Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  Running had become my narcotic. There were times that I would have preferred something more passive like scotch or bourbon, but I’d never developed a taste for it. Running had become my escape.

  I usually ran between three and seven miles. Any less and I don’t feel like I’ve run. Any more and my knees start aching. I climbed downstairs to the fitness room, jumped on the treadmill, set it for an eight-minute pace and tried to run that lace out of my mind.

  Given that my mom had died and I was more or less raised by the people who populated my trailer park, I didn’t have much of a fatherly role model. Hence, knowing how to treat a woman was something Abbie alone had taught me. The instincts were there, but Abbie had honed them. The way a man speaks to a woman who’s alone in a parking lot after locking her keys in her car, the way he holds the door for an older lady with an armful of groceries, the way he asks a question of a female police officer, the way he stops to pick up the movie ticket that the college co-ed dropped, the way he orders for his date, the way he walks her up the sidewalk fifteen minutes before her curfew because he knew her dad was counting the minutes, the way he asks her father’s permission to drive her to the lake on Saturday for a day of skiing—the way a man treats a woman is intangible. It is like a baton in a relay race—handed off and given from one to another. Abbie passed that baton to me. My learning curve with girls had been steep and mistake-riddled, but until that moment, not regret-laden.

  After an hour, the treadmill had done little good so I hopped off, ran out to the parking lot, took a right turn on San Pablo and ran under J. Turner Butler Boulevard. A half mile later, I crept around a security gate and snuck out onto the golf course of a private club commonly referred to as “Pablo.” Pablo Creek is one of the more exclusive and less well-known golf clubs in the country. Membership is capped at two hundred and fifty, and if you have to ask about the initiation fee, you can’t afford it. The course makes the Masters course look like kiddie Putt-Putt. I ran all eighteen holes beneath the moonlight. About 3 a.m., I hobbled back to the clinic and walked straight to Abbie’s room.

  The pain of her transplant was rather intense, so most nights, they gave her a sedative. Basically, it forced her into a twelve-to fourteen-hour coma—which was good. That meant she only hurt half the day.

  I walked into the room, took one look at my wife and felt the pang of dinner at the beach. She was deep in sleep, eyes rolling back and forth behind her lids. Sweat caked across me, I rolled the silver stool up next to the bed, slid my hand beneath Abbie’s and started at the beginning. I told her about the parking lot, how Heather had been dressed, Pete’s, the buttons and skirt, then the beach and, finally, the elevator. Then I told her I was sorry and that I loved her.

  It was little consolation.

  I walked back to the apartment building, climbed seven floors to my room and stood in the shower nearly an hour. Daylight was breaking through my windows when I walked out of the bathroom wearing a towel. I cracked the blinds, staring out over the marsh and the Intracoastal Waterway, and that’s when a lump between my sheets moved. I turned on the light, and Heather sat up in my bed.

  And no, she wasn’t dressed.

  My heart jumped into my throat. She smiled a sleepy smile, pushed her hair out of her face and stared at me. She really didn’t need to say anything. Being in my bed said enough.

  “You left your door unlocked,” she said.

  I nodded. “Look…” I was about to say something when there was a strong knock at the door. I knew who it was. The knock told me. I also knew that he never waited. He pushed the door open and strode in. He took four steps, saw me in a towel, and then saw Heather wearing nothing.

  I would have said something, but I didn’t figure it would do any good in this lifetime or the next. He stared at me a long moment, a vein popping out on his neck. He shook his head and walked out.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  I stared into the mirror hanging on the back of the door. “My father-in-law.”

  She chewed on a fingernail. “Senator Coleman?”

  “Yeah…” I nodded. “He’s that, too.”

  She shook her head, pulled the sheets up and let her hair fall over her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  I dressed, walked back up to Abbie’s room and found him standing there. “Sir, can I talk to you?”

  “My only daughter is lying here, fighting for her life. And you’re up there—” He backhanded me hard across the face. The acrid taste of blood spread across my mouth. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”

  “Sir, it’s not what you think.”

  He turned and swung a fisted blow to my face. It spun me and cut my lip. He pointed a shaking hand at me, the spit gathered in the corner of his mouth. “Get out of my sight.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He looked at Abbie and rubbed her toes. He checked the time, then walked toward the door. He turned. “She’s too weak right now. This…would devastate her. She’d lose her will to fight. But…when she beats this…and she will…I’ll tell her the truth. What you do between now and then is up to you.”

  “Sir—”

  He walked out and never looked back.

  When Abbie woke up, the transplant had thrown her body into a tailspin. She smiled, her eyes glassy beneath the 103-degree fever. “Hey you…”

  Two months later, Abbie’s father became the donor for her second bone marrow transplant—a process that some say is more painful for the donor than the recipient.

  It didn’t take, either.

  40

  JUNE 9, MORNING

  I walked into Bob’s kitchen and found him, Petey and Rocket watching the Weather Channel. The screen showed a guy standing in the rain. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker and the wind had peeled his comb-over up and held it in the air like a rooster’s feathers. He was mid-broadcast. “Hurricane Annie stalled over the Gulf, fattening herself on the warm water. Hemmed in by opposing fronts, Annie held there for a week. On June sixth, Annie started a slow crawl across North Florida and South Georgia, where she has dumped more than twenty inches of rain.” The swirling green and red mass now filling the screen told me that the worst of the storm would miss us but it would not miss the Okefenokee. We were on the southeastern side. The side that would get little rain but lots of tornadoes. The reporter continued, “After a head-fake to the northwest, she sidestepped, twirled and tiptoed northeast.” His mimicked the storm’s path with dance moves I’d never seen before. “Climbing out of the Gulf, she slowed yesterday, weakening to a tropical storm. Given that she’s just bumped into a colder front moving down from the north, it could be a while before the rain disappears. With her massive size and bulging waistline, her three-day, four-knot crawl across land is a lot like a walrus bellying across an ice sheet.” He stepped closer to the camera and lowered his voice. “Noisy, not very pretty, threatening and almighty slow. Folks might want to start thinking about trading their cars in on boats, because we are projecting record floods across North Florida and South Georgia.” The weatherman was quite proud of his report and stood there with an ear-to-ear smile while the rain peppered the side of his face.

  Bob stared through the window at a cloudless, sunlit deep blue sky and mumbled something to himself. He pulled on his cap and began walking outside. “Think I’ll check on the storm.”

  “Isn’t that sort of dangerous?”

  “Depends on how close you get.”

  Abbie pushed open the kitchen door carrying a syringe. She leaned on the table while Rocket licked her toes and spoke around the Actiq filling her cheek. “Cannnn weeee goooo?”

  Petey walked in a circle on the table. “We go? Hell no. We go? Hell no.”

  Bob shook his head. “I’ve tried teaching him some new words but…” He shrugged. “He’s very religious. Always talking about heaven and hell. Aren’t you, Petey?”

  Petey flapped his wings. “Hail Mary. Hail Mary.”

  I whispered to Abbie, “Honey, there are only two le
ft.”

  She pulled the cap and handed it to me. “Let’s hope it lassssssts a lllllllong timmmmmmme.” She looked again at Bob, the wrinkle hard creased between her eyes. “Cannn weeeeee?”

  He tried to make light of it. “You been drinking?”

  “I wwwwisshhhh.”

  “You can be rather determined, you know.”

  I piped in. “She gets it from her dad.”

  “It can get bumpy. If you thought the carousel made you woozy…”

  I pulled the cap and she nodded as I injected the dexamethasone into her thigh.

  “You sure?” Bob asked.

  She nodded and lifted the lollipop. “Yyyyyes, on one connndition.”

  “Name it.”

  “I want to do a lllllloopty…looooop.”

  He smiled. “I think I can handle that.”

  We stood next to his plane. He said, “You know much about planes?”

  “I know it’s bright blue and yellow, has a propeller, four wings and a couple of wheels.”

  He ran his hand affectionately along the part behind the engine. “This is a Stearman Kaydet. During World War Two, they served both the Navy and the Air Force and saw aerial combat in several theaters. Manufactured ’til 1945, about ten thousand were made.”

  Abbie put her hands on her hips. “Youuu donnn’t saaaayyy.”

  Other than the slurring sound of my wife’s voice, the year 1945 bothered me a bit. “Doesn’t that make her rather old?”

  “Rebuilt every square inch myself.”

  “Didn’t that take a lot of time?”

  Bob smiled. “That’s something I’ve had a good bit of. A priest with no collar is…questionable. Up there, I’m a man flying a plane. Folks don’t care as long as their crops grow.” He continued, “It’s a two-seat biplane. Part wood, part fabric, part steel. Landing gear is nonretractable tail-wheel type. After the war, the government surplused thousands of Stearmans. Some were used for aerobatic competitions, some served in the air forces of other nations, while most of the rest were converted to crop sprayers.” He walked toward the rear and ran his hand along a weird-looking pipe with a whole bunch of little nozzles sticking out of it. “When converted with crop-spraying bars and hoppers, the standard issue two-twenty horsepower Lycoming engine didn’t measure up.” He tapped the nose. “Many, like this one”—he stroked her as a middle-aged man touches his Ferrari—“were re-engined with brand-new war-surplus R-985 Wasp junior radials. About four-fifty hp—or twice the original power. We fly about five feet above the ground, so it helps to have good control and response.”

  To me, it looked like something out of Peanuts. But I kept that part to myself. He continued, talking as much to the plane as to us. “Empty, she weighs a few pounds shy of a ton. About nineteen hundred thirty-six pounds. She’s got a wingspan of thirty-two feet and a length of twenty-four feet. Initially her max speed was a hundred and twenty-four miles per hour, but I can do a good bit better now. She’ll fly to just over eleven thousand feet with a range of five hundred and five miles.”

  Abbie smiled. “I’ve heeeard modellllls, descrrribed wwwwith lllessss affffection.”

  I raised a hand. “You ever crashed?”

  “Not in her.” There was more there but he didn’t offer and we let it go.

  Abbie looked at me, the dexamethasone kicking in. “I don’t think I want tttttto know anymmmmmmore.”

  “Why?” Bob asked. He was wearing both his priest and pilot hats. “You afraid of dying?”

  She shook her head. “I made peace with that long ago.” The dexamethasone had taken effect. “We all die. Some just sooner than we want.” Abbie stared at me. “I’m afraid of leaving him.”

  We climbed in and Abbie tapped Bob on the shoulder. “Listen, I don’t handle things like this very well, so unless you want this little cockpit to turn into the vomit comet, you’ll get up there, do the loop and get me on the ground. Got it?”

  Bob half nodded. “Not really, but…”

  I tapped him on the other shoulder and pointed out across the grassy field he used as a runway. “What are all those dark green mounds?”

  He yelled above the grumble of the engine. “Animal bones.”

  There must’ve been a hundred mounds covered with dark green grass. “That’s a lot of bones. Where’d you get them?”

  He shrugged and continued our taxi. “Roadkill, mostly.”

  “Any human bones out there?”

  He throttled the engine, pulled down his goggles and yelled above the roar, “Not yet.”

  He left off the brakes, we sped down what seemed like at most a hundred feet and then Bob pulled back on the stick, lifting us skyward. We had just cleared the treetops when he slammed the stick back further, rocketing the nose toward the sky. We climbed and climbed and climbed and just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, he rolled us over, let the stick fall forward and we spiraled toward the earth. To add insult to injury, he started rolling. I thought we’d been shot down. Abbie howled with excitement while I tried not to crap in my pants. We shot earthward, then without notice, we leveled out and rolled six or eight times on our own axis. Abbie braced herself on both sides of the plane, laughed at the top of her lungs and babbled uncontrollably. Evidently, that was just a warm-up, because no roller coaster at Busch Gardens can do what came next. We skidded across the treetops—I think I remember seeing the reflection of the river off to my right—and then we shot heavenward again, but this time we just kept rolling over. When I could see the earth below us and we started falling, Abbie realized that she was at the top of her loop. She began screaming, “Yes! Yes! Do it again! Do it again!”

  I lost count after the sixth loop.

  In front of us, Bob had taken to singing at the top of his lungs. The words were off-key but washed over us just the same. With one hand on the stick, the other conducting the air around him, he sang, “I’ll fly away old Glory, I’ll fly away…”

  Later, when the wheels touched down, Abbie laid her head against me and I checked her carotid pulse—her heart was about to jump out of her chest. Bob cut the engine and rolled to a stop beneath his hangar. I lifted her out and lay her flat on the ground. Knees bent, one hand braced on a post, the other spread flat across the ground, she was half smiling, half moaning and her shorts were wet where she’d peed in her pants. “Oh, please stop the earth from spinning.”

  I sat down next to her and used my shirt to dab the mucusy blood trickling out of her nose.

  41

  We traveled to M. D. Anderson in Houston, Sloan-Kettering in New York, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, then back to Jacksonville. Each diagnosis, although worded differently, was the same. “Your cancer has metastasized and we are chasing it.” Although she’d never smoked, it went into the lining of her lungs. Next we found spots on her liver. Though the drugs were effective and the cancer seemed responsive to treatment, it was always a step ahead. In the meantime, Abbie grew weaker. Pretty soon, I knew her ability to fight a sniffle would be compromised. She couldn’t take much more.

  I, on the other hand, hadn’t painted in more than three years. Leonardo da Vinci once said that “where the spirit does not work with the mind, there is no art.” He was right. Given the fact that nobody wanted to hire Abbie and that her remaining contracts had been canceled upon failure to deliver what she’d promised, i.e. herself, we were rifling through our savings. I sold my flats boat and had started eating into our home equity line of credit.

  We participated in two trial studies that increased our hope, but while CAT and PET scans showed decreases in the size of the tumors, the tumors were still there. I investigated experimental and, according to some, radical treatments in Mexico, but that was a Hail Mary pass I was not willing to throw.

  Six more months passed, we finished another trial run and then started the month-long wait before we could have more scans to determine if the drugs had worked. At the end of that month, I didn’t need the scans.

  It started in the kitchen. Sh
e was trying to say apple and turned it into about five syllables. Then she murdered spaghetti and completely gave up on refrigerator. Slurring her words was a bad sign.

  CAT, PET and blood scans confirmed inoperable brain metastasis. If there was any good news in this it was that this was the worst possible news. This was the basement. Dr. Hampton explained, “The tumor’s location rules out radio frequency ablation, which is highly successful…except when it scrambles your brains. We can’t go sticking an eight-hundred-degree probe into your noggin and expect you to wake up.”

  “What about more chemo?”

  He shook his head. “Chemotherapy is largely ineffective against brain lesions because the lining of the brain is quite effective at protecting itself against any sort of toxin. It’s called the blood-brain barrier and thus far, chemotherapy has not found a way through or around.”

  I sat there listening but not listening. Dr. Hampton described her condition—and our final option. Abbie never blinked. She said, “I want the maximum dose that you can give me.” We drove to Jacksonville, checked into Mayo and I just sat there twiddling my thumbs while they shot Chernobyl into my wife.

  For fourteen weeks, Abbie endured the near crippling effects of two six-week doses of radiation. She slept much of the time, which from a certain point of view, was good. It gave her less time to think or feel the effects of either the cancer or the radiation. I didn’t fault her. I missed her madly but sleep was the only hole she could crawl into. The only escape she had left. Every other avenue had been taken away.

  When she was awake, we were limited in that the slightest noise, light or movement contributed to further nausea. This forced us to sit in dark, still silence. Just being together. It was about all we had left. Fortunately, they gave Abbie whatever she wanted for the pain, proving that lunacy can be a luxury.