Rabbit at rest (74 page)

Hugo clobbers

South Carolina

Dr. Morris, the old one, Harry's doctor, must have heard she is
in the hospital; he comes into the waiting room of the intensive
cardiac care unit looking himself not so well, spotty and whiskery,
in an unpressed brown suit. He takes her hand and looks her right
in the eye through his rimless glasses and tells her, "Sometimes
it's time," which is fine for him, being near eighty, or at least
over seventy-five. "He came in to me some days ago and I
didn't like what I heard in his chest. But with an impairment like
his a person can live two weeks or twenty years, there's no
telling. It can be a matter of attitude. He seemed to have become a
wee bit morbid. We agreed he needed something to do, he was too
young for retirement."

Tears are in Janice's eyes constantly ever since the blue police
lights appeared but this remark and the old man's wise and kind
manner freshen them. Dr. Morris paid closer attention to Harry
toward the end than she did. In a way since those glimpses of him
shining on the basketball court she had slowly ceased to see him,
he had become invisible. "Did he mention me?" she asks, wondering
if Harry had revealed that they were estranged.

The old doctor's sharp Scots gaze pierces her for a second.
"Very fondly," he tells her.

At this hour in the morning, a little after nine o'clock, with
dirty breakfast trays still being wheeled along the halls, there is
no one else in the ICCU waiting room, and Nelson in his own
agitation keeps wandering off, to telephone Pru, to go to the
bathroom, to get a cup of coffee and some Frosted Flakes at a
cafeteria he's discovered in another wing. The waiting room is
tiny, with one window looking toward the parking lot, damp at the
edges from the lawn sprinklers last night, and a low table of
mostly religious magazines, and a hard black settee and chairs and
floor lamps of bent pipes and plastic shades, they don't want you
to get too comfortable, they really want the patient all to
themselves. While she's in this limbo alone Janice thinks she
should pray for Harry's recovery, a miracle, but when she closes
her eyes to do it she encounters a blank dead wall. From what Dr.
Olman said he would never be alive the way he was and as Dr. Morris
said, sometimes it's time. He had come to bloom early and by the
time she got to know him at Kroll's he was already drifting
downhill, though things did look up when the money from the lot
began to be theirs. With him gone, she can sell the Penn Park
house.
Dear God, dear God,
she prays.
Do what You
think best.

A young black nurse appears at the open door and says so softly,
yet with a beautiful half-smile, "He's conscious now," and
leads her into the intensive-care unit, which she remembers
from last December- the central circular desk like an airport
control tower, full of TV sets showing in jumping orange lines each
patient's heartbeat, and on three sides the rows of individual
narrow bedrooms with glass front walls. When she sees her Harry
lying in one of them as white as his sheets with all these tubes
and wires going in and out of him, lying behind the wall of glass,
an emotion so strong she fears for a second she might vomit hits
her from behind, a crashing wave of sorrow and terrified awareness
of utter loss like nothing ever in her life except the time she
accidentally drowned her own dear baby. She had never meant never
to forgive him, she had been intending one of these days to call,
but the days slipped by; holding her silence had become a kind of
addiction. How could she have hardened her heart so against this
man who for better or worse had placed his life beside hers at the
altar? It hadn't been Harry really, it had been Pru, what man could
resist, she and Pru and Nelson had analyzed it to the point of
exhaustion. She was satisfied it wouldn't happen again and she had
a life to get on with. Now this. Just when. He called her stupid,
it was true she was slower than he was, and slower to come into her
own, but he was beginning to respect her, it was hard for him to
respect any woman, his mother had done that to him, the hateful
woman. Though all four of their parents were alive when they
courted at Kroll's she and Harry were orphans really, he more than
she even. He saw something in her that would hold him fast for a
while. She wants him back, back from this element he is sinking in,
she wants it so much she might vomit, his desertions and Pru and
Thelma and all whatever else are washed away by the grandeur of his
lying there so helpless, so irretrievable.

The nurse slides the door open. Above his baby-blue nose
tubes for oxygen his blue eyes are open but he doesn't seem to
hear. He sees her, sees his wife here, little and
dark-complected and stubborn in her forehead and mouth,
blubbering like a waterfall and talking about forgiveness. "I
forgive you," she keeps saying while he can't remember for what. He
lies there floating in a wonderful element, a bed of happy
unfeeling that points of pain now and then poke through. He listens
to Janice blubber and marvels at how small she grows, sitting in
that padded wheelchair they give you, small like something in a
crystal snowball, but finer, fine like a spiderweb, every crease in
her face and rumpled gray saleswoman's suit. She forgives him, and
he thanks her, or thinks that he thanks her. He believes she takes
his hand. His consciousness comes and goes, and he marvels that in
its gaps the world is being tended to, just as it was in the
centuries before he was born. There is a terrible deep dryness in
his throat, but he knows the sensation will pass, the doctors will
do something about it. Janice seems one of those bright figures in
his dream, the party they were having. He thinks of telling her
about Tiger and I
won
but the impulse passes. He is nicely
tired. He closes his eyes. The red cave he thought had only a front
entrance and exit turns out to have a back door as well.

His wife's familiar and beloved figure has been replaced by that
of Nelson, who is also unhappy. "You didn't
talk
to her,
Dad," the kid complains. "She said you stared at her but didn't
talk."

O.K., he thinks,
what else am 1 doing wrong?
He feels
sorry about what he did to the kid but he's doing him a favor now,
though Nelson doesn't seem to know it.

"Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!" the kid is yelling,
or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain
of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one
eyebrow, so they grow up against the grain. He wants to put the kid
out of his misery.
Nelson,
he wants to say, you
have a
sister.

But does he say it? His son's anxious straining expression
hasn't changed. What he next says, though, shows he may have
understood the word "sister." "We phoned Aunt Mim, Dad, and she'll
get here as soon as she can. She has to change planes in Kansas
City!"

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is
shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's
direction. "Don't
die,
Dad,
don't!"
he cries,
then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark
wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the
question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.

"Well, Nelson," he says, "all I can tell you is, it isn't so
bad." Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly
expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.