The Lovely Shadow (36 page)

I apologized breathily as I ran past him and
rapidly looked left and right for a sign that would tell me which
direction room five-seventeen lay.

I saw a sign on the wall to my right that
declared that rooms five-ten through five-thirty lay directly ahead
and I ran in that direction. I was receiving contemptuous looks
from all the hospital personnel I encountered but I didn’t
care.

At that moment I was too pumped up with
emotion to give a great green rat’s ass what they thought. I ran
all the way to June’s door and stopped outside it, panting and
trying to catch my breath before entering.

As I stood there wheezing it dawned on me
that I was in horrible shape, and for all the time it was taking me
to catch my breath again I probably could have walked to June’s
room and still been able to go in sooner.

Finally I regained enough composure to feel
ok about going in. I pushed the door open quietly and stepped into
the room. The curtains were closed and the lights were off, giving
the room all the shadowy ambiance of a tomb.

In the center of the room June was laying on
her bed, propped up at an angle with her eyes closed. Her skin was
pale and looked damp and her hair was pulled back tightly away from
her face making her forehead appear far too large.

Every wrinkle that had just begun to appear
in June’s still lovely and young looking face over the last couple
years had suddenly grown into full blown trenches of age,
increasing her perceived age not by single years, but by
multiples.

Tubes and wires appeared to be everywhere.
There were tubes running into her nostrils, there were tubes
running into each of her arms, there was a wire attached to a clamp
on her finger, racks containing the I.V. bags and equipment stood
sentinel beside her bed with tubes and wires hanging off from them
and running towards June in tangled masses.

Everywhere I looked there were tubes, wires,
gadgets, and gizmos some with silently flashing lights and some
that beeped quietly in the gloom of the room.

June managed to open one eye halfway up and
she raised an eyebrow slightly when she saw me and tried to give me
a weak smile. I wondered for a brief second if it was normal for a
young man that was pushing seventeen years of age to weep as often
as I did as I smiled back at June through the tears that were
running out of my eyes.

June tried to speak and I shushed her,
telling her to go to sleep and that I’d be here for her when she
awoke. She nodded almost imperceptibly and immediately closed her
half open eye and went to sleep.

I sat down in the large chair beside her bed
and fell asleep myself. It was about four-o-clock in the afternoon
when I dozed off in the chair and I didn’t awaken again until
eight-thirty the following morning.

When I awoke I looked immediately to my left
to see if June was awake. She was, and she looked horrible. Her
face appeared lumpy and swollen, large black bags hung sloppily
beneath her heavy lidded eyes and her mouth was slack, allowing a
slight trail of spittle to run from the corner.

She was staring at me when I woke. I jumped
up and went to her and gently grabbed her hand. She gave me a weak
smile and a weaker squeeze on my hand.

“Hey June,” I said quietly, “How are you
feeling?”

I know it was a stupid question but I didn’t
know what else to say.

When June replied, her voice was thick and
slurred and I figured the morphine drip that she was hooked up to
had fueled her answer more than her mind had, for she said, “Like a
truck squashed turd, fried in butter, served with parsley on rye
bread please.”

Then she closed her eyes and went back to
sleep. I continued to stand at her bedside, holding her hand for
several more hours. I had a feeling that the road to recovery would
be a long one indeed.

June’s stay in the hospital lasted only seven
days and she was released on Christmas Eve. She was still sore and
weak, but she was able to travel and the doctors convinced her that
she would recuperate better in the comfort of her home than she
would in a nursing home, especially considering that I still had
another week and a half of winter break and could help her until
the worst of her soreness passed.

I got June home that Christmas Eve and tried
to convince her to get straight to bed, but of course the stubborn
mule-headed woman refused, saying that it can’t really be Christmas
Eve unless she sits in front of the fireplace in the front room
sipping a cup of cocoa.

Seeing as I had forced myself into the
position of her caretaker against her wishes, for the time being
anyway, I felt obliged to see to her desires for cocoa and roaring
fires. So I set out for the woodshed beside the house and gathered
an armload of wood. I started a kettle of water to boiling on the
stove and then started the fire.

By the time the water was boiling, the fire
was just beginning to flare up nicely, illuminating the living room
with the ethereal flickering glow of its dancing flames. June was
engulfed in a heavy comforter in her favorite overstuffed chair
waiting patiently for her cocoa.

I stood in the doorway to the living room
surreptitiously watching her, and wondering how different and
possibly short my life would have been without her. I felt tears
welling up again but suppressed them. I was really getting tired of
crying all the damn time.

I supposed one of the side effects of being
raised solely by women with no father figure to speak of is that
you learn to weep at everything, but I feared that once I made it
out in the real world that habit would be seen as a sign of
weakness and I would probably find my ass getting kicked regularly,
or else find myself getting hit on by gay men. Neither of those
scenarios seemed overly pleasant to me so I decided that I’d just
try to stop crying instead.

As I watched June I saw the firelight playing
off her eyes. The twinkle and sparkle and glow of firelight
reflecting off her eyes was like a fountain of youth for her. Years
seemed to slip off her and she looked to me to like a little girl,
huddled in her blanket waiting expectantly for Santa to drop down
the chimney on Christmas Eve and fill her stocking with special
treats.

Perhaps she felt that way herself, perhaps
not. I’ll never know because at that moment the kettle began
whistling and I went to the kitchen to get her cocoa. By the time I
got back with it, she had fallen asleep in her chair so I couldn’t
ask how she was feeling.

Instead of waking her and sending her to bed
I lowered the arm on her recliner as slowly as I could so I
wouldn’t wake her and pulled the back of the chair down. Without
waking, June immediately stretched out into a more comfortable
position in the chair, extending her legs out to the leg rest and
snuggling her body into the dropped back of the chair.

I sat on the couch and watched her sleep. I
drank her cocoa and prayed silently, thanking God for the salvation
He had brought me in the form of this woman who had been a better
mother to me than my mother had been, and pleaded desperately for
Him to spare her from the horrors of a cancerous death.

June remained weak over the next few weeks
but was showing signs of improvement as her body healed from the
ravages of surgery. By the time I had to return to school she was
able to get around the house by herself—slowly—but unassisted.

She was scheduled to start chemotherapy
treatment on the first of February, which was a Tuesday, and I
prearranged with my teachers to let me have the necessary days off
from school to drive her to and from her appointments.

The last four months of my junior year at
school proved especially difficult for me due to my efforts to take
care of June and get her to her appointments. She did not handle
chemo as well as we might have hoped and suffered several side
effects.

The most disturbing side effect for me to
deal with was the hair loss. Without her hair, June looked like a
shaved cat. Tiny and frail are the words that came to mind when I
looked at my hairless Aunt.

She struggled to keep foods down and nausea
became a constant companion to her. Nausea was not her only
companion during her six months of chemotherapy though; she also
made an acquaintance with pain and anemia.

Frail, sick, weak, and in constant pain June
remained in good spirits and rarely made a complaint. She chastised
me anytime she thought I pitied her and let me know that she would
not trade a single day of her life to get out of the suffering she
was going through.

“Look here, Toots,” she said to me, “if life
hands you lemons…”

“You make lemonade; yeah I’ve heard that old
cliché before.” I interrupted rudely.

“Shut up, Dummy, that’s not what I was gonna
to say,” June retorted, not unkindly. “I was gonna say when life
hands you lemons your best bet is to take a big old bite out of
that lemon and chew it up—even though it’s sour as hell you chew it
up—then you spit it right back out and into the eye of the life
that handed it to you.”

“There ain’t one day of my life I would
change in the hopes of gettin’ out of this crap, Babe, because if
I’d changed anything—anything at all—it might have meant less time
with you. And there ain’t nothin’ in this world more valuable to me
than you are.”

“You’ve been my hope, my strength, and my
inspiration when I’ve been tired or lonely or bitter. You’ve
managed to overcome more pain and hardship than anybody I’ve ever
known and you did it without complaint, and without askin’ for pity
from the people around you.”

“You, Johnny, are my inspiration to make it
through this illness with dignity, and now I’ll either beat it or
it’ll beat me, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let it beat me down
and I’ll be double damned if I’m gonna let anybody pity me.”

I didn’t know how to respond when June said
things like that. I likewise didn’t know how to respond when Elle
had declared that I was her hope either. Similarly when Miss Lilly
had told me that I would be the personification of hope for the
lingering dead I didn’t know how to handle it.

I am Johnny Krimshaw; regular dude and
nothing all that special. I have never been a hero and I have never
performed any feats of superhuman endurance in the face of great
peril. I have managed to escape some traumatic experiences without
being destroyed by them, but not by any conscious effort on my
part. I simply don’t know how to carry a grudge, and have always
found forgiveness to be less exhausting than anger. If anything, I
have endured due to laziness, not strength of character.

I must admit that I found the experience of
trying to care for my mulish Aunt to be one of the more difficult
and trying experiences of my life. Although I never considered
giving up, I did have a few moments when I thought I might have
benefited from a little pity. But somehow I managed to hold it
together until school let out in early June and from there we only
had two more months of chemo to deal with.

Repeated trips to the doctor showed that the
cancer appeared to be in remission and June and I dared to be
hopeful. June’s final chemotherapy session was at the end of July
and we celebrated by doing absolutely nothing more strenuous than
watching a movie together in the comfort of our living room.

June had been miserable for seven straight
months and I’d done my best to keep her spirits up even as my own
spirits were plummeting. There are few things more difficult than
watching the person you love most in the world suffering and
knowing that you are completely powerless to help.

On top of trying to take care of June, keep
my grades up and maintain the house throughout that long winter and
spring I had an ache in my heart. I had not heard from Elle since I
poured my heart out to her in the hospital.

I was left to assume that she had either
taken my advice to walk through the doorway to eternity without
saying goodbye, or I had said exactly the wrong thing and had hurt
her deeply, chasing her away and dooming her to be miserable
forever.

As June and I sat on the couch watching The
Mummy, a special effects heavy movie that lacked any substantial
plot as far as I was concerned, my mind began to drift and finally
I dozed off.

I was awakened by a long missing but familiar
scent and a kiss on my forehead. I opened my eyes blearily and
expected to see June still cuddled in her favorite chair and the
movie half over, but instead I saw that I had slept for a lot
longer than I could have imagined.

The T.V. was off and June was gone to bed.
The wall clock told me it was nearly one-thirty in the morning. All
those things surprised me because I felt like I had only barely
dozed off, but none of those things surprised me as much as the
fact that not only had Elle finally decided to visit me, but she
had decided to let her shadow become visible in my presence!

“Elle!” I cried out in surprise.

I had previously wanted to blast her for her
extended absence and the subsequent guilt I felt, fearing that I
had hurt her, but I was so fascinated by the definitively feminine
shadow that loomed before me that I couldn’t remember why I had
been pissed off and what I wanted to complain about.

“Shh, Johnny, be still, my Love. I am sorry
that I have not come to you sooner, but I needed time to build my
courage. Your words when last we spoke have been tormenting me and
granting me hope simultaneously. I have been confused and did not
know which way to turn.”

If she thought she was confused she should
have spent some time in my head at that moment. I was pretty sure I
could show her what true confusion looked like. I was still
struggling to come to terms with the fact that I was really awake,
that her shadow was truly visible to me for the first time, and
that she had called me her “Love”.