(2006) When Crickets Cry (36 page)

I am ashes where once I was fire.

I stood on the beach, straddling that narrow ridge upon which I had built my home. I turned, not really knowing where to go or what to do, and saw Cindy highlighted by the moon, her faded, ankle-length flannel gown almost translucent in the light. She didn't say a word, but on her face, I saw shared pain.

"I need to show you something," I said.

She swallowed and nodded slowly.

"You're going to be angry, but I need to show you." I took her by the hand, led her upstairs, and unlocked the door to my office. I turned on the light and stepped aside so she could go in.

On the walls hung the diplomas and degrees and special medical recommendations of Jonathan Reese Mitchell. Hung about the room and sitting on the desktop and shelves were pictures of Dr. Donny Mitchell with his patients-each one smiling and alive. On my desk sat a stethoscope, a key to a small city in south Georgia given me by the mayor whose bypass had gone flawlessly, various old retired pacemakers or mechanical hearts that I used for paperweights. Beneath the window sat a teaching model of the heart, about the size of a child's football. Filtered in and around all of this were pictures of Emma and me. Charlie was in many of them as well. And scattered around my desk were the medical files and records of Annie Stephens I had retrieved off-line.

Cindy walked the perimeter of the room, her mouth open, her fingers walking the edges of the frames and the lines of the windowsill. Finally she sat at my desk, saw the files, the work in progress, and all the pieces fell into place with a thunderclap.

Waves of emotion flashed across her face like the northern lights: confusion, anger, hurt, betrayal. Each appeared, disappeared, bled seamlessly into the next. "How could you?" she whispered.

"It's a long story."

Cindy rose from the chair, walked to the edge of the office, slid down against the wall, and tucked her knees up into her chest. She didn't say a word, but her rigid body language told me all I needed to hear.

I took a deep breath and started with the pictures of Emma and Charlie and me as kids. I told her about our childhood, Emma's medication, the faith healers, her parents' struggle, high school, our falling in love, college, getting married, medical school, Dr. Trainer, Nashville, my fascination with transplantation, the trip to Atlanta, Emma's worsening condition, and our dinner with Royer. I told her about my work, about putting together the team, and then about our last weekend at the lake. And when I got to that story, I told her almost all of it.

Four o'clock in the morning found us spent, aching, not knowing what to say.

After a silence that lasted a long time, Cindy spoke in a broken whisper. "Reese, I'll only ask you one time. If you say no, I'll kindly ask you to take us home. But if you say yes, I want you to say it completely. I don't want half of you, because Annie needs all of you. I want to know right now, will you save Annie?"

Sitting on the floor, beneath the shadow of all that I once was and everything I had once hoped to be, I said yes. The word formed slowly and came up from someplace deep, recessed behind my soul where the nerve endings to my heart tingled with feeling.

Cindy took a deep breath, looked around the room, and shook her head. And for a long time, we just sat there, letting the truth sink in, or drain out, depending on where you sat. We didn't speak for almost an hour.

I finally stood and said, "I've got one more thing to do. I need to tell Charlie."

She looked confused. "Doesn't he know everything already?"

"Not everything."

"Do I?"

"No, but I need to tell him first."

She nodded, and as I walked out onto the dock, I turned and saw that she had followed me out and was standing on the porch, arms crossed but shoulders relaxed. She called softly, "You mind if I call Royer?"

"No. I mean, I don't mind. Tell him I'll be in touch." I looked across the lake, then back at her. "Maybe later this afternoon."

I dived in, pulled myself up on Charlie's dock, and was met by Georgia's licking. She wagged her tail and then ran back over to Charlie, who sat on the bottom steps, harmonica in hand, playing quietly to himself. He heard me climb up on the dock, wring the water out, and then sit down beside him.

He spoke first. "You told her?"

"Yeah."

"How'd she take it?"

I looked through the trees and saw her rocking slowly on the porch, looking out over the lake. "I'm not sure ... I mean, she's shocked and she's angry, but I guess she took it okay."

Charlie nodded and turned the harmonica in his fingers. "So you finally came over here to say the thing that's been on the tip of your tongue for five years and yet you haven't had the guts to tell me?"

I was stunned.

Charlie leaned against the railing and turned to me. He ran his fingers along my face and then held my face in his hands. "Stitch ... I'm blind, not stupid." He put his hands down and waited.

"Somewhere in medical school," I said, looking down at my hands, ashamed, "I began taking them. I'm not excusing it, but between the days on end with no sleep, the pressures and the responsibilities, I found what I needed in several different meds. They allowed me to stay awake long hours, work more focused, and then sleep short amounts of time." I paused. "They also allowed me to come home heavy with sleep, lie in bed with Emma, and listen to her heart beat." I closed my eyes and ran my fingers through my hair. "I wanted ... I wanted to know that she was alive. The drugs let me live beyond what my body was capable of. They let me ..." I shook my head.

Charlie took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"That went on through my residency, through my specialty in transplantation. I told myself that once we got past the surgery, I'd cut back, cut them out altogether, go someplace to get clean if I had to, that I was only doing it for Emma, for us. But that never happened. The night Emma died, I had ... I had taken several earlier in the day ... more than I'd ever taken, to help me through the transplant of a lady named Shirley. When I got home, I was coming down and ... by that time, I hadn't slept in almost four days. Then we laid down, and I couldn't hold it off anymore. I crashed.

"When I woke and heard the crash in the kitchen, I was so ... well, I hadn't been that tired in a long time. For the last week, I'd been trying to plan, put the team together, think ahead, make sure I had everything I needed ..." I was quiet for a moment. "I think she tried to wake me for probably close to thirty minutes. Slowly at first, then more ... more violently as her pain grew."

Charlie ran his fingers along my arm and felt the faint scars of Emma's claw marks.

"Charlie, if she'd been able to wake me ... we wouldn't be having this conversation."

Charlie stood, walked to the edge of the dock, sank his hands in the water, and splashed his face. Then he sat down against a piling and pulled his knees up just as the first signs of the sun crept above the trees.

"Stitch," he said, "I never expected to see my sister graduate high school, let alone have a twenty-first birthday. And if you'd told me when we were kids that I'd get to stand as the best man in her wedding, I'd have said you were smoking something. Emma lived to be thirty because you gave her the hope that she might live past that." Charlie shook his head.

"That girl loved you, brother. You gave her twenty more years than anyone else on the planet could have ever given her. That had little to nothing to do with your ability as a doctor, but it had everything to do with you as a person. You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn't the kind you were thinking of."

He laughed to himself. "Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes." Charlie stood, walked over to me, and squatted.

I looked up and saw his chiseled face searching mine.

"I was thinking just today about Helen Keller and the day Annie Sullivan took her down to the pump house and thrust her hand beneath the flowing water and then wrote w-a-t-e-r in her hand. When Helen realized that cool, liquidy stuff flowing through her fingers was w-a-t-e-r, something inexplicable happened. She said that `living word awakened her soul, gave it light, hope, joy, and set it free."'

Charlie stood up and reached for my hand. I gave it to him, and he walked me to the edge of the dock, knelt down, thrust my hand into the water, and brought his face just inches from mine. I felt his breath on my face and saw the strain behind his eyes while the tears cascaded off his face. Charlie's words were pained. "Close your eyes."

I did.

He waved my hand through the water and said, "You were that water for Emma." Charlie leaned in closer. "I'd like my eyes back, Reese, but I'm not waiting around. I'm living. And that's the thing. You're not. I'm soaking it in, feeling every minute, and you're the walking dead." He gripped my face with a stern hand and turned my chin up toward my house.

"Emma died. Not you. But I swear, you might as well have. Now, there's a little girl up there who's God's spitting image of my sister. Some people never get their chance at redemption, but .. He let go and shook his head. "Yours is up there sleeping."

I walked to the edge and stood, staring back at Charlie. "Charlie ... I'm ..."

"You're one of the smartest people I've ever known, but you don't always catch on too fast."

"How's that?"

"I forgave you the night it happened. How else do you think I've been living here across the creek from you? If I was all torn up about it, you think I'd be living here, day in and day out, rowing up and down this lake? I don't even like to row."

"You don't?"

"No." Charlie laughed. "It's boring as all get out, and it's not like the scenery is any good."

"How come you never told me?"

Charlie shrugged. "You're my best friend. Besides, it gets me out of the house and keeps my heart in shape. And that's important," he said, laughing and patting his chest, "'cause Lord knows I don't want you cutting on me."

He pointed to the house while Georgia leaned against his leg. "Go on. You got some explaining to do, and the little girl ain't gonna understand it in the same way the woman did."

"Yeah," I said, looking back at the house, "I know that."

nnie lay on a reclining chair, surrounded by pillows and a blanket, a picture of Emma ten years ago. I sat down and she sat up. "Annie, I want to tell you a story."

Cindy sat close by, elbows on her knees, hands tucked under her chin.

"When I was your age, I fell in love with a girl whose heart was very much like yours."

"What? You mean sick?"

"No." I shook my head and smiled. "Full of love."

Annie smiled too, enjoying the game we seemed to be playing.

"As we grew older, we did discover that her heart was like yours in another way. It too was sick. Very sick."

"As sick as mine?"

"In some ways, worse. In other ways, not so bad. On a scale of one to ten, you two are bringing up the bottom end."

Annie nodded like she already knew that.

I continued. "So, thinking I could make her better, I spent most of my life studying how to do just that. Eventually . . . I became a doctor ... and got pretty good at fixing sick hearts."

Annie began to look confused and listened more intently.

I took her hand and placed it inside mine. "I even took good hearts out of brain-dead people and-"

Annie's face turned white.

"-put them in people who needed them."

Her look of disbelief grew.

I nodded. "Dr. Royer was my partner and-"

Annie interrupted me. "You're the miracle maker?" She looked around the room as the conversation swirled about her mind.

"Let me show you something." I held out my hand and led her to the office. She turned in a slow circle, looking all around. I started to speak, but she stopped me.

"How come you didn't ... why.. ."

I picked up a picture of Emma, taken just weeks before she died. "Because I made some mistakes and ... I've never really stopped paying for them."

Annie looked at the picture, then at me. "Did your wife die because of something you did?"

I stood for a moment while the question settled in me. "Yes."

"Did you do something wrong?"

I nodded.

Annie sat down and looked around the room for several minutes. Finally she stood and walked into my arms and laid her head on my shoulder. She was pale, tired, breathing shallow breaths.

I carried her out to the porch and set her in a chair. Cindy wrapped her in a blanket. Annie finally opened her eyes and looked at me. The look was transparent and deep, and both scared and soothed me. Finally she said, "Will you be my doctor?"

For the first time in more than five years, I took in a breath deep enough to fill me. "Yes."

month passed. A month of long days, quiet nights, and every minute attuned to the possible rattling hum of a pager vibrating across the tabletop. To simplify all our lives, Cindy and Annie stayed at my house. With no mold in the air, Annie improved slightly, even regaining some strength. Cindy too. She relaxed, slept a little more, and some of the color returned to her face-a face that never failed to greet me with a smile. Charlie seemed to like his new neighbors, because most nights he'd entertain its with his humorous antics and harmonica.