The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(104)

I came around the counter and held her. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was that, at seventeen, the sex came without strings, without baggage, without expectations. It was just sex.”

“And at other times?” Mickie asked.

“I resent her.”

Mickie pulled back from me and gave me a curious stare.

“She intended to steal my virginity from the moment I walked into my father’s store, and she did. She saw me as easy pickings, and she relished the thought that she would be my first.”

“Well, whatever it is that makes that titillating for her, it’s apparently never gone away,” Mickie said.

“No pun intended?”

Donna had taken something I could never get back, something my monastic years helped me admire about my parents’ relationship, the knowledge that they had loved only each other. Donna was part of the reason I chose to be celibate. She did not come to my dreams and memories as a sweet recollection; she brought back the shame and humiliation I’d felt when I realized, standing in her kitchen, that love can be faked and, therefore, never fully trusted.

“You know, my desire for you has never gone away,” I said.

Mickie put down her coffee cup. “Oh no, you’re not getting off that easily.”

“For what?”

“For saying she was the best sex of your life. We’ll just see about that.” And she pulled open my bathrobe.





8

Late that morning, after a shower, Mickie and I stood in the bathroom, brushing our teeth and combing our hair. We were going to retrieve my father from the rehabilitation center and bring him to the hospital to visit my mother. I broached an idea that came to me while sitting in my mother’s hospital room.

“I want to take my mother to Lourdes,” I said.

Mickie spit toothpaste in the sink and considered me in the mirror. She stood in her underwear. She was wider in the hips but otherwise not much different from the young woman with the hard body in the bikini I first set eyes on at the Russian River. “France?”

“Yes. It’s said that the Blessed Mother appeared to Saint Bernadette back in the eighteen hundreds and it’s since become a Catholic pilgrimage. My mother has been devoted to the Blessed Mother her entire life,” I said. “She deserves to go.”

Mickie rinsed with mouthwash, spit again, then walked closer and put a hand on my shoulder. “No doubt. But you do realize there won’t be any miracles, Sam.”

“Last night and this morning were miracle enough for me,” I said.

Mickie smiled, closed lips. “Typical guy. You get laid, and the world becomes a Disneyland ride.”

I took Mickie’s hand. “I’m long past believing in miracles,” I said. “I just want to see her happy.”

“Do you think she could physically withstand the travel?”

“A commercial flight? No. No way.”

“Then how—”

“I’m going to make a call to David Patton,” I said, meaning the founder of Orbis. “I’m going to see if he’ll let me rent one of the planes.”

I could afford it. In 1997 I had been in Santiago de Cuba when Ernie called. “Do you remember that thirty thousand I forced you to invest in Cantwell Computers?”

I remembered, and I was familiar with the growth Ernie had predicted for Cantwell Computers since he used my money to purchase my initial shares of stock for pennies on the dollar. After repeated splits of the stock, I had no idea how many shares I owned in the company or their value. At the time, given my monastic lifestyle, I didn’t care.

“We just closed a deal with a software company,” Ernie had said. “Our stock has hit an all-time high. I hope you don’t mind, but I authorized your broker to sell. You did give me durable power of attorney when you left on your mission. Anyway, the bottom line is, you’re rich, Hill. You won the freaking lottery.”

And I had won the lottery, though it had changed my life very little. This was a chance to use the money to do some good.

“It’s a flying hospital,” I said to Mickie that morning. “If anything were to happen, she’d be well taken care of. There would, after all, be at least two doctors on board.” Mickie straightened. “I’m done traveling without you, Mickie.” A tear rolled down her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb, lifting her chin. It was the most vulnerable I had ever seen Mickie Kennedy since the night of my senior prom. “Besides,” I said, “I’ll need help with my father.”

And she punched me on the arm.





9

The doctors at Our Lady of Mercy advised against the trip; they said my mother would never withstand the travel, that it would be too arduous, too difficult. They pointed out that, after the plane landed, we would still need to take ground transportation to and from the airport into Lourdes. In the end, I left the decision to my mother.

She looked at her doctors as if they were all nuts. “It’s a pilgrimage,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”



We put two hospital beds in the plane’s audiovisual room just behind the classroom and pushed them together. My mother and my father held hands, giggled, and talked like schoolchildren on a field trip. My father looked and acted healthier than I had seen him in years. Though the stroke had taken the twinkle from his cobalt-blue eyes and dulled his facial expressions, he hung on every word my mother spoke, savoring each as if it might be her last, and I was certain I saw him smiling behind the mask.