Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [89]
“What’s a Stearman?”
“My plane.”
“We flew in a plane?”
He nodded and turned the Popsicle in his mouth.
“I don’t remember that.”
“Seeing as how you weren’t wearing any clothes, it’s an image I won’t soon forget.”
“Sorry. I had washed our clothes, and…”
He waved me off and smiled. “You took a pretty good hit. She was worried about your head swelling, so she shot you up with one of those.” On the table next to us lay the opened Pelican case. “She said it’d help with the swelling.”
A single empty dexamethasone syringe lay on the table. Two remained. My heart sank.
The rhythmic ticking of the ceiling fan tapped out a lonely tempo above me. The piercing pain in my head was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I lifted my hand to touch my eye, but Abbie stopped me. “Don’t.”
“Honey, are you—”
“They didn’t take anything.” She patted the corner of my head. “Easy, you’ll tear the glue.”
“Glue?”
She placed a cool rag on my face. “Superglue. We did our best but it’s not pretty.”
“We?”
Her voice lowered to a whisper. If he could hear us, he didn’t let on. “If he wanted to hurt us, he’d have done it by now. Once we got back here, he disappeared for a while, trying to find what’s left of the canoe.”
“And?”
“Gone.”
A quick mental inventory told me that we had the clothes on our backs, a shotgun, a revolver and the Pelican case.
I cracked a whisper, “Why did you give me one of the dex?”
She paused. “I wasn’t sure about the swelling in your head.”
“You should know better than to waste that on me.”
She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Sleep. We’ll talk later. Don’t worry.”
She laid alongside me, placing her head on my chest.
I reached across her, finding the patch. “How you doing?”
“I’m okay. We’ll work on me later.”
Sometime later, I woke to the smell of my own blood and the feel of a warm washcloth on my face.
The third time I woke it was dark and the pain in my head had morphed to a coming freight train. Complete with horn. Abbie and I were lying beside each other on what felt like two military cots. I groaned, a shadow crossed me and a large hand placed four pills into my palm. “It’s ibuprofen.” I stared into my hand, saw ten pills, swallowed them and then fought back the response to spew them across the porch. He leaned over me, a small flashlight wedged between his teeth. He shined the light into my eye several times, then clicked it off. “She wouldn’t let me take you to a hospital, or call the police, but you should go. You both should.” He paused. “But I got a feeling you already know that.”
Abbie’s hand found me beneath the blanket. She stretched it across my stomach, then searched higher, leaving it pressed flat across my heart.
31
The 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