The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  Judy was dead when she came back, floating face down in the pool. That's when Amma had taken the wheelchair from the patio and rolled it down the path and thrown it into the pool and thrown in the nightgown, too.

  Then she’d tried to yell for help but her voice was too old and weak. So she’d rung the big iron triangle hanging from the side of the summer kitchen, that Judy said was an antique, that had once called workers up from the terraced fields below.

  Sitting in the dark by the window at Clayhome, Amma told herself that if she couldn’t settle her mind about Judy before she died, she’d leave it up to Jesus. Maybe up in heaven she and Judy both could say they were sorry.

  Across the lawn, the holiday lights at Heaven's Hill were a blur of blinking colors. Noni's party was over; Amma could hear people shouting “Merry Christmas,” and the cars driving off.

  Afterwards it was quiet for awhile. Out of the quiet she could suddenly hear Johnny running across her gravel path and up her steps—she could tell it was him—and then he burst through the door into the kitchen. “Aunt Ma!”

  “I’m over here, honey, what's the matter?”

  “Kaye took Mom to the hospital in his car! And he told me to stay here.”

  Amma held out her arms and, breathless, the boy ran into them. His curls were damp, the curls people probably thought he’d gotten from Roland Hurd's black curly hair, like his tanned skin. Johnny had a sweet spicy smell like cookies. She patted his back. “What's wrong with her? Just wait. Catch your breath.”

  Johnny huddled next to the old woman, taking in air in deep gulps. “Nothing. Kaye says nothing's the matter with Mom. It's just some tests he's got to do and it's better to do them at Christmas because it's not busy. But why couldn’t I go if it's not busy?”

  Amma kissed the boy's head. “Well, I guess where they do these tests is someplace children can’t go. But, listen to me, honey, listen to me. Kaye knows what to do. If he says we don’t have to worry, then we don’t. He's the head of that whole place over there. So we can put our minds to rest, all right? It's just some tests your mama needs for those headaches she's been having.”

  “Maybe they can find some pills for her?”

  “I’m sure they can. You want to stay the night with me?”

  He nestled against her, shook his head beneath her hand. “I got to stay with Aunt Bunny. She's counting on me. Are you all alone?”

  “No honey. Dionne's upstairs watching Tat's videos. You go on back home.”

  “Okay. Bye.” And he was gone.

  Amma sat there in the dark, worrying about Johnny. Something was wrong with Noni and Amma knew it, whether Kaye did or not. You can’t keep your eye on a child from the day she was born and not know when there was something the matter with her.

  Well, if the cup wouldn’t pass from Noni, then the Lord give that little boy the strength the Lord gave Kaye when he wasn’t much older. Kaye had come through, like gold in the fire, like Daniel.

  And so would Johnny. He was a good boy, with his daddy's brave soul and his mama's loving heart. But deepest down he was like Amma herself. He had her love of family and of home, too. That boy loved Heaven's Hill. And it would be his.

  The Eleventh Day of Christmas

  December 24, 1996

  The Four-Poster Bed

  A year later, late at night on Christmas Eve, Kaye leaned against the white wall of the hospital corridor and read the chart for Noelle Tilden. He had been in New York, flown in to perform surgery on a famous man, when his wife Shani had reached him by phone. He took the first plane he could back to North Carolina.

  Pressing hard at the corners of his eyes, Kaye gathered himself into the stillness that had always saved him in the past and he opened her door. He heard the soft, sad, beautiful piano music playing on the small CD player by her bed.

  “Come look at this snow,” she told him. From her raised pillow she could see out the large window of her room in University Hospital. “It's our old snow, Kaye.”

  “Yes.” There was snow in Kaye's dark hair and on the shoulders of his dark coat. There was, he told her, half a foot of snow on the ground and it was still falling. His plane had just made it down before they closed the airport.

  She asked him to open her window, and when the cold sharp air and the fresh wet smell of snow filled the room she breathed it deeply in.

  “I came as soon as I could.” He showed her that he had seen her chart. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  She gestured for him to come closer and then to lean down to her. “I know,” she smiled at him. “You fixed me so beautifully and now I’m broken again.”

  The tumor was back, and worse, growing more aggressively, as if it had learned from the last battle new and more deadly strategies. After they had waged so long and so hard a war, it was back. Kaye had fought with every weapon he could find, could cajole or compel into being. And he thought that he had won. He thought they had routed their enemy, had so forced it into retreat that it couldn’t even be seen on an X ray.

  But the enemy was not defeated, was not dead. The one cell not killed, lying in hiding, seen in his dreams, searched for with bright lights and polished machines, that great enemy Death had now come crawling over the hill at him, snatching at their victory.

  “Kaye,” she said, “I want you to take me home to Heaven's Hill.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “You’re under treatment.”

  She smiled slowly up at him. “What for?”

  He stared at her a long time. She was thinner and gray-white, her eyes deep and shadowed. But she was Noni.

  After they’d stopped the chemotherapy in the fall, her short hair had grown back the same silvery blonde. It had made him think of the pixie haircut that she’d had when she was a teenager. Now strangely her hair was the length it had been the night he’d met her, when they were seven years old. In fact, so thin and pale was she, raised on the large white pillows in her white nightgown, lost in the white sheets and blankets, that she looked like the little girl who’d sat up in the high four-poster bed and called out to him when he’d leaned over her windowsill. “How did you get all the way up here?” she’d asked him.

  “Climbed,” he’d told her.

  Climbed, he thought, until now he was head of the hospital, the youngest chief of staff Haver had ever had. And what good did it do?

  He fought stubbornly. “You can’t leave. You’ve got more tests tomorrow.”

  She reached out for his hand and he moved closer to the bed so she could hold it. “There's nothing more to do. You know that.” She waited until finally he nodded at her. “I did try, Kaye.”

  “I know you did.”

  He thought for a moment that she’d drifted back into sleep, but after a while she said, “You know who came to see me today?” He shook his head. “My first-graders. Johnny and Zaki brought them.” She told him that Zaki Fairley, who was now an intern at the hospital, had sneaked in Johnny with the ten younger children. They had come with their recorders and had stood around her bed and played Christmas carols from the Christmas concert that she’d had to miss. They’d played “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells” before the nurses had discovered them and made them leave. They’d given her the Chopin CD she was playing. “They know what a hopeless romantic I am. They said there were two encores at the concert.”

  He smiled at her. “The Angel of Moors Elementary.”

  She tried to raise herself in the bed but gave up and so he lifted her onto the pillows. “Johnny didn’t want to kiss me.”

  “He's eleven.”

  “I told him, sometimes you just have to kiss girls when they ask you to. You just can’t get out of it.” She frowned, tightening her hand on Kaye's. “If it gets bad, don’t let him see me again. All right?” He nodded at her. “I looked pretty good this morning.”

  “You look pretty good now.”

  “Sure sure sure.” She looked up at him. He could feel her gat
hering her strength. “I want to talk to you about Johnny.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He's over at Clayhome. He said he felt safer there with Amma. I think it really hurt Bunny's feelings.” She squeezed at his hand.

  “Is there something you want me to do?”

  “Yes, don’t ever let Wade get hold of Johnny. Don’t ever let him get hold of Heaven's Hill.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Lucas did all the papers.” Kaye kept nodding. “I’m giving Johnny to you.” He nodded again. “Will you take him?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Look at me, Kaye.”

  They looked at each other for a long time. “Johnny's ours.”

  “…I know that.”

  “Do you know what I’m saying? Johnny's yours.”

  “…I know that.”

  “Did Shani tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell you we’d talked yesterday, that I’d asked her to come see me?”

  “No, she just told me to get down here.”

  “Thank her.”

  She asked him when he’d first known Johnny was his.

  Kaye wasn’t certain when he’d first realized it. Maybe it had been the day when he’d met the boy in the woods by the church. He said he hadn’t known for sure until last Christmas when his grandmother had called him a fool.

  Noni pulled at his hand. “Do you think I was wrong? When I came home to tell you, you were getting married. And she's wonderful, Shani's wonderful. It was too late. Please tell me I did right.”

  Kaye heard Bud Tilden's gentle voice in the dark on the porch that night. “The thing about Noni, you can count on what she’ll do. She’ll do the good.”

  He raised her hand to her face and kissed it.

  “What?”

  “Yes, you did right. Always. Do you want me to tell Johnny?”

  “You tell Johnny, when you want to.”

  “All right.”

  “I told Shani he's a very sweet boy…sometimes he has bad dreams….He's…” Tears fell down the line of her face, the curve of her slender neck. She let them fall.

  Time went slowly by. Then she said quietly, “I’m tired, Kaye. No more tests. No more machines and shots and pills and long words that all mean the same thing. Please let me go.”

  But he shook his head and eased away his hand. On her wrist was the plastic bracelet identifying her as Noelle Tilden. Between two of her fingers a needle ran under her skin. The tubing lifted as she gestured at the sterile room. “Ever since I was in that hospital, remember when Mom put me in the boarding school?… I’ve hated these places. This is no place for life and death.”

  He smiled. “You were born here. Doctor Jack delivered you. He was your Deliverer, he used to say.”

  “Well, I’ve turned into an old-timey girl. I want to die at home.” She closed her eyes again. “I’m asking you.”

  Kaye leaned against the window, looking out. The night was filled with the soft whirling light of snow in the moonlight. Whiteness everywhere floated flying in all directions.

  A year ago, at her Christmas party, when she and Johnny had played their music, when Kaye had forced her to come with him to the hospital, he had already suspected the source of her symptoms—the weakness and confusion, the hesitation while she searched for words, the volatile emotions, the loss of vision. He had accepted that the tests would discover some kind of inter-cranial mass pressing on her frontal lobes; he had feared that surgery might be necessary. But he had told himself and everyone else that there were benign tumors in the brain, too, and that was what this one would be.

  He hadn’t believed it when the Haver neurologists had told him what they’d found. As soon as they gave him the first results, Kaye angrily accused his colleagues of misreading the MRI and the CAT scan. They’d made a mistake, he insisted.

  When they gave him the results to examine on his own, he told them the data was wrong and that they had to do the tests again. They did them again. The results were the same. The words on the report were the same. Malignant. Astro-cytoma. Likely highly undifferentiated. Stage III at best. Inoperable.

  His colleagues said she’d be dead in three months, in six at the most.

  No, she wouldn’t, he told them.

  They started whole-brain radiation to reduce the pressure in the cranium as quickly as possible. Then the gamma knife. Directly at the tumor. They began giving her very high doses of steroids. They gave them to her four times a day, even when she began hallucinating.

  Kaye told Johnny that his mother would have to stay in the hospital for a while; they had to take care of her headaches. He told Amma and Bunny that Noni had a malignant brain tumor that they were going to treat aggressively, but that surgery wasn’t necessary. He told Shani he was scared.

  Inoperable. Inoperable. Inoperable. The word stayed under Kaye's eyelids like the grit of sand. He was famous because he could operate. He pried open human chests and fixed the hearts inside them. He repaired and replaced and enlarged and grafted new to old, plastic to living tissue, metal to breathing flesh, he made hearts beat again and go on beating.

  What good were his skillful careful hands to Noni, if he couldn’t operate?

  He called doctors at other hospitals. He studied through the nights. The latest papers. The Internet. Calls to the best in their fields. He took her to New York and Houston. He asked doctors in Switzerland and New Zealand for advice. He hounded and bullied the neurology and neurosurgery teams at Haver until finally a young oncologist complained to Shani that she needed to back her husband off.

  Shani told the man, “Kaye's best friend is dying. Maybe you don’t have one.”

  To attack the tumor, they intensified the chemotherapy. New drugs, new protocols, experimental treatments. Anti-angiogenics, antibody-tagged chemotherapy molecules, on and on. Often, sleepless, drenched in sweat, Noni broke down into senselessness. Often, she was unable to stop crying. Often, she shouted and cursed. Often, nausea doubled her over in her bed, poisons trying to save her. Long words.

  It was an unmerciful time.

  “Fight for us,” Kaye had told her, day after day. “Johnny needs you.”

  “How low can you go, Dr. King?” she had weakly smiled.

  “Oh, so low,” he’d told her. “Low as I need to.”

  Noni had fought as hard as she could.

  And for a while, they had won. The tests said the tumor was gone. By summer, they could send her home. By the autumn, she was teaching again.

  But now, Kaye saw how the enemy had hidden in waiting and then, in a surprise attack, had come screaming over the hilltop. Ten days ago, after Noni had searched for a word and couldn’t find it, after she’d felt for a stair but fallen, they had brought her back into the hospital. They’d done new tests and found the tumor was back. Once again they had radiated her skull, once again they had put her on the powerful steroids. But then they had talked together and frowned and written on her chart. They’d told Shani, and Shani had phoned Kaye in New York. The tumor was now pressing on Noni's brain stem and her brain stem was coning down very quickly, herniating into the spinal column, compressing the respiratory and cardiac centers. There was nothing they could do.

  Snowlight through the window was bright enough for him to read the words on the chart. Astrocytoma. Stage IV. Glioblastoma multiforme. Inoperable.

  Kaye turned to watch Noni lying quietly in the white bed, her eyes closed, her breath soft. On the white table beside the bed, there was a small photograph of Johnny in a gold frame. Beside it was a small black velvet bag. Kaye opened the bag and poured into his hand Noni's sapphire bracelet and earrings from her father, her mother's pearls, the broken silver chain with the heart, and the gold bracelet heavy with years of charms from Kaye.

  She spoke without opening her eyes, “Put those back. Those are mine.”

  He held up the chain. “We ought to fix this.”

  “Stop trying to fix everything. For once, why don
’t you do what I tell you? Accept it. You can’t fix me. Don’t you know I’m older than you are?”

  “Just for tonight you are, that's all.”

  “If I died tonight, wouldn’t I always be older than you are?”

  He walked back to her bedside. “No, if you die tonight, you’ll always be younger.”

  “That's true, you’ll be a grouchy old old man like Uncle Tat and I’ll be young.” She opened her eyes, smiling. “Aren’t I forty today?”

  “Yes. You’re forty and I’m thirty-nine.”

  “Good. I didn’t want to die in my thirties. It's just too goddamn sad.” She held out her arm to him. “Be my best friend.”

  They looked at each other. Then slowly, gently, he removed the IV from her hand and cleaned her hand and bandaged it. Then he wrapped her carefully in his long warm coat and lifted her into his arms. She was so light and yet so heavy against his heart. When they reached the door, she gestured urgently back at the bed. He brought her back there so she could pick up the little picture of Johnny and the velvet bag of jewelry and slip them into the pocket of his jacket.

  In the corridor, a nurse ran after them calling, “Sir! Sir!” until she saw who he was. Then she said, “Dr. King? Are you going to ICU? Should I call down?” He shook his head at her. “We’ll get her on a gurney, Dr. King.”

  Kaye kept walking. The nurse was shocked by the tears she saw falling down his face. She’d cried often on this hospital floor. She’d never seen Dr. King cry. She stopped following him.

  Carrying Noni in his arms, Kaye walked out of the hospital and across the snowy lot to his car.

  The storm was ending. The snowflakes fell unhurried, straight downward onto Noni's face. She tilted back her head, lifting her face to the snow and smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said, “for taking me home.”

  It was dawn on Christmas Day, rose in the sky and deepest blue. The soft snow was settled on the lawn and fields and woods of Heaven's Hill. Everything familiar to Noni—shrubbery, urns and fences, cars, brick garden walls and rows of outbuildings—all had been changed by the snow into a beautiful strangeness.