The Pirate Queen (5 page)

He was duly put back in his place. He stepped aside as Saphora pulled out a foam cup for Bender’s coffee. “He has cancer,” she said as if she knew he waited for another word from her.

“Lots of people are getting that. Me, I’ll take a good old-fashioned heart attack,” he said. He went off, he said aloud, in search of barbecue chips and beef jerky.

When Saphora climbed back into the car, handing Bender a coffee and sunflower seeds, she said, “We should buy groceries outside Oriental. Except for produce. The farmer’s market has plenty of local vegetables.” Sherry handpicked locally grown vegetables. Not that he noticed. “Raleigh has a nice supermarket right off one of the exits.”

Bender had reclined the driver’s seat so far back he could fall asleep. “Sherry will take care of the food, like always. What did she say about me? Did you tell her yet? Maybe it’s best to tell her about me in person.” His eyes were still on the car ceiling. A ribbon of sweat above his upper lip made him look nervous. “The top of the car needs cleaning.”

“Maybe I should drive,” said Saphora. She had completely forgotten to call Sherry. But it was at that instant the phone rang and it was Sherry. “Here she is, calling me back.” She stepped out of the car and walked around. Sherry had gone to the mall to add another set of piercings to her ears. She was thanking Saphora for the bag of costume jewelry when Saphora said, “There’s an emergency.”

Sherry was so upset that she began spilling guilty confessions for leaving too early.

“It’s Dr. Warren, Sherry. He’s come down with something. I’m taking him to Duke for tests and then he’s going to recuperate at the house in Oriental,” said Saphora. She finally gave in to Bender’s anxious stare. “He needs you, Sherry.”

“I’m leaving now for Oriental. How many days will you be there?” she asked.

“Plan for a couple of weeks.” Bender had never taken that much time off from his practice. “It might be serious.” Saphora felt dishonest for having said Bender had “come down with something.”

“I’ll throw together a few things and get on the road within the hour.”

A relief came over Saphora. “After you set up the house, maybe you could take time for yourself down on the beach.”

“That’s how you are, Miss Saphora, worrying about others when you need help,” said Sherry.

Saphora named a few things for Sherry’s grocery list. “Riesling from Shelton Vineyards. They have it in the stores now.” Oh, what was the use? She had intended on living simply for once when she had planned her escape to Oriental. “Keep it simple,” she said and ended the call. She looked through Bender’s open window. He had closed his eyes and fallen asleep behind the steering wheel. “Bender,
I’ll drive.” She shook him awake, enough to get him out of the car and into the passenger’s seat.

She climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted it for shorter legs. Before she could tell him that Sherry was coming to open up the house, he had fallen back to sleep. Since she had to take Bender to Duke first anyway, Sherry would have the house opened up and aired out a day ahead.

A card of pills was in his shirt pocket. He had taken sleeping pills for as long as he had been taking surgical shifts. But the small yellow pills did not look familiar to her. She would look them up later. Whatever they were had the same effect on Bender as cold medicine on Eddie. She took a deep, cleansing breath and aimed the car for Raleigh.

She found a country music station but turned it down low so as not to ruffle Bender’s intellectual sensibilities. Bender was pale. Beads of sweat formed just above the bridge of his nose between his brows. It was the first time she noticed that he truly appeared sick. She felt a sinking responsibility for what had happened to him. If she had noticed sooner, he might have gotten tested sooner. She had friends who confessed that they fantasized about what they would do if their husbands died. Saphora had not wished death on Bender. She had just imagined him far away, as if she could erase the place between the day she had met him and now.

The way he was acting was so not like him. Bender lived life happily on the perimeters of danger. Twice each summer he and other surgeons met in the gulf to tarpon fish. His last fishing excursion, he was the only man on the expedition to reel in a marlin. Then he started raft fishing, a sport that some of the twenty-something fishermen had sold him on. He caught a swordfish that might have pulled him under if his buddies had not rescued him.

Years ago he booked a wild game hunt, insisting that Ramsey and Turner accompany him. But Turner, loudly demonstrative, had gotten so afraid of the unfamiliar sights and sounds of the Serengeti that the guide had ordered them back to the compound. Before dawn, Turner had said, the sound of the Jeep’s engine gunning woke them up. Turner worried all day when Bender had stayed long past the allotted time. But in he came at sundown, the cicadas screaming and Turner pacing. Ramsey cried so hard Bender yelled at him to act like a man. Bender and the guides hauled a dead lion out of the Jeep. Bender sent it off to his friend who did taxidermy as a hobby. Then he hung the head in his office at home. Saphora never liked going in there after that.

Bender slept until Saphora drove into the afternoon crawl of Raleigh’s traffic.

“I was dreaming about you and the kids,” he said.

The last time he had said that was when Turner and Gwennie were still in diapers. “What were we doing?” she asked.

“We were all out in a boat. But not Lake Norman. It was a different lake. People were loud along the shoreline, like in Mexico. Even louder. There was rock music, not our kind, but like the kids play nowadays. I kept trying to get us farther from the noise. But you kept saying how you liked the music. You didn’t seem to mind it.”

“I do like music.”

“I just wanted things quiet.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t allow me in your dreams.”

“Why do you have to say that?”

“Good grief, Bender! I annoy you as much in your dreams as when you’re awake.”

He frowned, then continued. “There was this old woman on the
shore. She was staring at me. I kept steering the boat away from the shore. But then I would look up and there she would be again. She was following me. She had on this, I don’t know what you call it, this white serape thing wrapped around her. She was all white—white hair, white serape, white shoes.”

“Like an angel?”

“Not beautiful like you’d think. Very old and penetrating eyes. At least I don’t think she was an angel.”

“Did she like the music?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I’m hungry, Nana.” Eddie had come awake.

“It is past lunchtime,” said Saphora. “We’ll grab a bite before we check into the hotel.” She had gotten a room at the Embassy Suites. “I’ll ask the hotel clerk to give us an extra bed.”

“They’ve got two-bedroom suites. Get one of those,” said Bender.

“They’re triple the price, Bender.”

“Eddie needs his own room. You know how he is. I’ve got to have my sleep.”

Saphora drove to a restaurant off the interstate. “No good restaurants around Duke,” she said. Bender lay in the car while she went inside, Eddie hopping through the door behind her. She requested a table. She waved Bender inside, and they sat down and ordered sweet teas. The wait staff was slow, irritating Bender. But she soon had Eddie fed and back in the car.

Bender called his friend Jim Pennington, the oncologist at Duke. When Saphora pulled under the overhang at the patient check-in, Jim was waiting for Bender. He was tall, his deep eyes warmly looking out from his dark African American face.

Bender got out of the car. Eddie started bouncing around the interior
of the car, claiming he was a pro wrestler. Saphora was sorry she had left the cold medicine back at the house. Once Bender closed the door, she snapped. “Eddie! You can’t lose it today, or else Nana will lose it.”

He quieted down, surprising her. After she parked the car they both followed Bender and Jim into the hospital. Eddie was immediately interested in the gift shop. The window was full of stuffed green monkeys dangling from ropes, little green leaves glued on to make the display look like a jungle set. “No toys today,” she said. Turner and his ex-wife had indulged Eddie with so many toys that his bedroom floor was no longer visible. It was a competition to see who could give Eddie the most stuff.

Eddie charged the gift shop.

Saphora had never had trouble standing up to Turner. She should have left him to figure out what to do about Eddie. She had never believed that his marriage was really over when his wife, Karen, had said it was over. Karen was not a good judge of character, so how could she judge when her marriage was over? Turner would never learn how to father if Saphora kept allowing him to drop off the boy.

Bender came around the corner looking for her. “Are you coming up?” he asked.

“I sure hope Turner drives in this weekend to take care of Eddie,” she said. She followed Eddie into the gift store. “Eddie, stop touching everything. Let’s go.” She made sure Eddie was actually paying attention before turning to Bender. “I can’t do this, Bender, and take care of you.”

“Then call Turner,” he said, the tone of his voice rising as if she were disappointing him. “He’s a shift nurse. He can take hours or not take them.”

Bender knew that Turner needed all the hours he could get. He also knew how to get his way even while agreeing with her.

By now Jim had come back and was standing in the corridor near the physicians’ elevator, staring at them. He took out a key and turned it in a special lock that allowed him to call for the elevator. The surgeons’ special getaway system only added to their sense of entitlement.

Eddie bolted away from Saphora when the elevator doors opened. “I get dibs to push the button!”

Saphora was sure her face was red as she passed by Jim, who held the elevator door open. Jim didn’t seem to notice. He gave Eddie the floor number, then talked shop with Bender. “The pathologist I wanted came in on her day off to run your tests. She’s the best at Duke. That makes her the best in the state,” he said.

Eddie pulled a Blow Pop from deep in his pocket. He started to unwrap it, but Saphora took the sucker out of his hand. “Later,” she said, stuffing it into her purse. Eddie locked his arms around his waist and glared at her.

“I’ll speed up the test results for you,” said Jim. “You all can head back to Lake Norman in the morning.”

“We’re staying at the house in Oriental,” said Bender.

“We love that house,” Jim said to Saphora. “Thanks for letting me take Jeanie and the kids there. That river is the Neuse, right?”

“Yes, the Neuse,” said Saphora. Bender’s friends knew more about the place than she did. She had not seen it since they had closed on the house.

Jim said, “Once they nail down the type of cancer you have, we’ll talk about whether you’ll need my help or a different specialist’s.”

“Isn’t it lymphoma?” asked Saphora. Bender had said it, she thought. But then she realized he had not said exactly what it was.

“It’s a brain tumor,” said Jim. “Saphora, I’ll let you know about his treatment in the next day or so. I’ll keep you abreast of every detail.”

Jim had so much warmth that Saphora teared up. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the cancer center’s waiting room since Eddie could not sit at his grandfather’s side during the blood work. That was another thing Bender had not thought about. Saphora could not sit beside him. That is when it occurred to her that Bender might have orchestrated the whole afternoon so that she would be watching after Eddie while he and Jim talked about their golf games.

She held back from crying this time. It was an acquired gift.

3

It was a clear day in spite of the hurricane warnings going out south of the Outer Banks. The wake was high, and the sheriff’s son had posted undertow warnings up and down the Oriental Marina. Bender asked Saphora to park at Tiny Beach. “I’d like to take a walk down to the marina before unpacking,” he told her as he got out of the car.