — Mason did not have a cell phone. He still doesn’t. The man owns one landline and refuses to upgrade.
So at 1:55 on Tuesday, August 27th, 2019, Mason Brackett walked off the elevator on the third floor of Mercy Children’s Hospital carrying a hardcover copy of The Little Engine That Could and a small blue Hot Wheels train he had bought at a gas station that morning for Sophia.
He walked up to my station.
He said: Where is she, Delphine?
I could not speak.
He saw my face. He set the book and the toy down very carefully on my counter. He said: When?
I told him. Sunday morning. Peaceful. With her mother.
He nodded. He did not say anything else.
He turned around and he walked back to the elevator. He pushed the button. The doors did not open fast enough. He walked to the stairwell instead. I heard the heavy door swing shut behind him.
I found him forty minutes later sitting on a metal bench in the corridor outside the chapel on the first floor. Both of his elbows were on his knees and his face was in his hands and his shoulders were moving and he was not making a single sound.
I sat down next to him.
I did not say anything.
He sat there for two hours and forty minutes. I know because I went back to my floor and worked the rest of my shift and came back at the end of it and he was still there. The same position. His beard was wet. The cuffs of his sleeves were wet.
When I sat down again at 7 PM, he finally spoke.
He said: Delphine. I can’t come back. I’m sorry.
I told him I understood.
He stood up. He walked to the elevator. He went down to the lobby. I watched through the window as he got on his Fat Boy in the rain and he sat on it for another ten minutes before he started the engine.
Then he rode away.
The next Tuesday, he did not come.
The Tuesday after that, he did not come.
I covered for him with the kids the first week. Told them Uncle Bear was sick. The second week I told them Uncle Bear had to take a break. By the third Tuesday I was running out of stories. The kids on my floor are not stupid. They notice when grownups go missing. They have noticed every grownup who has gone missing from their lives, which is most of them.
A new patient had been admitted two weeks earlier. His name was Eli Voorhees. Five years old. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Standard-risk, good prognosis if treatment went well — but he was four weeks into induction chemo and he was scared and quiet and small and his mother was a single mom working two jobs and could not always be there.
Eli’s bed in the playroom was three down from where Sophia’s used to be.
On the third Tuesday — September 17th — I was getting ready to leave the volunteer coordinator a message officially asking her to take Mason off the Tuesday slot, because he had not called in and I figured he was done.
That was the afternoon Mason walked off the elevator.
He had not shaved in three weeks. His beard was longer and wilder than I had ever seen it. His eyes were swollen. He was carrying a backpack and his face was set in a way I recognized — I’d seen it on every parent who had ever come to my floor to take their child home for the last time.
He walked up to my station.
He said: Delphine. I came to tell you I can’t keep doing this.
I opened my mouth to answer him.
I did not get the chance.
Behind Mason, from down the hall, a small voice said: Uncle Bear?
Mason turned around.
Eli Voorhees was standing in the doorway of his hospital room in dinosaur pajamas, holding his IV pole with one hand and a small blue stuffed train with the other. The same blue stuffed train Mason had given Sophia the Tuesday before she died. Sara — Sophia’s mother — had given it to Eli’s mom the week of the funeral. Sophia would have wanted another kid to have it, Sara had said.
Eli looked up at Mason with the serious expression five-year-olds get when they’re working up the courage to say something big.
He said: Uncle Bear. Will you read me the book? Sophia said you read it the best.
Mason did not move.
For about ten seconds, that six-foot, three-hundred-pound man stood frozen in the middle of my pediatric oncology hallway.
He told me later — months later — what was going through his head in those ten seconds.
He told me he was thinking: Sophia told this kid about me. Before she died, she told this kid about me. She made sure.
He told me he was thinking: She kept her end of a promise I almost broke.
Mason walked down the hall to Eli. He got down on his knees so he was eye level with the little boy. The kneeling — the lowering of three hundred pounds onto a hospital floor — took some effort. I saw him put one hand on the wall to steady himself.
He said: What do you want me to read, buddy?
Eli said: The Little Engine That Could. Sophia said that’s your book.
Mason closed his eyes.
He opened his backpack. He pulled out a hardcover copy of The Little Engine That Could — the same blue one with the gold lettering. He had been carrying it in the backpack for three weeks because he had not been able to take it out.
He took Eli’s small hand. They walked together to the playroom — Mason at three hundred pounds, Eli at forty-six pounds, the IV pole rolling alongside them.
He sat down in the small chair Sophia had called the Bear chair.
Eli climbed into his lap.
Mason started to read.
He made it through six pages before he started to cry. He cried so hard his shoulders were shaking and the book was rattling in his hands and Eli looked up at him with worried five-year-old eyes and patted his beard the same way Sophia used to.
Eli said: It’s okay, Uncle Bear. I’ll help you. I think I can. I think I can.
Mason cried for another full minute.
Then he wiped his face with the back of one tattooed hand. And he finished the book. And he read it again. And then he read Where the Wild Things Are. And then he read Goodnight Moon.
He stayed on the floor for three hours that day.
When he left, he stopped at my station. His eyes were red. His voice was hoarse.
He said: Delphine. I’ll be here next Tuesday.
I said: I know you will, Mason.
That was five years and eight months ago.
He has not missed a single Tuesday since.
In that time, Mason Brackett has read to more than a hundred children on my floor. He has watched twelve of them die. He went to ten of those twelve funerals. The other two were out of state — one in Ohio, one in Florida — and he sent handwritten cards to the families instead, and the families both wrote him back.
He carries a backpack now that holds eight different children’s books and a small notebook. The notebook has every child’s name in it. Every child he has ever read to. Their diagnosis. Their favorite book. A small note about something they said. He has the dates of every funeral in there. He has the birthdays of every child still alive in there. He sends a card on every single birthday.
He buys a copy of The Little Engine That Could — the blue one with the gold lettering — in bulk from a bookstore on Lexington Avenue in downtown Asheville. The owner gives him a discount because she found out what he does. He gives a copy to every single child he reads to. Every one. There is a child somewhere in Knoxville right now sleeping with a copy on her nightstand. There is a child in Boone with a copy. There are twelve copies in twelve small graves in five states, because the families asked if they could bury them with their kids.
The first page of every book Mason gives out has a handwritten inscription in his slow, careful, construction-worker handwriting.
It says: I think you can. — Uncle Bear.
Then under that, smaller, it says: And so did Sophia. She started this.
Eli Voorhees is eleven now. He has been in remission for four years and nine months.
He still calls Mason on Sundays. He still asks Mason to read him the book over the phone sometimes, even though he’s old enough to read it himself. Mason still does it. Every time. Mason has read The Little Engine That Could over a landline phone in Asheville, North Carolina to a kid who lives forty miles away in Hendersonville more times than I can count.
Eli’s mother emailed me last spring. She said Eli had been asked at school to write an essay about a hero. He had written about a man with a beard who reads books to sick kids.
The essay won the school contest.
His mother sent me a photo of Eli holding the certificate. Standing next to him, in a borrowed sport jacket over jeans and motorcycle boots, was Mason Brackett. His arm around the kid. His face split in a smile I do not get to see very often.
I have that photo printed and pinned to the corkboard at my nurses’ station.
A reporter from the Asheville Citizen-Times came in last year to do a feature on the volunteer program. She wanted to interview Mason. She wanted to ask him why he kept coming back. Why he could face this floor week after week when so many of the children he loved were gone.
He gave her two sentences.
He said: Sophia started this cycle. I just keep it going.
The reporter pressed him. She asked if he could say more.
He thought about it.
He said: Ma’am. She kept her promise to me. I’m keeping mine to her.
He went back to reading. Eli was waiting.
If this one stayed with you, follow the page. There are more like it. Real promises. Real losses. Real reasons we keep showing up.
