Fear Nothing (2 page)

My friend Bobby Halloway says that I tend to anthropomorphize animals, ascribing to them human attributes and attitudes which they do not, in fact, possess.

Perhaps this is because animals, unlike some people, have always accepted me for what I am. The four-legged citizens of Moonlight Bay seem to possess a more complex understanding of life—as well as more kindness—than at least some of my neighbors.

Bobby tells me that anthropomorphizing animals, regardless of my experiences with them, is a sign of immaturity. I tell Bobby to go copulate with himself.

I comforted Orson, stroking his glossy coat and scratching behind his ears. He was curiously tense. Twice he cocked his head to listen intently to sounds I could not hear—as if he sensed a threat looming, something even worse than the loss of my father.

At that time, I had not yet seen anything suspicious about Dad’s impending death. Cancer was only fate, not murder—unless you wanted to try bringing criminal charges against God.

That I had lost both parents within two years, that my mother had died when she was only fifty-two, that my father was only fifty-six as he lay on his deathbed…well, all this just seemed to be my poor luck—which had been with me, literally, since my conception.

Later, I would have reason to recall Orson’s tension—and good reason to wonder if he had sensed the tidal wave of trouble washing toward us.

Bobby Halloway would surely sneer at this and say that I am doing worse than anthropomorphizing the mutt, that now I am ascribing
super
human attributes to him. I would have to agree—and then tell Bobby to go copulate
vigorously
with himself.

Anyway, I petted and scratched and generally comforted Orson until a horn sounded in the street and then, almost at once, sounded again in the driveway.

Sasha had arrived.

In spite of the sunscreen on my neck, I turned up the collar of my jacket for additional protection.

From the Stickley-style foyer table under a print of Maxfield Parrish’s
Daybreak,
I grabbed a pair of wraparound sunglasses.

With my hand on the hammered-copper doorknob, I turned to Orson once more. “We’ll be all right.”

In fact, I didn’t know quite how we could go on without my father. He was our link to the world of light and to the people of the day.

More than that, he loved me as no one left on earth could love me, as only a parent could love a damaged child. He understood me as perhaps no one would ever understand me again.

“We’ll be all right,” I repeated.

The dog regarded me solemnly and chuffed once, almost pityingly, as if he knew that I was lying.

I opened the front door, and as I went outside, I put on the wraparound sunglasses. The special lenses were totally UV-proof.

My eyes are my point of greatest vulnerability. I can take no risk whatsoever with them.

Sasha’s green Ford Explorer was in the driveway, with the engine running, and she was behind the wheel.

I closed the house door and locked it. Orson had made no attempt to slip out at my heels.

A breeze had sprung up from the west: an onshore flow with the faint, astringent scent of the sea. The leaves of the oaks whispered as if transmitting secrets branch to branch.

My chest grew so tight that my lungs felt constricted, as was always the case when I was required to venture outside in daylight. This symptom was entirely psychological but nonetheless affecting.

Going down the porch steps and along the flagstone walk to the driveway, I felt weighed down. Perhaps this was how a deep-sea diver might feel in a pressure suit with a kingdom of water overhead.

2

When I got into the Explorer, Sasha Goodall said quietly, “Hey, Snowman.”

“Hey.”

I buckled my safety harness as Sasha shifted into reverse.

From under the bill of my cap, I peered at the house as we backed away from it, wondering how it would appear to me when next I saw it. I felt that when my father left this world, all of the things that had belonged to him would look shabbier and diminished because they would no longer be touched by his spirit.

It is a Craftsman-period structure, in the Greene and Greene tradition: ledger stone set with a minimum of mortar, cedar siding silvered by weather and time, entirely modern in its lines but not in the least artificial or insubstantial, fully of the earth and formidable. After the recent winter rains, the crisp lines of the slate roof were softened by a green coverlet of lichen.

As we reversed into the street, I thought that I saw the shade nudged aside at one of the living-room windows, at the back of the deep porch, and Orson’s face at the pane, his paws on the sill.

As she drove away from the house, Sasha said, “How long since you’ve been out in this?”

“Daylight? A little over nine years.”

“A novena to the darkness.”

She was also a songwriter.

I said, “Damn it, Goodall, don’t wax poetic on me.”

“What happened nine years ago?”

“Appendicitis.”

“Ah. That time when you almost died.”

“Only death brings me out in daylight.”

She said, “At least you got a sexy scar from it.”

“You think so?”

“I like to kiss it, don’t I?”

“I’ve wondered about that.”

“Actually, it scares me, that scar,” she said. “You might have died.”

“Didn’t.”

“I kiss it like I’m saying a little prayer of thanks. That you’re here with me.”

“Or maybe you’re sexually aroused by deformity.”

“Asshole.”

“Your mother never taught you language like that.”

“It was the nuns in parochial school.”

I said, “You know what I like?”

“We’ve been together almost two years. Yeah, I think I know what you like.”

“I like that you never cut me any slack.”

“Why should I?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

Even in my armor of cloth and lotion, behind the shades that shielded my sensitive eyes from ultraviolet rays, I was unnerved by the day around and above me. I felt eggshell-fragile in its vise grip.

Sasha was aware of my uneasiness but pretended not to notice. To take my mind off both the threat and the boundless beauty of the sunlit world, she did what she does so well—which is be Sasha.

“Where will you be later?” she asked. “When it’s over.”

“
If
it’s over. They could be wrong.”

“Where will you be when I’m on the air?”

“After midnight…probably Bobby’s place.”

“Make sure he turns on his radio.”

“Are you taking requests tonight?” I asked.

“You don’t have to call in. I’ll know what you need.”

At the next corner, she swung the Explorer right, onto Ocean Avenue. She drove uphill, away from the sea.

Fronting the shops and restaurants beyond the deep sidewalks, eighty-foot stone pines spread wings of branches across the street. The pavement was feathered with shadow and sunshine.

Moonlight Bay, home to twelve thousand people, rises from the harbor and flatlands into gentle serried hills. In most California travel guides, our town is called the Jewel of the Central Coast, partly because the chamber of commerce schemes relentlessly to have this sobriquet widely used.

The town has earned the name, however, for many reasons, not least of which is our wealth of trees. Majestic oaks with hundred-year crowns. Pines, cedars, phoenix palms. Deep eucalyptus groves. My favorites are the clusters of lacy
melaleuca luminaria
draped with stoles of ermine blossoms in the spring.

As a result of our relationship, Sasha had applied protective film to the Explorer windows. Nevertheless, the view was shockingly brighter than that to which I was accustomed.

I slid my glasses down my nose and peered over the frames.

The pine needles stitched an elaborate dark embroidery on a wondrous purple-blue, late-afternoon sky bright with mystery, and a reflection of this pattern flickered across the windshield.

I quickly pushed my glasses back in place, not merely to protect my eyes but because suddenly I was ashamed for taking such delight in this rare daytime journey even as my father lay dying.

Judiciously speeding, never braking to a full stop at those intersections without traffic, Sasha said, “I’ll go in with you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

Sasha’s intense dislike of doctors and nurses and all things medical bordered on a phobia. Most of the time she was convinced that she would live forever; she had great faith in the power of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, positive thinking, and mind-body healing techniques. A visit to any hospital, however, temporarily shook her conviction that she would avoid the fate of all flesh.

“Really,” she said, “I should be with you. I love your dad.”

Her outer calm was belied by a quiver in her voice, and I was touched by her willingness to go, just for me, where she most loathed to go.

I said, “I want to be alone with him, this little time we have.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. Listen, I forgot to leave dinner out for Orson. Could you go back to the house and take care of that?”

“Yeah,” she said, relieved to have a task. “Poor Orson. He and your dad were real buddies.”

“I swear he knows.”

“Sure. Animals know things.”

“Especially Orson.”

From Ocean Avenue, she turned left onto Pacific View. Mercy Hospital was two blocks away.

She said, “He’ll be okay.”

“He doesn’t show it much, but he’s already grieving in his way.”

“I’ll give him lots of hugs and cuddles.”

“Dad was his link to the day.”

“I’ll be his link now,” she promised.

“He can’t live exclusively in the dark.”

“He’s got me, and I’m never going anywhere.”

“Aren’t you?” I asked.

“He’ll be okay.”

We weren’t really talking about the dog anymore.

The hospital is a three-story California Mediterranean structure built in another age when that term did not bring to mind uninspired tract-house architecture and cheap construction. The deeply set windows feature patinaed bronze frames. Ground-floor rooms are shaded by loggias with arches and limestone columns.

Some of the columns are entwined by the woody vines of ancient bougainvillea that blanket the loggia roofs. This day, even with spring a couple of weeks away, cascades of crimson and radiant purple flowers overhung the eaves.

For a daring few seconds, I pulled my sunglasses down my nose and marveled at the sun-splashed celebration of color.

Sasha stopped at a side entrance.

As I freed myself from the safety harness, she put one hand on my arm and squeezed lightly. “Call my cellular number when you want me to come back.”

“It’ll be after sunset by the time I leave. I’ll walk.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I do.”

Again I drew the glasses down my nose, this time to see Sasha Goodall as I had never seen her. In candlelight, her gray eyes are deep but clear—as they are here in the day world, too. Her thick mahogany hair, in candlelight, is as lustrous as wine in crystal—but markedly more lustrous under the stroking hand of the sun. Her creamy, rose-petal skin is flecked with faint freckles, the patterns of which I know as well as I know the constellations in every quadrant of the night sky, season by season.

With one finger, Sasha pushed my sunglasses back into place. “Don’t be foolish.”

I’m human. Foolish is what we
are
.

If I were to go blind, however, her face would be a sight to sustain me in the lasting blackness.

I leaned across the console and kissed her.

“You smell like coconut,” she said.

“I try.”

I kissed her again.

“You shouldn’t be out in this any longer,” she said firmly.

The sun, half an hour above the sea, was orange and intense, a perpetual thermonuclear holocaust ninety-three million miles removed. In places, the Pacific was molten copper.

“Go, coconut boy. Away with you.”

Shrouded like the Elephant Man, I got out of the Explorer and hurried to the hospital, tucking my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.

I glanced back once. Sasha was watching. She gave me a thumbs-up sign.

3

When I stepped into the hospital, Angela Ferryman was waiting in the corridor. She was a third-floor nurse on the evening shift, and she had come downstairs to greet me.

Angela was a sweet-tempered, pretty woman in her late forties: painfully thin and curiously pale-eyed, as though her dedication to nursing was so ferocious that, by the harsh terms of a devilish bargain, she must give the very substance of herself to ensure her patients’ recoveries. Her wrists seemed too fragile for the work she did, and she moved so lightly and quickly that it was possible to believe that her bones were as hollow as those of birds.

She switched off the overhead fluorescent panels in the corridor ceiling. Then she hugged me.

When I had suffered the illnesses of childhood and adolescence—mumps, flu, chicken pox—but couldn’t be safely treated outside our house, Angela had been the visiting nurse who stopped in daily to check on me. Her fierce, bony hugs were as essential to the conduct of her work as were tongue depressors, thermometers, and syringes.

Nevertheless, this hug frightened more than comforted me, and I said, “Is he?”

“It’s all right, Chris. He’s still holding on. Holding on just for you, I think.”

I went to the emergency stairs nearby. As the stairwell door eased shut behind me, I was aware of Angela switching on the ground-floor corridor lights once more.

The stairwell was not dangerously well-lighted. Even so, I climbed quickly and didn’t remove my sunglasses.

At the head of the stairs, in the third-floor corridor, Seth Cleveland was waiting. He is my father’s doctor, and one of mine. Although tall, with shoulders that seem round and massive enough to wedge in one of the hospital loggia arches, he manages never to be looming over you. He moves with the grace of a much smaller man, and his voice is that of a gentle fairy-tale bear.

“We’re medicating him for pain,” Dr. Cleveland said, turning off the fluorescent panels overhead, “so he’s drifting in and out. But each time he comes around, he asks for you.”