'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.'
CHAPTER TEN
That night, after Isabella was asleep, I went into my study and took out the stack of unpaid medical bills. It was a couple of inches thick, with plenty of red-edged envelopes and attention: overdue stamps on the pages. Our insurance had been sufficient until the radiation-transplant procedure, which was not yet considered an approved treatment. I had paid out about ten grand, but the well was almost dry. Try as I did to ignore these debts, I was still aware that some eighty thousand was still outstanding, and my attempts to stall had been intercepted by a case manager, one Tina Sharp, whose telephone calls I routinely failed to answer. A sudden fury shot through me as I held this stack of demands, so I got out my lighter, set the corner of one on fire, and watched it burn upward. So what? I thought. Even if you burn them, you still owe, and what does a roomful of smoke get you? It would be harder to explain that to Izzy than it would be to just keep on lying about the insurance. I dropped the flaming paper to the carpet, mashed it out with my foot, and threw the rest of the stack back into the wastebasket.
I turned on the news. There were Midnight Eye segments on two of the three networks and on three local stations. Stunned neighbors of the Wynns were interviewed, impaled on the cameras for close-ups to show their
