Wouldn’t you know it?

After end-of-life conversations with parents and siblings, with a doctor and a priest and nurses, after discussing life and the afterlife, the existence of God, burial rites and family history, Vanessa’s cancer went into remission.

Spending her final night – this time – in the hospital, Vanessa shared a conversation with an older nurse, a quiet, tender woman who thought Vanessa was a wonderful young lady and who doted on all her patients in the oncology ward. Her name was Alice Engelbrecht. Alice Engelbrecht was of medium height and medium weight. Her dark hair was cut to a medium length. Dark-eyed, she was all-business, working with a quiet, steady confidence. Patients were slow to warm up to her, perhaps because of her bustling, determined, non-nonsense approach to nursing. But once finished with the mechanics of her job, she would sit with a patient, talk and listen carefully, and respond not as a nurse but as a caregiver.

In the evening, Vanessa told her she was heading home again; Alice Engelbrecht’s smile lit the room. “The human body,” she told Vanessa, “is an amazing feat of engineering.” Alice dropped into a chair, pulled it closer to Vanessa’s bed and beamed. “Let me tell you something,” she said glanced at the door, stood up, walked to the door, peered out and looked both ways down the hall. She returned to the chair and winked. “Modern medicine is good, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s more to health than modern medicine.” She raised her eyes, tilted her head back and pointed up, lowered her chin and her eyes and nodded. “There’s more,” she said, “and I’m not sure we’re equipped to understand it all.” She jutted out her chin, still smiling, cocking her head like a conspirator. “There’s always a way that things work out, and we don’t always understand it until it’s over.”

Alice’s husband had died of cancer early. She’d raised two boys alone, put herself through nursing school while raising those boys and working as a waitress, and sang in her church choir Sunday mornings. A patient doing better was, for her, the reason to get up in the morning. The same was true for a patient doing worse.

“Vanessa,” Alice said, “I am so happy for you. I am. And I will always remember you, I promise. And you remember me, too. Please.”

How is a seventeen-year-old female to understand the bewildering, exhilarating, daunting onset of remission one more time? One more time? How often can one more time happen?

Vanessa’s parents were overjoyed. Ditto her siblings. Hannah was there when she arrived home, hugged her and hugged her and hugged her, and after that, her mother held her for as long as she could stand to be held.

Friends started showing up again. Breathing was easier. The thing that had been invading her and holding her down and slowing her down and battering her and clutching her, that grip dissolved, and life grew lighter. Yet, for Vanessa Hoffman, there was still something. There was a specter out there ahead of her. There was an apparition – would that be right, an apparition? – and she could feel it before she saw it, and thinking she was going to see it, she’d avert her eyes.

At home, a week went by. She told no one that now she felt like there were two Vanessa’s: the real Vanessa was worried and struggling, still battling, and the other Vanessa was masquerading as happy and healthy and self-assured.

Over the last couple of years, she’d talked to God any number of times. She’d talked with God-the-bearded-guy-on-the-cloud and God-the-mystic-energy and God-the-eternal-spirit and God-the-mathematizing-biological-ultra-universal-formula. She’d never felt ignored, actually felt listened to, and though she was never sure they’d come to any kind of agreement, she was pleased with the relationship. Maybe it was God who’d engineered the perfect recall and who’d sent the messages. She’d asked that Catholic priest – Father Wehmeyer – if God was on high alert all the time. He’d accepted that question with a shrug, rocked his head side to side thinking about it, humming tunelessly, then stopped, looked at Vanessa and smiled. “I’m not answering for the Lord,” he said. “That would be unwise, wouldn’t you think?”

Vanessa shrugged. Had she been unwise?

“But if you want to know what I think, I’ll tell you,” he said. And Vanessa pulled herself up and said, “yes, I want to know what you think, please.” And Father Wehmeyer nodded a few times, rubbed at his eyes, looked at her and took a breath. “God is conscious,” he said, “of all things and present at all times.” Here he smiled and shook his shoulders, signifying he was confident of his position. “That’s what I believe. And believing that makes my life joyful. All the time.”

She reluctantly (very reluctantly) went back to school. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t like her looks. She didn’t like the teachers, and she didn’t like walking the hallways, and she didn’t like getting up in the morning. She felt like a stranger in a strange land, and that made her uncomfortable and emotional and a bit snippy, and she was ashamed of it but couldn’t help it. Why was she resentful? She didn’t examine the resentment. What would that accomplish? She was exhausted from examining so many things – the examining had to be over for a while.

She didn’t want a social life; it frightened her, so she didn’t have one. There were girls (and boys) who wanted to pay attention to her, and she wondered where her patience had gone because she wanted to tell them all to get away from her and stay away. She was as polite as she could be, which was actually pretty good, but she was dead set on protecting herself. That’s what she was doing. Wasn’t that okay? Shouldn’t she do that?

She liked being alone. She liked not being attached, and she cocooned herself and liked feeling wrapped up in a cocoon of her own making, and her parents watched and worried, and her brothers worried, too, but there was little they could do except give her some space. What seventeen-year-old doesn’t need space?

Then who should show up … pick a God, any God; what did God have in mind when this plan was developed? … who should show up but the world’s most dangerous uncle?

About the Author:

Victor Kreuiter’s stories have appeared in EQMM, Halfway Down The Stairs, Bewildering Stories, Tough, Frontier Tales, Del Sol SFF Review, Literally Stories, and other online and print publications.