“I hope you and Patrick get your own church and start a healthy, beautiful family.
Ruth smiled through her tears. “And you and Heather will always be part of our family.”
“Maybe someday the two of you can come visit America.”
“I would like that.”
Patrick had added, “I’ve gone to college in Boston, but I have never seen the South. Perhaps one day we will come calling.”
“You’d better, because I won’t be coming back to Africa, and I don’t like thinking we won’t see each other again.”
“In the next life, we will,” Ruth had said, giving Amber’s hands a squeeze. “May God be with you, Amber.”
Once aboard the plane, Amber shut her eyes and revisited her memory of saying goodbye to Boyce. The night before, he had walked with her into the field where he’d taken her on her first night. The change in the field had been dramatic—the irrigation canals were dug, the earth tilled and turned, the reservoir built and waiting for the rainy season. Moonlight spread across the waiting ground like golden cream. Boyce had said, “My work here is finished. By December this field will be planted and thick with crops. It gives me a good feeling.”
“What will you do now?”
“Go back to school, I reckon. I still have several semesters before I graduate. After that, on to Dad’s firm in Birmingham.”
“Well, I’m sure this project will earn you the credits you wanted. What about our little side trip?”
“I expect it to earn me extra credit. How about you? What are you going to do?”
“After Africa, graduating and finding a college seems tame. I don’t know what’s going to happen if Heather—” She’d stopped herself, unable to say the words.
“No matter what happens to Heather, you have your life to lead, Amber. You’ll go on.”
“I don’t know how. My first memories are of Heather. Of her holding my hand and playing with me.” She started to cry, and Boyce held her against his chest. She heard his heart through the fabric of his shirt, felt her tears soak into the material.
“You tell that sister of yours to get well.”
“If only she’ll listen to me. She never has before.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“No problem. I excel at some things.”
He kissed her forehead.
“Not good enough,” she’d told him. She’d put her hands on either side of his face and stood on tiptoe. “This is for taking care of us out there in the bush. We’d never have made it without you.” She’d kissed him thoroughly, stepped away, and said, “I love you.” Then, without letting him see her cry, she had turned and run back to the guest house. And out of his life.
The jet from London touched down at Miami International Airport just shy of three in the afternoon. It took another hour to get through customs, but once they were through the line, Ted Barlow was waiting for them at the baggage claim carousel. To Amber it looked as if her father had aged ten years since she’d last seen him. He was thinner and looked haggard.
He kissed them both. “Thank God you’re home.” He turned to Amber and ran his hands along her arms as if examining her for himself.
“I’m fine, Daddy. All my parts are still in working order.”
“You’re getting a complete physical as soon as I can arrange it.”
“Whatever. Can we just go to the hospital?”
Janet fired questions during the drive through heavy traffic to the hospital. Amber tried to keep up, but her brain felt sluggish. She felt as if she’d been away years instead of just weeks, more like a visitor than a person returning home. The world she’d grown up in looked surreal—too hot, too bright, too noisy.
The colors were garish and cheap, the roads too wide, too crammed, an ocean of concrete instead of rich red earth studded with green.
At the hospital Ted took them up to the ICU, pausing at the forbidding door. “You’re going to see Heather through a glass window. When she’s awake she’s coherent, and she can see you and talk to you through the speaker on the wall. Just push the button when you want to be heard.”
“What does she know?” Janet asked.
“She knows it’s bad.”
Amber felt cold all over. “I want to hug her.”
“Later. You have to go through sterility procedures. Her immune system is wiped out. Any germ can destroy her, even one from a common cold.”
Amber walked to the window between her parents, holding their hands. Her knees went weak when she peered inside. Heather lay on a hospital bed, surrounded by equipment. She remained but a shadow of herself, wasted except for her abdomen—it was distended. Her hair had been cropped short, her skin was tinged yellow, several IVs ran into her arms, and clear tubing attached to a urine bag hung from below the sheets.
“Oh, my baby,” Janet whispered. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.”
Amber felt sick to her stomach. How could this be her sister? Heather resembled a limp, grotesque marionette. “Is she awake?”
“Push the button and talk to her.” Ted motioned to the speaker box.
Amber pressed the button. “Hey, sis . . . guess who’s here?”
Heather’s eyelids fluttered open and she smiled. Only then did Amber see a flicker of her sister’s former beauty. “Amber . . . Mom . . . can you come inside?”
“Dad says later.” Amber’s legs quivered from the strain of holding herself rigid. If she didn’t, she feared she’d fall apart.
“Wasn’t Africa wonderful? Did you have fun?”
Amber glanced at her father and he whispered, “I didn’t tell her about your being lost.”
“Wonderful,” Amber said into the speaker. “Everybody there is praying for you.”
“That’s good. Can’t have too many prayers.” Heather’s eyes closed, and Amber realized she was gathering her strength.
“I saw baby Alice right before we left. She’s looking fine. Mom really did an awesome job of fixing her palate.”
“I knew she would.”
Janet stepped up to the box and relieved Amber’s cramped finger. “Hi, honey. Mom here. You were right about getting back to my roots. I worked nonstop, but I fixed a lot of kids, corrected plenty of birth defects. And you know what? It felt good.”
“I wish—” Heather stopped, then started again. “It would have been nice to go as a family.”
“We can still do that.”
“I don’t know, Mom. I’m so tired.”
“Well, I didn’t mean right now.”
Heather’s eyes closed again, and Amber stepped away from the window. She couldn’t bear to watch any longer. She didn’t need a medical degree to know how sick Heather was. Or how useless it was to expect her to recover. Heather was dying. And all the medicine in the world, all the doctors and their expertise could not save her.
Amber went home with her parents for the night because they made her. She’d wanted to camp out at the hospital, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. “Get some rest. Come back tomorrow,” he said. “If you want to see any of your friends—”
“No.” She interrupted him. “I don’t want to see anyone. I’d just as soon not have them know I’m home.”
“All right.” He raked his hand through his hair and rotated his shoulders wearily. “Why don’t we all get some sleep?” His suggestion made sense. Amber’s internal clock was seven hours ahead of his, which made it one in the morning, Ugandan time. “Sleep in tomorrow, if you can. Drive to the hospital when you’re rested. Your car’s gassed and ready to go.”
Amber agreed and went to her room, cool, quiet, spacious, awash in shades of lime and blue. After the bedroom of the guest house, it seemed obscenely huge. How much space did she really need? In Africa whole families lived in huts smaller than her room. “Quit it,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. “You sound like Heather after she first came home.” Her heart contracted as she remembered how sick her sister had looked that afternoon.
She wan
ted to talk to Boyce and actually picked up the telephone before she remembered he was three thousand miles away. Bad idea anyway. They’d already said their goodbyes and gone their separate ways.
Without bothering to undress, Amber lay down on her bed. She felt as if the hard ground in Africa had been friendlier. There it had been only her body that was miserable. Here it was her very soul.
19
“I’m not afraid of dying, sis. I just regret not being able to do all the things I wanted to do with my life.”
Heather’s words did nothing to comfort Amber. She had stood at the window the next morning watching her sister sleep for a long time, and when Heather finally woke, Amber had complied with the necessary procedures and come into her isolation room. “Is this what I came home to hear you tell me?” Amber asked now. “I don’t want you to die. Did you ever think about that?”
“We don’t always get what we want.”
“You’re not giving up, are you? Because if you are—”
“What’ll you do? Kill me?”
The absurdity of her anger made Amber pause. Heather was right. It wasn’t as if Heather had any control over what was happening to her body. “Sorry,” Amber said, hanging her head. “Let’s start over, all right?”
“Okay . . . for starters, do you have any idea how silly you look in that getup?”
Amber wore a too-large paper gown. Latex gloves, a paper hat, and a special mask completed her ensemble. She twirled and struck a fashion pose. “I begged for something trendy, but this is all they had.”
“That’s better. Now, tell me all about Africa. Especially about you and Boyce.”
“I’m crazy about him.” Amber confessed her heart. “But what’s the point? He has his whole life planned out. I still don’t know where mine’s going.”
“Didn’t anything in Africa get to you?”
“Of course it did. I haven’t got a heart of stone.” Amber told Heather about Ruth, Patrick, and Rosemary. She told her about their midnight run for their lives, about walking through the bush for six nights, looking for help and a way back into Uganda. Now that she was safe, she didn’t see that Heather’s knowing could cause any harm.
“And you thought you were going to be bored.”
“No, boredom wasn’t much of a problem. Except I can’t say much good about the food.”
“You nut!” Heather’s eyes fairly glowed. “I wish I could have been with you.”
“Don’t think I didn’t wish you were too. I figured I was going to be hanging around a hospital doing good deeds. Instead I was hanging around the bush eating strange life-forms.”
Heather laughed, a sound that made Amber feel wonderful. “I kept asking Dad why you and Mom weren’t home when you were supposed to be. Everyone thinks that just because I’m sick, I lose track of time. But I knew something was going on no one was telling me about. I thought Mom had gotten bogged down in an extended surgery schedule. I had no clue you were the one with the problem. So you had to make a run for it through the bush. And you did it. I’m impressed, sis.”
Amber grinned, proud that she had pleased her sister. “The others get all the credit— especially Boyce. I just tagged along.”
“Back to Boyce. Does he know how you feel about him?”
“Sure does—I made a fool of myself. I told him I loved him.”
“Do you?”
Amber nodded. “I remembered what you told me about wishing you’d said it to Ian. I didn’t want him to return to his real life without knowing how I felt. So I said it. And ran for cover.”
“What if he feels the same way?”
“I’d be shocked. He’s out of my league.”
“I felt the same way about Ian. At least you laid your cards on the table.”
Amber patted Heather’s hand. She could tell that her sister’s burst of energy was waning. “I’ll come back later this afternoon.”
“I’d rather you stayed. Until I go to sleep.” Heather reached over to the morphine infusion pump and pressed a button. “My happy juice,” she explained. “I hurt a lot inside. This stuff really helps.”
Amber couldn’t hold back the film of tears that glazed her eyes. Quickly she wiped them away. “I’ll sit right here,” she said, leaning back in a chair.
“Tell me more about Africa,” Heather asked. “Tell me about the land, the people you met . . . Ruth’s village. Tell me about . . . the Children’s Home. Tell . . . me . . . please . . .” Her eyes drooped and closed.
Amber stroked Heather’s thin hand and began to describe everything she could recall, no matter how insignificant. She continued to talk long after Heather was asleep. Long after her voice faded from the weight of emotion, while her heart trembled with memories.
Amber’s high-school friends found out she was home and began to stop by the house in a steady stream. “I cut articles out of the newspaper about you being lost over there,” Kelly burbled when she found Amber out by the pool. “I was so, like, totally scared. I mean, you could have died over there! So tell me, what was it like? I’ve got all afternoon.”
“It wasn’t so bad. The papers played it up. We ran from some rebel soldiers. We walked back to Uganda. End of story.” Amber was reluctant to talk about Africa with any of her friends. She wasn’t sure why. Her experiences ran deep, close to her heart. Her friends wanted a sensational story, and she wouldn’t give it to them.
“That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“I’ve got other things on my mind, okay?”
“You mean Heather. We’re all really sorry about your sister, you know. Liz and Brooke and I tried to visit her in the hospital, but they wouldn’t let us in the ICU because we weren’t family.”
“That was nice of you. I’ll tell her you tried.”
“Um—are you coming back to school?”
There were two more weeks of classes, but Amber wasn’t about to return. “Don’t need to. I passed all my finals before I left, remember?”
“Well, sure, but you could have lunch with us. Oh, and there’s a party at Brooke’s stepdad’s lake place Saturday night. Why don’t you come? Dylan’s going to be there, and he’s asking about you.”
“Is that supposed to make me jump for joy? I could care less about Dylan.”
“He and Jeannie broke up right after the prom.”
Amber sighed. “Kelly, we’ve been friends for a zillion years, so I feel like I can be honest with you. Truth is, I don’t want to party. I don’t care what Dylan does with himself or who he dates. I don’t want everybody hanging around asking me a bunch of questions. My sister’s really sick, and she’s the one I want to be with now. So please back off. And tell the others to give me lots of space.”
Kelly looked shocked, then miffed. “Well— um—all right. I’ll spread the word: Leave Amber alone.” She stood up. “See you at graduation.”
“Whatever.” Without regrets Amber watched Kelly leave, and as the door shut behind her, Amber felt as if the door to her once-perfect high-school life had also closed. She stood in a no-man’s-land, unable to reconnect with her former world, unsure of how to live in her current one.
Amber went to the hospital with her parents every night, and after each visit she would say, “Heather looked stronger, don’t you think?”
“About the same,” her father would reply.
When he’d said it one too many times for Amber’s liking, she erupted. They’d just walked into the kitchen together. Enraged, she flung her purse onto the kitchen counter. “You always say the same thing. I think she’s looking better. Don’t you, Mom?”
“I think having us with her again has helped her rally. It’s lifted her spirits.”
“See, Dad, Mom thinks so too.”
He shook his head wearily. “Have it your way.” He picked up a bag from the desk. “I keep forgetting to give these to you. It’s your graduation announcements. The ceremony’s been scheduled for next Sunday in the county auditorium. You’ve gotten some messages on the answ
ering machine from your friends about all-night parties. If you want—”
“Would you and Mom be too disappointed if I didn’t walk?”
Her parents exchanged glances. “Amber, high-school graduation is a major milestone,” her mother said. “You’ve made it through twelve years of school, and we’re proud of you. Not walking the aisle and getting your diploma won’t influence what’s happening to Heather.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Sacrificing for Heather? Well, I’m not. I just don’t want to go. The school can mail my diploma to me.”
“Yes, but—”
Amber stamped her foot. Her nerves were on fire, stretched and ready to snap. “Didn’t you listen? I don’t want to go. It’s not important to me. Please, don’t make me!”
Her father moved swiftly to put his arms around her. She fought him but finally began to cry. “Shhh, baby,” he said. “It’s okay. Really. We’re not going to make you do anything. Calm down. If you don’t want to attend the ceremony, you don’t have to.”
She clung to him, sobbing, all her energy gone. “I don’t want to, Daddy. I really don’t.”
He lifted her, cradled her as if she were a baby again. “How about if I tuck you into bed like I used to do when you were a little girl? Remember? You’d fall asleep on the floor next to your sister, and I’d have to carry you both.”
Amber put her arms around her father’s neck and burrowed against his shoulder. “Yes, I remember,” she whispered, longing deep inside for those golden days of her childhood. She wanted him to take her back to a place where Mommy’s kisses could banish boo-boos and Daddy’s presence could vanquish the things that went bump in the night. A place where children played in magic forests, where there was no darkness, only light, and where sisters did not die.
The ringing of the front doorbell intruded into Amber’s dreamless sleep. Her parents had already left for work, and she had planned to go to the hospital at noon. She put the pillow over her head to muffle the sound, hoping the person would give up and go away. But the idiot wouldn’t stop ringing the blasted bell. “I’m coming!” she yelled, knowing she couldn’t be heard from her second-floor bedroom. She struggled into a robe and padded down the winding carpeted stairway to the foyer.