The Dying Breath

by Ferguson, Alane

  “Is this what you mean?” he asked hoarsely. “Because if you can love me, I will let you live. I’ll let us live.” Wrapping her hair around his forearm, he yanked her face to him so hard that her right arm twisted in its socket. She gasped in pain.

  “Do you love me, Cammie?”

  He forced her to look into his hazel eyes. The gold was back, shimmering like flakes of metal against warm wood. Wide-set, they pleaded with her, the eyes of a manic child.

  “Yes,” she answered, as gently as she could. “Yes, Kyle, I do.”

  “Then show me again.”

  This time his hands were soft on her face. These were the hands that killed Justin. This body, this inhuman being she had to pretend to care for, leaned into her and pressed his lips against hers. Repulsed, she issued orders to her body, signals from the general of her mind to the soldiers that made up the parts of her. She commanded her mouth to follow his, her arms to flex toward him, not away. As he kissed her, she felt her mind detach from her body, separate and hover somewhere above them near the ceiling of the car.

  A lone car roared by, then vanished beyond the bend, useless to her. Finally, he pulled back and sighed contentedly. “That’s what I remember,” he said.

  “Yes.” It was all she could manage to say.

  “You can see into me and see something worth saving.”

  “I can.”

  He moved close and put his arms around her, a lover’s embrace with no hint of violence. Gently, he put his lips to her ear and whispered, “The thing is, I’m not stupid, Cammie. I know you are lying to me. But I give you credit for trying. It was a good effort. Really, really good. A kiss before dying.”

  And then in one fluid motion he sat back and floored the gas pedal, the Jeep fishtailing as it reentered the Million Dollar Highway.

  But she was still close to him, just as she had planned to be. Beneath her, the gearshift knob rose like a beacon, only inches away, as the speedometer shot to thirty, thirty-five. Now! she screamed in her head. With all the strength she had left in her throbbing left hand she grabbed the ball of the knob, yanking it into reverse. Instantly the engine seized up with a violent spasm, the gears grinding in an almost human scream.

  “What the—” Kyle swore in a fury as he wrenched back into his seat. His strike was fast and hard. Balling his hand into a fist, he punched Cameryn in her cheek as the Jeep lurched into the other traffic lane. Bright lights shimmered behind her eyes as she held onto the gearshift, but the second punch sent her reeling and Kyle once again took control of the gearshift.

  He swore again as he tried to reset the gear, his attention solely on the car.

  It was the millisecond Cameryn had planned on, had prayed for. As his hand clutched the knob, Cameryn grasped the steering wheel and pulled to the right with every ounce of strength she had. Her elbow snapped as he broke her hold but it was too late; the Jeep pitched toward the mountain. A sickening squeal of metal against rock as the front end of the Jeep collided with granite. Sparks shot out like the end of a sparkler and then there was an explosion so loud it felt like a gunshot had ripped through her head. The breath knocked out of her as she whipped back into the seat, and then . . . silence.

  Smoke clouded the interior of the Jeep, stinging her lungs. She heard coughing and a quiet moan from Kyle. Deflated airbags hung down like white curtains as she blinked, trying to right herself again. Through the cracked windshield she saw the car had come to rest at a ninety-degree angle against the mountain. The car’s hood had crumpled into pleats.

  Kyle was not moving. She saw there were smudges of smoke smeared across his face like war paint, and his hands hung limp in his lap. And then she saw what she was looking for: the knife. It had skidded forward, at the edge of the dashboard, just within reach. She could cut herself free with its blade. Her left hand, swollen and bruised, pulsed with every beat of her heart, but she forced herself to go slowly, to reach past Kyle. Her fingers stretching, the blade, still red with Justin’s blood, glancing against her fingertips, and then pain exploding against her hand.

  “I’ll take that,” he said, plucking the knife by the handle.

  She could see the cold rage in his eyes as he kicked his way out the driver’s door, the knife clutched in his hand. In a flash he was at the passenger side; there was enough space for him to yank open her door, the hinges groaning in protest. The blade winked in the light.

  The sharp edge whipped up over her head and she watched its arc, sure of where it would strike. Her heart. It was aimed at her heart.

  She saw her parents and Justin and her school, Lyric, and her life, a shaken snow globe of memories. But the blade did not slice into her chest as she expected. Instead, she felt a stab as the knife cut against the zip tie that held her wrist to the grab bar. She was free. Mercifully free.

  Tossing the knife in the air, he caught it with his left as he yanked her out of the car, onto her knees. “Bitch,” he spat. “We’re going over the side, one way or another.”

  Her death had been postponed, but it was coming, just the same.

  Screaming, kicking, she tried to hold on but she was no match for him and his strength as he pulled her across the Million Dollar Highway.

  “No!” she cried, but he did not hear her. She dug her heels into the slick asphalt but there was nothing to brace her, no way to stop him. His grip around her wrist was like a vise. He grunted as he pulled her into the center, halfway across the line, then five feet from the edge. From there she caught a flash of the bottom, the sheer drop that ended in juts of stone so ragged they looked like teeth. There was no way to live through a fall like that. Her chances would have been better protected by the steel of the Jeep.

  “Oh God, don’t do this!” she begged.

  “God’s not doing it,” he said, leering. “I am.”

  And then, like a miracle from heaven, she heard a rumble from below. A semi appeared around the bend, blowing black smoke from an upright exhaust pipe. The driver looked down as the blue cab roared toward them. In that moment when Kyle wavered, she acted. Twisting her arm against the joint where his thumb met his fingers, she broke his grasp. Staggering, she stepped backward while Kyle stared at the approaching truck, paralyzed with indecision.

  The rear wheels of the cab smoked as it squealed then stopped less than ten feet away. The driver jumped to the ground, landing hard. He was thickly muscled, with a black mustache that brushed the edge of his jaw and a red plaid shirt.

  “You all right?” the truck driver cried. “That’s a bad wreck. You kids okay?” He held up a cell phone. “I already hit 911. They’ll be here any moment.” And then, as if he sensed something was off, the driver asked again, “You sure you’re okay?” Then he saw the knife.

  It seemed to take only a moment for Kyle to decide.

  Backing up, he kept his eyes locked on hers as he took three long steps toward the lip of the road.

  “Kid, what do you think you’re doin’?” the trucker roared. He was running toward Kyle but Kyle stood tall, like a diver ready to make a back flip off an Olympic high dive.

  “Kid!”

  Kyle’s arms flew out straight from his sides so that his body made the shape of the cross.

  “I guess I’ll make this last journey alone. Good-bye, Cammie. Make sure they write about me.”

  Then, without another word, he sailed backward, his eyes on Cameryn’s as he arced into the air to disappear onto the rocks below.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE BALLOONS IN her hand bobbed and swayed, looking like giant moons. While Cameryn rode up in the elevator she felt a similar lightness inside herself, as though she would rise up and touch the ceiling of Mercy Hospital. She was that happy.

  The elevator dinged, the doors slid open, and she made her way into the lobby of the third floor.

  “Oh, those are nice,” said the nurse at the station, whose name tag read Betty. “Who are you visiting?”

  “Dr. Moore,” she answered. “But these balloons a
ren’t for him. Can I leave them here with you?”

  “Certainly, dear. They’re lovely. So nice and cheerful!”

  “Thanks.” Cameryn smiled back. “Dr. Moore’s present is in my backpack,” she said, twisting around as though the nurse could see.

  Betty said, “So you’re here delivering two presents. Aren’t you an angel.” The woman was in her sixties, with crepey skin that held too much rouge and hair dyed the color of a Halloween pumpkin. But her tone was sweet, and as Cameryn walked down the hallway she heard the balloons gently tapping each other.

  The room wasn’t far away. Knocking softly, Cameryn stepped inside the small enclosure. A striped curtain had been pulled back, and she saw the doctor, propped on a hospital bed that was nearly flat. Tufts of white hair encircled his head like a fallen halo. His nose looked swollen, his skin pale. She was about to back out of the room so she wouldn’t disturb him when she saw his eyes flutter open.

  “Miss Mahoney,” he said, his voice weak. “My protégée.”

  “Hi, Dr. Moore. How are you feeling today?”

  “Sore.” He pressed a button that raised the bed until he was almost sitting. “A bit fuzzy from the meds. But grateful the cancer was contained, which I think I told you when you came by yesterday. You were here yesterday, correct? Or was I dreaming?”

  She set the backpack just inside the door. “Yes, I was here. This is my third day visiting.”

  “Uh-huh, that’s right.” He nodded. “If all goes well I’ll be up and running in a little over six weeks, which means we’ll be back on deck, with me at the helm. I’d like to hire you to work for me while you’re at Fort Lewis College. Did I ask you that already?”

  “You did,” she answered, smiling. “And I said yes.”

  “Good! You’ll be right up the street from me in the dorms. Are you amenable to working for a cantankerous old coot instead of a nice, calm coroner like your father?”

  “It depends on how much you’re willing to pay me,” Cameryn said, laughing, relieved that the fog seemed to be lifting from the doctor’s mind. “I’d like to confirm a number while you’re under the influence of narcotics,” she told him. “To take full advantage of the situation.”

  He waved her words away as though he were fanning gnats. “My point is there’s still a lot I need to teach you, Miss Mahoney. Sit.”

  “I can only stay a minute, Dr. Moore. I have someone else I need to see.”

  “This will only take a minute. Take that chair. Yes, pull it closer.”

  Cameryn dragged a green fabric chair with metal legs close to the side of his bed, the legs screeching against the linoleum floor, and sat down.

  The doctor picked up his glasses from the bedside table and peered at her, his eyes too large behind the lenses. Reaching for a glass, he sipped water from a straw, then carefully set it down again. His fingers trembled as he adjusted the folds of his sheets, pressing them into furrows until they looked like a miniature field ready for planting. Clearing his throat, he began, “I’m a sick old man who wants to give you some advice. Will you listen?”

  Cameryn hesitated. Even though he didn’t seem to remember her visit the day before, this conversation threatened to take essentially the same form. She braced herself for what she knew was coming.

  “Miss Mahoney, it’s easy at your age to get side-tracked by love.”

  “Dr. Moore—” she began to protest, but the doctor talked right over her.

  “I know, you think I’m too ancient to remember what it’s like to be young. But my great age brings wisdom, and that wisdom compels me to remind you that what you have is a gift.” He winced as he adjusted himself to face her. “No matter what, you need to stay the course with your career in medicine. Listen to an old sage. I’ve been around a long time—maybe too long—but I have been privileged to meet the best future forensic pathologist the field will produce. You!”

  “I think that’s just the drugs talking,” she answered, shifting uncomfortably in her seat.

  “This isn’t codeine, Miss Mahoney—I’m on half the meds I was yesterday because I want to get my mind clear.”

  “You do sound better,” she admitted.

  “I’ve been lying in this bed, thinking. I’m a patient who just dodged a cancer bullet, who will live to work and teach another day.”

  “Which is so great—”

  “And this amazing young woman is the one I want to pour my knowledge into, teaching her every trick I know.” He fingered a plastic tube that had been taped to the back of his hand. Sounding wistful, he said, “I have tricks . . . well, techniques might be a better word. But what you have is brilliance.” He tapped the side of his head, causing the tubing to dance across the sheets. “You got yourself out of a jam with that Kyle O’Neil by thinking. That kind of intelligent tenacity is hard to come by.”

  “My mammaw calls it stubbornness,” Cameryn replied as she raised an eyebrow.

  He chuckled, pressing the button again to raise himself even farther; the machinery hummed until he stopped at a forty-five-degree angle. “Stubbornness is one facet of your personality, certainly. I like it, if you want to know the truth. But you’re so young. Life comes at you hard when you’re seventeen.”

  “Eighteen. I’m eighteen today.”

  “Congratulations and happy birthday. Life comes at you even harder when you’re eighteen.” He winked, then hesitated, and Cameryn began to wonder if that was all he was going to say, but he trained his blue eyes on hers. “Do you remember what the word autopsy means?”

  Cameryn nodded. “It means ‘to see with one’s own eyes.’”

  “Precisely.” He dropped his chin into his bullfrog neck and peered at her over the rims of his glasses. “With my eyes I’m seeing what you will be if you keep your hand on the rudder. Don’t turn away from your future. An artist isn’t an artist if she doesn’t paint.”

  She thought about this. Today, on her birthday, she had chosen to wear her Mahoney sweater again, even though it was the clothing she’d almost died in. But as she’d reached into her closet in the morning she’d decided it was more than that. It had been knitted with the luck of the Irish, her perfect birthday cloth—the sweater she’d stayed alive in. Kyle O’Neil’s crumpled body lay in the Montrose morgue, while Cameryn was in a hospital with those she cared for, truly ready for the first time in her life for whatever would come. Her future lay wide open, vast with promise, but the new became possible only because of what had taken place before. Facing her own death had made her see that life was a series of threads as intertwined as the Aran yarn. Yet it seemed impossible to express what she’d learned. She sat quiet, thinking there was no way to wrap this knowledge into words.

  “Are you going to tell me that I’m an old geezer who needs to butt out?”

  “No.” Leaning forward so that her elbows drilled her knees, she said, “Do you remember the fortune cookie that predicted your future?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Yes, I remember sharing that story with you. About the whimsical fortune cookie that pointed me to my life with the dead—the one that showed me which medical path to pursue. It led me to the dark art of forensics.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. The fortune said You will touch the hearts of many.Remember? And you figured it meant you would go into forensic pathology so you could touch a lot of hearts of decedents when you preformed autopsies.”

  “I’m pleased you were listening.”

  Equally intense, Cameryn told him, “I’ve decided that I can also touch the hearts of many—dead people, but the living, too.”

  He waited a beat before saying, “The living?”

  “Yes, the living. You don’t have to choose one or the other, Dr. Moore. I realized this when I thought I might be going over the side of a cliff, as dramatic as that sounds. I don’t think it would have been forensics that I would have missed, but the people that I love. They were the ones I was fighting to get back to. The living, Dr. Moore, not the dead.”

 
Shaking his head grimly, he said, “You sound so young.”

  “And you’re sounding tired so I’m going to let you rest. I promise I’ll keep up my work and be a good student and do everything you want, but I’m going to do everything I want, too. That’s what’s so cool about being eighteen,” she said, rising to her feet. “I can dream big.” She paused. “Oh, I brought this for you.”

  She opened her backpack and pulled out a book, setting it into the doctor’s hands.

  “What’s this?”

  “An art book. It’s called The Last Rose of Summer by Robert McGinnis. It’s to make your wife happy. The grass you painted is beautiful, but don’t forget to put in the flowers, too. That’s where the color is. Now I’m sounding like a fortune cookie.” She leaned over to squeeze his hand before slipping out of the room, sure she could hear the sound of a faint chuckle as the door clicked shut.

  Back at the nurses’ station she picked up her dozen balloons from Betty, who was chatting with a male nurse in blue scrubs.

  “That’s the angel I was telling you about,” Betty said, while Cameryn disappeared into the elevator, catching her image in the shiny steel doors. The fuzzy reflection seemed older, more confident. The balloons bobbed against the ceiling as she exited onto the fourth floor, her heart skipping as she approached the room.

  Forensics had taught her that scars left tissue much tougher than skin. In a way she was stronger now, and so was he. Stronger together than they ever would be apart.

  This time she didn’t knock but instead opened the door quietly. Justin was sleeping, his chest rising and falling gently, his head bent to one side, his dark hair tousled against the pillow. For a moment she stood there, watching. A machine beeped in the background while light poured into the room in pale yellow squares. One knee propped the sheets into a tent. He must have sensed she was there because he stirred.