I said, “I want to be alone with him, this little time we have.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. Listen, I forgot to leave dinner out for Orson. Could you go back to the house and take care of that?”
“Yeah,” she said, relieved to have a task. “Poor Orson. He and your dad were real buddies.”
“I swear he knows.”
“Sure. Animals know things.”
“Especially Orson.”
From Ocean Avenue, she turned left onto Pacific View. Mercy Hospital was two blocks away.
She said, “He’ll be okay.”
“He doesn’t show it much, but he’s already grieving in his way.”
“I’ll give him lots of hugs and cuddles.”
“Dad was his link to the day.”
“I’ll be his link now,” she promised.
“He can’t live exclusively in the dark.”
“He’s got me, and I’m never going anywhere.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
“He’ll be okay.”
We weren’t really talking about the dog anymore.
The hospital is a three-story California Mediterranean structure built in another age when that term did not bring to mind uninspired tract-house architecture and cheap construction. The deeply set windows feature patinaed bronze frames. Ground-floor rooms are shaded by loggias with arches and limestone columns.
Some of the columns are entwined by the woody vines of ancient bougainvillea that blanket the loggia roofs. This day, even with spring a couple of weeks away, cascades of crimson and radiant purple flowers overhung the eaves.
For a daring few seconds, I pulled my sunglasses down my nose and marveled at the sun-splashed celebration of color.
Sasha stopped at a side entrance.
As I freed myself from the safety harness, she put one hand on my arm and squeezed lightly. “Call my cellular number when you want me to come back.”
“It’ll be after sunset by the time I leave. I’ll walk.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I do.”
Again I drew the glasses down my nose, this time to see Sasha Goodall as I had never seen her. In candlelight, her gray eyes are deep but clear—as they are here in the day world, too. Her thick mahogany hair, in candlelight, is as lustrous as wine in crystal—but markedly more lustrous under the stroking hand of the sun. Her creamy, rose-petal skin is flecked with faint freckles, the patterns of which I know as well as I know the constellations in every quadrant of the night sky, season by season.
With one finger, Sasha pushed my sunglasses back into place. “Don’t be foolish.”
I’m human. Foolish is what we are.
If I were to go blind, however, her face would be a sight to sustain me in the lasting blackness.
I leaned across the console and kissed her.
“You smell like coconut,” she said.
“I try.”
I kissed her again.
“You shouldn’t be out in this any longer,” she said firmly.
The sun, half an hour above the sea, was orange and intense, a perpetual thermonuclear holocaust ninety-three million miles removed. In places, the Pacific was molten copper.
“Go, coconut boy. Away with you.”
Shrouded like the Elephant Man, I got out of the Explorer and hurried to the hospital, tucking my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.
I glanced back once. Sasha was watching. She gave me a thumbs-up sign.
3
When I stepped into the hospital, Angela Ferryman was waiting in the corridor. She was a third-floor nurse on the evening shift, and she had come downstairs to greet me.
Angela was a sweet-tempered, pretty woman in her late forties: painfully thin and curiously pale-eyed, as though her dedication to nursing was so ferocious that, by the harsh terms of a devilish bargain, she must give the very substance of herself to ensure her patients’ recoveries. Her wrists seemed too fragile for the work she did, and she moved so lightly and quickly that it was possible to believe that her bones were as hollow as those of birds.
She switched off the overhead fluorescent panels in the corridor ceiling. Then she hugged me.
When I had suffered the illnesses of childhood and adolescence—mumps, flu, chicken pox—but couldn’t be safely treated outside our house, Angela had been the visiting nurse who stopped in daily to check on me. Her fierce, bony hugs were as essential to the conduct of her work as were tongue depressors, thermometers, and syringes.
Nevertheless, this hug frightened more than comforted me, and I said, “Is he?”
“It’s all right, Chris. He’s still holding on. Holding on just for you, I think.”
I went to the emergency stairs nearby. As the stairwell door eased shut behind me, I was aware of Angela switching on the ground-floor corridor lights once more.
The stairwell was not dangerously well-lighted. Even so, I climbed quickly and didn’t remove my sunglasses.