Now Emmylou swings her head around slowly and faces Lorna and fixes Lorna with her eyes. In these she sees bottomless sorrow, unlimited compassion. Lorna feels all the anger running out of her, although she wishes to cling to it, it is like water through her fingers.
“I’m not going to have any children,” Lorna cries. “I’m going to die and there is no God.”
And collapses utterly. She shrieks loud enough to frighten the birds away and pounds on the table and throws a cup shattering against a tree trunk. I’m going to die and there is no God, this is her wail, interspersed with wordless blubbering, shameful, beyond all control, God was going to torture her to death even he doesn’t exist, unfair, unfair! Emmylou jumped from her chair and held her in a wiry grip, stroking her hair and cooing meaningless comforting noises.
“I’m sorry,” she says when she can speak sensibly again. “I have cancer. Would God cure me if I prayed?” Lorna was appalled listening to her mouth say this, and in a little squeaking voice too.
“I don’t think it works that way,” says Emmylou, “but it never hurts to pray. If you want, I’ll pray for you.”
“Oh, what’s the point!” Lorna snaps as her self-disgust rises to overcome the terror. “Every plane that goes down must be screaming with prayers, but the plane still crashes.”
“That’s true, but if any of them are praying sincerely, they’re praying for God’s mercy in their final moments. That’s really the only thing wecan pray for, you know, thy will be done, and let me align myself with it.”
“This is all about heaven, right? The so-called afterlife?”
“That you don’t believe in,” said Emmylou.
“Of course not!”
“Then what are you afraid of? Extinction? You have extinction every single night of your life. What can it possibly mean if the lights go out permanently? You’d never know it, by definition.”
Lorna blows her nose into a paper napkin. “Oh, thanks! Why am I not comforted by that? I suppose for you it’s going to be choirs of angels and eternal hymns.”
“You know, I have no idea. We’re advised not to speculate: eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of man what the Lord has prepared for those who love him. I’m assured of a welcome into eternity and the resurrection of my body, but we really haven’t the faintest idea what that’s going be like, having an exalted body like the risen Christ had. It’s outside time, you see, and my brain just can’t bend around that, the idea of existence without duration, just like I guess the caterpillar doesn’t understand the butterfly, though it’s the future him.”
Lorna is staring at her, preparing some cynical remark, when a butterfly flies in from the yard and lights on Emmylou’s shoulder. It is small and bright blue, with orange eyespots in its wings. Then another comes and another, dozens of them, on Emmylou, the table, the chairs, on Lorna herself. Time slows and seems to halt, the breeze dies, the leaves fall silent, and for some incalculable period they share existence without duration. Then, in a blue flash the creatures take off all at once and disperse into the sky.
“And gone,” says Emmylou, smiling with delight.
Lorna felt something wrong in her mouth, a peculiar dryness, and realizes that her jaw has been hanging open for the whole time. Emmylou goes on as if nothing unusual has taken place. “I’m remembering something Teresa of Lisieux said. She was real sick, she died when she was twenty-five or so, and she said something like, It really doesn’t matter to me if I’m alive or dead, because I feel like I’m in heaven now, so what could death change? That’s pretty much how I feel, I guess. Of course, most people are in hell.”
Lorna misunderstands. “You think I’m going to hell?” she cried.
“Of course not. You have a much better chance of getting into heaven than I do. You’ve probably never done a consciously evil thing in your life. You work with the sick and try to cure them, and accept less money than you could earn in other ways. And you do it from pure goodness, since you don’t fear hell or seek heaven. I’m commanded to goodness and charity by my Lord, but you generate it like a pure fountain from your soul. You’re a far better person than I’ll ever be, and the devil has no grasp on you at all.”
Now Lorna jumps to her feet. These last remarks, with the butterflies, Eskimos, schizophrenic angels, the Little Flower: all too much for her. “I have to go,” she blurts out, “I have to go to the hospital now.” Racing toward materialism, escaping from all this…hope,whatever, but she can’t help herself.
She doesn’t even wash her face, just grabs her keys and her wallet and the medical records from GWU Hospital and gets in her car, and while she drives she dials Dr. Mona Greenspan and gives her secretary such a good impression of a patient just falling over the edge of psychosis (not much of a stretch now) that the frightened woman tells her to come right in.
Lorna in her paper smock, hours have passed, she has been probed and rayed and she has been waiting a long, long time, and now the door opens and Dr. Mona Greenspan, a small woman with a cap of silvery hair and an intelligent open face, enters holding a thick sheaf of folders. She sits on her little stool. “Well, the good news first,” she says. “You don’t have lymphoma.”
“What do you mean? I have all the symptoms of stage-four lymphoma and I had a positive biopsy and CAT scan in Washington.”
“What can I say? GWU is a good outfit, but people make mistakes. There are abnormal lymph cells there, but they’re not malignant. You have an infection. That’s why your nodes are blown up and why you’ve got a fever and why you’re losing weight.”
“Aninfection? What kind of infection?”
“Brucellosis, strange to say.”
“What? I thought that was a cattle disease.”
“It is, but people get it too, and it’s no joke. Have you been around any livestock lately?”
“Some cows. But the symptoms started before then.”
“Then what about unpasteurized or imported milk products, cheeses, like that?”
Lorna thinks back to before the weirdness started. The gym. Betsy. “Oh, God. I had some Albanian goat cheese in a health food restaurant. It was zero fat. Oh, Jesus, what a moron!” She slapped her head.
“I’m not done. I assume you don’t know you’re pregnant.” There was the usual stunned, gaping pause here.
“I can’t be pregnant. I’m on the pill.”
“I know you’re on the pill, dear, I’m your doctor. But you seem to be the lucky one in a hundred for which it fails. In any case, there it is, about five weeks. Didn’t you realize you’d missed a period?”
“I thought it was the cancer,” Lorna wails. “Oh, God, and that’s why I was puking up all the time.”
“Right. And the itching is an allergic reaction to sand flies, very common down here in South Florida. In any case…when I was an intern we called it Von Veilinghausen’s syndrome?a group of unrelated symptoms interpreted as a novel or more complex disease. But back to the brucellosis. There’s a real danger of spontaneous abortion here, not so much in human females as in cattle, but real enough. So what did you want to do about the condition? I’m assuming it’s an accident, in which case?”
“No! I want to keep it,” says Lorna, without any conscious thought at all.
Dr. Greenspan gives her a swift, sharp look and then smiles. “In that case, mazel tov. We’ll start you on rifampin right away.”
No one answered the doorbell, and Paz felt a little tickle of fear. Lorna’s car was gone from the carport, but that could mean anything. He used his key and paused in the short hallway, placing the grocery bag on the floor and listening. Nothing, the sound of an empty house, and then something else, a murmuring drone. Oh, right, he knew whatthat was. He took the bag into the kitchen and unloaded it onto the counter. Taking his cell phone, he punched the key for Lorna’s, and got the service. He left a call-me message, and the thing was no sooner back in his pocket than it played its tune.