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  “Will you be coming back today?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then. And don’t worry, Al. We’ll make it. We’ll make Madgic bigger than it was before.”

  I looked up and smiled at her. “By the way, I’m promoting you to Vice President.”

  A broad smile crossed her face. “Thank you.” She hugged me. “See? Things are looking up already.”

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  This evening I rushed McKale back to the hospital. More trouble. I feel as if the jaws of Hell have gaped after us. Where is God?

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  McKale was sitting in her wheelchair in the den when I got home. She had a book in her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She was just staring ahead at the wall. “Hey, girl,” I said. “I’m home.”

  She slowly turned to look at me. Her leg was still moving, but her smile was gone. “I wish the fall had killed me.”

  “McKale . . .”

  Her eyes watered. “This is my new life, pushing around the house, chained to this chair.”

  I put my arms around her. “Give it some time.”

  She looked down. “I’m sorry, I don’t feel well,” she said softly. “I think I have a fever.”

  I kissed her forehead then felt it with my cheek. Her skin was moist and very hot. “You’re burning. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You have so much work. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Come on, Mickey, you know better than that. I better check your temperature. Where do we keep the thermometer?”

  “It’s downstairs in the guest room medicine cabinet.”

  I retrieved the thermometer and held it under her tongue. She was running a temperature of 104°. “You’re hot. I better call the doctor,” I said.

  I couldn’t get hold of Dr. Hardman, but the doctor on call told me to bring her in. Forty-five minutes later, I checked McKale back into the Overland emergency room. The staff checked her vitals, blood pressure, and temperature, then took blood and urine samples. Her fever had risen to 105°.

  Within a half hour, Dr. Probst, a compact red-head in his late fifties, had her moved from the ER to the ICU where they put tubes back into her arms and a PIC line directly into her jugular vein, to fill her with antibiotics. The staff moved in a quiet, urgent manner, and the more I watched, the more concerned I became. I stayed by McKale’s side the whole time, holding her hand. She said very little through it all, though she moaned occasionally. When the motion had settled a little, the doctor asked to speak to me outside the room.

  “You’re her partner?” he asked.

  “I’m her husband. What’s happening?”

  “It appears your wife has developed a urinary tract infection from her catheter. Unfortunately it’s gotten into her bloodstream, and she’s septic.” He looked at me as if waiting for the gravity of his words to settle.

  “What does that mean? You give her more antibiotics?”

  He looked at me solemnly. “This is extremely serious. We could lose her.”

  “Lose her? It’s just an infection.”

  “Infections are never that simple, especially when the body has already been weakened. When they reach this stage, they’re very dangerous.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “We’ve upped her antibiotics. She’s on a pretty powerful dosage. Now we carefully monitor her and wait to see how her body responds. We’ve also sedated her. A fever this high can be quite uncomfortable.”

  I raked my hair back with my hand. “I can’t believe this. This morning we were celebrating. Her leg was moving. We thought she was gaining her nerves back.”

  “Involuntary muscle spasms,” he said. “It’s caused by the infection.” He had a strained, worried look in his eyes that made me wonder if he was holding back. “I just want you to be prepared.” He touched my shoulder then turned and walked away. I watched him go, then I walked down to the men’s room. It was a one-occupant bathroom, and I locked the door, then knelt on the tile floor and began to pray.

  “God, if you’re there, I’ll give you anything. Just spare her life. I beg you, don’t take her from me.” I was on my knees for another ten minutes, until someone tried the door.

  How much more humble can you be, I thought. Kneeling on the floor of a public bathroom. Surely God would hear my prayer. But the truth is, I felt like I was praying to nothing. I might as well have been praying to the urinal. I got up and went back in to McKale’s room. She looked paler already.

  “What did he say?” she asked softly.

  I didn’t want to frighten her. “He said it’s just a little infection.”

  “It doesn’t feel so little . . . ,” she said, grimacing. She looked up at me. “You must be so tired of all this.”

  I took her hand. “I’m tired of you going through all this.”

  “It won’t be much longer,” she said.

  I looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  She closed her eyes. “Stay close to me.”

  CHAPTER

  Fifteen

  Don’t deceive yourself. Things can always get worse.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  The painkillers did their job, and McKale slept for three more hours. Her temperature had fallen back down to 104° but no lower. Everything else seemed to stay the same, which I suppose was a mixed blessing.

  It was around nine or so when she opened her eyes. They were heavy with fever. She tried to speak, but her words were labored and slurred, and, at first, I couldn’t understand her. I put my ear next to her mouth. “What did you say?”

  Her voice was barely a whisper. “Orcas Island.”

  I looked at her quizzically. “What?”

  “That’s where I was going to take you.”

  Orcas Island is the largest of the San Juan islands, located off the northern coast of Washington. We had celebrated my college graduation there, staying in a bed and breakfast built from a restored farm house. It was one of my fondest memories. I had never been more happy or felt more in love.

  “Do you know when I knew I would marry you?”

  “When?”

  “That day in the tree house. You said you’d never leave me.” Her brow furrowed, likely as much from pain as concentration. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  She swallowed. “You never did.”

  “And I never will.”

  After a moment she said, “I’m leaving you.” I looked into her face. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

  “Don’t talk that way, McKale.”

  “Promise me . . .”

  “Don’t, Mickey . . .”

  “Please. Promise me two things.”

  My heart was racing. “What?”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “I’ll never leave you. You know that.”

  She swallowed. “I don’t want to die alone.”

  Her words sent a chill through me. “Mickey, don’t say that. You’re not going to die.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re going to beat this. We’re going to beat this.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Her words sounded more like pants. She closed her eyes again. A few minutes later a nurse came in. She checked the monitors and frowned.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Her blood pressure’s falling.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She hesitated. “I’m getting the doctor.” She walked out of the room.

  A minute later, McKale opened her eyes, but she didn’t look at me, and she didn’t speak.

  “You can’t leave me, Mick. I can’t live without you.” She silently looked into my eyes. “If only I had stayed home like you wanted, we wouldn’t be here.”

  She gripped my hand the best she could.

  A tear fell down my cheek, and I furtively wiped it away. I looked into her face. “Mickey. What was the other thing?”

  She
didn’t respond.

  “You said you wanted me to promise you two things. What’s the other thing?”

  She looked down for a moment, swallowed, then pursed her lips together, slowly moving them. I put my ear next to her mouth. “What, honey?”

  The word seemed like an expulsion. “Live.”

  I pulled back and looked into her eyes, then she closed hers. The nurse walked back in with the doctor. “You’ll need to step back, please,” the doctor said.

  The doctor gave McKale an injection through her I.V., then took the ventilator tube and carefully inserted it through McKale’s mouth and down her throat. My mind was swimming. Things were happening that shouldn’t be happening. Her body was shutting down. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events. It came at me like a dream where time moved one frame at a time, and disjointed, disembodied phrases hung in the air.

  “She’s in shock.”

  “Still dropping.”

  “Heart rate is dropping.”

  The motion in the room continued in a growing climax, a swirling, frenzied dance of activity. Then McKale started to breathe differently. She was taking long, strained gasps of air with long pauses between breaths.

  “Respiratory failure.”

  Then came the most frightening sound of all. A single, loud beeping noise joined the cacophony.

  “She’s going into cardiac arrest.”

  The doctor frantically began performing CPR. After a minute, he shouted, “Shut off that thing.” The beeping stopped. He kept pressing on her chest.

  Seven minutes later the dance stopped. My best friend passed away at 12:48 A.M. The last thing I said to her was, “I love you, Mickey. I always will.”

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  All is lost.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  A social worker came in and stood next to me. I don’t know how long she was there. I didn’t see her enter. She didn’t speak at first. She just stood there. Without looking up, I said, “She’s gone.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  I would give anything to have her back. Anything. But I have nothing to barter with. Not even my life. Especially my life. What could a life as wretched as mine be worth?

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  The next two days passed in a foggy parade of events. The people at the mortuary pretty much dragged me through it all—an unwilling participant in an unwanted production. I remembered the mechanical nature in which my father had acted in the aftermath of my mother’s passing. My condemnation was gone. Now it was me mechanically attending to the minutiae of death: I picked out a casket, a headstone, wrote McKale’s obituary, signed papers, and selected the dress she was to be buried in—a beaded, black chiffon overlay gown that gathered in front. She had worn the dress at last January’s WAF award ceremonies. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the room.

  It became very clear to me just how completely I had shut everyone else out of my life. Outside of each other, McKale and I had no real friends, and the only people we socialized with were on our payroll. I never thought I needed anyone else. I was wrong.

  Sam arrived Thursday afternoon with McKale’s stepmother, Gloria. I met them at the mortuary. Sam broke down when he saw her. “My little girl,” he sobbed. “My little girl.”

  My father arrived two days later, the day before the funeral. In his typical manner, he said very little, which, frankly, I was glad for. I could see that he hurt for me, and that was enough. He stayed with me and slept in the downstairs guest room.

  It rained all that night, and I sat in the kitchen and listened to a million drops pelt the earth. There was no way I could sleep. My father came upstairs to the kitchen at three in the morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table, a cold cup of decaf in front of me, staring at nothing.

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

  I shook my head.

  He pulled out a chair across from me. For a moment, we both sat in silence. Then he cleared his throat. “When your mother died, I felt as if half my body had been amputated. The half with the heart. At first I wasn’t sure if I could keep going on. Frankly, I wasn’t sure why I would want to.” He looked at me softly. “I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have you. I didn’t have the luxury of collapse.”

  “McKale wanted to have children,” I said. “But I kept telling her we needed to wait.” I rubbed my eyes. “The assumption of tomorrow.”

  My father had no response, and my words trailed off in silence.

  “Do you want to come back home for a while?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “How’s your business doing?”

  “Not well.”

  “Maybe you should throw yourself into that for a while.”

  I said nothing. We both sat in silence.

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “How’d you do it?”

  “I have no idea.” It was some time before he looked at me. “I love you, son.”

  “I know.”

  A few minutes later, he went back to his room. I put my head down on the table and cried.

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  My heart was buried with her. I would have been satisfied if the rest of me had been buried with her as well. As much as I have thought on this matter, I see no way around the hurt. The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  The next morning it was still raining. I showered, shaved, and dressed on autopilot. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I said, “God hates you.” It was the only explanation for my life. I had loved two women, and He took both of them from me. God hated me. The feelings were mutual.

  At 10:45, my father and I drove together to the funeral home. There was an hour-long viewing prior to the funeral. I stood next to the open casket, next to the still body of the woman I loved. Déjà vu. When they shut the lid, I wanted to scream out in anguish. I wanted to climb in with her.

  The service was simple. “Nice,” I heard someone say. Nice. That’s like describing a plane crash as well executed. The meeting was conducted by an employee from the mortuary, and a pastor, also hired by the mortuary, shared a few words. I don’t remember what he said. My mind was a fog. Something about the eternal nature of man. McKale’s stepmother, Gloria, a former opera singer, sang a hymn. “How Great Thou Art.” Then McKale’s father said a few words, or at least tried to. He mostly just wept through his eulogy. There was a prayer, and then the man from the mortuary got up again and gave directions for the burial proceedings.

  McKale’s father and four of his friends were pallbearers, along with my father. They carried the casket out to the waiting hearse, loaded it in back, then walked to their cars. We drove in a procession less than a half mile, where the pallbearers again took up the casket, carrying it to the top of a small knoll.

  After the pallbearers set down the casket, they unpinned their boutonnieres and set them atop the lid. Sam walked up to me. “I carried her when she was a little girl. No father should ever have to endure this.”

  McKale’s grave was near the center of the Sunset Hills cemetery, surrounded by much older graves. The mortuary had set up a canvas canopy that shielded the family from the rain while everyone else huddled beneath umbrellas. The rain never ceased. It was a steady fall that turned into a downpour that, at the conclusion of the burial, sent everyone scampering for their cars.

  As the congregation was dispersing, an older woman slowly approached me. I was certain I had never met her, though something about her looked strangely familiar. She was distraught. Her eyes were red and puffy, and her face was streaked with tears. When she was near, she said, “I’m Pamela.”

  I looked at her without comprehension. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  “I’m McKale’s mother.”

  I blinked in confusion. “McKale doesn’t have a . . .” Sudd
enly I understood. I had always thought of her mother as deceased. Seeing her reminded me of every pain-filled moment McKale had felt since the day I met her. The fact that she was here, now, filled me with rage. With all the emotion I held inside, it was all I could do not to explode. “What do you want?”

  “I kept telling myself that someday I’d explain everything to her. That day just never came.”

  “The assumption of tomorrow,” I said darkly.

  “Excuse me?”

  I rubbed my nose. “Do you have any idea how much you hurt her?”

  I could see how deeply my words cut her. “I’m sorry.”

  For a moment, I just looked at her tired, wrinkled face. “You missed out on someone very special. McKale was a beautiful woman. As sorry as I am for my loss, I’m more sorry for yours.”

  Her eyes welled up with tears. She turned and walked away.

  A few minutes later, Sam walked up to me. “You met Pamela.” I nodded. He put his arms around me, burying his head on my shoulder. “Do you know how much McKale loved you? You were her world.”

  “She was mine,” I replied. We both cried.

  “Keep in touch,” he said. Gloria took his arm. “If there’s anything you need, Alan.”

  “Thank you.”

  They walked, arm in arm, down the slope to their car.

  My father walked up to me. He was holding an umbrella. “Are you ready, son?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t leave her.”

  He nodded in understanding. “I’ll get a ride back with Tex.” He offered me his umbrella, but I just shook my head. He put one hand on my shoulder, then he slowly walked off.

  I watched him cautiously pick his way down the hill. He had aged a lot in the last few years. I had always had issues with my father. I know, who doesn’t? It would seem that blaming our parents for our problems is a favorite national pastime. But at that moment, I felt nothing but sympathy. He had done this, too. And somehow he had endured. He was a better man than I.