The Pirate Queen (9 page)

Saphora sat for an hour on the balcony, her curiosity causing her to sit guessing until she decided that it sounded like a shovel cutting into the soft, sandy loam. But the house was not near enough to the beach or the riverbank to pick up the activity of clam diggers or even teenagers building a pit for an illegal bonfire.

Finally the digging stopped. A door closed. Despite her curiosity about the digging, Saphora was even more curious about the occupant. Whoever had rented out the summer house had taken up a spade to dig by moonlight. Why on earth a neighbor would take to digging after midnight got her so curious she subconsciously got out of her chair to lean over the balcony railing. No hint of a human presence came through the trees. The next morning she would finagle a way to introduce herself.

The house next door had gone completely dark. There was nothing to watch except the half moon. She sat under it until the cool wind chased her indoors. The door faintly whined at the hinges.

Bender’s eyes opened, cat’s-eye slits widening under the hairline of moon falling across his face.

She froze in the doorway. “I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she said.

“Don’t apologize.” He did not take his eyes off her or look away as had been his custom for many years. “You look pretty standing there like that, the moon on your hair.” His voice was so thin that Saphora realized he had startled awake. Before he dozed off again he said, “But you have always been the prettiest of all the wives.” Then his eyes closed, and he fell directly asleep.

Bender had once asked Saphora to join him in a pact: only one
of them could take a sleep aid in case the house caught fire. He had seen too many burn victims in his operating room. Besides, the kind of sleeping pills Bender brought home from the hospital made him nearly comatose. She watched him sleeping and then took her place beside him as she had done for twenty-seven years.

She fell asleep as the puzzling sifting sound started up again.

5

Bender lay in the hospital bed with the blinds pulled closed. He looked too big for the bed, awkwardly pulling at the pale green hospital gown. Getting him to wear it took the genius coaxing of a nurse forewarned that he was a bona fide god complex–affected surgeon.

Jim came in to check on him and talk to him about the side effects of the chemo if indeed the therapy was needed. “It’s good to talk about chemo and prepare for the possibility of it,” he told Bender and Saphora. “Then if you don’t need it, no big deal.” But Jim felt chemo was the viable avenue and made good on his promise to keep Saphora honestly abreast of Bender’s diagnosis. He showed them the gels from the CT scan. The tumor had shown up in his cranium, a small shadow that looked like a tiny moon gliding over earth. Jim left to meet up with the surgeon who would perform Bender’s procedure. He had promised Bender to observe and assist during the surgery.

After Jim left, two nurses prepped Bender for the procedure.

Saphora sat beside him, offering ice chips, although he complained of hunger pangs. The wife seated next to the patient in the bed opposite them doted on her Latino husband, whose dark eyes softened each time she smiled and pushed more ice into his mouth.

Bender stared stiffly at the golf tournament on the overhead television. He kept switching the channels back and forth between the tournament and a tennis match.

“Ramsey is coming,” said Saphora. Their youngest son, hearing about his daddy’s diagnosis, had bought a ticket into Raleigh-Durham.

“He doesn’t have to come,” he said, still not taking his eyes off the tournament.

“Of course he’s coming,” she said. “You’ll dry out. Eat this.”

“Saphora, just hand me the cup. I can feed myself ice.”

The Latino’s wife glanced up at Saphora. She was a white lady who spoke in a quiet voice but laughed uninhibitedly. There was a faint mixture of sympathy and humility in her eyes, eyes that seemed to participate in everything she observed.

Gwennie came huffing into the room. She had taken the stairs in lieu of the elevator. She had used the exercise ploy as her excuse for avoiding elevators most of her adult life. But Saphora knew her fear of them.

“Eddie went to stay the afternoon with his new friend, Tobias,” said Gwennie. “I met his parents. The husband looks old enough to be Tobias’s granddad. The mom looks a lot younger than him, but what do I know?” She set a stack of freshly bought magazines on Bender’s tray and kissed her daddy.

It was the first time he took his eyes off the television. “Hold on to this,” he said, handing her his phone. “If I get any calls, just plug them into the message center on my laptop.”

Jim reappeared, flanked by two OR nurses. “No phone calls for a few days, Bender,” he said. “Gwennie, shut that thing off.”

Gwennie froze between the power of two stiff-necked surgeons.

Finally Saphora took the phone. “I’ll take care of it.”

Bender was wheeled out of the room. He was about to disappear behind the two automatic doors into the OR center when Saphora was overwhelmed with emotion. He looked helpless lying there, drifting off against his will into the sedation and under the management of a surgery crew not his own. Saphora leaned over the bed rail and kissed him lightly on the forehead that would soon be minus the thick blond forelock that had distinguished Bender from so many of his friends with thinning hair.

The last emotion to register on his face was indistinguishable to everyone looking at him except Saphora. He had seldom registered fear, but there it was in his eyes just before they closed.

An hour later she sat outside the surgery center holding a pager until Gwennie coaxed her down the stairs for a late lunch.

The cafeteria was dressed up like a Fourth of July parade. Red, white, and blue streamers festooned the common areas, linking the various buffet lines like veins. Helium balloons floated cell-like above the cash registers. Saphora had completely forgotten the Fourth and said so to Gwennie.

“It’s two days away. We can watch the fireworks on the water in Oriental. Turner will be in town, and Eddie’s never been to the Croaker Festival,” said Gwennie. “We’ll take him, and it’ll help keep our minds off things.”

“Ramsey is coming too. But Celeste is staying home with the kids. I told him to tell her not to worry.” Celeste tended to feel guilty about everything.

Gwennie put an apple on her tray next to the pasta dish. “I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. Those three kids of hers are out of control. But then I know nothing about kids. I’m too impatient.” Gwennie wasn’t patient with Celeste either. She said, “Celeste does that counting
thing with her kids. ‘Okay, Liam, I’m counting to five and then you’d better do what I say.’ The instant I would get Liam alone, I’d say to him, ‘Listen, kid, do it on one or you’re toast!’”

“Celeste told me she couldn’t figure out why her kids were scared of Aunt Gwennie.”

“Fear is akin to respect, Mama. Don’t confuse the meaning.”

“Now you sound like your daddy.”

“I realize I don’t need kids of my own,” she said.

“Gwennie, I can’t wait to see what kind of mother you’ll make. Don’t minimize all children under Celeste’s definition of family. She’s got Ramsey believing that if he so much as even thinks about a career change, he’ll wreck his kids’ college funds.”

“College! Liam’s what, five?”

“Liam is seven. Celeste has an exacting sense about saving money.”

“Celeste has an exacting sense about leading Ramsey around like a poodle,” Gwennie said over her shoulder as she led the way to a table on the farthest side of the cafeteria.

“He does seem cloistered by Celeste.”

“I know my brother’s not perfect. But he was the fun brother, the one who always knew what to do on a boring Saturday. Celeste has killed my baby brother and replaced him with a trained circus act.”

“He did always struggle with discipline,” said Saphora. At first, it had seemed Celeste was good for him.

“That was Turner. Ramsey was a natural B student. That’s not a failure, Mama. My phone’s ringing,” said Gwennie. She covered her pasta with a napkin. “I’ll take this outside. Signal’s awful in this place.”

The sandwich Saphora had picked off the deli line was untouched. She cut it in half and then in fourths. Finally she wrapped it up in her napkin.

“Impossible to eat the day of their surgery.” A woman seated across from her spoke. She was the Latino husband’s wife.

Saphora felt elated to see a familiar face. “How do you eat during something like this?”

The woman introduced herself as Linda Valdez. “It’s my husband’s second surgery. We both lose weight when Emilio goes under the knife. Try eating smaller portions more often. Tell yourself you’re just eating a snack. It’s better than adding starvation to stress.”

Saphora gave Linda her name. “How long has your husband known about his cancer?”

“A year. They gave him six months, but Emilio’s not giving up. We have five kids. He’s not going to leave us behind, he says. He says God wouldn’t dare bring him into heaven complaining.”

“Bender just found out. We don’t know the prognosis yet.”

“Chemo is hard on them.”

“He hates to lose his hair. But he told his doctor, Jim Pennington, ‘Shave it all off for the surgery and get it over with.’ I hate every step of it.”

“I wish I could say that after a year, you’re a pro at fighting cancer. But each day brings a new battle.” She got up and came to Saphora’s table. She took a seat beside her. “Don’t think I feel sorry for myself. Emilio and I have never known this kind of love before. You’ll know soon enough what I mean.”

Saphora was getting better at holding back her tendency to fall into a crying jag. But after several tears slipped down her face, she finally just let go and cried in front of this stranger. Linda might have assumed her tears were all for sorrow. It would have taken too long to explain that the day Bender told her about his cancer was the day she had planned to leave him. Linda would think she was a terrible
wife. She said, “My daughter is coming back. I don’t want her to see me like this.”

“It’s good for her to know you’re not an iron woman. You don’t want to teach her to live ashamed of her emotions. A daughter can know her mother is less than perfect. She’ll be stronger knowing the truth.” Linda said it effortlessly, like a woman well practiced in opening up her life for the whole world to see.

In her next leg of life, she would request an outlook like Linda’s. She dried her eyes and smiled for Gwennie.

The first time Saphora’s hospital pager went off was to tell her that Bender had not yet gone into surgery. Three hours later, the entire surgical team had gotten ready in order to proceed. That left Saphora and Gwennie waiting until midnight, when he was finally wheeled out of the operating room into recovery.

Before Saphora reached the recovery room, Bender was shouting, “Where’s Saphora? Bring her to me!”