Free The Death Factory by Greg Iles Page A

It was an extraordinary measure, trying that at home—crazy by any conventional standard—but God knows he wasn’t worried about any rules at that point. And the result was miraculous. It was as though this doom we’d all been fighting had magically been lifted, as though fate itself had been suspended, and time stopped. I woke Annie, and we all gathered around the bed. Sarah smiled and smiled, and even laughed a couple of times. Then our parents went out, and it was just the three of us. Annie was euphoric, seeing her mother like that, with the terrible weight lifted, the pain gone from her eyes. For an hour we were just a normal family, the family we’d been in Disney World four months earlier, before the diagnosis.
    “Eventually, though, Sarah tired. I asked Mom to take Annie, and then it was just the two of us. For the thousandth time, Sarah made me promise to take care of Annie. And I did, like I’d never said the words before. She told me she loved me. And then she said I shouldn’t let her death be an excuse to stop living. That I needed someone, and Annie would need a mother in her life. You’d think we would have talked about that long before, but we hadn’t. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let me. She seemed to feel this was her last duty, to give me that permission. She was speaking straight from the heart, pure truth, without fear or regret.”
    I shake my head, trying to push away the memory. “You don’t need to hear all this.”
    “It’s okay,” Jack says. “Was that the last time you spoke to her?”
    I nod slowly. “I didn’t know it, though it seems obvious now. Dad spelled me after a while, and I fell asleep on the sofa, watching an old Sherlock Holmes movie. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I’ve always remembered that.”
    “There’s nothing like a mystery to distract you from reality.”
    “Dad woke me about five hours later. The second I saw his eyes, I knew she was gone. Then I felt it. There was an emptiness in the house that hadn’t been there when I lay down.”
    “Who was with her when she died?”
    “Dad. Just Dad.”
    Jack nods slowly. “And Annie?”
    “Asleep, thank God, which gave me time to prepare for telling her. It also gave me a little time alone with Sarah. I just sat on the bed and held her hand. I’d thought it was cold the night before, but death brings a coldness all its own. After a while, I felt somebody beside me. I looked up, and it was Dad.
    “‘She stood it as long as she could,’ he said, and I heard a crack in his voice. Then he said, ‘She was a trouper, son.’ ”
    “Jesus,” Jack whispers. “You know what that means, coming from Tom?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “What do you think he meant by that first line? Do you think . . . he helped her at the end?”
    “Yes. She’d been suffering so much the night before, and then after she spoke to Dad, she was almost blissful. I think she made her decision right before that epidural. That procedure alone could have killed her, given her brain metastases and the possibility of elevated pressure in her spinal canal. And Dad would have told her that. She wanted a few last hours of clarity before she left us.”
    Jack considers this for a while. “Whatever happened, it was her choice.”
    I nod silently. “I think her mother sensed it, too. When Mrs. Spencer left to get her husband, she hugged Dad and said, ‘Sarah was so lucky to have you through this, Tom. We’ll never forget you.’ ”
    I shake my head, almost unable to continue. “After Mrs. Spencer left, I woke Annie and told her. That was the hardest thing I’d ever done, up to that point. Sarah had prepared her as well as she could. Not by saying she was going to heaven or any of that. Believe it or not, she used The Lion King to explain it. How she was going back to be part of the earth and then the grass and finally the stars again. Annie seemed okay with it. At first, anyway. But that’s another story.”
    I get up and wipe my