Fear Nothing

and curiously pale-eyed, as though her dedication to nursing was so ferocious that, by the harsh terms of a devilish bargain, she must give the very substance of herself to ensure her patients' recoveries. Her wrists seemed too fragile for the work she did, and she moved so lightly and quickly that it was possible to believe that her bones were as hollow as those of birds.
        She switched off the overhead fluorescent panels in the corridor ceiling. Then she hugged me.
        When I had suffered the illnesses of childhood and adolescence-mumps, flu, chicken pox-but couldn't be safely treated outside our house, Angela had been the visiting nurse who stopped in daily to check on me. Her fierce, bony hugs were as essential to the conduct of her work as were tongue depressors, thermometers, and syringes.
        Nevertheless, this hug frightened more than comforted me, and I said, “Is he?”
        “It's all right, Chris. He's still holding on. Holding on just for you, I think.”
        I went to the emergency stairs nearby. As the stairwell door eased shut behind me, I was aware of Angela switching on the ground-floor corridor lights once more.
        The stairwell was not dangerously well-lighted. Even so, I climbed quickly and didn't remove my sunglasses.
        At the head of the stairs, in the third-floor corridor, Seth Cleveland was waiting. He is my father's doctor, and one of mine. Although tall, with shoulders that seem round and massive enough to wedge in one of the hospital loggia arches, he manages never to be looming over you. He moves with the grace of a much smaller man, and his voice is that of a gentle fairy-tale bear.
        “We're medicating him for pain,” Dr. Cleveland said, turning off the fluorescent panels overhead, “so he's drifting in and out. But each time he comes around, he asks for you.”
        Removing my glasses at last and tucking them in my shirt pocket, I hurried along the wide corridor, past rooms where patients with all manner of maladies, in all stages of illness, either lay insensate or sat before bed trays that held their dinners. Those who saw the corridor lights go off were aware of the reason, and they paused in their eating to stare at me as I passed their open doors.
        In Moonlight Bay, I am a reluctant celebrity. Of the twelve thousand full-time residents and the nearly three thousand students at Ashdon College, a private liberal-arts institution that sits on the highest land in town, I am perhaps the only one whose name is known to all. Because of my nocturnal life, however, not every one of my fellow townspeople has seen me.
        As I moved along the hall, most of the nurses and nurses' aides spoke my name or reached out to touch me.
        I think they felt close to me not because there was anything especially winning about my personality, not because they loved my father-as, indeed, everyone who knew him loved him-but because they were devoted healers and because I was the ultimate oh'ect of their heartfelt desire to nurture and make well. I have been in need of healing all my life, but I am beyond their-or anyone's-power to cure.
        My father was in a semiprivate room. At the moment no patient occupied the second bed.
        I hesitated on the threshold. Then with a deep breath that did not fortify me, I went inside, closing the door behind me.
        The slats of the Venetian blinds were tightly shut. At the periphery of each blind, the glossy white window casings glowed orange with the distilled sunlight of the day's last half hour.
        On the bed nearest the entrance, my father was a shadowy shape. I heard his shallow breathing. When I spoke, he didn't answer.
        He was monitored solely by an electrocardiograph. In order not to disturb him, the audio signal had been silenced; his heartbeat was traced only by a spiking green line of light on a cathode-ray tube.
        His pulse was rapid and weak. As I watched, it went through a brief period of arrhythmia, alarming me, before stabilizing again.
        In the lower of the two drawers in his nightstand were a butane lighter and a pair of three-inch-diameter bayberry candles in glass cups. The medical staff pretended to be unaware of the presence of these items.
        I put the candles on the nightstand.
        Because of my limitations, I am granted this dispensation from hospital rules. Otherwise, I would have to sit in utter darkness.
        In