Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss Read online

  But now he was near the top of that wearying flight of stairs, and he’d discover the answer or he wouldn’t, depending on whether there was an answer or merely oblivion.

  “I love you,” Sarie said.

  Weak, struggling against the oxygen tube in his throat, David nodded. He knew she understood that he loved her as well. He was proud to have been not just her father, but her friend.

  You were a gift to me, David thought about Sarie. Just as Matthew was a gift, and it’s too bad we’re not all here together. Years ago I almost killed myself. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Because of you, dear.

  But now you’ll have to go on without me. The main thing is, my death isn’t a tragedy. My dissolution is part of the natural scheme. Grieve for me, because you love me, but don’t let my death hold you back. Persist. And maybe one day, we’ll meet in rapturous reunion.

  Who knows? Good-bye, sweetheart. I pray I’m about to meet Matthew. I’ve missed him so much. If death is oblivion, it won’t matter because I won’t have the consciousness to know.

  But if …!

  Sinking ever deeper into the ultimate sleep, David’s dwindling consciousness managed a final burst of strength. As if it were yesterday and not half a lifetime ago, he remembered another poem that Matthew had written, one that David had memorized with a persistence close to mania and could never have forgotten even on the verge of death.

  The poem had been written when Matthew was fourteen. Imagine. So young. And it represented everything that Matt’s young heart had wanted.

  To be a musician. To be in tune with the spheres.

  LOWDER

  VOLUME

  CO.

  The guitar. Rubbing the gentle polish

  On every smooth contour.

  On the lap. Knowing every curve

  As the light shines from it.

  (Silently strumming)

  On stage a planned metamorphosis

  Takes places as the hours go by and the

  Space is transformed to a concert hall.

  The energetic nemesis has struck.

  The risers are transformed into a stage

  And black boxes turn into powerful

  Pieces of sound equipment.

  The spring is taut.

  (Silently strumming)

  Backstage while pandemonium

  Sweeps the hall and people

  Crowd the arena as ants flow to a cake.

  The stage is set, the

  Instruments tuned and placed.

  The musicians work out last minute

  Kinks as the lights dim.

  (Striking power chords)

  An intense force hits the spectators.

  Energy is released in every form.

  A power rage beyond comprehension.

  18

  Fourteen years old, and to have written a poem so promising of future achievements.

  Gone. All lost and gone.

  Sinking.

  Dimming.

  Dwindling.

  And yet …

  And yet …

  In David’s mind, he seemed to rise above his dying body, to float above his soon-to-be corpse, to see his daughter sobbing over him and the nurses rushing toward him, raising the bottom of his bed.

  David knew what raising a patient’s feet meant. He’d seen it happen to Matthew. When the nurses raised the bottom of your bed, your blood pressure was dropping, and you were, to use Matt’s words, in serious shit.

  So what did it matter? David’s time had come, and he looked forward to it, hoping he’d reencounter a great love of his life, be replenished from his greatest loss.

  In his mind, he floated ever higher, through the ceiling, and higher yet, away from the shadows into a brightness, drifting toward it, toward a door that somehow didn’t interfere with the beautiful brightness.

  When David’s stepfather had suffered his first heart attack, the weary man had wakened to describe a dream in which he’d been floating through brightness toward a door.

  “I reached the door. I knocked and knocked. But no one answered.”

  Three months later, when a second heart attack had completed the job, maybe the tired man had reached the door and this time his knock had been answered.

  But David didn’t need to knock. Floating to the door, he merely turned its knob. At once he heard power chords. An electric guitar strummed ecstatically.

  David opened the door. The brightness increased its glare; the strumming chords became more powerful.

  The brightness he saw was caused by fireflies. Millions of them. Radiant. All around him. Enveloping. Silently rejoicing.

  The chords throbbed with greater intensity. David peered all around, squinting past the fireflies.

  Matthew? David’s joy became frustration.

  Matthew? Doubt became despair.

  The radiant fireflies swarmed around him. But he recognized none of them!

  Matthew?

  Where was Matthew?

  A POWER RAGE

  BEYOND COMPREHENSION

  1

  Fireflies swarmed. Power chords throbbed. David opened his eyes. Sunlight gleamed through a window. Through a swirl, he saw a cupboard above him, the edge of a sink, a stack of dishes. About to vomit, managing not to, he turned his aching head to the left and saw the blur of a kitchen table. His movement bumped an object and sent it rolling.

  David strained to clear his vision. He recognized the rolling object, an empty glass that the turn of his head had sent clinking to a stop against a leg of the table.

  His hair was soaked. He lay in a pool of water. But his body was drenched with more than water. Sweat. His bare legs, arms, and chest were slick with perspiration. His shorts clung sweat-soaked to his groin and hips. What was going on?

  Through misty vision, he focused on the digital clock on the microwave to the left of the table: 12:55.

  A calendar (the kind you tear a page off each day) showed …

  It couldn’t be.

  1987?

  June?

  Thursday?

  The eighteenth?

  Impossible! The last moment he’d known had been sometime in March. The delirium of morphine and the distracting pain of his mortal illness had made him unsure of the date. But without doubt he’d entered Intensive Care in March.

  Forty years from now. So what was he doing on the floor of the kitchen of a house that he’d sold five years after Matthew’s death because he couldn’t bear the memories of …?

  A year after Matthew’s death? Intensive Care forty years later?

  With tingling feet and hands, David raised his head from the floor and peered at his body.

  No wrinkles in his stomach. No cancerous gauntness in his chest. He was struggling through nausea to stare at the daily-exercised body of a man of forty-four. Despite his nausea, he felt in the middle-aged prime he’d known and then lost after Matthew had died.

  After Matthew had died? June eighteenth? One day before Matthew had contracted the septic shock that eight days later had killed him?

  Power chords kept throbbing. David squinted through a kitchen archway toward stereo cabinets against a wall in the living room. Lights glowed on a tape player. Stereo speakers thrummed. He still saw the fireflies, but now he realized that they were specks of lights inside his head.

  His dizziness lessened. His memory cleared. He’d spent all night at the hospital, sleeping next to Matthew’s bed. Donna had taken her turn to sleep at home, then had come up to the Bone Marrow Ward to trade places with David, to give him a chance to go home, shower, and change his clothes. He’d arrived home at eleven and decided to exercise, to run as was his custom. Frustration had made him run faster than usual, to sweat out his tension. But excessive humidity had added to the ninety-degree temperature, making it the equivalent of one hundred and three. Perspiring worse than usual, he’d stumbled into the house, turned on the tape player, poured a glass of water, raised it to his lips, felt dizzy, seen fireflies, dropped the glass, and fa
inted on the kitchen floor.

  David realized that none of the other things had happened. Matthew’s septic shock, his eight days in Intensive Care, his eventual death had only been a nightmare caused by unconsciousness due to overexertion and excessive loss of bodily fluid.

  A nightmare.

  Gaining more strength, David groped to his knees, crawled to the table, and tugged himself to his feet. For a moment he wavered. But with both hands on the table, he held himself steady. The fireflies dimmed.

  Sure, a nightmare.

  Then why had everything he’d dreamed appeared so real, as if the events of the nightmare had truly occurred and what he now saw was merely an illusion?

  The power chords kept throbbing.

  Why, if he’d merely fainted, was he so terrifyingly sure that on June twenty-seventh, nine days from now, his son would die from unexpected complications due to his cancer treatment?

  The tingling in David’s arms and legs made him wobble. He strained not to faint again.

  Something was horribly wrong. He recalled the fireflies in his bedroom and the dove in the mausoleum.

  But none of those things had happened!

  Yet he knew, as if remembering, every dismal instant he’d endure for the next forty years. His future was so clear and detailed that he could not believe those forty years, every wretched minute of them, could have been crammed into so brief an unconsciousness.

  While unconscious had he imagined the possible course of his life?

  He breathed deeper, faster, on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Or was he remembering his life from the perspective of forty years later?

  His chest felt tight. What in God’s name is happening?

  In his dream, the next events in his life had been that, after he wakened from fainting, his dizziness had worsened. He’d been forced to stay in bed until the next day. When he felt well enough to return to the Bone Marrow Ward, his son had contracted septic shock.

  But none of that had happened! At least not yet.

  But would it?

  His dizziness intensified. In a rush, he pulled a chair from the table and slumped into it. He propped his elbows on the table and clutched his head. His chest felt squeezed.

  I’m having a heart attack!

  But he didn’t feel a sharp pain down his left arm. And his heart—though it rushed—didn’t skip or feel stabbed.

  Mouth parched, tongue swollen, he knew he shouldn’t move if this was a heart attack, but he took the risk and staggered toward the kitchen sink, where he turned on the tap, bent down, and gulped water. He shoved his head beneath the faucet and drenched his hair.

  At once, he had the vertiginous sensation of floating over an old man in a hospital bed. The old man’s eyes were closed. Hooked to life-support systems, the old man was surrounded by nurses and doctors raising the foot of his bed, injecting medications, and turning dials on a respirator. An elderly woman slumped over the old man, sobbing.

  My nightmare!

  Drifting down a brilliant corridor, he hovered in a radiant doorway.

  Fireflies.

  Power chords.

  Hunched over the kitchen sink, David almost threw up. Man, you’re in really bad shape. You’d better go to bed.

  But that’s what happened in my nightmare! And the next day, the septic shock hit Matthew and …!

  Septic shock? He suddenly realized he’d never heard those words before. Except in his nightmare. But he understood what septic shock meant. Or thought he did.

  Floating from an old man’s body. Hovering in a radiant doorway. Searching for a firefly among splendrous millions.

  You’d better get control.

  David drank more water and turned off the tap. Grabbing a dish towel, he wiped his dripping hair.

  Well, there’s an easy way to convince yourself it’s all in your head, David thought. In your nightmare, before you staggered to bed, you phoned Matt’s room at the hospital. You let it ring ten times, but no one answered.

  David groped past a window toward the phone on the kitchen wall. Heart racing, he pressed the numbers for Matthew’s room. One ring. Two rings. Ten rings. No one answered.

  He let it ring longer. Still no one answered.

  Feeling suffocated, David set down the phone. He pressed his back against the wall and strained to keep his knees from collapsing. In his nightmare, the explanation for the lack of response on Matthew’s phone was that Donna had helped Matt get out of bed and walk into the ward so Matt could reach a bathtub in a room around a corner down the hall.

  Again David floated.

  He couldn’t ignore his terror. He felt so sure of what would happen next that he had to act as if it would happen.

  If he was wrong, he’d be grateful beyond belief.

  But what if he was right? He didn’t dare dismiss the possibility that he’d been granted the gift he’d prayed for in his nightmare.

  To dial back. To retreat in time. To take the knowledge of the future into the past.

  Based on what he’d dreamed, given what he’d learned from his experience with Matt in Intensive Care, from conversations with doctors who reconsidered the choices they’d made, from conclusions based on the autopsy report, he had a precious opportunity.

  To save his son’s life.

  2

  The University of Iowa’s hospital administers to patients not just in Iowa City but throughout the state. There are other hospitals in the area, of course, but few are so well-equipped to deal with extreme diseases, especially those involving children’s cancer. A helicopter is available to fly emergency cases from hundreds of miles away. Other patients—chronically ill but not in imminent danger of death—sometimes spend hours being driven to the hospital for specialized treatment.

  Two years before, when the demands of writing assignments had forced David to resign from being a professor of American literature at the university, he and his family had considered moving to another locale. Thanks to the famous character he’d created and the income he received from best-selling novels about other characters, he had the financial ability to live anywhere he wanted. After all, to work he needed only a word processor and a quiet room. He could set up those conditions anywhere. Los Angeles had been a likely place—because of the movie producers David sometimes worked for. New York City (or nearby in Connecticut) had also been an option—because he’d be close to his publishers.

  But in the end, as a consequence of the many business trips he had to take, the palm trees he saw in California and the skyscrapers he saw in New York had begun to seem ordinary. Flying home, peering down at the rich black soil and rolling wooded hills of Iowa, he’d gradually decided that the Midwest was as exotic as any of the so-called glamorous sites he’d visited.

  A friend had once laughed at David’s choice of word. “Exotic?”

  “Well, attractive anyhow, and more important, innocent. The air’s clean. There aren’t any traffic jams. I’ve never had to worry about my children being mugged in the schoolyard. I can get anywhere in town in fifteen minutes. The people are friendly. I like the space, the big-sky feeling. I guess what it comes down to is, I feel at home. I’ve settled. Even on a practical level, the dental and medical care are magnificent.”

  Medical care? Another irony, for David could never have guessed how desperate he soon would feel about the medical care he’d so praised or how fortuitous his choice to remain in Iowa City would be. Patients in the farthest reaches of the state had to travel hundreds of miles for their treatment. But David’s desperately ill son could be driven to one of the nation’s finest hospitals within five minutes; the family home was only ten blocks away.

  The hospital is huge, much larger than most medical facilities even in major American cities. The complex stretches over blocks and blocks. New buildings are constantly being constructed. And some of the sophisticated diagnostic instruments (a magnetic resonance imager, for example) aren’t available in many areas.

  Yes, David thoug
ht, if your son gets a rare form of cancer and the tumor lodges where it almost never does—in a rib instead of an arm or a leg … if your son might have the only case of its kind in the nation, it’s a damned wise choice you made in deciding to stay in Iowa City.

  These thoughts occurred to him as he pushed away from the kitchen wall. With an unnerving sense of viewing everything from a distance, he staggered downstairs to shower, then stumbled upstairs to his bedroom, where he struggled to dress. Still dizzy, he knew he was risking a traffic accident by driving to the hospital, but the alternative, that of staying in bed till tomorrow as his nightmare had told him he otherwise would, was an unacceptable option.

  He had to save Matt’s life.

  Driving carefully from the residential area, turning left toward the expansive towers of the hospital that it seemed he hadn’t seen in forty years, he entered a parking ramp, where he found a place to leave his Porsche 912 near the Plymouth Voyager his wife had driven to the hospital. For a moment he leaned against his car to establish his balance, then walked as steadily as he could from the ramp to one of the many entrances to the hospital.

  His mind was playing tricks on him. He felt unfamiliar with an institution that he’d visited almost daily for the past six months, as if he hadn’t been here for half a lifetime instead of just this morning. Pushing open a door, he walked along a corridor that he’d gone down a thousand times and yet seemed barely to remember. He reached a large open area in which chairs surrounded a grand piano that doctors sometimes played during lunch hour. Plants hung from gleaming mirrored walls and a ceiling four stories high.

  Turning right, he forced himself along another corridor, this too familiar but only as if through a mist. He reached an elevator marked G, and while it swiftly rose, he endured a powerful pressure behind his ears. With his hands cupped to his head to reduce the pressure, he heard an increasing hum within his brain.

  What’s happening to me?