“Last night and this morning were miracle enough for me,” I said.
Mickie smiled, closed lips. “Typical guy. You get laid, and the world becomes a Disneyland ride.”
I took Mickie’s hand. “I’m long past believing in miracles,” I said. “I just want to see her happy.”
“Do you think she could physically withstand the travel?”
“A commercial flight? No. No way.”
“Then how—”
“I’m going to make a call to David Patton,” I said, meaning the founder of Orbis. “I’m going to see if he’ll let me rent one of the planes.”
I could afford it. In 1997 I had been in Santiago de Cuba when Ernie called. “Do you remember that thirty thousand I forced you to invest in Cantwell Computers?”
I remembered, and I was familiar with the growth Ernie had predicted for Cantwell Computers since he used my money to purchase my initial shares of stock for pennies on the dollar. After repeated splits of the stock, I had no idea how many shares I owned in the company or their value. At the time, given my monastic lifestyle, I didn’t care.
“We just closed a deal with a software company,” Ernie had said. “Our stock has hit an all-time high. I hope you don’t mind, but I authorized your broker to sell. You did give me durable power of attorney when you left on your mission. Anyway, the bottom line is, you’re rich, Hill. You won the freaking lottery.”
And I had won the lottery, though it had changed my life very little. This was a chance to use the money to do some good.
“It’s a flying hospital,” I said to Mickie that morning. “If anything were to happen, she’d be well taken care of. There would, after all, be at least two doctors on board.” Mickie straightened. “I’m done traveling without you, Mickie.” A tear rolled down her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb, lifting her chin. It was the most vulnerable I had ever seen Mickie Kennedy since the night of my senior prom. “Besides,” I said, “I’ll need help with my father.”
And she punched me on the arm.
9
The doctors at Our Lady of Mercy advised against the trip; they said my mother would never withstand the travel, that it would be too arduous, too difficult. They pointed out that, after the plane landed, we would still need to take ground transportation to and from the airport into Lourdes. In the end, I left the decision to my mother.
She looked at her doctors as if they were all nuts. “It’s a pilgrimage,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”
We put two hospital beds in the plane’s audiovisual room just behind the classroom and pushed them together. My mother and my father held hands, giggled, and talked like schoolchildren on a field trip. My father looked and acted healthier than I had seen him in years. Though the stroke had taken the twinkle from his cobalt-blue eyes and dulled his facial expressions, he hung on every word my mother spoke, savoring each as if it might be her last, and I was certain I saw him smiling behind the mask.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, they drifted off to sleep. The two nurses I’d hired to accompany us suggested Mickie and I also get some rest, and we lay down in the recovery room at the back of the plane, waking when the wheels touched down at the airport outside Lourdes.
One of the nurses knocked on the door. “The van has arrived,” she said.
My mother was already awake. She asked Mickie to help with her makeup and the special dress she’d brought to wear, one I knew she would ask me to bury her in.
“Why are you putting on makeup?” I said as Mickie held a mirror. “It’s impolite to be the most beautiful woman in a foreign country, and makeup will only make the contrast between you and every other woman more noticeable.”