Of course my brother would insist on walking from St. Louis to Chicago like some medieval peasant to visit the shrine of St. What’s-His-Name. Leo’s always being Mr. More-Catholic-Than-the-Pope, I suppose to make up for the fact that as a convert he somehow feels less than all the other Catholics for not having suffered a childhood under the tyranny of sadist nuns and lecherous priests—not that he’ll admit to any of this.
Leo’s been pulling shit like this ever since he converted to Catholicism. That was years before he met his wife, Cynthia, so he doesn’t even have the excuse of converting so that he could sleep with his hot wife. At least that would be something people could understand. Instead it’s all about things he’s read in books. Cynthia once confided in me that half the stuff he does she’s never heard of any other Catholic doing. I told her that that’s typical for Leo; he’s always lived his life more in the pages of books than the real world.
The big surprise isn’t that Leo’s doing this pilgrimage with his advanced pancreatic cancer but that he talked Cynthia and me into going. Actually, he didn’t really talk us into going; either we went, or he was going to leave on his own and probably end up dead in a cornfield somewhere. Apparently he’s been planning this pilgrimage since he was first diagnosed with cancer and sprung it on Cynthia a couple weeks ago that he planned to leave the next day.
“Talk to him,” she said when she called me. “I can’t convince him of anything.”
It turned out I couldn’t either. Our compromise was that I was going to cash in a bunch of vacation time to go with the two of them on Leo’s pilgrimage, and we wouldn’t leave until I had my time off. At least I managed to persuade him that we should stay in hotels along the way rather than sleeping on the side of the road like a bunch of hobos. That’s how we ended up walking across the Mississippi River on the McKinley Bridge bikeway on our way to Chicago with the September morning sun in our eyes.
It’s been slow going, which I consider to be a good thing. At least this way we’ll be closer to home when Leo gives up on this quixotic pilgrimage, and we’ll get back home that much more easily. The cancer has robbed Leo of his appetite and strength, leaving him bone-thin like a concentration camp survivor. I’m surprised he can walk at all.
We end up stopping for the day at four in the afternoon, and we check into an East St. Louis motel. Leo immediately collapses on one of the queen-size beds and falls asleep as soon as we’re in the room. His breathing is rough and labored.
I sit on the other bed and stretch my legs over the comforter. Cynthia sits at the foot of my bed and tucks her legs under her. She says, “We’re never going to make it to Chicago at this rate.”
“I hope you’re right. I’m thinking we’ve got maybe three days before Leo finally gives up, and then I can rent a car and go back home.”
Cynthia turns to see if Leo is still asleep. A wheeze of a snore gives her the answer. “I don’t know that I have much energy myself,” she says. “Do you mind if I go to sleep as well?”
“No problem. I was just going to step out for a smoke. I think I’ll walk around a bit. Would you like me to pick up any food for you?”
“Thanks, but I’m too tired to eat.”
I light a cigarette on the balcony of the motel and look down at the handful of cars in the lot. I think back to the first time I ever saw Cynthia. It was a cousin’s wedding, and I spotted her going into the church and thought that she was stunning. She was going to be the girl I would try to bed after the reception. I sat down in the pew behind her, happy to see that she was alone. Before I could think of something to say, Leo came and sat down next to her and introduced her to me as his date.
I put out my cigarette on the railing and flick the butt into the bed of a pickup truck parked below me. Leo has no idea what a lucky fucking bastard he is to be married to Cynthia. Being married to Leo, though, isn’t such a great deal for Cynthia.
When I get back from my dinner of a gas station sandwich and soda, Cynthia and Leo are already asleep. She lies facing away from me with her arms wrapped around Leo. The back of her T-shirt has ridden up a bit, revealing the smooth white skin of her lower back. I can see the dimples of Venus just above the waistline of the jogging shorts she’s wearing, and I begin to get aroused. I turn away from the scene, reminding myself that Cynthia is my brother’s wife.
I wake up the next morning from an erotic dream about Cynthia to find that the two of them are already up. Cynthia meets my eye for a little longer than is comfortable, and I wonder if perhaps she heard me say something in my sleep. I glance at Leo. If I said something, he’s not acknowledging it.
We have breakfast in a coffee shop near the motel and continue on our way. Leo seems in slightly better shape today, and we’re able to walk a little faster with fewer breaks.
Once you get past the industrial mess of Granite City—the business parks, tract homes, and auto insurance parking lots—the route to Chicago becomes an odyssey through an endless sea of corn. We walk silently on the trail that runs parallel to Old Edwardsville Road, not bothering to look up at the monotonous countryside, with its corn beginning to yellow as the stalks and leaves wait for a combine to come churn them into silage once they finish drying. Leo wants to press on for Edwardsville, but looking at the map on my phone and seeing how likely it was that we’d end up nowhere near a hotel if we continued, Cynthia and I insist that we spend the night in the Hampton Inn that we can see in the distance, just off the interstate. Once we check in, Leo falls asleep on top of the bed again.
“Would you like to go downstairs and get some dinner?” I ask Cynthia.
She glances at Leo and agrees to come with me to the hotel restaurant. “I’ll bring up leftovers for Leo. He needs to eat more.”
At dinner we talk mostly about Leo and his medical treatment, avoiding the heavy subjects: how long Leo has to live, whether this pilgrimage idea of his is going to cut that time shorter, and so forth. Cynthia tells me that Southwest Airlines is still covering his full health benefits.
“They’ve always taken good care of Leo,” I say.
“Yes, I wish I had it so good at work. I’ve got another two months of unpaid FMLA time, and then if I don’t go back, there won’t be a job to go back to. I’m not sure we could afford for me to stay out of work much longer anyway. And there’s a part of me that would prefer to be back in the office writing test plans and all that other QA stuff. At least that feels like it accomplishes something as opposed to staying home taking care of Leo and watching him decline.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re too kind. Coming on this trip was already more than we could have reasonably asked.”
The waitress comes to the table to clear our plates and box up Cynthia’s leftovers.
“The tumor has grown so much,” she says as we linger over the crumb-dusted tablecloth. “I can actually feel it, this hard lump on his left side just below the rib cage.”
“Are you sure it isn’t just an organ or something?” I ask. “After all, he has lost a lot of weight.”
Cynthia shakes her head. “Leo said that the doctor told him that it was the tumor. When I’m holding him when we sleep, I can’t help but put my hand on it, as if maybe if I touch it enough, it will go away.”
“I’m sorry.” I reach across the table and put my hand over hers. The diamond of her engagement ring presses into my palm. Even in his absence, Leo is still present in the cold stone.
“Leo has decided to stop the chemo.”
“He has?”
“Yes. He says it’s only making him feel sick. And it doesn’t seem to have kept the tumor from growing, so maybe he’s right to give up on it.”
“Has his doctor said anything about it?”
“He agrees with Leo’s decision.”
I have no doubt we’re both thinking the same thing. Will Leo’s life end before Cynthia’s FMLA leave expires? A morbid but practical question no one wants to ask aloud. Certainly it’s on my mind, as clear as the feeling of my hand resting on hers.
“I should make sure Leo eats something,” Cynthia says. She slides her hand from beneath mine, our fingers grazing in a way that feels more like not yet than no. That’s what I tell myself, even as I know it’s not real.
“I’ll see you up there later.”
She leaves, and I go to the hotel bar in search of the sort of anonymous solace those places offer. This one doesn’t disappoint. There’s a redheaded woman just on the wrong side of experience sitting alone and nursing a fruit-colored drink. Attractive single women drinking alone in bars are the exclusive province of lazily written movies. Reality has women who have been through a divorce or two, stranded in some rural or exurban community where the regular bars provide too many familiar faces for an anonymous hookup to be anonymous. At least here a woman has a chance of meeting an actual stranger, a man who already has a hotel room waiting.
Of course, I don’t quite have that second item on the list. Other men passing through town, long-haul truckers or field salesmen with multi-state territories, would have that advantage over me, but none of them are in the bar now. The only other customers are a couple sitting in a corner table with the exhausted look of parents whose children have finally gone to sleep for the night.
I know how to do this. I’ve put in my time in outside sales before being promoted to my current position, where I can sleep in my own bed fifty weeks out of fifty-two. I take a seat near, but not too near, the divorcée. The woman and I will make eye contact in the mirror behind the bar and, if I sense openness on her part, I’ll say something innocuous, just enough to begin a conversation. I’ll move a stool or two closer to her and buy her a drink, maybe two. She’ll touch my arm as she laughs, and we’ll develop an unspoken understanding of what’s to come.
Instead, I stare into the mirror without seeing the divorcée at all. She tries to make eye contact, I’m sure, knowing full well how to play her part, but I’m too distracted to even begin the act. I finish my beer, leave a few dollars on the bar, and go outside to smoke instead of continuing the comedy. I tell myself that it’s because I have nowhere to go. I tell myself that there’s a part of me that thought that fucking some strange woman on the way might ruin Leo’s chance for a miracle—as if I believe in miracles. I push the real desire that I feel but can’t act upon deep down inside myself.
The next morning, Leo collapses in the hotel lobby as we’re about to check out. Cynthia and I do our best to persuade him that it’s time to turn back and give up on the pilgrimage, but he says that he would rather continue on his own and risk a solitary death along the road than turn back. After a great deal of arguing on my part and some tears on Cynthia’s, we finally come to a compromise: we’ll stay at the hotel another day to give Leo some more rest, and I’ll find someplace to buy or rent a wheelchair so we can push him. Waiting at the medical supply place, I play out an imaginary debate in my mind with Leo about how if he was going to be pushed in a wheelchair, he might as well ride in a car. But even in my imagination, Leo is obstinate enough to wear down my resolve.
We eat dinner together that night in the hotel restaurant. Cynthia feeds Leo one forkful of food at a time as if he were a recalcitrant toddler while Leo keeps insisting that he’s fine and he’s eaten plenty of food already and will we just let him tell us about the saint whose shrine we were traveling to visit?
Saint Peregrine, as Leo describes him, was the sort of impossibly holy boy who was probably mercilessly tortured by his peers, but in his hagiography he became a monk who, through self-mortification, got cancer in his leg. Then, the night before he was to have his cancerous leg amputated, he prayed before the crucifix in the church and had a vision of Jesus coming down from the crucifix and healing him. The next day, when the doctor came to amputate the leg, he found that the cancer had miraculously vanished.
“So, shouldn’t he be the saint for people trying to get cancer?” I joke. “After all, it was Jesus who cured the cancer and Peregrine who gave it to himself by doing crazy things like trying to walk from Saint Louis to Chicago.”
Leo scowls at me. “That’s not how these things work.”
I’m about to continue teasing Leo, but seeing how Cynthia holds his hand, caressing his fingers, stops me. It’s clear that she loves him very much, and I feel guilt and shame about my lust for her. And I really do want Leo to get better. Who can say? Maybe this pilgrimage thing might work after all. Or at the very least, it should give Leo some reason for hope.
When we return to our journey the next day, pushing Leo in his new wheelchair along the side of the road, we make much better time. There are the occasional assholes who drive close to the shoulder and hit their horns as they pass to compensate for their insecurity about their manhood, but other than that, the day offers little of note. Leo stays surprisingly alert as we walk, taking this as an opportunity to try to evangelize me with the joys of Catholicism, joys I have no interest in sharing. My secular, agnostic life has more than enough joy for me. I wonder whether Leo would have ever converted if he had managed to get laid before he became Catholic. I know a lot of ex-Catholics, and every single one of them, including the guy in high school who said he wanted to be a priest, ended up leaving the church once they discovered sex. Why would I want to become Catholic and have to choose between no sex at all or sex with just one person?
That night we stay at a Motel 6. I wake up in the middle of the night with that momentary disorientation that comes from waking in an unfamiliar space. In the dim light of the hotel room, I see that Cynthia isn’t in Leo’s bed. I sit up a little and look around the room. Cynthia is standing by the curtained window, her face illuminated by the gap between the curtain and the edge of the window as she looks out on the parking lot. She turns towards me, and our eyes meet for a moment before she returns to her bed.
This is the image that stays in my mind the following day as we take turns pushing Leo on the road to Chicago. When Cynthia has her turn at the wheelchair, I walk a few steps behind, watching her legs and hips undulate in her jeans, and I fight the desire to come up behind her and put my arms around her. She’s my sister-in-law, and I can’t let myself succumb to this, as much as I want to.
For the first time we end the day too many miles from anywhere to be able to find a motel. We try asking at a couple houses along the way if we might be able to sleep on a sofa or at least spend the night in a barn, and we are angrily turned away as freeloaders. At the last house we try, I point out that “John 3:16” is painted on the roof of the barn in letters twenty feet tall. “Some Christians,” I say.
“Some people have their own ideas of what being a Christian means,” Leo answers. I can’t tell if he’s exhausted or if there really is no hint of anger in his voice. Saint Leo once again.
We finally find a reasonably sheltered area where a row of trees separates one farmer’s land from the next and do our best to settle in for the night. Leo falls asleep in his wheelchair easily enough. He’s already demonstrated that ability a few times over the course of the day. Cynthia and I have the harder job as we both struggle to find some semblance of comfort on our bed of pine needles and pebbles beneath the tree branches.
This experience repeats itself the next two nights. We’ve apparently found ourselves in a part of central Illinois where no one ever seems to stop for the night. Given how little there is to stop for, I can’t blame them. When we finally find a motel after three nights of sleeping in the open air, Cynthia and I both insist that we stay there. I point at the dark clouds rushing at us from the west as support for our argument from Leo’s God, and he acquiesces to staying until the rain passes.
We spend the next day and a half in the motel room playing three-handed cribbage and listening to Leo’s stories of the saints and arguments in favor of Catholic doctrine based on obscure early Christian writings I’ve never heard of. I don’t bother to argue with him about any of his claims. He has a completely self-supporting belief system: his beliefs are true because they are supported by the arguments that his beliefs provide. It’s impervious to reason or logic.
I wonder whether Cynthia shares my annoyance with Leo’s continual flood of apologetics. There’s more than one occasion when Leo’s in the midst of a story of St. Whoever that I think Cynthia may be offering me a shared eye roll at Leo’s bullshit.
Leo insists that we return to our journey once the rain stops, and we find ourselves once again in another stretch of endless farmland. We spend the next night under a stand of oak trees where the ground is still damp, and the fallen acorns give an even less comfortable bed than the pine needles of the earlier nights’ sleep.
I don’t know if it’s the cold or something more as Cynthia and I move closer to each other through the night. Eventually her back is pressed against me, and my arm is draped over her side. I lie there half-awake, feeling her lungs inflate and deflate under her ribs with each breath. I deliberately slide my hand up her body and let it rest on her breast. She shifts against me and brings her hand up to mine, but rather than taking my hand away, she holds it there. I trace the outline of her nipple with my finger as I drift back to sleep.
When we wake in the morning, I can see in Cynthia’s eyes that this was not something she did in a dream, but it was as fully intentional on her part as mine. If only we were alone instead of pushing Leo along the road.
Then Leo leans over the side of his wheelchair and vomits onto the gravel shoulder of the rural lane.
“I’m fine,” Leo says, straightening up.
“No, you’re not,” Cynthia says.
“We should go back to St Louis. This trip has been horrible for your health,” I say.
“Absolutely not.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to make that demand.”
“I can make my own decisions. I’m an adult.”
“You don’t act like one.”
“I would rather die on the side of the road pushing myself in this wheelchair than turn back.”
Cynthia and I look at each other. This isn’t the first time he’s said this, and we believe him completely.
“How about this,” I say. “Can we at least get a car and drive the rest of the way? I’m sure that God and Saint What’s-His-Name are already sufficiently impressed with your devotion.”
Leo begins to respond but then leans over and vomits on the ground next to his wheelchair again. He coughs and spits out the taste of puke from his mouth.
“We’re driving,” I say.
Leo slumps in his wheelchair, too weak to fight.
A quick search on my phone turns up an Enterprise Rent-A-Car not too far away, and they agree to pick us up along the side of the road. The driver, a boy who doesn’t look old enough to shave, let alone drive, is curious about what we were doing on a country road in the middle of nowhere. Faced with an opportunity to share his quixotic plan with someone new, Leo’s strength blooms anew, and he regales the driver with the story of our pilgrimage.
“I don’t take none with that papist stuff,” the driver says. “If you accept Jesus as your Lord and savior, there’s no need to travel across the country to pray to some saint. Only the Lord can answer your prayers, you know.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” Leo answers. He offers his own defense of Catholicism and is ready to offer an extended lecture on apologetics to the hapless young man. I’ve seen Leo do this too many times to count. He believes that he can bring any Protestant over to Catholicism with the force of his logic, ignoring the fact that his own brother remains a hopeless infidel despite his best efforts.
“Well, to each his own,” the driver says. Leo’s disappointment at the driver’s unwillingness to engage is palpable. Cynthia and I share a private smile. Neither of us was enthusiastic about the looming theological battle of wills before the driver dismissed the possibility with his five simple words. I’ll have to remember that.
Once we’re in the car, we make the drive to Chicago in just a few hours. We check into a hotel near Midway Airport, booking two rooms now that we no longer have to budget for some unpredictable number of nights on the road.
As soon as I get into my room, I lie sideways across the queen-size bed and turn on the TV. There will be no more nights of sleeping on the ground, and once Leo visits his shrine, we can be back in St. Louis the same day. Or maybe we’ll stay an extra day so we can get a bit of rest and relaxation, maybe even do some tourist stuff in the city like see the Sears Tower and the Picasso.
I almost miss the soft knock on the door. It’s Cynthia.
“Leo’s asleep,” she says.
She doesn’t need to say any more. I put my arm around her waist and pull her into the room, closing the door with my foot. She gives a soft, high squeal of surprise. We kiss greedily as we stagger to the bed, a four-legged beast with hands clumsily undoing buttons and zippers. We don’t bother to unmake the bed or turn off the TV before that first experience of making love.
Once we finish, we lie facing each other. I caress her body as I lie just far enough away that I can drink in the sight of her naked body. I turn off the TV then pull her close to kiss her, and my erection returns.
“Again,” Cynthia asks, surprised.
“I think so.”
The second time is slower, longer, more tender. We’re no longer driven by an insatiable hunger like a pair of teenagers in the back of a station wagon. Now, we taste each other like gourmands, savoring each caress, each moment of contact between our bodies. I wonder how Cynthia justifies to herself what we’re doing. She’s not Leo, but she is still Catholic. Perhaps she sees that Leo will die soon, and she’s ready to start moving on. I’m fine with that.
I awake in the morning to an empty bed and a ringing phone. I pick it up and hear Cynthia’s voice on the line. “Leo’s ready to go to the church now.”
“Can he hear me?”
“No.”
“I can’t wait to fuck you again.”
“You’ll be ready in half an hour?”
“For you, I’m ready right now.”
“Leo and I will see you then. Bye.”
The church with the shrine is in a sketchy-looking part of the city. The instructions from my phone take us past Cook County Jail and block after block of liquor stores and currency exchanges, the universal indicators of a neighborhood you don’t want to be stuck in after dark. We park across the street from the church in front of a trash-strewn vacant lot.
The interior of the church is in remarkably good shape given the surrounding neighborhood. I’m not sure what I expected—folding chairs, fluorescent lights, and graffiti, I suppose, but we’re greeted by something that could have been a tourist destination in France if it weren’t in the middle of the Chicago ghetto.
“Now what?” I whisper. A sense of awe mixed with shame overcomes me in spite of myself.
“There,” Leo says. His voice is barely audible and yet still loud enough to startle both Cynthia and me. I’ve forgotten he’s with us. I tend to think of him as being absently asleep any time he’s in his wheelchair. Leo points to a painting on one side of the church with a small altar and two candles before it. I push him to it, and he asks us to leave him alone while he prays. I’m unimpressed. You’d think that if they have a shrine, they should at least have a statue.
Cynthia and I retreat to a pew on the far side of the church.
“He’s fading so fast,” she whispers. “I don’t think he has long.”
I take her hand in mine and caress it. I’ve already reached that conclusion. And once he’s gone, Cynthia can become fully mine.
Leo coughs and gestures for us to return to him. He seems to have edged even closer to death in just the few minutes he’s spent in prayer. I’m thinking he might not make it back to the motel, let alone all the way back to St. Louis. I seriously consider going to a hospital instead of the hotel. Then I remember Cynthia’s body against mine the night before.
It starts raining as soon as we get in the car, and nobody speaks for the whole drive back to the hotel. It’s a dull anticlimax to our journey. Cynthia and I had decided before we left for the shrine that we’d stay one more night in the motel and drive back to St. Louis first thing in the morning. I’m disappointed but not surprised when Cynthia doesn’t come to my room after Leo falls asleep. I understand her need to say good-bye.
I wake the next morning to an enthusiastic knock on my door. I expected Cynthia. It’s Leo.
“Surprised to see me?” he asks.
His skin has transformed from grey to a healthy pink. He looks like he gained twenty pounds overnight.
“I’m cured,” he says.
“What?”
“I’m cured. It’s a miracle. It worked. My prayers have been answered.”
I’m dumbfounded. “Are you sure it isn’t just psychological?”
“Is this psychological?” He grabs my hand and presses it to his side. “Do you feel that?”
“What?”
“It’s gone. The tumor. It was there, and now it’s gone. I’m cured.”
This can’t be real. There are no miracle cures. Miracles belong to the Middle Ages, not the twenty-first century. They were all about people confusing colds with cancer and sunburn with leprosy.
“We need to have a doctor confirm this.”
Leo shrugs his shoulders. “Sure. I know I’m cured, but I understand that you need your proof. I just don’t want to make a big deal about it. I’d rather not be all over the news as the guy miraculously cured of cancer.”
“Assuming that you are cured.”
Cynthia appears behind him on the motel balcony. I can’t tell if the expression on her face is one of joy or horror or both.
“I just want to get home,” Leo says. “Are you ready to head back?”
“I suppose we—” I stop. Cynthia shakes her head behind Leo. “I mean, maybe we should just take the day to rest. As far as we know, you still have the cancer, and we don’t want to overstress you.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not for you to say,” I reply, trying to grasp Cynthia’s desires from her frantic signing to me over Leo’s shoulder. “Look, let’s stay here one more day. It was our original plan, and I still think a bit of a break would do us all good. Tomorrow we’ll go back to St. Louis and make an appointment with your doctor, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t say one word to anybody.”
Leo doesn’t move. He reminds me of when we were kids, when he would stand in the door of my room with his arms crossed and his foot blocking the doorjamb until I gave in and let him play Legos with me.
“Come on,” I say. “Go, rest a while. We’ll order some Chicago-style pizza, and we can have a celebratory picnic in your room. Or, if you prefer, I’ll call the National Enquirer and let them in on your big news.”
“You really know how to hurt a guy.”
“Whatever it takes, bro.”
Leo goes back to his room. Cynthia comes inside and closes the door behind her. We sit down together on the unmade bed.
“Is he—?” I start to ask.
“As far as I can tell, the tumor is gone. I know where it was. I know what it felt like. There’s nothing there.”
“Oh my God.”
“Exactly.”
The conversation lags. We stare at the floor.
“I should go back to him,” Cynthia says.
“That’s true. He’s probably wondering what you’re doing here so long.”
“No, I mean, in general. This—what we’ve been doing—it has to stop.”
“It doesn’t have to stop. You can get a divorce. You have to admit you haven’t been happy with him for years.”
“No, you want me to be unhappy with him, but that’s your own selfishness.”
“You can’t lie to me. I’ve seen how you’ve been.”
“This is a second chance for me—for us, Leo and me. Maybe this really is a miraculous cure; maybe it’s a sign that Leo and I need to make things work.” She pulls away from me. I touch her thigh, and she pushes my hand away.
“But I love you.”
“No, you don’t. This isn’t love. It’s just sex. I don’t exist just as another woman for you to fuck.”
“You’re more than that.”
She doesn’t answer. She just walks away and leaves the room.
I go to the door. I want to tell her that I do love her, that I might not have known it when we left, but it was the whole reason that I agreed to come on Leo’s crazy pilgrimage. I consider chasing after her as she walks to the end of the motel balcony and down the stairs, but I remain frozen in the doorway while I watch her cross the parking lot and walk off to who knows where.
I close the door and slump down, staring at the empty room. I don’t want things to end like this. I can’t let things end like this. I realize that Cynthia has left her key card on the nightstand. I pick it up and run my finger along its rough plastic edges. I have to do something, and that something is going to be to tell Leo what has happened with Cynthia and me. I have a vague recollection that adultery is an exception for the whole divorce thing, so even a hyper-Catholic like Leo should be able to get with the program and free Cynthia from his clutches. If nothing else, I can make sure that he knows how miserable he’s made her with his rigid beliefs.
I go outside and open the door to Cynthia and Leo’s room without knocking. Leo is sleeping on his back on top of the king bed, his legs hanging over the bottom edge and his arms outstretched as if he were crucified. His breathing stops for a moment and then resumes with a sudden gasp and a loud snore. Sleep apnea, the family curse. I’ve had enough girlfriends tell me about my own apnea to recognize the symptoms. I consider what I’ll say when I wake him.
Another gasp and snore from Leo brings a new idea to mind. I pick up one of the pillows from the bed. I hesitate. Can I do it? I must. It’s necessary. I lean over and push the pillow into Leo’s face, putting all of my weight behind it, blocking his breathing. Leo puts up only weak resistance. God might have miraculously cured Leo’s cancer, but he hasn’t done anything to restore Leo’s strength.
I watch the flashing colon of the clock on the nightstand as five minutes tick off. When the time has passed, I put the pillow back where I found it and look down at Leo’s body, satisfied that he’s dead. I go back to my room and put Cynthia’s key card back where I had found it, replicating the position as exactly as I could. It will seem like a natural death. After all, Leo did have terminal cancer. I lie down on the bed and close my eyes. Let God fix this one with a miracle. I dare him. 
