by Ted Dekker
Spencer had run for the phone and called Grandma. During the fifteen minutes it took her to reach their house he had knelt by his mother’s bed, begging her to answer him. Then he had cried hard. But Mother was not answering in anything more than the occasional moan. She just lay there and held her stomach.
Grandma had arrived then, rambling on about food poisoning and ordering him around as if she knew exactly what had to be done in situations like this. But no matter how she tried to seem in control, Grandma had been a basket case.
They had literally dragged his mom to the car, and Grandma had driven her to the emergency room. Dark blue blotches spotted her skin, and he wondered how food poisoning could bring out spots the size of silver dollars. Then Spencer had overheard one of the nurses talking to an aide. She said the spots were from internal bleeding. The patient’s organs were bleeding.
“I’m scared,” he said in a thin, wobbly voice.
Helen took his hand and lifted it to her lips. “Don’t be, Spencer. Be sad, but don’t be afraid,” she said, but she said it with mist in her eyes, and he knew that she was terrified too.
She pulled his head to her shoulder, and he cried there for a while. Dad was supposed to be here by now. He’d called from the airport at six o’clock and told the nurse he was catching a 9 P.M. flight with an impossible interminable layover in Chicago that wouldn’t put him into Denver until 6 A.M.Well, now it was seven o’clock, and he had not arrived.
They had started putting in tubes and doing other things to Mom last night. That was when he first started thinking things were not just bad. They were terrible. When he asked Grandma why Mom was puffing up like that, she’d said that the doctors were flooding her body with antibiotics. They were trying to kill the bacteria.
“What bacteria?”
“Mommy has bacterial meningitis, Honey,” Grandma had said.
A boulder had lodged in his throat then. ’Cause that sounded bad. “What does that mean? Will she die?”
“Do not think of death, Spencer,” Grandma said gently. “Think of life. God will give Gloria more life than she’s ever had. You will see that, I promise. Your mother will be fine. I know what happens here. It is painful now, but it will soon be better. Much better.”
“So she will be okay?”
His grandmother looked off to the double swinging doors behind which the doctors attended his mom, and she started to cry again.
“We will pray that she will be, Spencer,” Pastor Madison said.
Then the tears burst from Spencer’s eyes, and he thought his throat might tear apart. He threw his arms around Grandma and buried his face in her shoulder. For an hour he could not stop. Just couldn’t. Then he remembered that his mother was not dead, and that helped a little.
When he lifted his head he saw that Grandma was talking. Muttering with eyes closed and face strained. Her cheeks were wet and streaked. She was talking to God. Only she wasn’t smiling like she usually did when she talked to him.
A door slammed, and Spencer started. He lifted his head. Dad was there, standing at the door, looking white and ragged, but here.
Spencer scrambled to his feet and ran for his father, feeling suddenly very heavy. He wanted to yell out to him, but his throat was clogged again, so he just collided with him and felt himself lifted into safe arms.
Then he began to cry again.
THE MOMENT Kent slammed through the waiting room door he knew something was wrong. Very wrong.
It was in their posture, his son’s and Helen’s, bent over with red eyes. Spencer ran for him, and he snatched the boy to his chest.
“Everything will be all right, Spence,” he muttered. But the boy’s hot tears on his neck said differently, and he set him down with trembling hands.
Helen rose to her feet as he approached. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“She has bacterial meningitis, Kent.”
“Bacterial meningitis?” So that would mean what? Surgery? Or worse? Something like dialysis to grace each waking day. “How is she?” He swallowed, seeing more in those old wise eyes than he cared to see.
“Not good.” She took his hand and smiled empathetically. A tear slipped down her cheek. “I’m sorry, Kent.”
Now the warning bells went off—every one of them, all at once. He spun from her and ran for the swinging doors on numb legs. The sign above read “ICU.” The ringing lodged in his ears, muting ordinary sounds.
Everything will be fine, Kent. Get a grip, man. His heart hammered in his ears. Please, Gloria, please be all right. I’m here for you. I love you, Honey. Please be all right.
He gazed around and saw white. White doors and white walls and white smocks. The smell of medicine flooded his nostrils. A penicillin-alcohol odor.
“May I help you?”
The voice came from his right, and he turned to see a figure standing behind a counter. The nurses station. She was dressed in white. His mind began to soothe his panic a bit. See now, everything will be just fine. That’s a nurse; this is a hospital. Just a hospital where they make people better. With enough technology to make your head spin.
“May I help you?” the nurse asked again.
Kent blinked. “Yes, could you tell me where I can find Gloria Anthony? I’m her husband.” He swallowed against the dryness of cotton balls seemingly stuffed in his throat.
The nurse came into better focus now, and he saw that her nametag read “Marie.” She was blonde, like Gloria—about the same size. But she did not have Gloria’s smile. In fact she was frowning, and Kent fought the sudden urge to reach over there and slap those lips up. Listen lady! I’m here for my wife. Now quit looking at me like you’re the Grim Reaper and take me to her!
Marie’s dark eyes looked across the hall. Kent followed the look. Two doctors bent over a hospital bed behind a large, reinforced viewing window. He made for the room without waiting for permission.
“Excuse me, sir! You cannot go in there! Sir—”
He shut her out then. Once Gloria saw him, once he looked into her beautiful hazel eyes, this madness would all end. Kent’s heart rose. Oh, Gloria . . . Sweetheart. Everything will be just fine. Please, Gloria, Honey.
Four faces popped into his mind’s eye, suddenly, simultaneously, with a brutality that made him catch himself, midstride, halfway to the room. The first was that of the wench back there with dark eyes. Grim Reaper’s bride. The second was Spencer’s. He saw that little face again, and it was not just worried. It was crushed. The third was Helen’s sweet smiling face, but not smiling. Not at all. Wrinkled with lines of grief maybe, but not smiling. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it that way.
One of the doctors had moved, and he saw the fourth face through the window, lying there on that bed. Only he did not recognize this face at first. It lay still, stark white under the bright lights overhead. A round, blue corrugated tube had been fed into the mouth, and an oxygen line hung from the nostrils. Purple blotches discolored the skin. The face was bloated like a pumpkin.
Kent blinked and set his foot down. But he did not move forward. Could not move forward.
Bile rose into his throat, and he swallowed hard. What this one face here could possibly have to do with the others he could not fathom. He did not know this face. Had never seen a face in such agony, so distorted in pain.
And then he did know this face. The simple truth tore through his mind like an ingot of lead crashing through his skull.
This was Gloria on the bed!
His heart was suddenly smashing against his rib cage, desperate to be out. His jaw fell slowly. A high-pitched screaming set off in his mind, denouncing this madness. Cursing this idiocy. This was no more Gloria than some body pulled from a mass grave in a war zone. How dare he be so sure? How dare he stand here frozen like some puppet when all the while everything was just fine? There had been a mistake, that was all. He should run over there and settle this.
Problem was, Kent could not move. Sweat leaked from his pores, and he began to bre
athe in ragged lurches. No! Spencer was out in the lobby, his ten-year-old boy who desperately needed Mommy. This could not be Gloria! He needed her! Sweet, innocent Gloria with a mouth that tasted of honey. Not . . . not this!
The doctor reached down and pulled the white sheet over the bloated face.
And why? Why did that fool pull that sheet like that?
A grunt echoed down the hall—his grunt.
Then Kent began to move again. In four long bounds he was at the door. Someone yelled from behind, but it meant nothing to him. He gripped the silver knob and yanked hard.
The door would not budge. Turn, then! Turn the fool thing! He turned the knob and pulled. Now the door swung open to him, and he staggered back. In the same moment he saw the name on a chart beside the door.
Gloria Anthony.
Kent began to moan softly.
The bed was there, and he reached it in two steps. He shoved aside a white-coated doctor. People began to shout, but he could not make out their words. Now he only wanted one thing. To pull back that white sheet and prove they had the wrong woman.
A hand grabbed his wrist, and he snarled. He twisted angrily and smashed the man into the wall. “No!” he shouted. An IV pole toppled and crashed to the floor. An amber monitor spit sparks and blinked to black, but these details occurred in the distant, dark horizon of Kent’s mind. He was fixated on the still, white form on the hospital bed.
Kent gripped the sheet and ripped it from the body.
A whoosh! sounded as the sheet floated free and then slowly settled to the ground. Kent froze. A naked, pale body laced with purple veins and blotches the size of apples lay lifeless before him. It was bloated, like a pumped-up doll, with tubes still forcing mouth and throat open.
It was Gloria.
Like a shaft of barbed iron the certainty pierced right through him. He staggered back one step, swooning badly.
The world faded from him then. He was faintly aware that he was spinning and then running. Smashing into the door, facefirst. He could not feel the pain, but he could hear the crunch when his nose broke on impact with the wooden door. He was dead, possibly. But he couldn’t be dead because his heart was on fire, sending flames right up his throat.
Then he lurched past the door somehow, pelting for the swinging ICU entry, bleeding red down his shirt, suffocating. He banged through the doors, just as the first wail broke from his throat. A cry to the Supreme Being who might have had his hand in this.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
To his right, Spencer and Helen stood wide eyed, but he barely saw them. Warm blood ran over his lips, and it gave him a strange, fleeting comfort. The gutturals blared from his spread mouth, refusing to retreat. He could not stop to breathe. Back there his wife had just died.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
Kent fled through the halls, his face white and red, wailing in long deathly moans, turning every head as he ran.
A dozen startled onlookers stood aside when he broke into the parking lot, dripping blood and slobbering and gasping. The wails had run out of air, and he managed to smother them. Cars sat, fuzzy through tears, and he staggered for them.
Kent made it all the way to his silver Lexus before the futility of his flight struck him down. He slammed his fist against the hood, maybe breaking another bone there. Then he slid down the driver’s door to the hot asphalt and pulled his knees to his chest.
He hugged his legs, devastated, sobbing, muttering. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”
But he did not feel God.
He just felt his chest exploding.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Week Three
KENT ANTHONY held Spencer on his lap and gently stroked his arm. The fan whirled high above, and an old Celine Dion CD played softly, nudging the afternoon on. His son’s breathing rose and fell with his own, creating a kind of cadence to help Celine in her crooning. He could not tell if Spencer was awake— they had hardly moved in over an hour. But this sitting and holding and just being alive had become the new Anthony home signature in the week or so since Gloria’s sudden death.
The first day had been like a freight train smashing into his chest, over and over and over. After sobbing for some time by the Lexus he had suddenly realized that little Spencer needed him now. The poor boy would be devastated. His mother had just been snatched from him. Kent had stumbled back to the waiting room to find Helen and Spencer holding each other, crying. He’d joined them in their tears. An hour later they had driven from the hospital, dead silent and stunned.
Helen had left them in the living room and made sandwiches for lunch. The phone had rung off the hook. Gloria’s church partners calling to give their condolences. None of the calls were from Kent’s associates.
Kent blinked at the thought. He shifted Spencer’s head so he could reach a glass of tea sitting by the couch. It was one good thing about the church, he supposed. Friends came easily. It was the only good thing about the church. That and their attending to the dead. Kent’s mind drifted back to the funeral earlier that week. They had managed to mix some gladness into the event, and for that he was thankful, although the smiles of those around him never did spread to his own face. Still it made for a manageable ordeal. Otherwise he might have broken down, a wreck on that front pew. An image rolled through his mind: a slobbering man, dressed in black and writhing on the pew while a hundred stoic faces sang with raised hymnals. Might as well toss him in the hole as well.
A tear slipped from the corner of his right eye. They would not stop, these tears. He swallowed.
Helen and two of her old friends had sung something about the other side at the funeral. Now there was a religious case. Helen. After setting sandwiches before them that first day, she had excused herself and left. When she returned three hours later, she looked like a new woman. The smile had returned, her red eyes had whitened, and a buoyancy lightened her step. She had taken Spencer in her arms and hugged him dear. Then she had gripped Kent’s arm and smiled warmly, knowingly. And that was it. If she experienced any more sorrow over her daughter’s death, she hid it well. The fact had burned resentment into Kent’s gut. Of course, he could not complain about the care she had shown them over the last ten days, busying herself with cooking and cleaning and handling the phone while Kent and Spencer floated around the house like two dead ghosts.
She was on her way to collect Spencer now. She had made the suggestion that the boy visit her for a few hours today. Kent had agreed, although the thought of being alone in the house for an afternoon brought a dread to his chest.
He ran his fingers through his son’s blond hair. Now it would be him and Spencer, alone in a house that suddenly seemed too big. Too empty. Two weeks ago he had described their next house to Gloria while they dined on steak and lobster at Antonio’s. The house would be twice the size of their current one, he’d told her. With gold faucets and an indoor tennis court. They could afford that now. “Imagine that, Gloria. Playing on your own air-conditioned court.” His wife had smiled wide.
In his mind’s eyes he saw her leaning into a forehand, her short white skirt swishing as she pivoted, and a lump rose in his throat.
He lay his head back and moaned softly. He felt trapped in an impossible nightmare. What madman had decided that it was time for his wife to die? If there was a God, he knew how to inflict pain exceptionally well. Tears blurred Kent’s vision, but he held himself in check. He had to maintain some semblance of strength, for Spencer if not for himself. But it was all lunacy. How had he grown so dependent on her? Why was it that her passing had left him so dead inside?
The doctor had patiently explained bacterial meningitis to him a dozen times. Evidently the beast lingered in over half of the population, hiding behind some cranial mucous membrane that held it at bay. Occasionally—very rarely—the stuff got past the membrane and into the bloodstream. If not caught immediately it tended to rampage its way through the body, eating up organs. In Gloria’s case the disease had already set its claw
s into her by the time she got to the hospital. Eighteen hours later she had died.
He’d replayed that scene a thousand times. If he’d taken her to the hospital Friday morning instead of traipsing off for glory, she might be alive today.
The monkey and the cross he’d purchased as gifts still lay in his travel bag upstairs, absurd little trinkets that mocked him every time he remembered them. “Lookie here, Spencer. Look what Daddy bought you!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a stupid monkey to help you remember Mommy’s death. See, it’s smiling and clapping ’cause Mom’s in heaven.” Gag!
And the crystal cross . . . He would smash it as soon as he built up the resolve to open that bag. The doorbell rang, and Spencer lifted his head. “Grandma?”
“Probably,” Kent said, running the back of his wrist across his eyes. “Why don’t you go check?”
Spencer hopped off his lap and loped for the front door. Kent shook his head and sniffed. Get a grip, old boy. You’ve handled everything thrown your way for years. You can handle this.
“Hello, Kent,” Helen called, entering the room at Spencer’s leading. She smiled. She was wearing a dress. A yellow dress that struck a chord of familiarity in Kent. It was the kind of dress Gloria might have worn. “How are we doing this afternoon?”
How do you think, you old kook? We’ve just lost our hearts, but otherwise we are just peachy. “Fine,” he said.
“Yes, well I don’t believe you, but it’s good to see that you’re making an attempt.” She paused, seeing right through him, it seemed. He made no attempt to rise. Helen’s eyes held his for a moment. “I’m praying for you, Kent. Things will begin to change now. In the end, they will be better. You will see.”
He wanted to tell her that she could keep her prayers. That of course things would get better, because anything would be better than this. That she was an old, eccentric fossil and should keep her theories of how things would go to herself. Share them with some other cross-stitchers from the dark ages. But he hardly had the energy, much less the stomach, for the words.
