Gift of the Golden Mountain (55 page)

She did not know if she had been sleeping; she thought so but she could not be sure. She felt the sudden, sick surge, the raw, aching memory and then she knew she had been asleep but that something had wakened her.

     She heard it. A sound, not loud. Soft, wrong. She listened, straining to place it so she could dismiss it and escape back into sleep. But no. There it was again. An animal noise, muffled and grotesque. She sat up, waited at the edge of her bed, listening. She walked into the hall, to the door of Philip's room and listened. Standing there in her nightgown, in the chill, she began to tremble. Carefully, she pushed open the door. The noise grew louder. She switched on the light. Philip was collapsed sideways on the bed, his mouth open, the hideous sound blowing from his mouth and nose.

The call came at six in the morning. I will never know how I knew, but I knew. It was Kit, and it was bad news. My fear was such that I could just barely rasp out a "hello" to let her know I was on the line and listening.

     "I'm at Alta Bates Hospital with Karin," she told me. "Philip has had a stroke. A massive stroke." She waited to give it time to sink in. "They don't know anything yet, a whole team of doctors is with him now—it's going to take time to assess the damage. He is paralyzed, Faith. It doesn't look good."

Frank Egon got out of his old Ford Falcon, walked around to open the barbed wire fence, drove through and stopped again to close it behind him. He squinted up at the sky. Clear, bright blue, only a few wisps of clouds over the mountains. He should be able to make it into Cat Canyon by eleven. If he was wrong, and Dan wasn't there, he could be back at the school for his three o'clock class. And
if he was right, well . . . to hell with the three o'clock class. Murray could take it. He realized he should have left him a note. But he hadn't wanted to leave a note, he didn't want them to know, he just wanted to find the kid and this was the last place he could think to look. Cat Canyon. Dan was the one who had said that if he was an outlaw, that was where he'd go to hide. After that, the boys used to tease him about "heading out for Cat Canyon."

     It was a longshot, Egon knew. But it had been more than a week with no word and the kid had to be somewhere.

     The blue plume of smoke was visible from the top of the trail, and he knew he had been right. Scrambling up a rise, he saw him sitting by the edge of the stream, tossing rocks in the water.

     Hands cupped around his mouth, he shouted, "Hey, Ward."

     Dan turned and looked at him without surprise.

     "I hope you've got some coffee going, boy," Egon told him when he was within talking distance. "I just double-timed it up this frigging mountain."

     Dan rummaged in his pack, found a packet of instant coffee, and handed it to him.

     Egon squatted by the fire, poured hot water into the tin cup Dan had given him, taking his time.

     "Your folks have been trying to find you," he started.

     Dan's eyes flared and he stood up to be prepared, as if he might bolt. "If my dad sent you here to talk to me, forget it."

     "No, no, it wasn't him. It's not that . . . Your stepmother's been calling me, she's pretty upset." He paused then, looking directly at the boy. "Dan," he said, using his given name for the first time, "I'm bringing bad news, I want you to prepare yourself."

     Dan frowned.

     "There's been a kind of accident. Your father is in the hospital." He decided to give it to him straight, all at once. "He's had a stroke and he's paralyzed, he's going to live, but it's pretty bad. Do you understand what I'm saying?" The flashes of pure, clear pain and confusion that flickered across the boy's face made the older man
put the coffee cup down and stand, at the ready.

     "Careful, boy," he said, staring Dan hard in the eyes. "Hold on to it. Don't lose it."

     Dan blinked and managed to slide a frozen expression over his face, to hide the one Egon had seen.

     "What happened?" Dan asked, his voice clamped even.

     "Your stepmother has been calling me regular . . . She thought you'd probably turn up at the school, so she wanted me to be able to give you all the details." He did not tell Dan that Karin had been terrified that he might hear about his father from a newscast or the paper, that he might blame himself and do himself damage. That was why she wanted him to find Dan. She thought he could handle it. He wasn't so sure. "You ready to listen to me now? You want a few minutes to get used to the idea?"

     Dan said, "Go ahead."

     "He has what the medics call locked-in syndrome. He is awake and he understands everything that's going on, but he can't move and he can't speak. In other words, he is fully conscious. The doctors say it is a rare kind of stroke that he had." Egon pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, smoothed it, and read, "Most strokes take place in the cerebrum. Your father's was in the area called the pons, the brain stem—it's the pathway from the brain to the body. The pons is so badly damaged that it can't relay the messages from the brain to his body. Since the visual and auditory pathways are higher up, they weren't injured. So while nearly all voluntary movement is paralyzed, he can still see and hear perfectly well and his thoughts, sensations, and involuntary movements are normal."

     "You mean he's trapped?" Dan said, horror on his face. "Jesus God, he's trapped inside his body."

     Egon looked at him carefully, and continued in the tone of voice he used in the classroom.

     "If the damage had been a few centimeters lower, it would have affected the regions of the brain that control blood pressure,
the heart, breathing . . . and he would have been dead. If it had been one centimeter higher, in those parts that control thought and sensory perception, he would be comatose. That's what usually happens. But in your father's case, the stroke acted to disconnect the brain from the body. Your father can blink his eyes, and that's a beginning. The doctors won't really know the extent of the damage for a few weeks. It's possible he might get some movement back."

     Dan sat looking at the ground. "When did it happen?" he finally asked.

     Egon stared at him until he lifted his eyes. "The night you left."

     Dan blinked, trying to absorb this new piece of information.

     "The fight," he finally said, "his face was all red."

     "The doctors said it had been coming on for a long time. He was being treated for high blood pressure, but he didn't want anyone to know. Your stepmother didn't even know. She is worried that you might blame yourself, and she says to tell you that you shouldn't. Looking back, she says, she can see the signs . . . and most of them were when you were in school. She said to tell you . . ." Egon paused, then went on, stiffly, ". . . that she loves you, and she wishes you could come home now even if you don't stay very long. She says she and your sister could use your support."

     He had said it all, more words of emotion than he had spoken at any one time to anybody for longer than he could remember . . . Korea, probably. That's what it reminded him of, men at war. Out here in the mountains, pine trees all around and the stillness and knowing there was death out there, behind that pretty tree-humped ridge, and pain and boys you weren't ever going to see again. The wind shifted and blew the fire smoke in his eyes, making them smart.

     "Let's break camp, Ward," he said. "I've got a three o'clock, and you need a shower and a shave before you head up there to help your family."

     He was relieved to see the boy had submitted to orders. He wasn't sure what he would have done if he had cut and run.

THE SWEET, SPICY smell of carnations caught in her throat as she passed the flower shop in the lobby, and for a moment she thought she was going to throw up. She hurried on to the elevators. "Good morning, Mrs. Ward," one of the nurses called out to her, "I've been setting my watch by you all these months, what do you mean being late this morning?"

     Karin wanted to laugh but she couldn't, laughing would bring her too close to tears. The elevator doors opened. She looked in; it was empty. She stood, staring, until the doors closed again. A man in a white coat came to wait beside her. He was reading a medical report and did not look up. The doors opened again, he waited for her to get on. "Going up?" he finally said, and when she shook her head he went in and was back to his report when the doors closed.

     "I wondered where you were," Marge Fromberg whispered, as Karin entered the room, "I've read the entire
New York Times
but I'm not sure how much Philip heard—he closed his eyes about fifteen minutes ago. I think my fine, droning delivery may have
put him to sleep—or maybe it was the story about the Watergate burglars."

     Outside, in the hallway, Marge asked, "How did it go at school this morning?"

     "I don't know what's happening, Marge," she answered, and was surprised to hear her voice quaver. "Thea hasn't been to school for the past week. I don't know what she's been doing all day long. And I don't know what's wrong with me, either. I stood downstairs like an automaton just now and let three elevators go by before I could get on one." The worried look on Marge's face made her cough, as if to pull herself together. "Thanks for coming over early, good friend," Karin said in what she hoped was a normal tone of voice. "I'd better go in—Philip's going to wonder if something's wrong."

     Marge put her arms around her and held her for a long moment. "You're going to have to take some time for yourself, dear heart. You really are."

     Karin felt the anger rising, but she swallowed it. She could not explode at Marge as she had at May. "How about you?" May kept saying. "You're pushing it too hard, I'm worried about you."

     "Well don't," she had screamed into the telephone yesterday. "It's not me lying in that rotten hospital bed, day after day, all these months, trapped inside a body that won't work . . . I'm not the one you should be feeling sorry for, for Christ's sake."

As soon as she leaned over the bed, he opened his eyes.

     "Were you playing 'possum?" she asked in what she hoped was a light tone.

     He blinked once. Yes.

     "Marge is dear, but I think you would rather have me?"

     Two blinks. "No? Is that the truth?"

     Two blinks. "Ah," she said, "you had me going for a minute
there, you tease." She looked into his eyes and wondered if she would ever get accustomed to it: those living eyes in a body that was so totally still. In the beginning she had thought she should be able to read his eyes, to understand what he was feeling by looking into them. She knew now that she could not. Only those few times when his eyes had filled with tears did she have any idea what he was feeling. She took a tissue and dabbed at a bit of dribble that had slipped out the side of his mouth.

     "Did Miss Parnell go through the morning drill with you?" she asked.

     No.

     "No? Damn! She promised she would do it first thing. You can't trust anybody . . ." She felt the anger flash through her and she took a deep breath to bring it under control. Anger was counterproductive. Her stomach fluttered; she stood very straight, put her hand over his. "Okay, let's get on with it then. I'll try to zip through the list as fast as possible. Okay?"