C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

Hot an’ cold rushed my face, part relief an’ part terror. My heart was hammering loud enough I thought the world could hear it. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it, doll. Guess I figured we had lotsa time.”

“No.” Just one hard word, like she couldn’t make herself say anything more.

Another tremor went through me, shaking down dreams I didn’t hardly know I had. Lil’ boy-shaped dreams, an’ lil’ girl-shaped ones too. Dreams with little faces like Annie’s an’ big broad shoulders like mine, an’ dreams with high laughing voices and stomping hurrying feet. They hardly had shapes to ‘em, those dreams, until they started to fall. Then I could see ‘em all clear as day, toothless grins and white wedding dresses, falling down like rain. And like rain, they hit the earth an’ disappeared into sparkling splashes of nothin’.

There wasn’t anything I could say, sitting there in that ruin. I got on to the couch and pulled Annie into my arms. She didn’t wanna let me, staying stiff and upright, but I held on until inch by awful inch she leaned into me. Not relaxing, and feeling like she might never relax again, but at least I was holding her.

It came out in bits an’ pieces over days, how the doctor said she seemed all right but that it couldn’t be any surprise to a nurse that sometimes a real bad sickness, like a fever, could leave someone unable to have kids. She couldn’t talk about it for more’n a minute without getting stiff and hurting again, an’ all I could do was keep saying I loved her, right up until she threw a mug across the room an’ screamed, “I know you love me! Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’m afraid it’s not enough?” an’ collapsed into tears.

I couldn’t catch her in time, she fell so fast, but I dropped down beside her an’ held her again. She fought like a wildcat, hitting and screaming with a kinda horrible incoherence that made all the sense in the world. She was a nurse, she understood how it could happen to somebody else, but when it was her, when it was her own body betraying her, an’ she wouldn’t let me say it wasn’t, ‘cause to her way of thinking, it was, no matter what all her studies might say, when it was her it was unbearable. An’ what if me loving her wasn’t enough, if she couldn’t give me babies, an’ I kept sayin’ it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, darlin’, I had her, I wasn’t gonna want somebody else, but not even the tears rollin’ down my own face convinced her, not for days an’ weeks, until the worst of the pain had passed. I still caught it on her face some days, though, as the years went on. I’d see it when she was looking at other people’s kids, an’ all I could ever do was hold on an’ never let go.

We had our ups an’ downs over the years, an’ we had our moments of the world turnin’ upside-down, when some kinda magic reared its head again, but the truth was, we never had a worse time than that, not ‘til the doctor told us Annie was dying of emphysema.

I had a headache start up about then, pounding at the back of my skull like a devil tryin’ ta get out. I was the smoker, not Annie. Didn’t seem fair she’d get the disease instead of me. Her breathing had been bad for a while and I’d cut down, started smoking outside the house insteada in it, but I threw my last pack of cigarettes away that day and wasn’t ever tempted by ‘em again. We sat there in silence, holding hands and listening to the doc tell us about the advancement of the disease an’ treatments, but he had a look that a nurse and her husband knew plenty well. After a few minutes Annie cut him off, saying, “How long, Doctor?” with the same grace as she faced most things.

The fella sighed and looked away, then back again, preparing to give it to her straight. “The truth is, Mrs. Muldoon, I don’t understand how your health has been as good as you claim for the past several years. The advanced stage of the disease suggests you should have been suffering, even bed-ridden, for an extended period of time already. If it was a cancer, perhaps, but—”

“Doctor.”

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s unusually aggressive, Mrs. Muldoon. If our treatments can’t slow the progression, I’m afraid you may have as little as a matter of weeks.”

My headache spiked, making the world go white for a minute. I couldn’t have heard that right, but Annie was talking, her hands real still in her lap and her voice the kinda steady it got when she had to deliver bad news to somebody. “I’ve only been ill a few months. That’s…difficult to accept.”

“I know.” The fella looked as helpless as I’d ever seen anybody, but it had nothing on the panic rising in me. A lifetime of crazy moments came back, from Annie’s Pop to the fever-comas at the hospital all those years ago, from near misses in Tampa and Pamplona to the wonderful, strange months in New Orleans, and one thought came clear in my head: Annie wasn’t sick.

Not a natural sickness, anyway. Not somethin’ that came on the way emphysema was s’posed to. This was something more like the sick fever, something that didn’t belong, that shouldna been happening to her. I was just about hearing that voice in my head again, though it’d been quiet for so long I’d damned near forgot about it. It was the one that had said this ain’t right about a few things a long time ago, and for the first time in fifty years I was thinking the same thing: this ain’t right.

An’ the voice that’d been mostly quiet at the back of my head woke up with a roar. A whole lifetime almost like the one I’d led, only just a little different, crashed through my memories and I had just enough time to realize that voice had always been me, just me from way down the road, when it took over me and then became now —

My vision went double before it settled out, two of me looking through my eyes for a couple seconds. I’d been a passenger to my own life for the past fifty years, quiet and enjoying most of it, and trying ta keep my mouth shut and not make anything worse or better when I didn’t, even when things I didn’t remember kept cropping up. Now it was my turn, an’ the fella I almost was could take his shot at sittin’ in the background for a couple weeks. ‘cause that was all we had, and I knew it. We hadn’t had a lot of time, once the doc had diagnosed her.

And it killed me knowing Joanne Walker was only a couple miles away and three years too early to save my wife. There was nothing I could say to Jo that would change that. She was a twenty-four year old kid right now, angry at the world and a long damned way away from the girl I was gonna meet a few years down the road. I could turn up on her doorstep like some crazy old man pleading for a miracle, and it wouldn’t get me one. It had to be me and Annie alone through this, and she wasn’t gonna come out of it alive.

“Gary?” She and the doc had asked me somethin’, and I hadn’t been listening. “Gary, are you all right?”

I closed my eyes a minute, afraid to even look at her. The lady had just been told she was dying, and she was worried ‘bout whether I was all right. The selfish part of me wanted to say no, but I took her hand an’ bowed my head over it, still not ready to meet her eyes. “I’m okay, doll. We’re gonna get through this.”

She said, “Gary,” again, this time with an old fondness that I missed so bad it made my hands hurt, holding hers. I dared look up, to look into blue eyes that time hadn’t faded one bit, even if there were wrinkles around ‘em now and her blond hair had turned snow white. I’d been looking out through my other self’s eyes all this time, watching us growing old together again, but it wasn’t the same as looking at her myself. I wished I knew how Cernunnos had settled me into my own self’s head, and wondered what the devil had happened to my own old bones that had been riding with him for so long.