A Reckoning (23 page)

While Jim talked gently about these factual things, Laura felt something less tangible, a kind of transfusion of compassionate interest, but even as she felt this balm, she resisted its effect, which was to make her weep.

“I’m so tired, Jim,” she said.

“I’m going to prescribe something to give you a long night’s rest. The I.V. will begin to have an effect by tomorrow, too.”

“I wish—” but the words stuck in her throat and came out as a humiliating sob. She turned her head away.

“You’ve had a hard day,” Jim was saying, holding her hand in his warm clasp. “Don’t try to talk.”

But she must manage to utter what had to do with her integrity as a person. “Jim, you promised.”

“What did I promise? I know I promised you’d see the spring, and I bet you enjoyed seeing the trees in flower on your way here, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Laura smiled. “I did.”

“I bet Mary will find a way to have you lying outdoors when you get home. Don’t you have a chaise lounge somewhere?”

He was cajoling her now, but Laura was not going to allow herself to rest in his kindness and imagination—not yet. It took an immense effort, but she lifted herself up a little to look him in the eyes.

“I want those bottles taken away,” she said.

She saw the pupils widen in Jim’s clear eyes. Then he bowed his head, looking down at his hand clasping hers.

“Laura, I don’t think I can do that.”

“You promised to let me die in my way.”

“All I am doing is trying to make you a little more comfortable. The I.V. will not arrest what is going on in your lungs, Laura. It’s mostly water, with a little glucose. You’ll feel a little less exhausted, that’s all, and your mouth won’t feel so dry. You’re dehydrated.”

Laura lay back to consider this. “Maybe you’re right. I have to see Ben—he may come while I’m here. But I hope not,” she added.

“He can wait a few days surely. I have given orders that you are not to have visitors, not even family.”

“But it’s so lonely here,” she said to her own astonishment. “If Ben comes, please let him see me.”

“Hospitals,” Jim sighed. “We do the best we can, but—”

“I’m losing myself, my identity. It scares me.”

“Just hold out for two days, Laura. Then you’ll be home again, I promise.”

“I’ll try.”

“If you want to see Ben, I’ll leave word that he can come in for a half-hour.”

“Thank you,” Laura whispered. Her throat was tight from trying to keep back tears.

“They’ll bring you an eggnog and something to help it stay down. Try to rest. Think spring,” Jim said with an anxious smile. He gave her hand a squeeze and then let it go.

“The apple tree,” she murmured. She saw it very clearly, an apparition behind her closed eyes. When she opened them, Jim had gone and the door was closed.

Panic. She had thought she wanted the door closed, but now she was terrified. I might die and no one would know. I might cough myself to death—quickly she felt for the bell and pressed it as hard as she could.

Chapter XX

Twice in the night Laura waked and did not know where she was for a moment. There seemed no way to get comfortable in the hard hospital bed with only one pillow behind her head. A neon light on a building opposite shone with nightmarish intensity, yet Laura didn’t want the shade pulled. The room was too much like a cell, and at least she could see the sky as the dawn slowly, slowly dimmed artificial lights and bathed the sleeping city in a wan real light hours before the sun rose.

She had finally dozed off into a deep sleep when she was roused by feet in the corridor, and a nurse coming to take her temperature, a different nurse of course. They were never the same, so there was no way to make contact, and Laura settled for being completely passive, hardly responding to a good morning, turning her head away.

Eventually they would come with a stretcher, she supposed, to wheel her down to X-ray, but before that she must try to get to the bathroom, brush her teeth, go to the john. It was now half-past six, so there was infinite time, and before making the effort of getting up Laura gave herself an hour. It was strange how the hospital atmosphere had anesthetized her capacity for thought—or feeling, for that matter. She felt absolutely naked in a glare of light, frozen there in a complete suspension of being. She tried floating, but always just as she had almost achieved that blessed state someone came in, or she was interrupted by the repeated call for a doctor. She tried the transistor and for a little while caught the end of a Mozart quartet. Breakfast trays were being distributed, but she supposed she would not get one. Instead the empty bottles on the contraption at her side were exchanged for filled ones.

How was she to get to the bathroom anyway? But that at last was a real challenge, something to occupy her mind, and she found that she could wheel the contraption with her into the bathroom, and in fact it gave her some support. Even sitting up, let alone standing, made her feel terribly dizzy and weak. She was just emerging from the bathroom feeling quite triumphant when a nurse caught sight of her and rushed to her side.

“Laura, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing?”

“Going to the bathroom. Is that not permitted?”

“You’re supposed to ring for a nurse.”

“Oh, well, you’re all so busy, I thought I’d invent a way.”

“Let me help you. At least you didn’t wrench the tube out,” the nurse said, as one might tell a small child who had done something naughty that at least there was no damage.

“I thought I had been quite clever.” Laura sank back into the bed. The nurse was reading her chart. “No breakfast,” she said.

“I wonder whether you could find a small bottle of lavender somewhere. I know it was packed.”

“Here you are.”

“Thank you.”

Laura poured a little in her hand and put it behind her ears, as Sybille used to do in Switzerland. “That’s better,” she said and closed her eyes. She must try now to leap as gracefully as possible from one small moment of respite to another. And soon enough she was being helped to slide from her bed to a stretcher and wheeled away down endless corridors, stared at by people in ordinary human clothes on their way to make visits, in and out of the elevator, a bundle of nothingness being taken nowhere. She was left in a brilliantly lit waiting room, with nothing to shield her eyes, flat on her back as she was, a room filled with people in wheelchairs and one old man on a stretcher like hers. Complete suspense, this state of absolute waiting, created a stupid amount of tension, and she wondered why. She was in their hands, the bright, efficient young women who called out a name and disappeared into the X-ray room, but they were not hands one could rest in. There was no handclasp here like Jim Goodwin’s to pump reassurance into her. Identity reached zero. Soon, she thought, I shall forget my name.

But when at long last she heard “Laura Spelman,” she responded foolishly by trying to get up.

“Oh, no, Laura, don’t you move. We’ll wheel you in.” And it proved surprisingly easy to slide from the stretcher onto the table. What was not easy was to remain sitting up while the machine was rolled down against her back, and to stay still. The first try was a disaster as Laura bent over wracked by a coughing spell.

“It’s all right, Laura, you just lie down and rest.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, but lying down was no good, and once more a stranger had to lift her and hold her and wipe her sweating face with a kleenex.

“Brother Ass is not behaving very well,” she managed to utter.

“Brother Ass?” This nurse, Laura noted, had a pleasant voice. That was a help.

“My body—it’s on some wild caper.”

“Oh, I see.” The nurse gently stroked Laura’s back.

After a while she tried again and was confident that all was well. Then there were more X-rays taken from the front this time—and finally Laura was wheeled out into the bright lights to wait what seemed an eternity until the nurse said the X-rays had developed well. But I can’t ask—I can’t know, Laura thought. That nurse with the kind voice knows how bad things are, but I don’t.

Laura closed her eyes and pretended to be dead, so that she couldn’t take in anything more around her. She slid into a cocoon of total passivity, down the interminable corridors, feeling slightly nauseated, and into the elevator where again people talked as though she were not there.

Finally she was back in her room, back where she could see the pigeons whirling up from the roof below, and one tree in leaf. And sky.

They came with the bottles and she was attached to that lifeline again, but she didn’t mind. She would do everything asked, and she would not complain as long as Jim allowed her to go home soon. She even managed to swallow a little orange juice through a straw; her mouth had felt so dry.

A new nurse came and washed her and brought the bedpan, which was excruciatingly uncomfortable. Laura felt now completely detached from her body. It was, she considered, simply a piece of machinery that was running down. But how could the separation be made? How could she find herself without this machine that labored for breath and rejected food and sent her into misery with the coughing? It could not be tamed. It could not be cajoled. It had, she felt, to be quite simply rejected as irrelevant.

When Jim finally came in and held her hand, she was able to say quite calmly, “I’m getting through with my carcass, Jim. It’s not much use anymore, is it?”

“The X-rays do show some deterioration. I expected that,” he said in his firm, gentle voice, the voice she recognized as one that had been trained not to show emotion and to be wary of frightening a patient.

“I’m going to need help,” she then heard herself saying. “I see that some part of this journey I can’t do alone, after all.”

Tears slid down her cheeks. Things were out of control. “I want to go home. Don’t let me die here, Jim, please.”

“Just try to trust me, Laura. The only thing we still have to do is drain the lungs. You’ll feel more comfortable and cough less then. I think we’ll be able to get you home late this afternoon.”

“Mary—” she said with a sob. “She’ll help.”

“She’s the best medicine you could have,” Jim said with a smile. He was holding her hand very tight, and after a moment she could feel it. She had been too upset before.

“Sorry I’m such a baby,” she murmured. “It’s the hospital.”

“I know. We’re going to get you out of here.”

Laura had closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw the naked compassion and grief on his face. He really cares, she thought. How strange. I’m leaving caring now—but this doctor, almost a stranger, he cares. She felt bathed in the radiance of it. It was an intimation of something larger, something she could not think about yet. But even the rejected body felt the power of it like an injection. Laura smiled.

“Laura,” Jim said quietly, “Ben is downstairs. If you would like to see him, he could come up, but he can perfectly well wait till you’re home again, and come tomorrow to the house—so—”

“I don’t know,” Laura said after a moment of taking in the news. “He’ll be upset, seeing me with these bottles.”

“You look beautiful,” Jim Goodwin said and coughed as he did when he was embarrassed, Laura remembered. “You’ve changed.”

“Have I?”

“In the last few minutes.”

He didn’t know what had happened, but Laura did.

“Thanks, Jim. I never knew what it meant before that we are all members of each other.”

And as Jim looked slightly bewildered, Laura added, “Yes, send Ben up.”

She rang for a nurse and for once someone came imediately. Laura asked her to roll the bed up so she was sitting suddenly quite high up in the air.

“My son’s coming, and he hasn’t seen me since—since—could you help me comb my hair? I must look pretty awful.”

This nurse looked very Irish, and fresh as a daisy. She was quick to see what was needed, even found the bottle of lavender and put some behind Laura’s ears.

“That’s what my mother used to do,” Laura said. “How did you guess?”

“It feels good behind the ears, doesn’t it?”

“Thanks. I guess I’ll have to settle for myself as is—do you think it will be an awful shock?”

“Oh, no—why he’ll be so glad to see his mum he won’t notice nothing.”

The trouble was that in this upright position Laura felt a little dizzy. Her head felt like a flower on a long, frail stem.

“Just one more thing. Could you put a pillow behind my head?”

“There, now you just take it easy.”

Laura’s heart was beating in an absurd way. She realized that some deep part of her had been waiting for Ben for weeks. Something had been held taut by his coming, and now the suspense was hard. But by some miracle she found herself floating. She had not until now been able to achieve it in the hospital. She was this time floating down a river in a canoe with Ben, about ten years old, trailing his fingers in the water ahead of her in the bow while she steered with a paddle. Summer stillness …

And then he was there, standing in the door, smiling. “I’m here,” he said.

“So I see,” said Laura, smiling too. There he was with his long El Greco face, the dark eyes darting a tender look at her then away, as he came in and kissed her on the cheek, then pulled up the armchair so he could be quite near the bed.

“Oh, Ben,” she sighed, “I’m glad to see you. It’s been rather a long journey, this illness, long and exhausting.” Then, as she saw the shadow cross his face and the familiar frown, she added, “long but interesting.”

“Can you tell me about it?” he asked. It was so much the right question, and no one had asked it before.

“I’ll try to tell you, but first, did you finish the painting?

“I did. You’ll find it in your bedroom when you go home.” He clasped his hands tightly together as he had always done when he was trying to say something important. “I think it’s good—it’s a sequence. It’s anemones, the way they appear almost to be dancing at first, and then the way the petals change color, and finally fall. I wanted it to be like music—oh, I don’t know! You’ll probably think it’s awfully abstract. I couldn’t do it straight—to get the motion, you see, the way they die, so beautifully.”