“You see that?” asked Bridget, pointing to Vern’s naked torso with a twisted grimace. No one but Howling and Feral had witnessed Vern’s passenger before.
“I see it,” said Gogo, unbothered as she assessed the ruin that was Vern’s back. Vern felt her heartbeat settle from sprint to march under the sedating roll of Gogo’s steel voice. Gogo was blues-singer cool, lake-calm. Her composure ran Vern’s fears right away.
After several minutes, Gogo plunged the thermometer back into Vern’s mouth.
“Any better?” asked Bridget.
“Let’s give it a few more minutes,” said Gogo, which meant Vern’s temperature hadn’t gone down.
“Is it cancer?” asked Bridget, eyes on Vern’s back. “One of them types of tumors with bones in it?”
Gogo shook her head, then with Bridget’s help lifted Vern from the tub onto the toilet to get dry. Vern’s bottom sank into the carpeted plush of the seat cover, and Gogo rubbed a rough towel over her skin. “This isn’t a teratoma,” said Gogo. This is—” she broke off. “This is new.”
“Then maybe we have to take her to the hospital. If we don’t—”
“What’s a hospital going to do for her? Even if I thought there was a chance they could help her—how would we get there? It’s an hour and a half away in the snow. We might kill ourselves on the journey.”
Vern slipped in and out of lucidity as they discussed her. She felt like Moses in that damn basket, whisked down the river through no choice of her own. When Gogo and Bridget carried her to a bed, she did not once resist. Docile, Vern lay on the mattress, ready to be delivered into Pharaoh’s clutches.
“Vern, don’t drift off. Not yet. I need you to pay attention,” Gogo said. “I’m going to try absolutely everything I can, but just in case, is there anyone we should call?” asked Gogo. “Any family?”
Vern remembered her mother. She remembered Carmichael. Didn’t they deserve to know she’d come to the end? The love she had for the two of them felt in this moment distant and vague. The idea of love rather than love itself. Even on the verge of death, Vern was heartless. She could not and would not ever forgive her mam. And Carmichael was nothing more than a boy, a foolish boy who’d one day be a foolish man. There was nothing to say he wouldn’t become a Sherman or like any of the other Cainite brothers.
“Just bring me my babies,” Vern whimpered.
“Of course.”
Vern rolled her head side to side against a pillow as Bridget placed packs of frozen goods and ice over her sheet-covered body. She fell asleep, then awoke, then fell asleep and awoke again in an endless cycle. Her body was a new and different stranger with each waking.
This decline had been a long time coming. For years she’d been teetering on death’s edge, and now she was finally falling. The sickness had overwhelmed what meager defenses she had, and good riddance. It was, as far as she could tell, every bit as deserving of life as she. It fed on her with the same enthusiasm she’d fed on swamp hares, deer, and catfish.
Next to her, her children hummed the sweetest, most mournful melody. She didn’t know how long they’d been there. Minutes? More likely hours. She reached out to stroke Howling’s cheek to find that she’d been hooked to an IV when she wasn’t conscious. She shivered as cool liquid from the catheter slid through her. Her body tingled blissfully. Gogo had given her something for the pain.
Vern opened her eyes to see if they’d taken her to the hospital after all, but a dark blur of smoke surrounded her. The tune that Howling and Feral hummed, she didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of the gospels she lullabied them with, but a new song, something Gogo and Bridget were singing, their hands locked together as they sat on either side of her on the bed.
Vern tried to hear the words, to let the music be an anchor, but they were not singing in English.
Her eyelids flitted open and closed, hours slipping by and by. Never once did their fervent, pleading song cease, nor did the smoke, the dark, their skyward-bent faces; and Vern understood, understood that with everything that was inside of them, they were praying for her life.
* * *
IT WAS MIDMORNING when Vern awoke. Air, sweet and cool, caressed her lips, tongue, and throat as she rose up out of the dark. She must’ve been out of it all night.
“Children?” she croaked, unsure if their presence next to her had been a hallucination. She moved her arms, searching for their weight.