No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,93
home ‘round midnight, and only shook her head, telling me not to say anything, when I mighta asked about the kid. We slept late, an’ when she woke up she stayed nestled beside me, taking careful breaths and listening to her own chest rattle with a clinical ear. “I’m breathing more clearly. It’s easier than it was yesterday, before the spirit quests. But I can still feel the weight of it in me, Gary. I’m not going to beat this, not in the long term. You have to promise me something.”
“Anything, darlin’.”
“Help Myles out, if you can.”
“What? He ain’t dead? I thought—”
Annie shook her head. “I was too tired to talk about it last night, but Miss Jones…well, I suppose she healed him. I hope it was she, and not that…thing.”
Feelin’ pretty confident, I said, “If it was that thing riding him he wouldn’t have come outta this alive. Pretty sure being possessed burns a fella out. I don’t think he woulda recovered from it, or anything else, if Hes hadn’t been there. So what’d she do, put his guts back together? Ain’t Crohn’s genetic?” I’d been underestimating Hester’s power, if she could do that. I wasn’t sure Jo could.
Annie shook her head again. “If there’s a genetic component, no one has found it yet. No, the surgical procedures are still in place, but by time I left the hospital last night none of his system was inflamed any longer. He hadn’t been that healthy when he left the hospital. He’d only been in remission, but Crohn’s does that. It flares and fades, so while it had been a remarkable recovery, there were still signs of it in his body. Last night the doctors couldn’t find any evidence that there had ever been a reason to give the poor boy an ileostomy. So whatever’s happened with him, whatever happens with me, Gary, if you can, help Myles out. This is going to be very hard for him.”
“An’ you think it ain’t gonna be for us?” I had just enough smarts to say us and not me, but Annie saw through it anyway an’ tucked herself closer to me.
“I know it will be.” That was all she said. It was all either of us said about what was coming at us fast, ‘cause there wasn’t much else to say. She got weaker as the days went on, until I realized for the second time that she was holding on, waitin’ for our wedding anniversary. I’d been slow figuring it out the first time, and was just as slow the second time around, ‘cause I was trying hard not to think about anything but the last hours I had with her. We had strawberries on waffles in a room full of roses, same way we’d had ‘em every morning of our anniversary since the first one, an’ then, finally, she said, “I think I should go to the hospital now.”
“No reason to, darlin’. Nothin’ wrong with home.”
“What did we do last time?”
“We went to the hospital three days ag—” I snapped my teeth together, tryin’ ta eat the words I’d already said, but Annie only smiled like she wasn’t surprised.
“So we’ve already changed it. Do you think the changes are enough? Is it going to make a difference, somehow? Will we win, Gary? Tell me what happens,” she said, real soft. “Please tell me what happens, Gary. I won’t be there to see it, so I want to know. We’ll stay home,” she promised, like promising would be the thing that would make me tell her. “We’ll stay home, we won’t go to the hospital, and you can tell me the future.”
An’ I did. It took all day, sittin’ in the bed with her, holding her like I couldn’t the last time through, and I told her about the next three or four years. Told her about picking up a mouthy fare one January morning, just a couple days after I turned seventy-three, an’ she got a notepad outta her nightstand and wrote that down, the time and date and SeaTac terminal, and she made me put it in my wallet. “Just to make sure you’ll be there,” she told me, an’ I smiled a bit.
“Like I could forget, sweetheart. I’d been kinda living on auto pilot up ‘til then, just kinda waitin’ to catch up with you. Jo…you gotta forgive me, darlin’. Jo gave me something else to live for, made me not wanna hurry dying up too much. I wish