“No, not personally. But I saw my mom go through it with Grandma Rhonda when she had her heart attack. It’s horrific. What a burden to put on somebody. It broke her heart to take Grandma off life support.” Ellen shivered.
“Well, she didn’t have to do it.”
“Yes, she did.” Ellen was firm. “Grandma wasn’t going to get better. It was her time to go, Sully. Keeping her alive was just postponing the inevitable.”
“Yeah, well, I have a story like that, too.” He turned to her, his eyes hard as flint. “You’ve met my cousin’s daughter, Lucinda. What you don't know is that Lucy was born prematurely, was very small, less than two pounds. At that time, they couldn’t do what they can today for preemies. The doctors gave my cousin a choice of turning off the respirator. Little Lucy had all kinds of things wrong with her, and she’d had a brain hemorrhage that day. The doctors predicted she would never recover. If she did, they said, she’d be little more than a vegetable. They told my cousin and his wife to think about letting her go. Well, they thought it over for about two seconds, and then they refused. And today she’s alive, twenty some years later. It didn’t happen overnight. It took a long time for her to heal. But, she’s alive and well today.”
“That’s different,” Ellen said. “She was a baby with her whole life in front of her, and she couldn’t make the decision for herself. I can understand why they made the choice they did. But, my grandma was old and debilitated.”
“I see,” he said coldly. “When you’re old, you’re not worth anything anymore.”
“God! You make me furious!” Ellen withdrew her hand and stood. She paced back and forth in front of the picture window.
“Look,” she said, trying to be reasonable. “Why are we doing this to ourselves? We probably won’t have to even worry about it for years. Years! We’re young and healthy. Nothing is going to happen to either of us for a long time.”
“Maybe, but you never know.” Sullivan felt a chill walk up his back on small icy feet. Later, he would think of it as a premonition.
As usual, they made up in bed with tender words and gentle touches. But Sullivan’s feelings for Ellen had been altered subtly. Although he loved her as much as ever, he felt that her particular set of experiences had warped her judgment. He still believed his way was the better way. When they went back to the attorney’s office later that month to execute their wills, end-of-life decisions were not discussed. No such documents were drawn up, not a living will for her, or its opposing counterpart for him. Sully didn’t know until Ellen’s illness that she had taken care of it secretly, at her doctor’s office. Her advanced directive was put in place, waiting in a file somewhere to confound and hurt him when the unthinkable happened.
Horrified, he realized his voice had become husky and his eyes moist as he had related the memory. But, Brooklyn passed no judgments on him, one way or another. She merely listened, which, of course, was exactly what he needed. He noted she had tears in her eyes also, feeling with him the long buried pain.
“So how did you come to be out here on the mountain?” she asked, moving the conversation away from the raw emotions.
“You know what, you look pretty tired. Why don’t we save that story for tomorrow?”
As he reached for her plate, she flinched. Their eyes met, and she relaxed.
“I’m still jumpy, I guess,” she explained weakly.
Lance set her plate back on the table and went around to her side, where he knelt on the floor and put his hand on the seat beside her. Brook cringed. He thought how small she looked when she was afraid.
“Brooklyn,” he said. “Let’s get one thing clear right now. I don’t mean you any harm. I will NEVER hurt you. Never.”
“I know,” she said, but even to her own ears her answer rang false.
Lance sighed. He figured it might take some time before she could accept his words as truth.
Chapter 33
Morning dawned. Snow fell. Brook lay on her belly, looking out a window and trying to ignore Lance as he worked on her feet.
“We used to get a lot of snow at home when I was a kid, but it seems to have slacked off these past years.” Even as she watched, the huge flakes drifting slowly to the ground became smaller and the snowfall denser.
“So, where
“Hmm,” Brook asked, deep in thought and then cried out, “Ouch!”
“Sorry, it can’t be helped; there are still a lot of little pieces of foreign matter buried in these cuts. They have to come out or they’ll become infected. Are you sure you don’t want a pain pill, or the last half of the tranquilizer?”
“I’m sure,” Brook gritted her teeth. “Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. I grew up in Newton, Kansas, a small town, although it’s much larger now than it was back when I was a kid.”
“Never heard of it. What’s it close to?”
“Wichita is the nearest big city; you know it?”
“I’ve passed through before, but never stopped,” Lance said. “I do remember three things I liked about Kansas.”
“Only three?”
Lance laughed. “No, no. But there are three that stand out in my mind. First, I love the fields of sunflowers. They always seem to be smiling. Second, the sky is enormous; you just don’t see that much sky here in the mountains. And third, with all that flatness it is so easy to get where you’re going. The roads stretch out forever.”
Brook smiled and then grimaced as Lance dug a little deep, sending tendrils of pain up the back of her leg. She moaned into the pillow and then managed to say, “True, all that is so true. Even our hills are more like bumps on the ground than anything, at least by Colorado standards. And you’re right; it’s pretty much a straight shot from one point to another.”
Lance waited for Brook to continue and when she didn’t he prompted, “Do you come from a large family?”
Brook yanked her foot out of Lance’s hand. “Damn it! That hurt!” She took a couple of deep breaths. “Sorry…I know you’re trying to help me.”
Lance waited a moment and then drew her foot back into his lap. He washed the foot with a soft cloth, dried it gently and applied more drawing salve. After he had wrapped it in gauze he turned his attention to her other foot. “This one isn’t quite as bad.”
“Thank God for small miracles,” Brook mumbled. She took a moment to pick up the thread of their conversation.
“Okay, is my family big? Not really. I have one brother and one sister. Gregg is an attorney in Wichita, unmarried, a swinging single as he likes to put it. Alice is a stay-at-home mom. Her husband, Dean, is an engineer at Boeing, one of the major airplane manufacturers in Wichita, but they live in Goddard. Alice and Dean have twin daughters. Kayla and Kendra are the most adorable little six-year--old blond-haired book-ends you could ever hope to lay eyes on.” She trailed off and her eyes turned to the window.
“Oh god,” she moaned. “My family probably thinks I’m dead! They must be panic-stricken by now.”
“I’m sure they are.” Lance was sympathetic and patted her leg gently. “I’m sorry, Brooklyn. I wish there was something we could do.”
She cried softly for a minute, missing her folks and her siblings, imagining their agony. “I just can’t think about it; it hurts too much. I need to focus on the joy they’ll feel when they find out I’m okay.” She continued to stare out the glass, concentrating on the scene outside the window instead of her inner turmoil.
“The snow is so beautiful. It reminds me of my childhood. My mom didn’t work outside the home, although she did do some volunteer work. When it snowed like this she always bundled us up till we could hardly move. We’d go down to this big hill outside town with our sleds and spend hours sliding down and trudging back up. Dad joined us when he had time.” Brook paused in her story as Lance finished treating her second foot, and helped her sit up.
