November 3
I no longer slept. I lay with Deborah through the night. She lay beside me, gaunt, her eyes fixed open, mouth slack, lifted heavenward as if on the verge of a question. Her chest rose and fell sporadically, sometimes in short, quick hitches, sometimes not at all. I watched red minutes tick by on the digital clock, eating up what remained of the life we had built. As dawn crept into the room, thunder rumbled. I could hear rain showering down the eaves, streaming through the gutters.
My New York partner, Michael, had called and asked if he could come see Deborah, and was on his way down. I had tried to discourage him and others from coming during these last weeks. Deborah had wasted away so that she barely raised the sheet that covered her. Her eyes had faded and seemed cruelly suspended in sockets of protruding bone. I wanted everyone to remember her as the beautiful, elegant woman they’d always known.
But Michael pressed, and since we were godparents to his son Jack, I said yes. Jewish by birth, he was not a particularly religious man. He knew we were Christians and had witnessed our own trek of faith. We’d talked about Jesus as Messiah, but that didn’t mesh with his own religious upbringing. Ours were philosophical discussions—friendly, never heated.
When Michael pulled up to the house at around 10:00 a.m., Mary Ellen and I were in the bedroom with Deborah, singing along to a CD of Christian songs, some of Deborah’s favorites. I went out to greet Michael, then he, Carson, and I went back to the bedroom. The moment Michael stepped through the door, the song “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” began to play: “We are standing on holy ground and I know that there are angels all around.”
As the song washed through the room, Michael looked at Deborah, then at Mary Ellen. “We are on holy ground,” he whispered. Then, as though someone had kicked the backs of his legs, he fell to his knees and wept. Frozen in place, Carson, Mary Ellen, and I traded glances. In the twenty years I had known him, I had never seen Michael cry. When the song ended, he collected himself. Pulling out a picture of Jack, he moved to the edge of the bed and placed it in Deborah’s palm, gently folding her fingers around it.
“Will you watch over him from heaven?” he said. “Be his guardian angel?” The moment later became a mystery. No one ever saw that picture of Jack again.
Michael thanked Deborah for all the prayers he knew she had prayed for him. She didn’t move or speak. He stayed about twenty minutes. When I walked him down through the living room, he seemed dazed.
“There was a power or a presence in that room that was not of this world,” he said. “All the times you spoke to me about an encounter with God . . . I just had one. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”
That was all we said. He ran through sheets of slanting rain and ducked into his car. Michael had always held faith at arm’s distance. Denver’s words echoed in my mind: “Miss Debbie ain’t goin nowhere till her work on earth is done.”
Is it done now? I wondered.
I bounded down the hall and told Deborah about Michael. Though she remained silent, I knew that she knew. Her pulse had dropped to a whisper, and her breathing to an irregular series of shallow gasps. I lay down, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the angels.