I refused to be a Christie. I refused to be a venomous, life-sucking demon. Until I could be something other than the fetal-positioned negative being that I had become, I had to shut the world out for as long as I could. I needed to keep the poison from seeping into the outside world, the poison that was literally eating me from the inside out.
As much as I had worried before about wasting a single day, at that point I didn’t care. My world had become the bed inside the room, and endless cycle of minutes and hours passing me by until I fell asleep again.
The man was back—my grandfather, according to Irma. The little, old man from the cave with the eyes of coal was back to haunt me. This time he brought the coyote who stood quietly next to him, smirkless.
“What are you doing here?” he asked me again.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped at the trickster. “No need to bring that coyote; I know I have been fooled.”
“But you are still here.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Waiting for what? We’ve told you what you wanted to know.”
“I don’t want to know any more,” I spat back. “I want you to take it all back. I want you to cure my body and erase my mind.”
“I already told you: For what you have, there is no cure. You must accept it. I cannot erase your memory; you must accept that as well. Now be gone from this place.”
“Be gone from what place? Why are you such a crabby, old geezer?” I demanded.
Was he pushing me into death, so I can join him in tormenting the living?
I woke up with a start to find Misty standing over me. I opened my eyes and would have let out a scream, but I was in a weakened condition, so it ended up being more of a loud whimper.
“Stacia, have you been in here this whole time?”
I didn’t want to lie to her—Misty, who had never wronged me. Nor did I want to answer truthfully.
“I’m just so tired.”
She lay down beside me.
“Me too.”
I wasn’t sure how many hours had gone by with Misty curled up by my side when she finally said, “I’ve been where you are.”
Then she stroked my nappy hair and left me to my misery.
Later—I’m not sure if it was the same day or the next—I heard the phone ring once again. It was Wilbur. He hadn’t given up.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Misty whispered through her painfully thin walls. “When I was in that situation I just wanted everyone to leave me alone. We have to do that for her. You just have to let her go through it.”
Let her go through it, she’d said—“through” meaning passing from one side of something to another. There was another side. This was a phase and I would pass through it. But what awaited me on the other side? I couldn’t even imagine. I was too tired.
I slept some more. Several more days passed. Sometimes I would soak in the bath. I grew weary of my own filth. In the bath, I could remain in my stupor, but at least be clean, if wrinkly.
Then I finally decided to change the sheets. It was one step toward doing something different, moving out of the phase—not necessarily through it, but I was knocking at the door. However, the clean sheets were so inviting that I climbed right back into bed.
“Stacia…Stacia, wake up.”
I blinked awake, but I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t face Wilbur the way I was. I kept my eyes closed and waited for him to go away, to vacate my realm of darkness. I wanted him to remember me living, not wasting away in a dark room.
“Stacia, please look at me.”
I refused. I thought if I didn’t look at him, maybe he wouldn’t see me, like a child playing peekaboo. I realized how much I had missed him, but I just couldn’t move.
Then it happened.
“Stacia, please wake up. I love you,” Wilbur whispered in my ear.
He loved me.
He had looked at the emaciated, unkempt mass of cancerous sorrow that I had become, and said that he loved me.
Then I heard the bedroom door close. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let him leave like that. I pulled myself up and ran for the door.
“Wilbur!” I yelled. “Wait!”
I caught him just as he was walking out the front door. He turned back and all it took was one look into his big, brown, lashy giraffe eyes.
“I love you too. I shouldn’t, but I do.”
I almost collapsed as he hugged me, but I somehow found the strength to stand. I had passed through…something.
Part 5
Acceptance
CHAPTER 39
I was in love. He knew I was in love. This horrifying thing that I had been avoiding, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was great. Even if I could only experience it for a little while, I could know with relative certainty that it would be for the rest of my life.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” I suggested to Misty and Wilbur. “Someplace nice, my treat.”
Misty and Wilbur exchanged confused looks. I decided to ignore them.
“I’m going to take a shower. Then we’ll go.”
I wasn’t taking no for an answer. All I received in return was silence. I realized how odd my behavior seemed: on the brink of death by depression one minute and springing back to life the next. But Wilbur loved me. I wasn’t invisible anymore. My life wasn’t meaningless, or even a fraud. I could die knowing that someone actually cared.
I showered and put on one of Misty’s come-knock-me-down-and-take-me dresses and slathered my face in makeup. I was determined to look my best and be a crazy person no more. When I walked back out to the living room, Wilbur and Misty were still standing there, dumbfounded.
“Let’s go,” I asserted. “I’m famished.”
And I suddenly was, probably because I hadn’t eaten anything that resembled food in the traditional sense for somewhere near a week. I looked emaciated and bloated at the same time, making my tumor more pronounced, but it didn’t matter. Wilbur loved me.
“So where are we going?” Wilbur asked.
I had no idea. Vegas was a completely different animal from when I had lived there. But I was taking charge.
“Let’s go to that place in the Paris Hotel,” I finally insisted. “The one that overlooks the Bellagio water-fountain show.”
“I love that place!” Misty concurred. “I’ll call my friend Mike. He’s the manager over there. He comes into the Imperial Palace to gamble all the time because he thinks the odds are better.”
A microsecond later, Misty was out on the patio, making her phone call.
“So you love me, huh?” Wilbur said playfully.
“Yes, I do,” I said without hesitation or remorse. “And if I’m not mistaken, you love me too. Or was that just a ruse to get me out of bed?”
“Well that would be something different, saying that to get a woman out of bed. No, it’s true,” Wilbur insisted.
And even though I had the urge to say, “I’m not sure why,” I didn’t. I was worth loving, even if I had felt unworthy most of life. Today was different. I was different. And I was going to let Wilbur love me as long as he would.
Misty came bouncing back in.
“Mike said to come right now.”
“Let’s go then,” I said.
So off we went.
And there we were: on the patio of a restaurant with the din of chatter and clanking of dishes, with people—normal people, living normal lives—and I was going to be one of them. Kind of. I was going to be happy.
“So, I just want to let you know what happened last week,” I began before we ordered our food, feeling obligated to explain my odd behavior. “But first, I want to let you know, I’m going to get a job. Though I can’t exactly work at Las Vegas Memorial. Misty, I’m going to pay half the rent and utilities. I still have enough to pay you until I find work.”
“You don’t have…” Misty began.
I cut her off.
“I do have to. I need to. Wilbur, I want to spend some time with
you, a few days at least, but after that I have to go back to Los Angeles to see my friend Jerry.”
“Jerry?” he asked, looking a little concerned.
“He’s my doctor.”
“Doctor? Does that mean…are you considering treatment?” Wilbur blurted, exited at the prospect that I might fight for my life.
“He’s my doctor, but he’s also my friend. I’ve left him completely in the dark. I feel terrible about it. But yes, it means I’m going to go see him, professionally. I’m not promising that I’m going to undergo whatever treatment he recommends, but I’m willing to hear them out—Jerry and the oncologist, I mean.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wilbur offered.
“I really need to go alone.”
Wilbur looked displeased with my decision, almost helpless, but he managed to say “All right” with no argument. God, I loved him. He always said “All right.”
“There’ll come a time when some decisions will need to be made. I don’t want either one of you to have to make them, so I’m going to use whatever relatively healthy time I have left to arrange for my care when I’m unable to care for myself. And I’ve already decided on the disposition of my remains.”
“That sounds so cold,” Misty noted with a shiver.
I had always thought so as well. Shortly after someone dies in a hospital, the nurses are forced to shove forms into the faces of their mourning loved ones, including the Disposition of Remains. It was always a tragic struggle for family members, especially if the deceased hadn’t made prior arrangements or informed anyone of their wishes. Their family was left to guess.
“I know it sounds cold, but it’s just reality, and I have to face it. It can’t be put off.”
Wilbur was visibly upset. His eyes began to well. I had never witnessed a man cry who wasn’t about to hold his newborn baby or who hadn’t lost the remote. It was so foreign to me. Evan had never cried, not even close. Michael had become upset when I broke up with him, but it was more of anger response. He was too cocky to let anyone see him cry.
“Wilbur, I just want to you to know what you’re getting into.”
“I know, it’s just when you say it like that…”
I suddenly felt terrible again for putting him through everything that I was about to.
“I just want to say all the things we haven’t said. I want to be clear, and then we don’t have to talk about it again.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“All right, I understand,” he said, and I knew he meant it.
“In that case, I have a favor to ask. A big one.”
“Anything.”
“I’ve thought a lot about this…where I want to end up. When I was in Italy, I spent every day with a nun named Sister Constance at the Church of Ognissanti. She agreed to place some of my ashes near the grave of Botticelli, who, as you know, is my favorite. But then, when I was in Africa, I came to the conclusion that I should donate my organs, since I am still fairly young. After that, when I was in Havasupai, I met my aunt, and learned all about the place where my family came from. I felt like it was my true home—the one I should return to.”
“Aunt…who?” Wilbur asked.
“Irma. She’s my mother’s sister.”
“What? Really? That’s incredible! I had no idea.”
“So, I know it will be complicated, but I want all three. I want to donate what organs are viable, then I want the rest of me to be cremated and divided between the two places: the Ognissanti and Havasu Falls.”
“I’m sorry…” Wilbur said as he excused himself from the table.
“This is hard for him to hear,” Misty muttered.
“It’s hard for me to say. I want to be with him, but the reality is, it won’t be forever. I want to be clear; I don’t want to leave anything to chance. Will you do it Misty? If he can’t?”
“I will, but give him some time. I think he’ll surprise you.”
Misty and I watched from our amazing vantage point as the Bellagio water show started dancing, with its twelve thousand jets spraying water up to five hundred feet in the air amidst the lights and fog to the score of “Time To Say Goodbye.” It brought me back once again to that perfect moment atop the Piazzale Michelangelo. Wilbur returned and sat back down at the table, but not before giving my shoulders a reassuring rub—making that moment perfect as well.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he whispered into my ear.
I was done being bossy for the evening and we never discussed it again, ever. Luckily, Wilbur has a very good memory.
As the music came to a dramatic climax and the water jets sank back into the waterline of the enormous man-made lake, Wilbur turned his attention back to me.
“You never told us why you can’t work at Las Vegas Memorial.”
“Oh, right. Because my father works there.”
“Say what?” Misty cried with a spit-take of her cocktail. “I thought your father was dead!”
“So did I.”
I told them the whole story of how my parents had met and the scandalous nature of their relationship. How my father had tricked the Havasupai people, but my mother had run off with him anyway. How she’d hidden him from me, and how he’d bolted at the sight of me.
Wilbur just put his arm around me, but for once I didn’t need to be comforted. I was all right with it. I was all right with everything.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Misty said gently.
Was it true? Was there some genuine cosmic honesty to that statement? I guess if a woman who had lost her husband and child could feel that way, there must be some truth to it. But I was done searching for reasons. The reasons didn’t matter; the reality of the situation was all that mattered to me.
We enjoyed the rest of the evening on the patio with mostly lighthearted non-death-related conversation, after I’d explained the events that led me to confront Alexander Misalov, and how he denied me. I realized that it was silly to mourn the loss of a father I’d never really had anyway.
Afterward, the three of us went for a warm-evening walk in the desert air. I had felt next to death for a week, and even though I had spent the majority of the night discussing my impending death, I was still alive. That, and having such good friends, was something to be happy about.
We returned to Misty’s place to discover a shadowy figure sitting on her porch. After I’d grasped that the form was much too tall to be Evan, I panicked that I was seeing the apparition of my grandfather while fully conscious. As we approached, his body language became more reminiscent of Michael, how he had waited for me in front of the hostel in Florence. But it wasn’t Michael this time. My heart began to pound as I realized that it was Alexander Misalov.
CHAPTER 40
The perfect end to the perfect evening was shattered. I had already fantasized how the rest of the night would go. It involved kissing, sweating, and nudity, not my estranged, would-be dad lurking on the doorstep.
“Wait,” I urged Wilbur as I grabbed hold of his arm. “That’s him. That’s my father.”
I pushed my way in front of Misty and Wilbur. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted.
Alexander stood as I approached him.
“Hello again,” he said hesitantly.
“Hello,” I replied, trying to remain calm and unaffected. “How did you find me?”
“From your application at the hospital,” he admitted. “I want to apologize, Anastasia. You caught me by surprise, but I shouldn’t have left that way.”
“All right,” I shrugged.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
“May I take you to dinner?”
“I just came from dinner. Why don’t we just talk here?” I suggested as I waived Misty and Wilbur over.
“You guys go inside; I’ll only be a minute.”
I could see the look of concern on Wilbur’s face, but he did as I asked. I was really not in the mood to deal with this man. I had made up my mind to excise him fro
m my memory, and I didn’t want him to spoil my newfound strength. Despite this, I sat down on the porch, and he took a seat next to me.
“I don’t know where to start, Anastasia.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning.”
“Yes, very well. When I was an intern at the University, I was sent to Havasupai to collect blood samples for some research they were doing. I fell in love with the place, and that’s where I met your mother. She was so beautiful; I’d never seen anyone like her. I had just moved to the United States…with my wife. I tried to resist your mother, but our connection was so strong, and we began an affair. I left Havasupai to ask my wife for a divorce, and I planned to return for Nova.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. When I went home, my wife informed me that she was pregnant. I couldn’t bring myself to leave her alone and pregnant in a country that was foreign to her. She hadn’t done anything wrong.”
I had so many questions, but I thought back to what one of my evil nursing instructors used to say: “Save your questions for the end, because I’ll probably answer them before you ask.”
“I went back to Havasupai to tell Nova that I couldn’t be with her, but the other Natives wouldn’t allow me on the reservation. They thought I had tricked them into some research that was against their beliefs.”
“Had you?”
“No, I was merely the phlebotomist—the person who drew their blood.”
“I know what a phlebotomist is.”
“Right, sorry. I had no idea what the University was doing. I was told we were doing research on diabetes. I have been contacted occasionally over the years by some of the Havasupai. Some still want retribution. That’s what I thought you came to my office for. I didn’t put it all together until later.”
“You thought I was part of the angry mob?”
“Yes, then when you mentioned Nova…”
He took a moment to catch his breath before shaking himself back to his story.
“Since I couldn’t see Nova face to face when I went back to Havasupai, I sent her a letter instead…but received no reply. A few months later, Nova showed up at the University. She had left the canyon and hitchhiked to Las Vegas. She’d never received my letter.”
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