The Survivor

abruptly, the guitar lying awkwardly across his thighs like a lapdog that could at any instant turn hostile.

They faced each other there in the light of the dark black night. The door clicked shut behind Nate, cold running up his sleeves and around his neck. “Why don’t you play that instead of the other crap?”

“You really know how to pay a compliment.”

“You really know how to play.”

The kid actually blushed. “Yeah, well.”

“I’m serious. Why don’t you play more like that?”

Jason shrugged, jerking his head to flick the hair out of his eyes. “Dunno. Guess I figured I wasn’t supposed to. You know. Be good at something.”

Nate sat beside him, the porch swing rocking. “Maybe it’s easier to just lump along sometimes.”

“No,” Jason said. “It’s exhausting to be a fuckup.”

Nate laughed.

Jason picked at his shoe. “All my life I was told no. Can’t go outside to play. Can’t do algebra. Can’t date a smart girl. Well, I’m sick of it.” A touch sharp-an accusation.

Nate thought for a time, then said, “You should be.”

The crickets were at it out there in the blackness.

Jason nodded a bit to himself. “You know when you hear a song on the radio that you just dig? And it sticks in your head, right? So you download it from iTunes. At first you love it. Take it with you to the skate park. Go to the beach with it, everywhere. But then you have it, so you get sick of it. And later you hear it on the radio, it’s not as exciting. Because you own it, right?” He licked his chapped lips. “That’s how it was with other girls. But I never feel that way about Cielle.”

They swayed a little on the porch swing, the silence growing awkward. Then Jason reached over and chucked Nate on the shoulder, a touch too hard. “Glad we had this talk, Pops.”

Suppressing a grin, Nate rose. “Good night, Jason.”

Jason threw his hands out, all smart-ass smirk. “C’mon. Shouldn’t we, ya know, go throw a ball? Quick bonding game of catch?”

Nate passed through the door. Safely out of view, he couldn’t help but crack a smile.

Janie lay across him in the sweaty aftermath, her lips at his chest, the blades of her shoulders forming an erotic ridgeline in the darkness. Starlight angled through the curtainless pane, blanketing half the bed in a faint blue glow. Her mouth worked up his neck and found his mouth. She lifted her head, catching the sheet of light, her face smooth and beatific save the inadvertent half sneer of her swollen lips. He tugged at her hair, damp and heavy at the nape, and she pulled forward into the gentle pressure, tilting her head as if to stretch her neck.

The moment was timeless-no, it was of a different time. It was before Fort Benning and the Sandbox, before the man-boy shackled to an outhouse and Abibas and a helicopter that capsized four feet above a dune. Before death notifications and a failure of will in the car outside Charles’s childhood home. Before nightmares and ghosts and a Westwood apartment with two photographs thumbtacked to the wall. Before safe-deposit boxes and interrogation rooms and oversize footprints in the back lawn. Before neurologists and little white pills and a body that slowly and unpredictably betrayed him.

But of course it wasn’t.

The muscle beneath his cheek rippled-a tiny bout of fasciculation-and Janie’s eyes tracked down to it. Her breathing changed, ever so slightly. The mood, taking a turn, paradise interrupted by a twinge of the flesh. The illness had brought him home again, but it also meant that he wouldn’t be able to stay.

His voice was husky. “I’m gonna die,” he told her.

Her fingertips were at his face, fording his lips. “I don’t care.”

“Do you have any idea how awful this is gonna get?”

“I don’t care.” Her mouth trembled, then firmed with anger. “Your eyes can dry up and you can stop talking and lie there choking on fluid in your lungs-I don’t care.” She clutched at him, her nails digging into the skin beneath his collarbone. “You can stop swallowing and have a ventilator rammed down your throat and … and barely be able to blink, but I still want you there. Dying. For me. I don’t care. I don’t care.”

She lowered her damp forehead to his chest and kept it there for a time. He held her and looked at the stars outside and thought how they’d be there the morning after he died and the morning after that. He stroked her back, and she fell asleep on him, and half his body went numb from the weight of her, but he didn’t dare move, didn’t want to waste a single instant of it.

Finally she stirred and shifted off him, raising her sleep-heavy face. “I don’t mean it,” she said.

He ran his fingers gently down her back and up again. “I know.”

Chapter 52

Nate slept hard and awakened new. Beside him the quilt was flipped back to empty sheets; Janie had slipped out, letting him sleep. With wonder he flexed his hands, rotated his feet, clenched his jaw. Hints of weakness, minor aches. Not perfect, but a world better.

Standing, he stretched, straining for the ceiling, fingers spread, pushing as far and high as his body allowed. It felt divine. The drug interaction had given him a preview of the future. Testing the strength in his hands again, he realized that he now had a brief window before the decline happened again and with finality.

He vowed not to waste it.

He paced outside, nose to his cell phone, searching out a signal. Mistaking this for play, Casper ran at his side, thwacking Nate’s legs with his tail. Nate wound up in the center of the footbridge, where two bars materialized and a third flickered moodily. The stream below was as clear as air, the rocks of the bed vibrant with mossy greens. He sent a text to Abara that simply read YOU THERE? and seconds later got an answer: CALL ME IN TWENTY. And a phone number.

He wandered back inside, where his father handed him a cup of coffee, the morning newspaper, and a plate full of fresh blueberry pancakes. The rustic Martha Stewart routine continued to surprise the hell out of Nate, but he had to concede that years of living alone had made his father proficient in the kitchen.

Nate took a sip of coffee, closed his eyes into the pleasure of it, then handed the mug back. “I can only drink decaf now.”

His father frowned at the curiousness of this but asked nothing. Janie was in the shower, the kids up in the loft. The hushed teenage voices were pleasant enough, though experience had shown that a petty argument was likely to erupt at any second.

Nate ate and swallowed his riluzole, glancing at the newspaper’s subtle headline: HOSPITAL MASSACRE. He scanned down, finding little in the way of helpful information. Unidentified shooter, two dead, multiple injuries, all survivors now stable. No mention of Nate or Janie; the agency was probably withholding information for the investigation. Beneath the fold, photos showed the nurse who had manned the front station and the security guard. The two black-and-white pictures held Nate’s attention.

What little regard Misha-and Pavlo-had shown for these lives. Obstacles to be obliterated in their pursuit. Scorched earth was right. With Nastya’s suicide it seemed that every restraint and objective had fallen away; Pavlo wanted nothing now except vengeance.

From habit Nate flipped to the obituaries and was surprised to see the same photograph of the nurse reproduced there. Luanne Dupries’s dedication to her profession and her leadership at the community level within the California Nurses Association were an inspiration to her many friends and colleagues. Nate’s fingernail underscored the last two sentences.

Luanne is survived by her immediate family: her parents, brother, son, daughter-in-law, and nieces and nephews. She is also survived by her fiance and his four children.