In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  When all else fails, there’s always procrastination.

  “What you working on?” I ask Delaney.

  She doesn’t answer for a moment as she peers into her microscope.

  “Did you—”

  “Yeah, I heard,” she murmurs. “Observing changes in cancer cells.”

  “You’re wearing gloves. Shouldn’t you be wearing a lab coat and, like, goggles too?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, shit. Don’t get any on you.”

  “That’s not at all how that works,” she says as she types on her laptop. “You don’t catch cancer. What are you doing over there? I can hear gears grinding.”

  I set my pen down and close my notebook over it to keep my place. “Poem for Dr. Adkins.”

  “The one about how awesome I am?”

  “Exactly, which is why I’m totally stuck.”

  Delaney points at me with a pipette. “Better watch that sass mouth. I’ll put cancer cells in your Coke. Give you some damn cancer. I don’t give a shit.” She bends over her microscope.

  “I’m jealous of what you’re doing,” I say.

  “Why?” she asks, not looking up. She uses her pipette to add something to the dish under the lens and makes another note on her laptop.

  “Because science has clear answers. You put that stuff in the dish and look at it, and either it does what you want it to or it doesn’t. That’s why you hear of writer’s block but not scientist’s block.”

  “Aren’t you the expert now.”

  “On writer’s block? Damn right I am.”

  “I bet science and poetry have more in common than you think.”

  “Now look who’s the expert.”

  “What are you doing when you write poetry?”

  I think for a bit. “I guess I’m reaching inside myself for something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Expression.”

  “Understanding something about the world?”

  “Sure.”

  “There you go, doofus. That’s exactly what scientists are doing. We’re both reaching for some understanding we’re not sure exists.”

  “Reaching is right. I’m totally stuck on this poem.”

  “That’s another thing. Failed experiments. You ever start writing a poem and it takes you in a completely unexpected direction?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s exactly science. Does poetry try to get you to think about processes in a new way?”

  “Like?”

  “Love. Death. Getting old. Processes.” Delaney punctuates her words with snaps.

  “Yep.”

  “That’s science too.”

  We look at each other. “If poetry and science are so similar, help me write this poem,” I say.

  “Pshhh, no way,” Delaney says immediately. “Totally different things.”

  We crack up. I was skeptical of the comparison Delaney was drawing at first, but she’s won me over. I’d certainly like to believe that she and I are working in parallel on equally worthy things. It makes me feel closer to her.

  We return to our tasks. I end up with two lines I like, after scribbling out about twenty-seven. A normal ratio for me.

  As Delaney is putting away her samples and instruments, I ask her, partly in jest, “So, how close are you?”

  “To what?”

  “To Papaw’s cure.”

  She just smiles sadly and disappears inward, as though she didn’t hear me at all.

  I’m immersed in the warm bath of a dream. An artificial noise enters my mind, but it fits into that surreal world, so I sleep on. The sound persists. I awake. My phone is ringing. I fumble for it. I notice the time: 3:07 a.m. The caller: Mamaw. A wave of adrenaline breaches the floodgates of my lethargy like an injection of caffeine to my brain.

  “Mamaw?” My speech is dry and somnolent.

  Tripp groans theatrically. I ignore him.

  “Cash?” Mamaw’s voice is tense and brittle.

  “What’s up?” I sit, rubbing my face, instantly more awake.

  Tripp makes an exaggerated show of flopping over to his side facing away from me and pulling his pillow over his ear.

  “We’re at the ER. Pep couldn’t breathe and he’s taken a nasty turn. The doctor says it’s likely pneumonia. I think…”

  I have a premonition of what she’s about to say. I know it where I try to bury the things I want most to deny.

  There’s a prolonged and laden pause on Mamaw’s end as she tries to scrape together words but fails. Finally, she says, voice faltering, “You ought to come home.”

  * * *

  Much of what happens next is an incoherent blur. I jam some clothes into a bag by the light of my phone while Tripp grouses. I go to the end of the hall and wake up Cameron. He helps me arrange my ticket on the first flight home. Soon after, Chris DiSalvo is driving me to the airport well above the speed limit. “Hope everything turns out okay with your grandpop, buddy,” he says as he drops me off.

  I’ve never flown. A generous airport employee sees how obviously lost and terrified I am, and ushers me to my gate. I barely make my flight. By six-thirty a.m., as my plane lifts off, I’m clutching my armrests with the force I use to grip my oar when rowing. What a cruel joke that this is how I get to fly for the first time.

  Aunt Betsy and Mitzi pick me up at the Knoxville airport in Aunt Betsy’s run-down Buick. She forces a brave face, trying to offer some cheer as she asks me how I enjoyed my first flight. But we both know the score, and so the drive is mostly tomblike silence undergirded by the death rattles of the various failing parts of her car.

  “You been to see him?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” Aunt Betsy says.

  My chest feels like a fist clenched around my lungs. “Sounds like he’s bad.”

  She stares at the road ahead. “Pep’s a fighter. When Daddy’d come home after tying one on, Pep would get between me and him and take the hits meant for me, and he always got back up after.” Aunt Betsy pauses for a while. “I haven’t thanked him enough for that,” she says quietly, mostly to herself.

  Sawyer is lifeless and dull in the dim, biting February morning. Naked branches on barren trees, derelict storefronts, lawns the color of sighs, with moribund cars decaying on them. A town crawling on its belly through another winter.

  It finally occurs to me to text Delaney and tell her what’s going on. It had totally slipped my mind in the turmoil of the morning. I ask her to let Vi and Alex know. I lack the energy.

  When Aunt Betsy parks, I bolt for the hospital entrance without waiting for her and Mitzi. It’s not my first time in Sawyer Hospital. Papaw’s been here a few times, and my mama before that. The standoffish, sterile smell that hits me as the sliding glass door opens resurrects all the worst memories. It’s not the aseptic smell of cleanliness, but of a barren place, where it’s hard for any living thing, even germs, to survive.

  I sign in. They tell me where Papaw is, and I hurry back to his room. Mamaw sits by his side and holds his hand as he watches a game show through bleary and listless eyes. He wears an oxygen mask. He’s pallid—his skin a drab, leaden yellow—and scraggy. He looks half-devoured from the inside, a husk.

  Mamaw stands and hugs me tight before I reach Papaw’s side. I can sense her trying to hold herself together.

  “Glad you got in safe,” she says in a trembling whisper.

  I go to Papaw’s side and hug him. “How you doing?” I ask, as though the answer is possibly “Great.”

  He wheezes. “Been better, Mickey Mouse,” he manages, voice muffled under his mask. But his face brightens upon seeing me.

  Mamaw looks utterly sapped.

  “You slept at all?” I ask her.

  “Not a wink. And I close tonight.”

>   “There anyone who can help?”

  “No. Just had two employees up and quit.”

  “Wanna go home and nap before work? I’ll be here. Aunt Betsy and Mitzi too.” They’re standing in the doorway.

  Mamaw looks to Papaw, who feebly raises a hand and waves her off gently. “It’s okay, Donna Bird.”

  She kisses him and tells him she loves him. She pulls me aside and speaks in a low, urgent tone. “You call me if he takes a turn. I’ll quit on the spot and come down.” She leaves.

  I sit back at Papaw’s side. I lay my hand over his. He starts to speak.

  “Save your energy for getting better,” I say gently.

  He nods slightly and closes his eyes. Minutes later, he’s out.

  I watch him sleep, machines surrounding him like a prayer circle.

  I have the sudden and giddy thought that maybe this isn’t the beginning of the end, but the difficult start of a new beginning for him.

  Maybe he’ll wake in the night, hacking violently, as though finally expiring. It’ll be terrifying as we look on, helpless. But even in this fit, a strange new strength fills him. He sits up in bed. He yanks away his oxygen mask. His coughing intensifies, but his vigor grows in parallel.

  He stands, coming to his full height. Then he doubles over, hands on his knees, the way he used to catch his breath when we’d go hiking, and enters one last coughing maelstrom. With a gagging noise, he expels a large, slick congealed-grease-colored tumor onto the floor with a fleshy plop.

  This is his disease. It twitches in its death throes, robbed of the host body on which it fed.

  Papaw straightens, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and draws, for the first time in years, a full measure of air into both lungs. The color instantly returns to his face and lips. The blue recedes from his nail beds.

  He roars with triumphant laughter, prisoner no more. He starts peeling off the tubes and wires taped to him and casts them aside.

  This hospital gown ain’t doing nobody any favors, showing my ass off like a prize hog, he says, and we laugh through ecstatic sobs.

  Sorry about the mess, y’all, he says to the doctors and nurses gathered to witness. Let’s go grab a bucket of chicken. I’m starved, he says to us. And we do. And he’s okay. Everything’s okay.

  Maybe this will happen instead of what I dread.

  Maybe.

  Mamaw returns after work. Neither of us leaves Papaw’s side all night. He only worsens.

  In the early afternoon, Mamaw leaves to shower and run some errands before she has to work, closing again that night. While daytime TV drones in the background, I text with Delaney, Vi, and Alex. Dr. Adkins sends me a message wishing me well. I guess the school told her I wouldn’t be in class.

  Papaw rouses. “Mickey Mouse,” he mumbles.

  I take his hand. “Get you something? You thirsty?”

  He wheezes under his mask and shakes his head slowly. “New lungs?”

  “You can have one of mine.” It’s not a joke.

  “Keep it.”

  “Want to watch TV?”

  He shakes his head again. “Got more poems?”

  “Like, mine?”

  He nods, shutting his eyes.

  Improbably, in my groggy frenzy of stuffing clothes in a bag, I instinctively grabbed my poetry notebook. It must’ve become more of a security blanket than I’d realized. I open it and read—quietly, because I’m embarrassed to hear my words out loud from my own mouth.

  But a blissful look comes over Papaw’s face, and after each poem, he pats me on the hand. “Beautiful,” he murmurs once. Just as I’m about to run out of poems to read, his breathing slows and he drifts off.

  As the hours creep by, I sit at his side, listening to him breathe, trying to build a store of his presence—like an animal hiding away food for a long season of hunger.

  I hear commotion up the hall. First, the sodden slap of wet sneakers running on tile. Then someone calling, “Miss? Miss! Excuse me. You can’t—Someone get her. I have to stay at the front. She can’t be back there like that.”

  I get up from Papaw’s side to investigate. No sooner do I reach the door than a sprinting figure almost bowls me over. I don’t recognize her at first; she’s wearing a stocking cap and doesn’t acknowledge me.

  Delaney’s lips are a faint gray violet to match the circles under her eyes, her face the antiseptic white of the hospital floor. Her clothes are soaked, and she reeks of cold mud and wet denim and down. Her shoes slosh and trail water behind her.

  Delaney rushes to Papaw’s side. I watch numbly as she unslings her backpack and pulls out a mason jar full of a greenish-black substance. She scans around and grabs a cotton swab from a container on the counter. She unscrews the lid of the mason jar and pokes around in it with the swab.

  Blood streams from her right thumb. A drop hits Papaw’s sheet with a pat, and it snaps me out of my stupor. “Red? What are you—” Then I remember. Her promise to Papaw. She said she’d find a cure. For one electric second, a wild hope seizes me. She’s got the cure. She’s going to save him like she promised. But that optimism quickly evaporates. I’ve never seen her like this—so feral and haunted and desperate.

  Delaney still doesn’t look at me and starts fumbling with Papaw’s IV bag with trembling hands, smearing it with blood and water. “How you work this shit? Help me, damn it.”

  “I don’t know if we should—”

  Papaw murmurs something in his delirium.

  Delaney bends down to him. “It’s Tess. I’m here to keep my promise,” she whispers hoarsely, tears at the edges of her voice.

  I start toward her. As I do, a pair of middle-aged women in scrubs appear in the doorway.

  “Miss! You cannot be in here. You didn’t sign in. Come on, let’s go,” one of the women (a nurse?) says to Delaney, motioning her back. “There are no opioids in here. They’re locked up and under guard.”

  “Ain’t no junkie,” Delaney spits back.

  “You’re a mess. You’re going to compromise this patient,” the other nurse (?) says. “And you’re bleeding? No, young lady. You can’t be in here. Come on.”

  “Tess,” Papaw croaks, and reaches.

  Delaney takes his hand.

  The two nurses enter and brush quickly past me. Delaney turns to face them, her eyes like a cornered animal’s. “I’m gonna help him. Y’all keep out my way.”

  Nurse One tells Nurse Two to get security. Nurse Two hustles off.

  “Delaney,” I say.

  But she disregards me and goes for Papaw’s IV bag again. Nurse One intercepts her and grips her forearm. “Don’t start messing.”

  “Stop. You make me drop this, and I’ll—”

  The nurse, twice Delaney’s size, starts dragging her out of the room.

  “Hang on,” I say to the nurse. “Stop. Don’t touch her.”

  The nurse throws her hands up, retreats to the door, and looks up the hall. Delaney glares at her. Then she edges toward Papaw’s IV again. He murmurs something. Delaney kisses him on the cheek.

  A short, mustachioed armed security guard in an ill-fitting fake-cop uniform enters, followed by Nurse Two and Papaw’s doctor. I forget her name, even though we’ve talked a few times.

  “Let’s go,” the guard says brusquely. “Out.”

  “No,” Delaney says. “I got medicine for him.”

  He grabs her by both arms and starts dragging her. “Let’s go.”

  She digs in her heels and shakes loose. “Get the fuck off me,” she says through gritted teeth.

  “You can’t be cussing people like that here,” the guard says indignantly.

  “Sir, leave her alone,” I say.

  “You want I’ll kick you both out?” the guard says. “I’ll get the sheriff down here.”

  I
back off, afraid he’ll make good on the threat.

  The doctor speaks. “Billy? Will you hold off? Miss, let’s talk in the hall, okay?”

  “He needs my medicine,” Delaney says.

  “I hear you. Let’s talk.” The doctor’s tone is calm and even, and reaches Delaney, who relents and follows her out. I move to where I can watch.

  “What happened to your thumb?” the doctor asks.

  “Nothing. Chewed it up,” Delaney says.

  “Brenda, will you bring me some Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide?” the doctor asks Nurse One. Nurse One bustles off.

  “I’m Khrystal Goins,” the doctor says. “Mr. Pruitt’s attending physician. You are?”

  “Delaney Doyle.”

  “What’s your connection to Mr. Pruitt?”

  “Family. And he’s called Pep if you really know him.”

  “Okay. Now, they told me you were trying to administer something to him. May I ask what?”

  “Penicillium delanum. It kills MRSA. Antibiotic-resistant TB. Everything. It’s named after me. I discovered it. They gave me a scholarship to the best STEM program in America and gave one to my friend, that’s how bad they wanted me. And now I gotta deal with this dipshit mall cop keeping me from saving his life.”

  “You got an ugly mouth on you,” Billy says.

  “You got an ugly mouth,” Delaney says.

  “Billy,” Dr. Goins says, “I’ll take it from here.”

  Billy shakes his head and stalks off a few feet, ruddy and fuming.

  Dr. Goins turns to Delaney. “I read about you in the news, and I read about Penicillium delanum in the New England Journal of Medicine.”

  “Then you know what it does.”

  “I also know it hasn’t been through human trials or received FDA approval and that it occurs naturally in caves, which is where it looks like you very recently got that.” She nods at Delaney’s jar.