Part 9 (2/2)

The doctor took a deep breath. ”Most likely, she will develop emphysema. Probably within a year or two. There's some medicine for some of the symptoms, but there's nothing to really address the disease. I'm sorry. I'm going to call some friends of mine who specialize a little more in conditions like hers. We're going to figure this out, okay? Rosa will make an appointment for you to come back in two weeks.”

On the street outside, June collapsed. It was all Caleb could do to catch her in his arms. He walked with these two girls, with the loose aim of walking to Dushanbe, a tea shop nearby. He was aware of some strange fracturing inside of him. It was time for his run, which he had not missed in ten years, but he had no thought of leaving them to begin it.

After an hour of herbal tea, June felt strong enough to go home. As they walked down South Boulder Peak, June had stopped and kissed him.

”I think I love you,” she had told him quietly.

He had possessed no idea of how to respond. Caleb felt that there might be two of him now; one running alone along the trails, headed only into himself. And one running with June, toward some new life. It might go either way. He felt like a coin which someone had tossed in the air. He knew that whichever way he landed, there would be consequences he could not stand.

The sauna door opened. Caleb blinked, trying to remember where he was. Cold burst around him, and the image of her face under the noon sky fell drastically away, and Mack pulled him out of the sauna.

The old man who managed the gym was standing there. He shook his head.

”You guys some crazy f.u.c.ks.”

Mack dropped him at O'Neil's.

It was two in the afternoon, time for his second s.h.i.+ft. A small college kid took off his blue ap.r.o.n and handed it to him.

”Do anything interesting with your morning?”

Caleb nodded and went to stock paper trays. When he was sure Mack had driven away, he found the store mailbox key. He had been sure Shane would have sent him the names of doctors by now, but again he found it empty.

His stomach tightened; it did not escape him that this must be how Shane had felt, all of these years, waiting for an answer to one of his long letters. Caleb wors.h.i.+pped silence and so had not seen its hurtful edge. He hadn't realized he had been causing so much pain.

He began his run back down the mountain. Along the curving isolated dirt road, he watched the house emerge from behind a cl.u.s.ter of pines, standing proud against the sun and wind and snow as if it believed in itself.

After dinner there was Beam and board games. Caleb hung around the landing until he was reasonably certain that he wouldn't be noticed, then moved quietly upstairs to June and Lily's room.

He could hear the baby coughing from the hall. Opening their door, he saw June on the floor, holding Lily in her arms, whispering to her. Her palm covered Lily's chest, moving in circles, but the cough kept coming, always followed by a sharp wheeze. She caught sight of him and her eyes seemed to clutch madly.

”Can you call Shane from work?” she whispered.

Caleb swallowed unsurely. He had asked Shane to visit, and for his help. He accepted his silence as meaning he was working on it. Meanwhile, there was help here. After all, Mack had cured Kevin Yu, who had arrived at Happy Trails with type 2 diabetes and not shown symptoms in years. And Caleb had his own experience of Mack's gift: he had suffered terrible sinus infections in New York, and now the only treatment he received was the heat shooting from Mack's hands hovering above his forehead. Mack had only been working with Lily for two months; perhaps invading bacteria and glucose levels were easier for him to normalize than genes.

”I'll get Mack,” he offered.

”He'll want to know why you're in here.”

”I don't care. She needs him.”

”Wait,” June said, ”hold her head.”

Caleb cradled Lily's head in his lap, and June s.h.i.+fted and moved her hands up from Lily's ankles, over her belly, toward her chest.

”This is what Mack does. You push the energy of her whole body up from her legs into her lungs. Okay? Now you do it from her head down.”

Caleb ran his hands from Lily's smooth shoulders down to her heart, where he met June's hands, gripping her fingers. He was in communion with both of them. And he understood then that something in his heart had s.h.i.+fted. He had thought he wanted to help the baby out of love for June. But really, he saw, he was in love with Lily too. He held each of them in his heart equally. He willed all of his own body's strength and energy into this tiny little being, whose lungs he could feel under her skin scratching and searching for breath. He willed it so hard he began crying.

”I love you Lulu,” he said softly into Lily's ear.

June looked at him. ”Did you just call her Lulu?”

Caleb peered down into Lily's eyes, which sparkled in the fading light.

”He's your brother,” June told him. ”What's he doing?”

Caleb looked out the window to the white aspens and their hieroglyphic black eyes, which he knew were watching his every word.

3.

Every day his face appeared different.

Sometimes he looked like an aged Shanghai bureaucrat, or a Florentine cherub, just like Janelle, nothing like Janelle. His face seemed to be a template formed by whichever spirits happened to be floating by.

He's completely pure, Shane thought, lying next to him in their bed. The air that pa.s.ses through his body comes back into the world purified.

Then the thought of the air trapped and spoiling in Lily's lungs swept over him; he pushed it away as fast as he could.

Janelle's mother Hua arrived daily bearing fragrant Hunan lactation herbs, and Fred and Julie flew down the following weekend. Recently Fred had become adept at making sus.h.i.+ and spent Nicholas's nap time rolling maki, squinting through bifocals under arched white eyebrows, adding his personal touches. His lifelong focus had never left him, Shane saw; it was simply being deployed in new pursuits.

”Dad looks,” Shane commented to Julie, ”like Gepetto.”

His mother laughed. Her chestnut hair was cut short, and she wore a shapeless sweats.h.i.+rt and high-waisted jeans. What force was it, Shane wondered, that commands women over sixty to take on the fas.h.i.+on of lesbians?

Watching them, he realized with some melancholy that he had never really known his parents, not the way they saw and defined themselves, at their peaks, vital, alive. He had no memories of Fred winning a case, of Julie on the eve of starting one of her ill-fated catering companies, laughing in the messy kitchen as she made Fred try obscure appetizers. He had no image of them arriving at a c.o.c.ktail party together, young and magical, or of them standing over his crib, full of dreams, the way he and Janelle now did at Nicholas's. He knew them only as older people. He felt as if he had missed something significant.

And, he understood with a sharp stab in his belly, Nicholas would never know him or Janelle the way they were right now, which seemed to be the real them worth remembering.

After dinner, and several pointed glances from Janelle, Shane looked at his parents. ”I saw Caleb.”

Julie whispered, ”Oh.”

Fred s.h.i.+fted in his chair, lawyer's eyes narrowing. ”How did that happen?”

”He wrote me a letter.”

Janelle stood, opened a desk drawer, and retrieved it. He handed the blue paper to Julie, who stared at every word.

”I didn't tell you, because I wasn't sure what I'd see. So, it's a lot like we thought. He's living with sixteen or seventeen other people in a house, a big cabin really, in the middle of the woods. It's about half an hour from Boulder.”

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