Where the River Ends (23 page)

31

T
he medical team in Charleston transferred us to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. They could administer the chemo as well as anyone, but Mayo offered a radiation machine far superior to anything else. It shot a beam of radiation that was accurate to thousandths of an inch and it compensated for breathing. Meaning, if you inhaled deeply and your chest cavity moved a third of an inch, the beam moved with you. This allowed them to be more aggressive with the radiation they threw at the tumor. They had similar machines at Sloan-Kettering and M. D. Anderson, but Mayo was closer to home.

We’d been in treatment six months. Abbie had lost her hair, some twenty pounds and lived with twenty-four-hour nausea. She said it was a nonstop ride on Gilligan’s three-hour tour. Treatments were four hours a day, Monday through Thursday. By Thursday night, she was usually so sick that she spent most of the night next to the toilet. We both did.

It was somewhere around 5 a.m. on a Friday. I don’t really remember the month. Somewhere in there they all started running together. She’d been throwing up so long that all she had left were the dry heaves and her legs were cramping. Add to that the fact that she was weaker than I’d ever seen her and you can understand that her stomach muscles had pretty much given out. I was standing next to the toilet, a wet rag in my hand, she was heaving but nothing was coming out. I helped her into the shower, turned it on and just let her rest under the steam and heat. I got her cleaned up, and got her in bed. For nearly two days, I just changed the sheets.

Sunday afternoon, I called the doctor and told him that we were staying in Charleston—she was in no shape to start up again Monday morning. She needed a few days. He agreed. Sunday evening, I propped her up, laid some saltine crackers on the table along with some Gatorade and aimed the bed so she could look out over the harbor.

Despite the nausea medication—which cost $500 for seven pills—she couldn’t eat or drink anything. I tried to monitor how close she was to becoming dehydrated by judging how many times she peed and the color. “Clear” and we were getting enough fluid. “Yellow” and we were getting close to trouble. Given the chemo routine, her doctor had inserted a PIC line into her chest. It was a direct dump line that allowed the medicine to flow through a clear tube and go directly through her heart and out into her bloodstream. This also helped keep her hydrated. I became the hydration king. I could swap, flush and hang a fluids bag quicker than most nurses. Without it, I’m not sure what we’d have done. So I swapped her bag and hung it on this stainless-steel pipe on wheels that Abbie had affectionately started calling Georgie. He was her six-foot, slender, quiet-type boyfriend that she kept on the side. With her “drinking,” I took a whiff of myself. Given my maid duties, I desperately needed a shower and about twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I turned on the shower, undressed and stepped on the scale. A hundred and seventy pounds. Abbie wasn’t the only one losing weight. I’d lost twelve pounds. I stepped into the shower and let the hot water blast the backside of my neck. We have a propane hot water heater and a propane tank that holds a hundred and fifty gallons. That means I can take a hot shower for as long as I want.

After maybe thirty minutes, I cut off the water and stepped out. Abbie was sitting on the floor, Georgie stood next to her. I stood dripping.

The last six months had been a rodeo of monumental proportions. Abbie was either flat on her back trying to stop the earth from spinning or hanging over the toilet puking up her toes. During that time there had not been much time for us. Actually, no time. Nada. We’d tried once and the pain was so intense, we just stopped. So when I stepped out of the shower, it was rather obvious that I’d not been with my wife in quite some time. I’m not trying to draw attention to that—there’s nothing special about me. It is what it is. That’s where we were living.

It was probably the first time she’d seen me without my clothes in several weeks. She looked up, pulled the rag away from her mouth and looked through squinted eyes. “Maybe…maybe you could get a girlfriend for a little while.”

“What?”

She nodded. “It’s okay. You can’t go walking around like that.”

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed. “You could just…you know, get a girlfriend. I know you need…”

It was one of her lower points. I sat beside her, put my around her and pulled her to me without making her any more sick. “I have a girlfriend.”

She started to cry and shake her head. She pulled off her robe, and sat Indian style in front of me. She was bald—all over. She was pale, her skin had yellowed, the scars on her chest had healed but had begun to pull in, drawing the skin tight and further concaving her chest. She leaned her head against the wall, tapped herself in the chest and managed, “How can you love this?”

“Honey, I didn’t marry you for your boobs. Don’t get me wrong, I miss them and once we beat this thing, maybe we can get them back, but…I already told you. I didn’t marry the woman on the magazine cover.”

She spoke between the sobs. “But why do you do what you do? Why? You have no life.”

I held her hand in mine, turning her ring in circles around her bony finger.

I’m no expert on women and their feelings but I think they have two unspoken, fundamental wants that occur as soon as they open their eyes. They want to be pursued and they want to know that they are beautiful. Abbie had always been pursued by most men and everyone had always told her she was beautiful. She’d never been anything but. Then cancer. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Slash, burn and poison. In her mind’s eye, sitting on that bathroom floor, she saw a remnant of her former self. I did not see that. But how do you convince her of that? How do you tell her that she is not the sum of what she sees in the mirror? Starting with Rosalia, Abbie had taught me to see past the surface. I spent the next few days pilfering her scrapbooks. Abbie had never been one to keep every picture she had taken, but there were enough to get the job done. I found eighteen of my favorite pictures. I had some blown into life-sized posters, the rest I turned into eight-by-tens. I taped the eight-by-tens to every mirror in the house. Abbie couldn’t look in the mirror without seeing what she once looked like. I hung the posters at the end of every hall, so every time she turned a corner, she was reminded of what her whole body once looked like. Then I walked her around the house. Abbie hated it. She hated seeing pictures of herself. She’d never been one to look at them before, and she waved her hand across the house. “Take them all down. I don’t want them.”

“Abbie, I don’t care if you want them or not. They’re staying.”

“But…why?”

“The mirror lies.”

32

JUNE 7, MORNING

I
could smell eggs cooking and hear bacon sizzling but that’s not what woke me. It was the laughter. Abbie’s laughter. I blinked and the warm furball next to me crawled out from under the blanket, hopped up on my chest and started licking my face. About the size of a loaf of bread, its nose was cold, whiskers long and the pads on its feet were digging into my ribs. I sat up, put both feet on the floor and waited while the spin of the earth slowed.

The room was screened in, maybe twelve by twelve feet, metal roof, ceiling fan, fishing rods leaning in the corner. Cobwebs hung between the trusses along with two propane lanterns that rocked in the breeze. Spindly live oak limbs wrapped around both sides, giving shade and protection. A summer porch of sorts. Through the cracks between the boards I could see the ground, some thirty feet below. Stairs wound down to the river beneath me, while a walkway led toward the main house, the smell and the laughter. I fingered my left eye. Puffy and tender, I forced it open. My vision was fuzzy but I could see out of it. The Pelican case rested on the end of my cot. The revolver was there, too. I set the dog on the bed, flipped open the cylinder and found it loaded. I tucked it in the small of my back, heard Abbie laugh again and set the revolver back on the bed.

The dog jumped down, ran three circles around its stub of a tail, then pranced halfway down the walkway that led into the main house. Two more clockwise circles, followed by one counterclockwise and then it disappeared into the main house. I’m not too versed on dog-speak but I had a feeling that meant “Hey, food’s this way. Follow me.”

Abbie sat at a small table sipping something hot. A blue bandana covered her head, but not her ears, and she was wrapped in a terry-cloth robe that looked like it fit Mr. Hawaii. He stood over the stove talking both to a skillet full of eggs and what looked like a parrot perched on his shoulder. I walked into the room and all three looked at me. The bird—a brilliant red and blue—dropped off the man’s shoulder, landed on the table, then climbed onto Abbie’s arm, using its beak to pull itself up to her shoulder.

A small, muted television sat on the table next to Abbie. A talking head from one of the networks seemed to be rifling through the news of the day. The man turned to me, hung a towel over a shoulder and extended his hand. “Bob Porter.” He pointed at the parrot. “That’s Petey.” Then he pointed to the dog. “That’s Rocket.”

“I owe you a lot.”

He split the eggs between two plates and motioned for me to sit. On another eye of the stove he was browning diced onions. And on a third eye, he was frying grits. I turned to Abbie. “How you feeling?”

“Good. I actually slept.”

The yellowish tint of her skin had receded in her cheeks to give way to some color I’d not seen in a while. She stood, placing her hand on my shoulder. “You two talk, I’m going to take a bath.”

Bob pointed down the hall. “Towels are in that closet. And be careful, the water’s hot.”

She closed the door and I heard water running. A second later, she called for me. “Doss?”

Her tone of voice didn’t say, “I need you,” but rather sounded like “Hey, come take a look at this,” or, “I want something.” Live with a designer long enough and your ear can pick these things out. I pushed open the door and she sat chin-deep in one of those big cast-iron, ivory tubs with huge lion’s feet. The edges rolled over the side and the back was high and made a pretty good headrest. Her left arm rested on the edge. She smiled, but didn’t bother to open her eyes. “When we get home…I want one of these.”

I felt the temperature of the water and said, “Deal.”

When I walked back into the kitchen, Bob was hand-feeding his eggs to Rocket. “Thanks for what you did. I’d be in a mess if you hadn’t come across us.”

He nodded while Rocket licked the palm of his hand. “Rocket likes his salted. Petey won’t touch them unless I load them up with cheddar cheese.”

“How is it that you showed up when you did?”

“Gus.” He shrugged. “I’ve known him a long time. He was kind to me when others were not.”

“That’d be Gus.”

He continued, “He knows I know the river and, given my occupation, I’m able to cover it, end to end, more quickly than most.”

“Occupation?”

“I fly…a bit.”

I looked more closely and put two and two together. “That was you at the gas station, in the rain?”

He laughed. “Yeah, thanks for the push. Gus called me the next day. Asked me to take a bird’s-eye view of you from time to time. Make sure you were getting along. Wasn’t too hard to spot a mango-colored canoe.”

“Guess that explains why you’ve buzzed us every day for a week.”

He nodded. “Once I clued in to how fast you were paddling, I could guess your progress to within a mile or so. You paddle well.”

“Practice.”

“That’s what I hear.”

More news about us. “I was afraid of that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You know Fisher’s?”

Fisher’s General Store was a public-access boat ramp on the Florida side. They sold beer, soda, candy bars, crickets, worms, life jackets, whatever somebody might need on the river. A handy little place. They also had public bathrooms, which weren’t the cleanest in the world but when you’re guiding folks, especially women, who’ve never squatted in the woods, it makes for a helpful stop. It was a routine stop on one of our legs downriver.

“I grew up guiding on this river, so I’ve been in a time or two.”

“I stopped in to deliver a bill to the guy who owns the place. He owns a farm west of here. Anyway, these four guys were milling around out front, being a little too loud. Between their tone of voice and what Gus had told me, I had a feeling they were up to no good. So yesterday afternoon I took off and started looking south of Pinckney’s.”

“You did all that based on a tone of voice?”

“I’ve had a lot of practice. Once I caught sight of you, they weren’t too far behind. The White Oak has a runway I’ve used once or twice. I set her down, made my way to the river and you came to me.”

“Any idea who they are?”

He shook his head. “Four idiots looking for trouble.”

“Why’d they choose us?”

“Hyenas always target the weak.”

“How do you know they’re not circling the house now?”

“They could be, but”—he smiled—“I highly doubt it.”

“Speaking of house…” I turned in my seat. “Where are we?”

“You remember the river?”

I shrugged. “Sort of hard to forget.”

“A few miles south of Trader’s.”

My heart sank. “South of the powerline?”

“You do know the river.” He nodded. “Two miles.” I did the math. We had just lost sixteen miles. Or rather, had them tacked back on. Now we were every bit of forty-six to Cedar Point and had to make our way back through real estate we’d already covered. It was a tough blow. He continued, “I imagine they’re trying to figure out what they’re going to tell the hospital when they ask about their injuries.” He leaned across the table, pointed an ear toward the sound of Abbie in the tub and whispered, “I know it’s none of my business, but I’m sort of curious to hear your side of why you’re on this river with that lady.”

“She’s my wife.”

“I understand that, but given her condition, why isn’t she in a hospital?”

I sat down and forked my eggs around the plate. “I guess we can skip the small talk.” He nodded. “That’s a bit of a long story.”

He checked his watch. “You been keeping up with the news?”

I shook my head. “Hadn’t really had much access.”

He flipped the channel on the TV, turned up the volume and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach. The screen flashed:
ABBIE ELIOT UPDATE.

Petey circled the table, stamping it with his feet. “Update. Update.”

About there, it hit me that our trip downriver was over.