When All Light Fails Read online

  He had an older sister in Front Royal, Virginia, but they had never been close. She was a heavy drinker and chain-smoker and he got angry every time she blew smoke in his nephew’s face. How old was little Harley now? Just shy of five when they had come back for Grandma’s funeral. Must be in third or fourth grade by now. All those years inhaling his mother’s poison.

  He thought about his father then, an hour away in assisted living. Assisted living and not yet seventy—how sad was that? All of those pesticides and farm chemicals. All of those back-breaking years. It was probably time to check in on the old fella again. If only it weren’t so awkward to sit in that little room with him and stare at the TV together. Neither one of them had ever developed a talent for conversation. How you been? Been all right. Yourself? That was about the extent of it.

  Boyd crumpled up his wrapper and napkins and picked up his plastic tray. Dumped the garbage in the container near the door, walked outside without meeting anybody’s gaze. The sky was graying, still a while before dark, the air chilly. He stood there beside his car wondering where to go now, what to do next. In a world so vast he seemed to have very few choices, and not one of them was appealing.

  Ten

  A lot of good, an extraordinary amount of damage

  Khatri’s sniper turned out to be a seventeen-year-old homeless man last known to be living on the streets of Markham, Ontario. The rifle he used to shoot DeMarco from the top-floor window of the old mill was a scoped .30–30 deer rifle tied to a Buffalo, New York, home break-in. The soft-point bullet struck DeMarco at a downward slant, ripped through his left lung and lodged in his latissimus dorsi between the fifth and sixth ribs. “It was amateur hour from the word go,” Bowen later told DeMarco. “And thank God for that.” A higher caliber rifle, a true sniper rifle like a .50 BMG, or even a .338 Magnum loaded with cop-killer Teflon-coated ammo and capable of taking down moose and bear, would have torn a huge hole out of DeMarco’s back, and he would have bled out before anybody could reach him.

  DeMarco only smiled and said, “Khatri never was much of a gun expert. Just a crazy, angry, messed-up kid.”

  “Geez, Ryan,” Bowen said. “He was a lunatic. Don’t go easy on him. He killed three people and almost took both you and Jayme out.”

  DeMarco held his smile. He, too, was surprised by his lack of anger, his lack of righteous indignation.

  Jayme, of course, was DeMarco’s most frequent visitor. She was with him around the clock until assured by the doctor that DeMarco was on the road to recovery, and only then did she begin to spend a few hours at home every night. On occasion she was given permission to bring Hero into the room, and, after the head nurse saw how docile and affectionate he was, she allowed Jayme to lead him from room to room so that any patient who wished could soak up some of his furry warmth.

  Jayme also visited Daniella Flores in her room two floors above DeMarco’s, then reported back to him. “She tries to put a good face on it,” Jayme reported, “but she’s devastated. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “They’re sure she won’t walk again?” he asked with tears in his eyes.

  “Not without the brace or crutches. She has no feeling from her thigh to her ankle.”

  “Because of me,” he said.

  “Stop it. That’s the only thing she has to be happy about. That she stopped Khatri. For you, she told me. ‘At least I stopped him for Ryan.’”

  “She said that?”

  “Exact words. What she did was just so brave, so…”

  “Selfless. But…”

  “Don’t say it, baby. She knows already. She doesn’t need to hear it from anybody else, and especially not from you. She had one split second for a decision, and she did what she thought she had to do.”

  He hoped the investigation board would feel the same way, but they probably wouldn’t. Flores might be let go, not even allowed desk duty. And that would destroy her. Although desk duty probably would too.

  “We’re going to have to fight for her,” he said.

  “You better believe we will.”

  A week earlier he would have blamed himself for her decision and her injury. Would have saddled himself with another bag of grief and guilt. But things had changed for him in the milky whiteness. The knowledge that had raced through him was difficult to call up at will, but sometimes a trickle or two appeared spontaneously, as it did now.

  We write our own stories, he told himself. Truth #12. And all it had taken to discover that simple truth was a visit from Mr. Death. What a handsome, friendly guy he’d turned out to be. Not the kind to hang around long, though. Takes you where you need to be and poof, he’s gone. Not even enough time for a quick orientation.

  “Dani needs to believe that she did a very good thing,” Jayme told him. “And she did. Probably a lot more good than any of us can imagine.”

  Good and evil, he thought. Positive and negative. The eternal struggle. Yet all of it good somehow. All of it positive. It was a difficult concept to grasp.

  He told Jayme as much about the experience as he could remember, about never losing consciousness, not even when he was thought to be dead and, later, in a coma. But he was still trying to process it all, still trying to fill the gaping holes in his memory.

  On an evening at the end of his first wakeful week in the hospital, Jayme helped him climb into a wheelchair, then pushed him to Flores’s room. Dani would have been sent home days earlier were it not for her deep depression, her near-catatonic detachment from life. In her room DeMarco struggled to stand so that he could embrace her. In his arms, her face wet with his tears, Flores’s fortress of solitude collapsed, and she sobbed uncontrollably until able to pull herself away from him.

  Jayme helped him to sit again, then urged him to share his near-death experience with Flores. He did so. When he finished, Flores sat quietly for a few moments, then asked, “What do you mean by everything?”

  “Just that,” he told her. “Everything there was to know. I knew every little bit of it. How everything was made, why it was made, who made it, and what all of us had to do with it. And I understood it all. It made perfect sense to me.”

  “But now you can’t remember any of that?”

  “All I remember is that it was like a beautiful spiderweb glistening with drops of dew. But an infinitely huge spiderweb. And multidimensional. All layered and interwoven. All of it singing. And that was just the framework. Like I was looking at it through a microscope, even though I was a part of it. It’s hard to explain. Impossible to explain.”

  “What do you mean, it was singing?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. It was alive and singing, that’s the only way I can explain it. Except that the description doesn’t begin to touch how grand it really was.”

  “And that was God?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “God is just a word. And no word can touch what it was. What it is.”

  That silenced all three for a while. Exhausted, DeMarco said, “We should probably go for now and let you rest.”

  “You’ll come back, right?” Flores asked.

  “Of course we will. We love you.”

  And that set Flores to crying again. Jayme sat on the bed and hugged her until she quieted. DeMarco squeezed her hand.

  Minutes later, in the elevator, after the door had closed, Jayme told him, “Hey. That was very sweet what you said to Dani.”

  He looked up at her from his wheelchair. “I feel a lot of love now.”

  “I think you always have.”

  He leaned his head back against her belly. “Just don’t let me get sappy about it.”

  She laid a hand on the top of his head. “Old trees like you don’t have a lot of sap.”

  God, he loved her. He loved everybody. He wondered how long it would last.

  That night, alone in his room, he could not sleep. There was a strangeness to the realizat
ion that he was becoming a different person. Was already different. The change had happened to him without his collusion, was intact the moment he awoke from the coma. Not that he disapproved of it. The fires of guilt and anger that had fueled him for so long were cooler now, the flames not always roaring. Despite his frequent doubts, the heat no longer threatened to consume him. It was interesting to watch, as if he were a spectator. And to wonder what the end result might be.

  What it all boiled down to was a different understanding of death. Living had been all about trying to avoid death, to not think about death, to stay out of death’s way. To fear death. All of society was built around that fear, promulgated upon that fear. And how strange to no longer feel that fear, but, in its place, only longing.

  Out of that longing, a memory returned to him. Something about making a choice. About choosing a…a what? A mask? A path?

  Choosing a path, he told himself. That sounds right.

  Gingerly he rolled onto his side, opened the bedside table, and was glad to see a pen and notepad there. He wrote with difficulty, haltingly, lying down with the notepad upright a few inches above his chest. It took more than an hour to finish what he had to say. He then copied it over, printing as neatly as possible. Read it again. It wasn’t perfect but it didn’t need to be. He buzzed for a nurse.

  Eleven

  Blow the bubble, pop it goes

  Flores had her eyes closed but wasn’t sleeping when the nurse came into the room. But Flores didn’t feel like talking, didn’t feel like interacting in any way. It never took long for her anger to come flooding back, the self-pity and fiery rage. Within minutes after Jayme and DeMarco left her room, she hated everyone again, hated nurses and doctors and everybody else too, hated life with a searing fury for the way it always screwed you over, always kept you down no matter how much good you tried to do. So when the nurse appeared, Flores kept her eyes closed and her breath soft and regular. After just a moment beside the bed, the nurse exited again, her rubber soles going shh shh shh out the door.

  Flores opened her eyes. What was the nurse doing in her room? If she had brought meds, she would have awakened Flores.

  On the wooden tray that could be swung over the bed was a slip of folded paper, standing there like a tiny pup tent. Flores picked it up and opened it but the light was too dim. She pushed herself into a half-sitting position, reached behind the low headboard and switched on the light. And read this:

  THE PATH

  for Dani, with love and gratitude from Ryan

  To begin, all you need to know is

  where to place the first step.

  Look to the right, the left,

  to the front, behind.

  Test the ground.

  Take a step.

  Choose your path.

  The ground can shift at any time.

  A fallen tree, a raging stream,

  a death. A bog to

  suck you under.

  It will happen, yes.

  Look to the right, the left,

  to the front, behind.

  Choose your path.

  There will be the hungry, the sick

  along the way. The poor, displaced

  and dying. Assist those you can but

  do not your quest defer—

  unless it is your path to stay.

  But first look to the right, the left,

  the front, behind.

  Consult your heart and

  choose your path.

  Do this every day, every morning.

  Reaffirm your decision or

  change it and seek another way.

  Every step you take

  is a soap bubble.

  Love and laugh with both

  the shimmer and the pop.

  Know this and do this

  joyful every day and

  then a morning will come

  when you rise slowly from your bed,

  when you linger at the open door.

  I like it here, you will think,

  surprised. I will stay.

  You will look long down that twisted trail

  your years carved through the weeds of doubt.

  All of those half stops, turns,

  they will stand out clearly now,

  all of those gnarls of will and wanting,

  all of those thwarts and urgings you carried

  and tossed along the way.

  That is the path you laid.

  It was always there,

  always waiting for you

  to take the first step.

  Look to the right, the left,

  to the front, behind.

  Consult your heart.

  Test the ground.

  And choose your path.

  Twelve

  A cooling river between two unquenchable fires

  The movement awakened him. He watched her coming into the room in the dim light and midnight hush, watched her swinging the crutches forward one after the other, one leg bent and held above the floor, that foot naked, still swollen and dark. She came lurching forward without looking at him and moved around the foot of the bed and sidled up close. She hoisted herself up onto the right side of his bed, one hip and then the other, then let go of the metal crutches so that they fell softly clanking atop the adjacent chair. Her dark eyes were wet, her face wet from tears, so he said nothing, but only reached for her. She curled against him, her face to his chest, her breath hot through the thin fabric of his hospital gown, and she pressed herself into him as if into the coolness of an enveloping cave, and he held her close, unspeaking, his heart weeping its silent invisible tears for the love that swelled it, this tragedy-strewn life, this broken child in his arms.

  Part II

  What you are is what you have been, and what you will be is what you do now.

  Thirteen

  On the bumpy road to recovery

  After the thoracoscopic surgery, after the chest tube had been removed, after the danger of pneumonia and other complications had passed, DeMarco had been sent home with the warning to remain vigilant for any indications of atelectasis, a dangerous scarring of his lung. Any chest pain, wheezing, fever, chills, night sweats, breathlessness, a dry cough, or high blood pressure should be reported to his doctor immediately. The long list of symptoms made him chuckle to himself. How many days of his life had he not suffered from at least one of those symptoms? He was given a device called an incentive spirometer that worked like a Breathalyzer in reverse, so that he had to suck in great lungfuls of air and then blow them out again—payback, he decided, for all of the breath tests he had administered over the years, all of the DUIs he had handed out. He was told to sleep with the good lung to the mattress and not the other way around, which made it necessary for him and Jayme to switch their sides of the bed. And he was cautioned to remain observant for a tendency for his fingertips to curl toward his palms, another curious symptom that made him smile while he tried to look solemn and grateful for the medical education.

  It wasn’t that he did not believe in the possibility of dire complications but that he now understood that even unpleasant circumstances would be for his own good. There was almost something playful to it. And there was also the recognition that every instant he lived after being scraped up off the asphalt was a gift. When he considered the anguish he had suffered in ignorance for nearly a half century, the only tenable response now was to shake his head and smile. The world is indeed a stage, and all men and women players. Amateur theater.

  For her part, Jayme passed those next few months in a kind of breathless suspension. Always watching DeMarco while trying not to be caught watching him, always wanting to do things for him but knowing he would resist. Little things he did made her want to shriek with worry. Climbing the stairs without holding to the banister, for example. A
nd even worse, galloping down the stairs like a kid. Sometimes in bed she would watch his chest rise and fall, just to make sure he was still breathing. She bought a blood pressure monitor and insisted that he use it every day, which, of course, he did not. She bought a Fitbit to monitor his heart rate, but he laughed when she asked him to wear it. She dumped all of the sugar in the house into the garbage and bought pure stevia extract, filled a refrigerator bin with supplements he had never heard of, things like spirulina and boswellia and chlorella and fenugreek. He would indulge her for a few days, mixing chia seeds and bee pollen into his oatmeal, but then he would smile and pour on the maple syrup and tell her not to worry, he was fine, all was right with the world.

  But he was different somehow. Even quieter than he had been before. Yet it was more than that, more than simply being laconic. He was different. They were just little things maybe, but really… He would whisper to the dog, for example. And would sometimes mutter in his sleep. He had never done that before either. He could stare up at the moon for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. Could sit all but motionless for an hour or more, a faraway look in his eyes. And he had taken to standing in the yard in his bare feet. In the snow, for God’s sake! What was that all about? And when was this crazy behavior going to end? When would he snap out of it? It was driving her mad.

  Fourteen

  A new leash on life

  The next to last day of March. DeMarco was up and walking around looking as normal as dirt, yet not pleased to have only one fully functioning lung, not pleased at all. Quiescence was wearing thin. According to his doctor, DeMarco was doing just fine, coming along nicely, but nicely didn’t cut it for DeMarco. A man can read and watch and otherwise spectate for only so long before he has to do something. Anything. It was okay if there would be no Ironman competitions for him, no marathon races, especially since he had never participated in one nor had ever wanted to. Still, to be sidelined like this was starting to get irksome, and he resented it. Left lung wheezing in a way that only he could hear, a way that didn’t even register through the doctor’s stethoscope, there was something embarrassing about that. And the left one had been his favorite lung too. He hadn’t known it was his favorite until it got perforated, but he knew it for sure now. You only miss something when you lose it, truth #68. True on Earth and all through the universe and its multitude of dimensions. Longing as a life lesson. He’d had his fill of that lesson. Let’s move on to something else now, can we?