Angels Unawares

by Jeffrey Anderson

Day Four

  Josh woke to discover Laura’s sleeping face not a foot from his own on the extra pillow. For a moment, he was convinced that he was either dreaming or dead. If he were dead, then God was generous and good and had fulfilled one of his oldest longings, cancelled one of his deepest regrets. If he were dreaming, then they must be back at their old apartment in Boston and Laura would rise any minute, awake in an instant, and slide out of bed to get dressed for her job as a receptionist at an investment firm.

  But then he knew he was neither dead nor dreaming—he needed to pee, so he couldn’t be dead; and Laura’s hair was graying at the temples, so this couldn’t be a dream of their long-ago life. To confirm the truth of both assessments, he slowly slid his hand down his right thigh till it came to the void just above where his knee should’ve been.

  Suddenly free of delusion, he unabashedly studied his ex-wife’s sleeping face in the clear honest light of the bright April morning. Part of what he saw there was the beautiful young girl he’d fallen in love with in high school. This sleeping face still held locked inside the magic that had contained the answer to all his hopes and dreams. But layered atop that young innocence and beauty was a hard shell of not so much old age as pain and loss and regret, much of which he’d caused. He’d seen that coating of loss and regret begin to cloud her features those last months together. He’d seen it and done nothing about it, seen it and only accelerated it with his selfishness. A self-justifying part of himself had always hoped that she was better off away from him, might find herself outside of his sphere of influence. But he saw now that’d been wishful thinking on his part, simple avoidance of responsibility. She’d given herself wholly to him and he’d failed to honor that gift. And, he now realized, he’d failed to honor his own stake in the relationship, his own sacred commitment. He wondered what sort of shell he’d see coating his own face, if he dared look in the mirror.

  Still, beside the loss (real or imagined) he perceived on his ex-wife’s sleeping profile, he also had to admit a confidence and an independence that had evolved since their distant parting. This face would no longer turn to him for fundamental affirmation, wait expectantly for his approval or rejection. This face had made its own way in the world, would from now on. This face knew its needs and how to fulfill them. This face knew its likes and freely chose its environs. And where it chose to be this minute was a few inches from his failing body and his, momentarily at least, absolutely clear mind. The few tears that rolled down his cheeks and stained his pillow were of simple thanks.

  Laura opened her eyes, instantly awake. “I look that awful?” But she smiled, closed the few inches to his face, and kissed his streaked cheek.

  “Pure beauty,” Josh said.

  She laughed again. “Not a chance.”

  “In my eyes.”

  “Then I thank you.” She leaned over again and kissed him chastely on the lips. “Now I’d better get up before Sherri comes in and calls the morality police.”

  “Morality police?”

  Laura smiled as she swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood. “Don’t want to disillusion the young gal.”

  “That’s probably not possible.”

  “You never know,” Laura said. She was all the way to the bathroom door when she turned suddenly and said, “Josh, I’ve found Angie.”

  Josh stared at his ex-wife for several long seconds then said, “Good.”

  Josh asked Laura who asked Sherri who asked the doctor (hardly more than a boy, really—almost young enough to be Josh’s grandson who invited them to call him Joe and who had a tattooed bracelet round his left wrist) if he could dial down the morphine long enough to let Josh read his daughter’s blog journal in its entirety and relatively clear-headed. Doctor Joe didn’t like the idea, saying that the short-term mental clarity would be dramatically offset by the mid-term pain combined with mild withdrawal (from the narcotic) symptoms; but he concluded his phone call with Josh by saying, “Your life, your pain, your call.”

  Josh thanked him for his honest assessment, hung up the phone, and instructed Sherri to turn off the morphine drip but leave the shunt in place and the tube connected—“Just in case.” Then he took a nap to let the drug already in his system dissipate.

  When he woke he didn’t have to look at the bedside clock to know that it was early afternoon, instinctively knew that fact by the height of the sun outside the window and the length of the shadows of the trees on the bedroom floor. He also knew that Sherri was in the den watching T.V. and that Laura was either outside in the yard or off in town shopping. Their routines granted each their moments of personal time and space, each their moments of privacy, all three understanding the unspoken truth that they should store up such time against the looming prospect, perhaps only days hence, when a round-the-clock vigil would preclude such privacy and personal time.

  It took Josh a few minutes to contemplate fully just how good he felt and how alert he was. He felt so good that he considered rising from bed to gaze out the window at springtime unfolding in the familiar woods, to stroll into the den and give Sherri a shock that might strain her under-exercised heart. Then he remembered his truncated right leg and confirmed, with a quick glance around the room, that Laura had stowed the crutches in the hall closet and Sherri had rolled the wheelchair into the laundry to give them more space in the bedroom. So he was prisoner in this bed unless he wanted to relearn how to crawl after having abandoned that mode of movement some fifty-six years ago. He’d stay put and spare Sherri’s heart this time. He took the urinal off the bed stand and relieved the pressure in his bladder, hiding the action under the covers. His pee smelled like turnips, a vegetable he’d been forced to eat while growing up but never since. He winced at the odor, no doubt the side effect of one of his drugs. Then he realized with a peculiar satisfaction that this was the first time he’d noted the odor of anything in days. This fresh alertness was almost intoxicating.

  He carefully placed the half-full urinal on the bed stand, then picked up Laura’s laptop and set it on his stomach on top of the covers. He opened the cover and waited for the screen to come to life as it booted up, then waited a few more seconds as the wireless signal linked to the computer and connected him to the boundless world of the Internet. He scrolled through the list of recently visited websites, found a.earl.inthedesert there near the top (where Laura had told him it would be), and clicked on it. It was only then that he noticed his hands were shaking.

  Angie’s simple site of journal entries opened almost instantly. Josh took a deep breath, scrolled to the start of the blog, read the matter-of-fact (and a little bit “in your face”) introduction Laura had read earlier, then began to read the journal entries in the order they were written.

  January 18

  I’d thought I loved sand—you know: digging in it at the beach, making sand pies and sand cakes and offering them to your mom like you some kind of amazing precocious chef then watching the surf reclaim your efforts and cleanse the beach and your body with rolling warm sea foam and sweet salt water.

  But that was then. And this is now—sand under your fingernails, sand under your toenails, sand in your socks, sand in your panties (and you can guess where else), sand in your ears, eyes, nose, mouth, throat; sand pulled up from between your teeth when you floss in the morning (or at night or midday or whenever it is you floss), sand in shampoo, sand in food, sand in the bottled water, sand on surgical instruments even before you tear off the wrapper, sand on catheters (OUCH!), sand on sponges swabs gloves masks.

  Well, I guess you get the idea—a new world order defined by and infested with sand. They say it’s the most plentiful substance in the world—I believe it’s all right here. They say the new millennia will be defined by silicone (instead of carbon), but I had no idea it would take over so fast or so completely. A brave new world indeed.

  January 27

  What a mess. Our company commander told us blogs were O.K. but to never disclose deployment intel and to be “
prudent when offering opinions about the war.” Well, while prudence has never been my strong suit, I don’t have any strongly held beliefs one way or the other about this war. The way I see it, we have an intractable enemy and we’re going to be fighting him (and the occasional her) in one place or another for a long time. At the moment, the battleground is Iraq. Next month or next year or next decade, the battleground will be somewhere else.

  But forget about the war. The joke is the delusion about “rebuilding Iraq.” Now I don’t doubt that the civilian command structure is sincere about their desire to rebuild Iraq, and the sooner the better. And I’m willing to believe that the average American on the street thinks rebuilding Iraq is a good thing, perhaps even a moral obligation given that we destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure, both over the last three years and fifteen years ago. So we feel obligated to fix what we blew up (take that to the great shrink in the sky and see what she has to say about it!).

  But somebody forgot to ask the freaking Iraqis!

  How the hell are we going to rebuild anything when our engineers fix it by day only to have it blown up or looted by night?

  When we arrived in country, they brought us to base along a heavily guarded military corridor that was devoid of any signs of damage or destruction. It could’ve been the beltway around D.C. or I-70 outside Kansas City (that is, if those smooth roads were travelled only by military vehicles and guarded by bunkers with fifty-cals sweeping 360 every quarter mile or so and Apaches sweeping both sides out two miles). But today for the first time I was dispatched to a bombing site in Baghdad and travelled there in a convoy that used a civilian highway. What a mess! Charred vehicles along both sides of the road, some still smoldering; black oil smoke hanging like fog over everything from a bombed oil pipeline that’d been hit last night; a pond of black crude from a pipeline that’d been breached weeks ago; houses and businesses with gaping holes in their sides and blown away roofs.

  How can you rebuild anything in an active war zone? Why would you even try?

  January 30

  Then there are the children. They are all clean, well-groomed, and neatly attired (even if the clothes are sometimes ill-fitting or heavily worn) despite the fact that almost all of them live in houses without running water or electricity. But even more amazing than their appearance against the backdrop of chaos and destruction is their playfulness, their happy shouts, their laughter in the midst of constant danger. Where do they find this enthusiasm and resilience?

  When I was about their age, I woke one morning to find my cat dead beside the road. I carried Sammy up the drive to the house, with his body still limber though cool to the touch. My dad dug a hole outside my bedroom window and had me gently lower Sammy into it. I remember being startled when I looked up to see tears running down the cheeks of both Mom and Dad. I’d not seen either of them cry before. And while I don’t remember saying anything, both my parents later claimed I looked up at them, smiling the whole time, and said, “Don’t worry. Jesus will make Sammy alive again.” But despite my reassurance to my parents, I was haunted for weeks by nightmares of violence, danger, and injury to loved ones. I would walk into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and lie down on the floor beside their bed. After the third or fourth time, they pulled out a sleeping bag and left it unrolled for me to slide into in the middle of the night. To this day, I don’t know if I went there out of my fear, or out of a desire to protect and watch over them.

  And this reaction to the death of a pet! Many of these Iraqi children have lost parents, siblings, relatives, friends. All of them have had to endure hours cowering under beds or in closets as bombs rained down and bullets zinged past. Most have been injured, some gravely—missing limbs, severe burns, lost eyes, lost hearing (from blast shockwaves). Yet always a smile, laughter, and (if we let them close enough) a hug around the legs.

  If my previous entry was abjectly pessimistic, then this one is cautiously optimistic. If anyone is to rebuild Iraq, it won’t be on concrete and steel; it will be on the spirit of the Iraqi children. If any of them survive.

  February 2

  Groundhog Day! In the few years I can remember before beginning school, my mom would make a big deal over this day. Every other day (except when she was sick or “tangled up in blue”), she’d wake long before me, be dressed in her day clothes, and have breakfast on the table by the time I made my way to the kitchen in my pj’s and sleepy eyes.

  But on this day of the year, February 2nd, she’d stay in bed, pull the covers over her head, and wait for me to find her. The first time, she didn’t tell me she was doing it; and I ran all around the house calling for her and crying before I finally noticed the lump in their bed, approached slowly, and touched the mound. Mom’s head slowly appeared from beneath the covers; she rubbed her eyes, glanced at the bright sun, then let out a frightened shriek and disappeared back under the covers. Without showing her face, a hand came out from under the covers, grabbed my wrist, and tugged me into the cave of blankets and sheets. There, in the blanket-filtered light, Mom told me about Groundhog Day—how some woodchuck in Pennsylvania would stick his head out of his burrow on this day and, if he saw his shadow, would retreat back into his hole, leaving the world to endure six more weeks of winter; but, if he didn’t see his shadow, would remain out of his burrow because winter was over.

  So, whenever the sun was out on the morning of February 2nd, we’d hide together under the sheets, telling each other scary stories about being lost in a blizzard or crashing through ice or getting stabbed in the heart by a falling icicle. We’d stay there till the morning sun was above the eaves and the shadow of the roof made it safe for us to come out.

  I understand now that winter was tough on my mom, and February the hardest month of all. In these pre-SAD days, when the deleterious effect of sunlight deprivation was not well documented or treated, my mom endured her depression without much help. I guess her peculiar celebration of Groundhog Day was her way of acknowledging the affliction and, in some small way, treating it.

  And, thanks to her, the legend and tradition of Groundhog Day lives on in me. But what if I’m 6000 miles from Pennsylvania, and the winter here means wet sand, and the clouds blocking the sun this morning are of oil smoke from a well burning to the west, raining down black droplets of crude, smudging the world? If the woodchuck can’t see his shadow here, does that mark the end of winter? Or just the beginning?

  Maybe I’ll mark this Groundhog Day with a new tradition, Biblical in its roots and scale. If Pharaoh can have his raining frogs, then Angie can have her plague of raining oil, with noon dark as night.

  But Pharaoh had ten plagues visited upon him by God. Where is Angie in her list? I know of five. I told you about the loss of my cat, Sammy. Then there’s the day my best friend Judy moved away. Then the loss of my father. Then the loss of my mother. Now this blackness at noon on Groundhog Day.

  How many more, God? Am I halfway through my list? More? Less? Have I known more plagues, too painful to remember? Or do some of these not count? Tell me God! Where am I in my journey? How many more plagues before you relent?

  February 8

  Sorry about that previous. Raining oil with the associate stench burning the lining of my sinuses—on top of sand in everything, on top of short days and longer nights, on top of all the wounded and the dying, especially the children, the children worst of all. It can get to a girl, even one hard-hearted as old Angie.

  But today the sun is out, temps in the 80s—beach weather! (And plenty of sand, but where’s the water and waves?) And I’m actually right this minute in a bikini lying in a chaise lounge behind my tent as I type these words. And my reflection in the laptop screen looks SO SMOKING HOT with my too cool for school reflector aviators I bummed off one of the chopper geeks. And given this hot bod in this hot outfit, I’ve taken some pains to shield myself from the eyes of horny enlisted grunts and the fundamentalist (with the emphasis on mental) Islamic contractors that work on base.
I’ve got tarps hung on zip cords strung from the tent poles of my tent and the next one down the line. I can’t see out, and I guess that means they can’t see in. But lest I begin to feel too secure in this illusion of privacy, I just paused to wave at one of the drones that make regular passes around the base perimeter, scanning for terrorists or hot nurses sunning themselves in bikinis. Did I imagine it, or did the drone actually rock its wings in response to my wave?

  Yesterday, we got a local shredded by shrapnel—maybe from one of our bombs, maybe from one of theirs. You can always tell if you remove the shrapnel and rinse it off. Ours is always shiny and perfectly round—stainless steel spheres constructed for durability (while stored inside the bomb heads in armories and munitions facilities scattered around the globe) and maximum velocity (after the bomblets explode at around shoulder height after being released from the mother bomb). Theirs are all manner of sizes, shapes, color, and condition—rusty nails, zinc-plated bolts, nuts with their edges rounded over by the wrench that took them off the wheel lugs. I pulled out one odd-shaped piece from the leg of a cabbie that I couldn’t figure out till another nurse told me to compare it to the blades in the blender we use to mix our margaritas. But now it’s getting harder to distinguish ours from theirs, as some of their bombs are yielding the same perfect spheres of surgical stainless as our bombs—Ali the Bombmaker is getting state support. (I wonder if that will get past the Censor?)

  But lately I just pull the metal out, throw it in the tray, and don’t even bother to look at it, much less rinse it off. What’s the point? A bomb is a bomb and a catastrophic wound is a catastrophic wound, whichever side it comes from. Let Forensics (who confiscate every piece of blast fragment, every last one!) worry about who initiated the mayhem. I’m just here to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

  Or Mrs. Dumpty (to continue the allusion—and hope I don’t sound too callous). The victim this time was a woman. Once we cut away her burka and the many layers of blood-soaked black muslin, we discovered that she was far-along pregnant. Dr. J (not the basketball player but the lieutenant I work with most often) gave up on trying to revive her after a few pops with the defibrillator produced no hint of a pulse, and turned his attention to trying to save the fetus, called for the scalpel and performed a C-section right then and there (no need for anesthesia or prep) and pulled a full-term son from the deceased’s uterus. He gave the slick baby a couple chest compressions and told me to give him a hit of O-2 (the mask was way too big, but O-2 is O-2 and primes the lungs, mask fit or not). And damn if the baby didn’t cough up some fluid, then let out a wail loud enough (and unusual enough) to cause all the surgical staff to pause and look up. Dr. J. raised the baby above his head like maybe he thought he was the basketball player, ready to make a flying dunk. But instead he just beamed from behind his mask and everybody who could cheered. For once, life was brought forth from death.

  He gave me the baby to clean up, and I had the honor (I mean that with all my heart) to cradle him in my arms and keep him warm till one of the other nurses lined an amputation tray with a blanket and placed it under a heat lamp (no incubators in this field hospital). And we set the little guy in his makeshift cradle.

  Word of this unorthodox birth travelled fast, and very soon the liaison officer from Iraqi Social Services arrived with a camera crew to film the miracle baby and his American guardian angels (me, J., and our CO). Then they whisked the baby away, bound for whatever remained of his family.

  I can’t help but wonder how the baby’s father will react—a living son in exchange for a dead wife: a trade as old as birth, I guess. If the father survived.

  February 15

  I don’t know where it came from, but last night a rabbit tripped one of the sensors on the base perimeter and all hell broke loose. Sirens wailed, flares went off automatically, searchlights beamed, and tracer rounds from the guard towers’ fifty-cals streaked across the desert. We were herded into subterranean bunkers in all manner of dress and undress. They tell us to sleep in our underwear and keep a robe handy just in case an alert is sounded in the middle of the night. But as we gathered in the long, narrow reinforced bunker, it became apparent that some of us had forgotten one or more of those steps. Some of the female nurses and doctors had hastily thrown on (and not Army-issued) sheer bras and panties, thongs, and even one frilly crotchless model. And many of the men were naked beneath their robes, a fact that became awkwardly obvious when we sat on benches facing each other and the men eventually grew tired of keeping their legs held tight together. A chivalric doctor offered his robe to a shivering nurse clad in one of those sheer lingerie sets, only to reveal his polka-dot boxer shorts. To his credit, he didn’t blush and said, “A gift from home.” We all nodded understanding.

  I at least—ever prepared Angie—was safely encased in full-coverage tanktop and cotton panties under my knee-length blue terrycloth robe and Crocs plastic clogs on my feet. It wasn’t exactly dinner attire or church clothes, but it spared me the added burden of self-consciousness (not to mention shivering) that clearly afflicted some many of the other women in that bunker. A part of me sympathized at their plight, while another part of me wondered at the persistence of our modesty. At any second a mortar round could make a direct hit on this bunker and we’d all be shredded into hamburger, skimpily clad and well-clothed alike, the perky breast in that lace Victoria’s Secret bra sliced away just as brutally as the testicles dangling over the edge of the bench across the way. What place does modesty have amidst such potential carnage?

  Maybe out here we cling to those vestiges of our old lives to keep from being swallowed whole by the awfulness of this new world disorder. Maybe the mundanity is even more important here than at home. Like those polka-dot boxers, these ill-suited emotions aren’t very practical, may even be counter-productive in a crisis, but they remind us of home, help us feel that at least some small part of the old self remains, is intact, may even get back in one piece. And I don’t know where we would be, who we would become, if we let those little pieces of ourselves slip away.

  Above us the machine-gun chatter continued, and at least three Apaches roared past with turbos in full burn. We waited there for nearly three hours, some of us dozing off while seated upright, most of us staring blankly at the person directly across, their faces gray and ghostly in the silver-tinged LED lights. At some point, an infantryman from above used his four-digit key code to unlock the blast doors and tossed in a few dozen shrink-wrapped blankets. He looked like an alien invader with his helmet and mounted video camera and flack collar and communication mike and hinged up night-vision goggles and charcoal painted skin. But his piercing eyes revealed a hint of desperation and, I think, a will to protect. Protect who? Well, us I guess—his comrades, his regiment, his country. Who knows? Then, quick as they’d appeared, those eyes and all that high-tech gear disappeared down the tunnel and into the night and the doors closed with a resounding thunk as the steel bars thrust into their concrete sockets.

  They let us out at dawn. There was no announcement, no official explanation for the alert. But a grunt who trades me bittersweet chocolate hearts (from his girlfriend back home—though he says chocolate gives him hives ever since arriving in-country) for condoms by the gross (don’t worry—not costing you a dime; they’re donated by Trojan and I’m in charge of distributing them “as need demands”) told me about the rabbit and said a sniper killed it at first light “at 600 yards!” (the grunt’s exclamation point, not mine).

  And I guess it was a good shot, given that thousands of rounds of machine-gun bullets and all those flares and roaring helicopters had failed to do the job. One wonders how much that rabbit cost the American taxpayer (not to mention lost sleep among the medical corps)? A few dozen Osama bunnies could bankrupt the world’s greatest power, given their rate of reproduction and their ability to find their way through, around, or under any fence.

  February 20

  Most of the time our hospital tent is like a product
ion line, or so it has begun to seem to me. Bodies enter through the front door (a makeshift loading dock) on stretchers, mattresses, plywood, car hoods, or simply in sagging blankets with each of the four corners glued together with sweat and blood and grime. Then, after passing through our production line, the bodies exit out the back (through surgically clean stainless steel doors opening onto a helipad) on gurneys or in body bags, to be whisked off by waiting choppers to the morgue or the nearest hard-topped hospital. Nobody, living or dead, stays with us for more than a couple hours, most not more than a half hour. Stitch ’em and pitch ’em. Dead or alive, they’re going to a better place.

  But on rare occasion, despite all my training state-side and here, I get hooked. Can’t say why. Maybe some intangible in the patient, maybe some loose wire inside of me. But once hooked, I can never shake that face, never forget the touch of that skin or the smell of that breath.

  Sometimes it’s their last breath I smell and remember—no different than the one before except that none will follow. Then I’m left hooked to a corpse. Not much future in that, but since when did future benefit ever have a say in why someone gets hooked? I’ve been hooked that way three times so far— an Iraqi boy with his head crushed by Humvee tire blasted into the air only to come to earth right where he was playing ball, an Air Force mechanic with a sniper’s bullet in his skull who somehow survived long enough to die, eyes suddenly wide-open, under my gaze, and an Iraqi woman impaled by the coffin cover at a bombing during her uncle’s funeral.

  Then there are those that hook me but still manage to stay alive, at least beyond my care. All of them (three so far) were men. Each was grievously wounded, their long-term survival in serious doubt. But each left alive, breathing (on their own or with a respirator), on gurneys with multiple IV bags and pumps dangling above, like an elaborate float in a holiday parade, rushed out those steel doors to choppers with their rotors whirring to be whizzed away to some high-tech trauma center in Baghdad, Kuwait City, or Germany. Each taking a little piece of me with them.

  Today it was Jim (not his real name). He was logged in at 1:18 PM. From the waist up, he looked perfectly normal—sweaty and a little dirty, like a college kid taking a break from a hard-nosed game of touch football. His eyes were open but they gave no sign of seeing, no hint of recognition of me or the hospital. His buddy, who was holding Jim’s right hand up to the second I pried his fingers loose one at a time, said Jim hadn’t spoken since the blast ripped the Humvee apart and he thought maybe his eardrums were popped. I thanked him, told him we’d be sure to check that, then wheeled Jim back into trauma.

  Once back there, I lifted the standard issue Army medic blanket to check below his waist and—well, there was no below the waist. I’d expected severed legs. The void beneath the blanket was all too familiar. But in this poor boy the blast had not only torn away his legs but pretty much everything from his belly button down—his hips and pelvis, his buttocks, anus, rectum, colon and lower intestine, his penis, scrotum and testicles. What existed in place of these organs and body parts was a tangle of over two dozen surgical clamps hanging like a belly dancer’s belt of ornaments (I thought of that comparison the minute I raised the blanket—no doubt some perverse self-defense mechanism) from the void of what used to be his waist.

  The field medic had done a great job of clamping all the major arteries, and he was in no danger of bleeding to death. So my job at that moment was to trim away all the shreds of clothing, try to clean away any shards of metal, plastic, or bone, and in general try to clean him up and prep him for the surgery that would happen far from here.

  I was in the middle of doing just that when I cut the elastic waistband of what was left of his underwear and exposed the neatly healed scar from a long ago appendectomy. Next to the scar was a tattoo with the words “God’s Stitching” in beautiful cursive script, and under those words “Mom.” Something about that thin scar inches from all that mayhem took my breath away. I glanced up and saw Jim staring at me. I thought he was in shock, but he said in a firm whisper—“Please.” Then he closed his eyes and his head fell back on the stretcher.

  Well, that did it. This soldier was no longer just a jumble of shredded tissue but now a young man with a past and a mother. He’d stayed too long under my hand; now he’d stay forever in my head and in my heart. And of course my eyes clouded and my hands began to quiver.

  I turned away and tapped another nurse who was prepping a plasma bag. She saw my tears, glanced at Jim, and nodded understanding. We swapped patients and she finished what I’d begun. I couldn’t help listening for Jim’s voice, but didn’t hear another word.

  A short time later I found him on a fresh gurney beside the discharge doors waiting for an evac chopper (it’d been a busy day and the choppers were running behind). His face had been cleaned up, his uniform cut away and replaced by a medical gown, and he was resting under a clean and brilliantly white sheet. His eyes were closed and his face now had the slack-muscle droop of coma—whether trauma or drug-induced, I couldn’t tell.

  Without pausing to reflect on its implications, I jotted my name and serial number on a prescription pad, folded the slip of paper into a tight square, and pressed the note into the palm of his loosely clenched fist. He never opened his eyes, but I’m certain his hand grasped my fingers for the briefest of moments and pressed them lightly. Was it acknowledgement of my note and the care behind it, or simply some meaningless reflex of pain or delirium. I don’t know; never will. Just then the Air Care Team burst through the doors and raced him off to their chopper and out of my realm (but not out of my care).

  I don’t know if he survived the trip or where he was taken. I don’t know if when his mother next touches that appendectomy scar—God’s Stitching—the skin will be warm or cool. I do wonder how many more faces God will ask me to carry home from this place.

  (I just printed out a page of business cards with my name, rank, and serial number in simple black print on white stock. I’ll keep them at the hospital. Twelve to a page, one page. That’s all I’ll ever print.)

  February 26

  It’s hard enough for a Christian—even a long-lapsed one like yours truly—to navigate the ethical minefield (a “loaded” metaphor in this setting, to be sure; but an intentional and accurate one) of serving here, a predominantly Muslim, and hostile, country. Whatever our short-term means or methods might be (and the U.S. Army, not to mention our civilian administrators, have caused plenty of mayhem in their quest for stability), I genuinely believe that all of the in-country servicemen and women (not including the occasional Section 8 psycho) want to improve the situation in this country and the plight of its long-suffering citizens. And we want to do this perhaps in some small part because it’s the right thing to do, the moral thing to do; perhaps to some slightly greater degree to make amends for the harm our country has caused to the Iraqi people. But chiefly we want to improve the situation here because such action is the quickest way for us to get home. The logic is simple—if conditions on the ground deteriorate, we’ll have to stay longer, pull longer and more frequent tours. Conversely, better conditions, shorter and less frequent tours. Now, of course, this isn’t guaranteed (given the often illogical machinations of the U.S. Army and its command structure). But servicemen and women live on a diet of hope; and hope would hold that if we improve the situation here, we’ll get to go home earlier.

  All of which is a convoluted preface to my main question for the day—if it’s morally complicated for a Christian to do good in a Muslim country that doesn’t want them there and where they may be called by their god to destroy the infidel (either now or later), then just how morally complicated, if not outright illogical, is it for a Jew to serve here and strive to save its citizens?

  There are a handful of (quietly) observant Jews in our regiment. And me being me, I’ve gently prodded them on this point. How can you labor, day in and day out under the most challenging of conditions, to save people who are indoctrinated to hate you, t
o kill you, to wipe your family and your religion off the face of the earth?

  Most respond with a version of “they’re all just injured men and women, boys and girls, to me; I don’t see religion or hatred in their faces, just pain and suffering.”

  But one devout Jew, a doctor in my unit, offered me a fuller and more delicately nuanced (a rare combination of adverb and adjective in this setting) explanation. He said, “To cancel the sins of our fathers.” When I looked at him with some doubt and confusion, he explained by saying, “It’s in Exodus, chapter thirty-four, verse seven—‘God punishes the children and their children for the sin of the father to the third and fourth generation.’ The scripture writer just understated the persistence of this punishment by a factor of about a hundred.” He laughed. “Or maybe they just translated it wrong.”

  I said, “So you think that by bandaging your sworn enemies you can make atonement for a cycle of sin and punishment that began more than three millennia ago?”

  And he looked at me with these beautiful and kind dark eyes of bottomless depth and said, with only a tiny hint of irony, “What is time and intractability in the face of love?”

  I knew a little about the different world religions from a survey course I took in college, so I challenged his theology. “That’s not a very Jewish response.”

  “Oh, but it is—the most progressive of Jewish responses, finding its basis in the visions of Isaiah and the promise of the restored kingdom.”

  “Sounds like Zionist propaganda!” I immediately regretted the joke.

  But he just smiled and said, “One life at a time.”

  His smile and honesty gave me the permission I needed to push my line of questioning one step further. “Do you think for one minute that any of your acts of kindness and love will sheath the executioner’s sword in the event your Islamic patients should manage to turn the tables and get the drop on you?”

  “No.” His smile never faltered.

  I must’ve looked confused, or maybe even a touch desperate, for a more uplifting answer—some promise of justice and a completion of his circle of love.

  He shrugged. “I offer unconditional love to my enemies in a blind leap off the cliff of hope.” He paused then added with a wink, “And I keep a loaded M-16 under my bed.”

  Warzone wisdom.

  March 6

  No special day on the Roman calendar; but on the Calendar of Angie, a day of great promise, hope, and beauty. You see, for me it marks my self-designated first day of spring—at least in the Piedmont of North Carolina, where I grew up. And though I’ve not lived there for a long time, this day still holds special meaning for me.

  Right now, this very minute in central North Carolina, the millions of imported Bradford pear trees planted there over the last half century are in full bud and ready to burst into magnificent bloom at the invitation of the first warm and sunny afternoon. Charleston may have its azaleas, Washington its cherry blossoms, Michigan its lilacs; but in central North Carolina, spring is inaugurated and indelibly marked by these gorgeous trees.

  It wasn’t always so, as Grandma told me every spring till I was ten and she died. In “dem olden days” the dogwood was king, and spring officially started in early April when the native dogwoods would bloom. Some towns still have their dogwood festivals on the first weekend in April. Trouble is, most of the native dogwoods were killed off by a blight years ago.

  But someone somewhere sometime discovered that the ornamental Bradford pear loved the Piedmont climate and soil and would grow almost anywhere it was planted, including in the postage-stamp-sized islands of soil sprinkled around the prairies of asphalt parking lots. So when zoning boards began mandating vegetation to break up these asphalt expanses, developers began specifying inexpensive, easy to maintain Bradford pears to go in these tiny islands. And voila—a new spring was born, weeks earlier than the old!

  When I was five, my dad and I (my dad worked, I watched) planted a dozen Bradford pears along the drive to our house—six on each side, paired directly opposite each other. They were little more than sticks with a couple leaves when we planted them; but Dad dug the holes deep, conditioned the dense clay with lots of peat and humus, left a shallow basin for summer watering, then mulched them good. It was my job to drag out the hose and keep them watered during dry spells, and we lightly fertilized them each spring.

  And darned if those trees didn’t grow! By the time I reached high school, they were maybe twenty-feet tall and their crowns almost touched across the drive. And each had this perfect, slightly tear-drop shape to their branches, as if they’d been cloned. These beautiful, lush trees greeted our every return to the house, a grand welcoming mat! Give Scarlett O’Hara her avenue of live oaks, I’ll take our Avenue of Bradfords any day.

  Oh, how I miss the promise of spring when those pear trees were paused just before erupting in riotous bloom. On March 6th each year, as I walked up our drive after being dropped off by the bus, I’d closely examine the lower branches of the trees. The buds were always tightly sealed on that day, still guarding against the threat of frost. One year on March 6th, the buds were dusted with snow. But regardless the weather or the temperature, by March 6th I could always feel the promise of spring vibrating in those buds, a vibration that seemed almost a sound, almost a shrill pitch of expectation, maybe not audible to the woods or the fields or the sky but screaming in my imagination. It occurs to me only now, having written these words, that the intensity of feeling I imputed to those buds was no doubt an externalization of my adolescent tornado of physical and emotional changes. But better to be directed toward Bradford pear buds than some other vibrating storehouses of teen passion.

  So where has that hope and expectation gone? It would be easy to blame my despair on my current situation. The regiment shrink is forever reminding us of the toll living in constant tension between boredom and emergency, not to mention the ever present threat of attack, has on one’s psyche. And the shrink can’t give us a pill to negate this stress (even if he could, it would keep us from doing our jobs); so he tells us to exercise, get rest, talk to each other, scream if we have to. Well, I’m screaming here, in this journal, in my own understated self-pitying kind of way.

  Screaming out for the promise of spring. Screaming out for real seasons. Screaming out for trees or bushes or shrubs or anything vertical that isn’t a guard tower. Screaming out for GREEN, for life that doesn’t bleed red. Screaming out for the potential held in a tiny white bud, potential that will, if left alone, unfold according to a natural order—bud to flower, flower to leaf, leaf to fruit (though the fruit of the Bradford pear is tiny and inedible to humans, but much loved by robins!), fruit to dormant twig. Here, there is no natural order. Here, potential is thwarted. The best we can hope for, with all our training and technology and will and desire is to return the wounded to some prior condition of stasis. Potential or hope or the natural unfolding of life has no place. That’s all been forced out by ugliness. Stitch and stabilize. If hope and potential and the promise of spring still exist, it exists somewhere other than here.

  Can I ever find that again?

  Josh felt suddenly free of his body, free of his bed, his room, his house, his illness. He was decades younger, digging those holes along the drive in the warm spring sun, intoxicated (as farmers, and farmers sons, always are) by the hope and promise of planting, a hope and promise made incarnate in the enthusiastic little girl playing and babbling along beside him. She’d examine every shovel full of dirt he’d excavate, using her plastic shovel and pail and sieve to sort and study the dense red clay.

  “What’s this?” she asked, holding up a tiny plant bulb the size of a marble with a frail green shoot extending like a tail from one end and fine white roots hanging from the other.

  He took it from her hand, studied it closely for several long minutes, then handed it back to her. “Looks like a baby sea monster.”

  “You’re silly,” Angie giggled. “We’re nowhere near the sea.”


  He grabbed her hand and looked closely at the bulb. “An outer-space alien then, got to be.” He nodded with satisfaction.

  Angie shook her head. “It’s an onion-grass bulb, starting to come to life.” She scratched the bulb with her fingernail. “Here, smell.”

  Josh bent over and sniffed the bulb. It was onion-grass, alright. “How’d you know that?”

  “I know a lot of things.”

  “So why’d you ask me?”

  “To test you.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “You said it was an alien.”

  “Onion? Alien? Almost the same.”

  Angie shook her head.

  “Do I get another chance?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Angie went a few yards into the field and spent perhaps ten minutes scratching at the hard clay with her plastic shovel. Then she carefully planted the onion-grass bulb in the loosened soil, leaving the green shoot barely projecting from the dirt. Without a word, she walked back to the house, filled her bucket with water from the spigot, then returned and gently poured the water on the ground around the bulb.

  Josh kept digging the holes for the remaining Bradford pears, and pretended not to be watching his daughter; but the few tears that trailed across his face were of pure joy and thanks.

  Those sprigs of trees they’d planted that day, so fraught with promise, had indeed grown tall and shapely, becoming the dominant feature of their drive. But the devastating ice storm a few years back, which came in the late fall while the Bradford pears still had most of their leaves clinging to their branches, had decimated those beautiful trees, tearing off limbs large and small, leaving lop-sided canopies and, in one case, nothing more than a trunk pointed like an accusatory finger at the sky. He’d cut up and disposed of all the fallen and dangling branches, and pruned the canopies best he could. But several times over the years he’d come close to calling the tree man to come take them all down—looking at their scarred trunks and lop-sided canopies, and recalling their former beauty and gracefulness, was almost too much to bear. But each time something had caused him to pause, to renege on issuing his death sentence. And the spared trees had rebounded, in a fashion. In a kind of time-lapse movie of nature’s resilience, the trees had concentrated new growth to fill in what the storm had shorn away. And even the stump, which surely should’ve died for lack of photosynthetic capacity, had sent forth new sprouts in all directions that had grown into modest strong limbs, and created a new, though shorter, full canopy, a dwarf sister to its taller kin along the drive and across the way. The Bradford pears were making do and getting on, claiming water and nutrients from the ground, sun from the sky, apparently unaware of the shape they sketched for their bipedal and metal-encased neighbors passing below their branches. And on each trip up or down the drive in the years since the storm, Josh had recited in his mind or aloud—until it became a kind of mantra, conscious and unconscious both—the last lines of a Frost poem:

  The question that he frames in all but words

  Is what to make of a diminished thing.

  And he had wondered at each recitation the antecedent of the pronoun in the first line—for Frost, and, more importantly, for this reciter.

  Even in his fast blurring consciousness, Josh perceived the complex web of symbol and foretelling, metaphor and allusion, that these trees cast over and around his current fate, their literal and figurative shadow, a shadow cast even before he knew of its existence—before Angie’s blog entry, before Laura’s selfless care, before the blood disorder and amputation, before his howling loneliness trapped in this house, before the ice storm, even before they’d planted those twigs: the shadow had predated it all.

  There—he’d said it (in his mind, at least), finally framed the truth. It wasn’t his fault. This fate had been there from the start. Her smell enveloped him as he fell backward far, far into the abyss.

  Laura sat in the motel room’s one upholstered chair and leaned toward Devon, who sat on the room’s one bed facing her across less than two feet of dimly lit (the room’s drapes were drawn to shield against the prying eyes of strangers walking past on the breezeway outside) motel-room air. The impersonal setting—with its pale-green walls, nylon floral-print bedspread, and unremarkable landscape painting hanging over the bed—somehow made the moment all that much more intimate. The two might’ve been adulterers paused before a mid-afternoon merging—so poignant the moment, so insubstantial the setting. Instead, they were suddenly what they had been over thirty-five years ago—two souls hungering for different reasons, locked in a moment devoid of past and future, clinging to each other in the fleeting present.

  Laura reached across the small space between them and took Devon’s hands. She needed to tell her about Josh—about both his ignorance of her existence, and about his fast-failing health. But something about the touch of Devon’s skin balked her words. She recalled holding these same fingers in the convent bed, counting them off as piggies to market or seconds to lift-off in those few hours they’d had together. That Devon’s hands had grown and changed so dramatically in the ensuing years struck Laura less intensely than the appearance of her own hands—wrinkled and splotched and loose-skinned: the hands of an old woman. She’d never seen herself as old before. She’d never even paid attention to her hands, long as they were able to gather and bag and label the soil samples she collected to earn her living.

  But now those hands she’d taken for granted looked pale and weak, especially when contrasted to the tight skin and slender fingers of her daughter. Though Laura’d never been big on physical touch (she spent far too much time alone for that), she just now couldn’t imagine letting go of these hands she now held, felt as if she’d shrivel to a husk—hands first, then arms, chest, heart—if she let go.

  Devon looked up from their joined hands and smiled. “Still have all ten.”

  Laura nodded. “I counted, many times.”

  “I figured. Who knows, maybe I remember—at some level.”

  Laura studied her eyes. “Really?”

  Devon shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d wake and think I’d smell your breath or hear you humming. The sensations were like something from a different world, totally unfamiliar but safe. The next morning I’d label the feelings my ‘imagination’ and get on with my real life. But in the dark, before waking to that real world, those feelings seemed true memory. I guess I had to have something to link me to you.”

  Laura nodded. “My coping worked in reverse. My memories of those few days with you were and are very real and vivid, still this moment. But I had to keep them locked away in some buried compartment in my mind. I just had to.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure, insofar as I can. The weight of living with a loss has to be at least as great as the weight of not knowing what was there.”

  Laura stared at her, this full-grown woman that was simultaneously stranger and most intimate of kin—maybe savior, maybe curse. “That’s more than I can say for myself.”

  Laura’s cellphone rang, its ring like an alarm in the room, breaking the spell. She dropped Devon’s hands and rooted around in her purse till she found the phone and answered.

  Even in the pale light, Devon could see the color drain from Laura’s face as she mainly listened to whatever voice was on the other end of the line. Finally she said, “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  Laura closed the flap of her phone, then looked quickly around the room as if lost. Her mouth opened but uttered no sound, then closed, then opened again in a gasp for air. Her eyes focused on Devon. “Josh has taken a turn for the worse.” She stood up but seemed unsure about where to go or what to do.

  Devon remained seated on the bed, but reached out and took her mother’s right hand. “Who is Josh?”

  Laura turned toward her. “He’s your father. He’s gravely ill and dying. That was his home nurse. He was fine when I left; now
he’s in a coma.”

  Devon gasped.

  Laura pressed her hand. “Can you drive?”

  Devon nodded. “Sure.”

  Josh sat on a rocky dry hillside in full and brilliant sun that neither felt hot nor seemed too bright. Below him in a shallow ravine was a line of people walking, all in the same direction, two or three abreast, most walking in a slow, purposeless fashion, heads down, eyes fixed on the dry rocky soil, no voices audible. The line stretched far as Josh could see in each direction, disappearing to his left (the direction they were walking) where the ravine curved out of sight perhaps a quarter-mile distant; disappearing to the right (the source of the endless line) a mile or so away where the ravine fell below a hill or the horizon, it was hard to say which. Josh watched the silent migration pass below.

  He watched intently, feeling an urgent need to document every passing face, fix them in his memory, as if after a moment each would continue to exist only if he could recall their face in every detail. They were of all ages—infants carried on shoulders, toddlers dragged along by the hands of parents or siblings, children, adolescents, young adults, middle-aged, old timers—all shuffling along in front of him. And they were in all manner of dress—jeans and t-shirts, shorts and tank-tops, suits and evening gowns, hospital smocks and overalls. Josh counted them off in his head. He wanted to call out, get at least one to look his way, reveal their features in full frontal pose. But he couldn’t speak, and none of them looked his way.

  From behind, a voice said, “They’re all going up.”

  Josh nodded. “And none coming back down.”

  That seemed a plain enough truth, yet somehow important, somehow a defining fact.

  “They’re all going up,” Josh repeated, in his mind if not aloud.

  The line continued to pass by. Josh continued to watch and record every passing face, counted them off—one thousand two hundred sixty-seven, eight thousand thirty-two, twenty-three thousand five hundred sixty-four. He never grew tired of watching or recording or counting. This was his life now. This was his purpose.

  When Laura arrived, the doctor was waiting for her in Josh’s spacious and bright living room with its vaulted ceilings and sliding glass doors on either side of a massive stone fireplace.

  The doctor glanced at Devon then turned to Laura with a questioning look.

  Laura said, “She’s family.”

  The doctor nodded. “As I told you and Josh this morning, discontinuing the morphine was a risky choice. His body had grown accustomed to that powerful drug and wouldn’t adjust easily to its withdrawal. That said, I’m at a loss to explain this extreme downturn. His blood pressure is dangerously low, but stable. His other vitals are O.K., given his condition. I’ve sent some blood to the lab for testing. Maybe the infection has spiked. I’ll know later today or tomorrow.”

  “He’s in a coma?”

  “Let’s call it unresponsive unconscious. There’s brain activity there. We just can’t rouse him.”

  “Sounds like too much morphine rather than not enough.”

  “We checked that. The drip is off; the unit levels are where they were this morning.”

  “Then why?”

  The doctor shrugged, a gesture that made him seem more human than at any time since she’d met him. “Laura, your ex-husband is very ill. He’s on a mix of powerful medications to ease the pain and attempt to slow the infection. But we all know where this is headed. It’s just a question of when.”

  “My husband.”

  The doctor looked perplexed.

  “He’s the only husband I’ve ever had; I’m the only living wife he has. I guess we can drop the ‘ex’ part, at least in this house.”

  The doctor nodded. “O.K.”

  “Can we see him?”

  “Sure. He’s beyond any risk of harm or shock.”

  “Or help?”

  “I’d never rule that out.”

  “Who can say, right?”

  “Who can say.”

  Laura turned and walked slowly down the long hall leading to the bedrooms, their daughter trailing two steps behind.

  Devon felt like a tumbleweed being blown across the west-Texas desert. She was suddenly all hollow inside—just a jumble of dried sticks and twigs in a tangled lopsided ball, held together more by chance than intention, the prospect of being blown apart by the wind ever present. She’d known when she stepped on the plane in Austin that she was taking the biggest risk of her life, was stepping off the solid terrain of her former life out into the dark unknown.

  Jocelyn had tried to reassure her by saying it couldn’t be any worse than her coming out—revealing her homosexuality to her parents. But that was a poor comparison and Joce knew it, was only trying to put the best spin on things. Uncovering her homosexuality had been a gradual and largely painless process. She’d mainly been surrounded by girls in her childhood and had no sense that she was more attracted or relaxed around them than with boys. Then in adolescence—with her breasts slowly swelling, her pubic mound sprouting fuzz, and her vulva becoming hypersensitive—her physical attraction to certain female friends steadily grew even as she developed platonic friendships with a few boys (though it did take her awhile to understand why some of these boys were always trying to kiss her or slide their hands under her shirt).

  Then she had the great good fortune of falling in love her first time with another lesbian. She was a sophomore in high school when the focus of her desire fell on Abby, a senior who appeared to be in a serious relationship with the school’s basketball star. But whatever the public appearances and private experiments of Abby and her guy-doll Don, it turned out that Abby really liked girls—really, really liked girls. And the girl it turned out she liked the most was Devon—a fact she demonstrated first in the bathhouse during a school beach trip, and then many times thereafter in secret moments and places known (even now) only to the two of them.

  After that undeniable confirmation of her sexual identity, the biggest challenge for Devon was fending off the unwanted advances of males (a defense that became much easier after she left home for college and could simply utter “I’m a lesbian” at the first sign of hanky-panky from a male acquaintance—though that phrase didn’t stop them all, seemed to actually arouse some, at which point she’d show them the strength of her swimmer’s arms or, if needed, her powerful kick).

  The second biggest challenge, which became the biggest once she’d figured out the first, was determining how to tell her parents. When she finally decided it was time to tell her parents, her stomach was in a knot for weeks. She planned to tell them over Christmas break her junior year in college. She was deeply in love and months into a physical relationship with her black roommate Jocelyn, and they’d grown tired and ashamed of maintaining a ruse every time Devon’s parents would visit. (Once, early in the semester, Devon’s mom commented how neat and tidy Jocelyn’s room and carefully made bed looked in comparison to the tangled sheets and disarray of Devon’s bed and room. After that, each time her parents were due to visit, Devon would go into their guestroom and “toss” the bed to make the room appear occupied.)

  But, as it turned out, telling her parents was as easy and painless as the anticipation had been frightening and stressful. She sat across the kitchen table from her mom one afternoon a few days after Christmas (her dad still at work), and said in as firm a voice as she could muster (which probably wasn’t firm at all, but her mom didn’t let on), “Mom, I’m a lesbian.”

  Her mother said, “We know.”

  “You know?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Darling, I’ve watched you like a hawk since the day we got you from the convent, more than any biological mother ever could or would. On top of all the normal maternal instincts, I feared you’d leave and try to go back to your birth mom. So I kept a very close eye on you. But I had to be discreet about it, so as not to make you feel smothered and push you away.”

  “So when did you know I wa
s gay?”

  “I suspected far back as grade school. You were extremely gentle and attentive to your girl friends, not competitive or manipulative. I figured it might be just your kind nature. But then when you started junior high and would fawn over certain girls but never had the time of day for any boy—well, then it was clear. Just had to wait for you to figure it out.”

  “Which took me awhile.”

  “Till Abby.”

  “So you knew about Abby?”

  “Darling, I respect your privacy; but you’ve got to understand that the walls in this house are thin.”

  Devon blushed and looked away—in embarrassment, relief, and a touch of anger.

  Her mom walked around the table and hugged her from behind. “I guess I succeeded.”

  “How?”

  “In knowing you. I doubt your birth mom would’ve noticed you were gay before you did, and then keep that knowledge to herself till you found your own way at your own pace.”

  “You could’ve let on a little sooner—saved me a lot of anxiety at the prospect of telling you.”

  “No, darling; I couldn’t have.”

  Devon knew she was right, and said so. “Thank you.”

  “The pleasure’s been all mine, since the day we brought you home. No thanks required.”

  So all that had been a piece of cake compared to boarding a plane to meet a stranger on unfamiliar turf who was your biological mother. And now, to meet a gravely ill and comatose man who had been your biological mother’s husband but now was not, who was your biological father but didn’t know you existed. Coming out was nothing compared to this.

  As much as Devon had wondered about, even occasionally longed for, her biological mother, she had hardly ever thought about her biological father. Part of this was simple self-defense—logic held (and statistics proved) that in most adoption cases the father is never identified in the documents, and might not even be known for certain to the mother. So why wonder about someone that might never be identified or found?

  But in Devon’s case, this indifference ran deeper than simple self-defense. For one thing, she was a female with emotions, sexuality, and involvements mainly focused on females. For another, she already had a strong, unfailing, protective father who would never, under any circumstances, have agreed to give her up. Why should she care about a weak or fickle biological father who had abandoned her at, or most likely before, birth? (Interestingly, Devon had never, not once in all her musings, leveled this same indictment at her biological mother, always had at the ready a long list of justifications for her mother’s exit even as she saw her father’s departure as pure treachery.)

  But mainly Devon longed to find her mother because she was certain in her heart of hearts that she remembered her, however unlikely that seemed, whereas she had no sense, intuitive or otherwise, that she’d known her father. Her earlier reference of her memories of Laura had been intentionally softened for public consumption. Where she’d told Laura (and Jocelyn and her mother and her therapist when she had one a few years back) that she was uncertain about the veracity of these memories, in fact she had no doubt whatsoever that her memories of her birth mother—of Laura—were real memories. She recalled lying in a cradle hearing her mother hum a song she’d never heard anywhere else, a tune that for her came to define loss. She remembered her mother lying with her in her arms and wiggling each of her toes, then each of her fingers, then starting with the toes again, as if trying every way she could to forestall the inevitable. She remembered her mother pressing her mouth to her ears and whispering words that Devon couldn’t recall but came to assume were a version of “I’ll always be with you.”

  Opposite these vivid (if embellished) and sustaining and haunting memories of her birth mom, Devon had no shred of memory, real or created, of her biological father. She’d never thought he didn’t know she existed; she’d always assumed he didn’t care that she did.

  But now he was just a few short strides away, somewhere down this dim hall that seemed a long dark tunnel. And she’d see him first (and maybe last) comatose and dying. Though she’d never anticipated meeting him, never thought about it or longed for it or dreamed about it, had she thought about it, she sure wouldn’t have thought about it like this. Just as Laura reached for the bedroom’s doorknob, Devon grasped Laura’s shoulder.

  Laura turned and even in the dim light could see her freshly found daughter was in deep pain. She instantly chided herself for her selfishness and single-mindedness, and quickly folded this grown woman (two inches taller and maybe twenty pounds heavier) into her arms as if she were again the infant she’d handed over to the sisters all those years ago.

  Devon’s sobs poured into Laura’s chest in a muffled gusher of sound and tears. One might’ve predicted such an emotional moment at the reunion of mother and daughter; but who would’ve guessed it would happen here, under these circumstances?

  Laura half-carried, half-guided Devon farther down the hall, opened the first door they came to (on the opposite side of the hall), and led Devon in there. It was a bedroom Laura’d not seen before now, medium-sized and well-lit by sunlight pouring through two small casement windows on either side of a neatly made up double bed. The color scheme was yellow and turquoise, and sitting atop the pillows of the bed was a white stuffed bear. Laura immediately knew this was Angie’s room, apparently little changed since Angie’d moved out, a shrine that’d maybe been seen by no one except Josh’s housekeeper in nearly fifteen years.

  Laura helped Devon to a seat on the bed then sat beside her. Her sobs were already subsiding, but she kept her face buried in her mother’s shoulder.

  This gave Laura a chance to look about the room. Opposite where they were seated was a tall white dresser with numerous photographs in small frames on top. In all the photos was a pretty dark-haired teenager that had to be Angie. In some were other teens, male and female—Angie’s long-ago friends. In a few was an older woman that was clearly Angie’s mom, Vicki. And in one, off to the side and behind the rest, was a younger Josh in a bathing suit holding a bikini-clad Angie horizontally over his head like a human barbell. Whatever the context of the photo, Angie was laughing and clearly relaxed, unabashedly and recklessly confident in her father’s strength and love.

  By now Devon had dried her eyes on her mother’s shirt and was following Laura’s eyes to the cluster of photos.

  Laura noticed Devon’s gaze and smiled kindly at her sudden new confusion and vulnerability. She reached across to the dresser and took hold of a picture of Angie lying atop her mother on a blanket or a bed, each with their arms crossed under their chins, grinning broadly like two Cheshire cats at the photographer (who had to be Josh). “This is Vicki, Josh’s—your father’s—second wife; and this is Angie, his only other child. I never met either one. Vicki died of cancer some years ago; and Angie, we just found out, is serving in Iraq as an Army-reserve nurse.”

  “Why isn’t she here, caring for her father?”

  “They are estranged.”

  “Why?”

  “He’ll have to explain that.”

  Devon thought, “If he can,” but remained silent.

  Laura set that photo down and reached around to grab the one of Josh and Angie at the beach. “This is Josh holding Angie.” She handed the framed photo to Devon.

  Devon studied the photo for long seconds. “I look like him.”

  Laura laughed. “When I first saw you in the airport, I thought you were Josh in a woman’s clothes.”

  “I guess we don’t have to do a DNA test to prove paternity.”

  Laura said, “No.” Then she added, “Wouldn’t have had to in any case—Josh was the only man I’d ever been with before you were born, and for a good many years after.”

  Devon looked at her gently but said nothing.

  “Josh and I were high-school sweethearts, each the other’s first love. We married the summer after I graduated high school, after his sophomore year in college. He dropped out of college
and we moved to Boston. We both worked and I took classes at night.

  “I’d like to say it was an idyllic, romantic period for both of us; but in fact it was a very confusing time. We were young and the world was before us and the city offered lots of exciting opportunities, but rarely were we on the same page in terms of interests or needs. What had seemed so clear and simple in the small town before we were married became murky and treacherous once we were married and on our own in a city. We drifted apart. My classes offered me friendships and stimulation that Josh became jealous of. And he developed habits that excluded me.”

  “Like what?”

  “He started staying out late, drinking and carousing with a gang of guys from school I’d introduced him to. But that really didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that he would read and write and escape into a world that I was forbidden to enter or share in. It left me feeling very lonely. He probably felt the same way about my studies and my friends. The strangest thing is we never once talked about this, about what was really wrong. We’d fight about money, about weekend plans, about what to make for dinner. But we never once argued about excluding each other from the most important parts of our separate lives.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I made arrangements to spend a semester in Paris without fully consulting Josh. And when I told him about my decision, he didn’t shout or cry or argue or ask to join me. He simply said, ‘O.K.’”

  “And?”

  “And he accompanied me to the airport and stood at the window watching as the plane pulled away from the gate. That was the last time I saw him till five days ago, last time I heard anything from him till a hospital social worker contacted me and relayed Josh’s request that I come and care for him in these last days.”

  Devon looked at the photo of her young and still vibrant father in his weightlifter pose.

  “And?”

  Laura hugged her daughter and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “You want to know where you fit in—or, more accurately, didn’t fit in. We generally used contraception—condoms—during our times together. But every so often, Josh would ‘forget’ in the heat of the moment. Josh always wanted a child, a daughter, and would talk about it at length even though he knew I wasn’t ready for kids, truly couldn’t begin to fathom the possibility (I was, after all, just twenty at the time, hardly more than a kid myself). I always figured those times he forgot to put on the condom were him playing roulette with God, using my body and my future as a gambling chip.

  “And such episodes had produced more than a few anxious days and weeks over the years, especially while I was still in high school—sleepless nights hoping for, praying for, my period to start. And it always had, till that last time. I suspected I might be pregnant even as I packed for the flight to Paris, but managed to dismiss my anxiety as related to the trip. I was a month in Paris before a French doctor confirmed my suspicions. By then, Josh and I were a lot further apart than the Atlantic Ocean.

  “I never figured out the right way to tell him. I still haven’t.”

  “And now it might be too late.”

  Fair as it was, that hurt more than Laura would’ve guessed or Devon intended. But Laura simply nodded and said, “May be.”

  She took the photo from Devon and set it back in its place on the dresser. Then she stood, offered her hand to her daughter; and together they walked out of Angie’s room and down the hall toward Josh.

  At some point in Josh’s vision, he had stopped recording the human exodus passing before him and become part of it. This transition had not been instantaneous but gradual and seamless. In imperceptible stages he went from sitting apart and witnessing and counting the migration to first feeling his legs (two of them, and both whole and strong) beginning to move in slow effortless stride, then his waist and arms starting to move, then his senses gathering in the sights and sounds and smells (stale huffing breaths, sweat-soured clothes) of proximate human bodies, then the feeling of movement in his inner-ear and balance equilibrium. Yet, even as he merged with that human tide, some part of himself continued watching and counting from afar—eighty-six thousand three hundred fifteen, one hundred twelve thousand four hundred eighty-two. In his counting and his walking, time was suspended and space compressed until both time and space ceased to exist, merged into something new. The counting and the walking became one action, one sensation; the close proximity of countless other bodies and the distant safe and airy spaces of observation blended into a unified wholeness; and Josh was all of these things—observer and observed, counter and counted—at once.

  And that was all.

  Sherri the nurse looked up from her seat—in “Laura’s chair”—where she was reading one of her pulp romances beside Josh’s bed. Above her on a stand beside the headboard was a new video monitor with numbers flashing and lines creeping across but no beeping sound or alarms. Several cords looped down from the monitor and to the headboard where they were held in place by white surgical tape, then ran from the headboard to sensors on Josh’s neck and chest and the back of his left hand and the tip of his left index finger. Josh himself was lying on his back with the sheet neatly folded just beneath his chest, his arms to either side on top of the covers, his shoulders, neck, and head raised on several pillows at about a thirty-degree angle above horizontal. The skin of his face and neck was shockingly pale, almost pure white and faintly luminescent in the room dimmed by the drapes being drawn in front of the windows.

  Sherri looked up at Laura with a neutral glance that seemed kind and compassionate when placed in the context of her expertise and professionalism. Her gaze silently spoke all that needed to be spoken—I don’t know what’s going on here; I’ve got the situation in hand for now; I’ll help guide you through whatever happens to a safe other side.

  Then she saw Devon behind Laura, and her reassuring gaze was instantly clouded by doubt and confusion and perhaps a touch of offense at this stranger’s presence so close to the heart of things.

  “Sherri,” Laura said in a voice barely above a whisper that nonetheless seemed a clanging gong in the shrouded silent room, “This is Josh’s daughter Devon; Devon, this is Josh’s nurse Sherri.”

  Devon squeezed between her mother and the bed and extended her hand to Sherri. Sherri stood and accepted the handshake even as her eyes betrayed some reluctance and confusion.

  Laura began, “I’d not told you—” then stopped in mid-sentence. She stepped forward and gave Sherri a hug, a loose embrace that lingered a second longer than either expected. “Thank you for being here when you needed to be.”

  “I’ll be here long as you need me.”

  Laura stepped back half a stride and looked closely at her. “I’ll count on that. Now can we give you a break?”

  “I don’t need one right now.”

  “Then can we have a few minutes alone with him?”

  “Long as you want. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Laura looked very closely at Josh’s nurse. “You mean you think he might be with us for a while?”

  “I’m not a doctor or a fortune-teller.”

  “I know that, but what do you think?”

  “I think that whatever this is,”—she gestured at Josh—“it’s not the end.”

  Laura nodded. “Thank you.”

  Then Sherri added, “But I’ve been wrong plenty. There are no guidelines for this part; and whoever is writing this story is keeping the ending to himself.”

  Devon added, to no one in particular, “Or herself.”

  Sherri smiled at that. “We can hope it’s a she.”

  Laura said, “Josh does.”

  Sherri nodded. “I figured,” then added as she walked past toward the door, “Holler if you need me.”

  “We will,” both women said simultaneously.

  Alone now with her husband and her daughter, Laura leaned over and kissed Josh on the forehead. His skin felt unnaturally cool and she touched her cheek to his dry lips. They were warmer and she fel
t the soft wash of his shallow exhalation across her skin and what she would swear was the slight movement of his lips into a dry and chaste kiss of his own. But when she turned to look, his eyes were still closed and his face expressionless.

  She straightened up and faced Devon. There was in the foot or so of dimly lit space between them a new bond strong as iron that neither could’ve predicted or planned. For Laura, there was the support of this woman, support that might actually allow her to survive this brutal trial. For Devon there was the light-speed thrust of her whole self into the heart of the life (and death) of not one but two parents part of her had thought she’d never meet let alone get to know at the very core of their lives. In the manner of death-watch epiphanies down through the ages, each woman knew that they were exactly where they needed to be, with whom they needed to be, each the other’s harbor through the storm. When you got right down to it, could either have asked for more?

  Laura crossed to the far side of the room and opened the drapes. The brilliant spring sun barely filtered by the new leaves feeding off it was too sudden and strong for the room or the moment, so she lowered the metal-slat blinds and tilted them to block about half the sun’s glare. Then she grabbed the wooden chair from Josh’s desk and carried it to the far side of the bed and set it beside the upholstered chair where Sherri’d been reading.

  Devon had remained frozen in place staring down at her father. She had no urge to close the small gap between her and the bed and reach out to touch his face or hand. In fact, she felt suddenly terrified at the prospect of touching him—not because he might in fact be as dead and cold as he looked (that prospect, though disturbing, would at least be final) but that he might in fact really be alive, that within his blood and bones and flesh was half her DNA, half all she was to this point or ever would be, the genetic precursors that had shaped her nose and eyes and ears and lips. This confrontation of the second of the two beings that had caused her, brought her into being, froze her in place, balked her in a way that preparation and planning had eased her meeting with Laura. So she chose to leave a few feet of space between her and her father for now. (Oddly, it didn’t occur to her that he might rouse at any moment from this slumber and choose to close that gap from his side—in Devon’s mind, that final gap would only be closed by her, at a time of her choosing.)

  Laura sat in the upholstered chair and gestured for Devon to sit in the one she’d brought from the desk. Devon nodded thanks and sat. Laura took Devon’s right hand and held in loosely in her left. Linked like this, the two women were content to let the silence of the room and the sun’s muted light gently spread round them, pooling at their feet and under the bed.

  They might’ve remained such for minutes or hours except Josh’s eyes suddenly flew open, stared directly at Devon with a look of fear or pain, then closed down tight. The lines on the video monitor flashed a series of steep spikes and equally precipitous troughs, and the numbers fluctuated wildly. Devon’s hand tensed beneath Laura’s, and she started to stand. But Laura reached out and touched her shoulder gently but firmly, holding her in place. The two women watched Josh closely, waiting to see if he would open his eyes again. He made no further movement; his eyes remained shut; his breathing calmed. The lines on the monitor and the accompanying numbers settled into a renewed and stable rhythm.

  Laura began in a clear, firm voice that gave every sign that it thought it was heard by the subject of address, “Josh, this is our daughter. Her name is Devon. I surrendered her for adoption when she was four days old. She contacted me some time ago, and we met for the first time since her birth yesterday. And now I introduce her to you.”

  Laura paused, took a long slow breath, then continued clear-voiced and clear-eyed. “I’m sorry I never told you about her, sorry I couldn’t give you the daughter you so desperately wanted. Maybe that was the impasse—your desperation, your blind desire for a child. You seemed to think it would be the solution to all our problems. To me, a child would’ve become a lightning rod for our differences. How could a helpless child have resolved our issues? How could another human being—one in constant need of love and support and security and guidance—have disentangled all those months of confusion and hurt? She would’ve only complicated our estrangement. She would’ve become the innocent caught in the middle. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  Laura weighed her words in silence, stared at Josh’s profile for any signs of recognition or response. She never once looked toward Devon, but part of her was acutely aware of her daughter’s presence. And it was that part of her, the part that was watching Devon in her mind even as she watched Josh with her eyes, that was a conscience to her confession, a truth filter to her words.

  “That last sounds so noble and selfless. Part of me did want what was best for our unborn child, but most of me was being selfish. I was scared of what a child would require from me, and scared of the weaknesses a dependent would uncover in me. I was twenty years old Josh, barely out of childhood myself. I knew I couldn’t bear the weight of another human being. All that other—that stuff about a child further confusing our confused marriage—is true far as it went. But when it comes right down to it, I didn’t tell you about my pregnancy and didn’t keep our baby because I was scared. And there’s no nobility or self-sacrifice in fear. It’s an entity unto itself, its own purpose and destination. I suppose I’ve been living in its shadow ever since.”

  Laura took another deep breath, then faced Devon directly as she spoke these final words, “I’m sorry, Josh. I’m deeply sorry to you for not ever giving you a chance to know your first daughter. And I’m sorry to this beautiful woman for not having had the courage to try to raise her. But I’m also sorry to myself, partly for the difficult choice I made, more so for never having forgiven myself once I made it.”

  Devon held steady through her birth mother’s confession, and bore unflinching Laura’s half-defiant, half-pleading stare that accompanied her last words. Really, what choice did she have? She couldn’t stand and leave and thereby turn her back on the two people she’d set out to find, the one person she felt she’d been walking toward her whole life. Besides, she acknowledged her responsibility in setting in motion the events that had brought her to this place, a responsibility that now obligated her to this witness. And in the moment’s spirit of accepted responsibility and obligation, Devon would have to admit to herself at least (if not out loud to Josh and Laura) that a significant part of her desired to be this hinge pin on which the door of her mother’s (and father’s) life might swing open. Her whole life, she’d secretly wanted to matter to them. Here and now, she mattered immensely. She knew at that instant she’d accept whatever weight they heaped on her shoulders.

  She broke from Laura’s stare and looked again at Josh. “Tell me about my father.”

  Laura glanced toward the bed. “He’s right there.”

  “About his life, from now working backwards.”

  “I don’t know much about the last thirty years. Heck, until five days ago, I’d seen you more recently than him.”

  “Tell me what you know, please.”

  Laura nodded. “He has a rare and terminal blood disorder. It has spread throughout his body, worst in the appendages but starting to affect his major organs. They amputated his right leg above the knee to try to slow the progress of the disease. They did that while he was in an earlier coma, with no living will or next of kin to stop them. When he came to, he said as clearly and as forcefully as he could while on his back in a hospital bed—No more! He hired a lawyer to draw up all the legal forms—no more surgery, no more efforts to revive, no more hospitals. Then he had a patient advocate track me down to ask if I’d be available to insure that his wishes were honored. And for some unknown reason, I said yes—set aside my life in California and came here to watch him die.”

  “Like me,” Devon said.

  “What?”

  “The unknown reason.”

  “You came to see me.”

  “And e
nded up here.” She tilted her head toward Josh.

  “To watch him die.”

  “With you.”

  Laura nodded. “Thank you.”

  “So why is Josh here, in Durham?”

  “He teaches—taught—at the university.”

  “Teaches what?”

  “Twentieth-century American literature. Apparently, after we split up, he followed his interest in writing and literature back to school—completed his undergraduate degree then went on to get his doctorate. Somewhere in that process, he met and married Vicki, they had Angie, he got a job at the university, and he’s lived here ever since. I know that’s a brief summary for thirty years of a person’s life; but, like I said, I wasn’t in contact with him. Most of what I just told you I gleaned from the back cover of one of his books.”

  “When did you get divorced?”

  “That’s how I knew he’d met Vicki in grad school. I got a registered letter from some lawyer’s office with the divorce papers inside. There was a hand-written note from Josh attached, explaining that he was asking for the divorce so that he could remarry. Then he ended the note with a sentence I’ve not forgotten in thirty years—‘I miss you every day.’” Laura paused and blinked back sudden unexpected tears.

  “And you believed him?”

  Laura grabbed a tissue from the nightstand box and took a moment to compose herself before continuing. “Oh, yes. It was vintage Josh—simultaneously selfish and deeply moving. He’d not once asked how I was doing, but in a sentence managed to cut me to the quick.”

  “Why?”

  Laura stared at her incredulously, not believing her daughter didn’t already know the answer. “I’d never stopped loving him. And if ever I began to think I could stop, could possibly move beyond him with this or that willing partner—and there were several eager candidates—I would get a mental image of you, like you looked when I last saw you. I would smell your formula-tainted breath, feel your incredibly soft skin, hear your cooing. What I never could’ve imagined when I chose to carry you to term was that you would link me to Josh for the rest of my life.”

  “But you never saw either of us for over three decades.”

  “It didn’t matter—how foolish is that? I knew you existed; I was the only one who knew who your father was. I felt I was a vital part of both your lives. I just didn’t know how.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Laura shrugged. “Don’t be. People live whole lives without ever grasping one thing that matters. I’ve had this.” She paused and smiled, the expression lifting a huge weight from her face. “I mean, you.”

  “Not entirely your choosing.”

  “What ever is?”

  For Laura, that seemed an ending, at least for the moment, a logical and welcomed pause in the morning’s inexorable rush of crises, demands, and revelations. Her eyes fell to Josh’s peaceful profile, locked on his face as the calm heart at the center of the storm his illness and this sudden turn for the worse had caused. Her whole being poured itself into his peacefulness. Unconsciously, her breathing slowed to match his, her heartbeat calmed to reflect the blips passing on the monitor, her face relaxed. As she began to fall into a waking rest in the resting Josh, a small scrap of her self-awareness couldn’t help but note the irony in the present exchange—patient caring for caregiver, struggler soothing the soother, dying showing the living how to survive.

  From Devon’s side and seat, Laura’s last words opened a window on a whole new world of possibility and risk—what that matters is ever our choosing? A month ago, before she’d filled out, signed, and submitted the forms requesting that her birth mother be made aware of her desire for contact, Devon would’ve confidently claimed that she was in full control of all the major aspects of her life. She had a devoted and stable life partner, supportive parents, a secure job, a house in a good neighborhood that was nearly paid for. There’d been no surprises at the core of her life since the day her mom had told her she was adopted twenty-nine years ago. Her and Joce’s willingness to consider parenthood reflected this sense of security; and their desire to uncover any possible genetic risks to her or the baby—even to the extent of seeking Devon’s birth parents—further reflected the intent, and expectation, of preserving control over their lives and choices.

  But the day she’d dropped those forms in the mail—she remembered the moment with absolute clarity, even recalled the half-dollar sized blister of rust on the postal box across the street from her bank—Devon felt a strange and unprecedented light-headedness, a kind of momentary dizziness and detachment that might’ve been construed as either foreboding or fortuitousness. She imagined then that the envelope containing those forms was like a dove, struggling in her hands for release but oh so fragile and vulnerable, a dove that would fly out into the world beyond her control, perhaps never returning—slain along the way or finding shelter beyond sight or further knowledge—or, even more frightening, returning after absence of unknown duration, carrying who knows what scars or message from the world beyond her, and beyond her control. She’d accepted an evangelical friend’s invitation to attend Sunday School for a few months when she was eleven, and therefore knew the story of Noah’s dove returning first with nothing, then with an olive branch, then not returning at all. (Their erstwhile Sunday School teacher—a plumber during the week who liked to close his eyes and boom “Praise the Lord” at the slightest provocation—confidently explained that the dove hadn’t returned the third time because he’d met a girl dove and set out making a nest and raising a family of baby doves in the land wiped clean of sin. But Devon had blurted out, “Or got eaten by a hawk!”—an explanation that resulted in groans from her classmates and a condemnatory stare from the plumber.) So, against all her training and expectation, Devon felt herself a latter-day Noah, releasing the dove of her forms out into an uncharted and potentially perilous world, not knowing if that dove would return or what might happen to it along the way—in short, relinquishing control, leaving her destiny in the hands of Fate, or God.

  And here she was, seated within arm’s reach of her dying birth father and her good-hearted but fiercely independent birth mother, most firmly in the clutches of Fate, or God. And it now mattered to her immensely which of those two held her. Though she’d not thought much about either Fate or God in her former life, she knew she wasn’t like Jocelyn, who happily blurred the line between the two, seeing God as Fate, Fate as God. No, in her mind the two were profoundly different. Fate was simply chance, random events outside the control or planning of anyone or anything. God, on the other hand, possessed both control and intention, and (she was reckless to hope) exercised that power with unseen and inscrutable benevolence, maybe even (still bolder hope!) love.

  But which was it—Fate or God—dictating her life? At that moment, from her seat in the desk chair that might be resting on bedrock or might be sinking in quicksand, a part of herself she didn’t know she possessed, a part laid bare by the events of the last few days, the last few hours—that part silently but irrevocably chose to believe it was God. And in this belief, she made a final leap into the darkness of these events beyond her control, trusting God to catch her.

  Though it seemed he’d been plodding along forever—his two solid legs had never stopped moving and the myriad bodies that surrounded him had never ceased their slow forward momentum—Josh would’ve sworn he was where he’d started. And from above, where the other Josh was watching, though the line kept moving and the numbers kept climbing, at some level the scene never changed, was simultaneously static and moving.

  It was only then, in the contemplation of this paradox, that Josh recalled the presence of another, the one who had spoken from behind him earlier. And he knew now that this other was watching both him and them, was both far above and intimately close; and further that this other controlled both time and space, could blur the line between the two at will. Intimation of this news should’ve been reward enough for his long witness and journey, but Josh wanted m
ore. “Then why let us choose?”

  A protracted and massive silence ensued. In what might’ve been a millisecond or a millennium, bearing the weight of a microbe or a mountain, the silence was all consuming—nothing but silence. Yet outside the silence, the migration continued, with Josh both participant and witness.

  Then a tiny voice so faint it might’ve been the wind, and like the wind was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, said, “To discover my love.”

  Josh’s answer was immediate. “Never soon enough.”

  The wind answered. “Always just in time.”

  Josh thought for a moment that might’ve been an eternity. “But you control that too.”

  The migration continued—the shuffle of worn feet, a puff of dust.

  Laura set the tray between them on the kitchen table. On it were two small plates, each with a pimento-cheese sandwich neatly cut in half diagonally, two cups of steaming Earl Grey tea, and lemon wedges, milk, and sugar, each in its own matching pottery container. Laura gestured, palms up, to her daughter. “Eat.”

  Devon nodded. “To preserve our strength.” She sat opposite her mother at the table.

  They’d left the still unconscious Josh under the attentive gaze of Sherri. Before they’d left the bedroom, each agreed to serve an eight-hour watch daily, long as needed—Sherri would handle 8 AM to 4 PM, Devon 4 PM till midnight, and Laura midnight till 8 AM. Further, Sherri would serve as a live-in nurse, bringing an overnight bag of clothes and toiletries and setting up in the nursery (where Laura’d been—close at hand in case of an emergency), Devon would retrieve her bags from the hotel and stay in Angie’s room. And when the two younger women looked to Laura, she said, “I’ll move my stuff to the guestroom down the hall,” then added after a pause, “but intend to sleep, if I sleep at all, right here, with him.” Sherri took a deep breath to object, but Laura stilled her with a silent raising of her hand. So Sherri swallowed her protest and said only, “Be careful of the monitor leads.” Laura said, “I will.”

  The two women ate their sandwiches in a comfortable silence, sharing a kind of battlefield intimacy that far exceeded their history (which was, after all, only two days) or even their kinship. Though neither felt hungry, they ate their sandwiches and drank their tea with deep satisfaction, savoring each bite and sip.

  Her plate cleaned of every morsel, Laura looked up at her daughter. “You can use my car—correction, Josh’s car that I’ve been driving—to get your things from the motel.”

  Devon nodded.

  Laura asked, “How bad is this disrupting your life?”

  Devon paused to consider that. “Normal amount, I guess. I’ll have to change my plane reservation, get someone to cover for me at work, cancel a dentist’s appointment.” She shrugged. “No big deal, in the near-term.”

  “It could go on for a while.”

  Devon nodded. “Then we’ll see.”

  “And Jocelyn?”

  “She hates sleeping alone, but I think she’ll understand. If not, she can always come here.”

  Laura kept quiet, but her face betrayed her reservations.

  “We could stay at a motel, maybe one closer by.”

  Laura said, “We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” She collected the empty plates and cups, set them in the tray, and turned to carry them to the sink before pausing and looking back over her shoulder. “Devon, I feel so close to you that I’m already taking you for granted. Please forgive my selfishness and accept my sincerest thanks for your willingness to share this burden, and all that choice is costing you.”

  Devon nodded. “Thanks accepted. I only hope I’m up to the task.”

  “I hope we both are.”

  “We’ll prop each other up.”

  “Or fall trying.”

  Devon asked, “Would you like for me to try to reach Angie?”

  Laura responded simply, “Please.”

  That night Devon sat in her father’s dimly lit room in the upholstered chair beside his bed watching his calm and unmoving profile. Sherri’d connected an IV bag to a port in his arm to keep him hydrated and provide rudimentary nutrition, and she’d added a permanent catheter to drain his bladder and track his urine production and kidney function. Just before leaving for the night (to put her house in order—she’d be back the next morning by 8), she’d checked the urine bag and nodded with satisfaction. “That’s a good sign.” She held up the plastic bag for Devon to see. “Normal urine production, good color. Kidneys are usually the first to go, but no sign of that yet.” She set the bag back down on its hanger taped to the footboard of the bed. “Now you or your mom call me if there’s any change, any change at all. This phone”—she pointed to the phone clipped to her belt—“is always on and within arm’s reach.”

  Devon laughed. “Even in the shower?”

  “On a hook just outside the curtain. You’d be surprised how many calls I get while in the shower.”

  “You must take long showers.”

  “This woman’s only consolation, since my husband ran off.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. The sex wasn’t worth the headaches. I’ve found alternatives that are more satisfying and whole lot easier on the nerves.” She winked.

  “Might need to hear your tips one day.”

  “Anytime. A girl never knows when she might need to be self-reliant.”

  “A girl never knows.”

  Now alone, Devon watched her father locked in his persistent unconsciousness. The house was incredibly still. Laura was somewhere down the hall but made no sound, was probably asleep after their exhausting day. The numbers and lines flicked past on the monitor. Beyond the window, night gripped the woods. Somewhere out there, an owl trilled its lilting tune that Devon recognized from her childhood in Louisiana. Then new silence ensued.

  Devon had not yet touched her birth father—no part of him: not his face, not even his pale near hand resting atop the covers. She wasn’t quite ready for touch, wasn’t quite ready to take the final step to make him real. Part of her reluctance derived from an understanding, both formal and visceral, of his empirical rights—in this case, the right to welcome or initiate contact with a stranger (even a stranger that is your daughter). And part of her wanted him conscious so that he might invite her approach, share in that first touch. But beyond both of these reservations was a more basic fear—the fear that no sooner would she make him real to her through touch then he would be taken from her, dying without ever seeing her or knowing she existed.

  So she sat beside him, watched him closely, but watched him as if she were watching a corpse, the corpse he might soon be.

  She opened her laptop, accessed the Internet through Josh’s wireless router, and typed Joshua Earl into the search engine. She was startled, as always, by the thousands of entries the search returned. After several dead ends, she found a website maintained by the university that included brief bios of the faculty. She was surprised to see how many books Josh had published, including scholarly works on Frost, Agee, Roethke, and Stevens, and two books of his own poetry. The bio ended with this sentence—Professor Earl was married to the late Victoria Lawton Earl, with whom he had a daughter, Angela Brock Earl.