Lee Child: First Thrills

“It’s me.”

“John?” Even as she said his name, she imagined it spelled correctly, the “h” flashing like a neon sign outside a strip club.

In keeping with his new California lifestyle, he had said it so matter- of-factly, as if he were discussing the weather: “I’m dying.”

She’d been glib, said something she had watched him say so many times on Oprah or Dr. Phil: “We’re all dying. That’s why we need to make the best of our lives now.”

Such an easy thing for him to say. Independently wealthy people didn’t tend to have as negative an outlook on life as those who had to get up at five every morning to get dressed so they could go out and teach drooling teenagers the periodic table.

“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 ticket when it came, had not told him to go fuck himself with his first-class plane ride and his fucking millions the way she had so many times before.

Millions. It had to be several million by now. Biological Healing was still on several bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the “mind-body connection” to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.

“Grief,” John told an agreeable Larry King, “knows no one particular language.”

He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most: being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.

The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes about his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit and taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.

John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she were a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rocklike. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack-one of many, it turned out-had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.