The Last Noel (39 page)

His colleagues said she'd be dead in three months, in six at the most.

No, she wouldn't, he told them.

They started whole-brain radiation to reduce the pressure in the cranium as quickly as possible. Then the gamma knife. Directly at the tumor. They began giving her very high doses of steroids. They gave them to her four times a day, even when she began hallucinating.

Kaye told Johnny that his mother would have to stay in the hospital for a while; they had to take care of her headaches. He told Amma and Bunny that Noni had a malignant brain tumor that they were going to treat aggressively, but that surgery wasn't necessary. He told Shani he was scared.

Inoperable. Inoperable. Inoperable. The word stayed under Kaye's eyelids like the grit of sand. He was famous because he
could
operate. He pried open human chests and fixed the hearts inside them. He repaired and replaced and enlarged and grafted new to old, plastic to living tissue, metal to breathing flesh, he made hearts beat again and go on beating.

What good were his skillful careful hands to Noni, if he couldn't operate?

He called doctors at other hospitals. He studied through the nights. The latest papers. The Internet. Calls to the best in their fields. He took her to New York and Houston. He asked doctors in Switzerland and New Zealand for advice. He hounded and bullied the neurology and neurosurgery teams at Haver until finally a young oncologist complained to Shani that she needed to back her husband off.

Shani told the man, “Kaye's best friend is dying. Maybe you don't have one.”

To attack the tumor, they intensified the chemotherapy. New drugs, new protocols, experimental treatments. Anti-angiogenics, antibody-tagged chemotherapy molecules, on and on. Often, sleepless, drenched in sweat, Noni broke down into senselessness. Often, she was unable to stop crying. Often, she shouted and cursed. Often, nausea doubled her over in her bed, poisons trying to save her. Long words.

It was an unmerciful time.

“Fight for us,” Kaye had told her, day after day. “Johnny needs you.”

“How low can you go, Dr. King?” she had weakly smiled.

“Oh, so low,” he'd told her. “Low as I need to.”

Noni had fought as hard as she could.

And for a while, they had won. The tests said the tumor was gone. By summer, they could send her home. By the autumn, she was teaching again.

But now, Kaye saw how the enemy had hidden in waiting and then, in a surprise attack, had come screaming over the hilltop. Ten days ago, after Noni had searched for a word and couldn't find it, after she'd felt for a stair but fallen, they had brought her back into the hospital. They'd done new tests and found the tumor was back. Once again they had radiated her skull, once again they had put her on the powerful steroids. But
then they had talked together and frowned and written on her chart. They'd told Shani, and Shani had phoned Kaye in New York. The tumor was now pressing on Noni's brain stem and her brain stem was coning down very quickly, herniating into the spinal column, compressing the respiratory and cardiac centers. There was nothing they could do.

Snowlight through the window was bright enough for him to read the words on the chart. Astrocytoma. Stage IV. Glioblastoma multiforme. Inoperable.

Kaye turned to watch Noni lying quietly in the white bed, her eyes closed, her breath soft. On the white table beside the bed, there was a small photograph of Johnny in a gold frame. Beside it was a small black velvet bag. Kaye opened the bag and poured into his hand Noni's sapphire bracelet and earrings from her father, her mother's pearls, the broken silver chain with the heart, and the gold bracelet heavy with years of charms from Kaye.

She spoke without opening her eyes, “Put those back. Those are mine.”

He held up the chain. “We ought to fix this.”

“Stop trying to fix everything. For once, why don't you do what I tell you? Accept it. You can't fix me. Don't you know I'm older than you are?”

“Just for tonight you are, that's all.”

“If I died tonight, wouldn't I always be older than you are?”

He walked back to her bedside. “No, if you die tonight, you'll always be younger.”

“That's true, you'll be a grouchy old old man like Uncle Tat and I'll be young.” She opened her eyes, smiling. “Aren't I forty today?”

“Yes. You're forty and I'm thirty-nine.”

“Good. I didn't want to die in my thirties. It's just too goddamn sad.” She held out her arm to him. “Be my best friend.”

They looked at each other. Then slowly, gently, he removed the IV from her hand and cleaned her hand and bandaged it. Then he wrapped her carefully in his long warm coat and lifted her into his arms. She was so light and yet so heavy against his heart. When they reached the door, she gestured urgently back at the bed. He brought her back there so she could pick up the little picture of Johnny and the velvet bag of jewelry and slip them into the pocket of his jacket.

In the corridor, a nurse ran after them calling, “Sir! Sir!” until she saw who he was. Then she said, “Dr. King? Are you going to ICU? Should I call down?” He shook his head at her. “We'll get her on a gurney, Dr. King.”

Kaye kept walking. The nurse was shocked by the tears she saw falling down his face. She'd cried often on this hospital floor. She'd never seen Dr. King cry. She stopped following him.

Carrying Noni in his arms, Kaye walked out of the hospital and across the snowy lot to his car.

The storm was ending. The snowflakes fell unhurried, straight downward onto Noni's face. She tilted back her head, lifting her face to the snow and smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said, “for taking me home.”

It was dawn on Christmas Day, rose in the sky and deepest blue. The soft snow was settled on the lawn and fields and woods of Heaven's Hill. Everything familiar to Noni—shrubbery, urns and fences, cars, brick garden walls and rows of outbuildings—all had been changed by the snow into a beautiful strangeness.

She heard Kaye walking back to where he had brought her at dawn. She waited, wrapped in his coat, on the garden bench that overlooked the hill beside Clayhome, the hill that swept widely down through a meadow where in summer wildflowers grew. It was the highest hill for miles and it fell steeply away
through the knolls and gullies left by the earthen terraces, fell to the edge of the dark woods that guarded Heaven's Hill.

She would miss the seasons moving over the fields and the woods here. Sharp new greens after April rain, late summer's deep languid shade, the red and gold and orange of autumn trees, the quiet of snow. She would miss her first sight of white crocus in winter frost and the May morning when her early roses bloomed.

Everything returns, Noni thought. There is no loss, only change. In years to come, Johnny would be here, and Johnny's children, and the seasons would move for him over Heaven's Hill, as they had for her and for those before her, as the seasons would move with the turning earth over these fields and woods for Johnny's children and for generation after generation.

Had she said the right things in her letter to Johnny? All she could be sure of was that she had said the true things. Her hope, her faith, was that true things, told in love, would do more good than harm.

She hadn't planned to ask Shani to give Johnny the letter. She'd planned to leave the letter for Bunny to give him. But Shani had come into the hospital room the night they'd rushed her to the ICU. She'd come in, holding a folder, and she'd read the papers in it, and then she'd said, “I'm calling Kaye. Kaye needs to be here.”

When Noni had protested, Shani had come to the side of her bed and held Noni's hands and told her, “There's nobody in this world he's ever loved more than you. Of course he needs to be here.”

Everything had been in Shani's eyes, everything Noni had never said to her or to Kaye, had never asked, fearing to cause them pain. And Noni had felt so safe, so sure, looking up into
Shani's eyes, that she had spoken without waiting for any doubt to stop her. “I'm not going to survive this, am I?”

Shani looked at her, then slowly shook her head. “No.”

Noni nodded. “I want you and Kaye to take Johnny. Will you talk about it with Kaye?”

Shani looked a long while out the window, then she turned and nodded and said, “Yes.”

“Thank you.” Noni gestured to the bed table. “Will you give Johnny this letter when you think it's right?”

Shani took the letter, slipped it into the pocket of her white doctor's jacket.

Noni touched her hand. “You already knew.”

Shani brushed back the dampened hair from Noni's forehead. “Of course I knew. You think I don't know that man's ear, or his eyebrow, or his little finger when I see it?”

Tears fell along Noni's cheek and onto the pillow. “I didn't think it would be right to tell him.”

Shani placed Noni's hand on the cover. “I don't know whether he's thought about it or not. And neither does Amma. You know how she says, ‘Kaye King's the smartest fool alive.'”

Noni tried to smile. “I guess you better get him here.”

“I guess I better.”

She heard him before she could make out his shadow against the snow. And then he was standing beside her. The red childhood sled looked small in his arms.

“Stop frowning,” she told him. “It's the last thing I'm going to ask you.”

“You said taking you out of the hospital was the last thing you were going to ask me.”

“Ho ho.Why did I always think you were so funny?” Or she thought she said that. She couldn't tell now if the words were
coming out loudly enough for him to hear if she was even saying them or just thinking them. Perhaps, after all these years, he could hear her without her having to speak at all.

He lifted her carefully onto the sled at the steepest edge of the hill. “Hang on,” he told her and then he was at her back gently pushing, his shoulder leaning into hers, snow flurrying around them, and then he was jumping on behind, holding her to him.

Down the hill they glided, so much more slowly, more softly, more quietly than that first time, now, like a sled ride in a dream. She could feel him warm against her back, his arms around her, all the way down the long slope to the edge of the woods. They stopped against the snowy bank. Above the white trees, the darkening sky was luminous to her. They sat on the sled, not moving, his arms around her.

“Kiss me,” she said. But she didn't know if she said it aloud. She couldn't hear her words. But she felt his lips, chilled and soft, brush against her burning face, and then against her lips. “I love you,” she thought she told him. “I've loved you all my life.” His eyes looked down at her, dark gold, darker, and then lost in light.

He carried her into the room where they had first met and he placed her on the laced pillows and soft linens in the high tulipwood four-poster bed. Taking the quilt from her hope chest, he covered her with it and then he lay down beside her in the bed, holding her in his arms.