Suddenly Grandmother laughed like a little girl and gathered this grandeur inward until it was cupped in her hands. These she finally closed, until Tony could only see light pulsating through the spaces between her fingers. She brought it all slowly to her mouth as if to encourage embers, but instead blew like a cosmic magician, spreading her arms and opening her hands at the same moment to create a shape like a heart descending. The glory was gone.
She smiled at Tony, whose mouth was still open. “You like that?”
“There aren’t words,” he said, struggling to speak. “That was the single most thrilling thing I have ever seen, or heard, or even felt. What were those things?”
“Strings,” she responded matter-of-factly. “You remember cat’s cradle?” He nodded, thinking about the simple game of finger manipulations and shapes he played as a child. “That was my version. Helps me focus.”
“So.” He hesitated, not wanting his question to be ignorant, but still needing to ask. “So, what I just saw, that… whatever that was that you just did, did you just make that up as you went, or was that the design of something specific?”
“That is a brilliant question, Anthony. What you saw, heard, and felt is a very tiny presentation of something very specific.”
“And what is that, specifically?” Tony was eager to know.
“Love! Self-giving, other-centered love!”
“That was love?” he asked, hardly believing what she was saying.
“A tiny presentation of love. Child’s play, but real and true.” She smiled again as Tony sat back, trying to grasp her words. “One more thing, Anthony. You couldn’t have noticed, but there was something essential purposefully left out of my little composition. You heard and felt the harmonies of light, at least the surface of them, but you didn’t notice, did you, that the melody was missing?”
It was true, Tony had not heard a melody, just a symphony of harmonies.
“I don’t understand. What’s the missing melody?” he asked.
“You, Anthony! You are the melody! You are the reason for the existence of what you witnessed and consider so immeasurably awe inspiring. Without you, what you perceived would have no meaning and no shape. Without you, it would have simply… fallen apart.”
“I don’t…,” Tony began, looking down at the dirt floor, which he felt move slightly under his feet.
“It’s okay, Anthony. I know you don’t believe much of this yet. You are lost and looking up from a very deep hole just to see the superficial. This is not a test you can fail. Love will never condemn you for being lost, but love will not let you stay there alone, even though it will never force you to come out of your hiding places.”
“Who are you?” He looked up and into those eyes, almost able to see in them what he had so recently witnessed in her hands. At this moment, “Holy Spirit” seemed a vague description and without much content.
Her gaze held his without waver or hesitation. “Anthony, I am she who is more than you can begin to imagine and yet anchors your deepest longings. I am she whose love for you, you are not powerful enough to change, and I am she whom you can trust. I am the voice in the wind, the smile in the moon, the refreshing of the life that is water. I am the common wind that catches you by surprise and your very breath. I am a fire and fury opposed to everything that you believe that is not the Truth, that is hurting you and keeping you from being free. I am the Weaver, you are a favorite color, and he”—she tilted her head toward Jesus—“he is the tapestry.”
A holy hush descended, and for a time they only watched the cinders glowing, breathing bright, then fading, oscillating according to the whim of invisible breath.
“It is time,” whispered Grandmother.
Jesus reached over and took Tony’s hand. “The gift I spoke of earlier, Tony, is that on this journey you are taking, you can choose to physically heal one person, but only one, and when you choose the one, your journey will end.”
“I can heal someone? Are you telling me that I am able to heal anybody that I want to?” he asked, surprised by the very idea. His thoughts, without prompting, immediately returned to Gabriel’s bedside as the five-year-old’s hand slipped from his, and then skipped to his own body in an ICU room. He glanced down at what was left of the fire, hoping that no one else knew what he had been thinking, which he by now accepted as unlikely. He cleared his throat and asked, just to be certain he understood, “Anyone?”
“Providing they are not dead already,” commented Grandmother. “Not impossible, but not usually a good idea.”
Tony interrupted, his vision slowing, as if he were seeing frame by frame, and his words blurred, too. “So, lemme get it straight. Anyone! I can heal anyone I want to, I can heal?” Though he wasn’t sure what he asked made any sense at all, he was confident that Grandmother and Jesus understood.
Jesus leaned closer. “You can’t actually heal anyone, not alone, but I will be with you, and anyone you choose to pray for, I will heal through you. But this sort of physical healing is ultimately temporary. Even faith healers eventually die.”
“Anybody?”
“Yes, Tony, anyone.” Jesus was smiling, but his smile was beginning to come off his face, and Tony reached out into space to try to put it back.
“Okay, then,” he mumbled, his words barely understandable. “Good! So lemme ask you, do I have to believe for this to work?” He again looked back at the fire, bare remnants remaining, yet heat emanating from it strong and certain. He wasn’t certain he heard the answer, but thought later that Jesus had replied, “Healing isn’t about you, Tony.”
He lay back and began sliding.
7
SLIP SLIDING AWAY
You know the nearer your destination,
The more you’re slip slidin’ away.
—Paul Simon
Night had fallen in Portland. Somewhere above the seemingly ever-present clouds and precipitation flew a full moon, and the normal lunar patient increase had begun to clutter the waiting rooms of OHSU’s emergency ward. Neurological Sciences ICU on the seventh floor was thankfully quiet except for routines, accompanied by the programmed repetitions of monitoring devices and other electronic gadgetry, medical staff and personnel dancing to the rhythms of well-established and predictable expectations.
Dr. Victoria Franklin, head of the Department of Neurosurgery, was making her evening rounds with a cadre of students who pursued and huddled like a flock of chicks trying to keep pace with their mother hen, each hopeful to impress while avoiding embarrassment. She was a smallish African American woman, a little frumpy but with eyes and a demeanor that demanded and maintained attention.
Her next stop, room 17. Walking to the end of the bed, the chief resident tapped the tablet and scanned the information. “Our patient is Mr. Anthony Spencer,” she began, “who will be forty-six in a couple weeks, assuming he makes his birthday, a businessman who has graced our premises a couple times in the past, once for a torn Achilles tendon and another time a little sparring with pneumonia, but other than that has been mostly healthy. He came in yesterday and presented with head trauma in two places, a sizable gash on his forehead and a concussion probably occurring when he collapsed on-site where he was found, resulting in bleeding from the right ear.
“Bleeding like that is indicative of…?” queried Dr. Franklin.
“Battle sign for a basilar skull fracture,” responded the resident. She continued, “The patient almost coded while first responders were attempting to stabilize, was transported immediately here, where imaging confirmed subarachnoid brain hemorrhaging and also revealed a subfascial meningioma tumor located in the frontal lobe, midline beneath the falx cerebri.”
“So what do we have here?” the doctor asked.
“A highly unusual concurrence of three processes. Trauma, aneurysm, and tumor.”
“What side of the brain is the tumor?”
“Uh, we don’t know, but he was wearing his watch on his right.”
“Signific
ance?” She turned to another of the students.
“Uh, he’s left-handed?”
“And that is important because?”
While the questions and responses in room 17 continued for a short time before the doctor and her entourage exited to the next room and next medical situation, another more heated interaction was taking place in the adjoining building on the tenth floor of Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.
Molly Perkins was angry and tired. The life of a single mom was routinely difficult, but on days like today seemed impossible. God wasn’t supposed to give you more than you could handle, but she felt at the last-straw point of the load. Did God include the baggage that she herself had added to the weight of what she was supposed to handle? Did God take into account what others brought and dumped on her? She hoped so.
Molly and the doctor on call were engaged in a conversation similar to others she had been having for almost four months. She knew that this particular man was not the cause of her pain, but in this moment it simply didn’t matter. The unlucky recipient of her frustration, he kindly and patiently let her emotions spill in his direction. Her precious fourteen-year-old, Lindsay, lay dying only a stone’s throw from where they stood, her physique ravaged not only by the spreading leukemia but also by the drugs that had been commissioned to take up combat inside this tiny, trembling, and weakening island of humanity. She was well aware that the hospital was filled with others like her Lindsay who were locked in war with their own bodies, but at the moment she was too exhausted to care for more than her one.
Compassionate people, like the doctor Molly was verbally castigating, were among the dedicated many in the trenches, and while these might later weep their losses into pillows in secure homes, on duty they held it together. They, too, knew the haunting guilt of continuing to live, laugh, play, and love while others, often young and innocent, slipped from their best attempts at rescue.
Parents like Molly Perkins needed answers and reassurances on which to hang the myriad of uncertainties, even when there simply weren’t any. The doctors could provide only more facts and charts and attempts at explanations that might soften the potentials or the inevitabilities. Thankfully there were wins, but the losses seemed to carry much greater weight, especially when they ran in a series.
“We’re going to run the set of tests again tomorrow, Ms. Perkins, and that will let us know how close we are to nadir, the point that the white blood count reaches zero. I know you’ve heard all this many times already, so I apologize if it feels condescending in any way. Are you going to be able to be here? It’s easier for Lindsay when you are.”
“Yeah, I’ll be here.” She tugged on the wisp of blond hair that always seemed to escape her best attempts at control. What was her boss going to say this time? At some point his patience would end. He couldn’t keep asking the others to fill in for her. Although she was hourly, not paid unless she punched in, it still upset the schedules; and while most seemed to understand and bend with the wind that was so turbulent in her world, they had their own lives to live, their own families and children waiting.
She glanced over to a nearby chair to check on Cabby, sixteen years old and busy looking through the friends and extended family photo album that he often brought to occupy the wait, rocking back and forth gently to some invisible breeze or rhythm. He was engaged and that was good. Had to keep an eye on this one.
Cabby sensed her attention and looked up, beamed his gorgeous smile, and waved his affection. She blew him a kiss, this firstborn child, the offspring of what she thought had been true love. Ted was there faithfully, right up to the moment he first saw their newborn’s rounded face, almond-shaped eyes, and small chin. Suddenly the romantic idealism that had fired her boyfriend’s infatuation lost its orbit and crashed onto the realities of everyday commitments.
Both of them healthy, with the naive optimism of youth and the world their common enemy, they had ignored the advantages of prenatal visits or checkups offered freely through their state medical plan. Not that she would have made any other choice had she known. After the initial shock of her son’s cognitive disability, she found within the rising of a ferocious love for her baby boy. It was the look of bitter disappointment on Ted’s face that she would never forget, and just as she was falling in love with their challenged little man, he fell out of love with her. She refused to become weak or run, while he did both.
Some men, when confronted by their own mortality or the embarrassment, unwanted attention, and intrusion brought into their lives by a child beneath their expectations, justify their cowardice with noble language and slip out the back door. Ted didn’t even bother to say good-bye. Three days after Cabby was born, she returned to the tiny three-room apartment above the bar she tended and found no trace that Ted had ever been present, and in all the years since, she had neither seen nor even heard from him.
The arrival of the unforeseen reveals the depths of one’s heart. A small ambiguity, the exposure of a tiny lie, an extra bit of the twenty-first chromosome, the replacement of the imagination or ideal by the real, almost anything unexpected can cause life’s wheels to lock up and the facade of control to reveal its inherent arrogance.
Thankfully, most women do not see escape as the option that some men do, and Molly responded to her losses by pouring her heart and soul into her son. She named him Carsten, after her great-grandfather, for no reason except she had always liked the name and had heard good stories about the man. Cabby was the name he had given himself, a name he found easier to say. Better, she thought, than Taxi!
About a year after bringing Cabby home, she had let herself be sweet-talked by a pub rat in heat and on the prowl, with a face of kind consideration and a touch that lingered. She knew better, but the daily weights of existence dulled the warnings and her heart’s longings drowned out the flashing sirens. For him, she was another soulless conquest, a way to love himself through another’s body for a night. For her, their liaison became a catalyst for change. With the help of social services, some friends, and a church whose rock walls held living hearts, she had relocated, found new work, and nine months later brought Lindsay Anne-Marie Perkins, seven pounds, eight ounces of dark-haired health, into a community eager for her arrival. Now, fourteen years later, it was her daughter who lay deathly ill while Cabby, her Down syndrome son, sixteen and with the mind of an eight-year-old, was vibrant and healthy.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, and the doctor nodded, understanding. “What time did you say the tests were going to be run?”
“We’d like to start as close to 2:00 p.m. as possible, and it will take the better part of the rest of the day. Would that work for you?”
He waited for her assent while she mentally calculated what it was going to take to alter her schedule. When she nodded, he continued, “How about if we take a quick look at her last results.” He motioned to an office adjacent to where they were standing and added, “I can bring them up on the screen here, it will only take a couple minutes, and then I’ll have you give me a few signatures that we need, answer any questions you might have, and get you on your way.”
She glanced once more at Cabby, but he was still busy, focused on the photos. He seemed oblivious to anything that was happening, humming to himself while making exaggerated motions with his arms and hands as if conducting an orchestra visible to only the most prescient. Usually one of the many young hospital volunteers would help keep an eye on him, but none had arrived yet.
The charts, signatures, questions, and explanations took longer than Molly anticipated, and time passed quickly. She finally allowed herself to ask the most difficult question, steeling herself in anticipation of the answer.
“Can you tell me what Lindsay’s real chances are? I mean, thank you for taking the time to explain all of this to me… again, but what are her chances?”
He reached out and touched her arm. “I’m sorry, Ms. Perkins, but we simply don’t know. Realistically, without a bone marrow transplant, the ch
ances are less than 50 percent. Lindsay has responded to the chemo, but, as you know, it’s been arduous and extremely wearing on her. She’s a fighter and sometimes that makes all the difference. We will continue to run the tests and regroup.”
It was in that moment that Molly remembered how long it had been since she had checked on Cabby. She glanced at the wall clock. Almost twenty minutes, which was too long. Oh no, she thought as she quickly excused herself, hurriedly promising the doctor that she’d be there the next day.
As she feared, Cabby had disappeared, taking with him his album of photographs but leaving behind an empty bag that had contained goldfish-shaped crackers, a snack they had not brought to the hospital. She glanced at the clock. If only Maggie was working, but her shift had ended and she was probably already at home. Maggie was a seasoned registered nurse who worked on-call shifts in Doernbecher’s Oncology/Hematology Department. They shared a house together and she was Molly’s best friend.
First stop, down the hallway and into the ward in the direction of room 9, Lindsay’s room. Her daughter was fast asleep and there was no sign of Cabby. After a couple of brief conversations she established that he had not come this direction, so back she exited to the main hall. Two choices at this point: back toward the clinic or in the other direction, toward the elevators. Knowing how his mind worked, she headed for the elevators. He was always pushing buttons, hers mostly, she thought to herself and couldn’t help a weak but worried grin.