Kent blinked and set his foot down. But he did not move forward. Could not move forward.
Bile rose into his throat, and he swallowed hard. What this one face here could possibly have to do with the others he could not fathom. He did not know this face. Had never seen a face in such agony, so distorted in pain.
And then he did know this face. The simple truth tore through his mind like an ingot of lead crashing through his skull.
This was Gloria on the bed!
His heart was suddenly smashing against his rib cage, desperate to be out. His jaw fell slowly. A high-pitched screaming set off in his mind, denouncing this madness. Cursing this idiocy. This was no more Gloria than some body pulled from a mass grave in a war zone. How dare he be so sure? How dare he stand here frozen like some puppet when all the while everything was just fine? There had been a mistake, that was all. He should run over there and settle this.
Problem was, Kent could not move. Sweat leaked from his pores, and he began to breathe in ragged lurches.
No!
Spencer was out in the lobby, his ten-year-old boy who desperately needed Mommy. This could not be Gloria! He needed her! Sweet, innocent Gloria with a mouth that tasted of honey. Not . . . not this!
The doctor reached down and pulled the white sheet over the bloated face.
And why? Why did that fool pull that sheet like that?
A grunt echoed down the hall—his grunt.
Then Kent began to move again. In four long bounds he was at the door. Someone yelled from behind, but it meant nothing to him. He gripped the silver knob and yanked hard.
The door would not budge.
Turn, then! Turn the fool thing!
He turned the knob and pulled. Now the door swung open to him, and he staggered back. In the same moment he saw the name on a chart beside the door.
Gloria Anthony.
Kent began to moan softly.
The bed was there, and he reached it in two steps. He shoved aside a white-coated doctor. People began to shout, but he could not make out their words. Now he only wanted one thing. To pull back that white sheet and prove they had the wrong woman.
A hand grabbed his wrist, and he snarled. He twisted angrily and smashed the man into the wall. “No!” he shouted. An IV pole toppled and crashed to the floor. An amber monitor spit sparks and blinked to black, but these details occurred in the distant, dark horizon of Kent’s mind. He was fixated on the still, white form on the hospital bed.
Kent gripped the sheet and ripped it from the body.
A
whoosh!
sounded as the sheet floated free and then slowly settled to the ground. Kent froze. A naked, pale body laced with purple veins and blotches the size of apples lay lifeless before him. It was bloated, like a pumped-up doll, with tubes still forcing mouth and throat open.
It was Gloria.
Like a shaft of barbed iron the certainty pierced right through him. He staggered back one step, swooning badly.
The world faded from him then. He was faintly aware that he was spinning and then running. Smashing into the door, facefirst. He could not feel the pain, but he could hear the crunch when his nose broke on impact with the wooden door. He was dead, possibly. But he couldn’t be dead because his heart was on fire, sending flames right up his throat.
Then he lurched past the door somehow, pelting for the swinging ICU entry, bleeding red down his shirt, suffocating. He banged through the doors, just as the first wail broke from his throat. A cry to the Supreme Being who might have had his hand in this.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
To his right, Spencer and Helen stood wide eyed, but he barely saw them. Warm blood ran over his lips, and it gave him a strange, fleeting comfort. The gutturals blared from his spread mouth, refusing to retreat. He could not stop to breathe. Back there his wife had just died.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
Kent fled through the halls, his face white and red, wailing in long deathly moans, turning every head as he ran.
A dozen startled onlookers stood aside when he broke into the parking lot, dripping blood and slobbering and gasping. The wails had run out of air, and he managed to smother them. Cars sat, fuzzy through tears, and he staggered for them.
Kent made it all the way to his silver Lexus before the futility of his flight struck him down. He slammed his fist against the hood, maybe breaking another bone there. Then he slid down the driver’s door to the hot asphalt and pulled his knees to his chest.
He hugged his legs, devastated, sobbing, muttering. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”
But he did not feel God.
He just felt his chest exploding.
Week Three
KENT ANTHONY held Spencer on his lap and gently stroked his arm. The fan whirled high above, and an old Celine Dion CD played softly, nudging the afternoon on. His son’s breathing rose and fell with his own, creating a kind of cadence to help Celine in her crooning. He could not tell if Spencer was awake— they had hardly moved in over an hour. But this sitting and holding and just being alive had become the new Anthony home signature in the week or so since Gloria’s sudden death.
The first day had been like a freight train smashing into his chest, over and over and over. After sobbing for some time by the Lexus he had suddenly realized that little Spencer needed him now. The poor boy would be devastated. His mother had just been snatched from him. Kent had stumbled back to the waiting room to find Helen and Spencer holding each other, crying. He’d joined them in their tears. An hour later they had driven from the hospital, dead silent and stunned.
Helen had left them in the living room and made sandwiches for lunch. The phone had rung off the hook. Gloria’s church partners calling to give their condolences. None of the calls were from Kent’s associates.
Kent blinked at the thought. He shifted Spencer’s head so he could reach a glass of tea sitting by the couch. It was one good thing about the church, he supposed. Friends came easily. It was the
only
good thing about the church. That and their attending to the dead. Kent’s mind drifted back to the funeral earlier that week. They had managed to mix some gladness into the event, and for that he was thankful, although the smiles of those around him never did spread to his own face. Still it made for a manageable ordeal. Otherwise he might have broken down, a wreck on that front pew. An image rolled through his mind: a slobbering man, dressed in black and writhing on the pew while a hundred stoic faces sang with raised hymnals. Might as well toss him in the hole as well.
A tear slipped from the corner of his right eye. They would not stop, these tears. He swallowed.
Helen and two of her old friends had sung something about the other side at the funeral. Now
there
was a religious case. Helen. After setting sandwiches before them that first day, she had excused herself and left. When she returned three hours later, she looked like a new woman. The smile had returned, her red eyes had whitened, and a buoyancy lightened her step. She had taken Spencer in her arms and hugged him dear. Then she had gripped Kent’s arm and smiled warmly, knowingly. And that was it. If she experienced any more sorrow over her daughter’s death, she hid it well. The fact had burned resentment into Kent’s gut. Of course, he could not complain about the care she had shown them over the last ten days, busying herself with cooking and cleaning and handling the phone while Kent and Spencer floated around the house like two dead ghosts.
She was on her way to collect Spencer now. She had made the suggestion that the boy visit her for a few hours today. Kent had agreed, although the thought of being alone in the house for an afternoon brought a dread to his chest.
He ran his fingers through his son’s blond hair. Now it would be him and Spencer, alone in a house that suddenly seemed too big. Too empty. Two weeks ago he had described their next house to Gloria while they dined on steak and lobster at Antonio’s. The house would be twice the size of their current one, he’d told her. With gold faucets and an indoor tennis court. They could afford that now. “Imagine that, Gloria. Playing on your own air-conditioned court.” His wife had smiled wide.
In his mind’s eyes he saw her leaning into a forehand, her short white skirt swishing as she pivoted, and a lump rose in his throat.
He lay his head back and moaned softly. He felt trapped in an impossible nightmare. What madman had decided that it was time for his wife to die? If there was a God, he knew how to inflict pain exceptionally well. Tears blurred Kent’s vision, but he held himself in check. He had to maintain some semblance of strength, for Spencer if not for himself. But it was all lunacy. How had he grown so dependent on her? Why was it that her passing had left him so dead inside?
The doctor had patiently explained bacterial meningitis to him a dozen times. Evidently the beast lingered in over half of the population, hiding behind some cranial mucous membrane that held it at bay. Occasionally—very rarely—the stuff got past the membrane and into the bloodstream. If not caught immediately it tended to rampage its way through the body, eating up organs. In Gloria’s case the disease had already set its claws into her by the time she got to the hospital. Eighteen hours later she had died.
He’d replayed that scene a thousand times. If he’d taken her to the hospital Friday morning instead of traipsing off for glory, she might be alive today.
The monkey and the cross he’d purchased as gifts still lay in his travel bag upstairs, absurd little trinkets that mocked him every time he remembered them.
“Lookie here, Spencer. Look what Daddy bought you!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a stupid monkey to help you remember Mommy’s death. See, it’s smiling and clapping ’cause Mom’s in heaven.” Gag!
And the crystal cross . . . He would smash it as soon as he built up the resolve to open that bag. The doorbell rang, and Spencer lifted his head. “Grandma?”
“Probably,” Kent said, running the back of his wrist across his eyes. “Why don’t you go check?”
Spencer hopped off his lap and loped for the front door. Kent shook his head and sniffed.
Get a grip, old boy. You’ve handled everything thrown your way for years. You can handle this.
“Hello, Kent,” Helen called, entering the room at Spencer’s leading. She smiled. She was wearing a dress. A yellow dress that struck a chord of familiarity in Kent. It was the kind of dress Gloria might have worn. “How are we doing this afternoon?”
How do you think, you old kook? We’ve just lost our hearts, but otherwise we are just peachy.
“Fine,” he said.
“Yes, well I don’t believe you, but it’s good to see that you’re making an attempt.” She paused, seeing right through him, it seemed. He made no attempt to rise. Helen’s eyes held his for a moment. “I’m praying for you, Kent. Things will begin to change now. In the end, they will be better. You will see.”
He wanted to tell her that she could keep her prayers. That of course things would get better, because anything would be better than this. That she was an old, eccentric fossil and should keep her theories of how things would go to herself. Share them with some other cross-stitchers from the dark ages. But he hardly had the energy, much less the stomach, for the words.
“Yeah,” he said. “You taking Spencer?” Of course she was. They both knew it.
“Yes.” She turned to the boy and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You ready?”
Spencer glanced back at his father. “I’ll see you soon, Dad. You okay?”
The question nearly had him blubbering. He did not want the boy to go. His heart swelled for his son, and he swallowed. “Sure, Spencer. I love you, son.”
Spencer ran around the couch and hugged his neck. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
“I know.” He patted the boy’s back. “Have fun.”
A soft
clunk
signaled their departure through the front door. As if on cue, Celine ceased her crooning on the CD player.
Now it was just his breathing and the fan. He lifted the glass of ice tea, thankful for the tinkle of its ice.
He would sell the house now. Buy a new one, not so large. Scrap the tennis court. Put in a gym for Spencer instead.
The tall picture of Jesus holding a denim-clad man with blood on his hands stood to Kent’s right.
Forgiven
, the artist had called it. They said that Jesus died for man. How could anyone follow a faith so obsessed with death? That was God, they said. Jesus was God, and he’d come to Earth to die. Then he’d asked his followers to climb on their crosses as well. So they’d made as their emblem a familiar symbol of execution, the cross, and in the beginning most of them died.
Today Jesus might have been put to death by lethal injection. An image of a needle reared in Kent’s mind, and he cringed, thinking of all the needles Gloria must have endured.
Come die for me, Gloria.
It was insane.
And to think that Gloria had been so enraptured with Christianity, as if she actually expected to meet Christ someday. To climb up on that cross and float to the heavens with him. Well, now she had her chance, he supposed. Only she hadn’t floated anywhere. She’d been lowered a good eight feet into red clay.
An empty hopelessness settled on Kent, and he sat there and let it hurt.
He would have to go back to work, of course. The office had sent him a bouquet of flowers, but they had made no other contact. He thought about the Miami meeting and the announcement of his program. Funny how something so important now seemed so distant. His pulse picked up at the thought. Why had they not called to tell him about the meeting?
Respect, he quickly decided. You don’t just call a man who has lost his wife and segue into office talk. At least he had a bright career ahead of him. Although, without Gloria it hardly seemed bright. That would change with time.
Kent let the thoughts circle in his mind as they had endlessly for days now. Nothing seemed to fit. Everything felt loose. He could not latch on to anything offering that spark of hope that had propelled him so forcefully for years.