Jacob hesitated then said, “What the heck! Next I’ll be eating pork.”
Tonio recorded his three friends, even Jacob, stroking Akela and the other wolves that came within hand reach. Then he joined Betty, kneeling down as the wolves sniffed and licked their fingers.
“Let’s go over to see Ben and Miri now, guys,” he said. “Then we’ll head back to the house for dinner.”
Faisal dropped back to walk a bit with Jacob, who continued his recording.
“They look like Hansel and Gretel holding hands and walking, don’t they?” Jacob said in a low voice. Then he slapped his forehead at his faux pas.
“They’re more like Romeo and Juliet,” Faisal replied. “I just hope their story has a better ending.”
The door of the small house opened slowly, and the tall and hard-looking man standing in the doorway reminded Jacob of the character, Lurch, in the old “Addams Family” TV series.
“Miss Betty, Tonio, come on in. Ben and Miri are in the studio. It’s good to see you doing well, young lady.”
“Thanks, Lem, and thank you again for what you did for us.”
Lem’s eyes instantly glistened, as they followed him into the room, where Ben sat reading a newspaper. Miri was moving slowly back and forth on her sleeping mat, the she-wolf sitting close by her side.
Without seeming to see the quartet that had entered the room, the girl rose and went to her sketch table. Her hands began moving over the paper, weaving in the charcoal markings to form images across the blank page. Faster and faster the fingers flew like knitting needles across page after page. Then she stopped and sat down on the rug once more.
Ben got up to pick up the papers now lying on the floor, but Lem beat him to it. He quickly put them in an empty folder then showed the young people to some chairs. Tonio made the introductions.
“Ben, Lem, you know Faisal and Akela. This is a new friend, a classmate of Fai’s from New York, Jacob Geltmacher. Jacob, this is Ben Castle, his daughter Miriam, and Lem Caddler.”
Jacob kept the camera running and handed it to Tonio while he shook hands with the two older men.
“What’s with the camera, Jake?” Ben gave one of his lopsided welcome grins, as he pointed at the small gadget.
“He wants to be a filmmaker when he gets out of school and becomes human,” Faisal joked.
Ben laughed, and even Lem cracked what was, for him, a smile.
“We just wanted to be sure that all of you will be at the house for Christmas dinner.”
Tonio looked expectantly at the men, and they both nodded.
“Good! I’ll tell Tia Nancy. This will be great. Everyone’s here, and Betty and her folks will be with us as well. So we’ll see you soon. We need to head up to the house. Tia has dinner just about ready.”
Lem showed the four young people to the door. Then, when Ben went back to his newspaper, he took the folio holder to his room and laid out the drawings on his bed.
One showed Faisal in formal wear, sitting at a grand piano. Another showed Jacob dressed in casual clothes and standing on a stage. The third showed an older Tonio dressed in white coat. The fourth—and here his heart sank—the fourth showed a misty figure and nothing more.
Christmas arrived as a clarion-lit day of moderate temperature. Refreshing wisps of cool air moved the upper branches of the bare trees. The faint-but-unmistakable scent of multiple holiday dinners being prepared rose from the valley and wafted across the mountaintop, as the sun warmed the ground frozen since before the winter solstice.
Lem had set up a large Christmas tree. It sparkled with twinkle lights, candy canes, and many handmade ornaments, including some of Ben’s, which his father and mother had made when he was a child. He even added some little clay figures Miri had fashioned. At the top was Edison’s pride and joy: a high-intensity, light-emitting-diode array in the shape of a star, its multicolored, tiny bead lights casting pastel shades of lavender, red, green, blue, and white on the boxes piled beneath.
The guests began to arrive around eleven that morning, and soon the house became a cacophony of young, middle-aged and geriatric voices, each of the latter trying to outdo the others with reminiscences of past Yuletides.
Carmelita, Freddie, and Tonio circulated and refilled glasses of Nancy’s special fruit punch, cautioning everyone not to eat too many appetizers before the festival dinner.
Eventually the three youngsters gravitated toward their friends. Carmelita and Mike sat near the tree, gazing more into each other’s eyes than the sparkling lights. Freddie and Lilly sat next to them.
Lilly bent forward as if to nibble on her fiancé’s ear. What she really did was whisper, “Do you think your brother is up to all this?”
Freddie nodded and sub-vocalized yes, but added, “God help him if she doesn’t show up tonight.”
Tonio sat with Jacob, who recorded some of the party with his video camera. But he quickly left his friend when the door opened, and Betty and her parents arrived.
Galen brought out a four-and-a-half-by-two-foot-wide box. He smiled at the group and yelled above the crowd noise.
“I’d like to jump ahead just a bit and have one gift opened now. Faisal, would you do the honors?”
Galen carried the package over to him, and Faisal felt it and began to tear at the wrappings, as he realized what it was. Then everyone saw it: a professional-quality, digital-electric piano, complete with stand. He couldn’t cry. He just hugged the bear-sized man and said “thank you, Tio Galen,” over and over.
Soon the house was filled with Christmas and Chanukah music, as the young man’s fingers raced over the keys.
Nancy stuck her head out of the dining room doorway.
“Anyone need to wash their hands? No? Then dinner is served!”
Edison guided the guests to their seats one by one. Seventeen chairs now filled the long, home-crafted table, eight per side with Edison at the head.
“In the spirit of ecumenism, let me make one little prayer,” he said quietly, and the room became hushed.
He looked at Nancy, in his eyes still the lovely girl he had married. His gaze moved down the table to Galen, first a savior, now a close friend and colleague, and then to the children, once the wretched castaways on the island, now grown and soon to seek their own lives. Those lives revolved around Mike, Lilly, and, he hoped, Betty.
He looked at Ben and Miriam and Lachlan and Diane.
Strange, how circumstances bring people together.
He looked at Lem Caddler, once unwanted, now invaluable.
His heart twinged when he looked at Hisayo and Jesse. He prayed that they would not experience what he and Nancy had suffered long ago.
Edison raised his voice in jubilation.
“God bless us, everyone!”
Belts now loosened and small cups of Jasmine tea taken to cleanse the palate, the hosts retired to the living room and called in the youngsters.
“Jacob,” Nancy said, “As our newest guest, I’d like to give you something. It belonged to my father. He had always hoped to pass it on to a son, but I can’t think of anyone better to fulfill his wish.”
She handed him two boxes. He opened the smaller one first and pulled out a beautiful, hand-made set of dreidels passed down from father to son for generations. Jacob looked wide-eyed at Nancy, as he opened the second, larger box and found the set of generational phylacteries worn by Nancy’s father at temple. He was speechless.
Carmelita came next. Edison and Nancy handed her a small box. She opened it to find two pieces of antique jewelry, a filigree pendant and a simple, gold ring.
“These belonged to our mothers,” Nancy said quietly.
Galen handed her another small box. Inside was a small silver cross.
“This belonged to my grandmother. It was the only thing she could give my father when he left the old country to come to America. It is the only thing I have to pass on from my family.”
She hugged the old man, her eyes wet with tears.
“Freddie, getting you something posed a problem for the three of us,” Edison said. “So we thought maybe you and Lilly could put these to good use.”
He handed each of them a package.
“Wow, wireless notebook computers! Thanks so much, Tio, Tia!”
While the quartet exchanged hugs, Tonio handed two boxes to Betty, one large and one small.
“The big one’s from Carmelita and Freddie.”
She opened it, and her eyes lit up at all the cosmetics. She shot them a big grin. The small one contained a gold, heart-shaped pendant on a chain. Before she could react Tonio reached over and draped it around her neck.
And the all-seeing camera continued to record.
It was New Year’s Eve. The bustle of Christmas had subsided, the guests were long gone, the gifts carefully put away, and the debris of the holiday gift exchange neatly packed up and consigned to the recycling bins. The youngsters, being youngsters, were out with their friends, and the three old timers sat quietly in the living room while Bach’s “Violin Concerto in E” played in the background. Light snow dappled the ground outside
“We made it to another one, guys,” Edison said between sips of his favorite tea. “I wonder what’s in store for us.”
Nancy squeezed his hand.
“As long as we’re here, that’s all that matters.”
Galen stared at the fireplace, its hypnotic shades of yellow flame mesmerizing and enticing. All he could do was nod in agreement.
The grandfather clock in the corner started to chime the midnight hour.
Edison kissed Nancy. Nancy hugged Galen, and Galen shook hands with Edison.
“Happy New Year,” all said, before quietly going to bed.
Winter passed quickly that year. The winds and snows that had persisted into early March soon gave way to days of increasing warmth and gentler breezes. Even the best of students felt the soporific influences of impending spring.
“Did that last equation make any sense to you?”
The advanced calculus class had just finished, and Tonio stretched lazily, as he stood up from his desk. He turned to see what Betty thought. She was sitting there, staring straight ahead, not moving.
Suddenly her arms and legs began to contract and shake, and her head arched backwards. Her eyes rolled upward, and her breath came out in clipped grunts.
Tonio yelled to the teacher, who was just leaving.
“Call the rescue squad. Betty’s having a seizure!”
He stood by, as the team started two IVs, one in each arm. He heard the emergency-room doctor instructing the paramedics to administer diazepam. He tried to tell them that she needed Decadron, that the seizure was probably due to the cancer spreading to her brain, but they didn’t listen.
He called home and told Galen what had happened. The old doctor directed him to go to the hospital and said he would meet him there.
Galen called the ER and informed the attending about Betty. She was being wheeled in, still convulsing.
The ER doc knew Galen, and he knew the old man could still match any of the younger staff in knowledge and skill. He reached into the crash cart, pulled out the ampoule of Decadron—four milligrams per milliliter—and administered a dose through the IV portal. The girl’s body movements quieted down.
“Jay, what’s the story?”
Galen stood in the hall outside ICU 3 talking to the cancer specialist.
“It’s amazing how fast it spread,” the doctor replied. “Her scans and counts were normal just two weeks ago. Now, her MRI looks like the process is disseminated through the entire brain and parts of the upper spinal cord.”
“Have you talked with her parents yet?”
“Yes. I don’t want to dash their hopes, but I can’t lie either. In my experience, this pattern is the worst possible one to see.”
“Any use trying a stem-cell transplant?”
“Flip a coin, Galen. We’ll either kill her or just buy her a short amount of time. To make matters worse, there are no good donor matches.”
“What about intrathecal chemo?”
“Only if the Decadron brings the swelling way down. You know how toxic intrathecal can be.”
“So we’re talking palliative care.”
Jay nodded quietly.
Tonio stood in the corridor waiting for his tio to return from the ICU.
Galen walked out and immediately saw the anguish in his face. He remembered having that same feeling long ago, powerless in the face of nature’s whims. But years of experience and countless moments like these had fortified him—he knew no other way.
“Tonio, I know you’ve read everything you can about Betty’s condition. And you were absolutely right about the Decadron. But there’s a…”
He was about to say “problem,” but seeing the boy’s eyes filling with tears stopped the word from coming out. He wrapped his arms around his ward and held him, while he tried to continue, as his own eyes began to water.
“The disease has spread throughout her brain and…”
The boy wailed, “Can’t she get a bone marrow transplant?”
“No, son, there are no matches. And even if there were, there’s no guarantee it would help because of the severity of the condition.”
“Won’t the Decadron control the swelling?”
“Only for a limited time.”
They stood there in silence.
He was at her bedside. He held her left hand, swollen from the repeated changes in IV needles. Her face was puffy from the effects of the Decadron and fluid input. Her eyes would flutter briefly then stop.
Jesse and Hisayo Orth sat on the other side of their daughter’s bed. Both prayed for a miracle. The girl’s breathing became more prolonged—quick catches in between episodes of stopping and starting again. Suddenly her eyes opened wide and her upper body moved forward. Then her eyes half-closed and she fell backwards. Her breathing had stopped and the heart-monitor alarm went off in the central station of the ICU
Tonio threw himself across the bed, a loud, shrill “NO!” emanating from his open mouth.
Hisayo and Jesse wept as they gently pulled him away.
It was Easter Sunday. A golden-red sunrise streaked the cloudy sky with tendrils of yellows and light pinks. The air was still as the early plants began their push through the earth in their tropic search for light.