Carrie asked her mother first about going to the Gardner’s cabin. Faye stared at her, making eye contact via the mirror on her dresser. “I can understand your attraction to him, Carrie, but to stand around watching him die—” She shuddered. “I can’t imagine doing such a thing.”
I know, Mother, Carrie thought. Aloud she said, “I’d still like to go.”
“It must be hard on his mother,” Faye added absently. “No one ever expects to bury her own child.”
“Keith’s family is pretty close. They want to all be together for as long as possible.”
Faye shrugged her shoulders in resignation. “If you want to go, it’s all right by me. Besides, it’ll give me an opportunity to start painting the inside of the house.”
“What?” Carrie asked, feeling as if she’d missed an important line in a book. How could her mother switch between Keith’s dying to house painting?
“Larry said he’d help, so we’re going to repaint. You know, sort of spruce everything up. With you out for a week, it’ll go quicker. Do you want to pick the color for your room?”
“Surprise me,” she said. Carrie felt a million miles apart from her mother just then, as if they’d come from separate universes. And besides, what did Larry have to do with anything? This wasn’t his house.
“I’ll probably go with a pale pink. That’ll be nice for a little girl’s room.”
Carrie started to tell her she wasn’t a little girl anymore, that having cancer and watching kids die from cancer sort of took her out of the “little girl” category. But her mother was spreading night cream across her cheeks and throat and humming to herself in the mirror. Carrie said nothing, because she realized that her mother wouldn’t have truly heard her anyway.
Getting her father’s permission to go to the Gardeners’ cabin wasn’t so simple. “What about your job?” he asked.
“This is more important than any job,” she said.
“I don’t like the idea. It doesn’t seem right, with him dying and all.”
“Mom said it was okay with her.”
“Where does she get off giving you permission without checking with me?”
What was the matter with her parents? This wasn’t a contest to see who was the boss or to figure out who was calling the shots for her life. Neither was it a pajama party with some of her friends. It was important that she go. Couldn’t they see that? This could happen to her, and then how would they act?
“You should be living here with me and Lynda and Bobby,” her father said.
“I’m not walking out on Mom,” she said defiantly.
His face turned red. “I didn’t walk out on her.”
“She needs me,” she said stubbornly.
“She doesn’t need anyone,” her father told her, then clamped his lips together tightly.
This wasn’t getting them anywhere. Carrie didn’t want to antagonize him, so she said, “It’ll just be for a week. You can spare me from the office for a week.”
“I want time to think about it.”
“But they want to leave as soon as school’s out.”
“I said I’ll think about it.”
In the end he’d agreed, but Carrie was certain that it had been Lynda’s doing. At least she had one ally in this battle. Why couldn’t her mother be more like Lynda? Perhaps if she had been, there would have been no divorce, no tug-of-war for Carrie’s allegiance. But there was still her cancer. Could Lynda cope with that?
Chapter Thirteen
The Gardner’s cabin sat at the upper end of a winding dirt road, on the crest of a Carolina mountaintop. The surrounding woods were lush and green, so thick that Carrie was reminded not of a forest, but of an ocean. The shades of green sparkled in every imaginable hue, broken only by the brown of tree bark and the white flowering of Queen Anne’s lace.
It had taken nearly all day to drive there in the van, but Carrie thought the trip fun. Keith had slept most of the way in a makeshift bed in the back, while she and Holly and the others had played cards and word games across the seats. They ate lunch from a picnic basket Mrs. Gardner had prepared, snacked on chocolate-chip cookies and popcorn, and sang endless rounds of camp songs.
Carrie considered them a fantastic family. They had heated discussions, but there was always an atmosphere of caring and concern for others’ feelings. Yet what impressed her most was the way Keith’s parents responded and acted. They never yelled or argued and intervened only when a compromise between factions couldn’t be worked out.
Throughout the trip Carrie saw Mrs. Gardner reach over and stroke her husband’s arm, or him squeeze her hand and smile. The gestures seemed very intimate, and at first she felt guilty about watching. Yet they never appeared ashamed about openly showing their affection. She wondered what it would have been like to have been raised by such people but decided that the wondering was too complicated—sort of like peering into a maze of mirrors and trying to discern which reflected object was the “real” one.
The scenery changed gradually as the van left behind the Ohio valley and climbed across the Cumberland Gap, winding its way into the Smoky Mountains. Her first glimpse of the cabin was late that afternoon. It was larger than she’d imagined, constructed of dark logs held in place with grout and pitch. Most of the structure looked weathered, but the new addition jutting off to one side looked fresh and unmarked by rain and sun.
Inside, a breakfast bar separated the kitchen area from the great room, and a large stone fireplace stretched along one wall. The air smelled stale, and everyone set about dispelling the musty odor by flinging open windows. In the room Carrie was to share with Keith’s sisters, there were double bunk beds and white eyelet curtains that fluttered in the mountain breeze. Jake bounded from room to room, squealing with delight and babbling excitedly. Each one had a mission, a task to accomplish, except Carrie, so she wandered out onto a rustic back porch and studied the surrounding woods.
“Didn’t I tell you it was beautiful up here?” Keith asked, coming up behind her.
“It’s beautiful, all right. And the cabin’s really nice. Maybe I should help your sisters make up the beds and unpack.”
“They can do it. Come on, we’ll go for a walk.”
She didn’t need any urging. She was anxious to explore the scenery, so she followed him down a trail, and moments later, when she turned, the cabin had been swallowed by the trees. “Can you find your way back?”
“I’m an ace explorer, remember?”
“Yes, but can you find your way back?”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve spent every summer since I was seven in these woods. I want to show you the lake.”
They walked downward, along a sloping path lined by variegated shrubs. The air was dry and cool and smelled of the sweet, untamed scent of wild-flowers. “I didn’t think it’d be so cool in June,” she said.
“We’re in the mountains, remember. At night you have to wear a sweater.”
“I don’t think I brought one.”
“I’ll loan you a sweatshirt.”
In front of them the woods thinned out. Grass appeared, the ground grew softer, more spongy. The lake burst into full view, causing Carrie to catch her breath. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the water’s edge and looked across its shining gray green expanse. “It’s the afternoon sunlight,” Keith told her. “First thing in the morning, the color’s a dark navy blue.”
Speckles of sunshine danced over the surface, reminding Carrie of jeweled sequins. “It’s so big,” she said. “Is it deep?”
“Sure is.” Abruptly he yanked off his shoes and socks and started to wade. “Come on,” he told her.
She stepped into the water and felt soft mud squish between her toes. “It’s like ice.”
“There’s an underground spring that feeds it from inside the mountain. When I was a kid, I used to imagine I could find the spring, go underwater, and swim through a hole into a prehistoric world underneath the lake.”
“I use
d to imagine that a starship would come for me and take me away to another planet,” she confessed shyly because she’d never told another person in the world about that fantasy. “Especially when they’d do bone-marrow aspirations. It helped, you know. Pretending that I was out in the stars instead of lying on that table with some lab person jabbing my bones and sucking them out. It hurt. It really hurt.”
“I used to always pretend I was here at the lake when they’d do my lab work,” he said. “Did you ever dream that you were a bird and could fly?”
“I sure have. And in the dream I could actually see things from a bird’s-eye view—flying over roofs and treetops and mountains. In the dream it seems so real. How do you figure that we can see things so realistically when we’ve never even flown before?”
“I read once that some scientists think we might have some sort of collective memory.”
“I thought you didn’t read,” she teased.
He kicked a spray of water her way, and she dodged. “These guys think that when we crawled out of the slime we kept some sort of primitive recollection of it. So as we evolved into birds, we kept the recollection of flight too.”
Carrie wrinkled her nose. “Do you believe that?”
“Not for a minute.”
They laughed, and the sound floated over the lapping water and into the trees. “So where did we come from?” she asked.
His green eyes danced. “Don’t you know where you came from, Carrie? Didn’t your mom ever tell you about the birds and the bees?”
“Very funny.” She trudged out of the water and found a grassy spot and sat down. She rubbed her toes, which were numb from the chilly water. Keith’s shadow fell across her, and she looked up. The sun was directly behind him, sending darts of light into the sky and making his body seem ethereal, otherworldly. For a moment her heart hammered, and she was filled with an unbearable aching.
He lowered himself beside her, plucked a blade of grass, and chewed on it. “For me, Carrie, where I came from doesn’t matter. What matters right now is where I’m going.”
His mood had changed. Pensiveness had replaced the teasing and joking. “Maybe you’ll come back as a bird,” she ventured.
“Reincarnated?” he asked. “That’s not for me. Who wants to live again as an ant or a dog?” He raised himself up on his elbow and stared at her hard. “I want to be me. Always and forever—I want to be Keith Gardner.”
“You’d make a cute puppy,” she joked, because she wasn’t prepared to think about the hereafter. Yet the thought nibbled at the back of her mind. “Forever seems like such a long time to be away from all of this,” she mused, gesturing to the lake and trees. She realized that she never wanted to be anything other than Carrie Blake either. As hard as it was sometimes, she still wanted to be herself.
“Maybe it’s sort of like falling asleep,” Keith ventured. “Nothing hurts when you’re sound asleep. Time passes, and you don’t even know it.”
“But sleepers wake up,” she reminded him. “What about dead people? Maybe they don’t ever wake up.”
He balled his fist around a clump of grass, as if touching it anchored him to the earth. “I think about being put into a hole in the ground where it’s very dark. I think about never seeing the sun again, or feeling the wind, or smelling flowers. My mind can’t accept that, you know? It can’t picture nothingness.”
She shuddered, because she couldn’t picture it either. “So we don’t believe in reincarnation, and we don’t believe in a forever of nothingness. What do we believe in?”
“I guess that’s where God comes into things,” he said simply. “God and heaven and all that stuff. I think about going to heaven when I die and meeting God one on one.”
An egret lifted from the far side of the lake. It was white and slender, and its feathers reflected the sun. “Why do you suppose God made the world so beautiful, then won’t let us live in it forever?”
“I’ll ask him when I see him,” Keith told her. He paused then continued, “Doctors bring people back from the ‘dead’ by restarting their hearts, but even when medical technology can save someone, that person will still die someday. We all have to die eventually.”
“I know, but—”
Keith cut her off. “When Ma was carrying Jake, she let us put our hands on her stomach and feel the baby kick. That was so weird. I’d seen pictures in books, but I couldn’t imagine a real live baby inside of her, all curled up in a ball with no room to move. I used to think how awful it must be to be all cramped up in the dark when it’s so beautiful out here in the world. But then I realized that maybe for Jake it was okay to be that way because he didn’t know anything else. I mean, how do you explain sunlight to someone who’s never seen it? This life is great, but how do we know there’s not something better after this life is over?”
His eloquent words reached inside Carrie and made her less afraid. She wanted to tell him, but just then they heard twigs snapping as someone came crashing through the trees. Carrie bolted to her feet and turned to face her foe, but it was Holly who burst through the foliage, not an avenging angel.
Holly stopped and stared from one to the other, her expression reminding Carrie of someone who’d stumbled onto a scene she wasn’t prepared to see. She guessed she and Keith must look pretty serious, so she asked brightly, “Going for a swim?”
“No, I was looking for you two. Mom’s got supper ready, and we couldn’t find you, and we were worried, and …” Her voice trailed off.
“Daniel Boone here promised to show me the lake and not get lost. We started talking and lost track of time. Sorry.”
Keith rose slowly, painfully, by Carrie’s estimation. But his voice was light. “So they send out a hound dog to find us.”
“A dog!” Holly cried. “You call me a dog? Prepare to die, fiend!” She ran toward him, feigning terrible retaliation but stopped short in front of him, realizing what she’d said.
Keith reached out and touched his sister’s cheek. “That’s why I came here to the cabin,” he said tenderly. “That’s why I came.”
Chapter Fourteen
Keith’s words stayed with Carrie for days. She understood now that his coming to the cabin was really more complex than seeing his favorite place one last time. For Keith it had become a ritual of leaving, of bidding farewell not simply to a place, but to the world, people, to time itself. In months, perhaps weeks, he would step into a realm where they could not follow. This week would somehow prepare him for that transition.
Sadly she felt it was not to be so simple for her. She felt torn in half—some moments prepared to relinquish her medical status of remission so that she could go with him, and other times adamant about staying in the bright green world until she withered from old age. Still, in spite of the seriousness, the time she spent with Keith’s family was also idyllic.
She caught tadpoles at the edge of the lake with Jake and the girls in the early morning. She lay in the noonday sun beside Holly and went hiking along twisting trails where she picked buckets of wild blackberries that Mrs. Gardner turned into succulent pies. After hiking she’d come back ravenous and sit down to enormous meals and cleanup periods marked by dishtowel wars and soap-bubble contests. In the evenings they all played Monopoly at the round oak dining table.
Keith slept frequently. Carrie knew that he took more pain pills as the week progressed, but whenever he felt able, he’d join them for cards and board games. Some evenings he simply stayed on the sofa, watching them play. Carrie often felt his gaze before she saw his eyes on her. It was as if they were linked by some strange telepathic power—mentally joined like surgically separated Siamese twins. They spoke without speaking, communicated without language.
He spent one long afternoon fishing with his father in a boat on the lake while Carrie and the others swam. After swimming she lay on a towel next to Holly and let the noonday sun remove the chill of the water from her skin. Jake came over with his bottle of tadpoles.
“Look!”
he cried. “See, they got legs.” Carrie and Holly squinted through the glass. Sure enough, the wiggling tads had lost their tails and grown webbed appendages.
“That’s cool,” Holly said. “You know, pretty soon you’ll have to put them back in the lake.”
“Why? I wanna take ’em home. They can keep live in the bowl with my goldfish.”
“They’re amphibians and just start out in the water. Then they breathe air like you and me, so they need dry land.”
“No way, they can just keep swimming.”
“She’s right, sport,” Carrie said. “I took biology this year, and frogs need water and land. My teacher said so.”
“Aw, you’re making that up.”
“Go ask Mom.”
Jake grabbed up his bottle. “I will,” he said, marching off.
Carrie giggled. “I think you ruined his dream of frog farming.”
“Just what we need—a frog dynasty.” Holly rolled her eyes. She stretched out on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, chin in hand. “I’m glad you came on this trip,” she told Carrie.
“I am too.” Carrie shut her eyes against the overhead glare of the sun.
“Do you like my brother?” Holly blurted the question.
“Of course.”
“No, I mean do you really like my brother—like a boyfriend?”
Carrie turned her head and saw the pensive expression on Holly’s face. Carefully she turned on her side. Emotions churned inside her as she remembered the times she’d sneaked longing looks at Keith during support-group meetings, or felt her tummy flutter when he passed her in the halls at school. And then when they’d actually gotten together, their illness had become their common bond.
But something had changed over the months. She liked him, but with more than gooey feelings and sweaty palms. She cared about him, longed to be with him, wanted to talk to him, tell him her deepest secrets and favorite dreams.
Carrie said, “I’ve never had a boyfriend before. Some of my friends have them, but when they were going crazy over some guy in their class, I was on chemo and I was bald and ugly and worried about keeping my lunch down.”