Mortality Bridge (5 page)

He kept the room heat high because she said that she was always cold. She drank liter after liter of water and sweated constantly. Nauseated and no appetite. The bones emerging in her face and her color bad. She’d lost twentyeight pounds since the CAT scan and hadn’t had them to spare to begin with. Often she made noises that made Niko think that she was having nightmares and he’d lean across the bed to reassure her and she’d be awake. Had been awake for hours. Sensitive to everything. Water was freezing and tepid teas scalded. The room too bright and her bedclothes bunched and his footsteps loud on the deep pile carpet. Her world burning brighter even as it waned.

Niko kept his vigil by her bed and talked to her. She’d grown short of breath and did not talk much. Short tired sentences often trailing off as medications claimed them. He talked about their lives together and adventures they had had. Would have. The great good fortune of their lives, of being alive. News of the world, their friends, their industry. He tried to keep it light but every word felt like goodbye. He called her father and held the phone against her ear and she said a few words but mostly listened. Hank a brokenhearted bear who had been nothing but kind to Niko despite all that Niko’d put his daughter through. Tolerant and forgiving and firm and stern when need demanded. His wife dead of pancreatic cancer these eight years. The man made smaller in the years since then. Tentative. Aware that everything valuable can be broken. Will be broken.

She called friends and spoke to them through him. She’d been texting them but that had dwindled. Some came to visit though he discouraged this. The great unspoken in their eyes. She didn’t need to see that. When the reporters started calling he stopped answering his phone.

He helped her to the bathroom while she still felt good enough to walk and changed her bedpan after she did not. He changed IV bags and swabbed insertion sites and gave meds as the nurse had shown him. The litany of medications now well known to him and only palliative. A month ago it had been Tylenol for headaches and chronic fever and joint pain. The headaches became migraines which had led to Imitrex. The joint pain became general which led to Lyrica. Shortness of breath and chest pain led to asthma inhalers which did nothing. Reglan for nausea. Her skin began to hurt and sometimes even burn. She spiked fevers several times a day and soaked the sheets with night sweats. She became dehydrated and had no appetite. IV glucose and fluids, Vicodin and then Percoset for pain. Marinol briefly to horrible effect, hallucinations and panic. Now it was morphine and nowhere left to go.

He did everything he could to be with her and make her comfortable, and conducted his researches and arrangements while she slept. Phone calls and emails and websites and rare books. Fed Ex packages delivered through discreet third parties. Notes and diagrams and incantations. He became disturbed by how familiar all these preparations felt. Keys and summonings, abjurations and imprecations. Icons and dead languages. Things he’d never been exposed to in this life and could not have known. Yet know them he did. He did not learn so much as remember. As if the more he dug the more some tiered self surfaced like recovered strata of despoiled Troy.

He worked in the study and left the intercom on in case she called out and kept his cellphone near to hand in case she texted him. Sometimes that was easier for her than talking. Her voice the first thing he had loved about her. Wise beyond its years and freighted with the world no matter what it sang about. Now threadbare and so much diminished. As Jem herself was much diminished. She slept more than she was awake. It all got worse.

SOME NIGHTS IT weighed on him too much. The unforgivable nature of his complicity. The exquisite folly of what he was going to attempt. On those nights he’d simply play his Goya on the button-down leather couch in the study. He had a fine small studio across the courtyard but the thought of even going in there filled him with dread. Like desecrating a tomb. He’d play the guitar on the couch and let his sorrow rage despair and grief emerge as notes upon the quiet air to linger well beyond his fingers’ muting on the strings. The counterpoint of hope among them. All of it delivered from six tuned strings and a hollow lacquered wooden body far more easily than speech could ever convey. And throughout it all the sense of final things, of winding down. Of waiting for some tardy guest. Every gesture emblematic. Every note farewell.

For the first time in decades he heard the bottle’s siren song. The memory of whiskey trickling down his throat, the warm purr spreading in his veins. It would be so easy. In the next room was a cherrywood bar, Waterford decanters and matching highball glasses. Jem had thought he should get rid of the bar, toss out the booze or give it away, remodel the room into something very else. She needn’t have worried. Since the Deal he hadn’t touched a drop.

But one night he found himself sitting at the bar and turning a decanter in his hands, the caramel liquid disk seesawing as cut facets caught the light. The thick round stopper sideways on the glossy wood. He frowned. Had he? He took stock of himself. No. No. But still. He raised the decanter to his nose and breathed in and coughed. He thumped the decanter onto the bar and restoppered it and went back into his study and sat down again to play.

THE PHONE CHIME woke him. Jemma’s ring. He’d fallen asleep on the couch again. He sat up and picked up the phone and pressed it and it lighted.
Whats it like outside.
He looked around the study. Ancient leatherbounds and scattered notes. Trophies, portraits, ragdolls guarding books. The Goya leaning on a bookcase. He drew aside an opaque curtain and squinted out the window at the courtyard. Bright Los Angeles morning.
Looks nice,
he typed. He pressed send and got up and used the bathroom and splashed his face and stood looking at it dripping in the mirror until the phone chimed again.
Can I see?

SHE WAS SITTING up and typing on her phone when he came in. Her color better but much else wrong. She turned the phone screen toward him. “Clear, sunny, seventyeight degrees, air quality index mild.” This the longest she had spoken in a week.

“Another shitty day in paradise.”

“Can we go outside?”

He looked at her. Gaunt and pale, dark circles around her eyes, breathing strained. She did not look as if she could make it as far as the bedroom door. “We can try,” he said.

The nurse was not due again until tomorrow. Niko pulled the sheets aside and Jem swung her legs over the side of the bed. He put her slippers on and started to make some Cinderella joke but stopped. He disconnected the IVAC monitor and gathered the clear IV tubes and picked up the metal pole and put his free arm around her and was startled at the hardness of her shoulderblades against him. He helped her off the bed. She could stand. She took a test step toward the door and stopped and nodded. He said Okay and stayed beside her and carried her IV pole, the plastic bag swinging from its loop as they moved slowly from the room. Her hipbone a hard knob against his thigh. He moved in unison with her and held the gathered tubes like someone operating a lifesized marionette. His ankle kept hitting the IV pole casters but it was easier to carry it than to pull it along. His framed past slowly sliding by them in the hallway.

The flared sweep of staircase was work but he held her and waited while she caught her breath and then continued down. He imagined having an elevator installed or one of those gliding bannister chairs. Then he caught himself. What the hell was he thinking?

Through the cavernous living room and the long main dining room, so little used in recent years. Through the french doors and onto the patio. The landscaped courtyard beyond. The whole place suddenly obscenely large.

He sat Jem in a white adirondack patio chair and set her IV beside her and made sure she was comfortable and then went to the kitchen to get her a bottle of room temperature water. The huge spotless space, all the stainless steel. Like some underutilized restaurant.

Going out again he stopped. Jemma ghostly in the sunlight on the wooden chair, the IV pole beside her. The simple heartbreak wrongness of it. Look at her, you son of a bitch.

He gave her the water and dragged another chair beside her and sat on the edge of it and watched her drink most of the water in one go. He took the bottle back and asked her if she wanted more.

“I’m good right now.”

“You look a little better today.”

“I feel a little better today. You don’t know where the mountaintop is till you’re past it.”

“All downhill from there.”

“That would be nice.”

“You comfortable?”

“Considering, yeah.”

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.”

She smiled a little. The new sharp contours of her face, the hard prominence of veins on her arms and on the backs of her hands. The daylight merciless.

“It’s nice out here, isn’t it?”

“It is. I’m not sure the sun’s good for you.”

“It won’t kill me.”

“Aren’t you the comedian.”

“I’m here all week. I’d like that water now I think.”

He picked up the bottle. “Sure.”

“Bring your guitar back too.”

“You got it.” A ghost bullet in the heart, but he didn’t hesitate. He went inside again and got the Goya from the study and got a pair of sunglasses from a drawer and grabbed another bottled water from the kitchen. Back outside he waited while she gulped down most of her water again and then set her chairback more upright and put the sunglasses on her face. “Ooh look, I’m a movie star. Alfonse, strike up a fandango.”

He set the Goya on his lap and started up a fandanguillo. She had an awful coughing fit and he stopped and then realized she was laughing.

“Aren’t you the comedian,” she said.

“I’m here all week.”

“Play something.”

Niko looked at the guitar. For the first time in living memory it felt like a block of wood on his lap. What notes and chords for such a time as this? What meter counts the winding down? He looked up from the guitar and felt a sudden shock of recognition. They had been in almost exactly these positions long ago. This moment nearly reenactment. He shut his eyes and remembered and his hands moved on the wooden body, remembering as well:

IN THE SILENCE after he cut the outboard they listened to the water gurgle against the hull. In the fading early morning gray the surface of Lake Arrowhead was haunted by a mist. They drifted, they bobbed, they breathed the rarefied air.

Niko closed his eyes and felt himself cradled, endlessly rocking. Floating on a lake high in the mountains. A wonder to a flatland Florida boy.

Between them Niko’s Martin lay within its case. On the deck a thermos rolled and rolled.

He opened his eyes.

She faced him with her Navajo blanket across her knees, its thunderbird wings spread toward him. She reached for the thermos and poured fresh Kona. “You look good.”

He took the offered cup. Vapor rose to join the mist. “I feel good.” He lifted and drank and felt the coffee lighting up his veins.

“So. New band. New album. New single. National tour. No drugs. And you look ten years younger. What’s your secret?”

Niko handed back the thermos cup. “I signed a deal with the devil.”

“You signed a deal with Atlantic, anyway.” She blew to cool the coffee.

“Same thing.”

Water gurgled on the hull.

They opened a brown paper sack and ate thick bearclaws and washed them down with strong fresh coffee. They floated without speech or navigation as they ate and drank and watched the sun burn off the mist.

“So,” he finally said, “here we are.”

Jem looked away from the rumpled shoreline drawing slowly past. She seemed a little disbelieving she was here, like someone recovering her memory in the midst of a vacation. “Here we are. I swore I wouldn’t.”

“I know.”

She watched him and he looked steadily back. “But you really do seem changed. Since—” She gestured vaguely.

“You can say it. Since the accident.”

She nodded but said nothing. Niko took her napkin and put it with his in the paper sack that had held the bearclaws and folded the sack then crumpled it.

They floated.

“I wish I could’ve met your brother.”

Now Niko made his own vague gesture and looked out at the fractured mirror of the lake. “Yeah.”

“It saved you, didn’t it?”

“I guess it did. That’s a hell of a price for going clean.” Her eyes teared as she nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

He gave a little helpless shrug.

A fish chopped water near the boat and they both jumped. Jemma smiled a little and glanced at the case between them and they both knew it was time. He unlatched it and pulled out the Martin and tuned it and thought how he could play before a screaming thousand without a second thought yet here with Jemma astonishingly returned to his life and all between them fragile and uncertain he felt his palms grow damp.

Niko played.

Jemma watched him close his eyes and rock with their boat’s rocking. She listened to his music, the morning birds, the water lapping on the hull. She thought of how he loved to watch her sleep.

The final notes had disappeared across the morning before he opened his eyes to find her watching him. He lowered the guitar. “Long time since I had to audition.”

Jemma took a deep breath. “I think you got the gig.”

They should have met each other in the middle of their little boat but they did not. They swayed and turned upon the water. They were laughing by the time he brought the boat back to the rental dock. It looked unfamiliar and Niko asked the old guy watching them if they were at the wrong dock. “Hell, you’re at the wrong shore,” the old man said, and pointed them back across the lake. They laughed harder and gunned the engine and fractured the lake’s glassy surface heading back as the sun burned off the last of the mist.

It was the happiest day of Niko’s life.

HE OPENED HIS eyes as if awaking from a dream but the playing continued and the dream went on. Slowly rocking back and forth. Jemma in the sunlight in her sunglasses with the IV pole beside her. Vamping along with him, slow blue notes robbed of the authority that had been their trademark. But the feeling was there. Their faint duet a fragile elegy on this beautiful California day. A motionless dance.