The Descent (5 page)

I was smothered by a sense of incredible melancholy. I should’ve known that talking about Luke would stir memories, bringing to the surface everything that I’d tucked away in the back of my mind. It was the first time I’d spoken about Luke’s
death with someone who hadn’t been directly affected by it; namely: his children, Jolene and Winona; his ex-wife, Tricia, and her husband; and the doctors and nurses who’d worked with Luke at the clinic. Of all those people, I was the one who was least entitled to anyone’s condolences. Sure, Luke and I lived together as though we were husband and wife, but we’d been together for only a few years. I was practically a newcomer. Tricia had more of a claim on him than I, let alone his children. The sympathy belonged to them.

The first sign that something was wrong came when Luke collapsed at the clinic. He didn’t tell me until he got home that night. “I passed out today,” he said casually at the dinner table, not even looking up from his plate. “I woke up on the floor of my office. I don’t recall how I got there.” He tried to claim it was only light-headedness, because he hadn’t eaten lunch or because he was dehydrated, but after a few minutes of cross-examination he admitted that he’d been having headaches for days. I begged him to see a specialist, but being a man, and a doctor, he wouldn’t listen. I think it was because he had an idea of what was wrong and he didn’t want to have it confirmed.

I’ve been with a lot of people as they were dying and can attest: it’s not like it is in the movies. It’s not antiseptic or tidy. It is absolutely the lowest point in any person’s life. They’re either old and their body is starting to irrevocably fail, or they’re young but very sick or have had an accident. In either case, they’re afraid of what’s coming, afraid and confused. I’ve learned through experience that there’s nothing you can do for someone at the end except to try to keep them company so they don’t have to make that passage alone. No
one wants to die alone; I’ve held the hand of many a dying man. That’s the price of immortality. It hasn’t meant that death is a stranger to me; if anything, we are reacquainted frequently at the deathbeds of others.

As a matter of fact, I’d been through the death of a close loved one so many times that, during those last weeks with Luke, I went into a kind of autopilot. I knew what was expected of me in those situations. The dying wanted unfailing support. Luke wanted me to be stoic in the face of his emotional ups and downs. He wanted me to be practical and logical, to be a rock at a time when his life was falling apart. He wanted me to be in the waiting room while he was undergoing tests. He didn’t want me to freak out when he suddenly couldn’t speak or use his right arm. He never had to ask for any of this; I just knew it was what he needed from me. He was too smart to worry that I would be unhinged by his passing; he knew I’d lost plenty of others before him.

It seemed that immortality—rather than make me more sensitive to the pain of losing a loved one—had robbed me of the ability to feel real emotion in the face of death. When my lovers and friends died, my feelings were always muted and distant. I’m not sure why this was. It might have been to protect me from being swamped by grief, so I wouldn’t relive the sadness I’d felt for each of the people I’d lost over the course of my life. Or maybe it was because I knew from experience that, soon enough, another person would come along and—if not take Luke’s place, not exactly—at least distract me from missing him. Because I had no choice but to live on and on.

Immortality had made me less human. Instead of giving me greater perspective on what it meant to be human, which you’d
think would happen when you had such a long life, immortality had put me at a greater distance. No wonder Adair grew to be insensitive to the suffering of others: immortality forces you to become something other than human. I felt it happening to me, even though I didn’t like it. I came to see it was inevitable.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought back to one afternoon in the hospice. The doctors didn’t expect Luke to last more than a couple of days, and he was unconscious most of the time due to the morphine drip easing his pain. He wore a knitted cap for warmth as almost all his hair had fallen out from chemotherapy. What was left had turned shock white. He’d lost a lot of weight, too. His face was shrunken like an old man’s and his arms seemed too thin for the IV needles and the sensors that fed his vital signs to the monitors.

I’d taken to curling up in a lounge chair by the window, reading or knitting while he slept. I was grateful for the sedatives and painkillers making his last days more comfortable. After all, I’d sat with loved ones dying of tumors and tuberculosis with nothing stronger than Saint-John’s-wort and fortified wine to see them through it. The nurses, when they came in to check on him or change the drip bag, would invariably comment on my seeming calmness—backhanded compliments all; I think they thought I should be more upset, like Tricia and the girls. They couldn’t understand how I could be so detached. I’m sure they thought me cold-blooded. I wondered if Luke thought so, too.

This one afternoon, however, Luke was more lucid than usual. When I saw him shift restlessly in bed, I put down my book and went over to him. “How are you feeling?” I asked, taking his hand gingerly to avoid jarring the IV needle.

His eyes were feverishly bright. “I have a question for you. Are we alone?”

I looked through the open door toward the nurses’ station down the hall. They were engaged in their work. “Yes. What do you want to ask?”

He licked his lips. He seemed to be looking past me, as though he could no longer focus his eyes. “Lanny, I was wondering, now that I’m dying . . . if you had the power, would you make me like you?”

I hated that question. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have expected from Luke, either. He’d always seemed too sensible, too down-to-earth. I tried not to miss a beat, however. “But I don’t have the power. You know that. . . .”

He was impatient with my evasiveness. “That’s not what I asked. I want to know if you
would
.”

I reached up to tuck a few loose white hairs under his cap. “Of course I would, if that’s what you wanted.”

He snorted and closed his eyes. “You’re just saying that.”

“Where is this coming from?” I asked, trying not to sound as tired as I felt. I knew why he was being peevish: he was afraid and exhausted. It was the end. It hovered in the darkness every time he closed his eyes. The waiting could bring out the worst in people.

His breath grew louder, ragged. “You know who
could
make me like you. Adair. He’d do it if you asked him.”

This time, I paused. Was Luke asking me to track down Adair and beg him to give me the elixir of life? It made me see Luke in a completely different light. Not only had I never suspected that he cared about living forever, I thought he would have sooner chosen death than ask me to go on his behalf
to this man who frightened me so much. But death plays us cruelly at the end. “Is that what you want?” I asked, waiting.

But he’d slipped into unconsciousness. His hand went lax in mine. By the time he woke a few hours later, he’d forgotten ever asking me and I was spared from having to come up with an answer.

I remembered Luke’s question that night in the fortress, though, as I tossed and turned in bed. For here I was at Adair’s house not for Luke’s sake, not to beg for Adair’s favor so that Luke could spend eternity with me, but to ask him to help Jonathan, a man who was dead and gone and surely beyond our help.

And I did not want to ask myself why.

The house was very quiet when I rose the next morning, though I wasn’t surprised, not after listening to women’s voices and squeals of delighted laughter late into the night. I trotted down the stairs to the kitchen and made coffee, looking forward to time alone to sort out my thoughts without being reminded that Adair was finding ways to pass the time without me. My disappointment was understandable, then, when I found Terry lounging at the old farmhouse table in a pair of men’s pajama bottoms and a tank top too small to do much besides decorate her breasts. As the coffee brewed, she watched me out of the corner of her eye and popped tangerine segments into her mouth. Once the coffee was ready, I slid into a chair opposite her with a mug in my hands.

“There’s coffee,” I said, to be sociable.

She said nothing.

“It’s a lovely day,” I tried again, taking a sip from my mug.

She snorted and tore off another segment. “It’s bloody windy and cold, same as it is every day.”

“At least it’s sunny.”

“It is that,” she said, looking down at the tangerine peels, flicking them with a fingernail. Then she fixed her merciless stare on me. “So, don’t take this the wrong way . . . it’s not that Robin and I aren’t delighted to have you stay with us so completely out of the blue and all. But what made you decide to come looking for Adair, anyway?”

I could’ve pointed out that it wasn’t her house and it didn’t matter what she and her friend thought of me, but I reminded myself to look at it from her point of view. They’d all been having a wonderful time until I showed up. “I got the urge to see an old friend,” I said.

“Old friend, eh? How far back do you go, you and Adair?” Okay, that probably was the wrong excuse to use with her, given that I looked to be in my early twenties on the outside, and Adair not much older than that. As a matter of fact, we both appeared to be younger than Robin and Terry. “Are you childhood friends, then?”

“He was one of my first lovers.” It was the truth; I hoped that by letting her know we were intimate once but no longer would satisfy her. There was a time, in the beginning, when life with Adair had been thrilling. When I came to him, I was a young girl from a small, isolated town of people with Puritan forebears. I had been raised to work hard, not to question either my elders or the Bible, and to have few expectations of life. I knew nothing about desire or physical pleasure. Life under Adair’s roof turned all that upside down. Adair taught
me about pleasure and showed me that it was possible to enjoy my body as well as other things in life—beautiful clothes, a fine wine, a good book, gay company—things the good folk in St. Andrew would’ve condemned as frivolous. To want such things was a sign of moral weakness. Life hadn’t always been easy in Adair’s house, but had it been any harder than the life I’d had in St. Andrew? I looked up to find Terry regarding me hostilely and added, “I haven’t come back for him, if that’s worrying you. I swear.”

Her aggression subsided upon hearing this. “I know I’m being awfully rude. It’s just—we’re having a good time here. And I’ve gotten very fond of Adair. Still, we know fuck all about him—he won’t talk about himself at all. We’d like to know more.” Her tone took on a conspiratorial warmth.

“There’s not much I can tell you,” I said, conscious that I was walking a tightrope. Adair didn’t like to be talked about behind his back. He’d impressed upon all his creations, we immortals, that we were never to share our secret with anyone outside our circle or risk terrible consequences. The result was that I tended to be tight-lipped around people. I saw in Terry the same frustration I’d seen in my friends over the years. They’d been hurt by my wariness and unable to understand why I put a barrier between us. I hadn’t been able to get close to anyone in a long time—until Luke.

I think Terry was starting to realize that what she had with Adair was all she’d ever get. It would never go on to greater intimacy; he would never let her get truly close to him. Now here I was—the first person from his past to show up on the island and probably the last. I was her one opportunity to learn more about the man she loved and, as much as she disliked me, she
weighed the benefit and risk of sharing her fears with me. She nervously jammed her hands between her knees like an anxious child, before she spoke. “It’s been fun staying here with him, you know? He’s a good bloke, and we’re having a fine time, all carefree and easy. And it’s a nice place to live, isn’t it? Better than some filthy youth hostel. We thought we’d only crash here for a short while, Robin and me. That was the plan, anyway. We stayed for the laughs and”—her eyes flitted over my face—“good sex. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything. Things have changed, though. We feel differently now. He grows on you, doesn’t he? He’s so mysterious, and smart—and dead sexy, too. I’ve never met a man who could do the things he does in bed. . . .” She caught herself and gave me a brief, embarrassed smile. “Let’s just say they don’t make them like that in Bristol, where we come from.”

“They don’t make them like him
anywhere,
” I offered.

“Which is why we figured you came to get him back.”

I shook my head. “Adair and I found out the hard way that we’re not right for each other. We’re just friends.”

“If you say so . . .”

“Look, he’s wonderful—in some ways. He’s all the things you said of him, but there’s more to Adair than meets the eye. I’m not trying to talk him down, but . . . you can trust me on that.”

I was trying to convince her that she had nothing to fear from me, but everything I said seemed to have the opposite effect. Maybe she thought I was being patronizing, maybe she thought I was trying to trick her, for she jumped off the stool, bristling. “You talk like you’re done with him, but you’re not. I can tell. I can see it in your eyes plain enough, and if you really
believe what you just told me, you don’t know your own mind. You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s over between you.”