SUMMER of FEAR (30 page)

"Who m-m-made the stew?"

"I did," said Grace. "Would you like
some?"

"Maybe l-l-Iater."

Izzy rode the lift up to the bedroom. The contraption
did its usual screech-and-groan, a rather startling sound that I suddenly
realized I'd been missing these last few days. She continued her tour. She
stared for a while at our wedding picture; ran her hands over the polished wood
of her piano; touched the hanging crystal hummingbird so it swung slowly. I
could hear Grace downstairs, talking quietly on the phone.

"So h-h-hot," said Izzy.

"Over a hundred today. Welcome home, love."

"I love this h-h-house. I'll never run away from
home anymore."

She reached back into the pack she kept tied between
the handles of her wheelchair and came out with a small wad of shiny black
material, which she held out to me. I took it and let it unfurl. It was a
swimsuit.

"My surprise is y-y-you are taking me swimming.
Then, t-t-t-tomorrow, the alteration."

Her face held a world of hope, another of fear, both
of which were echoed by the hard, deep beating in my chest.

She smiled, steadying her eyes at mine. "I think
it will be a good th-thing. B-b-but Russ, there's the ch-chance I could wake up
being a s-s-spit-dribbling v-v-vegetarian. Even Dr. N n-nesson said so, but in
different
worlds...
words.
So
I want to go sw-sw
-swimming."

"Swimming? Where?"

"Ocean, silly."

"Gosh, baby—kind of rough out there."

"I c-c-called surf report. No s-s-swell, seventy-three in the
water. I'm s-s-swimming."

She looked at me then without speaking, but volumes of emotion came
through to me from her face. I understood the Izzy was more terrified of the
operation than she would let or that if she awakened even more damaged
tomorrow—or not at all—she would have had this final trip to her beloved ocean

"Can Grace come?" I asked.

She smiled. "Suretainly"

"Here, let's put on your suit."

"No. I w-w-want Grace to."

Grace was standing at the top of the stairs.
"Never
let man
dress you if you can help it," she said. "Your husband would probably
put your new suit on inside out."

We all laughed. I
had, in fact, managed to do that once

The water broke coolly around my
legs as I carried Isabella through the shore break at Main Beach. But the night
was still hot and by the time I leaned forward to set her in, the water felt
warm and welcoming. Izzy groaned as I placed her down in the waist-deep sea,
the same groan—I recalled—that was often evoked by our lovemaking. She jerked
abruptly when her head neared the water, grabbing my arm hard. Her legs, almost
powerless, sank, then rose to the surface. Grace steadied her from the other
side. For a moment, all three of us waited to see what Izzy's body would do. With
my left hand under her head and my right hand under her butt, I eased her
toward deeper water. I felt her grip release on my arm. She drew one hand
through the water, up past her head. Then the other. Then, with a gently
affirmative "ahhh," she brought them down together to her sides and
I felt her glide ahead, self-powered.
"Ohhh, yes!"

We floated out past the waves, which
were small and occasional, nothing more than brief levitating humps that lolled
through us without adamance, rose minimally, wavered, then crumbled as if with
old age into faint suds that spread and flattened on the shore. With my right
hand under the small of Isabella's back and my left pulling us forward, I could
kick in a wide, strong scissor that gave us a delayed and subtle surge. Grace
floated on the other side, her head close enough to Izzy's that her spreading
black hair seemed to be shared by both of them. We progressed, under stars,
westward. Then Grace rolled away and slipped under the water with an
astonishing beauty, no visible means of locomotion, not even her scarred feet,
which simply followed her down unmoving, then vanished. She surfaced ahead of
us, pale, subaqueous arms in motion, hair shining in the moonlight. I guided
Izzy forward and let go of her with a slow push. I felt her arms quicken,
deepening their pull. I sidestroked alongside her, close as I could get without
interfering, synchronizing my stroke with hers, watching her upturned
profile, her face of concentration, her eyes wide and starward, the parted lips
through which she breathed, her white smooth head moving through the water like
that of a creature designed for water, her arms sure and unhurried and capable,
the dead lower half of her only a faint suggestion within the dark ocean
through which it trailed like some devolving superfluity that would diminish
and disappear in a short few million years.

"This is what I want it to be
l-l-like."

"What to be like?"

"The dying."

"You're not going to die."

"You know I am, Russ."

"We all are."

"But I'll die sooner than you.
And I w-w-want it to b-b- be like this. N-n-not an end, b-b-but
a...
change."

"A beginning."

"Yes. And I think it w-w-would
best be done w-w-ith the eyes closed. Th-then you could see where you're going.
l-l-like this."

She shut her eyes and continued on,
arms opening, arms closing. Grace appeared in the mid-distance, then was gone.
Beyond Izzy's profile, the cars on Coast Highway crept along beneath
streetlamps, and the bottom-lighted palms of Heisler Park drooped green-black
against a sky of specifically rendered stars.

"Russell, c-c-close your eyes
and come with me."

I did. The world became immediately
louder. The water lapped at my ears with a new sharpness; the cars echoed from
town with a kind of muted urgency: Izzy's breathing rose to a forceful rhythm.

"K-k-keep them closed, like me.
Let's see h-h-how far out we can go. Kay-o?"

"Kay-o."

Blind, we continued. I turned onto
my back so I might feel her, intermittently, with my fingertips. I stopped
kicking and allowed my legs to sink partially, like hers. I listened to her
breathe.

And then, strangely, I began to do
something I had not done in a long time, something I once practiced with
conviction. I had lost that conviction as Izzy lost her legs, as I sat in her hospital room asking for it to stop—imploring, begging—to no effect
whatsoever upon the continuation of Isabella's relentless and irreversible (the
doctors refused to use that word) damage.

I prayed.

Dear Father
in heaven, I am small, corrupt, hateful, mean-spirited and too much a coward
to sin importantly: I am a fool. Hear my prayer. I know how you value humility,
so I confess to all this to assure you I know my place in your order of things.
I deserve nothing. I expect nothing. I will ask for nothing. But you are absent
here, you ceded this earth to us, and there are some things you should know. We
suffer. We cry. We toil. Sickness comes to us. Death moves among us with
arrogance. We die, trembling, bound for unspecified destinations. Christ died
for our sins once: we die for them
again. His agony is over, but ours
continues. Our anguish is real. Do you remember how it feels? I know that your
design is huge, so I have stopped trying to understand it. In your larger
hands, we leave the larger motions.

My concern
is this life you have given us. I am too stupid to believe it is only a
prelude. I am too weak to be happy that there may be a reward at the end of it.
I am too literal to believe that the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. This
is the heart of this matter. Do not think less of me for holding dear the life
you've given. I lied when I said I would ask for nothing. This is what I want:
I want you to treat Isabella with respect. I want you to give me the love that
I want so badly to have for Isabella in these coming days. Give it to me so I
can give it to her. I ask to be your representative. Do not leave us without
love. Respectfully submitted to you in this hour of need,

Amen.

Two hours later,
I got into bed and lay down beside my wife. We whispered and kissed and
embraced and we made love.

Whatever motion
she lacked, I tried to offer for her; whatever feeling she missed, I tried to
feel. The cry that came to my throat hurt, and my ears rang and my eyes burned
and my daughter whom I had quite frankly forgotten was downstairs, banged out
of her room and threw on a light. Of all things at that moment, I was only
dimly aware, except for the quaking of my body and Isabella's voice.

"It's kay-o,
Grace. Russ just s-s-sort
of...
well."

My father was waiting
on the steps of the UCI Medical Center when we admitted Isabella just after
sunrise the next day. He nodded at me rather curtly, which, in the minimalist
language of his body, meant that everything was okay. Obviously, Amber was not
with him. He smiled and wrapped his weathered dark arms around Isabella and
held her for a long while in a strong and gentle embrace.

The morning was already hot as I
pushed her wheelchair up the ramp toward the tower. We were expected; all was
in order. A medical student from China conducted the preop interview. He
explained the procedure to us—debulking by resection—introduced our
anesthesiologist, and informed us the one of the possible side effects of this
procedure, among others, was death. We signed the consent forms. Paul Nesson
appeared an hour later. He was grave and gentle as always, and I sensed in him
the focus and intensity of a soldier preparing for combat. He seemed
reassuring, in an invisible way. He shaved Isabella head again, though there
wasn't much hair to take off. Then the six of us—Grace, Joe, Corrine, Izzy,
Dad, and I—squeeze into the prep room when Nesson left. Isabella was given
Dermerol. Her smock was tied in only two places at the back, an she shivered in
the rampant air conditioning of the medical tower. A few minutes later, she was
helped onto a hospital bed and we wheeled her up to the swinging double doors
of the OR. She held my hand fiercely. I kissed her, then two orderlies took the
bed and disappeared into a territory of chrome and tile and tubing and sheets.
A group of green nurses converged on my wife as the doors swung shut.

The minutes could
have been hours; the hours seconds. I drank coffee, bought all the morning
papers, glanced at my front-page article, noted the garishly big headlines the
Journal
reserves for garishly big stories,
two people, 27 pets die in canyon slaughter—
Special to the
Journal
by Russell Monroe.

Theodore informed me that—as I suspected—Amber had never returned. But
she had called the night before, late, to tell him she was all right and not to
worry. I shook my head, hardly able to factor worries about Amber into the
larger concerns of the moment. If she didn't have enough sense to stay with
Theo, then she could suffer the consequences.

I was heading outside to smoke a cigarette and passed the main desk,
where I overheard this snippet of conversation between a small, somewhat
disheveled-looking woman and the security guard.

"I would like you to page a Mr. Russell Monroe for me. It is very
important."

"Your name?"

"Tina Sharp, with Equitable."

Without breaking stride, I made it outside and sucked down the
comforting smoke. I had another. I walked the hospital grounds for half an hour
and then went into the cafeteria the back way.

I ate breakfast,
locked myself in a bathroom stall an threw up, rinsed my face in cold water,
then found an empty seat in the waiting room and leaned my head back against
the wall. I felt like the most vital and precious part of me had been removed
and that it might not ever be returned. I wondered how forty years of life
could suddenly boil down to a lesson in triage. I closed my eyes, said a
prayer, lost my train of though and fell asleep. In the dream—short and vivid
as a memory---I approached a table tucked under a
palapa
at the edge of
a orange grove, at which sat Isabella, who, when she lifted her face to me and
moved her lips, made no sound at all.

Six hours later,
Paul Nesson eased across the waiting room an approached. He looked calm,
composed, and, strangely, shorter. He still had on his pale green scrubs, and
each shoe was wrapped in a green plastic moccasin that bunched at the top like
a shower cap. He smiled wanly at Joe and Corrine and Grace.

"She's doing fine. Everything went very well."

"How much of it did you get?"

"All
I could. There are viable brain cells on the perimeter of the mass, so I worked
with the core—the necrosed tissue.

"How much tumor is left?"

"It's
hard to say. These astrocytomas grow in fingers, very small. They're like the
roots of weeds. In a day or two, we can talk about some new modalities of
treatment."

There
was a pause in the conversation then, during which I noted in Paul Nesson's
eyes the dullness of exhaustion.

Corrine
wiped her nose with a tissue, then cleared her throat. "How long does she
have?"