THE LAST BOY (58 page)

“Where's she now?”

“Up at the hospital. She's really sick. I’m back home with the twins. I don’t quite know what to do.”

Molly called Tripoli, who came straight home. She left him with little Rachel and went directly to the hospital.

They had Rosie in a semi-private room, screened off from the other occupant. When Molly saw her, she could hardly believe what she saw. Rosie's skin was completely yellowed. Her cheeks looked as though they had collapsed. She was being catheterized, and they had bottles of saline and drugs plugged into her veins.

Rosie slowly turned her head, and when she noticed Molly standing at the foot of her bed she gave a weak smile.“Liver cancer,” she said hoarsely.

Molly, unable to speak, took her hand.

“Just like I thought,” said Rosie. “Every day when I worked at
that body shop they were poisoning me.” Then she started to cry quietly.“I wanted so bad to see my boys grow up and now I’ll never have the chance.”

Molly wanted to say that it wasn’t like that at all, that Rosie would survive this, but even without talking to the doctors she could see it wasn’t true. She couldn’t even brave the lie. So she sat with Rosie silently holding her hand, sat with her for a couple of hours until Rosie drifted off to sleep.

Molly's mind was in turmoil. She worried about the twins, tried to envision what would happen to them in Rosie's absence and who would care for them. She felt heartsick. Wrapped up in her own problems, her pregnancy, and her writing and her life with Tripoli, she had neglected Rosie. She knew Rosie hadn’t been well, yet she hadn’t bothered to visit her, making do with phone calls. And then there was that lie, that wall she had erected.

She headed down the Trumansburg Road back into town, cut over the inlet bridge, and drove to Spencer Street.

Ed was beside himself. “They told us it's bad. Very bad. She doesn’t have much time left.” He broke down and wept in the kitchen, sopping up his tears with Rosie's apron that lay abandoned on the counter.“I love her so much, and now…I don’t know how I can go on,” he confessed. He had to look after Rosie, keep on working, take care of the babies. He was trying to get one of Rosie's cousins to lend a hand. Or somebody in his family.

“We’ll help. You don’t need to worry about that. Trip and I are here. You can count on us.”

Weekdays, while Ed held down his job, Molly had three children. Three pairs of diapers to change. Two sets of bottles and meals to prepare while she nursed Rachel. Mounds of dirty laundry that needed washing.

Nevertheless, with Tripoli's help, she squeaked in time to keep
reading and writing. “I couldn’t manage all this without you,” she said, following Tripoli as he carried out a heavy basket of laundry to hang on the line.

“I didn’t exactly plan to spend half my life running a daycare,” he said, wrestling a sheet, a pair of clothes pins gripped in his teeth. “But you gotta do what you can. Poor Rosie.”

Ed came by each night after visiting Rosie at the hospital and picked up the twins. Often, however, he was so exhausted that he crashed right there on their sofa, too tired to even eat, and they tiptoed around him, letting him sleep the night.

Rosie came home from the hospital and her Aunt Betty took care of her days, leaving Ed to attend to her at night. When Molly went to see her, she was now so weak she couldn’t even get out of bed to urinate, and had to ask for a bedpan. It was hard to fathom the speed with which she was wasting away. Ed kept besieging the doctors. What about chemotherapy? he kept asking. Okay, if not that, then a liver transplant. But the cancer had already spread to her adjoining organs, to Rosie's spleen and pancreas. It also appeared to be metastasizing into her bones and spine leaving Rosie in almost constant pain.

Finally, Molly suggested to Ed that he consider moving her to the hospice.

“
Hospice?
” he repeated with a shudder. It meant the end of the road, and he couldn’t bring himself to even contemplate the prospect. Molly realized that the trip had already been started a long time ago.

In order to be home to help Molly during the day, Tripoli pulled as much night duty as he could. In the city, the deadening heat lingered on through the long fall nights, and cruising the streets at three in the morning, Tripoli could still see people sitting on their stoops and porches dressed in sweaty undershirts and shorts trying to catch the
relief of a breeze. Paradoxically, crime in the city was down. There were fewer stickups and burglaries, fewer domestics and assaults. People were just too wrung out from the heat to fight, steal, or otherwise disturb the peace.

Tripoli spent the hours of daybreak watering the garden and picking the daily crop while Molly and the baby still slept in the silent house. He was thankful that they had a good, deep-drilled well. Other peoples’ wells had run dry and they were hauling water from the lake—a once pure and glacially deep lake that was now sprouting smelly algal blooms along the shore.

In his pocket, Tripoli still carried the tracing he had made from the old Hermit's book. And when, moving through town in the dead of night, he started thinking about the fish gasping in the lake, about his neighbors squeezed by food prices as they struggled to put meals on the table for their kids, when he permitted his horizon to expand and consider the problems of people elsewhere in the state, the country, the world, he would take out that piece of paper, unfold it and run his fingers over those ancient Hebrew letters.

To the chosen others who follow and are granted the right to gaze on these hallowed works, the keepers of the Sacred Spirit of Anterra, holders of these eternal truths. May this flame continue to burn and shed its light on this noble planet, hear the word of Anterra.

Smoothing that wrinkled paper as it lay on his lap, Tripoli felt a surge of comfort…and hope. For Anterra, he began to realize, was the divine spirit of the world, both mother of the Earth and father of the sky, the keeper of mountains and oceans, the protector of humankind and nature. Anterra had been defiled and forgotten and now lay seriously ill. More than ever, people desperately needed direction, someone to remind them of their fundamental connection to this spirit, of their absolute dependency on the Earth and their venerable responsibility to it…to what the books had called “Anterra.”

One morning, instead of going home, Tripoli took a detour and drove out to the Danby Forest. As he walked through the woods, the sun was just rising up over the lip of the horizon, and the birds were beginning to chirp. When he came upon the site of old Matthew's hut, he was taken aback by the sight of people. There were nearly two dozen of them, both men and women. They were gathered in a large circle around the remains of the building. The rubble, entangled now in brush and weeds, stood illuminated in a shaft of the red fiery light penetrating the opening in the forest. Someone had laid bouquets of wild flowers on the remains of the hut. There were rows of candles burning in little glass jars. And the people, their heads bowed, were praying, the low hum of their voices resonating through the forest. Tripoli's skin broke out in goosebumps and, before they could notice him, he silently slipped away.

Rosie's twins had started walking and, when Tripoli was left in charge, he had his hands full. One of the twins would take off towards the kitchen while the other would head for the stairs, as if they had worked out some diversionary ploy. They would hoist themselves up on a chair and pull dishes off the table, yank books off the shelves, and dump food out of the refrigerator, spilling whole pitchers of juice and jars of jam. Nothing was safe from their eager clutches. They were intensely curious, and whenever Tripoli turned away for a second they were riffling through Molly's papers or banging away on her computer keyboard.

But they were cute and cuddly, and Tripoli would lie on the floor making crazy animal sounds as they climbed all over him laughing with excitement. And Tripoli couldn’t get enough of Rachel. He loved to hold her, fascinated by her face and fingers and toes. He sang to her, held long conversations with his little daughter, and swore that she understood every word. She was so tiny and delicate that it was hard for him to believe that one day
she was going to be a big girl, a teenager, much less a grown woman. He loved her smell and, when he had her up on the changing table, he would bury his nose into her belly and drink in the sweet scent of milk and powder and baby—somehow he just couldn’t get enough of it.

Molly was going full speed in all directions. She had three kids, a garden that was producing food faster than it could be eaten or canned, a husband who needed to be loved, and a dear friend who was dying. Nevertheless, she managed to carve out chunks of time to keep updating her database and continue her correspondence, encourage Wally Schuman and his foundation, and write her column. These days it was dense with suggestions of things ordinary people could do to lessen their impact on the ecology, simple things like turning off lights when not needed, walking instead of driving short distances, using bicycles instead of cars, fans instead of air conditioners, heat pumps in lieu of furnaces. “Small actions by large numbers of people,” she wrote,“end up having sizable effects.”

Ed relented and Rosie, clearly in the final stages of her illness, was moved to the hospice. It was an attractive, gray wooden building with peaked roofs that sat high on King Road and had a striking view of the valley and surrounding hills. It was decorated in restful shades of purples and pinks, and hanging on the walls were paintings and photographs of Ithaca's gorges and waterfalls by local artists. The place had lots of comfortable, well-worn furniture, wicker chairs and stuffed sofas. Wrought iron plant holders filled with greenery hung everywhere. There was even a piano. And off to one side sat a kitchen where the staff could prepare whatever the resident desired—if they could eat.

They gave Rosie a corner room which had large windows and an outside deck. On the days when Rosie felt up to it, they would wheel out her bed and let her lie in the shade to gaze out on the rolling hills.

Rosie was sleeping more and more each day, and on some occasions Molly would sit with her, reading a book as Rosie slept through the visit.

The staff was very protective of Rosie. On the particularly bad days when she couldn’t face people, they turned away all visitors, including Molly and Ed.

They gave Rosie drugs to mitigate the pain, as much as she felt she needed—though frequently she refused all medication. “I want to be alive for the time that's left.” And though she had more pain, her caretakers honored those wishes, too.

“There's something I’ve wanted to tell you,” said Molly one late afternoon. She had managed to get Rosie to take a few spoonfuls of warm cereal, and was dabbing her lips with a tissue. The fall sun was slanting in through the windows and Rosie just looked straight at her with those big, dark eyes of hers, the whites yellowed with jaundice.

“Danny's alive,” she said succinctly.

Rosie became very still, her brow wrinkling as she took in the news.“Oh…oh my,” she sighed, the muscles in her face relaxed as a surge of relief flooded her face.

Molly then told her about the night they had spotted him and the old man leading the ewe from the barn, about the boots and food she had left him, about his vanishing tracks.

“You couldn’t have given me happier news,” said Rosie, gathering her strength and pulling herself upright in bed with such vigor that it alarmed Molly.“You know, I always felt he was alive. I was just afraid of upsetting you.”

“Oh, Rosie,” she said, clutching her and starting to weep. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. We were worried about telling anybody.”

“Of course!”

“Can you ever forgive me?”

“Forgive you?” she said, and stroked Molly hair. “What's to forgive?”

Whenever he could, Ed brought the twins over to the hospice so Rosie could see and touch them, witness how they were growing, healthy and happy.

For each passing day, Rosie was becoming progressively slower to respond and Molly could see how she seemed to be almost deliberately detaching herself from her surroundings. She required increasing help for each movement of her body, and Molly had to support her head just so she could sip a little cool water.

Then, Rosie started refusing all food.

“I’m tired. I’ve had enough,” she said, and Molly could actually see that her friend was preparing to die. She spoke less and more infrequently. Sometimes she merely opened her eyes, searched for Molly or Ed and then, spotting them, wordlessly closed them.

Late in the afternoon on the sixteenth day of October, while Molly was sitting with her, Rosie suddenly awoke with a start, a look of surprise on her face as though she had just made a discovery. She stared straight at Molly and there was brightness, a burning in her eyes that looked to Molly like ecstasy.

“Molly,” said Rosie. She spoke so softly that Molly could barely hear her. Her breathing was light, her chest hardly rising or falling. A gurgling noise came with each breath and though she was smiling, Molly became alarmed.

Molly pulled close to her. Rosie's body was now all just raw, leathery skin and painful bones, and Molly was careful not to jar her as she tenderly encircled her friend with her arms.“Yes, Darling,” she said.

Rosie smiled, and her face was nothing but teeth and burning eyes. “Promise me…” she began. Then she closed her eyes and her breathing became ever more quick and shallow, like the fluttering of bird's heart.

“Yes, yes?” said Molly, but Rosie was slipping away.

Molly ran and got a nurse.

The nurse called Ed, and he was there in less than ten minutes. By the time he got to the hospice, however, Rosie was already dead. When he saw that his wife was gone, he crumbled into convulsions of inconsolable tears. Molly, who had been quietly sitting there with Rosie, finally started to cry, too. They wept in each other arms, and Molly understood what the promise was.

“Last week, as you probably read,” began Molly in her column that appeared around the country in the October twenty-second papers, “a large piece of the Ross ice shelf, almost the size of the state of Montana, broke off and slid into the Pacific Ocean. There was a massive wave that swamped coastal dwellings from Chile to the islands of the South Pacific. The Maldives off the coast in Africa no longer existed. In a matter of hours, the Marshall Islands lost 80 percent of their land mass. The low-lying countries of Europe and Southeast Asia are imperiled. In Holland, the sea level has risen to the point where the first storm surge could drive it over the dikes and flood the entire country. The governor of Florida has declared a state of emergency; New Orleans and countless other southern coastal towns and cities are in imminent danger. It will take months just to calculate the loss of life. Uncounted millions have lost their homes, their agricultural lands, and their means of livelihood. The less obvious but long-term effects are incalculable: salt water intrusion threatens drinking supplies, the mouths of rivers are backing up against the high sea and will undoubtedly cause flooding in the near future; the infrastructure of ports and sewage systems, roads and bridges, constructed on the basis of previous sea levels, have been rendered worthless. The list goes on and on.