Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(20)
A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)…
With the second line of verse, she recalled the source: Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot.
She took some comfort from the fact that though her body seemed to have seceded from her soul, her mind remained clear and still part of her kingdom. Fragments of other Eliot lines came to her:
Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered…
Bibi drifted away once more into a nothingness that might have been a more solemn oblivion than mere sleep.
Later she revived in a panic, acutely aware of the severe decline in her condition. Paralysis. Blindness. Her tongue cinched into a knot that would not allow her the grace of words. She had gone downhill faster than rhyming Jill after she tripped over the idiot Jack. Suddenly the Big Question was whether chemo and radiation made any sense in her case, or whether the better course of treatment, the more humane course, would be to give her a box of morphine lollipops and let her suck her way out of this world in some hospice run by kindly nuns. Valiant girl or not, she wanted to cry for herself, but if she wept, she could not feel the heat of tears or the tracks they made down her face.
She woke again in the night, and this time she could open her eyes and see by the dimmed lamp above her bed. The orientation of her body became obvious to her, as well: She was lying on her right side, facing the first—still empty—bed, and the door at the farther end of the room.
That door opened and a man entered, backlit by the hall light as he approached. Even when the door eased shut behind him, closing off the light, he remained a silhouette. Bibi saw the leash as he arrived between the beds. Earlier someone had put down the railing. The dog stood on its back legs, forepaws on the mattress, favoring Bibi with the fabled smile of its breed: a golden retriever. Perhaps more than any other breed, goldens had unique faces, and although for a moment she thought that this was Olaf, it was not.
This was just some Good Samaritan with a therapy dog named Brandy or Oscar or whatever. These days, hospitals were veritable dog parks, with hordes of well-meaning people trying to make the sick and the depressed get with the uplift program. She had seen others like these two since being admitted as the poster girl for aggressive tumor maturation, and they were all sweet, the people and the dogs, though she declined their determined efforts to help her find the giggles in gliomatosis.
Her left hand lay palm-down upon the mattress. She could see it but not move it.
The dog began to lick her hand, and at first she couldn’t feel that canine caress. Soon, however, her sense of touch returned, and the warm wet tongue working between her fingers filled her with a wild hope. To her surprise, she broke her paralysis, moved the hand, and repeatedly smoothed the fur on the retriever’s noble head.
As she petted the dog, their eyes met. She knew that hers were dark and unrevealing, but the retriever’s were so gold and luminous and deep that its gaze stirred something within her. That lustrous stare awakened the slumbering child that Bibi had once been, the easily enchanted girl who, in recognition of inevitable adulthood, had taken a page from the book of bears and had hibernated through a long winter.
When the dog dropped from the bed, Bibi said, “No, please,” but the visitors moved away.
At the door, as he opened it just wide enough to slip out into the hall, the man turned to look back, still just the outline of a man, and said, “Endeavor to live the life….”
Bibi had heard those words before, although in her current condition she could not quite remember when.
Alone in the near dark, she could not decide if something extraordinary had happened or if she had hallucinated the encounter.
She flexed her left hand, which was still moist with the dog’s saliva. She could feel her body to all its extremities. She wiggled her toes. When she tried to roll onto her back, she had no difficulty doing so.
As a great weariness descended, she wondered if she was awake or dreaming. In the absence of the loving dog, whether or not it had been real, a bleak sense of isolation pierced her, and she felt alone and lost. Her voice shamed her for the misery it revealed. Valiant girls did not so boldly disclose the distress of mind and heart, but it was all there in his name when she spoke it—“Paxton, Pax. Oh, Pax, where are you?”—and then a wave of darkness washed her into sleep or something like it.
The head-shed—senior commander—planners called it Operation Firewalk. They had an endless supply of colorful names for special-ops missions, some of them literary, which proved they had gotten a well-rounded education at Annapolis. There would be no firewalk, no doves from scarves, no lady sawn in half, no other illusions that made magicians’ audiences applaud, just a street-level strike that should be, to the bad guys, as unexpected as an earthquake.
Paxton Thorpe and three guys on his team had come down from the cold hills in the night, having taken two days to make their way from the insertion point, where the helicopter left them, to the outskirts of the town. Had they been dropped closer, the helo noise would have been an announcement no less revealing than if they had been preceded by a bluegrass band on a flatbed truck draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. They wouldn’t have been able to cross the open ground and enter those streets without being cut down.
Surrounding the town were fields once tilled, now fallow. The last planting had never been harvested. Months of searing heat and stinging cold and skirling winds had threshed the crops and withered the remaining stems into finely chopped straw and dust, all of it so soft that it produced little sound underfoot. Depending on where he stepped, Pax caught a musty scent that reminded him of the feed bins and hayloft in the barn on the Texas ranch where he had been raised.