Fear Nothing Read Free Page A

crystal—but markedly more lustrous under the stroking hand of the sun. Her creamy, rose-petal skin is flecked with faint freckles, the patterns of which I know as well as I know the constellations in every quadrant of the night sky, season by season.
    With one finger, Sasha pushed my sunglasses back into place. “Don’t be foolish.”
    I’m human. Foolish is what we are .
    If I were to go blind, however, her face would be a sight to sustain me in the lasting blackness.
    I leaned across the console and kissed her.
    “You smell like coconut,” she said.
    “I try.”
    I kissed her again.
    “You shouldn’t be out in this any longer,” she said firmly.
    The sun, half an hour above the sea, was orange and intense, a perpetual thermonuclear holocaust ninety-three million miles removed. In places, the Pacific was molten copper.
    “Go, coconut boy. Away with you.”
    Shrouded like the Elephant Man, I got out of the Explorer and hurried to the hospital, tucking my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.
    I glanced back once. Sasha was watching. She gave me a thumbs-up sign.

3
    When I stepped into the hospital, Angela Ferryman was waiting in the corridor. She was a third-floor nurse on the evening shift, and she had come downstairs to greet me.
    Angela was a sweet-tempered, pretty woman in her late forties: painfully thin 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