Five Tuesdays in Winter(41)

“Do you remember Dennis Wight, Charlotte? He was asking about you the other day.”

Once he had found Dennis on one of the lawn chairs in the middle of the night, snoring loud enough to bring down the house a story. The boy had been waiting for a glimpse of Charlie through a crack in the guest bedroom’s curtain.

“You girls used to get so tan. And your hair had streaks of gold.” Without looking, he could feel the bleakness of February through the window, the half-frozen mud puddles in the parking lot below. “Summer is a beautiful season, Charlie.”

“It sure is.”

He had forgotten about the nurse. He wasn’t sure what he’d said and what he’d just thought about. He put the cap back on the lemon and brought out the peppers. No smell was released. He brought them to his nose. Still nothing. He shook the bottle and smelled and his head exploded. He coughed and wheezed and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. During all this the nurse laughed. He wished she would go to hell.

He held out the bottle for Charlie. Again, she breathed lightly without response. In the war he had seen plenty of death, but never in all his years had he seen something as terrifying as this face before him now. All of its muscles had gone flaccid. The flesh was like jelly. Her chin pooled onto her neck; her cheeks flopped back near her ears. Even her nostrils had flattened. Physically, she had lost everything that had once defined her. He looked away, down at his own legs. His old brown pants billowed out like a skirt; the cuffs dragged on the ground. His belt, the leather worn thin on the first notch, was now fastened at the last one. Soon he would have to puncture a new hole. They were both adrift from their bodies. And without the body, what are we? Had he ever truly believed in a soul?

He shook the bottle hard and kept shaking until he heard her take a breath. It made him sneeze four times, reminding him of sunlight and pollen and dusty books, but it had no effect on her at all.

The summer her parents divorced, she’d walked from room to room complaining of boredom.

“Aren’t you bored in there, Charlie? Aren’t you horribly bored by this coma?”

The nurse reached over the bed and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

“Am I not allowed to say the word ‘coma’? Is that a dirty word around here?”

“It could frighten her.”

“Well, she’s frightening me.” He hadn’t heard himself whine like that since he was a little boy.

“Maybe it’s time to go now.”

“No. Not for me. It’s not time for me to go.” He felt how fast his heart was beating and knew he had to calm down. He rummaged through the basket and found a bottle of blue liquid marked AFTERSHAVE. He opened it and breathed in dances when he was young: the bathroom of his parents’ house, his brother, Tom, hogging the sink, and the smell of his own cologne in the hair of a girl at the end of the night. He had never been religious, but he knew that if anything happened to Charlie, Tom would be waiting for her. They would be about the same age now. Tom was only twenty-four when he died. It seemed impossible that he had lived sixty-seven years without him.

He feigned another coughing fit and wiped his eyes. It was too much. There was too much unnecessary loss. There always had been. He held the aftershave up to Charlie’s flat nose. She took it in slowly, and opened one eye. The pupil rolled down and she looked straight at him. He was too dumbfounded to greet her. Here she was. He had done it.

“That happens,” the nurse said. “Only that one eye. Around and around.”

Obediently, the eye began to travel the length and breadth of the room. When it swung back around to him, he waved and smiled as if for a camera. No one knew, not even the specialists with their fancy jargon and machines, if Charlie was still in there.

He put the blue bottle back and idly fished through the basket again. He wasn’t sure he had the stamina for another and was relieved when the nurse suggested that three was plenty for one session.

“Those were neat smells, weren’t they, Charlie?” she said before she checked her vital signs and left.

Her presence had been an annoyance, but the room seemed drained and vacant after she left. He took his granddaughter’s hand, a hand clenched tight on her chest, and tried to pray. He’d never learned to pray. All he knew how to do was beg. He begged for this child to be spared, but even in the small chamber of his own head, his voice was faint.

He sat back in the chair. He hadn’t noticed the enormous clock opposite him. He still had forty more minutes.

Footfall was steady outside in the hallway. Occasionally a nurse or orderly would slow and glance in, having been informed about the very old man visiting in room 511.

“I am an arrogant man,” he whispered. “I thought this would be easier.”

It was a nice room, bigger than any he’d had here. There was something comforting about hospitals now. He liked the ambience, the voices on the intercom system, calling out names of strangers, the steam coming out of the oxygen tube, the bright light of the buzzer near the bed, the rolling of carts and chairs in the hallway, the clean sterile smells. He felt safer here than at home where accidents were waiting, where help was across town. Here, death felt far, far away.

The chair was comfortable. A light rain began to tap at the window. He could feel the extra oxygen in the room and took it in gratefully. Sleep came over him, thick and slow, and just before he surrendered to it, he felt the rhythm of his breathing falling into Charlie’s, falling into an easier, simpler place where they might finally reach each another.