Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  Shortly after Olivia’s fifth birthday, Lopez came out of the cabin and saw her jumping off the barn roof and onto a pile of tarps while the boys cheered her on. Lopez thought his heart was going to stop. Despite the harshest discipline he and Lani could muster, Olivia showed no repentance.

  “What was she in her first life?” Robert wondered one day.

  “Warrior queen of the technology magicians?” Lopez said while massaging his temples. “Hard to imagine her adding her mind to a heaven without taking over the whole fucking thing.”

  Robert’s newest son, and perhaps favorite uncle, was growing fast. But on one foggy morning when Melisa was holding him on the porch, the baby stopped breathing and dissolved into luminescent green light and floated off into the white air.

  Melisa had lost three other boys this way. She seemed unaffected and spent more and more time with Lani caring for Olivia, but Robert fell into a dark mood for nearly a month.

  At nine years old, Olivia had mastered the air of sweet-talking her father into letting her stay up late or into buying something for her at the store. In town, the men teased Lopez. He never admitted how much he enjoyed it all.

  But then Olivia talked her Aunt Melisa into teaching her how to ride, even though her father had forbidden it. She was caught only when she fell off at a gallop and broke her leg. This sparked a shouting match between Lopez and Melisa, then Lopez and Robert. For a tense few days it seemed as if the outfit might split.

  During Olivia’s immobile convalescence, Lopez tried lecturing, cajoling, and pleading to inspire caution in his daughter for her own sake, for her mother’s sake, and—goddamn it—for his sake. She agreed to be more cautious but never apologized.

  Two years later, Luis told his father he’d be leaving. Lopez had seen it coming. Olivia admired Collin, now a levelheaded young man. It was clear to everyone that if Collin stuck around, he would one day marry Olivia. Luis, on the other hand, had nothing to keep him in a small outfit deep in the redwoods.

  Olivia threw a fit, screaming and crying for three days. Everyone else in the outfit still spoiled her, but now her brother would not. Two days after Luis left, Lopez heard crying from Olivia’s bunk and went to sit with her. “Mija,” he said, taking her hand, “you’ll see him again.”

  She hugged him close.

  When she turned fifteen, Olivia was five feet and nine inches tall. Her eyes were wide and childlike, her body slender. Her curly black hair cascaded down her back. Lopez knew she was a Gringa, but still found himself comparing her smile and long hair to his mother’s.

  In the early dry season, Olivia convinced Collin to take her to town and then, for a laugh, slipped away. A man caught her alone behind the tailor’s shop. He was a squat old trader named Jimson. He owned a mule caravan that ran goods up from the Petaluma trading outfits. He held her against the wall and ripped her blouse. She bit his thumb hard enough to draw blood and then rammed her knee into his testicles.

  While Jimson was doubled-over and vomiting, she went into the tailor shop and showed the owner what Jimson had done to her shirt. She also told him that Jimson’s penis was as small as a five-year-old boy’s. Collin took her back to the homestead. By the time Lopez and Robert came marching back into town with rifles, Jimson had left for Petaluma. For the next two weeks, neighbors visited the Lopez outfit to hear Olivia tell her story. She told it well.

  A few months later, when the summer seemed nothing but dust and heat, Lopez found Olivia on the path up from the ocean. Her shins and forearms were covered with bruises. At first he worried someone had attacked her. But when she denied it, he asked if she had been cliff-diving with Collin. After a telltale pause, she denied this too.

  Lopez sent her home and went looking for Collin. He found the young man helping his father clear land behind their cabin. After a few questions, Collin confessed to the cliff-diving.

  Back in his own cabin, Lopez found Lani fretting over their daughter’s bruises. They kept Olivia in bed for three days. The bruises faded but she developed a nose bleed that didn’t stop for an hour. Lopez walked her up to town. Dr. Lo listened to their story and examined Olivia for a long time, drew blood from her arm, disappeared into a back room. He came back with a tight expression. Lopez felt as if his heart had fallen into ice water. “What is it?”

  “I believe there are too many immature blood cells in Olivia’s blood.”

  Lopez blinked. “What does that mean?”

  “With the equipment I have, I can’t be certain. It could be nothing.”

  “Or,” Olivia asked, “I might have something bad?”

  “We can’t jump to conclusions.”

  Lopez felt darkness closing in. “What’s the worst it could be?”

  The doctor looked at Olivia as he said, “Cancer.”

  On the way back to the homestead, Olivia stopped and covered her face. Lopez put his arms around his daughter. At first her shoulders shook and the only sounds she made were sudden inhalations. Then came wailing, and she clenched his shirt in her fists. He felt nothing. No panic, no dread, no darkness closing in. Nothing. He rocked slightly and made the same shushing sound he had made when she was a baby. “It’s okay, Nena. Oh, oh, it’s okay.”

  When she was done crying, he still felt nothing.

  Lopez felt as if the air had been replaced by a drug so thin and so light it flowed across a body like wind and filled the lungs, removing all sensation. He was himself and not himself as he led his daughter by the hand to their cabin.

  Lani met them at the door. He told her what the doctor had said, and she shook her head. “He wasn’t sure. He said he wasn’t sure.”

  Dr. Lo had told Lopez about several doctors in Sebastopol that could make or rule out a diagnosis of leukemia. Lani wanted to go there with Lopez and Olivia, but they both agreed that traveling with two women might prove too great a temptation for the worst sort of men to resist. So they decided Lopez and Olivia would leave the next day. Until they returned, Lani didn’t want to talk about it.

  Lopez and Olivia sat on the porch. He took his daughter’s hand. She squeezed it. “Papá?” She was studying him. Her expression was flat, exhausted. “How are you?”

  “Fine, fine, mija. Don’t worry about me.”

  “But if I have cancer, then so do you.”

  “You can’t worry about me. I don’t feel…anything just yet.”

  She laid her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her. “I’m worried you’ll have one of your panics.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  They sat in silence, watching the shadows stretch. When Lani called them in for dinner, she did her best to cheer them up. It worked, a little. Lopez was hungry. He couldn’t remember ever feeling hungrier.

  The next morning, they rode through bleaching dry-season sunlight to reach Sebastopol at dusk. Lopez bought a dinner of sausages and dumplings. They lit two candles in a cathedral that seemed to be both under construction and falling apart. They camped on the town’s edge, beside a lemon tree.

  At dawn he took Olivia to the address Dr. Lo had given him. It was an old mission-style building, plaster flaking. The nurse took them up to a wide room with two rows of beds. Hours passed, punctuated by different doctors who questioned and examined Olivia before vanishing.

  Finally a doctor explained that blood came from bone marrow. To see if something was wrong, they had to stick a needle into Olivia’s hip. She bravely agreed, squeezed her father’s hand when they did the horrible thing. Lopez thought he heard a crunch; it felt as if the sound came as much from his chest as from her hip.

  Afterward, Olivia cried silently while he brushed her hair back. “Mija, mija,” he murmured. Gradually her breathing slowed. Midday heat crawled into the room. Olivia slept.

  In the evening, they talked about what might be happening on the homestead while he sat on her bed. They must have dozed off, for when he opened his eyes again they were sitting in a square
of moonlight.

  In the morning, one of the younger physicians appeared wearing an expression of practiced, perhaps genuine, concern. “You have the bone marrow test back?” asked Olivia.

  The doctor sat down. “I am sorry, but the results are consistent with leukemia.”

  Olivia buried her face in her father’s stomach. He sat down and wrapped an arm around her. “Can it be cured?” he asked.

  The young doctor exhaled. “Long ago it was often cured, four out of five cases. But back then there were many more drugs.”

  “And you don’t have all of those drugs now?”

  “We don’t have any of them. Not here. There is one drug left that comes from a wild flower, a kind of periwinkle, from an African island named Madagascar.”

  Lopez cleared his throat. “You don’t grow that flower here?”

  “The only place left that grows it is the hospital in the old university.” He looked at Lopez with searching blue eyes. “Can you take her down the peninsula? Often the Bridge People take sick children across without fee. We can write you reports. The drug you should ask for is called vincristine.”

  “I’ll take her. Her mother’s people are from down around there.”

  The doctor nodded and left. Olivia wasn’t crying. She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Papá,” she said.

  “Nena,” he whispered.

  There was nothing left to say.

  The moment she saw her husband’s face, Lani began to cry. That evening, Lopez and Robert worked out how he and Collin could tend to the outfit’s fields. At dawn, Lopez and his wife took their daughter, two rifles, and a horse, and they left.

  It seemed like a story Lopez’s mother would tell—a quest for a magical flower that would save a girl’s life. Periwinkle. Vincristine. Old technology. Old magic.

  After two days they reached the Old Freeway and joined the traffic of mule caravans, travelers, drifters. A few men eyed Lopez and his two women. They also eyed his rifle.

  Two days later they reached the Golden Gate. Fog obscured all but the tops of its towers. All the fabled gold had fallen off, leaving only rust and patches of orange paint. Lopez wondered at how it must have shone in the lost world.

  A hundred yards before the ancient monument, one of the Bridge People with wild brown hair and a long aluminum spear stopped them. When Lopez showed him the papers from the Sebastopol doctors, the man looked at Olivia and waved them past.

  The bridge was riddled with holes. In some places nearly half the concrete had fallen out. Beneath these gashes swirled white air obscuring a view of the long drop to twisting currents.

  On the other side, Lopez paid a few Bridge People to guide them through the city of crumbling streets, rusting cars, hollow-eyed men standing around oil drum fires. Toward night, their party reached the city’s southern edge and looked back at the sunset glittering on decaying buildings shrouded in fog. “It’s beautiful,” Olivia said from horseback. “It must have been even more beautiful.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “In my last life?”

  “Everyone in the heavens was from the Valley of Melted Sand. You’ve seen it before. You’ll see it again.”

  “Papá, are you angry at reincarnated people?”

  “No, no.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze but then pulled his hand back, worried that he might bruise her.

  She continued to look out at the city, her expression softening. She had been growing up so fast, too fast for Lopez. Now she had discarded the joy and petulance of childhood for…Lopez couldn’t say what exactly. She hadn’t suddenly become an adult, but now she carried an air of solemnity, which she never had before.

  “I think…” she said, her tone experimental, “I think I had this cancer in my first life. I must have been cured and grown up to become one of the technology magicians who made the heavens.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But in every reincarnation since then, I might have died of the cancer.”

  “Or maybe you were cured each time. Maybe you’ll recognize the hospital and you’ll say ‘Hey, doctor, do this or that because that’s what worked last time.’ And they’re going to groan when they see you’ve come back because they know you’ll end up running the place.”

  She laughed and the solemnity hanging about her evaporated. She gave him her bright, mischievous smile and said, “Maybe.”

  As they continued down the peninsula, Lani pointed out landmarks that she remembered from childhood. That night they camped by San Andreas Lake. The next morning, in the blue hour before dawn, Lopez woke to pee among the bushes. On the way back, he saw Olivia sitting by the shore. The water was so smooth that the lake had become a mile-wide mirror. He sat beside her.

  “Papá,” she said, her face miserable. “I’m not going to remember the hospital. I don’t want to go.”

  He took her hand. “Mija, it’ll be okay. It’s just scary.”

  “It is, but…not for the reason you think. I mean…it’s frightening because of what they might do to me and because you might die.” She paused. “It’s not scary because I might die.”

  He nodded. “You’ll go to your heaven. You’re not scared about that. That’s good.” For the first time since Dr. Lo had suggested she might have cancer, Lopez felt an emotion twisting in his heart, something hot.

  “I mean…I mean…” Olivia started to say.

  He let go of her hand.

  The hospital was smaller than Lopez expected. Three stories tall and circular, it enclosed a small garden of poppies and a pool of green water. Most of the glass windows had been replaced by paper screens. In every room, at least one small rectangular window was left open. Lopez started when he realized that this was to provide an escape for reincarnates returning to their heavens.

  In the midmorning, Lopez and Olivia sat in a room on the third floor. He stood by the window and looked down on the poppies. Olivia sat on a bed, fussing with her gown. They had seen several nurses and three physicians. He had lost track of how many times he had told their story. No one seemed to know if they could get vincristine or if it could cure Olivia.

  Lani was down in the hallways, talking to her relatives. Most of her old outfit had come down from the hills to see Olivia. They were powerfully built Polinesios who lavished their cousin Olivia with embraces and soft words in English and Samoan.

  A knock sounded at the door before it swung open. An older doctor—black man, thin wreath of white hair—came in and sat down. He wanted to talk about how difficult it would be to take vincristine. “It might make your fingers and toes numb or your hair fall out,” he said. “And if you have a lot of cancer cells, it might hurt your kidneys.”

  “You don’t think we should give her the drug?” Lopez asked.

  “I want you to be aware of the options.”

  “What are the options?” Lopez asked, his voice more heated than he had intended.

  “We can treat any discomfort you two might have before you return to your heavens.”

  “You two?” Lopez repeated.

  “You are my patient as well.”

  “I’m not reincarnated.”

  The doctor blinked. He hadn’t known. “I see. That complicates things.” He paused. “But please consider, without the old technologies, vincristine can be dangerous.”

  “So if the cancer doesn’t kill me, the drug might?” Olivia asked. She glanced at her father. “Might kill us?”

  “We have to deal with a lot of uncertainty. You will want to talk it over.”

  After the doctor left, Lopez sat on Olivia’s bed. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.”

  After a while Lani returned. Lopez reported what the doctor had said. “We have to try,” Lani said and looked from Lopez to Olivia. “Why wouldn’t we? We have to try. If we don’t, both of you will die.”

  Olivia flinched and Lopez looked away.

  “What’s going on with you two?” Lani wanted to know.

  “Nothi
ng,” Olivia said.

  He agreed.

  They started vincristine injections the next morning. Olivia had to spend the day drinking as much water as she could stand. The drug would kill many of her cancer cells, releasing toxic chemicals that had to be filtered out by her kidneys.

  In the late afternoon, Olivia began to vomit. The doctors gave her a shot of something that reduced her nausea but made her groggy. She fell asleep soon after sunset.

  Lopez and Lani walked down to the ground floor to talk. An electric light shone in the room with the sickest patients. “How much longer?” Lani asked.

  “Four weeks,” he said numbly. “Then they need to look at her bone marrow again.”

  Lani went back up to sit with Olivia. Lopez remained, standing at the edge of the fluorescent light. Something was breaking open inside of him. The numbness that had been sustaining him was being filled with something that made his fists clench and his throat tighten.

  All the toil and action of his life—love and fear for his daughter, admiration for his wife, the long journey through the ruined city filled with fog—were only distractions. Now he felt as if everything he perceived was not real but rather had been painted onto the emptiness that his death, closer now than ever before, would deliver him into. He had to die, and die soon, while his wife would continue to live. He would go into unknown darkness, while his daughter would float up to her technological heaven.

  He paced around the hospital trying to dissipate the anger that coursed through his veins like a drug. An hour passed as if it might be endless, and still his hands trembled. He went up to Olivia’s room. Lani was sitting at the bedside, stroking her daughter’s hair. He went to stand by the window. After a moment, Lani went to him and slipped her arms around his waist, hugged him close.