"You're on," Nita's mother said. "Now let me talk to you about dinner." "No dinner tonight," said the nurse. "Just the bottle, until tomorrow." "I want a second opinion," Nita's mother said, unimpressed. The nurse laughed, and went out.
"And a cheeseburger!" Nita's mother called after her.
Nita chuckled; her mother got junk food cravings at the oddest times. Then she caught herself chuckling, and stopped abruptly.
"No," her mother said. "Don't. You're right; it's disgusting, and there's no reason you shouldn't laugh." This she said as much to Nita's dad as to Nita.
Her father didn't say anything.
"Would you two excuse us a second?" Nita's mother said to Kit and Nita.
They went out. "Back in a moment," Kit said, and walked away down toward the vending machine and the rest rooms—a little too quickly, Nita thought. She watched him turn the corner. It didn't occur to me how much this was hurting him, too. If he's going to be watching out for me, I'd better keep a close eye on him.
Might get to be a full-time occupation.
Nita leaned against the wall outside the room. She should not have been able to hear anything from where she was, but she could.
Harry," she heard that soft voice say. "Cut it out and look at me. We've bought me some time. We have time to say our good-byes—enough for that, at the
Friday Afternoon
least. Beyond that, it's all a gamble. But it always has been, anyway." Nita could hear her dad breathing in the silence, trying to let it in.
"But one thing, before I forget. You don't need to waste any more time worrying about Kit." "No?"
"No."
I shouldn't be able to hear this, Nita thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated on not listening. It didn't work. It has to have something to do with where I've just been.
"But enough of that. We've got things to do. Listen to me! I don't want you to start treating me like someone who's about to die. I expect to spend every remaining moment living. There's little enough time left, for any of us."
Nita could have sworn she heard her father gulp. "Oh, God, sweetheart, don't tell me there's going to be some kind of... of disaster!"
"What? Of course not." Her voice went soft and rough again, in a way that Nita had last heard just after her mom had dropped a handful of lightning. "But, Harry, being where I've just been, do you think that sixty years looks any longer to me than six months? Or that anything that's just time looks like it's going to last? So shut up and kiss me. We've got a lot to do."
There was only silence then. Nita took herself away as quietly as she could. Down the corridor and around the corner, she found Kit leaning against the wall, his arms folded, waiting for her.
"What are they up to in there?" he asked after a moment.
"Don't ask." She gave him a thoughtful look. He didn't ask. And 1 bet be doesn't have to. "So, what now?"
"Just for a little while," Nita said, "we leave them alone." Kit nodded. Together, they headed out.
Dawn
NITA WENT HOME AFTER that, and slept the clock around. They would only need to go to the hospital once or twice more to pick up equipment that the visiting nurse would need, and to talk to the doctors about chemotherapy and so on. Nita was glad enough to let her dad take care of all that. For her own part, she and Dairine mostly just sat and held her mom's hands, and listened to her complain about the hospital food, which she had been allowed to start eating that morning. It was a peculiar kind of happiness that Nita and Dairine were experiencing, and Nita was being careful to say nothing that might break it. Just under the surface of it lay a lot of pain. But right now, the simple joy of knowing that her mom would be home the next day was more than enough for Nita... and she knew Dairine agreed.
They went home that evening, and Nita went off to her room and went straight to sleep again. She was getting caught up a little on her own weariness, enough to dream again, but the realization that she was dreaming coincided with a certain amount of confusion. The mountainous landscape towering all around her in a misty early morning sun wasn't anyplace she recognized. Neither were the forests running up and up those slopes, all golden, or—as she turned, and paused, amazed—the vast, glittering, manyspired city that was looming out of the mist a mile or so away from her. Beyond it was a faint glimmer, as of the sea unseen in the overshadowing light. Nita thought of the roil and shimmer of the light on Jones Inlet, and let out a long breath of wonder. "Where is this?" she said aloud.
"The inside, honey," Nita's mother said. "The heart of things... what's at the core. Don't you ever dream about this?"
"Uh.. .yeah, sometimes. But it never looked exactly like this."
"Oh, well, this is my part of the territory. That's yours over there; of course, it'd be here, too. It's part of me, like you are." Her mother, in that beat-up denim skirt and T-shirt again, waved a hand back at the glittering towers, half veiled in radiant mist. "I know you'll live there, eventually. Have your own children there." She smiled slightly. "What is it they say? Your grandchildren are your revenge on your kids?" And Nita's mother laughed. "Well, at least you'll know what to expect from them. Partly. But this..." She turned her back on the towers, looking toward the mountains. "This is mine. When you grow up at the edge of the Continental Divide, there's always this wall towering up over you... and when you're little, you look at it and say, 'I'm going to go there someday. Right to the top of that mountain.' Or else you imagine mountains that don't have any top. The places that just go right up and up, into the center of things... forever."
"Yeah," Nita said.
They stood there a while together, looking at those mountains, and then began to walk slowly down through the flower-starred meadow below where they'd been standing. "It's not fair," Nita said softly. "How come I only get to really know you now, when I'm going to lose you?"
"I don't know if you can ever lose me, honey. I'm your mother. There's a bond neither of us can break unless we want to. And it doesn't have to hurt."
Nita wasn't sure about that as yet. But still, there was no lying here...
"So this is it?" Nita's mother said, gazing around her with a look of awe and appreciation. "What you told me about: Timeheart?"
"Uh," Nita said. "I'm not sure. I'm not sure how nonwizards see it." "After all that" Nita's mom said, "am I a non-wizard?"
Nita had no answer for her, but her neart lifted, and she felt a twinge of something that until now she had been afraid to feeclass="underline" hope.
And it wasn't even hope that her mother would somehow miraculously survive. Nita would hurt for a long while every time she remembered all those dark little creatures dying, and the feeling of many of them not dying, hidden away where even the flush of power from the glede couldn't reach. But Nita had reason to believe that she and her mom would have enough time to get to know each other very well before the hardest moment—the moment of final parting—had to be faced.
And when that came...
... there would, eventually, be Timeheart, where no matter what you dreamed might await you, there was always more.
If she could just last through the testing that would follow, just keep faith long enough to find out what that more would be.
"I could definitely get used to this," her mother said.
You will, Nita thought... or heard. With the words came a pang of relief mingled with pain, the two impossible to separate. It would be a long time before Nita would get used to the pain, she knew. But the relief was there regardless, and here, in this place, there was no matching echo of grief to suggest that the relief was somehow false or illusory. Nothing that happened here could fail to be real. If she felt relief here, it was justified.
"No," Nita's mother said, "I don't think I'm going to let anyone throw me out of here."