A nurse with a milk-chocolate face as lovely and ethereal as that of a Raphael Madonna, hair pulled tight and braided at the back, was preparing to change the bag of fluid on the IV rack. The name PETRONELLA crowded the width of her uniform badge. She smiled as Pax appeared bedside, and although he wore civilian clothes, she said, “You can’t be anyone on Earth but this sweet girl’s Navy man.”
Kindled by those words and by the sight of Bibi in such dire circumstances, Paxton found himself at a pivot point, inevitably transformed by an insight into himself and into the meaning of his life, and more than an insight, a revelation. From a Texas horse ranch to the special operation that had resulted in the death of Abdullah al-Ghazali, Pax had been born to be a Navy SEAL, as surely as the quarrel of a crossbow, fired by a master archer, would whistle from bowstring to the center circle of a target. For him, as for every SEAL, two commitments were sacred above all others: one to the members of his team, one to his country. Family, God, community, and freedom were sacred as well, but it was the warrior way that all else he loved must shine in the shadow of his duty to those with whom he fought and to the country for which he put his life at risk. You were first a soldier or you weren’t a soldier at all. You expressed your love of family primarily by putting yourself in the line of fire for them, by dying for them if that’s what proved to be required. But as he stood bedside, gazing down upon Bibi in a coma, acutely aware that she was vulnerable and possibly lost to him, his love for her intensified like the fission of nuclei in the generations of a chain reaction. Such a profound tenderness overcame him, he knew that now and forever, in whatever cause he might be asked to give his life, he would in fact be giving it for her, and that although he would die for her, he would rather live for her, whether that meant an end to his Navy career or not.
In Pax’s mind, clear as speech, he heard Bibi say, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. If he had not been looking at her, he might have thought that she had indeed spoken, so clear and resonate were those words. But her lips didn’t move, and her brow remained smooth. Her eyelashes didn’t flutter, although in spite of her untroubled brow, her eyes moved ceaselessly beneath the lids: the rapid eye movements of a dreamer deep in dreams…perfectly pronounced, Petronella. Nothing like an auditory hallucination had happened to Pax before, and he found it more disturbing than he might have expected.
When his gaze rose from Bibi to Petronella, where she stood by the IV apparatus on the farther side of the hospital bed, Pax must have appeared to be unsettled by something more than his fiancée’s condition, because the nurse regarded him with concern. She cocked her head and asked, “Are you okay?”
He was manifestly not okay. Being shot at wasn’t as bad as this. There had been hard moments in tight places, with the world crumbling underfoot, when he had imagined his demise, when he would have preferred death to some of the immediate alternatives. But if Bibi perished, Pax would suffer death by proxy, and having died, he’d nonetheless be required to live in a world for which he no longer had a heart, one of the living dead. He loved her, yes, and he had asked her to marry him, yes, but until now, until here, he had not understood how completely the very threads of her were woven through him.
“Are you okay?”
Before Pax could think what to say to the nurse, Nancy spoke from the foot of the bed, her voice wrung by emotion. “I brought Bibi here last Tuesday. The worst day of my life. Dr. Chandra gave her the diagnosis Wednesday. It was such a very busy day, a terrible day. We wanted…We wanted to have dinner here that evening, like a defiance dinner….”
“Just the three of us,” Murphy continued, when Nancy could not. “Only primo takeout, like cheeseburgers with jalape?os and chili-cheese dogs and every damn thing you’re not supposed to eat, like what Nancy said, in defiance. But Bibi said we were tired and she was tired. She just wanted to eat a little something and use her laptop to research this damn brain cancer, she wanted to know all about it and fight it with everything she had.”
Red-eyed, cheeks rivuleted, mouth soft with grief, Nancy said, “That’s the last we ever talked to her.”
“It won’t be the last,” Murphy said. “Our girl will come out of this.” He put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “She has to.”
Nancy said, “Sometime Wednesday night, she went into a coma. They say coma never happens with this disease, at least maybe not until the final stage, not until the very end. But it happened with her.”