Precious and Fragile Things (13 page)

S
he woke again, this time to darkness. She'd thrown off the layers of blankets and now chills assaulted her. Gilly shuddered, twisting against the pillow and struggling to pull the covers back up. Just as she did, her cheeks flared with sudden, urgent heat.

She understood in the back of her mind that she was feverish but could do nothing about it. She seemed to float in the darkness, and without the bed beneath her to anchor her to the earth, Gilly wondered if she might have just floated all the way to heaven.

She groped for the cup of water. Her fingers tipped the cup, spilling it onto her pillow. She pressed her cheek against the welcome wetness, but all too soon even that brief chill was gone. The heat from her face was so great it dried the tiny spill in no time.

She thought about calling for Seth, knowing even as she did so that he wouldn't come. She couldn't exactly remember why
and didn't want to try. Where were her pills, the extrastrength antibiotics and heavy-duty decongestants that worked to make the pain in her head disappear?

She must be sicker now. Was she at home? Gilly had the sudden fear that her wish had come true. That she'd been hospitalized, taken from her children. Who was with them if she was here?

She cried their names, reaching into the blackness as though she might find their faces there beneath her fingertips. She found only frigid air and emptiness. Gilly plunged her hands back beneath the covers, hugging herself and burying her face in the pillow.

Someone had wrapped her in cotton. The thickness of it, the weight, surrounded her, pressed in on all sides. Someone had covered her eyes with gauze, so that even the blackness had taken on a fine white haze. Someone had gloved her hand, so that all she touched seemed faraway and unrecognizable.

Hands stroked her forehead. Fingers ran a delicate pattern down her cheek. Gilly turned her head, her hand trapped beneath the cotton and the gloves, unable to fight off the caresses she did not want.

“No,” she mumbled. “The drugs…it's not safe….”

Antibiotics interfered with the effectiveness of birth control pills. She couldn't let Seth make love to her, not this cycle, not without some other protection. They hadn't used other protection in years.

“No,” Gilly muttered as she gained the strength to push at the hands now slipping beneath her shoulders. “Don't touch me.”

Not until after her next period, when the cycle would be unaffected. But when would that be? Thinking was hard,
the effort enormous and ineffective, because she couldn't remember anyway. Two weeks? One? A few days?

“Don't touch me!” She found the force of will to say, and the hands underneath her slipped away and left her alone.

She had to get to the children. Baby Gandy was crying for her. Gilly's breasts tingled with a surge that meant it was feeding time.

Then she realized it was not baby Gandy sobbing for her to nurse him, but Arwen crying out for her. “Mama!” Then it was the two of them, crying her name over and over, the sound of it agonizing to hear.

She had to go to them, had to get to her babies. Gilly struggled free of the covers anchoring her to the bed. Even the darkness would not prevent her from finding them.

Her hands paddled at the air, swimming through it, but gaining no purchase. Her legs were leaden. She couldn't move them. She managed to push herself out of bed.

She hit the floor with a thud that jarred her head so badly she cried out. The ceaseless cries of “mama” stopped abruptly, and a sob of despair threatened to rip from her throat. Something was wrong with her babies. She had to get to them,
had
to.

The wood floor scraped at her cheek. Gilly pushed against it with little result, too weak to sit up, much less stand. Her breath whistled in her lungs, forcing her to cough until bright sparks flashed in her vision.

She couldn't breathe. Gilly gasped for air, but it felt like soup in her lungs, thick and suffocating. She struggled, choking and coughing, flopping on the floor.

Her mind cleared a little, and she remembered where she was. But she
had
heard someone saying “mama.” She hadn't
imagined it. Gilly pushed again at the floor, but couldn't really move.

The dark began to turn gray, but not because the sun was coming up. Fringes of red flickered in the gray. She was going to pass out.

She'd been sleeping a long time, she could sense that. Dozing in and out for hours. Maybe even days. But now true unconsciousness threatened, and Gilly fought it as though it were a physical being. The red fringes thickened and clung together, taking over the gray.

The darkness had been difficult, frightening but not terrifying. It was natural, part of the night. The gray and red were horrifying in their casual replacement of the simple darkness; the gray and the red were not outside of her, they were in her mind.

Her arms stiffened even as she twitched. Every meager breath she managed to take sounded like a freight train, rumbling. Gilly wheezed, unable to do anything more now than clutch at the pain in her head, squeezing her temples with frozen fingers.

She was losing the battle. She could not get up from the floor; she could not get to her children. She'd abandoned them. Even as unconsciousness threatened, her thoughts became clear.

The gray and the red had been replaced by blackness, black as ink, as tar, as eternity. Not the darkness of night, but of the void. Gilly fought it, too, but fared no better. She closed her eyes but the blackness followed her even there.

She would never see her children or Seth again. Whatever sickness she'd been fighting for the past few weeks had taken root and bloomed. Without medicine to battle it, and with the circumstances to aid it, it was going to overtake her.

She coughed again, feebly, unable to bring up the mess in her lungs stealing her ability to breathe. Gilly choked and choked, unable to stop.

Slow down. One breath at a time. Breathe in slow, breathe out slow.

It didn't help. Her breath was too thick. It lodged in her throat, refusing to get down into her lungs. The floor beneath her spun.

Was this it? The blackness filled her vision from side to side so there was nothing left. Gilly couldn't win.

Gilly dives to the bottom of the lake on a dare to retrieve a weighted ring. She makes it to the muddy bottom, finds the garish-colored piece of plastic, but the search has taken her too long. She hasn't gone more than a quarter of the way back to the surface before her lungs begin to burn. Halfway back her legs stop kicking hard enough to get her back to the surface in time.

She sees daylight, golden as it slants through green water, and beyond that the shimmery image of the wooden raft moored at the lake's center. She glimpses her friend's faces, watching, laughing, pointing. Gilly lets go of the weight, feels it knock against her ribs and snag the lilac nylon of her bathing suit. She reaches to the sky, grasps for the air, but cannot reach it.

What of all the boys she'll never kiss? The songs she'll never hear? She'll never finish school, marry, move from her parents' house. Regret and yearning give her enough strength to kick once, twice more, but it isn't enough. A flurry of bubbles, the last desperate few, escape her lips like butterflies dancing in the breeze.

Only one of her friends has seen her distress. David Phillips reaches one of his long arms down into the water and hauls Gilly out by her hair. She breaks the surface choking and gasping, breathing in deep. Shaking while everyone laughs. For the rest of the day, she endures the good-natured teasing of the group at losing the weight and thus
the dare, but Gilly won't so much as dip a toe in the water for the rest of that summer.

She'd only nearly drowned then, but she was going to drown now. This time there would be no hand reaching down to pluck her to safety. This time, she had so much more to regret losing.

She heard her name and thought it part of the dream. The voice came again, louder this time. Hands grasped her own and pulled. Gilly didn't fight the touch this time, recognizing they were saving her from drowning. From dying.

A light shone in her eyes, and at first she thought it must be the hand of God. She blinked, and the golden glow revealed Todd's face instead. Gilly felt instant relief and disappointment at the same time.

“Don't die, Gilly.” Todd's fingers bit into her wrists as he hauled her upright. “Don't die, please, don't die….”

He didn't put her back on the bed. He lifted her, and Gilly had time to think she must've lost weight, because he didn't stagger beneath her this time. Despite everything, she smiled. Would she be skinny, now?

He must have seen her smile and taken it for something else. “Jesus, Gilly. Don't you fucking die on me!”

“…easier for you…” she wheezed.

They were in the stairway now, her feet and head thumping on the narrow walls with every step.

“Shut up.” He grunted with the effort of carrying her. So she wasn't skinny, after all.

“…what you want…”

“It's not what I want, goddamn it!” At Todd's shout pain flared again behind her eyes, but Gilly welcomed that pain as a good sign. She wasn't slipping away any more.

He plopped her down on the ugly plaid couch; her head
banged on the arm. He left her to light the propane lantern on the table. Gilly managed to stay upright, though without the support of his arms she barely had the strength. All at once it seemed like someone had taken a huge vacuum cleaner and sucked the garbage right out of her lungs and nose. She could breathe again, albeit with a wheezing, grumbling snort, but she
could.

If she could breathe, that also meant that she could cough. The first bout brought up a bunch of gunk that she spit into the palm of her hand, not caring how disgusting that was. Mothering had made her immune to bodily fluids. She'd had worse on her fingers. The second bout of coughing brought a fine spray of blood from her lips.

The green mucus disgusted her, but the blood scared her. With trembling hands she took the wad of paper towels Todd handed her and wiped her hand and mouth. She waited to see if more blood would come, perhaps a gout of it, but it didn't. It looked even worse on the paper towel, small blots of crimson against the white paper. She crumpled it in her fingers so she wouldn't have to see.

He hovered over her. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I need a doctor.”

He shook his head. “I can't get you one.”

“I need medicine.”

He held up his hands helplessly. “I don't have any. Just aspirin.”

Another cough swelled in the back of her throat, but she was afraid to let it out. She swallowed convulsively to get rid of the tickle. The feeling of thick snot draining down the back of her throat sickened her, but vomiting would be worse than the coughing.

Another round of chills racked her, clattering her teeth.
More pain stabbed behind her eyes and in the hollows beneath them. In her cheeks, too, and her ears, which popped mercilessly with every swallow. Gilly rocked with the pain, body jerking. Todd paced the floor in front of her, each stride long enough to take him out of her area of view and then back into it again as he turned. With nearly every step his calf rubbed against the couch until not even the shaking and the pain in her head could stop her from yelling, even though her shout came out as no more than a hissing whisper.

“Stop that. You're shaking me.”

He stopped and dropped to his knees beside her. “I don't know what to do.”

She was sick, sicker than she'd ever been in her adult life, and yet she
still
had to be the one in charge. To take care of herself. Resentment burbled in her, but she didn't have the strength to do anything about it.

“Blankets” was all she managed to get out before another round of coughs ripped through her. “Hot tea…”

Todd put his hand gently on her arm, timidly, as though afraid she would order him to take it off. She didn't have the strength for it, and now it didn't seem like such a big deal. Like so much else that had happened over the past few days, what difference did it make any longer?

When he saw she wasn't going to yell, he bent forward to look at her. “You got to tell me what to do.”

Wasn't that what she was doing? Gilly clenched her jaw to keep herself from biting her tongue. “Get me some blankets, some hot tea. Some more aspirin.”

“Okay.”

An idea struck her like a hammer between the eyes, so hard and strong she gasped and coughed. “The truck!”

“It's wrecked,” Todd said. “I can't drive it anywhere. Shit, it might be totally gone, I told you that.”

“Not drive,” Gilly managed. “In the truck. Medicine. It's in the center console. You didn't bring it.”

“I didn't know,” he started, sounding defensive, but Gilly shushed him.

She'd stopped at the pharmacy just before going to the ATM. Her prescription, the decongestants and antibiotics, were in the truck. She gripped his arm, her fingers slipping and falling away without strength. “Just go. Try. I have pills in there. They'll help.”

He left her, and was back in a moment with an afghan he tucked around her tightly. Todd tucked the edges around her, smoothing them. And after that, Todd didn't come back for a long time.

Gilly closed her eyes. Sleep took her again almost instantly, but it was fretful. She twisted on the couch, coughing relentlessly every time it seemed she'd drift off. Her neck and back cramped from the force of it, and shudders still swept over her.

Had she ever felt this bad? If she had, she couldn't remember it. There'd never been time to be sick when she was a kid, not when she had to be awake and alert to take care of her mother, who was hardly ever well. Even in later years, when Gilly came down with everything the kids did and often twice as hard, she didn't get “sick days.”