| Romance Fiction posted April 16, 2023 |
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A Peripatetic Love Story
On the Altar of Self-Sacrifice
by Jay Squires
Story of the Month Contest Winner
The author has placed a warning on this post for sexual content.
Some lives, certainly Lena's, might best be viewed using the classic formula for the Hollywood tearjerker. Whenever the movie starts with a tight focus on an attractive person, a man or a woman, sadness etched in the lines of his or her face, while that person is sitting or standing or walking (it matters little), but essentially alone (and that does matter), you know the screen is soon going to fuzz around the edges and you are going to spend most of the next couple of hours in an earlier time watching that attractive person with another attractive person, both laughing a lot and in love.
Who can forget old Rose? She is one of the more recent examples of an attractive person, sad and alone in her room when the film, Titanic, begins. (There may be stuttery scenettes scattered about before we're introduced to her, but when we do meet her that is where the film really begins.) Then, when the screen fuzzes around the edges we are transported to the Titanic where Old Rose is now young Rose and, given a little warp and weave of the plot, she and Jack are drawn into each other's lives with joy, adventure, laughter and love. And, there follows the journey toward the tragic end we suspicioned at the movie's beginning. As Hollywood is wont to say, "It's the journey that sells the popcorn."
Lena's story, however, follows more the formula of a 1970 Hollywood blockbuster, Love Story, also an Oscar winner and a seller of a lot of popcorn. Love Story and Lena's story are alike in spirit only. You don't need to read or see Love Story to enjoy Lena's story. One difference (and thank goodness, not the only difference) between their plots is this: It is the male, Robin, not Love Story's female, Jennifer, who is dying of cancer. Lena, not Oliver, is the attractive person, bewildered and alone we meet at the end. Which is our beginning.
* * *
(The Beginning)
As with any too hastily conceived story, I'll begin by righting a wrong. Lena wasn't entirely alone, not exactly alone—except in a philosophical sense. The fully dead, but not yet even cold, Robin leaned against her breast in the front seat of their Ford Pickup. She had chosen his truck instead of her car because it had the bench seat in the front. He begged to have Lena drive him from his deathbed in their home to the beach where he desired rather to die watching and listening to the waves crashing to the shore. It was three in the morning in the empty parking lot, a hundred yards of moon-yellowed sand separating them from the Pacific Ocean.
She didn't need to feel for a pulse to know he was dead. She had been talking to him, but stopped to confirm his last long exhale, felt his muscles slacken and melt into her, and his head loll to the side, then forward. She adjusted herself back against the door, and, with the arm she had around him, snuggled him up (he was light as a pillow) to a better position against her breast. Lifting his head, which, with all her movement, had come to rest against the steering wheel, she arced it up across her chest and rested it against the seat back, facing the opposite window. She tried to remember what she was talking to him about.
It came to her. It was about that famous line from Love Story, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Left to her own thoughts on their way to the beach, with Robin sleeping against the window, she had been remembering the two of them watching that movie on television four months earlier. He hadn't really been watching. He was having one of his horrific headaches that would lead not too much later to a battery of tests, the revelation of a tumor on his brain and two weeks after that the diagnosis that the tumor was malignant and inoperable. So, she was thinking about Love Story on the way to the beach, marveling over the stupidity of those words. She knew there were apologies left unsaid, scores of them, by her and by Robin. Hers, a few of them, were eating up her soul, just as Robin's cancer was gobbling away at his brain. Cowardice was never allowing yourself to say you're sorry.
And, so, in the empty parking lot at three in the morning, she peered through the near darkness at his reflection of open-eyed, open-mouthed amazement in the window and she asked him the question she had asked him before. "How fragile it all is, isn't it, Robin? Look at you, my fragile darling .... Do you remember the beginning of it all?"
We are eavesdropping on all this, positioned now somewhere slightly above and behind Lena's head, perhaps peering through the feathering of her auburn hair; we catch the left side of Robin's face, the sere cheekbone, the jaw slack and, in the window he faces, his dim reflection stares back at the camera. Then, taking art to a higher level, the camera penetrates the reflection that holds Robin, probes deeper past it to a tight focus on Lena's austere face. This feat could only be done in Hollywood, but it works. Impossible but entirely believable. We see the two of them, side by side, the living by the dead, a macabre portrait. There ... the camera has done nearly all its work. Only one thing remains. Predictably, the perimeters start fuzzing, and the portrait goes slowly out of focus and we know we are to be transported to an earlier time....
Lena gazed down at the back of Robin's head from eight semi-circular rows higher, willing him to turn around again and glance up at the clock against the wall, another six or seven rows behind her. She knew he didn't want to be a prisoner of this astronomy class either. She counted three times he had turned around in his seat and looked past her. He had better things to do than be at this lecture. The professor droned on. The auditorium was dust-moted in the slant of high windowed sunlight, smelling of antiquity, morning breath and spilled coffee, while outside the perfume of springtime permeated the campus. Robin didn't know it yet, but he'd rather be lolling in the high, fragrant grasses, flattened where their two bodies lay, but standing tall all around them, like sentinels, secluding them as they patiently gazed into their owned part of the sky, waiting for greater stars than the professor could possibly promise.
But the lecture ended this time as it had a half-dozen times before with the two of them leaving in their separate orbits around whatever other planets held them to their personal gravities.
Just about the time she had given up on Robin, his sister, Maretta, brought his message to her. Lena probably wouldn't know him from Adam, Maretta guessed, but her brother, Robin, was in her Astronomy class. Would she have coffee with him? If she couldn't he'd understand. He'd have asked her himself if he didn't have to stay after class to discuss a matter with the professor. At that point, Lena and Maretta shared a look that women understand intuitively; Maretta then giggled and said, "Robin'd kill me if he knew I told you, but he really likes you. And," she added, blushing, "I can see why. He's awfully shy, though. And—and while I'm at it, he won't understand at all if you can't do it, regardless of what he told me to say. He'll be crushed."
Lena had coffee with Robin the following morning after her history class. She met him in the far corner of the student lounge, sitting alone, as Maretta had arranged it, his chair tilted back against the wall, his legs crossed. Between two fingers extending out from the palm clasped over his knee, an unlit cigarette protruded. When their eyes made contact across the room, he brought his chair upright and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. His expression didn't change. He appeared vaguely bored, but as she approached his brows arched to add to his boredom a look of detached arrogance. What she'd imagined about their romance crashed headlong into the catastrophe of this first meeting. They had their coffee. And, between sips she did nearly all the talking while he appeared to listen, looking back from those intense smoky-gray eyes. His answers to her direct questions were monosyllabic and terminal. When she'd finished her coffee and got up to leave she was surprised at how he sprang to his feet, made an incongruous continental half-bow and produced a smile. "Thank you," he murmured.
He was absent at the next day's Astronomy class. As she filed out of the auditorium in the midst of a rush of pushing, book-jabbing students, an arm reached out and grasped her by the shoulder.
"I'm glad I caught you," Maretta said, breathlessly, tugging Lena free of the flow and to the side of the open double doors. "Lena, may we talk, just for a minute? I need to tell you something." She paused at this and took a deep breath, patting her sweater just above the two small mounds of her breasts. And at that brief moment before she spoke again Lena had tucked away, without realizing it, an image that would sustain her for months, even years, ahead. "Robin is devastated, Lena," she said after another breath. "He kept me awake half the night. He must've told me a hundred times, 'I think I blew it sis! I know I did. I blew it! I tried too hard to impress her and I blew it.' What did he do, for Pete's sake? He blubbered all around it but wouldn't tell me." She reached out and put a hand on Lena's shoulder.
"He ... um ..." Lena started, glancing at the slender fingers lightly fanned on her shoulder. "He didn't do anything. I did all the talking."
Maretta withdrew her hand and crossed her arms over her breasts. "Oh, dear, and I don't suppose it was like he was just being a good listener?"
"No, I doubt that he heard anything. He seemed bored, and that just made me rattle on more and more."
"Oh, the poor dear. He was petrified. Lena ..." She laid a hand on her shoulder again. Its warmth penetrated her blouse. "Will you give him another chance?"
"No, I don't think I—" she began.
"It'd be a double date this time. Bob and me, you and Robin. He'll be more comfortable and that'll make you more comfortable." She gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Please, Lena ..."
"Well, I guess I—sure, okay. But, you're sure Robin—"
She laughed, showing a row of white teeth with just a hint of an overbite. "My God, Lena, he adores you! I've got to get you two over this little hump. I need the sleep."
Bob was a jerk. Lena sat stiffly in the back seat of his Mitsubishi Eclipse, trying not to look at the rearview mirror. Robin hunched down at the other end of the back seat, looking straight ahead. Maretta was leaning in toward Bob, whose arm lay across her shoulder. Her eyes may have been closed, Lena couldn't tell, but Bob's were fully engaged. She caught him again winking at her in the rearview mirror. She scowled.
Robin spoke so suddenly it startled her. "Hey, dude, shall we go bowling?"
Bob laughed. "Dude? What're we, still in high school?" He looked in the mirror to solicit Lena's approval. Then he added to her, "You're more of a movie person, aren't you, Lena? You don't want to get all sweated up bowling, do you?"
She looked over at Robin. "I think it's a great idea ... bowling." And, then to Bob: "But, if you and Maretta want to go to a movie you can just drop us off."
At that, Maretta pulled back from Bob's arm and turned to Lena. "Then, it's decided. It's bowling. Three against one."
"Hey," Bob said, with sudden energy, "did I say I didn't want to bowl? I like my women nice and sweaty. How about you, dude?" he said with special emphasis. "You want Lena all sweaty?"
Robin turned to the window. Maretta glanced over at her brother, then at Bob. But she didn't say anything, either.
"Not your traditional love story was it, Robin?" Lena arched her back and grimaced, and after a moment eased back against the armrest. She reached her left arm around his chest and pulled him closer. His head still angled to the seat back, she reached over, gripping it under the chin, and pulled it toward her; kissing it once on the cold, taut cheek, she eased it back to where it was. "Your sister once told me she read that falling in love has a recent history. Maybe five, six, seven hundred years. Sure, people still fell in love, but what she meant was that the foundation of marriage wasn't love. She read that in her sociology class. Love didn't even play into most marriages. What was important was social, financial, or political status. Can you imagine that, Robin?" He stared out of his reflection at her with dead eyes, the eyes of a shored carp. She closed her eyes; the corners welled and tears trailed down either side of her nose. "I'm sure Maretta believed—I think she really, truly believed," she said, with her eyes upturned, remembering, "if I'd just commit to you, not waiting for bells and explosions and flashes of light, but would just hold on tight and be accepting of your flaws and weaknesses, that you, nourished by this, would eventually, inevitably respond by growing stronger, and then I, witness to this developing strength would one day, without realizing how it happened, find myself happier when I'm around you and sadder when you're gone. And, that, she said, was probably the best definition I could get of love. What do you think, Robin? Is that what love is, or is it something more mystical?"
Lena blinked at Robin's reflection. And here, the moviegoer, if he is wide awake to the moviemaking process has to smile a bit at the cameraman's (or rather the film editor's) legerdemain. For, between her first and second question, as we see Lena's slow, reflective blinks, the camera shifts to the right and to Robin's staid stare; and as it tightens in on that, which fills the entire screen, we hear her second question to him, "Is that what love is, or is it something more mystical?" Here is where we begin to smile and wonder if the editor might have his ambition set for an Academy Award. Observe .... With the question we can only hear from the now off-screen Lena, her slow blinking has been internalized by the camera so we see Robin's face compressing to a horizontal slit then enlarge again, full screen, the process repeating twice more, until the slit remains with black all around, then the slit, too, vanishes. In the editor's bag of tricks this would be the equivalent of the screen fuzzing around the edges. With perhaps two seconds of blackness in the theatre we know a flashback is imminent.
Maretta sat knee-to-knee with Lena. She held both hands in her own, resting on Lena's thighs. She massaged Lena's knuckles with her thumbs. Her smoky-gray eyes bored into Lena's. "You are a lovely romantic." Maretta told her, the corners of her mouth turning up in the barest hint of a smile. Lena had to will her thighs to relax to keep them from trembling beneath Maretta's hands, whose thumbs kept gliding back and forth across her knuckles. She had to consciously breathe through her nose because she knew her uncontrollably quick, jabbing exhales through her mouth would be hot against Maretta's face and give her away. "Your first reaction," Maretta continued, "because you are a romantic, will be to reject Robin—or worse to laugh at him or scoff at his proposal."
"His proposal!" Lena bolted up to a stiffly seated position, yanking her hands out of Maretta's. "His proposal! I hardly know him. I haven't even—"
"Kissed him? Oh, my love, my love," she laughed. Reaching out, she once again grasped Lena's hands in hers and pulled her gently toward her, until their hands rested this time on her own thighs. Lena was forced to lean even more forward now than before. "I know, Lena, I know .... I tried to talk him out of it. But, he's driven. He wants you. He wants you so badly. To reject him now, well—well, it will kill him. Literally kill him!"
"But, I couldn't. How could I—"
She gently squeezed her hands. "Lena, love, you confessed to me how you used to stare down at him in that cold and unromantic auditorium and fantasize the two of you, instead, lying together in a warm meadow. In your imagination you had already gone a lot further than a kiss. And, now I suppose, my dear—I suppose, for his sake and—and for mine, I'm asking you to lay yourself on the altar of—of what? Self-sacrifice? Love will come. I promise you. Love will come ....
For the next few days, and if she were pressed to admit it, for weeks and months after, Lena delighted in the delicious ambiguity of Maretta's words. What did she mean by "for his sake—and for mine"? And, "Love will come"? She said it twice. Part of her wanted to disentangle the ambiguity. Part of her dreaded deciphering it. As to Robin, how could she possibly say yes to marrying him? Besides, how could he be so bold as to ask?
Yet, ask he did! It came at the end of a movie date together (the first that was not a double with Maretta and Bob). During the movie he smiled or laughed at all the right spots. He managed, before it was half over, to lower a cautious arm across her shoulder and she responded by leaning a little toward him. But there was no talk that wasn't initiated by her either before or after the movie, until, that is, he pulled to the curb, strangely, about a half-block from her house. Was he afraid she might jump from the car and bolt to her front door? Turning the key off, and the radio's volume down, he brought his knees around to face her.
With surprising confidence he said, "Lena, I'm asking you to be my wife." But his eyes betrayed his confidence and he finished the rest of it while looking above her head, then out the window. "I graduate this year and I have two job offers already. I'll be able to give you the things you deserve. And I'll take care of you."
"But, do you love me, Robin?"
"Yes, I—I do."
"Can you say it?"
Still looking out the window, he said, "I do—I love you." He glanced at her.
"Then, I will marry you, Robin."
The wedding came three months later. Maretta was Lena's Maid of Honor. Bob was Robin's Best Man. At the reception following the ceremony Bob toasted the couple, alluding to the hot time Robin was going to have on their honeymoon. Some gasped. More laughed. Robin blushed. Maretta fumed.
Sad to say, looking back at it, Lena could count only two memorable times in bed with Robin over the next seven years. The others settled into an obscurity of restless insomnia, nights of listening to his light snoring, of sobs torn through the membrane of a nightmare, but later demurred.
The first came at the end of the day of their wedding, three hundred miles from the church, in the Glade Hotel, just outside of San Francisco. They had freshened up after their drive, showering separately, Robin taking his first. When Lena entered the main room after her shower, a robe covering her nightie, the first thing she saw were the rose petals strewn on the floor forming a path to the bed. She followed them with her eyes to Robin who lay under the blankets, folded back to his waist. His chest was thin, sunken and hairless. She could tell he was trying to smile seductively, that he wanted so much to please her. On the bed stand, within arm's reach, a champagne bottle, its cork already loosened, angled out of its ice bucket toward the bed. Two glasses were turned upside-down beside it.
"Oh, Robin," she said, already feeling the tears wet her cheeks and watching Robin blur. She rubbed the tears from her eyes, and he came back into focus. He looked confused, his smile twisted to a grimace.
"I'm sor—I've made you—" he stammered. "What, what did I—I'm sorry ...."
"No, Robin ... don't be silly. I'm so—so moved by it. You've made me feel special." Standing by the bed, she slipped her robe off her shoulders, letting it slide down her arms to the floor behind her. Her white, lace nightie had been a private, pre-wedding gift from Maretta. A little item she picked up at Frederick's of Hollywood because she thought Lena would look sexy in it on their honeymoon. Getting out of the shower she wondered if she should wear panties under it, then chided herself for being a prude. After all, this was their wedding night! She could sense his eyes devouring her and felt for just an instant an urge to cover herself. She resisted and said, instead, words that sounded foreign to her: "Am I beautiful to you, Robin?"
"Oh, God. Jesus... yes!"
"Do you want me, Robin?"
"Oh ... Oh ..." He made a sound like a whimper.
"Now? Do you want me now?"
He didn't answer. His eyes were tightly closed and his breathing was labored. Then he opened them and turned his head toward her, nodding fitfully.
Bending slightly at the waist, she brought her arms, crossed in front of her, to grasp the opposite hems of her nightie, and in one fluid movement (that belied all the time she practiced to make it so), she pulled it over her head and dropped it on the floor beside her robe. She slipped under the blanket and across the bed to his side. The flesh of his hips and thighs trembled against hers and she thought she heard a brief clattering of his teeth. There was no doubting the sound of his breathing, thin and nasal, followed intermittently by that odd whimpering.
When he didn't immediately face her, she nuzzled up to him, turning toward him. She kissed him on the chin and settled her lips against his neck. She brought her leg up and laid it across his thighs, feeling them stiffen under the weight. He inclined his head toward her and she whispered in his ear, "Shhhh. Please, let's not do anything just now. Can we just lie here for a while? It feels so good to snuggle with you." Before long she felt his thighs relax under her leg. His breathing slowed and was deeper. And while she lay there, through the silence Maretta's voice came as clearly to her mind as if she were lying there beside them: " ... And, now I guess, my dear—I guess, for his sake and for mine, I'm asking you to lay yourself on the altar of self-sacrifice. Love will come. I promise you. Love will come ...."
She began a slow undulation of her pelvis into his hip and then raised her knee up his thighs until it met the expected resistance. She took in a sudden suck of air just as he groaned. She felt his hands on her leg. She thought he was going to push her leg away, but instead, he slipped his fingers underneath, lifting it enough for him to turn toward her and guide himself into her.
There would be no other night like that first. Lena sensed something of this. She thought Robin did, too. Neither would attempt to duplicate it. Not that they didn't want to. She wanted desperately to recapture that moment of instinctive sexual innocence she felt between them. She knew he craved, most, that flash of explosive excellence. He never felt that excellence before. He knew in his heart he would never experience that excellence again. But, the closer he came to achieving it the further away it took her from the sexual innocence she needed. They were at opposite poles. Spirit at one pole. Power at the other. A chasm of snow and ice separated them. They never spoke of this. There weren't words for it. And, if words were found, both would deny the truth of this.
Maretta and Bob were married two months after Lena and Robin's wedding. Lena was the Maid of Honor. Robin was passed by as Best Man in favor of one of Bob's cronies. The chosen showed up drunk on their wedding day. Bob thought that was hilarious. The ceremony was completed somehow, without a hitch. They left for their honeymoon. Less than a week later Maretta returned alone by Greyhound. Makeup couldn't conceal the purple bruise on her chin and her puffy eyes, the left one swollen shut. The following day, she began the proceedings for the annulment.
There was a second time, about seven years from the first, when being in bed with Robin would forever be lodged in her mind. There were no rose petals; there was no champagne. It happened in the hospital bed, where, God bless him, Robin lay dying.
Robin had motioned with a little movement of his head for her to come closer, the same movement he used five minutes earlier to get her to sit on the bed beside him. She could tell from the tightening of the muscles around his eyes that even the slightest movement of his head, both times, did not come easily to him. Which was why she climbed up to sit on the bed in the first place. She learned over the last month to decipher the messages contained in the muscles surrounding those flat, unheroic eyes.
"Robin, she could come barging in any time." But, even as she was saying the words she was already lying down and sliding across the sheet to him. "I swear, Robin, if she does they'll boot me out for sure."
He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly. His mouth was a grim line. Inclining his head toward her, he closed his eyes again and this time left them closed. She was relieved that his breathing came easier. Had the morphine finally kicked in? She put her head on his pillow, and getting closer, rested her cheek on the soft flesh between his shoulder and chest. She felt him stir beneath her head and the breath from his nostrils feathered her cheek. For a moment she thought of their wedding night and letting her imagination linger there she almost, without realizing it, laid her leg across his. But before that could happen, she became aware of sudden irregular puffs of air. She raised herself from where her head had cradled and looked at him. He was trying to talk to her.
"What is it, love? I'm here, Robin. Don't strain. Here ..." She pulled her hair away from her ear and lowered it to his lips. "Just whisper, dear." She waited through what felt like a warm sigh, then looked back into his eyes. They were filled and overflowing. He moved his lips. She drew near him again.
"What, Darling. What?"
"Home..." he mouthed. That one word, with not even the force of a whisper behind it, held in its quiet strength a childlike, innocent expectation. She thought her heart would burst.
"Home?" she asked. "Darling, we need to get you well first."
He fixed his eyes on hers and kept them there until she couldn't bear it anymore and had to look away. Then he started laughing, but it was thin, dry as late-summer weeds, humorless and cruel. Just as suddenly as it started it stopped.
"Oh, Robin," she said, bending over him, kissing him on the cheek, "Please, Robin ... you've got to want to get well." As she started to pull away from him, he summoned some reserve of strength and lunged at her ear, clamping her earlobe between his teeth. Yelping in terror and pain, she jerked away from him and scrambled off the bed. She stood, shaking her head in disbelief, blood dripping onto the shoulder of her white blouse. "How could—why—why, Robin, why?
He slammed his eyes shut again and said in a raspy whisper, "I'm dying.... He swallowed hard and grimaced, turning away, then back. "I want—to die—at home. Lena ... Please .... "
"But, who would take care of you, Robin? If I don't work they'll cancel the insurance." She pulled a tissue from the box on the stand beside his bed and pressed it to her ear.
"Sorry," he whispered.
She shook her head without speaking of the incident. "I've got a week of sick pay. Then we'll see if your sister—"
"Won't ... last a week," he murmured.
"Of course, you will. You will!" She tried to appear upbeat and positive. But, she knew he saw through her act.
"Get me—out."
"I'll talk to Doctor Mansky."
"When?" He coughed fitfully.
"Now. But, if he says no—"
"Then... then..." He breathed fast and hard like a trapped animal. "We—check me—out. "
"The sad thing is, Mrs. Fisher, he might not be far off the mark. A week. Two. Three. Whenever his body chooses to shut down."
She stared at Dr. Mansky leaning toward her behind his abundant desk, clicking his ballpoint tip in and out of its casing against the green blotter. In and out, in and out, like a hard little tongue mocking her while the great doctor pronounced his sentence. What a bizarre phrase: When his body chooses to shut down. Chooses! Think I'm gonna shut this here body down, bossman. Not doin' you no good, Mr. Fisher Not doin' no body no good now, no how. Okay, bossman? Gonna flip the switch now. There... light's out! Buh-bye.
"He'd rather die at home, Doctor."
"But, you should have some say-so, too, Mrs. Fisher. It won't be easy. It won't be pretty."
"It's not pretty or easy watching him die here, either."
The doctor stood. "It's against my better judgment. Okay, I'll have the papers ready to sign in an hour."
At the door Lena turned around. "You've done your best. I know that."
"That's not Robin. That's not my brother, Lena. I love my brother. But, I don't know who that was in there. When I asked him if he needed something for his pain, he spit at me. He's doped up now, but I don't know how much more ..."
Lena stared out from some abstract station in her mind at the thin, blanched-faced young woman who had just launched herself through the door and onto the patio. Before that invasion, she had been some seven years and 300 miles away from remembering the square, soured, jangled room where Robin lay. She was once again gazing down at the back of Robin's head from eight semi-circular rows above him. Her mind had been going back to that time more regularly now. It gave her a measure of peace. And, part of her resented this interruption.
"Lena ... dear," Maretta said, exploding to her feet with sudden, unexpected energy, "I didn't mean that—Oh, I didn't, Lena! ... Come here." She spread her arms and waited while Lena, still in the grip of her delicious memories, got up more slowly, a little bewildered by the other's apologies, and the two held each other for a long time. Lena pulled away first, holding her sister-in-law at arms-length by the shoulders, looking into that sullen, helpless face.
"You need to get some sleep, Maretta. Go home, get some sleep." She put a palm flat against her cheek and brushed back the strands of hair that clung to her damp face. She continued to comb back her hair with the fingers of that hand, while she searched her eyes. Maretta smiled a bit awkwardly at her. Lena drew her again to a light embrace, brought her mouth to the place where her hair had adhered, kissing her gently there, feeling the other's body go just a little slack, before she pulled back away from her. "Go home, Maretta. I'll stay with him now. We'll be all right. I promise I'll call you if I need you."
Lena peered out from the curtain she pulled back from the open window and watched Maretta's car turn the corner at the end of the block. At the back of her mind the words echoed: "Love will come. I promise you. Love will come." She replaced the curtain, pulling it out from the sill so it fell freely, and then she settled in the rocker beside Robin's bed. In a moment she was back on her feet, feeling Robin's forehead, squeezing the excess water from a washcloth into the basin at the head of the bed, folded the cloth in thirds and laid it across his forehead. Flipping it over, she felt the heat radiating from it. She returned it to the basin, wrung it out, and repeated the process. "Sleep, sweet Robin," she whispered, looking down on his face.
Love means never having to say you're sorry. "Oh, Robin ... I am sorry. I am so sorry." She adjusted his weight again. The sun had been rising over the last half hour and already his reflection had disappeared from the passenger side window. That saddened her. For the first time in seven years she felt isolated, totally alone. She fumbled around behind her for the door handle and opened the door. An invasion of cold, salty air filled the truck. In the distance she heard the ocean's consumptive breathing. Backing out slowly, she laid Robin down on the seat and rolled him from his back to his side, facing the direction of the ocean. She thought of closing his eyes, the way she had seen it done in the movies, but that seemed so irrelevant now. She closed the door and stood there a full minute looking down on him. Then she opened the door, rolled down the window a few inches and closed the door again.
The stretch of sand to the ocean was glittery and white. She stopped where the pavement ended and removed her shoes and socks. She left them there and stepped off into the sand. It was cool and yielded to her step. She was already close enough to hear the crash of the waves farther out followed by the sizzle of retreating water and foam. Within an hour, the parking lot would fill and sunbathers would start spilling out onto the sand. It had been cold in the car earlier. She was warm now. She unbuttoned her cardigan, removed it and let it fall as she continued her path to the ocean.
(The End)
Some lives, certainly Lena's, might best be viewed using the classic formula for the Hollywood tearjerker. Whenever the movie starts with a tight focus on an attractive person, a man or a woman, sadness etched in the lines of his or her face, while that person is sitting or standing or walking (it matters little), but essentially alone (and that does matter), you know the screen is soon going to fuzz around the edges and you are going to spend most of the next couple of hours in an earlier time watching that attractive person with another attractive person, both laughing a lot and in love.
Who can forget old Rose? She is one of the more recent examples of an attractive person, sad and alone in her room when the film, Titanic, begins. (There may be stuttery scenettes scattered about before we're introduced to her, but when we do meet her that is where the film really begins.) Then, when the screen fuzzes around the edges we are transported to the Titanic where Old Rose is now young Rose and, given a little warp and weave of the plot, she and Jack are drawn into each other's lives with joy, adventure, laughter and love. And, there follows the journey toward the tragic end we suspicioned at the movie's beginning. As Hollywood is wont to say, "It's the journey that sells the popcorn."
Lena's story, however, follows more the formula of a 1970 Hollywood blockbuster, Love Story, also an Oscar winner and a seller of a lot of popcorn. Love Story and Lena's story are alike in spirit only. You don't need to read or see Love Story to enjoy Lena's story. One difference (and thank goodness, not the only difference) between their plots is this: It is the male, Robin, not Love Story's female, Jennifer, who is dying of cancer. Lena, not Oliver, is the attractive person, bewildered and alone we meet at the end. Which is our beginning.
* * *
(The Beginning)
As with any too hastily conceived story, I'll begin by righting a wrong. Lena wasn't entirely alone, not exactly alone—except in a philosophical sense. The fully dead, but not yet even cold, Robin leaned against her breast in the front seat of their Ford Pickup. She had chosen his truck instead of her car because it had the bench seat in the front. He begged to have Lena drive him from his deathbed in their home to the beach where he desired rather to die watching and listening to the waves crashing to the shore. It was three in the morning in the empty parking lot, a hundred yards of moon-yellowed sand separating them from the Pacific Ocean.
She didn't need to feel for a pulse to know he was dead. She had been talking to him, but stopped to confirm his last long exhale, felt his muscles slacken and melt into her, and his head loll to the side, then forward. She adjusted herself back against the door, and, with the arm she had around him, snuggled him up (he was light as a pillow) to a better position against her breast. Lifting his head, which, with all her movement, had come to rest against the steering wheel, she arced it up across her chest and rested it against the seat back, facing the opposite window. She tried to remember what she was talking to him about.
It came to her. It was about that famous line from Love Story, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Left to her own thoughts on their way to the beach, with Robin sleeping against the window, she had been remembering the two of them watching that movie on television four months earlier. He hadn't really been watching. He was having one of his horrific headaches that would lead not too much later to a battery of tests, the revelation of a tumor on his brain and two weeks after that the diagnosis that the tumor was malignant and inoperable. So, she was thinking about Love Story on the way to the beach, marveling over the stupidity of those words. She knew there were apologies left unsaid, scores of them, by her and by Robin. Hers, a few of them, were eating up her soul, just as Robin's cancer was gobbling away at his brain. Cowardice was never allowing yourself to say you're sorry.
And, so, in the empty parking lot at three in the morning, she peered through the near darkness at his reflection of open-eyed, open-mouthed amazement in the window and she asked him the question she had asked him before. "How fragile it all is, isn't it, Robin? Look at you, my fragile darling .... Do you remember the beginning of it all?"
We are eavesdropping on all this, positioned now somewhere slightly above and behind Lena's head, perhaps peering through the feathering of her auburn hair; we catch the left side of Robin's face, the sere cheekbone, the jaw slack and, in the window he faces, his dim reflection stares back at the camera. Then, taking art to a higher level, the camera penetrates the reflection that holds Robin, probes deeper past it to a tight focus on Lena's austere face. This feat could only be done in Hollywood, but it works. Impossible but entirely believable. We see the two of them, side by side, the living by the dead, a macabre portrait. There ... the camera has done nearly all its work. Only one thing remains. Predictably, the perimeters start fuzzing, and the portrait goes slowly out of focus and we know we are to be transported to an earlier time....
Lena gazed down at the back of Robin's head from eight semi-circular rows higher, willing him to turn around again and glance up at the clock against the wall, another six or seven rows behind her. She knew he didn't want to be a prisoner of this astronomy class either. She counted three times he had turned around in his seat and looked past her. He had better things to do than be at this lecture. The professor droned on. The auditorium was dust-moted in the slant of high windowed sunlight, smelling of antiquity, morning breath and spilled coffee, while outside the perfume of springtime permeated the campus. Robin didn't know it yet, but he'd rather be lolling in the high, fragrant grasses, flattened where their two bodies lay, but standing tall all around them, like sentinels, secluding them as they patiently gazed into their owned part of the sky, waiting for greater stars than the professor could possibly promise.
But the lecture ended this time as it had a half-dozen times before with the two of them leaving in their separate orbits around whatever other planets held them to their personal gravities.
Just about the time she had given up on Robin, his sister, Maretta, brought his message to her. Lena probably wouldn't know him from Adam, Maretta guessed, but her brother, Robin, was in her Astronomy class. Would she have coffee with him? If she couldn't he'd understand. He'd have asked her himself if he didn't have to stay after class to discuss a matter with the professor. At that point, Lena and Maretta shared a look that women understand intuitively; Maretta then giggled and said, "Robin'd kill me if he knew I told you, but he really likes you. And," she added, blushing, "I can see why. He's awfully shy, though. And—and while I'm at it, he won't understand at all if you can't do it, regardless of what he told me to say. He'll be crushed."
Lena had coffee with Robin the following morning after her history class. She met him in the far corner of the student lounge, sitting alone, as Maretta had arranged it, his chair tilted back against the wall, his legs crossed. Between two fingers extending out from the palm clasped over his knee, an unlit cigarette protruded. When their eyes made contact across the room, he brought his chair upright and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. His expression didn't change. He appeared vaguely bored, but as she approached his brows arched to add to his boredom a look of detached arrogance. What she'd imagined about their romance crashed headlong into the catastrophe of this first meeting. They had their coffee. And, between sips she did nearly all the talking while he appeared to listen, looking back from those intense smoky-gray eyes. His answers to her direct questions were monosyllabic and terminal. When she'd finished her coffee and got up to leave she was surprised at how he sprang to his feet, made an incongruous continental half-bow and produced a smile. "Thank you," he murmured.
He was absent at the next day's Astronomy class. As she filed out of the auditorium in the midst of a rush of pushing, book-jabbing students, an arm reached out and grasped her by the shoulder.
"I'm glad I caught you," Maretta said, breathlessly, tugging Lena free of the flow and to the side of the open double doors. "Lena, may we talk, just for a minute? I need to tell you something." She paused at this and took a deep breath, patting her sweater just above the two small mounds of her breasts. And at that brief moment before she spoke again Lena had tucked away, without realizing it, an image that would sustain her for months, even years, ahead. "Robin is devastated, Lena," she said after another breath. "He kept me awake half the night. He must've told me a hundred times, 'I think I blew it sis! I know I did. I blew it! I tried too hard to impress her and I blew it.' What did he do, for Pete's sake? He blubbered all around it but wouldn't tell me." She reached out and put a hand on Lena's shoulder.
"He ... um ..." Lena started, glancing at the slender fingers lightly fanned on her shoulder. "He didn't do anything. I did all the talking."
Maretta withdrew her hand and crossed her arms over her breasts. "Oh, dear, and I don't suppose it was like he was just being a good listener?"
"No, I doubt that he heard anything. He seemed bored, and that just made me rattle on more and more."
"Oh, the poor dear. He was petrified. Lena ..." She laid a hand on her shoulder again. Its warmth penetrated her blouse. "Will you give him another chance?"
"No, I don't think I—" she began.
"It'd be a double date this time. Bob and me, you and Robin. He'll be more comfortable and that'll make you more comfortable." She gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Please, Lena ..."
"Well, I guess I—sure, okay. But, you're sure Robin—"
She laughed, showing a row of white teeth with just a hint of an overbite. "My God, Lena, he adores you! I've got to get you two over this little hump. I need the sleep."
Bob was a jerk. Lena sat stiffly in the back seat of his Mitsubishi Eclipse, trying not to look at the rearview mirror. Robin hunched down at the other end of the back seat, looking straight ahead. Maretta was leaning in toward Bob, whose arm lay across her shoulder. Her eyes may have been closed, Lena couldn't tell, but Bob's were fully engaged. She caught him again winking at her in the rearview mirror. She scowled.
Robin spoke so suddenly it startled her. "Hey, dude, shall we go bowling?"
Bob laughed. "Dude? What're we, still in high school?" He looked in the mirror to solicit Lena's approval. Then he added to her, "You're more of a movie person, aren't you, Lena? You don't want to get all sweated up bowling, do you?"
She looked over at Robin. "I think it's a great idea ... bowling." And, then to Bob: "But, if you and Maretta want to go to a movie you can just drop us off."
At that, Maretta pulled back from Bob's arm and turned to Lena. "Then, it's decided. It's bowling. Three against one."
"Hey," Bob said, with sudden energy, "did I say I didn't want to bowl? I like my women nice and sweaty. How about you, dude?" he said with special emphasis. "You want Lena all sweaty?"
Robin turned to the window. Maretta glanced over at her brother, then at Bob. But she didn't say anything, either.
"Not your traditional love story was it, Robin?" Lena arched her back and grimaced, and after a moment eased back against the armrest. She reached her left arm around his chest and pulled him closer. His head still angled to the seat back, she reached over, gripping it under the chin, and pulled it toward her; kissing it once on the cold, taut cheek, she eased it back to where it was. "Your sister once told me she read that falling in love has a recent history. Maybe five, six, seven hundred years. Sure, people still fell in love, but what she meant was that the foundation of marriage wasn't love. She read that in her sociology class. Love didn't even play into most marriages. What was important was social, financial, or political status. Can you imagine that, Robin?" He stared out of his reflection at her with dead eyes, the eyes of a shored carp. She closed her eyes; the corners welled and tears trailed down either side of her nose. "I'm sure Maretta believed—I think she really, truly believed," she said, with her eyes upturned, remembering, "if I'd just commit to you, not waiting for bells and explosions and flashes of light, but would just hold on tight and be accepting of your flaws and weaknesses, that you, nourished by this, would eventually, inevitably respond by growing stronger, and then I, witness to this developing strength would one day, without realizing how it happened, find myself happier when I'm around you and sadder when you're gone. And, that, she said, was probably the best definition I could get of love. What do you think, Robin? Is that what love is, or is it something more mystical?"
Lena blinked at Robin's reflection. And here, the moviegoer, if he is wide awake to the moviemaking process has to smile a bit at the cameraman's (or rather the film editor's) legerdemain. For, between her first and second question, as we see Lena's slow, reflective blinks, the camera shifts to the right and to Robin's staid stare; and as it tightens in on that, which fills the entire screen, we hear her second question to him, "Is that what love is, or is it something more mystical?" Here is where we begin to smile and wonder if the editor might have his ambition set for an Academy Award. Observe .... With the question we can only hear from the now off-screen Lena, her slow blinking has been internalized by the camera so we see Robin's face compressing to a horizontal slit then enlarge again, full screen, the process repeating twice more, until the slit remains with black all around, then the slit, too, vanishes. In the editor's bag of tricks this would be the equivalent of the screen fuzzing around the edges. With perhaps two seconds of blackness in the theatre we know a flashback is imminent.
Maretta sat knee-to-knee with Lena. She held both hands in her own, resting on Lena's thighs. She massaged Lena's knuckles with her thumbs. Her smoky-gray eyes bored into Lena's. "You are a lovely romantic." Maretta told her, the corners of her mouth turning up in the barest hint of a smile. Lena had to will her thighs to relax to keep them from trembling beneath Maretta's hands, whose thumbs kept gliding back and forth across her knuckles. She had to consciously breathe through her nose because she knew her uncontrollably quick, jabbing exhales through her mouth would be hot against Maretta's face and give her away. "Your first reaction," Maretta continued, "because you are a romantic, will be to reject Robin—or worse to laugh at him or scoff at his proposal."
"His proposal!" Lena bolted up to a stiffly seated position, yanking her hands out of Maretta's. "His proposal! I hardly know him. I haven't even—"
"Kissed him? Oh, my love, my love," she laughed. Reaching out, she once again grasped Lena's hands in hers and pulled her gently toward her, until their hands rested this time on her own thighs. Lena was forced to lean even more forward now than before. "I know, Lena, I know .... I tried to talk him out of it. But, he's driven. He wants you. He wants you so badly. To reject him now, well—well, it will kill him. Literally kill him!"
"But, I couldn't. How could I—"
She gently squeezed her hands. "Lena, love, you confessed to me how you used to stare down at him in that cold and unromantic auditorium and fantasize the two of you, instead, lying together in a warm meadow. In your imagination you had already gone a lot further than a kiss. And, now I suppose, my dear—I suppose, for his sake and—and for mine, I'm asking you to lay yourself on the altar of—of what? Self-sacrifice? Love will come. I promise you. Love will come ....
For the next few days, and if she were pressed to admit it, for weeks and months after, Lena delighted in the delicious ambiguity of Maretta's words. What did she mean by "for his sake—and for mine"? And, "Love will come"? She said it twice. Part of her wanted to disentangle the ambiguity. Part of her dreaded deciphering it. As to Robin, how could she possibly say yes to marrying him? Besides, how could he be so bold as to ask?
Yet, ask he did! It came at the end of a movie date together (the first that was not a double with Maretta and Bob). During the movie he smiled or laughed at all the right spots. He managed, before it was half over, to lower a cautious arm across her shoulder and she responded by leaning a little toward him. But there was no talk that wasn't initiated by her either before or after the movie, until, that is, he pulled to the curb, strangely, about a half-block from her house. Was he afraid she might jump from the car and bolt to her front door? Turning the key off, and the radio's volume down, he brought his knees around to face her.
With surprising confidence he said, "Lena, I'm asking you to be my wife." But his eyes betrayed his confidence and he finished the rest of it while looking above her head, then out the window. "I graduate this year and I have two job offers already. I'll be able to give you the things you deserve. And I'll take care of you."
"But, do you love me, Robin?"
"Yes, I—I do."
"Can you say it?"
Still looking out the window, he said, "I do—I love you." He glanced at her.
"Then, I will marry you, Robin."
The wedding came three months later. Maretta was Lena's Maid of Honor. Bob was Robin's Best Man. At the reception following the ceremony Bob toasted the couple, alluding to the hot time Robin was going to have on their honeymoon. Some gasped. More laughed. Robin blushed. Maretta fumed.
Sad to say, looking back at it, Lena could count only two memorable times in bed with Robin over the next seven years. The others settled into an obscurity of restless insomnia, nights of listening to his light snoring, of sobs torn through the membrane of a nightmare, but later demurred.
The first came at the end of the day of their wedding, three hundred miles from the church, in the Glade Hotel, just outside of San Francisco. They had freshened up after their drive, showering separately, Robin taking his first. When Lena entered the main room after her shower, a robe covering her nightie, the first thing she saw were the rose petals strewn on the floor forming a path to the bed. She followed them with her eyes to Robin who lay under the blankets, folded back to his waist. His chest was thin, sunken and hairless. She could tell he was trying to smile seductively, that he wanted so much to please her. On the bed stand, within arm's reach, a champagne bottle, its cork already loosened, angled out of its ice bucket toward the bed. Two glasses were turned upside-down beside it.
"Oh, Robin," she said, already feeling the tears wet her cheeks and watching Robin blur. She rubbed the tears from her eyes, and he came back into focus. He looked confused, his smile twisted to a grimace.
"I'm sor—I've made you—" he stammered. "What, what did I—I'm sorry ...."
"No, Robin ... don't be silly. I'm so—so moved by it. You've made me feel special." Standing by the bed, she slipped her robe off her shoulders, letting it slide down her arms to the floor behind her. Her white, lace nightie had been a private, pre-wedding gift from Maretta. A little item she picked up at Frederick's of Hollywood because she thought Lena would look sexy in it on their honeymoon. Getting out of the shower she wondered if she should wear panties under it, then chided herself for being a prude. After all, this was their wedding night! She could sense his eyes devouring her and felt for just an instant an urge to cover herself. She resisted and said, instead, words that sounded foreign to her: "Am I beautiful to you, Robin?"
"Oh, God. Jesus... yes!"
"Do you want me, Robin?"
"Oh ... Oh ..." He made a sound like a whimper.
"Now? Do you want me now?"
He didn't answer. His eyes were tightly closed and his breathing was labored. Then he opened them and turned his head toward her, nodding fitfully.
Bending slightly at the waist, she brought her arms, crossed in front of her, to grasp the opposite hems of her nightie, and in one fluid movement (that belied all the time she practiced to make it so), she pulled it over her head and dropped it on the floor beside her robe. She slipped under the blanket and across the bed to his side. The flesh of his hips and thighs trembled against hers and she thought she heard a brief clattering of his teeth. There was no doubting the sound of his breathing, thin and nasal, followed intermittently by that odd whimpering.
When he didn't immediately face her, she nuzzled up to him, turning toward him. She kissed him on the chin and settled her lips against his neck. She brought her leg up and laid it across his thighs, feeling them stiffen under the weight. He inclined his head toward her and she whispered in his ear, "Shhhh. Please, let's not do anything just now. Can we just lie here for a while? It feels so good to snuggle with you." Before long she felt his thighs relax under her leg. His breathing slowed and was deeper. And while she lay there, through the silence Maretta's voice came as clearly to her mind as if she were lying there beside them: " ... And, now I guess, my dear—I guess, for his sake and for mine, I'm asking you to lay yourself on the altar of self-sacrifice. Love will come. I promise you. Love will come ...."
She began a slow undulation of her pelvis into his hip and then raised her knee up his thighs until it met the expected resistance. She took in a sudden suck of air just as he groaned. She felt his hands on her leg. She thought he was going to push her leg away, but instead, he slipped his fingers underneath, lifting it enough for him to turn toward her and guide himself into her.
There would be no other night like that first. Lena sensed something of this. She thought Robin did, too. Neither would attempt to duplicate it. Not that they didn't want to. She wanted desperately to recapture that moment of instinctive sexual innocence she felt between them. She knew he craved, most, that flash of explosive excellence. He never felt that excellence before. He knew in his heart he would never experience that excellence again. But, the closer he came to achieving it the further away it took her from the sexual innocence she needed. They were at opposite poles. Spirit at one pole. Power at the other. A chasm of snow and ice separated them. They never spoke of this. There weren't words for it. And, if words were found, both would deny the truth of this.
Maretta and Bob were married two months after Lena and Robin's wedding. Lena was the Maid of Honor. Robin was passed by as Best Man in favor of one of Bob's cronies. The chosen showed up drunk on their wedding day. Bob thought that was hilarious. The ceremony was completed somehow, without a hitch. They left for their honeymoon. Less than a week later Maretta returned alone by Greyhound. Makeup couldn't conceal the purple bruise on her chin and her puffy eyes, the left one swollen shut. The following day, she began the proceedings for the annulment.
There was a second time, about seven years from the first, when being in bed with Robin would forever be lodged in her mind. There were no rose petals; there was no champagne. It happened in the hospital bed, where, God bless him, Robin lay dying.
Robin had motioned with a little movement of his head for her to come closer, the same movement he used five minutes earlier to get her to sit on the bed beside him. She could tell from the tightening of the muscles around his eyes that even the slightest movement of his head, both times, did not come easily to him. Which was why she climbed up to sit on the bed in the first place. She learned over the last month to decipher the messages contained in the muscles surrounding those flat, unheroic eyes.
"Robin, she could come barging in any time." But, even as she was saying the words she was already lying down and sliding across the sheet to him. "I swear, Robin, if she does they'll boot me out for sure."
He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly. His mouth was a grim line. Inclining his head toward her, he closed his eyes again and this time left them closed. She was relieved that his breathing came easier. Had the morphine finally kicked in? She put her head on his pillow, and getting closer, rested her cheek on the soft flesh between his shoulder and chest. She felt him stir beneath her head and the breath from his nostrils feathered her cheek. For a moment she thought of their wedding night and letting her imagination linger there she almost, without realizing it, laid her leg across his. But before that could happen, she became aware of sudden irregular puffs of air. She raised herself from where her head had cradled and looked at him. He was trying to talk to her.
"What is it, love? I'm here, Robin. Don't strain. Here ..." She pulled her hair away from her ear and lowered it to his lips. "Just whisper, dear." She waited through what felt like a warm sigh, then looked back into his eyes. They were filled and overflowing. He moved his lips. She drew near him again.
"What, Darling. What?"
"Home..." he mouthed. That one word, with not even the force of a whisper behind it, held in its quiet strength a childlike, innocent expectation. She thought her heart would burst.
"Home?" she asked. "Darling, we need to get you well first."
He fixed his eyes on hers and kept them there until she couldn't bear it anymore and had to look away. Then he started laughing, but it was thin, dry as late-summer weeds, humorless and cruel. Just as suddenly as it started it stopped.
"Oh, Robin," she said, bending over him, kissing him on the cheek, "Please, Robin ... you've got to want to get well." As she started to pull away from him, he summoned some reserve of strength and lunged at her ear, clamping her earlobe between his teeth. Yelping in terror and pain, she jerked away from him and scrambled off the bed. She stood, shaking her head in disbelief, blood dripping onto the shoulder of her white blouse. "How could—why—why, Robin, why?
He slammed his eyes shut again and said in a raspy whisper, "I'm dying.... He swallowed hard and grimaced, turning away, then back. "I want—to die—at home. Lena ... Please .... "
"But, who would take care of you, Robin? If I don't work they'll cancel the insurance." She pulled a tissue from the box on the stand beside his bed and pressed it to her ear.
"Sorry," he whispered.
She shook her head without speaking of the incident. "I've got a week of sick pay. Then we'll see if your sister—"
"Won't ... last a week," he murmured.
"Of course, you will. You will!" She tried to appear upbeat and positive. But, she knew he saw through her act.
"Get me—out."
"I'll talk to Doctor Mansky."
"When?" He coughed fitfully.
"Now. But, if he says no—"
"Then... then..." He breathed fast and hard like a trapped animal. "We—check me—out. "
"The sad thing is, Mrs. Fisher, he might not be far off the mark. A week. Two. Three. Whenever his body chooses to shut down."
She stared at Dr. Mansky leaning toward her behind his abundant desk, clicking his ballpoint tip in and out of its casing against the green blotter. In and out, in and out, like a hard little tongue mocking her while the great doctor pronounced his sentence. What a bizarre phrase: When his body chooses to shut down. Chooses! Think I'm gonna shut this here body down, bossman. Not doin' you no good, Mr. Fisher Not doin' no body no good now, no how. Okay, bossman? Gonna flip the switch now. There... light's out! Buh-bye.
"He'd rather die at home, Doctor."
"But, you should have some say-so, too, Mrs. Fisher. It won't be easy. It won't be pretty."
"It's not pretty or easy watching him die here, either."
The doctor stood. "It's against my better judgment. Okay, I'll have the papers ready to sign in an hour."
At the door Lena turned around. "You've done your best. I know that."
"That's not Robin. That's not my brother, Lena. I love my brother. But, I don't know who that was in there. When I asked him if he needed something for his pain, he spit at me. He's doped up now, but I don't know how much more ..."
Lena stared out from some abstract station in her mind at the thin, blanched-faced young woman who had just launched herself through the door and onto the patio. Before that invasion, she had been some seven years and 300 miles away from remembering the square, soured, jangled room where Robin lay. She was once again gazing down at the back of Robin's head from eight semi-circular rows above him. Her mind had been going back to that time more regularly now. It gave her a measure of peace. And, part of her resented this interruption.
"Lena ... dear," Maretta said, exploding to her feet with sudden, unexpected energy, "I didn't mean that—Oh, I didn't, Lena! ... Come here." She spread her arms and waited while Lena, still in the grip of her delicious memories, got up more slowly, a little bewildered by the other's apologies, and the two held each other for a long time. Lena pulled away first, holding her sister-in-law at arms-length by the shoulders, looking into that sullen, helpless face.
"You need to get some sleep, Maretta. Go home, get some sleep." She put a palm flat against her cheek and brushed back the strands of hair that clung to her damp face. She continued to comb back her hair with the fingers of that hand, while she searched her eyes. Maretta smiled a bit awkwardly at her. Lena drew her again to a light embrace, brought her mouth to the place where her hair had adhered, kissing her gently there, feeling the other's body go just a little slack, before she pulled back away from her. "Go home, Maretta. I'll stay with him now. We'll be all right. I promise I'll call you if I need you."
Lena peered out from the curtain she pulled back from the open window and watched Maretta's car turn the corner at the end of the block. At the back of her mind the words echoed: "Love will come. I promise you. Love will come." She replaced the curtain, pulling it out from the sill so it fell freely, and then she settled in the rocker beside Robin's bed. In a moment she was back on her feet, feeling Robin's forehead, squeezing the excess water from a washcloth into the basin at the head of the bed, folded the cloth in thirds and laid it across his forehead. Flipping it over, she felt the heat radiating from it. She returned it to the basin, wrung it out, and repeated the process. "Sleep, sweet Robin," she whispered, looking down on his face.
Love means never having to say you're sorry. "Oh, Robin ... I am sorry. I am so sorry." She adjusted his weight again. The sun had been rising over the last half hour and already his reflection had disappeared from the passenger side window. That saddened her. For the first time in seven years she felt isolated, totally alone. She fumbled around behind her for the door handle and opened the door. An invasion of cold, salty air filled the truck. In the distance she heard the ocean's consumptive breathing. Backing out slowly, she laid Robin down on the seat and rolled him from his back to his side, facing the direction of the ocean. She thought of closing his eyes, the way she had seen it done in the movies, but that seemed so irrelevant now. She closed the door and stood there a full minute looking down on him. Then she opened the door, rolled down the window a few inches and closed the door again.
The stretch of sand to the ocean was glittery and white. She stopped where the pavement ended and removed her shoes and socks. She left them there and stepped off into the sand. It was cool and yielded to her step. She was already close enough to hear the crash of the waves farther out followed by the sizzle of retreating water and foam. Within an hour, the parking lot would fill and sunbathers would start spilling out onto the sand. It had been cold in the car earlier. She was warm now. She unbuttoned her cardigan, removed it and let it fall as she continued her path to the ocean.
(The End)
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If you're not so winded from reading the text that you're concluding with the Author Notes, I thank you. I'd considered lopping the post off about halfway through and running it in two installments, but with all the flashbacks and backstory, you would not have the impact you (hopefully) had by reading it in one rump-numbing sitting. I do hope it was worth your time.
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