by Denise Gwen
Sarah walked alongside Jake for a few moments in the cold night, watching her breath plume out into little clouds. She was racking her brain to come up with something to say to Jake, anything, anything at all, that would temper the tension between them. She was in an agony of indecision, and, when Jake glanced at her with hooded eyelids, she regained a measure of strength, and cleared her throat.
Jake looked hopefully at her.
“Tell me about your wife?” she asked with a shy smile.
“Robin Roundtree . . . ” he said slowly, as if measuring the words, taking comfort from the weight of them on his tongue.
“That was her name?” she asked.
“Yes, Robin. My Robin.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment, and she didn’t press. As her mother used to say, ‘We all have our secret sorrows,’ and it was enough that she’d learned his wife’s name.
At last, he spoke. “Robin came to me one night, five years ago, after a tribal dinner. Well, let me go back a little. We attended primary school together, then her father moved the family north to join a salmon fishing operation. When she grew up, she came back to us from the northern Alaskan frontier. She’d heard of our tribe and wanted to be a part of us. Paul Livingston was there, and he’d been courting your sister for the past several months, only she—your sister, that is—didn’t realize it at the time.”
At this, he glanced at her and smiled faintly. Yes, she knew the story of how Paul came to woo her sister and how she fell in love with him during a ceremonial moment following the dinner. Rachel went to Paul, who’d been standing outside his teepee with a blanket wrapped around his body. As she came to him, he opened his arm for her to enter into the folds of his blanket and they snuggled together. The rest, as they say, is history. For after that night, Paul and Rachel became lovers, and then they married, soon becoming parents of darling Olivia.
This suddenly made Sarah start, for she realized something.
“Rachel mentioned something to me of that night,” she said, and then ducked her head, blushing. They both knew that Rachel had been embraced by Paul, snuggled in with him, and then gone into his tent, and they didn’t need to discuss what happened next, for they both knew.
But then it occurred to her, she knew what happened to Jake and Robin on that night, as well.
“She went to you that night, Robin did.”
Jake nodded, then said, hoarsely, “Yes.”
She listened, raptly, as he rasped out.
“The tribal dinner ended, I danced with the other men, and then I went to my tent, along with all the other young males—and… and Robin came to me, out of the dark. I took her in my arms, and I held her, and then we went inside the tent.”
She did the math, and Jake finished the thought for her.
“A few weeks later, we married, and nine months later, our little Joshua was born.”
“Your beautiful little boy,” she said.
Jake’s voice sounded ragged. “She was the love of my life.”
They’d reached her cottage. Jake didn’t know if he was more relieved or saddened that their walk had ended so quickly. He was on the verge of losing control, yet at the same time, it was therapeutic to finally talk to someone about it.
“Here’s my cabin,” she said in a colorless voice.
He watched as she pulled the key from her pocket and unlocked the door to the snug cabin that he’d built long before he’d ever met her but knew enough of her to install a secret desk for her to write her private journal.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and looked at him. “Would you, would you like to come in for a few minutes?”
For one long second, he was really tempted.
There was something so yearning, so vulnerable, in the way she looked up at him. He wanted to step forward, take her in his arms, wrap his hands around her slender waist and draw her close to him.
She reached out to him, tentatively, and he saw her lovely hand, and his inner resolve weakened. He stepped forward quickly and wrapped his arms around her waist and she gasped, and he bent his head down and kissed her tenderly on the lips. She melted into him, and he pressed himself against her, and she let out a little sigh. He groaned deep in his throat. He crept his right hand up her torso, stopping shy of her left breast, and cupped it, and even though she was wearing many layers of fabric, he still got a shot of desire as he sensed the soft round mound of her left breast. She moaned now, and he eased her inside the cottage and closed the door, but the closing of the door seemed to revive her to her senses, for she suddenly resisted him, pushed against him, and gently, yet firmly, extricated herself from his arms.
“I’m so sorry, Jake,” she whimpered. “I’m engaged . . . to someone . . . back in Omaha . . . I’m so sorry,” and she walked him to the door, and he left.
He longed to make love to her, but she’d applied the brakes, and quite frankly, he loved her too much to go against her wishes.
She put the door between them, and he cast one last smiling regret back at her. “Good night, Doctor Sarah.”
“Good night, Doctor Jake,” she called after him.
His life with Robin had been beautiful. When she was alive, his life had mattered, but she experienced difficulty in getting pregnant again, shortly after Joshua’s birth.
“It’s okay, honey,” Jake assured her one night, as she lay in bed, weeping. “It’s okay. Our family is perfect. You’re perfect. We’ve got a beautiful little boy, and he’s the light of my life, and I’ve got you, my beautiful little wife, and you’re the love of my life, and we’re great. We don’t need more children.”
“You’re not . . angry with me?” she asked, still weeping.
“Of course not, no, of course not,” he said, drawing an errant strand of hair from her eyes. “I love you. You made us a perfect little boy, and our family is complete. We’re complete.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly.
“He’s only nine months old. Your body hasn’t recovered fully yet from his birth. Give it at least a year.”
He knew why she was upset. They didn’t marry until she was thirty-seven, and she’d been worried enough about being pregnant as a so-called geriatric pregnant patient. Because she was older than thirty-five, she had to undergo the painful amniocenteses test, and was relieved when it came back normal.
They would have kept the baby whether or not it had Down Syndrome, but it was a welcome relief to learn that the baby was fine.
And so, Robin waited.
Little Joshua celebrated his first birthday, and the occasion was so joyous. Marcheline gave him a quilt she’d hand-made, the other tribal women gave him lovely handmade gifts, and he fell asleep before the party ended.
Robin let her birth control prescription expire.
“It’s time,” she said to Jake, and he nodded and agreed.
He would’ve preferred putting a little more time between children, but it was her body, and she’d made it clear to him that she wanted to be finished with pregnancy before she hit forty. She’d also always wanted to have four children, and it was painful enough accepting the idea that she might only have two.
A month later, one night, she came to him with shining eyes. They made love that night with extra tenderness.
And then, a few days later, she called him while he was at work, to ask him to come home.
Something in her voice . . .
He hurried home, and his mother greeted him at the door, holding Joshua on her hip. “Mama crying,” Joshua said.
“I’ve got her all cleaned up,” Marcheline said. “But we need to get her to the clinic so that Paul can perform a D&C.”
At this news, Jake’s heart shuddered.
Some of the tribal men came to the house and transported Robin to the clinic on a stretcher, where Paul waited. He performed the dilatation and curettage, as his wife Rachel, sat with Jake in the waiting room.
“This sometimes happens,” Rachel said gently. “After
a successful first delivery.”
“How’s Robin taking it?” he asked, morosely.
“Better than you,” Rachel said gently.
A bare month later, Robin got pregnant again, even though this concerned Jake tremendously. He wanted her to wait longer before trying again, but it was hard to shoot down her joy at finding herself pregnant with her second child.
She miscarried two weeks later.
“Robin, I think it might be a good idea for you and Jake to visit the hospital in Juneau for a full battery of tests and a general health checkup before you try to get pregnant again.” Paul had called both Jake and Robin in for a meeting in his office. Robin and Jake sat across from Paul, clutching each other’s hands.
“Okay,” Jake said. “I think that’s a wise idea. What do you think, Honey?”
Robin, tense, her sallow face drawn, only nodded. “Yes,” she said at last.
Paul pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down a name. “And I want you to see this fertility specialist, while you’re in Juneau. Harry Weathers. He’s wonderful, and he’ll be able to help you, Robin.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
Jake made the necessary appointments. He decided to make a mini vacation of it and splurged on a nice hotel. His mother stayed behind and watched Joshua, now a sturdy, inquisitive baby of eighteen months.
On the drive to Juneau, Robin wept silently.
“Honey, it’ll be all right. You’ll have your baby.”
“I’m thirty-nine, Jake. I’m running out of time. If I hadn’t miscarried, that baby would’ve been three months old by now.”
“Don’t fret, sweetheart,” he said, but she was inconsolable.
Dr. Weathers was kind and affable and listened to Robin’s tearful narrative. He smiled at last, and said, “I think we can turn this around.”
The look on Robin’s face, Jake would remember that moment forever after. It’d seared into his mind. She’d looked radiant, relieved, and even more beautiful than on her wedding day, if that was remotely possible.
Dr. Weathers sent Robin to the outpatient surgery center where she underwent a full physical—“to rule out anything that might be causing the infertility,” Dr. Weathers said—which included a complete battery of tests and the drawing of fluids, and the testing of blood sugars, and the testing of blood, not to mention an entire series of x-rays, a pelvic ultrasound, a PET-scan, and a mammogram, because, as Dr. Weathers put it, she was past due for her first, baseline mammogram, and it’d prove useful as the baseline for all future mammograms in the years to come.
A lot of hassle, a lot of waiting in waiting rooms, a lot of technicians, tests, blood, urine samples, but Robin endured it all with a happy heart.
“We’re going to have this baby, Jake,” she said.
And, God help him, he believed her.
When Dr. Weathers called Jake and Robin into his office at the end of all this exhaustive testing, they found out what was really wrong with Robin.
Dr. Weathers, strained, tense, sat behind his desk and told them the bad news.
Robin had estrogen-based breast cancer in the left breast. It’d already spread to the lymph nodes, and the radiologist had detected some cancer cells in her liver.
And Robin’s dream of having more children, quickly turned into a fight to save her life.
“We’re lucky we caught it in time,” Dr. Weathers said, but the hopeless expression on his face spoke the truth, and Jake found himself fighting to keep his small family from shrinking.
Even after a total left breast mastectomy, plus the removal of all her lymph nodes from the left arm, followed by radiation, chemotherapy, and more radiation, the cancer roared back with a vengeance, as if outraged at the efforts to eradicate it. Robin, frail, bloated, sickly, and dying, finally said no to anymore treatments and refused the last round that Dr. Weathers begged them to try, assuring them that it would do the job of reversing this awful, malignant cancer that was rippling through Robin’s body. Hospice came to the house, and in the last few months of her life, Robin watched as her two-year old son burbled around the house, and Marcheline came to live with them and take care of Robin.
Robin’s last breath of life came on January the first.
She’d been gone for two years now, and Jake still longed for his Robin.
Chapter 8
January 16th
“There’s been another grizzly attack,” Willie Bellefleur told Jake early one morning.
“Oh, no,” Jake said. “Where?”
“On the Denali roadway. Signs were posted everywhere, a tourist wandered off the trail, but at least this time, the tourist didn’t die.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Jake said. “But the grizzlies are getting closer.”
“They are. And a grizzly was sited near the reservation yesterday.”
“That’s not good,” he shook his head. “Not good at all.”
“I know. If we’re not careful, we’re going to have some fatalities at the reservation.”
“I can trust my people,” Jake said, “to know how to conduct themselves around a grizzly, but it’s the tourists who don’t pay attention to the signs.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“It’s the dry weather. We’ve had unseasonably dry temperatures. It’s cut down on the salmon population, and it’s forcing the grizzlies out of the mountains.”
“Yeah, it’s the grizzlies from way up high in the mountains that aren’t used to people, and they’re dangerous, really dangerous.” Willie’s expression was worrisome.
“I get so angry when I see tourists getting too close to the grizzlies. They think it’s cute to see them floating around in the water, rolling around at the bottom of the stream bed, where they’re searching for the salmon.”
“Yeah, they don’t realize the grizzlies are starving. Searching the bottom of the riverbed for salmon and coming up empty is not the best of ways to satisfy their hunger.”
“We’ve gotta do something,” Jake said.
“There’s a task force starting up,” Willie said. “And they’d like some volunteers to head up north, near Mount Denali, to conduct a study to see where, exactly, the grizzlies are coming from. Once they pinpoint where the grizzlies are searching for food, they’ll deliver a shipment of salmon.”
“Okay, how do you want my help?”
“There’s a team of scientists who are going to visit the southern side of Mount Denali, and they want the grizzlies to be tagged with microchips. They’re gonna move them up north, where they’ve been getting more rain.”
“I’m not walking up to some hungry grizzly and tagging his ear,” Jake said blandly.
“Duh, Jake,” Willie laughed. “The investigative team will send you a shipment of tranquilizer darts and a dart gun. You shoot the grizzly with the dart gun, then, while it’s down, you put a tag on its ear, and it’ll have a GPS device imbedded in the chip. Later on, a second team will locate the bear and then move it to a safer location.”
“Hmm,” Jake said. “Where do I come in?”
“I’ve got a helicopter lined up, and a pilot out of Juneau, who can fly down here, pick you up, and take you into the Mount Denali area to investigate the grizzly bears.”
“You don’t need to arrange for a pilot.”
“How come? You got someone on the reservation who can pilot a copter?”
“I sure do,” Jake said. “Me.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously,” Jake said with a smile. “I’ve got a helicopter pilot’s license.”
“You’re full of surprises, my friend.”
“It came in handy, awhile back, long before Doctor Paul first came to the reservation, when we needed to transport patients to the hospital in Juneau.”
“Well, ain’t that something?”
“Okay, looks like you’ve got this little expedition all lined up and ready to go.”
“Purt near,” Willie said. “You thinking of taking that c
ute lady doctor out there with you?”
“I don’t want to put her in any danger.”
“Ask her if she’s interested. She may surprise you.”
“I’ll do that,” Jake said.
“Hmm,” Willie mused. “She handled herself well with that grizzly attack victim.”
“Yes, and on her first day at the clinic, no less.”
A sly, slow grin passed across Willie’s face. “You, uh, ain’t, uh, doing another kind of reconnaissance mission, are you, Doc?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jake said brusquely. “She’s got some highfalutin’ doctor boyfriend back home waiting for her… down in the lower forty-nine.”
“Okay, go on telling yourself that, for sure.”
“We’re not interested in one another,” Jake said, more sharply than he intended, and Willie reared his head back.
“Okay, Doc,” Willie put up his hands in surrender. “I was just having fun with you.”
“Just see to the helicopter, will you?” Jake smiled faintly. “I’d like to embark on this trip at the beginning of the week.”
“Sure thing, Doc.”
Jake couldn’t stop thinking of her. He thought of her first day at the clinic; she’d barely had a chance to tour the facility, when she encountered her first emergency… that poor man who died in the ER of his injuries from the bear attack. It’d been an abysmal failure, and her first signed death certificate. He wondered if she really wanted to go with him on this journey.
But he really wanted her to be with him.
He was drawn to her, in a way that perhaps she didn’t want, but still, he wanted to be with her.
Sarah had been dreading the moment when she and Jake had to deal with one another again, and when he approached her one morning, she thought, Okay, this is it.
She steeled herself. “Good morning, Mr. Roundtree.”
“Good morning, Doctor O’Reilly.”
He stood there a moment, looking uncomfortable.