Robin said, "Poor mom, I looked so normal at birth." That was the first thing I heard her say.

My first year working on the Neurosurgery service at Yale-New Haven Hospital, I was called to see Robin Crabtree. She was a sea-breeze of a girl stuck in our surgical battle zone, an un-air-conditioned hallway with hardened weary nurses. Their call just said, "The abscess seized."

That day I met Robin, a turbulent day, as most were, I pulled the curtains back and saw a young woman not at her best, her head bandage-wrapped and partly shaved, the rest of the hair twisted and blood-caked, and her face with the glazed-over look after a seizure. That's when she said the thing about her mom.

Her chart said they had just sewn a Dacron graft into her pulmonary artery. A graft with a ten-year life expectancy. The procedure dislodged something to her brain, she convulsed, and the thoracic people sent her to us. All that at nineteen.

Robin's brain surgeon was Dr. William Collins, a seventh generation Yalie with tousled gray hair. What she would remember was his tie, done with an anemic knot, and his limp. He was world-renowned for pituitary tumors, but had two hip replacements, from something "I got in Egypt," and chewed his nails while he talked to her. She said, "He can spit all he wants. He's why I'm here, egocentric, brilliant."

He said she had a "horrible disease." I got to know her, disease and all, and her lure, the state of Maine.

Robin was born in Orono, Maine, born with a rare congenital heart disorder, the arteries awry like spaghetti and her left lung deflated like an old party balloon.

Her first memory, of anything, was at three, in her underwear lying on a steel table in a Portland medical center and having a stream of tight-lipped doctors pass by, lay their cold stethoscopes on her chest, and then nod at each other. When she looked up, her chin trembling, she saw more doctors peering down from their perch around the amphitheater.

At eight, again she stood in her underwear before more doctors, this time at Yale. They made a diagnosis, truncus arteriosus. Hers was Type IV, meaning no pulmonary artery. Most of the children with this condition, she heard the cardiologists whisper to her mother, never see their first birthday.

By the start of school she could tell she was different and that gave her resolve: to be the same. In third grade in Bangor, she would gaze up the steps, ninety-nine of them, going to the music school. It took every fiber to tug her tiny body to the top. And it took even more to hide the breathlessness, so no one would find out about the "mess in my chest." Robin was laughably last in PE, so she stopped going. She avoided water and didn't have a bike, sled or skis. Her mother kept it their big secret, for fear her little girl would be labelled "retarded" and end up "making potholders."

When I saw her outside the hospital in rehab, there was no secret about her condition. Her lips ran purple, her cheeks like thick rouge from a hematocrit that sludged in the mid-sixties, and her fingertips were spoon-like, spongy, and bruise-colored like they had been caught in car doors. Whenever she moved she quietly gulped like a fish for air. But between those gasps, she got a lot done.

It was a surprise to learn, after reading her cards that regularly arrived, that she had a pretty normal life: a job, a house, and she even found someone. I got a card from her in a wedding ceremony on the Maine shore.

The man beside her, Scott, an even-tempered Maine native himself, claimed, "I never noticed anything wrong." So the graft didn't bother him, that is, the ten years it had been given, nor the fact five were left.

Scott was a photographer for the Orono Daily Press, his photos capturing the long shadows or the black and white nakedness in the Maine landscape. His pastimes lent themselves to thought, like golf, in that latitude where the April fairways were empty and practically permafrost. He liked long hikes, a favorite spot being the near-by Appalachian Trail, particularly up on the Knife Edge of Katahdin, where it ends. He would sit there sometimes in the red and yellows of autumn's pointillism and greet the weary hikers that had started in Georgia that Spring. He said, "All types and for all reasons," and added, "some turned right around and headed back." It was his secret goal to get Robin up on that same spot.

Fresh cards kept arriving, on front, Scott's photos of fog on a pond or their dog, Sophie, clasping on a stick; and inside, Robin's script, notes in enthusiastic penmanship filling it up, informing the world the crocuses were up or snowflakes were down. She was like a wide-eyed Pilgrim in her own land, recording everything, as if just back from a long voyage. Or perhaps about to go on one.

She was born with no chance for a lot of things, for one, to have a child, much less care for one. She begged me to bring my Suki, six years old, up to Maine. More to the point, Sophie had to meet Suki. So Suki, with her duffle bag packed with teddies, her map of Florida in hand, her phobia of dogs still there, and me at the wheel, braved the Interstate 95, which starts in Miami but goes to the far ends of the northeast, and disappears.

After coursing along the jagged coast of Maine, Suki and I found Robin's house, in Orono, on Ohio Street. Robin greeted us and we stood outside. There was an August chill, and mosquitoes, plenty, fat with a summer's take of blood. Maples showed tinges of color. Sophie ran out and Suki scattered.

Robin finally coaxed Suki and Sophie together, and they all headed out as if to see Oz. They stopped a lot, to catch Robin's breath, and they did a full mile, a bit of derring-do for Robin.

We saw Stephen King's house, the university, and Suki and I hopped on rocks on the coast. Robin picked up flat stones and we skipped them. Pants rolled up, we waded in the fluffy surf, water so icy our feet turned blue, while Robin held our sweaters. On a pier, locals who fished called out "Crabtree" in coastal accents. They handed Suki a pole and she got nibbles.

She took us out on logging roads that made me queasy eyeing the gas gauge because I thought they had no end, and after the two hundredth lake, I complained, "You guys have lakes you don't even use."

In Ellsworth, we spotted a balloon and a "PotLuck" sign in front of the Episcopal Church and pulled in. There was a table lined with hot dishes and ladies in perms standing behind them.

One of them saw the purple lips on Robin and said, "Honey, sit down, you gotta be freezing." Robin sat. She told me, "I get advice all the time."

In town there was a store that said Crabtree Hardware. Robin said, "There are a hundred Crabtrees between here and Hancock. One part's even named Crabtree Neck."

There were seven generations of Crabtrees before Robin, all raised and buried in this part of Maine--and each had a sea captain. Even her dad had kept that tradition from dying--he skippered a nuclear submarine.

A big weight fell on Robin and her only brother, and was going down with them, for it seemed a ridiculous thing to ask a sixties child: to captain a ship. Robin came back and lived with her back to the sea, doing the best she could, since, "They'd never even let me on a fishing trawler." Her brother got a law degree and went to Hawaii. Robin said, "He married a Japanese woman and now litigates. In Maui. I guess that's the sea." Her voice fell off, "He'll never be back."

It was with a certain duty that Robin was even born in Maine. Her mother twice in the fifties made the trip by train from Corpus Christi, where her husband was stationed, to Orono, each time eight months pregnant, just so her baby's first breath would be Maine air and not Gulf air, then nursed them back to Texas.

Robin's father was a stern calculating man, a Dartmouth graduate and career Navy officer who retired young and eventually ran a cement company. But Buzz, as he was called, must have himself carried a silent weight much like his concrete, all during those productive years.

His three brothers, all older, enlisted to fight in World War II. One went down in a fireball over Italy. The second was assigned to a Memphis Belle-type airship. On one mission the air was so thick with German fire that he wrote a letter saying this night was his last. He was nineteen, married, and was shot out of the Belgium sky that following gray day. They still have the letter. And the third was on the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. He survived that, but died of typhus in their prison. They used to call him Movie Star because he looked like Barrymore or Valentino. Robin's father, who was too young to fight, by one year, decades later went off to find his brothers, and in the only traceable place, the island Mindinao, he found the grave of Movie Star.

Sometime after that, Robin's mother, a one-time nurse, began to seal herself off and fill the house with the sounds of great opera, "La Traviata" and "Barber of Seville," while she buried herself in obscure French novels. Robin thought of her as being like a library, with so little outside and so much inside.

She died as a result of a hike, somewhat mysteriously. No one saw her fall. No one heard anything. The group was up ahead. They turned back to look for her and found her crumpled at the bottom of a cliff. Turns out she was still alive. She withered away in a coma, then in a vegetative state.

Her father felt guilty. "Each time I saw her," he said, "I felt like I was kicked in the gut." His gut eventually got deep pains--it was pancreatic cancer. Refusing any treatment he died three months later.

But Robin's mother had not died. Her brother told her, let Mom go. Robin anguished and searched for her mother's wish. She called her mother's five closest friends and each told her the same, letting her go. She pulled down her mother's books and searched the pages. Books were her mother's best friends and she always told her daughter, if it's underlined, it's important; but if it's underlined and dogeared, it's vital.

Robin was halted at one such passage, about a seminary. It was there--she actually went to the seminary--that she enquired and heard the simple words that would rock her, "There are worse things than death."

Feeling she had words out of her mother's own mouth, she called her brother and they cried. They removed all the tubes and their mother quietly passed away.

Robin did well after her Dacron grafts, beating the odds by making it to ten years. Then, the eleventh year, she returned to New Haven, her condition slipping. They said the grafts were closing.

The surgeons did something never tried before, inserting stents, wire meshes, into the arteries to open them up. When she got back to her room where we all waited, she was colorless and lifeless. The house staff came in, listened, and fiddled with her machines. Her breaths were shallow, her "numbers were bad." She gave me a feeble kiss, which I feared meant goodbye. That night they gave her Lasix, Digitalis, and the next day she was brighter. And the next day after that even better.

Robin left after four days, her color more like life, her breathing less labored. To me, it was still an abyss of death. To her, new life.

In the calls from Maine, she said she could walk a half mile, then a mile, and "I can even argue." Once, paging me at work and describing it to me like a stammering kid, two whole miles.

Now it was two years later. The usual news had come down from Robin about daffodils and mockingbirds. Then little else.

The phone rang. On the other end, in a raspy almost inaudible voice, a woman said my name. It was a voice that stabs you: someone close, an accident, a death.

"This is Robin." She breathed heavily and said, "I have to come to Ya.." Breathing.

Her husband, Scott, came on and told me she had gained twenty-five pounds of fluid, was in extreme lower abdominal pain, couldn't get up, and her O-2 Sat, the oxygen in her blood, was in the low sixties, a suffocating number. The doctors in Maine were making desperate calls to Yale.

For ten days Robin stayed in the Yale CCU. They didn't know why she had gotten worse. They took the fluid off and tried new medications for her heart. She had lost blood, it was not known where or why. They transfused her to get her hematocrit back in the sixties, careful not to overfill her lungs.

Scott sat for long hours in the unit with Robin. Suki begged, "Take me to Robin," each evening.

The last day I saw her, we were all on edge. They were discharging her but the answers Robin needed were changing each time she asked.

"Maybe my heart is just too tired from all this."

I tried to say something, "You look good. When you called..."

She said, "I thought they'd tell me I had until Christmas."

"What now?" I asked.

"They said I should consider a heart-lung transplant."

There was a pause. "You need lungs?"

"I guess, because of the hook-ups. They say it's sixty per cent survival. Just a heart is ninety-five."

"Think of a new Robin." I meant a cherry-lipped Robin proudly slapping her chest. But I thought of no Robin.

Robin said, "If I am going to do it, they tell me, it has to be soon, before the other systems fail." The tube from her nose ran to the wall where oxygen bubbled, her arms were swollen from the attempts to get IV's in, and the clamp on her finger registered her O-2 Sat: 81%.

"Maybe you should," I told her.

"That's what everybody thinks."

"What did you tell them?"

"I said I'm happy with my life. That's what I told them. Just the way it is." You could only hear the bubbling oxygen. Robin caught her breath and said, "I know there's not much left. But there's never been much left."

She told me the one thing she put on her last will and testament was: no autopsy. "They've poked me enough."

Scott came home with me. We packed the car, lifting Robin's "R2D2" machine in, an oxygen-maker. He patted down the front seat like a hospital bed. Scott said, "I'm hoping she can make Portsmouth, half-way."

Suki and I said good-bye. Robin said, "I have just the card for Suki when I get home."

The car drove off with two unsure passengers: Scott, not knowing when he'll get Robin up to the Knife Edge. And Robin, not knowing when she will need her mother's words, "There are worse things than death."

They headed up the highway, to where it disappeared. Back to Maine, where the sun is so low in the sky, where nature is harsh, where people there accept it that way. Where you don't go unless you belong. Home. Crabtree country.