First Thrills - Lee Child [132]
“I’m serious,” he had said. “It’s cancer.”
Her heart was no longer in her throat, but there was something stuck there that made speaking difficult. She managed, “What about Cindy?” The petite, dark-haired Pilates instructor who had been living with him for the last year.
“I want you to be there when it happens,” he’d said. “I want that healing.”
“Come to Georgia, then.”
“I can’t fly. You’ll have to come to California.”
Pam still cursed that day when they had first flown to California for a teachers’ conference. It had been a way to get out of Atlanta; an exciting adventure, their first trip out west. Their grief counselor had suggested they do something “fun” to take their minds off what had happened and John had eagerly suggested the conference. Pam had stared out the window most of the flight, shocked at the vast and varied terrain beneath them. Dense forests with dirt roads cutting into them like lashes from a switch gave way to barren desert and nothingness. How could people live in such desolate places, she had wondered. How could people survive with nothing but cacti and tumbleweed out their windows?
“Look,” John had said, pointing out the oval plane window to the patch of red dirt that represented the state of Arizona. “That’s where Ted Williams is.”
Ted Williams, the baseball player whose decapitated head had been cryogenically frozen by his nutty children.
“Liquid nitrogen,” John had explained. “His body’s floating in a vat next to it.”
Pam looked away from the window for the first time. She allowed herself a quick glance at John, his steely blue eyes, his long eyelashes that were more like a woman’s. She loved him profoundly, but could not see her way across the chasm that had opened up between them. She wanted to touch his hand, to revel in the way his voice changed, got deeper, when he was teaching someone something new.
Instead, she asked, “Why did they have to decapitate him?”
John had shrugged, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile.
“You know,” he began, “The only other organ in the body with similar chemistry and composition to the brain are the intestines.”
Pam should have laughed. She should have made some silly comment about how we all really are shit-for-brains, but she had simply said, “I know,” and let the low hum of the plane’s engines fill her ears as they flew into the unknown.
Zachary had never been on a plane. His life had revolved around the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where Pam and John had lived all of his life. This was where he played baseball, went to the mall, and, judging by the empty condom packets Pam found in his pockets when she washed his jeans, managed to screw every girl in his class.
At sixteen, he had his father’s height, his mother’s sarcasm, and his grandfather’s addiction. The autopsy report revealed an alcohol level nearly six times the legal limit. The coroner had seemed to think it would comfort Pam to know that Zack had been so intoxicated that he had probably been unaware of any pain as his car had skidded off the road, tumbled down a ravine, and wrapped itself around a tree.
“I’m dying, Pam,” John had said on the phone. “Please. I want you here with me.”
Brain cancer. No pain, because there aren’t any nerves in the brain. She wanted to make a joke, to remind him of what he had said about Ted Williams, the decapitated popsicle, but John had brought it up himself. “Remember when we first flew out to California?” As if she had ever been again after that conference. She was lucky if she could afford a vacation to Florida during the summer, and then it had to be with a couple of other teachers so she could afford to stay somewhere nicer than the roach motel eight miles from the beach.
“I want to be put into stasis,” he’d told her. “I want to be cryogenically frozen so that I can be reanimated one day.”
She had laughed so hard that her stomach had literally clenched. The tears in her eyes were from the pain, she had told herself, not from any sense of losing him.
Yet, she had not thrown away the