Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox Part III

18 April 2014

0738 hrs

More Fonda for you, Patient Reader.

            This is an exhausting story to tell, and I hope it doesn't bore you.  If it does, well, you know how to quit the page.

            For those of you who have given positive feedback, read on.  There will only be one or two more parts to the story.  Continue to be Patient, Reader, and let's all try to be kind to one another.

            For those of you who miss the Wrath of the Fox, my Easter rant is soon in coming.  

       Shall I press on?  Splendid!

            Children’s hospitals have the best toys.  One of the toys Fonda checked out regularly was the Nintendo game console.  Yes, that is how old how I am. 

            The only game she checked out for us was Jeopardy!  I don’t refuse challenges when it comes to trivia games.  I am a wealth of unnecessary and useless information.  I know almost everything there is to know about nothing, and for some reason, I take great pride in it.

            I never lost, and Fonda never backed down.  I never threw a game, knowing full well it would have forever gone unforgiven. 

            Amanda, the roommate, was in end-stage CF.  Lips blue from cyanosis; her face partially obscured by an O2 nasal cannula that barely delivered too little of the precious gas.  Her cells starved, burning themselves up as they struggled to live.  Amanda was twenty.

            Fonda never allowed Amanda to see how much she terrified her.  Terrified of that unholy blackened creature that crouched on Amanda’s chest as she slept.

            
            Fonda faced each day with positivity; a defiance so natural that my admiration for her surprised me.  I am never surprised. 

            Fonda travelled back and forth from a little town on the Alabama/Mississippi border, though she hailed from Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

            She would get her respiratory therapy, her meds, and her Jeopardy! fix each night for one week a month, then she’d be off to that little town where she lived. 

            She had a mischievousness that she played close to the vest.  It manifested in her wry humor which I got immediately as it went unnoticed by the others in the room. 

            Fonda and her straight, white teeth framed by her crooked grin.

            Fonda with her delicate heart under the pane of bullet-proof glass; a treasure as seen and untouched as a museum piece, beautiful and unreachable, pinned to her.  As is the case of most of us, others were allowed in so far; her line of demarcation indicated by red velvet rope while mine, in sharp contrast, might as well be a moat filled with gators or a police line do-not-cross strip of yellow tape.

            Perched over a strong chin were her lips, red as wine from a new vine; red as blood.  Red as lips can be not yet touched by cyanosis. 

            But her eyes, those blue, blue eyes.  Cerulean at times; periwinkle; desert horizon; cornflower.  Her mood dictated the chameleon colors that shared the same spectrum of light  as sapphires, lapis lazuli . . . sodalite.  Turquoise and the sea. 

            These colors bled into my own heart, melting the glacial ice into pools pink and warm, and I felt as Odysseus; lashed to the mast, fighting and failing against this madness.  This, the insurmountable power of her blue eye’s siren song. 

            I saw her love me in those eyes, telling myself that I was imagining the whole thing.  Everyone who says they love me go away.  They would give to me all the love I needed before they lost the will to live.  The abyss of my own heart was the oubliette into which they poured themselves; my dark devouring was the abattoir into which they led their flocking desires willingly.

 

            No one loves me and lives through it.  Why couldn’t Fonda see this?

            And for all of that, when caught in the trap of her eyes, as my heart fluttered as the wounded bird, all I wanted to do was lie down and die the slow, soft death, bathed in the severe blue of that desert’s Sheltering Sky.

            Fonda was diagnosed with CF many years earlier, but only after her older sister died from it.  The IS and her cruelty in waiting for Fonda to be a toddler before her sister suffocated on the ventilator.  Nature, ever the viper as a cruel god is, bit this family twice.

            Her parents, still in love, were no longer capable of looking into one another’s eyes.  They glanced at one another across the vast ocean of the breakfast table, each recognizing the other as their babies’ murderer.  They would look away when caught by the other’s glance; neither remembering the exact hue of the other’s eyes.

            I can imagine they eschewed the mirror for the same terrible reasons.

            These Soulmates, these Forever Loves, divorced when Fonda was a child, and her father drank himself to death.

            “How can you see your partner every day,” Fonda asked, “at the store, or in church . . .  and even begin to live knowing that you would never be together again?”

            And there was I, Jeopardy! master, with nothing even resembling an answer.

End of Part III