Angels Unawares

by Jeffrey Anderson



  Angels Unawares

  by

  Jeffrey Anderson

  Copyright 2014 by Jeffrey Anderson

  This story is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:

  For thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

  Hebrews 13: 2

  Day One

  Joshua Earl dreamed this while sound asleep on his wide bed in the darkest depths of a moonless mid-April night.

  He stood alone on the road shoulder at a busy highway intersection beneath a searing and brilliant midday sun. Cars stopped waiting to turn began a chain beside him that snaked off into the glaring distance and disappeared beyond a cluster of pine trees that had somehow survived the assault of highway construction and the daily dose of choking exhaust fumes from stymied vehicles. The sun glinting off the windshields of that chain of cars shaped a diamond bracelet that seemed made just for him to wear in his mind if not on his arm.

  He became aware of a denseness in his right armpit and felt before he saw the rough-hewn crutch that originated in his armpit and downward pressed along his right side past ribs and hip and thigh to the pavement at his feet. Well, pavement at his foot, he now saw as he gazed blankly at the spot where the tree-branch crutch pressed into the asphalt. Where his right foot should’ve been was a void. In fact his whole lower leg was gone, nothing but blank air from just above where his knee should’ve been to the empty stretch of pavement between the crutch stump and the sparkling new tennis shoe on his left foot. In that void between lower thigh and road there wasn’t even an empty pant leg flapping. The right leg of his jeans had been crudely cut at the knee and tied off with a piece of twine pulled tight like a tourniquet, a humble white line of defense against the upward march of loss.

  In his left hand he held a steel coffee can. A few coins jangled in the bottom when he shook the can. On a piece of paper taped to the can were the handwritten words—Spare Change God Bless. The handwriting didn’t look like his, but he couldn’t say for sure.

  The diamond chain of stagnant cars called him forth and he began to walk crutch then foot crutch then foot along the road shoulder beside the cars with the waves of heat rising off their metal flanks and mixing with the fumes drifting lazily skyward from their blackened tailpipes. He thought he should’ve felt discomfort at the heat and choking exhaust. But he felt no discomfort. He thought he should’ve felt the jarring lurch then impact of each clumsy swing then stop of his crude crutch. But he felt no thump. What he felt was floating past the baking cars and over the searing asphalt in conditioned comfort, neither hot nor cold, no sense of the effort of movement but still no question of movement as the diamonds turned to cars that drifted past—silver, white, black, bronze. Every so often metal would strike metal in the bottom of the can and he would look toward the arm that had tossed the coin and struggle to discern the face he knew must be somewhere beyond the shadow of the car’s side window. Try as he might, he could never make out the face. They were all hidden, secret. And he floated past, farther on down the line.

  So he focused on the hands and forearms that would emerge from the dark with their offerings—this hand clearly a woman’s and young, with red painted nails and a gold ring on her thumb; that hand pudgy with cracked skin and black grease under torn and irregular nails, the hand of an aging auto-mechanic with a few dimes to spare. He created faces for the hands—a red-haired schoolgirl on her way to dance lessons, a bleary-eyed and balding day-worker on his way home to an empty apartment. He knew his creations were false faces, but somehow the process helped assuage the guilt he felt at not being able to see and thank the real ones.

  His floating deposited him beside a limousine with dark-tinted windows that radiated black diamonds from the sun. An arm emerged as if through the tinted glass. The woman’s hand held a bill, a hundred-dollar bill. The delicate but not young fingers let it fall. The bill floated like a leaf, gently back and forth, till it disappeared into the black round hole of the coffee can. It made no sound.

  The arm retracted into its tinted-glass shelter. Somewhere up the line a traffic signal switched from red to green. The diamond chain began to move. That reaction reached the black limo. It began to move past.

  Joshua felt sudden fury rise in his throat. He wanted to grab the bill and thrust it back into the woman’s hand, back into the shadowy depths from which it had risen. His mouth shaped words—Coins only, coins only! But if the words came forth as sounds, he never heard them.

  He tossed aside his crutch and turned to run after the receding vehicle. Then he realized he had no second leg. He would surely fall. He might even die under the wheels of the line of cars now whizzing past in a blur.

  But he didn’t fall and he didn’t move. He looked down at his remaining whole leg. It wasn’t a leg at all. It was a trunk of braided woody vines rooted in dark moist loamy earth. And the vines twisted their way up through his pelvis and torso and out his arm sockets and down his now immovable arms. Woody brown vine trunks softened to moist green shoots where his wrists had been, green shoots to tendrils, tendrils to leaves just starting to unfurl. Then from his neck and burrowing through his skull more tendrils thrusting forth in resolute growth, pushing skyward and sunward and out what had been his ears and eyes and nose, his mouth yielding forth not words but all mix of blooms—clematis, wisteria, honeysuckle, trumpet flower: all dangling in a nectar-laden tangle of succulent and fragrant clusters. A hummingbird whirred past, paused and hovered, staring into his eyes turned to flowers, then flew on. A butterfly landed where his nose had been, uncoiled its proboscis and reached into his mouth turned to flower, found some sustenance there.

  In the dream Joshua realized—this would be his destiny, his resting place.

  Laura Jackson Earl lay in that embracing fog between sleep and waking. The fog would thin and she would see her surroundings as they were, though with the edges softened and the shadows pregnant with a tension between promise and threat; then, soundlessly and suddenly, the fog would thicken, blocking real sight with dozing and prompting her sleep vulnerable imagination to fill the void where the tangible had so recently resided.

  The bed on which she lay was firmer than she was accustomed to and narrow, pushed tight to the wall on one side, barely a foot off the wooden floor that her fingers lightly brushed on the other. The room was small but high, with a narrow band of clerestory windows on three sides yielding grainy gray pre-dawn light. The walls below the windows were solid books, shelf upon shelf, their spines glowing shades of silver and beige broken by horizontal and vertical bars of black. Those books seemed the thickened walls of a fortress, spine melded to spine, an edge-grain butcher-block of strength and hardness to keep marauders out. But as Laura’s consciousness twisted slowly toward sleep, those fortress walls took on the nature of a prison, not to keep danger out but to keep her in, no chance of escape, no view beyond except those lofty windows, and there only sky—blue to gold to pink to silver to black to gray.

  She was reading to young children. They formed a loose circle around her hub, perhaps a dozen in all—seated cross-legged, some kneeling, others lying on their stomachs, heads perched on folded arms. Their faces were featureless masks—no eyes or ears or nose or mouth, just skin drawn tight over chin and cheekbone and skull, the skin of various shades: black, olive, tan, pale pink, luminous white.

  She read from a big book with a glossy cover. On the open pages were colorful pictures interspersed with large bold text. She read the words in a firm sonorous voice of deliberate cadence but heard no sound and recognized no words. She’d pause in her reading, flip the book and hold it open f
or the eyeless children to see, moving it from side to side, giving all a good long look.

  Reading to children—what an odd endeavor for her. She was a free-lance soil scientist, gathering field samples for analysis, carrying them to a private lab for testing, evaluating the results and recommending remediation to the client paying her fees. She rarely came in contact with children. Truth be told, children rather frightened her. They tended to be so—well, active: darting to and fro, talking nonsensically, watching, moving some more, flitting about like birds in a cage, like birds out of a cage and she’d been the one who forgot to latch the door, her fault they’d escaped and how was she to gather them all back in, safe and sound. Laura couldn’t remember when she’d last read to children, or to a single child, stretching all the way back to when she was a child, being read to, reading to her dolls. What an odd endeavor. What an odd dream.

  Yet she seemed fully at ease in this unfamiliar role. Her voice reading the story was expressive and reassuring and all-encompassing. Its tone and its volume spoke the only truth any child ever desired—no harm will befall you in my presence, and my presence will never end. So potent was her offer that the featureless masks evolved features—a nose here, a mouth there, all those paired eyes winking to life: all those eyes, all those famished eyes.

  Then there were only two eyes gazing at her. The words of the story fell silent, then the book disappeared, tumbling into the black void beyond her lap. It was only Laura and those eyes, the eyes now faceless, hanging there above her in the pre-dawn grayness, staring down, pinning her like an insect on a foam display board.

  Those eyes—first of a child, then a teenager, then an adult.

  Those eyes—now long since past their hunger for security, now with a different hunger, now yielding forth something new, something steely blue and unrelenting: now streaming forth the beginnings of blame.

  Laura’s eyes, that had been open this whole time staring at the high ceiling that disappeared into the grainy shadows, suddenly clenched hard shut, pressed out tears.

  Laura carried Josh’s breakfast on a tray down the long dim hall leading from the kitchen to his bedroom. The bedroom’s open door beckoned her onward with the warm bright glow of morning light. She made it to the threshold without spilling juice or coffee and paused there to let her eyes adjust and the muscles in her face relax. Josh lay on his back in the bed, his graying hair cushioned deep in the pillow, his face turned away from the doorway, his eyes staring out the long picture window to his right. Laura watched her ex-husband for long seconds that seemed like minutes or hours.

  His unflinching and obstinate gaze recalled her oldest memory of him. He was a high-school junior waiting beside her locker in a deserted hallway. She’d stayed late to make-up a test; and, though he barely knew her, he’d waited the whole time, at least forty-five minutes—leaning against the wall beside her locker, unmoving, staring at the hall floor. She knew this because she could see his dim figure reflected in the glass of the open door to the classroom. Every few minutes she’d glance up from her test paper and see he was still there, waiting. His patient determination thrilled her but also frightened her a little. Who was this boy who could wait for her like that? Any other boy she knew would’ve been fidgeting after thirty seconds, and gone within three minutes. Who was this tall figure who could wait like that; and, what’s more, would wait like that for her? Only later, in retrospect, did a related question arise—who could bear such waiting? She stepped onward into the room with her tray.

  Josh rolled his head to face her and smiled. “A penny for your thoughts.”

  Laura set the tray on his writing desk and went to the edge of the king-sized bed to help him sit up higher against the headboard. “My thoughts cost more than that.”

  “Then at whatever cost. Name your price—I’ll write a check this minute.”

  “Viewed your account balance lately? Might not have enough in there.”

  Josh shook his head. “I’ve got enough or I’ll find it. I’ve always been good at that.”

  She nodded to concede the point, then bent at the waist, slid her arms under his armpits, and lifted his startlingly light torso against the pillow-cushioned headboard. She retrieved the tray and set it carefully astraddle his blanket-shrouded waist, the short legs on either side of the tray puckering the plush bedcovers. Breakfast safely delivered, she sat in the cherry armchair with the cushioned seat and back that was normally beside the desk but had been moved to the near edge of the bed.

  His gaze hadn’t left her throughout these efficient actions and settled on her face now. “Thank you,” he said, but didn’t move to eat.

  She nodded. “You’re welcome,” she said, then added, “What thoughts you wanting to buy?”

  He laughed. This was a new Laura. The old Laura would never have picked up a dropped strand of questioning, never have invited a deeper glance into her workings. “At the doorway—your thoughts while waiting on the threshold. You were waiting there so long I considered dragging what’s left of these old bones out of this bed and sweeping you off your feet to carry you over the threshold.” His eyes left her face briefly and glanced toward his covered legs. “But that wouldn’t have worked very well, would it?”

  Laura ignored this latter. “You saw me?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you gave no clue.”

  Josh’s shoulders dipped slightly—a shrug or surrender, she couldn’t tell. That small movement seemed to trigger the subtle collapse of his body in on itself. The thin tension of expectation and hope he’d maintained since hearing her footsteps in the hall dissolved in the morning light.

  Laura felt this shift—or had she imagined it? “I was thinking of my oldest memory of you.”

  “Way back.”

  “Yes, way back. You were waiting for me in the school hallway, unmoving as a statue, for—I don’t know? a half-hour, an hour; in any case, a long time. Just waiting.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I saw you reflected in the door’s glass.”

  “So I’m not the only secret watcher.”

  She laughed at that, caught in her own accusation. “That was back then. I had to use all the means of discovery at my disposal.”

  “For what?”

  Laura didn’t hesitate. “To bear your gaze.”

  “And now?”

  She shrugged. “What’s to hide?”

  “You tell me.”

  Laura offered no answer. It was she who now stared out the big window at trees sprouting pale-green foliage against a deep-blue patient sky.

  Josh took a few sips of the lukewarm tea. Laura had mixed in a squeeze of lemon and a spoonful of honey. There was a sweetness and comfort to the drink that went beyond mere taste. “My oldest memory of you is stored in my fingertips, not my eyes.” He set the cup down, raised his hands before his eyes, and watched his fingers perform a silent line dance in the air. “At least I have these parts,” he said, no trace of bitterness or pity, “and their memories.”

  She faced him again, faced his fingers fluttering in mid-air like tan feathers on a fading breeze. “The memory is stored in your fingers not your mind?”

  Josh let his fingers—fingers, then hands, then forearms—fall silently into the down comforter, the breeze that had held then aloft and dancing suddenly dead. “I think so,” he said, and that moment believed his assertion. “My left thumb stores the actual memory of the hammer blow when I was fourteen and helping my dad mend the river fence; my right middle finger the deep cut from the razor clam I was digging up the summer I was eight; my left pinky smashed in the car door by Angie when I was thirty-five.” His left pinky floated up from the covers and offered itself—its last joint kinked sharply to one side—as living proof of the memory. “The event stored in the fingertips—the only proof it ever occurred.”

  Laura was truly intrigued by the idea. “And events that don’t have enduring physical consequences—say, a touch of kindness or slap or anger—
those are there too, in the appendages?”

  He nodded, “Yes,” then paused and added, “Well, maybe.” He couldn’t help but think of his lower right leg, amputated just above the knee, and the toes of his left foot—gone also. Where then would be his memories of running, swimming, kicking a soccer ball, brushing the leg of his a lover beneath the sheets in the depth of a shared night? Those memories now residing in a lab somewhere? Turned to ash and smoke in a biohazard-disposal furnace? Just like that—dissolved into thin air, forever gone? Or maybe, just maybe, forever present—inhaled by himself and all living creatures in trace molecules and atoms floating freely across the globe, fixed now in this bush, this insect, then released again to be used again later and later and later, again and again and again. Ahh, now there’s a thought, a hope, a dread. Breathe deep the countless memories, hopes, and dreams of a long and full life. Breathe deep all he was or ever will be.

  “Tell me, then, please.”

  Her voice settled over him from afar, from a distant land or different reality, like his mother’s firm but gentle voice calling to him through the door to his room to rise for school. “Josh,” the voice said softly. “Josh. Time to get up.” Time to rise and shine. Time to greet the new day. His mother fully awake and calling, just there behind the closed door, just there out in the dimly lit hall, awake and preparing the way for him to enter the new day. “Josh.” His mother with bacon already popping and spitting in the large black frypan, eggs mixed in the bowl, plates set on the table. “Josh.” And he still lodged in a different world, in the tangle of sleep and dream and the slow emerging reality of his boyhood room with its dresser and old school desk and braided rug over worn oak floor. His mother waiting beyond the door—real and hard and permanent as a rock, a granite boulder, unmovable and unshakeable. And he caught up in his web of shifting realities and overwhelming fantasies.

  “Josh.” Laura’s fingers archived new memories as she touched her ex-husband’s shoulder where it emerged from the covers. “Josh.”

  He rolled his head to face her. “Sorry. Those pills really work, maybe too well.”

  She nodded. “I know. It’s O.K. Just wanted to be sure you were O.K.”

  “What were we talking about?”

  She laughed. “The memories in your fingers—some ancient and no doubt sordid tale they told about me.”

  He looked up at her face, so near at hand, her fingers still lightly on his shoulder, as she willed him to remain awake, at least these next few minutes. Was it important for him or her that his consciousness remain with her now—in the morning light in this bedroom with his breakfast on the tray across his lap—rather than drift away to some other world, some safer and softer immersion? Did it matter, really? And if so, why?

  Her face was of the girl he’d met when he was sixteen and she fourteen, the girl he’d married the day after she’d graduated high school. The face hadn’t changed appreciably for him despite the intervening decades and the wear of all those years and choices. To be sure, there were a few wrinkles, creases around the eyes, slack skin at the cheek and jawline; but beneath those shallow changes ran a deeper radiance that shone through for him—still the first girl he’d fallen in love with, neither young nor old but eternal in his eyes. And he wondered—maybe memories stored in the eyes, permanent and unchanging long as the eyes gathered light. No, longer than that—past when the eyes stopped gathering light, more vivid in blindness than ongoing sight. Memories stored in the sensing organ—fingers, eyes, amputated toes. Was it good or bad that time and disease could nibble away at memories by consuming the sensing organ or appendage? What were the costs of such an equation; what were the rewards?

  Laura sat back in her chair. She’d not force Josh to stay with her if the drugs and his fading chopped-up body elected to take his mind elsewhere. She should be relieved at the prospect—dozing, her ex-husband was no threat to her, no risk of opening old wounds or inflicting new ones. Yet just now a larger part of her wished to—no, needed to—engage a conscious and clear-headed Josh, needed to build something new between them, whatever it might be, however briefly it might endure. She understood, with only a faint sense of foreboding, that this new relationship might well include some of the pain from long ago, like the ache stored in Josh’s kinked finger.

  Yet greater than this fear and risk was a need to affirm their seeming ancient bond, and build on it. She’d not set aside her calm and peaceful other life, flown three thousand miles, unpacked her bags in a strange room, waded through stacks of insurance and power-of-attorney paperwork just to get Josh checked out of the hospital, ridden in the ambulance beside her moaning and doped-up ex-husband and hovered over the home nurse as she got him set-up in his own bed in his own bedroom, then made up the bed in the nursery turned to library beside his bedroom and slept fitfully last night to the sound of Josh’s snoring and intermittent yips and moans of whatever dream or nightmare or pain he was wading through—not endured all that just to watch her ex-husband and oldest friend fade away without talk or renewed companionship.

  Or had she? Was this what she got for her trouble? If so, could it be enough? Enough for what?—to get her through whatever months or years or decades she might have left, rattling around in her small ranch house in the San Fernando Valley? She’d never thought she was lonely, not once in the three-and-a-half decades since she’d become single—truly single for the first time, detached from her husband of three years and her parents for the eighteen before that. Turns out that she’d taken to single-ness like a fish to boundless open water, breathed it through gills of self-sufficiency ever since. It was a single-ness that did not preclude the occasional love, even a live-in one a few times, as well as several friends and close professional acquaintances. In short, it wasn’t a monastic life, nor would she want it to be. But she’d never truly bonded with another after Josh. Had that failed experiment turned her permanently against such a serious relationship? Or had she simply discovered her natural state of alone and become content with it?

  Whatever the answer to all those questions, she now felt lonely—hollow through her whole being—for the first time in as long as she could remember.

  “These fingers remember the nubbly gooseflesh of your taut stomach.” Josh’s fingers danced in the air above the bedcovers, revived and somehow daring, taunting.

  Laura blushed—at the image of Josh’s fingers memory or at being caught in dazed self-absorption: she couldn’t say, so flustered she was. And when had that happened last, her flustered and blushing? “My taut stomach?” she managed to reply. “That must’ve been ages ago.” But then of course it was—Josh hadn’t touched her stomach, barely touched any part of her body, for decades.

  My oldest memory of you—in the absolute dark of the hayloft: no sight or sound or taste or smell but all senses channeled into the tips of my fingers on your freshly uncovered midriff, and your skin taut and nubbly. I know now and probably knew then that you were just cold or nervous or excited or some combination of those, but at the time I thought of it as your skin reaching out to me, and granting me permission to continue.”

  Laura laughed at that. “Continue upward or downward?”

  “You know, I truly can’t remember. Probably in both directions—they both held promise.” He chuckled softly, a sound more like a cough than mirth. “Or maybe neither direction. Given it’s my oldest memory of you, it must’ve been early in our courtship, and maybe that early it was enough just to touch your stomach.”

  “And dream of the promise that lay beyond.”

  Josh nodded. “Something like that.”

  That promise had brought them to this moment all these years later—where had the chances gone? how had those hopes been squandered? Laura felt a kind of mudslide in her chest, the stable, gentle slope of her life suddenly letting go and racing crashing toward a dark void with no bottom visible. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes and waited for what was left of her soul to find its bottom, its
new resting place. But no bottom arrived, no new home—but quieter now, dissipation into the void, a stasis of free fall.

  Josh touched the back of her hand, recorded new memories in old fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

  She opened her eyes reluctantly, sure he would see the pain and confusion lurking therein. “Sorry for what?”

  “Bringing you here. Asking you to bear this.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, then shivered the length of her body—trembling the chair, the floor, Josh’s fingertips. The she opened her eyes. Her face was calm again, her body relaxed, the chill past. “Josh, nobody put a gun to my head. I bought my one-way ticket, packed my small bag.” She paused, glanced into the nursery where her carry-on suitcase sat open on the luggage holder, her few clothes neatly folded and stacked within its confines. “I boarded that plane, flew all the way across the country, got a cab and found my way to your hospital room—and not once did I see anyone, armed or threatening or pleading or begging, not anyone forcing me to come. It was my free choice. Please don’t apologize again.”

  Josh nodded. “I’ll try,” then added, “But can I say thank you?”

  Laura smiled. “No more than once every other day.”

  Josh thought—That may not be many times—but kept the thought to himself. “Then thank you from the depth of what’s left of this body and soul—that’s today’s and tomorrow’s thank you.” His left hand, still resting on hers, pressed down lightly then retreated to his side, disappeared in the folds of the plush comforter. “But may I ask why you agreed to come?”

  Laura considered that a long while, gazing across Josh’s bed to the bright morning beyond the picture window. She recalled the soft yet firm and business-like voice of the patient advocate reaching across three thousand land miles and who knows how many atmospheric and space and satellite miles to tell of Josh’s grave condition and say that her name was the only one that Josh had given. She’d immediately thought of Josh’s more recent wife (whom Laura’d never met) and their child some mutual friend had told her of (a daughter, no doubt grown by now, but where?), and she even asked—“No others?” The voice on the other end of the line had said no, no one else. She’d thanked the woman for the call and the information and even made some vague excuses—busy with work, couldn’t possibly get away—and apologized to the woman and asked her to apologize to Josh for her. Then she’d hung up.

  But after she’d hung up, she sat at her desk—motionless and numb—for who could say how long, the absolute stillness of her neat empty house roaring around her. Then she picked up the phone, brought up the patient advocate’s number on the phone’s screen, hit dial and told the woman she’d be there the next afternoon. Then she called her travel agent, booked a one-way ticket to North Carolina, and set about prepping her home and her California life for an absence of indeterminate duration.

  But why? The why lay in that numb motionless silence following the first call, and she had no memory of what happened during that time, what she was thinking or feeling. And she’d not thought about the decision since, not till this moment. “You can ask, but I can decline to answer.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I really don’t know.”

  “When you figure it out, will you tell me?”

  She nodded. “If you tell me why my name was the only one you gave the hospital staff.”

  “That’s easy—you were the only one I could trust.”

  “Trust to come, or trust to see this through?”

  “Both.”

  “And why’s that?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll tell you when I figure it out.”

  “Likewise, then.”

  Josh’s hand rose from the covers. “Deal?”

  Laura reached out, touched her fingertips to his. “Deal.”

  Laura hung weightless suspended in the warm spring afternoon and didn’t know if she liked or hated the sensation, but she’d grow used to it soon enough.

  The arrival of the home nurse shortly after lunch had bought her a couple hours free time to invest as she wished. She had a mental list of numerous chores and loose ends to tie up—a trip to the drugstore for toiletries (for her and Josh), a trip to the market for groceries, calls to her clients regarding her changed timetable for their projects, a call to Josh’s lawyer to confirm filing of his living will and power of attorney. And beneath those pressing demands, there was a larger demand that felt like an open wound in the form of a phone number that Laura’d not written down but was powerless to avoid memorizing.

  So in the face of all these responsibilities, Laura’d yielded to the call of Josh’s backyard hammock and its promise of weightless suspension. It was a large cotton-rope hammock of the type first made along the Outer Banks of North Carolina but now made and marketed all across the United States, a hammock so large and spacious that it could easily have accommodated four adults (if they worked together and avoided dumping one and all on the ground) or swallowed this one hapless visitor alive. It was strung between two large pine trees at the edge of the lawn, and strung so high off the ground that Laura had to jump to get into it. And once she’d thrown herself into this lofty web, she felt the strands suddenly yield to the point where she felt sure the fibers were tearing and she’d shortly strike the ground with a painful thud. She had a moment’s vision of her and Josh in paired hospital beds, each with bandaged legs—the transcontinental caregiver now needing care. But the cotton cords only stretched after a long winter of drying and shrinking, and their yielding halted more than two feet above the ground. Laura caught her breath, then laughed long and hard—at the recklessness of throwing her middle-aged bones into an untested old hammock, at the image of her incapacitated beside Josh, and at the sudden new sensation of weightlessness in the face of so much weight: trees, grass, house, sky, Josh—his truncated body naked (she imagined, though the nurse gently shooed her out before starting her ministrations) and being sponge-bathed in his bed not fifty yards away at this very moment.

  She set the hammock to gently rocking with slight shifts in her body’s center of gravity. Each pendulum swing brought her briefly into sunlight, then back into a longer interval’s pine-needle shade—sun, shade-shade-shade; sun, shade-shade-shade. A mourning dove mourned its mate. A cardinal sang out in rising quickening crescendo of spring hope. Sun, shade-shade-shade. Even with her eyes closed, the contrast of light and dark was inescapable—penetrated her eyelids, pierced her skin.

  He was a boy named Steve. He was fourteen, she twelve at a summer camp. She floated suspended on the pond’s warm water with his strong hands on the small of her back and between her shoulders gently swaying her from side to side. “Now try,” he’d said, asking her to extend her arms over her head in the start of classic backstroke form. But her arms wouldn’t move from where they floated, remained extended straight out, cruciform, as weightless as her soul. She wanted the moment to never end—the water, the floating, his hands firmly on the skin of her back. She willed the moment onward, onward. That night in the shadows just beyond the campfire light, she kissed him. She’d waited for what seemed and eternity for him to lean over and kiss her. O.K., maybe it was only a minute or two in clock time; but to her twelve-year-old lovestruck mind’s clock, it seemed an eternity. Then she’d risen on one elbow and leaned over and kissed him and that was that. She didn’t remember anything else—of that night or if she ever saw him again or even the touch of his lips on hers: sloppy or slippery or moist or dry. She was floating—on the water, on his sure hands, on his lips, on this new sensation the world called love but she knew as Heaven.

  The hammock’s gentle swing had long since stalled; and the light then shade-shade-shade had settled to persistent shadow, though the spring air was still warm even with the light brush of a breeze. She opened her eyes on the grid of white woven rope; and beyond that grid was the sun-dappled shade of springtime woods cast in an incandescent green, so bright the glow of emergent foliage. And there, not twenty feet from her, w
as the figure of a deer in profile—dark brown flanks, white belly, head cocked slightly to one side and facing only her. How odd she’d not noticed the statue before, and how odd of Josh to put the yard art in the woods and not on the lawn.

  Then the statue’s ears twitched. Laura gasped, in surprise and perhaps a little fear. Could this all too proximate wild creature harm her? What were its intentions, anyway? She’d left the east coast decades ago, long before the proliferation of backyard deer herds; and roaming wildlife were not a common sight around her arid and thinly vegetated California home. So the proximity of this calm and curious wood’s creature left her both startled and amazed. What would it do? Would it charge (she vaguely recalled some local news story of a rampaging bull elk in a mountain community west of her home)? And if it charged, how could she disentangle herself from her cotton-webbed prison?

  Then the deer lowered its head—to eat! It nosed aside some dry leaves and pulled up a tender green sprout. It nosed some more, ate some more. It took two short steps parallel the hammock and the lawn, then grazed some more. Whatever the sight or sound or smell of this newcomer in the hammock, it was insufficient cause to interrupt a good meal.

  Then Laura, her eyes fully adjusted to the shade, saw another deer beyond this one, then another and another and another. The woods were full of gray-brown moving shadows. She counted fourteen total—all antlerless (did any deer, male or female, have antlers in the spring?), all no taller than a good-sized retriever and considerably thinner. And where the first, startlingly near-at-hand, had seemed large and perhaps a threat, she now realized that the whole herd was composed of small deer, all thin and appearing frail. Were these some sort of miniature deer? And what were so many of them doing here, anyway—grazing on such sparse offerings?

  The herd soundlessly floated away, merging into the denser dark of deeper woods. Once gone, Laura wondered if they’d really existed. Or were they simply the creation of her new weightlessness—in the hammock and in life?

  Or ethereal messengers from some world between reality and fantasy—deep-woods fauns probing the edges of their range; or a cherub chorus singing in, of all sounds, silence? And, if messengers, what then their message? She was not, and never had been, given to interest in the fantastic or the abstract. In the old days, Josh—in a mix of frustration and endearment—called her “Literal Laura.” And her profession as a soil scientist, who pried loose the secrets of Mother Earth and exposed them under the shrill light of chemical analysis, well mirrored her full embrace of the tangible and the known.

  Until this past week. Now, she wasn’t so confident in her old beliefs. Now, she wondered about what might lay beyond the edges of rational explanation, all those speculations she’d formerly rejected with a disdainful smirk or a derisive laugh or a dismissive shrug. All those possible something mores that lay beyond rationality—what might be out there? And, if she ventured forth into that unknown, could she ever return?

  A breeze swayed the pine boughs far above, the bows slightly twisted the pine trunks at their attachment point, the trunks tilted ever so slightly all the way to the ground and moved the hooks that’d been screwed into the trunks to hold the hammock, the metal hooks grated against the metal of the grommets at either end of the hammocks cotton cords, the metal grinding against metal made a slight creak as it caused the hammock holding Laura to sway ever so slightly. What message this?

  Chalk it up to some odd side effect of his pain medication or some delayed glandular reaction to his surgery—whatever the reason, Josh felt himself becoming aroused as Sherri the home nurse sponge-bathed his torso and downward toward his groin and thighs. After stripping off his pajamas, she’d tossed a hand towel loosely over his private parts before starting the bath. Now that towel was relentlessly rising in near miraculous levitation—miraculous not in the towel defying gravity but in his penis springing to life after weeks of total hibernation. But now back, and what was he to do about this? He felt first embarrassment, but that sentiment quickly gave way to humor and a detached amazement. “It seems we have a visitor,” he said to Sherri, nodding toward the tenting towel.

  “What, that?” she replied, perhaps a little too dismissively (at least she didn’t add “little thing” at the end of her response). “Happens almost every time.”

  “Really? I figured all I had left were fond memories.”

  Sherri laughed. “That’ll be the last thing that goes. You know what they say about Strom Thurmond—had to beat his pecker to death with a stick after he passed!”

  Josh laughed heartily. “Never heard that one.”

  Sherri continued. “My experience would suggest that’s the norm. The lights can go out in all the other rooms; but that thing will still be stirring, looking for who knows what.”

  “Maybe it’s you, your magic touch.” At that moment, her hands and fingers and that sumptuous sponge did seem to be infused with magical powers—a sorceress’s spell woven through touch, a tale ancient as the species.

  She shrugged. “Could be. I figure I can always get a job beating dicks if they ever run out of a need for home nurses.”

  A part of Josh—a part that seemed like it was off on a distant mountaintop, surveying the landscape of his life and circumstances—thought he should be shocked at this ribald turn of this conversation with an employee and virtual stranger. But the rest of him, all those parts near at hand (and now under those magical hands of Sherri), those parts of him that had been so ignobly sliced and diced and bequeathed with a near-term death sentence—those parts of him basked in these golden rays of sensuous touch and playful, and playfully daring, exchange. “Make more money,” he said with a wink.

  “Sure, but lousy benefits.” Her tone was earnest—she’d clearly given the prospect serious consideration (or maybe tried it?).

  Josh nodded. “I guess you’re right. Besides, where would our friend be without your magic touch?” He nodded toward the towel in his lap, now slowly collapsing, surrendering unfulfilled to the inexorable pull of gravity and context. Josh quickly scanned his mind for sense of loss and found none there, found instead an improbable hint of hope, a glimmer of optimism not in his penile gland’s brief resurrection but in the spontaneous and unexpected human exchange between nurse and patient, a humanity that had been all but nonexistent in the past weeks of testing, diagnosis, surgery, and treatment.

  “Oh, he’d be fine,” Sherri said. She deftly straightened the newly flat towel in his lap. “That pretty wife of yours has plenty of magic left in her fingers.”

  Josh was briefly confused at her confusion. He wondered if he should set her straight—that Laura was no longer his wife, hadn’t been for decades; and that he surely had no claim on the use of her fingers for his pleasure, however therapeutic that might be. But he decided to leave her assertion uncorrected and said only, “How do you know?”

  Sherri looked straight at him, her round kind face almost glowing in the late afternoon light. “Trust me,” she said firmly, “I know.” She resumed bathing him, sponging now his right leg, working downward toward his bandaged stump. Only then did she add, “But you might have to ask her.”

  After dinner Josh and Laura sat in a spreading pool of early evening silence that was not so much the absence of sound as the presence of—well, what? ancient companionship? condition-free love? or balked questions? encroaching despair? Or perhaps the silence was just an opportunity for the word-less digestion of their supper of tunafish salad, sliced tomato, and an English muffin. Dusk lapped at the large window in shades of pastel green and pink merging slowly into a pale silver, then into a dove gray, a slate blue, finally a gun-barrel black. The pool of silence steadily rose to cover Laura’s feet, ankles, calves, knees; it encircled the bed, covered the side rails, began to flow out onto the quilt, puddled around Josh’s body. Dusk had become night, quick as that. The bedside lamp cast the room in bands of light and dark, shadows that seemed to shift and dance though the source of light never moved. The silence rose to Laura�
��s waist and up over her torso; it steadily covered the bed, Josh’s body, lapped at the pillows couching his head.

  For Josh, this silence—which had started comfortably enough: two old friends at ease with one another in word-less dusk at the end of a full day—began to take on the shape of his tomb, intimating his end, perhaps only days or weeks away. He felt a chill wash over his body and could almost taste in the still air the brassy finality of death. He felt suddenly and totally seized by this all too real premonition of his eternal abode—cold, dark, and oh so endlessly silent. Josh was paralyzed with fear, powerless to move or protest or break the spell of the moment. The tomb of silence stretched on and on and on. He closed his eyes, pressing out tears. And there—behind his eyelids, beneath the tears—an image arose: his daughter Angela, Angie always to him, perhaps five years old and bouncing on his knee like riding a horse, her laughter like hiccups exploding out of her chest, changing his whole world.

  For Laura, the silence stretched backwards across time, racing like a super-reverse on her life’s remote control, streaming images of the years, the decades, the scenes and snapshots of her life merging into a blur, a homogenized warm beige blur with flakes of red and purple and gold. Then, just as suddenly, stopped, freeze-framed on a single instant of real memory—she on her back in the night in bed, Josh asleep beside her, the place their one-bedroom apartment in Boston, the time the night before she would leave for France on what she was describing as a short-term academic excursion but what was in fact (both she and Josh knew, however much they might deny or avoid the subject) the beginning of the end of their marriage, the circumstance of their permanent separation following several trial (and error) separations in the months past.

  In this freeze-framed moment, the apartment’s high plaster ceiling seemed both suffocatingly near—Laura felt she could lick the chill plaster if she dared extend her tongue—and infinitely distant—swallowing this tiny spec of organic molecules that was her body and life in the universe’s massive swirl of inexorable time and infinite space. How could she leave, jumping voluntarily into that void? How could she stay, compressed into a dot by Josh and their marriage, the very breath of life and growth and freedom being pressed from her by the minute, the second?

  And the inevitable question, as she lay on her back, a question both from and to that ceiling both near and far—where was God in all this? Why had he put her at this impossible juncture? Where would he have me go? She’d been raised a Roman Catholic, even attended a Catholic elementary school. But the God those nuns described, the God they invoked when dispensing both punishment and praise (and, sadly, more punishment than praise), never seemed real to her, never took root in her heart. And since marrying Josh in his Protestant church, she’d never darkened the door of a church or even thought about God or his place, if any, in her life and choices.

  But now here she was, at a crossroad, her first true adult crossroad (her marriage to Josh being her last childhood crossroad), and the question of God’s place and purpose in her present actions and choices pressed hard upon her with an urgency even closer than the ceiling she could’ve licked, heavier than the weight of the anonymous city and the frozen night and the finality of the one-way ticket sitting neatly atop her packed bag within her reach from the bed. But if God was anywhere here present, within or without her frozen body frozen this moment in his time, she discerned him not.

  But unknown to her frozen in that crossroad moment—known only to Laura looking back all these years later and to God who had for his own reasons chosen to remain hidden and silent on her occasion of extreme need—there was a cluster of cells embedded in her uterine wall, relentlessly dividing throughout her frozen moment trapped between compression and dissolution, those cells growing toward a future fate that would haunt Laura the rest of her life.

  He was still awake. Still awake despite the resolute downward tug of synthetic opiate that left a taste in his mouth like the taste of the brass rail on his crib that he’d spend hours licking while he silently waited for his mother’s return. Still awake through the haze of Laura smoothing his covers and setting a tumbler half-full of fresh water on the nightstand and switching off the bedside lamp. Still awake through the sound like a musical instrument of Laura’s pee hitting the water in the toilet bowl, her whirlwind brushing of her teeth (hard and fast, so violent he used to—when sometimes sharing the tiny apartment bath—expect to see the foam she’d spit into the sink tinged in crimson, though it never was), the scrubbing sound as she washed her face with a lemon-scented astringent, the whisper (did he imagine this?) of the brush gently ordering her thick graying hair. Still awake as Laura walked past his bed in her striped boy’s pajamas in the dark and gently closed the door to the nursery that he’d turned into a library that was now Laura’s room as she slept on the daybed built into a notch between the wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling shelves, as she turned on the light behind the closed door, then reopened the door just a crack in case he cried out in the night. Still awake as he heard her pull back the covers to the bed, slide between those folds, and switch off the light with three clicks that took the bulb through two stages of greater brightness before settling on the finality of darkness. Still awake as he heard her exhale a long and almost mournful sigh that he was surely not supposed to hear. Still awake as the big house encasing the two of them—itself an assemblage of mainly organic compounds surrounding and embracing the two humans’ bodies of mainly organic compounds—as the big house settled toward a night’s stasis, its strong beams and headers and wood and gypsum skin giving back the warmth they’d absorbed through a day long with solar heat in a kind of sigh of its own, low groans and creaks like some large animal trying to get comfortable before sleep.

  Still awake; still awake.

  “I thank God for your presence.” Was the sentence voice or thought, statement or prayer?

  The house yielded no response. Even the subtle moans of timbers giving back heat had momentarily ceased, all at rest.

  And from the nursery, no clue—no voice in response, no ruffling of bedcovers or creaking of mattress springs, no sigh or gasp.

  So unspoken, then—six words that had floated to the surface of his drug-fogged consciousness, formed a simple declarative sentence, and offered that sentence to the deeper dark beyond his consciousness. So more than a simple sentence—a prayer. And if a prayer, surely his first in years or decades. Though he’d always believed in an all-powerful, all-loving, all-watchful God, he’d rarely felt compelled to reach out to this God in plea or thanks. Had he assumed that God saw and already knew his needs, his hopes and regrets? Or was he simply too reticent to trouble the ruler of time and space with his petty troubles and thanksgivings? Or did both these understandings merge into a single belief structure that combined reticence and awe and trust?

  “I do too,” Laura said finally. She’d tested the response in her mind several times to be sure of its truth before speaking the words.

  Josh was startled and confused—had he heard the words or imagined them? “What?” It was almost a shout, echoing off the dark walls, no question of sound waves this time.

  “I thank God also, for my presence here, wildly improbable as it still seems to me.”

  Josh’s low chuckle was barely audible through the door. “Fate, I guess.”

  Laura wouldn’t let it go at that. “But I can’t thank God for the reason I’m here.”

  “My illness or my aloneness?”

  Laura’d meant his illness but said, “Well, both.”

  “God had nothing to do with either.”

  “Then who, or what?”

  Josh took a deep breath. “Me. My choices.”

  “You chose a terminal blood disorder?” She immediately wished she could take back the word “terminal,” but there it was—a simple adjective but dense and immovable as a granite boulder, damming the night between them.

  Josh didn’t flinch at the adjective or her question, but took a few moments to compose his resp
onse. “I chose disorder, or perhaps disorder chose me. It’s none of God’s doing.”

  Laura suddenly envied his peace. Was it some side effect of the medication? Or the surgery? Was peace some biochemical protective response to radical amputation? If so, she wanted some of those chemicals in her bloodstream, whatever the price. She was furious with his peace, his resignation, his fatalism. “What about me? What about my aloneness? Is it my choice? My fault?” she asked, her voice rising with each question.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were unhappy.”

  “I didn’t think I was.”

  The house and night were ample to fill the silence that ensued. The walls hadn’t echoed a voice raised in passion in—what? a dozen years? that day Vicki’d railed at him as she packed two suitcases then left forever? One might assume the walls preferred silence, or low calm voices, to shouts of passion; but then the walls didn’t state their preferences.

  Outside in the fast-cooling early spring dark pointed toward a pre-dawn frost that might be the last of the season (then again, might not), countless stars and countable planets sparkled like so many diamonds in the vast blank dome of a dry and clear moonless night, those infinite sparkles appearing motionless but in fact rushing past at unfathomable speeds toward their appointed destinies—the earth itself spinning fast and moving through its ordained space; and the stars and planets also racing through the vast emptiness of space, moving toward the earth, or away, or sideways; everything moving: toward something, toward nothing, but moving, powerless to halt the movement or return from whence it had come. And under this kaleidoscope of motionless motion, of seeing and knowing but not seen or known, an acorn finished its ordered parting and yielded forth its sprout in an imperceptible but inexorable unfurling beneath the moist and fetid blanket of its parents leaves shed last year and the year before that and the year before that. A tree frog peeped once, gained no response, fell silent—too early in the season, too cold for song. A doe bedded not fifty yards from the humans’ beds felt its unborn fawn stretch its legs against her encasing womb, nudge its twin, which didn’t move. A cardinal huddled in the rough-hewn nest it’d assembled from twigs and pine needles in the fork of the tall camellia outside the kitchen door, the slick calcium shells of the three eggs somehow easing the irritation in its breast muscles, the cold on its back. A barred owl glided across the clearing, beneath the star-encrusted dome.

  “Tell me about your daughter.” Laura got no response for several slow heartbeats. She wondered if maybe Josh had fallen asleep.

  “You want the sordid or the sublime?”

  Laura couldn’t help but laugh—what an answer to a seemingly harmless question that was in fact not harmless at all, she now acknowledged, a question she would’ve never ventured in the full light of day but felt safe to wager here in the dark. “Sordid doesn’t sound very appealing, but I’ll say you choose.”

  “The sordid was just one moment, but it changed all the rest. Angie came home early from school one day when she was sixteen and found me in bed—this bed, in fact—with one of my grad students. And she wasn’t just any grad student. Joan had tutored Angie in algebra, taught her how to play the guitar, and helped her learn how to drive. She was the big sister Angie had always longed for. And there I was screwing this girl in my marriage bed. Sordid enough for you?”

  “Oh, Josh.”

  “I can see Angie’s face this very second, etched there in the doorway, her expression a mix of confusion, shock, and the beginning of disgust. It’s the only image of her I can ever summon in my mind. I used to get out the photo albums and gaze at photos of happier times in hopes of replacing, or at least supplementing, that single memory. But it always returned, forcing the other images aside. I now accept it as just punishment.”

  “But why, Josh? How could you?”

  “That’s easy—Joan smelled better than anything I’ve ever smelled except you. I can still smell her, though I never saw her again after that day. She smelled like every hope I could ever have. She smelled like I would never die, or grow old, or suffer loss.”

  “You surely see the irony in that.”

  “I surely do. I never figured it out. I stopped trying years ago.”

  “And you still claim there’s a God?”

  “There’d better be.”

  Laura could assemble no spoken response to that. For the second time in but a few short minutes, she was furious with Josh’s fatalism but felt powerless to release this fury. Her whole body wanted to shake itself violently like a dog ridding itself of the chill effects of a sudden cloudburst; but her body wouldn’t move. She felt pinned to the mattress like an insect on a foam board, like some gray-bland aging moth desperate to flutter away to find some dim light to beat its wings against but its wings powerless to move its body, nowhere to fly. She finally said, “You should seek her out.”

  “Why? She doesn’t want to see me.” His voice sounded very weary, his words a little slurred.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know she didn’t ever respond to the gifts or cards I sent for years following the divorce, until I finally received a two-sentence response—‘These reminders are worse than silence. Please stop.’ That’s Angie for you—ever the verbal economist.”

  “Nothing since?”

  “No. I honored her request, figured it was the least I could do. A few years ago I heard, months after the fact, that Vicki had died of cancer. If Angie didn’t reach out to me then, why would she want to see me now?”

  “Maybe her silence then was at your wife’s request.”

  “Vicki was dead—she had no more wishes.”

  “No, Vicki was dying and had the power of her condition to enforce her wishes. And once she’d died, what was your daughter to do—call and say ‘Dad, come and lay flowers on Mom’s grave?’ It was too late then. Your daughter had few options at that point, none of them good.”

  Josh was finally losing his battle with fatigue and medication; but some part of him felt the need to finish this conversation, to bring Laura up to date on his other family. “Please understand why I don’t see events that way. Angie’s a strong-willed individual. She’d make happen what she wanted to happen.”

  “Josh, I’m in her shoes now. She could’ve used your help, whatever the complications.”

  For just an instant, Josh heard Laura’s words for what they were—a spontaneous plea. But that brief insight quickly crumbled as his consciousness lost its battle with the night and started to roll downhill toward the valley of sleep. In the midst of that silent tumble, he might’ve said aloud, “We’ll see.” Or maybe not. In either case, blank rest fully embraced him now and for the full balance of this clear spring night.

  Laura thought she heard Josh mumble something from the room beyond but couldn’t make out the words. In the ensuing enduring blank silence that followed, her mind churned, like some creek bed flooded to overflowing with eddies and cross currents in unexpected places—doubling back against the tide, swirling in surprise whirlpools. She thought about Angie, a woman now, a woman she’d never met. She felt sure she’d want to know about her father’s condition, but had nothing to base that assumption on. Maybe she wouldn’t want to know, wouldn’t come if she did, really wanted nothing more to do with her father. Then, in the peculiar nature of late-night ruminations, Laura’s mind started to drift. She started to think about Josh’s other daughter. Does she need to know? Does Josh need to know her?

  Then her mind went blank in self-preservation. The stream of her consciousness that had been flooded and churning instantly calmed and cleared and returned to its restful channel. She floated on its current into blank sleep, her deep and easy breaths merging with those of her ex-husband in the room beyond.

  Sister Gertrude (they called her Trudy) sat beside her bed in the Sacred Heart Home for Unwed Mothers in Meridian, Mississippi—at least in her dream, Laura assumed it was the bed she slept in for two months or so nearly thirty-seven years ago. It had the same
narrow too-soft mattress with a sheet of plywood instead of a boxspring set on a white painted cast-iron frame with solid brass finials atop the four iron posts. Those brass finials gave it away—they always struck Laura as the sole indulgences in an otherwise stripped-to-the-bone efficiency in her room and the home in general.

  But then, in her dream, the finials disappeared, the mattress grew firm and broader and rose off the floor, and she was back home—her bed in Modesto, the room and furniture and sounds of the house exuding a level of comfort and security and peace never present, for her at least, in the Sacred Heart Home. Yet there was Sister Trudy, beside her bed in Modesto, seeming fully at home there also, her quiet presence a steady calm amidst any storm. “You will survive this,” Trudy said softly.

  “The delivery, you mean?” Laura asked. She was terrified of the prospect of labor. She’d never handled pain well, and the Home’s midwife was quite insistent on natural delivery.

  “Yes, but also the tearing.”

  That didn’t sound good to Laura; “tearing” didn’t sound good at all. Her gut wrenched so violently she thought maybe the baby would burst loose at that very moment, tearing the whole way. But Trudy didn’t seem to notice the revulsion she’d triggered in Laura. Maybe she couldn’t see Laura lying in the shadows as clearly as Laura could see her.

  “And the healing—you’ll survive that too.”

  “The healing?”

  “That’s the hardest part. You give her away in an instant, then you spend the rest of your life healing from that tear.”

  Laura’s hands cradled the fetus ballooning her belly. There was no question she would put the baby up for adoption. Her marriage to Josh was over—emotionally and practically if not yet legally. She’d not seen him since leaving for France, and even the sporadic letters had stopped months ago. She had no family to turn to, no close friends, no good job prospects. She needed to finish her degree as quickly as possible and there was no way she could do that with a baby in tow. She justified her selfishness with the honest observation that there were countless infertile couples who longed for a child and could provide a stable and loving home and upbringing, vastly more than she could ever hope to give. So yes, she would have the baby; and yes, it would be given up for adoption—a life set free to the world, the only parcel of worth her thin existence had yielded back to abundant creation: then or now, Laura silently acknowledged in her semi-consciousness outside the dream, lying on the daybed in Josh’s nursery turned library.

  Trudy was still there, beside this bed in Josh’s house. “You will survive the healing by becoming it.”

  Laura asked, “How do you know?”

  “It’s what I did. It’s what you’ll do.”

  “Show me how, please.”

  “I already will.” Then she was gone.

  Laura woke gently in darkest night, lying on her stomach, her face deeply buried in the plush down pillow. All her suddenly revived and keenly aware senses tested the night air for hint of harm or threat or foreboding yet uncovered only peace. She didn’t recall Sister Trudy’s face or words from her dream, but a strong calm settled over her body and soul. The word will danced about her mind and soon outward into the room, like a ballerina with full pirouettes and graceful leaps against the dark. I will—my will—she will—his will—thou will. In a dance captivating, dizzying, enthralling, disarming. And defining. My will, your will, his will, her will. The swirling dance slowed, calmed; stillness returned home to her pillowed head, her resting mind, her peaceful soul.

  Yes, Laura both heard and said from somewhere within—I will.

  Whatever that meant; wherever that might take her.

  Inside his fever, Josh floated on a broad slow-moving river in the dark. Looking to each side, there were bonfires on the river’s banks, sending a staccato glow across the calm reflecting water as he drifted past. He heard the fires’ crackle, could see their smoke rise gray against the darker night sky. He could hear voices, people talking around the fires, but couldn’t make out the words—if they were words at all or maybe just the hoots and hollers and purrs and grunts of onward rushing life. He strained to hear, to understand the sounds, to know what they were talking about, what their plans were. But no words separated themselves from the human murmur passing by on the banks.

  He looked downstream and the fires continued along both banks, far as he could see. What were they for? Some attempt to bring fish to the surface, ready prey for pre-set nets? Or an effort to light the whole of the broad river, bank to bank? And if so, then for what purpose? To rescue a drifting child or secure a boat that had broken free from its moorings? Or to celebrate a war hero or a popular leader passing by on the waterway? Or were they just fires of celebration—the summer solstice or Fourth of July or victory in battle or divine deliverance from some strife or plague? The why of the fires both mattered tremendously yet didn’t matter at all. It was enough that they were there, lighting the way ahead, far as he could see.

  He looked behind and there was only darkness back there—no fires, no water visible. Where had the fires gone? Had he rounded a bend in the river that blocked them from his view? He couldn’t tell; he didn’t know. There were so many things he didn’t know. And he couldn’t go back. The water carried him onward.

  His second wife Vicki was floating beside him. He wondered how she managed to stay afloat. He looked about for a log or some piece of flotsam he might offer her, but the surface of the water was unbroken by branch or other debris. He was sorry he couldn’t help her. But Vicki didn’t need his help. She floated beside him without effort or struggle. He waited for some word from her, a word of accusation or condemnation or recrimination. Lord knows she had a bountiful store of such words, and he deserved them all. But no words came from her, and she floated so peacefully beside him that he accepted her silence as a truce. He’d longed for that. Then she raised her hand and touched her fingers to his dry lips. Cool water dripped from her fingertips over his parched lips.

  But the fingers weren’t Vicki’s but Amy’s. And he was twelve and in the pool in the dark floating beside a sixteen-year-old neighbor girl whose fingers lightly, almost imperceptibly, traced a line along his lips and all the way around his mouth. Softly, slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly around and around and around his lips till his whole body was on edge, taut with a newfound longing that would never be filled.