“Why?”
“Elsebietta had consumption. There was no real treatment and no cure. She wasted to nothing before my eyes.” He inhaled sharply, then eyed me. I couldn’t avert my gaze. I knew that consumption was an historic diagnosis that contemporary researchers believed meant cancer. “My daughter needed my help and I had nothing to give her.”
I swallowed then, knowing that sense of helplessness all too well. We had been to the same place, Micah and I.
“Only her hair held its color.” He smiled, lost in recollection. “It was so beautiful, like spun gold.”
I knew then that his wife and daughter had been blonde, like me. My hair has always been wavy and unruly, so I have kept it tightly controlled, captured beneath dozens of pins and clips. I saw the yearning in Micah’s eyes, though, and I wanted to console him, this haunted man who mourned his only child.
It was such a small thing to give. Even if I was clumsy with such gestures.
I unpinned my hair and shook it out. It fell just past my shoulders, and seemed to writhe with pleasure to be free for once. I shoved the pins in the pocket of my lab coat and looked up to find his dark gaze fixed upon me.
Filled with admiration.
In an instant Micah was beside me, although I never saw him move. He lifted a hand and gently captured one tendril between finger and thumb. That secretive smile touched his lips again.
“So soft,” he whispered, then bent his head and kissed that lock of my hair. When he glanced up, those dark eyes were near mine, that mouth so close that I could almost feel it on my own lips. I caught my breath, felt my eyes widen, and saw that sparkle light his eyes. There was a moment in which we stared at each other, a moment in which time stood still, a moment in which there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
Then he kissed me.
I could have stepped back. I could have ensured that he never touched me. But one kiss, one kiss was nothing. A taste. A tease. A temptation.
And it had been so long since I’d kissed anyone.
I let him kiss me, and he seemed to understand that I wouldn’t give much, not without being persuaded to do so. The first touch of his lips was as light as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. Ethereal. Almost illusory. I made some small involuntary sound – one of disappointment – and he bent close again, his kiss soft upon my mouth..
Persuasive.
Tender.
I thought of Micah helpless to save his child. I thought of the wife he had lost. I recalled my own mourning of my mother. I remembered how our small family had dissolved and scattered in her absence, and guessed that he had experienced a similar loss. The same sense of having no direction. Of being lost. Adrift.
Alone.
The isolation must have been worse for Micah. I had had my father, barricaded as he had been in his own grief. And my brother, Rick, now on the other side of the world and estranged. We had had the comfort of each other’s physical presence, at least.
But Micah…Micah had been all alone.
I kissed him back. There was solace in the common ground of sorrow, purpose in consoling another. Our kiss was sweet and gentle, but then it changed. Then it became more sensual, more rooted in desire than in consolation, more demanding.
More exciting.
I opened my mouth and gripped his shoulders, leaning against him as he caught me close. He knew when to entreat and when to wait, how to drive me crazy as if we’d been lovers for years. I wanted more. I wanted it immediately, and I knew he tasted that in my kiss.
It was unlike any kiss I’d ever had, making all others look like pale shadows of this perfection. It was the kiss I had always wanted and I realized, as he let his tongue tempt mine, that I had been looking for just this kiss.
Then I felt the brush of Micah’s sharp tooth against my lower lip. There could be no stronger reminder of the predator he was.
And I heard music.
I broke the kiss and backed away from him in fear.
He let me go, watching as intently as I’d come to expect. “Now you look alive,” he murmured with satisfaction.
I pivoted to check my reflection, and was shocked at my own appearance. My hair was loose and wild as it had never been, my eyes sparkling, my lips swollen. I looked like a woman who had been thoroughly kissed, and as different from my usual prim self as could be.
I would have blamed Micah for that, but when I turned back, he was gone.
As surely as if he had never been. My hands were shaking as I scooped up the scattered pins from my hair, and I pulled my hair up so tightly that it made me wince.
I could still taste that kiss, though.
I knew I would relive it in my dreams.
III
We aren’t supposed to become involved.
We learned that in med school. Oncologists should be professional and detached, in order to make the best logical decision for treatment. We are the rudders, the realists, the rational ones. It’s the only way to balance the emotions we encounter, the ones that cancer rouses.
It’s the only way to fight the battle over the long term. I may have been called Icicle Taylor, but I haven’t been the only one with my moat filled and my portcullis dropped. I have waded through buckets of emotional reactions every day since graduation, but always kept my eyes fixed on the prize.
Maybe it’s not an accident that I chose to stay in research, to be a specialist called in for tough cases, but never the primary contact.
But, two years before this particular March, a little boy named Jason had reached in and grabbed my heart.
He had been all of five years old when he came to the ward with leukemia, the adored elder child of a devoted couple. They were a picture-perfect husband and wife, trim and attractive, affluent and kind, professionals. They were affectionate with each other and with their adorable son and daughter. They were the kind of people who get what they want, and what they wanted was their son healthy again.
They would do whatever it took.
Jason was solemn, with a tangle of dark hair and eyes that seemed too big for his face. He had beautiful dark lashes and a surprising ability to understand what was really going on. His leukemia was aggressive and I was testing a new drug. Their oncologist, pushed by Jason’s parents to do more, called me in.
I was not used to being noticed in these situations. I’d explain the drug or the protocol, the risks and advantages, the unknowns, then step back and let the patient’s oncologist handle the rest. I witnessed but didn’t really participate.
Jason was the first to challenge that. We were at the end of our meeting, the oncologist summing up the strategy for Jason’s parents, when this boy reached out and grabbed my hand. I jumped. I had thought they had all forgotten my presence.
“Will it hurt, Dr. Taylor?” he demanded, his eyes wide.
I was so surprised that I couldn’t lie to him.
“Yes,” I said. “But if you can do this, you will get better.”
His mother caught her breath sharply. His father watched in horror. The oncologist closed his eyes. The tension in the room was palpable.
But Jason studied me, his gaze searching mine. I stared back at him steadily. I knew we would win and I let him see my conviction. His lips set and he nodded then, as committed to the course as I was.
And he was a trooper. Never complained. I went to his second marrow transplants as an observer, unable to stay away. The first hadn’t been easy and the second was likely to be worse. Jason had seized my finger in pre-op, insisting that I hold his hand.
The whole team was shocked when Icicle Taylor agreed.
I was more shocked when Jason ran to give me a hug on the day of his final discharge. No one had spontaneously hugged me since my mother’s death. I didn’t think to hug him back. I was surprised and touched, and although I had rationalized it since, I still relived that moment of triumph.
It was a battle we had won.
But a week after Mrs. Curtis died, Jason came back.
Cap
ricious, deceitful March.
I’d been working even more hours, cross-checking everything, determined not to let anyone down the way I’d almost let Mrs. Curtis down. Dr. Bradley was a genial nag about my apparent inability to give the lab some blood. I’d never logged so many hours and I was exhausted, but I felt on the cusp of a breakthrough.
Until I saw Jason’s parents in the ward. My heart stopped cold with the knowledge of why they were there. I have never wanted to be wrong as badly as I did then. Headaches, lassitude, infections that wouldn’t go away, night sweats. His parents knew the truth as well as we did.
Jason had always reminded me of somebody I couldn’t quite remember. I was so shocked at the sight of him this time that I realized who he resembled.
He looked like Micah. He had the intensity of focus and thoughtfulness that characterized Micah. That solemnity, that intensity, that watchfulness. Never mind the dark eyes and dark hair, the beautiful features.
It made no sense. I had met Jason before Micah.
No. That wasn’t true. I remembered suddenly that I had seen Micah before. He’d been at my mother’s funeral, a stranger on the perimeter of the gathering of mourners, watching.
Watching me.
My father had told me to pay attention and had been impatient with my insistence about the stranger. He had said that there was no one there.
I had never told anyone about the dreams I’d had later, dreams of that same man who didn’t exist. I had shoved the recollection of those dreams aside, like so much else that made no sense that year.
Once recalled, I couldn’t forget them. Micah had been watching me.
Why me?
I had a dreadful feeling about Jason’s prognosis. We ordered the tests and tried to make cheerful noises, but the oncologist on the case and I avoided each other’s gazes.
I was there the night the tests came back from the lab, a little ping from my computer indicating that the file I was watching had been updated. I didn’t get coffee, just sat and read.
The results were terrible.
Inescapable.
I shut the door of my office and wept. Optimism isn’t nearly a good enough weapon. I know the statistics and the survival rates as well as my own name. I looked again at Jason’s blood work, even though I knew.
I was caught. We couldn’t deny him treatment. I couldn’t be fatalistic. I couldn’t send Jason home to be happy for as many months – or weeks – as he had left. But I didn’t want to put that darling boy with his trusting eyes through a treatment ordeal that wouldn’t matter at the end.
I didn’t want him to suffer more than he would anyway.
I wanted mercy for him.
I knew that Jason’s parents would spare no expense and no trouble in their quest to see him cured. They had proven to be great allies in his past treatment regimen.
But this time they would fight, and they would lose.
And so I cried. I sat alone in my office and I wept for the futility of it all. I wept for Jason and his parents and the fact that he would never grow up to be the heartbreaker I wanted him to be. I wept for Mrs. Curtis, believing at the end that she was dancing with a handsome man. I wept for my mother, and my father who had never been able to talk about his own pain, and my brother who had run as far away from the past as was physically possible. I wept for Micah and his lost wife and his beautiful daughter.
It was late when I had shed all my tears – two decades worth of them – and the night was still and dark. I wiped my face and blew my nose and decided I needed some sleep. I was straightening my desk when I grimaced at another e-mail from Dr. Bradley. The message from the day before was still unopened as I’d assumed it to be a nag about iron supplements. This one was marked urgent.
Some people don’t like to be ignored.
I had done the blood work, for goodness sake.
I rolled my eyes and flicked open the file, guessing that he’d been right in his diagnosis. Low iron is a common problem among women, and I knew I wasn’t that special in biological terms. I certainly didn’t practice good self-care.
But it was a referral to the head oncologist on our team.
I clicked through to my own blood tests and sat back, stunned. My hemoglobin was down, but my white blood counts high. Worse of all, Dr. Bradley had requested a cancer antigen test, because of my family history, and its high result told me all I needed to know.
My old adversary had moved the field of battle into my own cells.
Cancer is sneaky. It takes advantage of your mistakes. I’ve learned that, but I had left one flank undefended. My mother, after all, had died of ovarian cancer. Her death was what got me into this line of work. I wanted the power to do something other than stand by and watch for the inevitable. I’ve made a lot of saves in my time, and spearheaded a lot of research. I’ve done good work.
Maybe that’s why it came after me. Maybe I was too worthy an opponent. Maybe that’s why it took advantage of my genetic weakness.
It had certainly taken advantage of my slip-up. How long had it been since I’d had a physical examination? A suite of blood work done? A Pap smear? I just never had the time. Or maybe, I’d thought I was invincible, since I was fighting for the good guys.
It didn’t really matter. I knew too much about treatment, about pain and suffering, and I knew the statistics. I knew that the oncologist would review my family history and immediately order an ultrasound of my lower abdomen, and I knew what he would find. I understood suddenly why I couldn’t shed that round belly I’d developed, and it wasn’t the food in the cafeteria.
I had a tumor and, with these counts, I would bet that it had already metastasized. It made too much sense. I knew that by the time there are symptoms of ovarian cancer, it’s all over.
Even more damning, I had known my mother would die, with unshakeable certainty, when she was diagnosed. I had the same conviction that this cancer would take me, too.
Maybe I had always known that. Maybe that was why I hated March so much. Maybe it was a kind of foresight.
I didn’t cry for myself. I’d cried all my tears for Jason and for Mrs. Curtis. I was too angry that the fight would go on without me, that the battle would rage without my contribution. It wasn’t fair. I was surprised by how much I wanted a different answer than the one I routinely gave.
I looked out the window at the night, seething.
Micah was leaning against the fender of my car again, and he looked as if his gaze was fixed upon my window. I understood then why I was the only one who could see him. Just as Mrs. Curtis had seen him.
He was waiting for me.
And I knew why.
“You knew,” I said when I was still twenty feet away from him.
Micah inclined his head in agreement, that same graceful gesture, but there was no amused curve to his lips this time. He was as watchful as ever, though.
Still.
I couldn’t simply stand, not with this chaotic need to do something swirling inside me. I was excited, agitated, uncertain. Could I battle my old enemy in a different way?
“I need to walk.” I headed for the scrap of wilderness around the parking lot.
Micah followed. I walked quickly, striding through the brush, ignoring the patches of snow underfoot and the brambles snatching at my clothes. It felt good to push my body, a denial of the disease that lurked inside my cells.
When I finally halted and spun, there was nothing but Micah, his glittering eyes and the stars overhead. I was aware of the warm strength of him, aware of the lump in my throat.
I saw no need for pretence. “Tell me about the coven.”
“We offer relief to those who suffer, especially those who suffer needlessly. It’s a choice on our part.”
“When treatment is futile.”
“When there is no chance of healing.”
“Like Elsebietta.”
He nodded once and looked away, still tormented by that loss. “It was hell.”
I knew exactly
what he meant and so I did what I never do – I reached out and touched him. I offered solace.
He eyed my hand, then reached down and captured it in his. My heart skipped at the heat in his eyes and I sounded breathless. “So, you joined the coven.”
“I saw the chance to diminish suffering.” He grimaced and bent his head, staring at the glint of the creek. “I follow the edicts of the coven of mercy, but I’ve been looking for something different than the others. Something more.”
“Like what?”
He looked at me so quickly that I couldn’t look away, his eyes gleaming. “I don’t want to be alone,” he whispered.
I swallowed, guessing his implication. “You said the coven is short one member.”
He nodded once. “I asked for the right to fill that place. I have been waiting for a dance partner for a long time.”
“How long?” I knew the answer, but I had to hear it.
“Twenty years, this very month.”
“I thought I saw you at the funeral,” I guessed. “But no one else did.”
“No, you could only glimpse me then. It was too soon.” He smiled. “But you dreamed me. I managed that.”
He was right. “Why me?”
“Because I saw the same passion in you that burns in me.”
I caught my breath and looked away, dizzy at the implication. I heard the music begin, sounding as if it carried from a distant orchestra, and panicked. “But Mrs. Curtis died.”
“Because I didn’t stop.”
I eyed him, seeing that he looked paler than he had, seeing a gauntness to his cheeks. “You’re hungry.”
He nodded, licked his lips and looked away. “I’ve been waiting for you, Rosemary.”
“For a long time?”
He smiled. “Always.”
“And I would be able to do what you do, to give mercy?”
“Yes.”
“But I would be your partner?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We can only try when we have similar powers and objectives.” His smile was fleeting, barely curving his lips. “I’m inviting you on an adventure.”
It was an invitation that I was destined to accept. Another chance, an opportunity to make a difference, an adventure…and Micah.