by Susan Wiggs
On the day everything had changed, the late-summer sun was as intense as her smile, the breeze as sharp-edged as a scalpel. She came in from her walk looking fresh and happy, the tip of her nose pink from the chill air. He remembered the way she pressed her hand to his chest, right over his heart, and leaned forward to kiss him, as she had a thousand times before. Did she seem a little breathless? Unsteady? Had he been too distracted to notice?
He had been going over some long-range business plans. They would be moving to the city before winter took hold. The summer station had its rustic charms and brutal challenges, but caution overruled adventure when it came to the birth of their first child. In busy, urban Fairbanks, they had taken a sublet on a temporary apartment close to North Star Hospital, where the baby would be born, and they intended to stay until the spring before flying home. A simple, workable plan. In a million years, he never dreamed so much could go wrong, so quickly.
That day, a subtle note in her tone pierced through his absorption in whatever business documents or flying data drifted across the computer screen.
After she kissed him, her mood shifted. “I don’t feel so good. I have a headache.”
“You want to lie down? I’ll bring you some of that herbal tea—”
“I don’t want to be a scaredy-cat about this, but it’s not a regular headache. Something’s wrong. I have to go to the doctor. Now.”
The urgency in her soft tone had seized him. Something was wrong.
He swiveled in his chair, stood to hold her. “Is it the baby?”
“No.” She hesitated, looking uncharacteristically helpless and confused as she whispered, “It’s me.”
Going to the doctor was not a matter of driving down the road to a strip center clinic. He flipped on the radio and the laptop, alerted the two-man ground crew at the airstrip. To get her to the doctor, he would have to fly for forty-five minutes. They left the house unlocked, chopped tomatoes lying on the counter next to Karen’s grocery list written in purple ink. While he sped to the runway, she called her doctor on the mobile phone. He could hear her struggling to be calm and clear as she described her symptoms: sharp headache…the pain is strange, hard to describe…no contractions, but this headache…. In her taut, pale face, he could see terror mingling with confusion. Why was this happening?
Dusty was an experienced pipeline pilot. For five years, he’d ferried oilmen, boomers, company executives and millionaires along the jagged cold spine of Alaska, over a white wasteland as beautiful as it was treacherous. He had delivered lifesaving serum to native Inupiats, evacuated men who’d fallen down holes or roughnecks who’d had their noses smashed in barroom brawls. Two years earlier, he’d even flown a woman in labor and her scared young husband to the hospital. They’d counted together through the contractions and laughed nervously between them, debating whether to name the baby Del Rey for the city of his conception or Macon for the parents’ hometown. The woman had been even younger than her husband, but she’d never once said, “Something’s wrong.”
Those two words had changed Dusty’s world, his entire future, and on some level he’d known that, even as he zipped on his flight jacket and helped Karen into hers. He wasn’t sure whether or not he imagined it, but she felt very fragile to him at that moment, her arm almost birdlike as he guided her hand into the sleeve of the jacket.
His ground crew was the best in the state and they were at their best the day Karen left the Alaskan wilderness for the last time. Even then, some bitter unacknowledged part of him understood that she would not be back. It was written across her pain-pulled face; it lurked deep in her eyes.
He flew as fast as the state-of-the-art Pilatus turboprop would allow, not caring about drag or fuel conservation of all things. Karen sat virtually unmoving, strapped into her seat, eyes shut, sweat beading on her upper lip.
In the other passenger seat rode Nadine Edison, a bush schoolteacher whose unimpeachable qualification was that she was Karen’s best friend. She’d been keeping Karen company and adding to the excitement of planning for the baby. She talked constantly, reassuring Karen all through the flight. She told Karen how much she was loved, how perfect the baby was going to be, what a proud, honorary aunt she would be.
Dusty paused in dictating his narrative to the tape recorder, a gurgle and cry from Amber bringing him back to the present. “The only thing Karen’s best friend hadn’t told her was how much money she was going to get for selling the story to the tabloids.”
He glanced at his daughter, who resembled a giant pink carnation in her lacy dress. Arnufo had bought it at the Mercado del Sol down in San Antonio. It was hard to imagine Amber being old enough to read this stuff one day, but he knew that time would come.
“So you trusted Nadine Edison.”
“Karen did. I didn’t have much of an opinion of her either way.”
“All right. So take us back to that day. Your wife was quiet during the flight.”
He nodded. The brackish, polluted sky over the city had never looked more welcome, the homely block of the Northward Building more beautiful. But, even before Karen passed out, he felt a premonition of how wrong things were going. “I told her I loved her. I told her that a bunch of times.” He stared down at his hands, flexed and unflexed his fingers. “I reckon that’s what you say when you’re losing hope, when there’s nothing more to do, nothing more to say.
“She told me three things before we landed.” He remembered seeing the brightly lit cluster of emergency vehicles waiting on the tarmac. These people knew him and Karen; they were friends. Everyone at the airpark wanted to do his part.
“There’s a recording of our last conversation.” If the situation had been different he might have laughed at Blair LaBorde’s expression. “The flight data recorder got it all. And yes, I’ll let you listen to it, and yes, I’ll give you a transcript. I’m not ashamed of anything I said.”
“What were the three things?” asked Blair.
“She told me she loved me and the baby. She told me to save the baby, no matter what.” He paused, took a deep swig of his Coke. “And she told me she thought she was going to die.”
Dusty stared off into the distance, memories melding with the present moment in a way that was almost surreal. Across the water, the Benning place looked busy as usual—kids running all over, folks coming and going. In his mind, the last moments with Karen crystallized for him and then shattered.
He shot a glance at Jessie Ryder. She had walked into his life uninvited, and yet she seemed to belong here. She was turning his grief into a public spectacle, but at the same time, she was making a record of it for Amber. One day, his daughter would be old enough to see the images Jessie was making today, to read the words he was speaking.
“That was the last thing she said—ever,” he continued.
The flight data recorder had picked up his strained and frantic, “Karen. Karen. God, she passed out. Goddamn it, do something,” he said to Nadine. She’d stayed on the radio with the ground, where an ambulance would be waiting.
Karen had lost all color and life, yet somehow he kept flying while his whole world disintegrated at eighteen thousand feet. During the frantic transport from touchdown to hospital, panic and denial screamed through him. Yet his heart began to ache with things he knew were true, even before the doctors rendered their verdict. A massive cerebral aneurysm had burst, the trauma team declared her brain dead. All that remained was to decide when to pull the plug. He heard what they were saying, saw the flat brain waves on the monitor, but he couldn’t accept it. That was his heart, his wife, his future, lying on the gurney.
He glanced at Jessie Ryder again. She sat perfectly still, riveted. She hadn’t taken a single picture. The only movement was the river of tears coursing down her face. When their eyes met, she made a visible attempt to steel herself: straightening up in her chair, gripping the arms, swallowing with visible effort.
“What’s with you?” he asked, surprised.
“I don
’t know your story,” she explained. “I’ve never heard it.” When Amber laughed, she looked in the direction of the baby, then turned back to Dusty. “She’s the reason you agreed to do this, isn’t she?”
Her swift comprehension gratified him. What a strange time, he thought, to feel this way. The currents between them were almost tangible, a thick tension in the air. “I owe it to her to get the truth out there. I guess I’ll never figure out why the public’s fascinated by the crude and brutal facts of the case.”
“People read about a stranger’s tragedy in hopes of avoiding their own,” Blair said. “Maybe it’s a talisman against their own suffering. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to deal with someone else’s tragedy than it is to deal with your own.”
Dusty figured he only imagined the shadowy grief that flickered over Jessie as Blair spoke. Suddenly he wondered if the wreck was even worse than she’d let on. Yet she seemed totally focused on him. Not in the newshound way of Blair LaBorde, but in the way of a listener around a campfire, equal parts sympathy, horror and partisan interest. He ought to be used to that by now, but in Jessie Ryder, the concern had a different quality. She made him want to stop, explain, take out his heart and sift through the ashes of it, to see if any life spark could be revived.
He finished his Coke and addressed the digital recorder again—a neutral device that cushioned his emotions. “There comes a time during pregnancy when the baby becomes real,” he said. “Do you believe that?”
Blair shrugged. “I’ve never been pregnant.”
He glanced at Jessie. She opened her mouth, closed it. Her cheeks turned red, but she said nothing.
“One of the duty nurses at North Star told me this. She claimed there’s a moment during gestation when everything becomes real. That day hadn’t happened for me yet,” he told her. “We planned to do all the shopping and preparation for the baby in the autumn while living in the city, waiting for the big day to arrive. So we hadn’t really done anything about…well, anything.” Still he didn’t want to say it. They had barely discussed names, announcements, and it had never occurred to them to discuss arrangements in case the unthinkable happened.
“Then when Karen—” He stopped, regrouped. “I was sitting at the side of her bed. I’d just had about the hundredth meeting with the hundredth set of doctors and counselors and what have you. They told me she was gone.” Although the hours of anguish seemed fused together, he vividly remembered his sleeping-beauty wife, the way her hand felt and the smell of her hair. He tried to convince himself that she had gone away somewhere, never to return. But she was still so…present.
“The organ donation counselor said that when the brain dies, everything else wants to shut down, so they had to get a decision quickly. They made a big deal about how healthy she was, the fact that she was known to be a generous person, that she’d signed an organ donor card—hell, didn’t we all? And they were right. She had. I had no problem agreeing to it. She would have made the same decision for me.”
He took a deep, rib-stabbing breath. “The trouble was, she wasn’t really dead…yet. That’s when it came to me. Here they are telling me she’s a life-support system for a heart, lungs, kidneys, corneas, skin, you name it—and nobody mentioned the other life she was supporting.”
He saw the moment comprehension dawned. Jessie’s face expressed shock and sadness and finally, when she glanced at Amber, a deep and genuine appreciation. She made him remember the hard choices he’d been forced to make. They could deliver the baby immediately and remove Karen’s life support, leaving him a widower with a premature infant. They could let Karen die, taking the baby with her. Or they could keep Karen alive as long as possible in the ICU, monitoring the baby’s progress until it was healthy enough to be delivered, probably six to eight weeks down the road. But despite options for the baby, there was no hope for Karen. Dusty’s world had blown apart. He’d hated his promise to her, and maybe he’d even hated the baby a little for prolonging his grief.
“I wasn’t real civil to the duty nurse who kept talking to me about the baby. I yelled at her, a lot. And the whole time, I’m sitting there holding my wife’s hand.” He paused, swallowing and looking off into the distance again. The forest fringe along the lakeshore trembled and blurred, but not with tears. His tears were private. This story was going out into the world.
He looked back at Jessie. He could read her heart by the tender set of her mouth, the tremble of her eyelashes. He suspected nothing in her experience approximated what he’d endured with Karen, yet he saw something in Jessie’s face. He regarded her with a peculiar and heightened awareness, feeling a tremendous affinity for her. She was a stranger, yet her heart seemed to him like familiar territory. It was the oddest sensation. He knew it with the same powerful intuition that guided his pilot’s hand when he flew. Since the incident, women had tried to console him, to share his pain, to seduce him into numbness, but it never worked. Now, without seeming to be conscious of the fact, Jessie offered something different. An acceptance of his hurt, and somehow, the unspoken promise that healing was possible.
Arnufo came out of the house and picked up Amber, taking her out to the middle of the yard to play with a bright red ball. Neither woman moved.
“My wife was pronounced legally dead,” Dusty said. “For two months, I visited her every day, talked to her as though she were actually there, played the music we used to dance to. They kept telling me she was dead, gone. But she was warm, and beautiful, and I sometimes let myself believe she was only sleeping. When I held her hand, I could feel her pulse. And the whole time, in the back of my mind, I knew they would come for her. They would take the baby, and Karen’s organs, and then they would take her away from me.” He’d gone a little crazy, watching Karen’s stomach grow as her lifeless body gave life to a tiny, unseen stranger. The long goodbye had passed in a blur of agony.
“When the time came, her O.B. supervised the whole business, start to finish. It was a marathon, keeping everything monitored. The doc let me listen to the baby’s heart sounds and told me how it would all play out. But nobody told me how you survive something like that.”
The moment he held his newborn, he realized the wonder of his sacrifice. He named the baby Amber, the color of Karen’s eyes. He would have called her Karen, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to say the name without sadness. He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath. This was a tell-all, so he might as well tell it. “At one point I considered giving the baby up for adoption.”
Jessie gasped as though she’d burned herself. Cheeks flaming, she fumbled with something on her camera.
“Why didn’t you?” Blair asked.
“Actually, I came pretty close. But…my heart wouldn’t let go. It was something I had to do, was meant to do, hard as it was going to be. Giving her to someone else to raise wouldn’t work.”
Amber’s early months were a sleepless haze in Dusty’s mind. He didn’t drink, because drinking only made him sadder, but he felt like he had a constant hangover. Grief and fury and even resentment tangled his heart until sometimes he couldn’t breathe, until he had his hand on the phone, ready to call the lawyer he’d spoken to about a private adoption. But he never made that call. The baby’s utter dependence on him kept him going, sometimes only minute to minute. It was a way to get through the night, and then the months, and now almost two years had passed.
In the silent wake of his story, he felt raw and exposed, but also…lighter. It was absurd. He knew almost nothing about this woman, yet he’d found himself glad he’d met her. She had come to invade his privacy, but she looked as raw and exposed as he felt. Phony compassion emanated from LaBorde, but not Jessie. Jessie’s reaction was far more interesting to him. She wasn’t staring at him with pity in her eyes. She was looking at Amber. And she was smiling.
Though she couldn’t know it yet, she was a new element in his story, not just a hired gun who’d come to document the baring of his soul. She was a stranger who had
stepped into his world, and for some reason he could look at her and life looked good to him once again.
CHAPTER 17
There were simply no words. Jessie felt as though a vise had grabbed her heart and squeezed. She pictured Dusty seated at his wife’s bedside, playing music, holding Karen’s hand and talking endlessly, as though she were still there. The image haunted Jessie. How would it feel to love someone like that? To lose her? To know the precise date and time her breathing would stop and her still-warm heart would be lifted from her chest and given to a stranger?
She couldn’t bear the terrible, compelling way he was watching her, so she turned to Blair LaBorde, with anger burning in her eyes. You didn’t tell me… She’d been told only that he was a widower returned from Alaska to raise his child, not some tragic figure forced to endure the unendurable.
“Excuse me,” she said, getting up from the table. Checking her film load, she walked across the lawn to Arnufo and the baby. This was why she photographed tree specimens, rock formations, ancient mosaics, monuments of lost civilizations. She never should have taken this assignment. She’d never be able to do justice to this man and his suffering. The shots she’d taken earlier of Arnufo and Amber were inadequate. She knew that now. Her work lacked that indefinable real quality it would have had if she’d taken the time to see with her heart as well as the camera’s eye. She had to try again.
As she approached, the baby hid behind Arnufo’s knee. Jessie didn’t know much about babies, but she did know they could sense a person’s mood. Maybe, like horses, they could sense fear. Slowing her steps, she composed her face into a warm smile.
“Does Amber like having her picture taken?” she asked Arnufo. As she spoke, she switched lenses and added an extension tube.
“Of course,” he said with a fond grin at the little towhead. “She is used to it. She has a lot of admirers.”