The Survivor

Preparing dinner, Janie and Nate could hear them down the hall.

Jason’s voice first. “I didn’t say she was hot,” he backpedaled. “I just said I didn’t think she was ugly.”

Checking the stove, Janie murmured to Nate, “He said she was hot.”

Cielle’s reply now, at equivalent volume: “Christina Verducci. As in, ‘OMG, I would, like, so kill for a mani-pedi. Like, see how much time I save through my clever use of abbreviation?’ If you find that ‘hot,’ what are you doing with me?”

Janie poured pasta into the colander. When the hiss died away, the debate had intensified.

“In telling me to shut up,” Jason said, “you’re clearly not shutting up.”

Janie, again with the color commentary: “She did just tell him they both needed to shut up.”

Cielle, back on the offensive, her voice echoing down the hall: “You’re so wrong, I wish we had a tape recorder just so you could hear the extent of your total wrongness.”

“I wish we had a tape recorder to rewind this conversation to prove I never said Christina Verducci was hot.”

“If we asked, like, a hundred people, ninety-nine would agree with me.”

“Sure. And Rosie O’Donnell is gay.”

“She is gay, dipshit.”

“I meant not gay.”

Strident as it was, the youthful banter did provide, Nate had to admit, a respite from the oppressive heaviness of the wait. Janie handed him a stack of plates, and he set them on the wooden table, the knock of ceramic and the jangling of flatware momentarily drowning out Lincoln and Douglas. When he’d finished pouring water into the glasses, things had grown quiet down the hall.

Janie cocked her head. “What now?”

“Forest,” Cielle was saying.

“Nah.” Jason’s husky voice, barely audible. “Too hippieish. Carson?”

“No. I knew a Carson in elementary school who used to eat his eyebrows. How ’bout Taylor?”

“I like it. Taylor Hensley.”

“No, Taylor Overbay.”

Nate thunked the final water glass into place. “Oh, Jesus. Are they…?”

“I believe they are,” Janie said.

They listened. Nothing.

“Silence is bad,” Janie said, but already Nate was moving.

He stormed down the hall and into the study. They were upright, thank God, but making out on the leather couch. He cleared his throat angrily, and they scrambled apart and gave him Garfield eyes.

“No, okay?” Nate said. “Just … no. Now, come eat.”

They followed him sheepishly, Jason muttering, “Dude, we were just kissing. We weren’t all boom-chicka-wah-wah.” Nate held up a finger, and the boy silenced.

In the kitchen Janie had lit candles to avoid turning on the overheads, the effect soothing and inadvertently elegant. The pasta steamed on the plates, but by some unspoken agreement none of them started eating. There was no sound save the faint crackling of the candle and Casper at his dinner, his collar dinging the salad bowl into which Nate had emptied a can of dog food. Nate stared down at the woven place mats, the folded napkins, and understood fully for perhaps the first time in his life why people said grace before meals. For a brief stretch, they’d managed to forget about what awaited them beyond the comforting walls of this borrowed house. Sitting down at a well-set table threw their situation into sudden relief. Even Shithead Jason kept his mouth sealed.

Cielle broke the stillness first, tentatively picking up a fork, and they followed suit, eating almost shyly.

With dismay Nate realized that his jaw quickly tired from chewing, soreness radiating out from the hinge of the bone. The first weakness to reach his face. The invasiveness of this-the increased proximity now of the illness to his brain-seemed dire and insurmountable. The irony was sickening; he’d finally found the will to crack free of the frozen suspension that had kept him from his family, and now his muscles were fighting to paralyze him. Struggling to contain his reaction, he set his fork aside.

“You okay?” Janie asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Just not hungry.” He dabbed his lips with his napkin. “Excuse me a sec.”

He walked back to the master bathroom on wobbly legs and splashed water on his face. His fingers slipped over the faucet without purchase, so he knocked the water off with an elbow and stared at himself in the mirror. “Hold it together,” he said.

He took a leak and used the heel of his hand to depress the flusher. He had trouble tucking his boxers back into his jeans, his hand gone numb, and he shoved at the fabric, frustration driving him to the verge of tears. He finally succeeded, but then the buttons wouldn’t heed, and it struck him that he’d soon have to buy pants with elastic waistbands.

The time for his meeting with Abara was fast encroaching, and he needed his limbs to function if he hoped to get through it. His left arm was in worse shape, so he tried to use his right thumb to knead the muscle, pressing as hard as he could to feel something-anything-familiar. But no matter how hard he dug, the ache stayed foreign, a new shade of pain. In short order his right hand, too, began to lose its strength, and he stared it down, willing it to grip tighter, to obey the signals he was straining to send.

A faint knock at the door. He said, “Just a minute.”

Janie pushed into the bathroom. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m … I’m … Nothing.” He was having trouble getting any strength into his voice.

Her stare moved across him. Belt unbuckled. Left arm curled to his stomach, his right hand still groping at it weakly. He was mortified to think what he looked like.

Stepping forward, Janie reached down and gently tugged the top button of his jeans through the hole, then fastened his belt. He stayed motionless, as if that might help him disappear. His arm shuddered against his stomach. His right hand clasping, clasping, yet barely denting the skin.

She took his arm firmly in her warm grasp. He pulled away from her, his hand quaking, but she held on tight.

“Look at me,” she said.

Her gaze was steady, those blue eyes shining right through him, forcing his gaze to meet hers. He and his arm were going nowhere.

“Stop fighting,” she said.

His words from the riptide in which they’d met.

With effort he relaxed, releasing his arm to her, and she compressed his wrist gently. Stilling it. He drew in a quick, surprised breath. The motion of her hands resumed, working the muscles of his forearm, squeezing the feeling back into them.

A melancholy smile touched her mouth, faint enough to miss.

“I got you,” she said.

Chapter 42

By the time he left, Nate felt better, the muscular fit having subsided under Janie’s touch. His grasp of the steering wheel remained firm if stiff all the way up and through the dark bends and grassy slopes of Griffith Park. The municipal parcel of land, hemmed in by three freeways at the eastern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, was L.A.’s answer to Central Park, only larger and more untamed. Nate passed turnoffs for the zoo and the merry-go- round, then the observatory where causeless James Dean had faced down a pack of baddies with a switchblade and his trademark smolder.

During the day the park was a democratic gathering place for the city, an explosion of movement and color. But at night shadowy foliage predominated. Every idling car and solitary wanderer took on an ominous cast before