At the beginning of the new children’s picture book “Rescue & Jessica: A Life-Changing Friendship,” a girl lays in a hospital bed worried after being told by her doctor: “You’re an amputee now Jessica. … You have to wear a prosthetic leg or use a wheelchair for the rest of your life.”
The story—authored by Cambridge couple Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes and illustrated by Scott Magoon of Reading, Massachusetts—is inspired by what happened to them at the 2013 Boston Marathon, five years ago on April 15.
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An athletic couple, Kensky, a nurse, and Downes, now a psychologist, had both run the marathon in 2005—before they met. They married in 2012. The day of the 2013 marathon, they worked out at their local gym, then strolled through Boston’s Public Garden together before heading to the
marathon finish line to watch the midafternoon finishers run by. The bomb blast severed his left leg and set her clothes on fire and damaged her left leg so badly that doctors amputated it. Persistent problems from wounds and shrapnel to her right leg resulted in that leg also being removed in January 2015.
“Rescue & Jessica” stays close to Kensky’s actual story, but reframes it as the life of a teenage girl. It skips over what hurt the girl’s legs to focus frankly and lovingly on the struggles and setbacks of her healing. “The illustrations demonstrate her learning wheelchair transfers, learning to walk and balance in parallel bars, opening a door and carrying items in a wheelchair,” Kensky writes in materials provided by the book’s publisher, Candlewick Press in Somerville.
The co-star of the book is the service dog, Rescue, who helps the girl along the way. He’s named after Kensky’s own black Labrador service dog, trained by National Education for Assistance Dog Services (NEADS}/World Class Service Dogs in Princeton, Massachusetts.
“Perhaps we, as a society, assume the truth is too scary for children because in fact it is too scary for most adults,” the couple writes. They hope the book invites “readers to feel the pain, sorrow and anxiety that Jessica and Rescue feel, but also to witness how they are able to sit with uncertainty and yet achieve so much as a team.”
The book describes the girl learning how to walk again with a prosthetic leg, “frustrated and sad about the things she still couldn’t do. She felt like the changes were too big, too much.” Rescue helps her open doors, barks if she needs someone, lets her lean on him when she’s fallen and needs help getting back up. Then, as in Kensky’s actual story, the girl’s doctor tells her that her right leg will need to be removed too. “This didn’t get any easier for Jessica to hear.”
The book says: “Rescue and Jessica had to start all over again. Slowly but surely, they learned how to do all the things they need to do. Together.”
Illustrator Scott Magoon’s gentle digital illustrations depict them visiting Boston’s Greenway, Boston Common, and the bridge over the lagoon in the Public Garden (with a shout-out to the classic picture book “Make Way for Ducklings”).
“When I was applying for a service dog through NEADS [National Education for Assistance Dog Services], I was focused on all the ways he was going to help me physically,” Kensky writes. “I did not think of the myriad ways he would help me and my family emotionally heal from trauma. … Also, our relationship is a true partnership. He takes care of me, and I need to take care of him. Having him forced me to get off the couch and out of bed. I had to feed him, walk him, and make sure he had daily free/playtime. His exercise became mine.”
Magoon was running the 2013 marathon as an unofficial—a “bandit”—runner and was near the finish line “when the first bomb exploded in front of me. Twelve seconds later, the second bomb detonated behind me. I felt the concussion wave on my back, my ears rang and then, all around—pandemonium.”
He escaped without injury. He writes on his website: “Panic in my heart—I knew my wife and two boys (ages 8 and 6 at the time) had made their way to Boylston Street’s finish line and were somewhere nearby waiting to watch me pass. Where were they? Were they okay? As I abandoned the course, my iPhone rang—it was Christy to say they all were okay.”
For Magoon, the book has been a way to give some purpose and meaning to his experience. And this year, to raise money for the National Education for Assistance Dog Services, he’s planning to run the marathon again for the first time since that day.
The authors are scheduled to make appearances at Barnes & Noble, 98 Middlesex Turnpike, Burlington, at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 7; at An Unlikely Story, 111 South St., Plainville, at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 8; and at Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel (tickets required), 138 St. James Ave., Boston, at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 14.
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