T. Parker: Summer Of Fear

"Do you have your subject y-yet?"

"No. I'm still thinking about fiction."

"I think you'd be a fine fiction writer."

"I'm tempted and worried at the same time. Before, I've always had the story there for me. In fiction, I'd have to make it up."

Isabella thought about this for a long minute. "But that way, it can end how you want it to. The hero can get the girl and the good guys can shoot the bad guys. And you wouldn’t have to visit those terrible men in p-prison."

She asked for seconds. I served them up in the kitchen and started back outside. Around the house, Isabella wore baseball caps to hide the nakedness of her head. I liked her head the way it was-its smoothness and humility, its honesty- I liked it a whole lot better when it had Isabella's rich black hair. Coming up on her from behind with the plate, I stopped for just a moment, rocked for the millionth time by how it had changed. She looked like a little man sitting there, a fan perhaps, her cap tilted at a jaunty angle as she looked off into the west hills. I could see the line of her cheek, her fork held midair and not moving. God I love you, I thought. God, help me love more. God, do something good for her or I'll cut your heart with a chain saw and feed it to Black Death. So Jah seh.

I put down the plate, sat, drank. "Things are starting scare me," I said. The wine was beginning to talk. "Nonfiction seems like a terrible thing to try to capture. Who wants to. There's no order. Killers prey on people at random. Good people like you get sick."

"Nature is cruel," said Isabella. "I quit trying to figure out why a year ago. But if you wrote ffiction, you could change that. The killer could get a brain tumor. The hero's wife could be beautiful and slender and have long black hair and help him solve the crime. She could cook for him. At night, she could take him to bed and love him. She wouldn't be a two-hundred pound bald whale."

"You're not a whale-"

"I look like one. I look in the mirror and I can't believe it's me."

"You'll lose the weight when you get off the steroids, not your fault."

"No wonder you drink so much. I would, too, if I had to look at me."

And there sat Isabella in her wheelchair, a once-beautiful woman racked by medicine and cancer, tears running down her face and off her chin. The neurologist had warned us about mood swings caused by drugs. Swing is not the right word.

I knelt down beside her and put my head in her lap. The Fourth of July fireworks show started down on Main Beach and I could see the bright blossoms unfolding in the sky, followed by the distant thud of the launcher. I kept seeing Amber's head in the red explosions.

For a moment, I thought about Amber and Isabella together, about how different they were and how different- opposite, really-were the things that had led me to love each of them. What had drawn me to Amber was her mystery, her odd lack of substance, her absolute aloneness in the world. She rarely spoke of her family, and not once in the years we were together did I ever meet her parents or her sister, who lived, Amber said, in Florida. She told me once, with that natural, unforced arrogance she wore so well, that her sister-Alice, I think it was-was the only woman in the world prettier than she was. There was some feud between them that had ended in estrangement, but Amber's details were not forthcoming. She never called anyone in her family; never wrote; never mentioned missing them even around the holidays. Her family name was actually Fultz, which Amber changed to Wilson as soon as she was old enough. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to give her connection. I always believed that I could fill that huge emptiness surrounding Amber Mae. What I didn't understand until much later was that she never wanted it filled.

Years after that, when I met Isabella's family for the first time, I saw the difference in bold relief. There was a closeness there, a strong sense of interconnectedness, a blurred set of borders where she left off and her parents-Joe and Corrine-began. And where Amber was alone and vague and fore-molting one skin for another, Isabella was positioned firmly with her people, forthright, and quietly content with them and with herself. As I fell in love with Isabella, I plunged gratefully into that pool of connection, wondering sometimes why I had be so taken with Amber's solitude and secrecy.

And while I sat there on the deck with my head in Isabella's lap, I was proud of her, and of myself for having had the good sense to marry her.

"When you go downtown at night, do you look at other g-girls?"

"No. I think about you."

"Then why do you go?"

"I need to be away sometimes."

"That hurts me more than anything else. That you need to get away from me. Remember how it used to be when we were always together?"

"It can be that way again. We'll have that again."

"But you need to get away from me and I understand. I know you have to dress me in the morning when you wish you were writing, and you do all the shopping and errands, and you clean up after me. And you do the c-cooking at night and the dishes. And you don't have a social life anymore because I don't want people to see what a pig you have for a wife. And I know I don't like our friends to come over. And I know you wanted babies, Russ-because I wanted them even more than you did. And I know now when you Iook into the future, all you can see is me getting w-worse. I can’t stand the look on your face sometimes. It's so full of regret and hate. It scares me."

I drank more. "It's not you I hate, Iz. It's the sickness. It’s not our life I regret. It's all the things we wanted to do."

"I wish I could change it. I've tried so better to get hard. I mean-"

"I know. You're doing everything you can, baby."

Her speech was deteriorating more rapidly. She stroked my hair for a long while. The fireworks burst open in colors, lobbed fading comets down toward the hills. Fresh ones wobbled upward through the darkness, leaving smoke trails. Coyotes yipped from some unspecified distance, their cries bouncing madly around the night. I looked out to the hillsides and followed the outline of Our Lady of the Canyon-one of Isabella's favorite formations. At night, two hills running one behind the other became a pregnant woman lying supine against the sky; the sandstone became her hair, the oak stands became her breasts, and the lights of the city spraying up from between her legs became a soft glow in the place her genitals would be. Isabella had named her. You couldn't even see her during the day. Isabella had even named the sound the wind made-or was it the cry of some misplaced animal? — a keening moan that issued from deep in the canyon on some nights. She called him the Man of the Dark.

"Our Lady of the Canyon looks nice tonight," I said. Her sobbing stopped. She drew a deep breath and I felt it shudder back out of her chest. "She's watching the show, too."

It is hard to describe what I felt then, kneeling beside Isabella's chair. Have you ever known helplessness while someone you love is suffering? Have you ever cursed God for what He has done? Have you ever felt your heart throbbing with so much love and rage that they get mixed up and you can't tell one from the other?

Well, let me tell you this: No matter how deep my own despair was, I knew it was nothing compared to hers; knew that I could only follow her so far out on that gangplank she was being forced to walk over deep black water. Isabella was the one it was happening to. Isabella was having this nightmare. Isabella-no matter how I felt or what I said-was in this alone. And she knew it.

"I'm done with my little outburst," she said finally. "What for d-dessert?"

By nine, I had done the dishes, gotten Isabella undressed and into bed, and almost finished the wine. My heart was beginning to beat faster. I could feel the motion coming on. I imagined breeze blowing against my face, objects racing past. I was a unfettered spirit, rushing with the wind down Laguna Canyon. I was a thing without conscience. I was free.