by Noelle Adams
But the sight of him, trying to maintain his dignity and composure on the mule, was the funniest thing Emily had seen in a long time.
He knew she was silently laughing at him, which was doing nothing to improve his disposition.
“Dare I ask why this particular endeavor was on your list when you were twelve?” he asked, noticing her slanting discreet, amused looks in his direction.
Emily giggled. “I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. It’s something most people want to see at some point.”
“Sure. I understand wanting to see it. But why the mules?”
“Well, if you have to know, I watched a lot of reruns of old TV shows, since that’s what my dad kept on in the shop, and there was this one episode of…”
Paul groaned low in his throat and rolled his eyes. Emily burst out laughing.
They had a private guide, instead of going with one of the normal mule tours in groups of tourists. It would have been nice to be able to do the full ride, but that would require an overnight, and there was no way Emily would be well enough to last that long. She would have a fever again tomorrow, if not earlier. Three hours there and back was about all she was strong enough to handle.
It wasn’t that long ago when she’d been perfectly fit—her health never holding her back from something she’d wanted to do. There was no use in whining about it now, though. At least she was still alive. At least she was with Paul. At least she was able to ride a mule along the Grand Canyon.
The last months of her life could have been—should have been—so much worse.
They reached the overlook over the abyss, where they stopped to rest and have a snack on a blanket, looking out on the breathtaking scenery. Emily was more tired than she’d realized, and she stretched out on the ground with her head in Paul’s lap. She fell asleep without realizing it.
She was stiff and flushed when she woke up, completely disoriented and having no idea what time it was.
“It’s just been twenty minutes,” Paul said softly. He was gently stroking her hair. “You can rest more if you need to.”
“No,” she croaked, making herself sit up without groaning, even though every move seemed to hurt. “I’m fine.”
He pulled her against him until she was reclining against his chest, his arms around her, holding her almost protectively. “There’s no hurry.”
Despite the swell of emotion in her chest, her sense of humor flared up unexpectedly. “You just want to delay getting on that mule again for as long as you can.”
“Of course.”
She nestled against him, stroking his flat belly fondly. She loved how firm and lean he felt—no extra fat on his whole body. “Don’t think I didn’t see you petting your trusty Brownie before you got off. And then you snuck him a snack when you thought no one was looking.”
Paul ignored her blithely, except to say, “Brownie is a ridiculous name for a mule. I think I’ll rename him Arion.”
Emily wracked her mind for the allusion, but she just didn’t recognize it. “That sounds Greek. I suppose it’s some great mythic steed of some kind.”
Paul’s voice took on a different quality, and she knew he was quoting something famous. “…there is no man that shall catch thee by a burst of speed, neither pass thee by, nay, not though in pursuit he were driving goodly Arion, the swift horse of Adrastus, that was of heavenly stock…”
Emily giggled. Then she couldn’t stop laughing.
Paul’s arms tightened around her, and she could tell he was smiling, even though she wasn’t looking up at his face.
“Homer?” she guessed, when she’d caught her breath.
“Absolutely.”
“The Iliad?”
“Yes.”
“Poor old Brownie. Plodding through his life for years and then suddenly elevated to an immortal horse of Greek myth.”
“He’s up to the challenge.”
Emily laughed again and looked over to where Paul’s mule was munching on the leaves of a bush that happened to be directly in front of him in oblivious contentment. “I think the donkey in his family lineage might be dragging him down from Greek horse heroics.”
“I’ve got a good eye,” Paul said, his voice still dry and utterly even, despite the fact that he was obviously teasing. “He has untapped potential.”
Still laughing, Emily stretched up to kiss Paul on the lips. “I still wouldn’t suggest you trust Brownie to carry you into war with Troy.”
Paul kissed her back. “Duly noted.”
* * *
Emily was running a low-grade fever, but she had refused to stay in bed that morning. The high fever yesterday had broken, but she was feeling worse and worse on each of her “good” days. She wasn’t going to waste the brief time they were California, so she’d bluntly told Paul to stop fussing when he’d wanted to delay their plans to give her more time to recover.
“So,” Paul asked, slanting her an ironic look as the chauffeured car took them back to the airport two hours later so they could start for Hawaii as soon as possible, “Was it worth years of waiting?”
“Don’t be snide. I thought he was the most handsome man in the world back when I was twelve,” Emily said, scowling at her husband.
“I’m sure you did. And six years later you get to kiss him at last. It was a dream come true, no doubt.”
Emily stuck her tongue out at him. “I got to cross it off my list. That’s what counts. He was very nice to be willing to do it. Did you have to give him a big sob story about me to convince him to agree to kiss me?”
“I didn’t even talk to him,” Paul explained. “I talked to his manager. It was no big deal.”
He sounded nonchalant, but she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He would have told her that convincing the former television star to give her a kiss so she could cross one of the final items off her list was no big deal, even if he’d had to wage a prolonged campaign of manipulation, bribing, and/or bullying to make it happen.
Emily sighed. “He seemed nice enough. He’s not as cute in person as he was on TV.”
“He looked about the same to me.”
Studying Paul’s face, Emily smiled, even though she was feeling weak and shaky. “Maybe my taste in men has changed since then.”
“I should certainly hope so,” he muttered.
Emily’s former heartthrob was big, buff, dark-haired, and square-jawed. Next to Paul he looked overly bulky and overblown. But no one would ever be as handsome to Emily as Paul—not anymore.
He caught her gazing at him and seemed to recognize something in her face. His expression changed. He didn’t say anything, but he reached over and took her hand. Then raised it so he could press a kiss in the palm.
“Thanks for arranging this,” Emily murmured, feeling dangerously emotional. “You have no idea how much it means to me.”
Paul’s eyes rested on her face for a long time, and the feeling they conveyed was deep and heartbreaking.
But then he gave a half-shrug. “It was no big deal.”
* * *
Emily sat on the edge of her bed in their hotel suite in Hawaii and tried to find enough energy to reach down and put on her shoes. She’d been in bed most of the day before with a high fever, but it had lowered to just the low-grade one that she doubted would ever go away now.
Today she was going to climb the volcano. If she had enough strength to stand up.
Her whole body ached miserably, and her eyes were raw and dry. Dr. Franklin had trained Amy on administering a new round of treatment on the trip, and Amy had traveled with them to help tend Emily while she was ill.
Amy was sleeping now, since she’d stayed up most of the night until Emily’s fever had broken. Paul was working at the desk in the main room of the suite. Emily was supposed to be getting ready to go.
Instead, she was just staring down at her shoes, which she’d yet to put on.
All she had left of her list was to climb a volcano and to finish reading Shakespeare’s
plays.
They were going to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. They would drive through most of it first, so Emily could see all of it without actually hiking it. She didn’t have the strength for a very long walk, but fortunately Kilauea had a number of trails that weren’t particularly challenging and weren’t very long.
But first she had to at least manage to put on her shoes.
She just felt so bad. Like her body itself was weighing her down. She was only eighteen. She shouldn’t feel like an eighty-year-old. But she did.
She wanted to go back to bed. She wanted to cry. She wanted her father.
She was suddenly hit by a wave of grief so intense it almost strangled her. She missed her dad so much it physically hurt.
With a choked sob, she doubled over, trying to breathe, trying not to make any noise. She didn’t want Paul to hear her crying. She didn’t want to make him feel any worse.
She was supposed to climb a volcano today, and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to do it.
She wasn’t sure she was strong enough for any of this.
She gasped and wheezed and hiccupped and tried desperately to control her tears, but she hadn’t managed to restrain them when she suddenly felt the bed shift.
She jerked up straight and wiped hurriedly at her face in a futile attempt to pretend she hadn’t just been sobbing.
Paul had sat down on the edge of the bed beside her, his face tightly controlled.
Without speaking, he slid an arm around her and pulled her against his side.
“I’m okay,” she rasped. “I was just…”
Paul pulled her against his chest, and she sobbed into his shirt. His arms around her were so tight she could barely breathe.
After a few minutes, Emily had stopped crying. She tried to pull away and finally Paul released her.
She rubbed at her wet face and looked back down at her shoes. She still needed to put them on. She took a shuddering breath, hating how weak and miserable she felt.
“We don’t have to do it today,” Paul said. “If you feel too bad, we can wait.”
She shook her head and reached down for one shoe. “I’ll feel worse tomorrow. It has to be today.”
* * *
As was expected, Paul had planned the volcano hike perfectly. He’d arranged for a private guide to take them up to the rim of the Kilauea caldera. They didn’t use one of the public trails, so they didn’t have to deal with a lot of other tourists. They were able to park in a spot that was close enough for the walk to not be too rigorous for Emily, but it was long enough to feel like she was climbing the volcano and not just stepping out of a car.
The terrain of rock and lava flows was fascinating and almost alien, but climbing the volcano was nothing like what she’d imagined at twelve-years-old. As a child, she’d assumed it would be like climbing a mountain and then looking down into a crater of hot lava. Instead, the caldera was over three miles wide. Naturally, there was no sea of lava inside. Their guide explained about cracks, fissures, and steam vents, and how the previous eruptions had shaped the landscape into what it was.
Had Emily felt better, the walk would have been incredibly enjoyable. But, as it was, even the short half-mile, combined with the sulphur fumes and hot temperature, was almost too much for her.
As they turned back to return to the car, Emily was drenched in sweat and felt so ill she could barely stand up. Waves of heat kept slamming into her, and she was having trouble taking a full breath. The low grade fever she’d had that morning seemed to have risen, and there wasn’t a single part of her body that didn’t hurt.
The guide kept looking at her dubiously, and Paul had put a supportive arm around her as she stopped to drink some water.
“You don’t have to walk back,” Paul said softly. “We can—”
“No,” she interrupted in a croaky voice. “I’m doing this. I can do it.”
Perhaps it was irrational, but if she didn’t walk the whole way then it wouldn’t feel like she’d really completed her list. She ignored the weakness of her body and forced herself to keep walking.
Paul kept a hand on her back the whole way, until the last stretch where her legs would barely hold her up. Then he held her up with one arm, supporting most of her weight as she stumbled. She knew he just wanted to pick her up and carry her. She knew it was hard for him to let her continue doing something that was obviously battering her physically.
But he didn’t object. He just held her up as she kept limping and faltering through the daze of pain and heat until they finally made it back to the air-conditioned car and Emily could breathe at last.
She was so sick and exhausted that she couldn’t sit up on the drive back to the hotel. She collapsed in the back seat with her head in Paul’s lap and hoped to drift into unconsciousness, since at least then her body wouldn’t hurt so much.
“I guess this new treatment isn’t working either,” she rasped without warning, opening her eyes after a brief, uncomfortable doze.
Paul must be in bad shape emotionally, since he couldn’t keep up his normal soothing confidence. Instead, he blurted out what he’d really been thinking. “The report they found about the virus could have just been a wild goose chase. There might not be anything worthwhile to come from it at all.”
“We don’t know that. I still think it was your dad, and he was trying to help.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“I think he would. I think he cares about you more than you think.” She gazed up at Paul’s face, blurry from the dryness of her eyes.
“I don’t know why you would feel that optimistic about humanity. The world has been nothing but brutal to you. Where did you find that kind of hope?”
She wasn’t sure if the bitter question was rhetorical or not, but she answered it anyway. “I found it in you.”
The hardness on his face shifted into confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you had every reason not to love me.” She had to force the words out over a lump in her throat. “Loving me has only hurt you. But you do anyway.”
Paul turned away with a sudden jerk of his head.
“So I’m going to keep hoping about your father,” she concluded, wishing she was strong enough to help him, to comfort him, for real.
When he didn’t turn back to meet her eyes, she added, “I’ll hope enough for both of us.”
* * *
She was barely conscious as they went up to their suite, and Paul helped her out of her clothes and into a tepid bath scented with lemon and eucalyptus oils. She vaguely tried to convince him to go rest and let Amy take care of her, but he refused. Of course.
The bath helped, as did the pills Paul made her swallow.
He helped her into clean pajamas and then gently brushed her hair and pulled it into two ponytails. She felt like a child and didn’t like the feeling. She tried to summon the strength to do some of these simple tasks on her own, but she just couldn’t.
After he helped her into bed, Paul stood staring down at her. He wore the casual clothes he’d worn for the volcano walk, and he looked handsome and masculine. And strangely helpless.
She ached for him—even more than she ached for herself.
“Do you need anything, baby?” he asked after a minute.
Emily stared up at him with glazed eyes, shifting slightly from the discomfort her body. “My list.”
Paul understood. He went to her bag and pulled out the folded list. The paper was so worn it was fragile, and he very gently unfolded it, spreading the page out on the nightstand beside the bed and handing her a pen.
She heaved herself up enough to lean over and poise the pen over the paper. Then she crossed out “Climb a volcano” with a slightly shaky line.
She gazed down at the list. Thirteen items were crossed off now. Only one remaining. She still hadn’t read all of Shakespeare’s plays.
She dropped the pen and collapsed back onto the bed, her eyes hot and swollen, her breath coming out
in uneven pants.
A completed list would seem like a symbol that she could die, which was a horrible thought, but she was terrified of dying before she’d completed it.
“Almost done,” Paul murmured, picking up the list and moving it to the dresser against the opposite wall.
“I still need to read Hamlet. I haven’t even started it yet.”
“That's all right. You have plenty of time to read it still.”
Emily writhed under the covers, hot and pained and horrified by the thought of one of Shakespeare’s plays unread. “I need to get started.”
Paul’s mouth twisted slightly, but he said, “I can bring you the book, if you really want to read it now.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t think I can read.”
“You can read it when you feel better.” He was trying to sound soothing, but his voice was thick with emotion he couldn’t quite suppress.
A swell of aching grief rose up, threatening to drown her. “I’m not going to feel better than this,” she gasped. “I can’t read anymore.”
For some reason, the words might have been the worst thing she’d ever said—some sort of unassailable proof that her life was really over. She shook with the grief of it, tears streaming down her hot face.
Paul was still standing over her bed, and his head suddenly jerked to the side the way it had in the car. She saw his features contort briefly, as if he were struggling to control himself.
He didn’t say anything. Just turned away from her and walked away.
She didn’t mind. She understood. There wasn’t anything he could do anyway.
She was too hot so she pushed down the covers, keeping just the sheet on top of her. Then she pulled her left hand out from under the covers and looked at the engagement ring and wedding band on her finger. She brought her hand up and kissed the rings in a foolish gesture of affection.
She dropped her hand quickly at a noise from the doorway, but she thought maybe Paul had still seen her, since he walked back into the room just then.
He was carrying his Riverside Shakespeare.
Without explanation, he pulled a chair up to the side of her bed and sat down, opening the book and flipping the pages until he’d found the place he wanted.
