SUMMER of FEAR (11 page)

"It's a different situation, Isabella. I believe that now we have
more to gain."

"You mean less to l-lose."

"I suppose you can look at it that way."

Nesson outlined the procedure, its risks and possible benefits, what we
might gain and what we might lose.

"What are my chances of waking up a spat-spat-spit-dribbling
vegetable?"

Nesson said that 90 percent of these procedures were done without that
kind of damage.

"Well, my chances of getting a brain tumor in the first place were
one in about two hundred thousand. Your odds one in t-t-ten. Not g-good, if
you're me."

"I'd like you to think about it. Any surgical procedure has its
risks. This is not urgent. Yet."

I rolled Isabella back to the car in silence. When we were inside, she
turned to me. "Does the insurance cover it?"

"Of course."

"But I don't
want
them in my head."

"No. That's okay."

"It terrifies me, Russ, worse than anything in the world. I don't
think I'd ever out come of it."

"Then I won't let them take you in."

We spilled from the dark parking structure into the dazzling sunshine of
early July.

"Will you do me a favor, R-R-Russ? Take us to the grove? We could
get some sandwiches, okay?"

"My
pleasure," I said, smiling, heart heavy, hands tight on the steering
wheel. I wanted to crush things and cry a curse the Maker at the top of my
lungs, but this was not the time. It was never the time.

The grove was an
orange grove—Valencias, in fact—one of the last still owned by the SunBlesst
Company, once operated under the hard scrutiny of my father, Theodore Francis
Monroe.

What
made the grove important to Isabella and me was a Sunday evening six Septembers
ago, after a day I had spent making the ranch rounds on horseback with my
father—checking the irrigation, the fruit sugar levels, the poacher and pest
damage.

It had been a typical day for me and my father: polite, given mostly to
the exchange of professional complaints, which for him always meant the
shrinking acreage of SunBlesst Ranch. The day was, on my part at least, less
than fully felt. I loved him, but there was a cynicism in my father that he
cultivated as carefully as he did his citrus crop, a hardness that left him
somehow both unlikable and untouchable. He had tried to pass along those things
to me, as if they were gifts, and I accepted them—especially when I was with
him. I always felt stronger when I left him, though a little smaller, too. But
like most men who protect themselves with toughness, my father revealed his
tenderness inadvertently, unbeknownst to himself. There were three things I
never saw him handle with anything but deference and care: my mother, Suzanne;
the oranges on his trees; and the men—mostly Mexicans—who worked for him.
Looking back at him now, I will say that he was, and still is, the most
fiercely paternal man I've known, paternal in the atavistic sense of protecting
his mate, guarding his cave, commanding his pack of underlings, and treating
outsiders with extreme suspicion— particularly males, especially, of course,
those most like himself. I will say, too, that despite my efforts to rise above
him in the way that all sons try to better their fathers, his imprint is upon
me with all its faults and blessings. I am truly my father's son. It was that
fact, more than anything, that left me mystified by Amber Mae Wilson's
peremptory employment of my "pollen" and my subsequent dismissal, and
that left me blindly, numbly, stupidly infuriated by the way that Grace had
been removed from my life before ever really becoming a part of it. My father,
needless to say, had been horrified by everything about Amber Mae, except for
her astonishing beauty. They came to hate each other.

Toward evening, my father and I shook hands outside the ranch house and
I left. My mother sent me off with a boxful of food—Russell the bachelor, even
at thirty-four still spoiled by his mom. But rather than heading home, I drove
down one of the dirt roads that ran along the crest of a hill, wound along the
edge of an emerald green grove, then ended in a place that had always been my
favorite piece of ground in the entire SunBless Ranch. This corner of the grove
was originally where the laborer: would gather for lunch and, on Friday
evenings, dinner. At first--- years ago, my father said—there had been just a
table that the workers had made of old upturned cable spools. The chair: were
orange crates borrowed from the packing house. But a: time went on and—I found
out later—with my father's help, a few trees had been relocated, a large
palapa
had been built, eight long picnic tables were set up around a square
of raked and packed earth, and an impressive ceramic fountain featuring a
creature-laden St. Francis of Assisi was placed near the road at the entrance
of the "cantina." My father had T'd off of an irrigation pipe to
divert enough water to keep the fountain full and flowing.

As a boy, I had spent many hours there, some with the laborers, some on
the weekends, when I could be alone to sit in the shade, listen to the water
spill around St. Francis's sandaled feet, and look out at the green continent
of citrus to the south or to the dry, tormented hillsides to the west. I danced
with my first girl there, on the packed ground between the tables, on a Friday
night some thirty years ago. I got drunk for the first time in my life there at
that "cantina," the same night as my first dance, I believe. When my
heart was broken in the fourth grade by a girl named Cathy, I'd spent weekends
for two whole months in the shade of the
palapa,
writing her letters
that I never mailed, feeling profoundly sorry for myself. You can leave me, I
remember thinking, but I'll always have
this.
Boo-hoo.

Of course, this corner of the grove had changed by the time I arrived
that Sunday evening in September, after spending the day with my father. The
shrinking SunBlesst Ranch meant fewer workers, and fewer workers meant less
life. No one worked Sundays anymore.

I'd parked and walked toward the now-tilting, algae-stained fountain and
looked at the aging
palapa.

And to my surprise, someone sat at one of the tables in the shade,
looking back.

What struck me first was the whiteness of her blouse against the green
background of trees behind her. The rest of her seemed to blend with those
trees, as if she were a part of them and they had allowed her to stray just far
enough to use the table, as if they could snatch her back at any second. As I
walked closer, she came into relief: a young woman, her hair pinned up in a
haphazard knot, an open book lying on the table in front of her, regarding me
with calm, very dark brown eyes.

"Sorry to bother you," I said.

"No bother at all, unless you've got some
planned."

"Just a visit to one of my favorite places on
earth."

"Mine, too. Sundays are the best."

I took my eyes off her, looked quickly around the "cantina,"
then at her again. She wore simple silver hoops in her ears, which shone subtly
against her black hair and toffee-colored skin.

"What
are you reading?" I asked, strictly as an excuse to keep looking at her.

"Wallace
Stevens." She picked up the book, looked at me, then down at the page. I
noted her ringless left hand with a thrillingly inappropriate satisfaction. She
read:

Slowly the ivy on the stones

Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields

And men in waves become the sea.

'"The
Man with the Blue Guitar,"' I said. I'd never been so thankful to have
known a poem in my whole life, and probably never will be again.

She smiled for the first time, a small smile with something pleased in
it. "I'm reading it with John Rowe out at the university."

"I read it with Bob Peters. Same school. That was a long time
ago."

She set down the book. "Do you work here?"

"My father is the manager."

"Mine's one of the supers—-Joe Sandoval."

"I've met him. Russell Monroe," I said.

"Isabella Sandoval."

Then a silence pried its way between us, and I couldn’t think of
anything to say. She smiled at me again, then reached down to the bench and
hauled up a rather large canvas to bag. Out came two beers.

"I'd offer you a bite to eat, but all I brought was this,” she
said.

"I'd offer you a drink, but all I have is about twenty pound of
food. I'll get some, okay? It's right there in the car. My mother made it. It's
always real good."

She suddenly pulled a serious face, then nodded. By the time I came back
with Mom's generous box of provisions, Isabella Sandoval was laughing directly
and undisguisedly at me.

In that moment, I saw myself as she did: a big thirty four-year-old dope
carrying around a picnic box packed by his loving mother, offering to share it
with a pretty girl he'd met two minutes ago. I laughed at myself with her—red
in the face, she told me later—and it came out strongly, that laughter, up from
a place I kept hidden from my father's cynicism and from my own dull
convictions about what it meant to be a man.

I fell in love
with Isabella's laugh then, and a few hours later, I had begun to fall in love
with the rest of her. I, quite literally, could not take my eyes off of her. It
was the purest, widest, most simple emotion I had ever felt, and I've never
experienced anything close to it since. I believed then that it was enough to
last a lifetime. But all that seemed—as we drove there from the hospital six
years later—much, much more than a lifetime ago.

I eased the car
up to the grove and swung it around so Isabella's walk would be as short as
possible. Her cane tips left two perfect rows of circles in the soil on each
side of her. It seemed to take hours to go a few yards. She started to fall and
I caught her.

When we got her settled at one of the tables under the
palapa,
Isabella took off her baseball cap and I set out the food. She gave me an
inquiring look when I brought my flask from the car and stood it on the old
redwood table.

"You forgot the beer," I said, smiling.

Isabella smiled back. I drank.

We ate as the sun drew itself together over the western hills and
started its slow summertime descent. The whiskey went straight to my center,
then spread outward, suggesting velocity. Neither of us spoke. Few things are
as agonizing in this life as a magical place bereft of its magic. The trees and
hills around us assumed a fierce specificity in the evening light; each clod of
earth and grain of soil seemed isolated, blindingly singular.
Whiskey,
I
thought,
blur this moment.

"Are you okay?" Isabella asked.

"I'm okay."

"I don't need s-s-surgery, do I?"

"No." I drank. A pair of doves split the sky above us wi the
squeak of dry wheels—tight wings, diminishing shape gone. What speed, what
motion!

"I wouldn't blame you if you went away for a wall," she said.
"For a
while."

"I don't want to be away."

"If I were you, I would."

"I'd still be with you, even if I was
gone."

"Anchored to be. To
me."

"No," I said quietly, while a voice inside me screamed Yes!
Yes! Anchored! Buried! Chained!
Drink!

"Do you remember what you said the last time we talked about
the... the...
this?"

I didn't.

"You said that tay—taying, staying with me was the nob thing to
do."

"I didn't mean that in a bad way."

"And I don't want it to be noble for you to stay with me I w-w-wanted
to take care of you. Because you're a hard man and I know you need somebody. I
want it to be me."

"It is you, Isabella—only you." Liar!
Cheat! Fool!
Drink

"I wish we could make love again."

"It's my fault."

"You could close your eyes."

"I know."

"I don't want you going somewhere else for
it."

"Never. I want you." I drank deeply. The sun inched dov in the
sky. I looked for a moment at my hands, how dry and tough and veined they were.

"You know what the w-w-worst thing is?"

I shook my head. There seemed like so many to choose
from.

"Losing you."

I stood up and, taking my flask, walked to the edge of the clearing,
behind Isabella.

"I won't let that happen," I said. "It cannot happen.
It's the one thing they can't take away."

Then my eyes were suddenly burning and I closed them, but the tears came
scalding out. I lifted the flask and drained it. There was never enough.

"Oh," I heard her say from behind me.
"Oh,
Russ...

shit"

When I turned to look, her head was tilted sharply to the right, her
face twitching, and her right shoulder was drawn up, convulsing. Her eyes were
wide. I could see her arm jerking as if wired straight into high voltage.