Tiptoeing down the dark hallway to my parents’ bedroom for the bedtime devotional, the scene stops me dead in my tracks. In their big four-poster bed, Garrett is rubbing Tina’s back, holding her carefully in his arms, gently turning her over like some tiny, priceless figurine. Tina points to a place above her shoulders, and Garrett kisses the spot before he inhales deeply behind her ears and lays his head on the pillow next to her, glancing up at her like a kid. I’m wondering if they know how damned lucky there are. To have shared your bed with someone for over forty years.
A few minutes later, climbing into the inner sanctum of the tree house, retrieving the binoculars from their place on the wall, I survey the Tischman place through the woods. I kneel on the window sill, my prayerful pose wasted on the cold, hard reality that my adventure here with Joe has come and gone.
The water ripples in the creek below, and a light in the Tischmans’ carport comes on briefly. A figure crosses from the house to the sundeck and back again. I distinctly hear the back door of the house close a couple of seconds later. I can even hear them bolt the latch, a cold, deafening sound that echoes across the darkness.
I stay here, on the sill, half in and half out of the tree house, half in and half out of slumber, in the shadows of the giant live oak limbs until the quarter moon above me goes to bed with everyone else.
* * *
In the six months since we’d been spared the bug truck, Tina’s cough persisted. Although never heavy, its mere presence weighed heavy on all of us. On a phone call to the Village, Justin and Marsala said, “Healing isn’t a straight path. The cough will come and go, maybe for years to come.” Tina was happy with their response, and none of us brought it up again.
In the weeks to come, Tina developed a pain in her shoulders and lower back that never let up. At night before bed, I’d give her an hour-long neck massage, silently sending every healing mantra I could come up with. I’d read that near the end, cancer often spreads to the bones. But we’d all heard stories at the Village of people who had given up all hope before their health turned around. Sadly, everything we’d heard from the medical community offered nothing but a minimal extension of life, minus any quality to go along with it.
Sis asked Tina more than once if she wanted to see the doctor. “You could do both, right? Macrobiotics along with Western medicine. Best of both worlds.” Tina’s answer was always no. She refused to take anything for the pain, continuing to stay true to the macrobiotic lifestyle.
I wanted desperately to believe the diet was still working. But I also wanted to save my mother’s life. I asked myself, if it was me, would I stick strictly to macrobiotics, forsaking all medicine in the process? My answer was, at that point, maybe I’d also do radiation. Sis later told me she was haunted by the fact that she didn’t push the radiation more. But no matter how concerned we were, Tina had to make her own decision. My mother chose a path very few take, a path I put in front of her, and we were golden for a couple of years. Not one of us would trade anything in the world for that magical time.
When the pain increased, Sis and I drove her up to the Village. Sis asked Justin and Marsala if it would be helpful to them if Tina had a CT scan. “This way,” Sis told Tina, “you won’t really be seeing a doctor. You’ll just be forwarding the information to your macrobiotic counselors, here.” I wasn’t against the idea. But Tina would have none of it.
Justin and Marsala said, “We don’t need a CT scan to do our work. Tina is on the healing path. She is fine. Nothing has changed.”
So, that was that.
* * *
Garrett and Tina are glued to the TV when I come in from my run. Hovered over a steaming bowl of miso soup on a tray, Tina coughs hard into her dinner napkin. She doesn’t look well. I take a seat on the hearth in front of the blazing flames of the roaring fireplace, the consequence of an unseasonably cool fall.
“Your aunt Lola called, said we needed to watch,” Garrett says without looking up from the cable news show. A faith healer in her eighties is being interviewed by the respectful host.
“So, the irony was, as a healer, you were finally faced with this horrible, incurable illness.”
The faith healer smiles, leaning across her side of the desk. “A study proved people who were prayed for by others fared better than those simply praying for themselves.”
“And you believe you were healed because of the thousands of people praying for you all over the world?”
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt.” The faith healer turns to the camera, closes her eyes, and raises a hand. “Jerry, I just want those in need to come to the TV and lay their hands on the screen. God’s unconditional perfection, I can feel it, is now moving across the airwaves. Just do as I say right now. Crazy as it sounds. Take my word—all of you.”
Tina pushes aside her tray, pulls herself up out of the chair, and makes her way slowly to the TV. She kneels in front of the screen, her hands crackling with electricity as she lays them on either side of the faith healer’s head.
“Lord, I just want you to come into these living rooms right now, and I want them to feel the goooolden light of your heeeealing salvation lift them up. Can you feel it?”
As if on cue, a spark of fire discharges from a splinter of kindling and out on the carpet runner next to the hearth.
Tina looks at me, then to Garrett, an eyebrow raised in wonder.
“Can you feel it out there, people? Can you feel it?”