Revival, Page 29

  Rudy came running into the room, closely followed by Norma.

  "I told you to turn that blasted thing off before we started!" Jacobs shouted at Rudy.

  Astrid pistoned her arms up, one right in front of Jenny's face as she came back to put her hands on Astrid's shoulders again.

  "Sorry, Mr. Jacobs--"

  "Shut it OFF, you idiot!"

  Charlie snatched the control box out of my hands and slid the switch back to the off position. Now Astrid was making a series of gagging sounds.

  "Pastor Danny, she's choking!" Jenny cried.

  "Don't be stupid!" Jacobs snapped. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. He looked twenty years younger. "Norma! Call the gate! Tell them the alarm was an accident!"

  "Should I--"

  "Go! Go! Goddammit, GO!"

  She went.

  Astrid's eyes opened, only there were no eyes, just bulging whites. She gave another of those myoclonic jerks, then slid forward, legs kicking and jerking. Her arms flailed like those of a drowning swimmer. The alarm brayed and brayed. I grabbed her by the hips and shoved her back in her chair before she could land on the floor. The crotch of her slacks was dark, and I could smell strong urine. When I looked up, I saw foam drizzling from one side of her mouth. It fell from her chin to the collar of her blouse, darkening that, too.

  The alarm quit.

  "Thank God for small favors," Jacobs said. He was bent forward, hands on his thighs, observing Astrid's convulsions with interest but no concern.

  "We need a doctor!" Jenny cried. "I can't hold her!"

  "Bosh," Jacobs said. There was a half-smile--the only kind he could manage--on his face. "Did you expect it to be easy? It's cancer, for God's sake. Give her a minute and she'll be--"

  "There's a door in the wall," Astrid said.

  The hoarseness had left her voice. Her eyes rolled back down in their sockets . . . but not together; they came one at a time. When they were back in place, it was Jacobs they were looking at.

  "You can't see it. It's small and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits on the other side, above the broken city. Above the paper sky."

  Blood can't turn cold, not really, but mine seemed to. Something happened, I thought. Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.

  "Who?" Jacobs asked. He took one of her hands. The half-smile was gone. "Who waits?"

  "Yes." Her eyes stared into his. "She."

  "Who? Astrid, who?"

  She said nothing at first. Then her lips stretched in a terrible grin that showed every tooth in her head. "Not the one you want."

  He slapped her. Astrid's head jerked to the side. Spittle flew. I shouted in surprise and grabbed his wrist when he raised his hand to do it again. I stopped him, but only with an effort. He was stronger than he had any right to be. It was the kind of strength that comes from hysteria. Or pent-up fury.

  "You can't hit her!" Jenny shouted, letting go of Astrid's shoulders and coming around the wheelchair to confront him. "You lunatic, you can't hit h--"

  "Stop," Astrid said. Her voice was weak but lucid. "Stop it, Jenny."

  Jenny looked around. Her eyes widened at what she saw: a delicate pink wash of color beginning to rise in Astrid's pale cheeks.

  "Why are you yelling at him? Did something happen?"

  Yes, I thought. Something happened. Something most surely did.

  Astrid turned to Jacobs. "When are you going to do it? You better hurry, because the pain is very . . . very . . ."

  The three of us stared at her. No, it was the five of us. Rudy and Norma had crept back into the East Room doorway, and they were staring, too.

  "Wait," Astrid said. "Wait just a darn minute."

  She touched her chest. She cupped the wasted remains of her breasts. She pressed her stomach.

  "You did it already, didn't you? I know you did, because there is no pain!" She pulled in a breath and let it out in an incredulous laugh. "And I can breathe! Jenny, I can breathe again!"

  Jenny Knowlton went to her knees, raised her hands to the sides of her head, and began to recite the Lord's Prayer so fast she sounded like a 45 rpm record on 78. Another voice joined her: Norma's. She was also on her knees.

  Jacobs gave me a bemused look that was easy to read: You see, Jamie? I do all the work and the Big G gets all the credit.

  Astrid tried to get out of the wheelchair, but her wasted legs wouldn't hold her. I got her before she could do a face-plant, and put my arms around her.

  "Not yet, honey," I said. "You're too weak."

  She goggled at me as I eased her back onto the seat. The oxygen mask had gotten twisted around and now hung on the left side of her neck, forgotten.

  "Jamie? Is that you? What are you doing here?"

  I looked at Jacobs.

  "Short-term memory loss after treatment is common," he said. "Astrid, can you tell me who the president is?"

  She looked bewildered at the question but answered with no hesitation. "Obama. And Biden's the vice president. Am I really better? Will it last?"

  "You are and it will, but never mind that now. Tell me--"

  "Jamie? Is it really you? Your hair is so white!"

  "Yes," I said, "it's certainly getting there. Listen to Charlie."

  "I was crazy about you," she said, "but even though you could play, you could never dance very well unless you were high. We had dinner at Starland after the prom and you ordered . . ." She stopped and licked her lips. "Jamie?"

  "Right here."

  "I can breathe. I can actually breathe again." She was crying.

  Jacobs snapped his fingers in front of her eyes like a stage hypnotist. "Focus, Astrid. Who brought you here?"

  "J-Jenny."

  "What did you have for supper last night?"

  "Sloop. Sloop and salad."

  He snapped his fingers in front of her swimming eyes again. It made her blink and recoil. The muscles beneath her skin seemed to be tightening and firming even as I watched. It was wonderful and awful.

  "Soup. Soup and salad."

  "Very good. What is the door in the wall?"

  "Door? I don't--"

  "You said it was covered with ivy. You said there was a broken city on the other side."

  "I . . . don't remember that."

  "You said she waits. You said . . ." He peered into her uncomprehending face and sighed. "Never mind. You need to rest, my dear."

  "I suppose so," Astrid said, "but what I'd really like to do is dance. Dance for joy."

  "In time you will." He patted her hand. He was smiling as he did it, but I had an idea he was deeply disappointed at her failure to remember the door and the city. I was not. I didn't want to know what she had seen when Charlie's secret electricity stormed through the deepest recesses of her brain. I didn't want to know what was waiting behind the hidden door she had spoken of, yet I was afraid I did.

  Mother.

  Above the paper sky.

  *

  Astrid slept all morning and well into the afternoon. When she woke, she declared herself ravenous. This pleased Jacobs, who told Norma Goldstone to bring "our patient" a toasted cheese sandwich and a small piece of cake with the frosting scraped off. Frosting, he felt, might be too rich for her wasted stomach. Jacobs, Jenny, and I watched her put away the entire sandwich and half the cake before setting her fork down.

  "I want the rest," she said, "but I'm full."

  "Give yourself time," Jenny said. She'd spread a napkin in her lap and kept plucking at it. She wouldn't look at Astrid for long, and at Jacobs not at all. Coming to him had been her idea, and I have no doubt she was happy about the sudden change for the better in her friend, but it was clear that what she'd seen in the East Room had shaken her deeply.

  "I want to go home," Astrid said.

  "Oh, honey, I don't know . . ."

  "I feel well enough. I really do." Astrid cast an apologetic look at Jacobs. "It's not that I'm not grateful--I'll bless you in my prayers for the rest of my life--but I want to be i
n my own place. Unless you feel . . . ?"

  "No, no," Jacobs said. I suspected that, with the job done, he was anxious to be rid of her. "I can't think of better medicine than sleeping in your own bed, and if you leave soon, you can be back not long after dark."

  Jenny made no further objection, just went back to plucking at her napkin. But before she bent her head, I saw a look of relief on her face. She wanted out as much as Astrid, although perhaps not for quite the same reasons.

  Astrid's returning color was only part of the remarkable change in her. She was sitting upright in her wheelchair; her eyes were clear and engaged. "I don't know how I can ever thank you, Mr. Jacobs, and I certainly can't repay you, but if there's ever anything you need from me that's mine to give, you only have to ask."

  "Actually, there are several things." He ticked them off on the gnarled fingers of his right hand. "Eat. Sleep. Work hard to regain your strength. Can you do those things?"

  "Yes. I will. And I'm never going to touch another cigarette."

  He waved this away. "You won't want to. Will she, Jamie?"

  "Probably not," I said.

  "Miss Knowlton?"

  She jerked as if he'd pinched her bottom.

  "Astrid must engage a physical therapist, or you must engage one on her behalf. The sooner she gets out of that damn wheelchair, the better. Am I right? Am I cooking with gas, as we used to say?"

  "Yes, Pastor Danny."

  He frowned, but didn't correct her. "There's something else you fine ladies can do for me, and it's extremely important: leave my name out of this. I have a great deal of work to do in the coming months, and the last thing I need is to have hordes of sick people coming up here in hopes of being cured. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," Astrid said.

  Jenny nodded without looking up.

  "Astrid, when you see your doctor and he expresses amazement, as he certainly will, all you'll tell him is that you prayed for a remission and your prayers were answered. His own belief--or lack of it--in the efficacy of prayer won't matter; either way, he'll be forced to accept the evidence of his MRI pictures. Not to mention your happy smiling face. Your happy and healthy smiling face."

  "Yes, that's fine. Whatever you want."

  "Let me roll you back to the suite," Jenny said. "If we're going to leave, I better pack." Subtext: Get me out of here. On that, she and Charlie Jacobs were thinking alike; they were cooking with gas.

  "All right." Astrid looked at me shyly. "Jamie, would you bring me a Coke? I'd like to speak to you."

  "Sure."

  Jacobs watched Jenny trundle Astrid across the empty restaurant and toward the far door. When they were gone, he turned to me. "So. We have a bargain?"

  "Yes."

  "And you won't DS on me?"

  DS. Carny-speak for down south, meaning to pull stakes and disappear.

  "No, Charlie. I won't DS on you."

  "That's fine, then." He was looking at the doorway through which the women had gone. "Miss Knowlton doesn't like me much now that I've left Team Jesus, does she?"

  "Scared of you is what she is."

  He shrugged it off. Like his smile, the shrug was mostly one-sided. "Ten years ago, I couldn't have cured our Miss Soderberg. Perhaps not even five. But things are moving fast, now. By this summer . . ."

  "By this summer, what?"

  "Who knows?" he said. "Who knows?"

  You do, I thought. You do, Charlie.

  *

  "Watch this, Jamie," Astrid said when I arrived with her soft drink.

  She got out of the wheelchair and tottered three steps to the chair by her bedroom window. She held on to it for balance while she turned herself around, and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief and pleasure.

  "Not much, I know--"

  "Are you kidding? It's amazing." I handed her an ice-choked glass of Coca-Cola. I had even stuck a piece of lime on the rim for good luck. "And you'll be able to do more each day."

  We had the room to ourselves. Jenny had excused herself to finish packing, although it looked to me as if the job was already done. Astrid's coat was laid out on the bed.

  "I think I owe you as much as I owe Mr. Jacobs."

  "That's not true."

  "Don't lie, Jamie, your nose will grow and the bees will sting your knees. He must get thousands of letters begging for cures, even now. I don't think he picked mine out of the pile by accident. Were you the one in charge of reading them?"

  "Nope, that was Al Stamper, your friend Jenny's old fave. Charlie got in touch with me later."

  "And you came," she said. "After all these years, you came. Why?"

  "Because I had to. I can't explain any better than that, except there was a time when you meant the world to me."

  "You didn't promise him anything? There was no . . . what do they call it . . . quid pro quo?"

  "Not a single one." I said it without missing a beat. During my years as an addict, I'd become an accomplished liar, and the sad truth is that sort of skill sticks with you.

  "Walk over here. Stand close to me."

  I did. With no hesitation or embarrassment, she put her hand on the front of my jeans. "You were gentle with this," she said. "Many boys wouldn't have been. You had no experience, but you knew how to be kind. You meant the world to me, too." She dropped her hand and looked at me out of eyes no longer dull and preoccupied with her own pain. Now they were full of vitality. Also worry. "You did promise. I know you did. I won't ask what, but if you ever loved me, be careful of him. I owe him my life, and I feel awful saying this, but I believe he's dangerous. And I think you believe that, too."

  Not as accomplished at lying as I'd thought, then. Or perhaps it was just that she saw more now that she was cured.

  "Astrid, you have nothing to worry about."

  "I wonder . . . could I have a kiss, Jamie? While we're alone? I know I'm not much to look at, but . . ."

  I dropped to one knee--again feeling like a swain in a romance--and kissed her. No, she wasn't much to look at, but compared to how she'd looked that morning, she was a knockout. Still--it was only skin against skin, that kiss. There were no embers in the ashes. For me, at least. But we were tied together, just the same. Jacobs was the knot.

  She stroked the back of my head. "Still such wonderful hair, going white or not. Life leaves us so little, but it's left you that. Goodbye, Jamie. And thank you."

  *

  On my way out, I stopped to talk briefly to Jenny. Mostly I wanted to know if she lived close enough to Astrid to monitor her progress.

  She smiled. "Astrid and I are divorce buddies. Have been since I moved to Rockland and started working at the hospital there. Ten years ago, that was. When she got sick, I moved in with her."

  I gave her my cell number, and the number at Wolfjaw. "There may be aftereffects."

  She nodded. "Pastor Danny filled me in. Mr. Jacobs, I mean. It's hard for me to get used to calling him that. He said she might be prone to sleepwalking until her brainwaves re-regulate themselves. Four to six months, he said. I've seen that behavior in people who overdo stuff like Ambien and Lunesta."

  "Yes, that's the most likely." Although there was also dirt-eating, compulsive walking, Tourette's syndrome, kleptomania, and Hugh Yates's prismatics. So far as I knew, Ambien didn't cause any of those things. "But if there's anything else . . . call."

  "How worried are you?" she asked. "Tell me what to expect."

  "I don't really know, and she'll probably be fine." Most of them were, after all, at least according to Jacobs. And as little as I trusted him, I had to count on that, because it was too late to do anything else. The thing was done.

  Jenny stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. "She's better. That's God's grace, Jamie, no matter what Mr. Jacobs may think now that he's fallen away. Without it--without him--she would have been dead in six weeks."

  *

  Astrid rode down the handicapped ramp in her wheelchair, but got into Jenny's Subaru on her own. Jacobs closed her door. She re
ached through the open window, grasped one of his hands in both of her own, and thanked him again.

  "It was my pleasure," he said. "Just remember your promise." He pulled his hand free so he could put a finger to her lips. "Mum's the word."

  I bent down and kissed her forehead. "Eat," I said. "Rest. Do therapy. And enjoy your life."

  "Roger, Captain," she said. She looked past me, saw Jacobs slowly climbing the steps to the porch, then met my eyes and repeated what she'd said earlier. "Be careful."

  "Don't worry."

  "But I will." Her eyes on mine, full of grave concern. She was getting old now, as I was, but with the disease banished from her body, I could see the girl who had stood in front of the stage with Hattie, Carol, and Suzanne, the four of them shaking their moneymakers while Chrome Roses played "Knock on Wood" or "Nutbush City Limits." The girl I had kissed under the fire escape. "I will worry."

  I rejoined Charlie Jacobs on the porch, and we watched Jenny Knowlton's trim little Outback roll down the road that led to the gate. It had been a fine melt-day, and the snow had pulled back, revealing grass that was already turning green. Poor man's fertilizer, I thought. That's what we used to call it.

  "Will those women keep their mouths shut?" Jacobs asked.

  "Yes." Maybe not forever, but until his work was done, if he was as close to finished as he claimed. "They promised."

  "And you, Jamie? Will you keep your promise?"

  "Yes."

  That seemed to satisfy him. "Stay the night, why don't you?"

  I shook my head. "I booked a room at Embassy Suites. I've got an early flight."

  And I can't wait to get away from this place, just as I couldn't wait to get away from The Latches.

  I didn't say this, but I'm sure he knew it.

  "Fine. Just be ready when I call."

  "What do you need, Charlie? A written statement? I said I'll come, and I will."

  "Good. We've been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives, but that's almost over. By the end of July--mid-August at the latest--we'll be finished with each other."