Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [124]
Sixty feet above me towered Reed’s Bluff. It’s a sand dune that, for no apparent reason, rises straight up out of the water and runs east and west for nearly a mile. At the top, it might be five feet in width and the backside falls off as fast as the front rises. It’s dotted with scrub oaks and enough wiregrass to hold the sand together. It’s steep, but once at the top, you can see for miles. More important, you can see St. Marys. I needed to show Abbie. She needed to know we were close.
I cradled her and threw her arms around my neck. Her arms fell. “Hold on to me.” She made no response.
I dug my toes into the sand, pulled on the wiregrass and crawled up. Every few feet, the sand gave way, spilling away beneath us and forcing me to dig in further and pull harder. Climbing up took several minutes. Finally, I laid her on the narrow ridge, caught my breath, sat her up and let her lean against me. “Honey, look.” I held her arm out and pointed her index finger. “St. Marys. Just five miles. That’s all.” She couldn’t breathe through her nose without coughing.
“Hey…” I was reaching. Grasping. “When we get there, I’ll call the folks at M. D. Anderson. Maybe something’s opened up. We could have dinner tonight at Sterlings and fly out tomorrow.”
Her eyes cracked. She leaned toward me and patted my chest. “Doss…” Her whisper was faint and gurgled with fluid. “I’m dying. Not stupid.”
“You know about that, too?”
She nodded and spat. “Uh-huh.” Cracking a smile, she said, “You’re not a very good liar.” She locked her arms around me, kissed my cheek and whispered, “No scars.”
I stared out across the expanse. The wind blew in two directions, meeting in the middle. In front of us, the wind blew in from the northwest, rolling across the marsh grass that ran for several miles out in front of us. It blew southeast, bending the grass and tress toward us. Behind us, the wind rose up over the bluff from the southwest and moved northeast, pulling the limbs, branches, wiregrass and spanish moss, laying them out across the water like hair. We sat in the middle, looking out upon a world that had come to pay its final respects.
“Abbie…look. Everything is…” The world was bowing down, but she never saw it.
Her eyes were rolling back and her tongue grew thick and white. I checked her pulse and it was faint. Barely there. I slid back down the bluff and scoured the bank for the Pelican case, but it was nowhere. I ran up and down the bank, looking. How hard can it be to spot a yellow plastic case? I ran a quarter mile down the bank to where a tree had fallen from the bluff into the water. The current stripped it of its foliage but left the thin twigs: They poked into the water like fingers, slowing the flow. Tangled in the middle, floated a yellow box.
I dove in.
When I surfaced, I grabbed the box and fought the current back to the bank. I anchored a hand in the soft sand, pulled and spiked the other hand. Three pulls and I’d freed myself from the current that sought to wash me out to sea. I ran back up the bank, clawed and scrambled back up the bluff and dropped next to Abbie. I flipped open the case, cracked the seal on the last of the dopamine and shot it into the inside of her thigh—into her femoral artery. Then I cracked the dexamethasone and slid the syringe into her arm. “Abbie, please come back. Don’t go. Not yet.” Finally, I dug around through the discarded syringes and found one last Actiq. I read the label, 800 mcg.
I pulled off the wrapper and placed it just inside her cheek. The three medications went to work quickly.
She stirred. “Have you ever broken a promise to me?”
I stared off down the river. She traced the lines of my face, breathing as deeply as she could. “Then don’t start now.” I cradled her on my lap and we slid tandem down the sand. When we reached the bank, I laid her down and scrambled through the debris, looking for anything that would float. A piece of plastic, an old cooler, a chunk of Styrofoam. If I could keep her afloat, I could swim alongside and we’d make it. We could still make it.
I thought about a makeshift