by Nancy Adams
Opening her eyes, Marya saw that Sam’s sad eyes were facing her own, her reflection glimmering off of them.
“Where do I go now?” he asked her in such a despairing voice that it made Marya’s tears fall even harder.
“Oh! Sam,” she cried into his ear. “I’ll still be there watching over the two of you.”
Sam gripped both her and Jess even tighter, the little girl wincing slightly, and buried his head into his wife’s breast, sobbing witheringly into her, feeling the bed open up beneath him, swallowing him up into a terrible abyss of sorrow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sam awoke to the sound of silence. A terribly hollow silence that threatened to deafen him. When he opened his eyes, he saw the lily-white nape of Marya’s neck in front of him. His arm was around her body, reaching over and holding Jess’s hand as she slept on the other side of her mother, the family spooned together on the bed. Under his arm, Sam could feel the gentle breathing of Marya, her ribcage going in and out; each breath making him tremble slightly as he wondered how many more the sick woman had left in her and how laborious they would become when her nervous system finally began to completely break down.
The doctors had been astounded when they’d first diagnosed Marya. It was a first for them. They were even going to name it after her: Burgess Syndrome. As to the killer itself, it was a genetic disease that caused the brain to suddenly start over producing a certain type of protein in the body that then began to group around the fibrous tissues of the nerves, grouping upon the nerve stem and the neurological system in the brain, until the patient lost all neurological functions and slowly suffocated to death as their vital organs gradually stopped functioning.
It had begun with Marya occasionally losing her balance or dropping things, until it became so common that they visited the doctor. At first, all the medical professionals they saw were baffled, unable to give a prognosis based on existing medical rationale, and Marya was sent to a leading neurologist, Dr. Franklin Jones. Jones quickly dismissed the prognosis that it was an aggressive strain of Multiple Sclerosis, and many tests later, a new disease was discovered, or rather one that might have been extremely old, existing since the dawn of man, but, because of its rareness, was only now being correctly diagnosed for the first time.
So Burgess Syndrome was born. How horrifying it must be, Sam had thought as he sat with Marya that first time Jones had mentioned his ‘Burgess Syndrome,’ to have something so terrible named after you all because you’re its first recognized victim. It’s like naming a serial killer after the people he’s killed.
Since then, two months had passed, and last week the news was given that Marya was officially terminal. That she would die for certain and that, for all the treatment she’d suffered under, it had only slowed the disease in the most minimal of ways. This had included the terrible venom of a new type of chemotherapy that the doctors had devised especially for this disease using existing knowledge of cancerous cells. Many of the doctors and specialists believed that by destroying the cells responsible for the production of the protein, they could foreseeably stop the nerve damage before it killed her. But it only went so far as making her sicker than the disease itself, as well as having almost no affect on the manic, protein-producing cells.
Watching your wife, the mother of your child, the only woman you’ve ever loved or been loved by up until then, so terribly weak from the chemo’s toxins, is not something that a man of thirty wants to see. It’s not something that any sane man would want to see of anyone. The sickness from the drugs that she was on made her so weak, so distant, so sick, that Sam had spent the time with her in a miserable daze. It was when he watched her writhing from cramps and perpetually vomiting after the third dose of therapy that he had to plead with Marya to stop. The woman was tough, she was a fighter and she refused to give up until it was completely certain that the treatment was failing. In some ways, Sam was relieved when Jones informed them that the chemo had been a total failure. Of course, he’d prayed that it had worked. But even more, he’d feared to hear that it was working very slowly and that they’d need Marya to go through another few courses to see where they were at by the end—the continuation of a terrible torture with nothing but uncertainty at its conclusion.
Sam was so scared that Marya would spend her last days on Earth in such terrible pain due to the increasingly hostile forms of treatment that she was going through. At the beginning, Jones had been honest and told them that Marya’s chances were almost naught. The disease was aggressive, and modern science was still in an early phase of understanding such brain-debilitating diseases. The chemo, as well as many of the other treatments, was medical lip service in many respects. Sam knew that—he could see it in the faces of the doctors as they went through another phase of treatment. And deep down, Marya knew it too.
Unlike her husband, though, she refused to recognize the defeat in their faces as they stood around her administering another dose of the sickness that would hopefully eat into the other, more deadly, sickness. But when the treatment had ended, she too let out a sigh of relief at the thought that the fight was over and that she could finally just be from now on; merely ride it out toward the inevitable conclusion. The whole month and a half of her treatment, she’d only seen Jess twice, the woman unwilling to let her little girl see her during her worst, which had been pretty much all the time during those awful weeks of suffering. Now she was free to die surrounded by her loves.
In the last three days, Marya had lost the sense of smell, of taste, and now of touch. Soon, it would be her hearing and then her sight. It was like she was being cast into a sea of black ink, and there she would remain until her vital organs failed. Jones had told them that it would probably be respiratory failure that finally ended her life. And all that time in the darkness, she’d be totally unaware of the gradual shutting down inside of her. She would exist in nothingness until nothingness eventually swallowed her up.
Sam slowly retracted his arm from around Marya, gently letting go of Jess’s freckled hand. A glint of sadness spread over him as he realized that it was a waste of time removing his arm so softly from around Marya—she couldn’t feel it anyway. But the thought didn’t stop him from removing himself from the bed as tenderly as possible. When his bare feet touched the cold floor, Sam recoiled slightly from the chilly touch. He then glanced down at a digital clock that sat on a bedside cabinet. 22:00.
How weird, Sam thought, the exact time.
Sam spent several seconds glaring at the clock in confusion, scratching his head, feeling like he’d woken up into a dream. He had felt so wretched when he’d fallen asleep earlier that he couldn’t even remember slipping into unconsciousness. The three of them had simply fallen onto the bed. At some point Jess had gotten up and removed his shoes and socks, before nestling herself back into her mother’s front. While she unlaced one of his shoes, Sam had awoken and secretly peeked down at the sweet cherub as she went about her work. When she suddenly looked up at him, Sam quickly closed his eyes again and pretended that he was still asleep. Having finished, the little girl walked around to his side of the bed and kissed her father on the temple, before leaning into his ear and whispering, “It’s okay, daddy. I can look after you from now on.” It had taken all his will for Sam not to burst into tears then.
Standing by the bed, Sam gazed about the place. He could see that they’d been left alone to sleep, the staff all in an anteroom somewhere, monitoring Marya from there. A dim electric light in the center of the room, left on for them in case they needed the bathroom, was all the gloomy light that he had. He began to walk across the floor toward the exit.
When he was halfway across, under the faint haze of the light, he instinctively turned and took a look at his loves on the bed, wondering how he could have been so callous to them at the very moment when they needed him the most. How weak and cruel he had been. He’d never in his life before even considered another woman, let alone had an affair. But something of the moment and
of Claire herself had overridden him, and like the weak fool that he was, he allowed his desires to sweep him along into committing a terrible act on three people.
For one, Claire was a nineteen-year-old college student volunteering at the hospital during her vacation. She had her whole life ahead of her, and here he was breaking into that life. He hated all those other powerful men he knew who allowed themselves to cheat on their families because they could; all those dirty old men that constantly used their positions of wealth to lure young girls into bed behind their wives’ backs. He felt that he too was like them and that his actions toward Claire had been cruel from the off.
Then there was his wife: Marya. In her worst moment, when she needed him to be her rock more than ever, Sam had stabbed her in the back by starting an affair with a young girl. A young girl that Marya was acquainted with. A young girl that Marya trusted and admired.
Just over a month ago, Claire had been present during a procedure on Marya and the two had sparked up a conversation, Marya asking a few questions about the girl’s life. After that, they’d begun talking regularly, and Marya had requested for Claire to be moved permanently upstairs to them after that, preferring the young girl’s warmth to the more professionally stern doctors and specialists that generally surrounded her. Plus, Sam was being very quiet at the time and she needed someone to talk to that didn’t look at her and internally compare her to her former self.
After some time, Sam too had gotten to speaking regularly with the girl, having been a little cold toward her at the beginning. Claire had mistaken this for him being arrogant, but in truth it was because he found the girl fascinating and was attempting to fight the magnetism he felt toward her. He had become mesmerized by her very presence and it was then that he felt the first pangs of guilt as he began overlooking his sick wife in favor of the young girl.
However, despite these early warnings of guilt, Sam went ahead and maneuvered things between them into an affair.
Early on, when they had begun talking alone while Marya slept after her treatment, they would have coffee together in one of the vacant rooms. It had started innocently enough, but Sam began to see a glint in the corner of the girl’s eyes that gave away her true feelings for him. How he had wished that the girl wouldn’t take to him during those first solitary meetings. How he wished that she simply felt pity for him. That she saw a sad man and no more. But he could see, held within that glint, that she found him enchanting too, and their mutual desires began pulling them, crashing into each other, like a sun going supernova and pulling in the surrounding planets.
Standing at the threshold of the door, Sam looked back at Marya and Jess. He recoiled from what he was doing to his little girl. He felt that he was abandoning her when he was with Claire, that Jess had always been a part of his and Marya’s love, but that with Claire, the little girl was outside of it. He imagined that he and Claire were drifting away from Jess, abandoning the little girl outside of her father’s feelings.
Sam shook his head and continued out the room.
When he was in the corridor, he looked up and down its length. No one there. He entered the corridor and walked along for some time, glancing around every now and then like a man in fear of being followed. Eventually, he reached a door and entered a small side room. Inside, it was pitch black and, after closing the door quietly behind him, Sam attempted to adjust his eyesight to the bleakness of the room.
Suddenly a voice in the opposite corner made him jump.
“I’ll open one of the blinds,” the feminine voice said, “to let a little light in from the moon.”
“That’ll be good,” Sam replied.
The blinds of the window began to open and moonbeams flowed into the room, lighting it up in a gloomy hue. It was then that Sam saw the silhouette of Claire sitting at a small table in the far corner, the room usually a staff area.
Sam made his way to her and sat himself down opposite.
“So,” Claire said in a sorrowful tone, “you came.”
“Yes—I wasn’t going to, but then I woke up randomly, looked at the clock and saw that it was the exact time of our nightly meetings. I wasn’t expecting you to be here, but I came anyway, just in case.”
“I don’t know if it makes me glad that you came or not,” she said shaking her head. “What are we doing?”
“Falling in love,” was Sam's sincere answer.
He then stretched his hand across the table and enveloped Claire’s, rubbing his thumb delicately across the top. She looked up at him, her eyes red and sore.
“You must believe me,” he said tenderly to her, “when I tell you that I love you, Claire.” The girl smiled at this. But as quickly as it had emerged, the smile limply dropped. “But,” Sam continued, “you must also understand that I love my family as well.”
“Is that why you made love to me on your wife’s bed?” Claire suddenly put to him.
Sam’s heart dropped like a stone and he weakly let go of Claire’s hand. He heard such bitterness in the young girl’s tone; bitterness that he had been otherwise oblivious to since he had first spied the light that existed in her. He felt himself unable to meet her gaze and looked down at the table between them instead.
“You’re full of shame, Sam,” Claire said in the same embittered tone.
“Yes, I am,” Sam admitted to her. “But that doesn’t detract from the fact that I am deeply in love with you, Claire.” On this last word, Sam raised his eyes to meet hers and she shuddered to see such passion burning brightly within them. “And after all of this is over, I want—”
“Do you know that I lost my virginity on your dying wife’s marital bed?” Claire angrily interrupted.
Once again, Sam dropped his gaze to the table.
“Yes,” he let out in a barely audible voice. “But after this—”
“I told you things,” she interrupted again, “about myself that I haven’t told another human being, let alone another man.”
Sam felt shame at having picked this young girl’s locks so thoroughly this last month. She had made him privy to a part of her that had previously been locked away deep down.
“Please, Claire,” he said pleadingly. “I’m a fool—I admit that—but I do love you and want—”
“I’m nineteen years old,” Claire let out. “Do you know that when I went home two nights ago there was a reporter waiting outside my parents’ house?”
Sam suddenly looked up at her, fear burning in his eyes.
“What did they say?” he asked in a trembling voice.
“Nothing,” Claire replied. “He just wanted the usual about Marya’s condition, how you were holding up, etc. He’d gotten my name from some source at the hospital and wanted information on what was happening. But when he approached me as I walked from my car and mentioned your name, I froze. I sincerely expected him to begin questioning me on our affair. And do you know why I felt like that?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m ashamed of myself for stealing the husband of a dying woman.”
“You’re not stealing me, Claire,” Sam commented, reaching out and trying to retake her hand. But the girl retracted it and he was left clutching thin air.
“A month ago, I was a volunteer at a terminal ward,” she said, “while on vacation from my first year of college. I was set to eventually become an ER doctor like I’d always wanted to be since I was a little girl. Now I’m the mistress of one of the richest men in the world. Do you know how the media will spin this when they find out? I’ll be the gold-digging bitch who stole the husband of Marya Burgess while she lay dying.”
“They won’t find out.”
“Oh!” Claire exclaimed, so loudly that Sam glanced over his shoulder in fear. “So,” she continued bitterly, “I’m to be kept a secret then?”
“No—once Marya is…gone, we’ll…”
“My God! You’ve actually been fantasizing about a future between us when your wife isn’t even cold in the ground yet.”
> “Please, I didn’t mean it like that. She’s gone…” His voice broke at this point and tears welled up in his eyes. “Marya’s gone,” he continued sobbingly. “That’s for sure. When she originally got ill, I was initially too involved in the possibility of her getting better to even think about her death. But as one treatment after another failed, I realized that it was the end—the actual end. I was sure then that I would never find another, never be with anyone other than her. And then…” Sam looked up into Claire’s swollen eyes. “Then I met you and I couldn’t believe it. I was so drawn to you, Claire. Every word you uttered, every movement you made, every little gesture, all made me irresistibly attracted to you. It was the same as when I first saw Marya as a boy. Everything she did captivated me like never before. When I look at you, it’s as if a part of her soul has split off early and I’m staring at it through you.”
Tears were streaming down Claire’s face now. She reached forward and took his empty hand.
“I love you so much,” she wept. “I have never felt the way I do around you ever before in my life, not even for a fleeting moment. I had begun to believe that I was dead inside before I met you. You invigorate me.”
At that moment, Sam leaned forward and took Claire in his arms and the two kissed passionately under the dim light of the moon. She felt such a surge of electricity move up through her body, a spark emitting from his soft lips and sending shivers down her. In his arms, she went weak and Sam pulled her into him further, almost dragging her limp body across the table.
Just then, an alarm sounded breaking the nighttime silence of the place. Sam and Claire instantly broke apart and gazed around them as the din of the alarm filled the air. Sam glanced back at Claire with a strained look upon his face. That guilty look again, she thought.
With that, he let go and bounded out of the room.
