When I returned home, Grace and Isabella were sitting on the porch-Izzy in her wheelchair and Grace on the step. My heart made a minor leap at the sight of them together, apparently peace. For a brief moment, visions of the Wynns receded and all that mattered was on my porch. We were a family.
Hugging Izzy, I noted her smart outfit-a gewgaw-spangled T-shirt with matching hat and earrings, outrageous surfer pants with an explosive red-black-orange pattern, and her usual tennis shoes with the glitter ties. She was freshly made up and smelled wonderfully of perfume.
Grace allowed me to hug her, too.
"You look beautiful today," I said to Isabella.
"G-G-Grace helped me. She has better taste than y-y-you."
"And probably more patience, too," I said.
"She's got totally great clothes," said Grace.
Grace regarded me with unspoken pride. How she had found her way into Izzy's heart in so short a time, I could not immediately understand, but I sensed that some workable truce had been struck between them. After that, the exigencies of appearance and fashion had obviously taken over.
Isabella looked up at me with her great dark eyes. "I don't want to be l-l-late."
"I promise we won't be late," I said. "But I need one hour to write an article. Can you two behave yourselves for that long?"
"We definitely cannot," said Grace.
Isabella nodded.
One hour later, I was driving Isabella up to the UC Irvine Medical Center for the reading of her second PET scan. Her doctors were afraid the tumor was growing. We were terrified the tumor was growing. The scan results would help us know whether it was, and, if so, how fast and in what direction. I had written and faxed my first article on the Midnight Eye to Carla Dance at the Journal, and a courtesy copy to Karen Schultz. I used his self-given name. Death seemed everywhere, common as air.
These drives from our home in the arid tan hills of the canyon into the smoggy industrial sprawl of the medical center always seemed like a combination of the Bataan death march and a scene from Alice in Wonderland. There was a surreal overlay to these dismal journeys, along with a shaken faith that any minute the nightmare would be broken and we would be just another expectant couple heading up to the hospital for a chatty visit with our obstetrician. In fact, we had made just such a trip once, two months before Isabella was diagnosed, after a drug-store pregnancy test went bright pink. But an ultrasound showed no heartbeat. A day later, she miscarried. It was her second loss in six months. Eight weeks later, when the tumor was discovered, we understood that her body had refused to begin another life because it was already in a secret battle for its own.
Isabella sat beside me, staring out the window, lost behind her sunglasses. The spire of Angel Stadium protruded from the haze in the east. The wide parched bed of the Santa Ana River wound beneath us, testimony to five years of drought, reminder of still another blessing that God seemed to have plucked from our tables. There was a wreck on 1–5, as there always seemed to be each afternoon. We came to a stop, funneled over to the middle lane, and looked at the lights flashing up ahead.
"What if it's big-bigger?"
"It isn't."
"It really isn't, is it?"
"No way. The implants killed it all."
"And half of m-me."
"That's right."
"I deserve some good news for a charge-charge.. change — don't I?"
"You deserve the best news in the world."
We crept around the bang-up. Three cars were off on the shoulder. A woman sat on the asphalt, her back up against the freeway divider, her face in her hands.
"Why do p-people always slow watch and down?"
"It lets them be thankful it's not them."
"Is that why my friends call me?"
"That's not fair, Izzy. Your friends call because they love you. They don't know what else to do."
"My peach-peach… speech is getting worse, isn't it?"
"I think so, baby."
"I can see the word but I c-can't say it."
"You're doing well enough for me."
"It's worse than last week, though. But it m-m-might be the drugs."
"It might be," I said.
Isabella stared at the wreck as we moved past, edged into the newly vacant "fast" lane, and sped up.
She was quiet for a while. "I heard a woman's house in the voice last night. Was I d-dreaming?"
I told her it was Grace.
"Why didn't she j-j-just stay with her m-m-mother?"
"Out of town, I guess," I said.
"Do you want her to stay?"
I told her about Grace's trouble.
Isabella thought for a moment. "She might have turned out all right, if she jaw… just had a mother nother. I mean another mother."
I let that pass. Isabella had always derived comfort from slamming Amber, and it wasn't my duty to deny her that pleasure. The thought came to me again how fundamentally different they were, how opposite.
"Have you seen her re-re-recently?"
"No."
"What about the Fourth of July? You h-had that Amber look at dinner on the d-deck that night."
"No, Izzy. I haven't seen her in months."
"Does Grace want to live with us?"
"No, she just-"
"I don't want her in the house!" Isabella breathed very deeply and her chin shook. A tear flattened under the frame of her sunglasses and smeared her cheek. "I'm sorry," she said.
"It's okay."
"I'm r-r-really afraid they're going to find new growth."
"No. No new growth, Is. Not today."
"We see some new growth," said Paul Nesson, pointing out the dark tumor on the PET scan. "It hasn't been particularly fast. It's about what we expected. Part of it might be mass effect.'
Dr. Paul Nesson was Isabella's neurosurgeon, a young soft-spoken man who managed to be grave, humorless, and warm, all at the same time. Of all the surgeons we consulted Nesson was the only one who said that Isabella's was not hopeless situation. He also said there was no cure. He also was the only one who advised against surgery. Instead, he implanted ten radioactive "seeds" into the tumor on a Monday, and by Friday, Isabella's legs had lost 60 percent of their function, he had sat with us for many of those long hours on the neuro floor while the movement in Isabella's legs ebbed away-starting at her toes and continuing up. Paul Nesson had told us then that the function loss was "probably not irreversible," but by now a year later, we all saw that he'd been wrong. I will never forget the sight of Isabella Monroe, age twenty-seven, lying in that cheerless room, her head wrapped in a lead-lined cap to keep the radiation from damaging anyone but her, trying to move her toes, then her ankles, then her knees. "Well," she said, always thought those wheelchairs with motors were nice. Can you get me one in a hot pink, Dr. Nesson?"
"We'll get one in any color you want," he said quietly.
We settled on black, motorless. When it came time to actually get a wheelchair, the concept of hot pink had lost its charm.
Isabella looked at him now, then back at the colorize PET scan pictures. The tumor was a dark mass outlined in red and yellow. It was no longer round: The powerful radioactive implants had contorted it into a lumpy asymmetrical mess.
"What do we do?" Isabella asked.
"How's your leg function?"
"Pretty bad."
"More weakness?"
"Yes."
"Speech?"
"It's g-g-getting worse. Want to see my tricks now?"
Nesson did his usual neurological exam: reflex in the leg (almost none), nystagmus in the eyes (plenty), facial symmetry (good). He asked to see her walk. Isabella labored out of her chair, took the handle of a quad cane in each hand, and picked her way across the room with excruciating slowness, patience, and concentration. Nesson and I followed on each side of her, ready. She made a turn, came back to her chair, and slumped into it.
"Why don't I feel any better, doctor?"
Nesson said nothing, looked up at the scan pictures again, his hands deep in the pockets of his white coat, his head cocked a little to the left. For a moment, he stood there without moving.
"I think it's time to go in and debulk the tumor, clean out the necrosed tissue," he said.
"Cut my head open?"
"That would be necessary, yes."
"If you d-d-didn't want to operate a year ago, why now?"
"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.
It was the biggest seizure she'd had-bigger even than the first, a year and a half ago. I ran and stood behind her, wrapping her quaking body in my arms, pressing my face against her violent cheek. She felt, to me, as if she were possessed by some alien force. Her words were slow, scrambled beyond comprehension, "Sose oreo d-d-do tis to you… nebber won d-d-dis happt…"
I timed it on my watch, as always: one minute and forty-five seconds. You cannot believe how long a minute and forty-five seconds can be.
Then she slumped a little, settled down in her chair, the demons departing. Her heart was beating hard. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.
"Am gin hab doot."
"Going to have to do what, Is?"
"Operation. I'm g-g-going to have them do it."
On the way home, she seemed to become clearer. She asked me whether I'd understood what she'd said during the seizure. I told her I didn't.
"It made p-p-perfect sense to me. I said I was so sorry to do this to you. That I never wanted this to happen."
I put my arm around her and brought her close to me "I know, baby. I know."