marveled at the sun-splashed celebration of color.
Sasha stopped at a side entrance.
As I freed myself from the safety harness, she put one hand on my arm
and squeezed lightly. “Call my cellular number when You want me to
come back.”
“It’ll be after sunset by the time I leave. I’ll walk.”
“If that’s what You want.”
“I do.”
Again I drew the glasses down my nose, this time to see Sasha Goodall
as I had never seen her. In candlelight, her gray eyes are deep but
clear-as they are here in the day world, too. Her thick mahogany hair,
in candlelight, is as lustrous as wine in crystal-but markedly more
lustrous under the stroking hand of the sun. Her creamy, rose-petal
skin is flecked with faint freckles, the patterns of which I know as
well as I know the constellations in every quadrant of the night sky,
season by season.
With one finger, Sasha pushed my sunglasses back into place.
“Don’t be foolish.”
I’m human. Foolish is what we are.
If I were to go blind, however, her face would be a sight to sustain me
in the lasting blackness.
I leaned across the console and kissed her.
“You smell like coconut,” she said.
“I try.”
I kissed her again.
“You shouldn’t be out in this any longer,” she said firmly.
The sun, half an hour above the sea, was orange and intense, a
perpetual thermonuclear holocaust ninety-three million miles removed.
In places, the Pacific was molten copper.
“Go, coconut boy. Away with You.”
Shrouded like the Elephant Man, I got out of the Explorer and hurried
to the hospital, tucking my hands in the pockets of my leather
jacket.
I glanced back once. Sasha was watching. She gave me a thumbs-up
sign.
When I stepped into the hospital, Angela Ferryman was waiting in the
corridor. She was a third-floor nurse on the evening shift, and she
had come downstairs to greet me.
Angela was a sweet-tempered, pretty woman in her late forties:
painfully thin and curiously pale-eyed, as though her dedication to
nursing was so ferocious that, by the harsh terms of a devilish
bargain, she must give the very substance of herself to ensure her
patients’ recoveries. Her wrists seemed too fragile for the work she
did, and she moved so lightly and quickly that it was possible to
believe that her bones were as hollow as those of birds.
She switched off the overhead fluorescent panels in the corridor
ceiling. Then she hugged me.
When I had suffered the illnesses of childhood and adolescence-mumps,
flu, chicken pox-but couldn’t be safely treated outside our house,
Angela had been the visiting nurse who stopped in daily to check on
me.
Her fierce, bony hugs were as essential to the conduct of her work as
were tongue depressors, thermometers, and syringes.
Nevertheless, this hug frightened more than comforted me, and I said,
“Is he?”
“It’s all right, Chris. He’s still holding on. Holding on just for
You, I think.”
I went to the emergency stairs nearby. As the stairwell door eased
shut behind me, I was aware of Angela switching on the ground-floor
corridor lights once more.
The stairwell was not dangerously well-lighted. Even so, I climbed
quickly and didn’t remove my sunglasses.
At the head of the stairs, in the third-floor corridor, Seth Cleveland
was waiting. He is my father’s doctor, and one of mine.
Although tall, with shoulders that seem round and massive enough to
wedge in one of the hospital loggia arches, he manages never to be
looming over You. He moves with the grace of a much smaller man, and
his voice is that of a gentle fairy-tale bear.
“We’re medicating him for pain,” Dr. Cleveland said, turning off the
fluorescent panels overhead, “so he’s drifting in and out.
But each time he comes around, he asks for You.”
Removing my glasses at last and tucking them in my shirt pocket, I
hurried along the wide corridor, past rooms where patients with all
manner of maladies, in all stages of illness, either lay insensate or
sat before bed trays that held their dinners. Those who saw the
corridor lights go off were aware of the reason, and they paused in