Your Perfect Year(25)
“A diet? Simon’s a string bean!”
“It was the first thing that came into my head. Or should I have told them that his girlfriend forced him into playing the entertainer despite a raging fever?”
“Ha ha.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got a full house again tomorrow, starting at two.”
“I hope Simon’s better by then.”
“You’re not intending to sign him up again?” Lisa looked at her incredulously.
“Of course I am,” she replied as seriously as she could. “If he can stand, he’s got to play his part.”
“Then I can only hope he takes a while to recover—you’re going to kill him!” Their loud laughter drew bemused stares from the other occupants of the waiting area. But Hannah didn’t care. It felt good to have a moment’s light relief.
“Hannah Marx?” She hadn’t noticed the white-coated young man in his early thirties approaching. He now stood looking down at them through rimless glasses.
Hannah’s attempt to suppress her laughter ended in a shrill squeak.
“Um, yes?” she managed to say.
“My name is Dr. Robert Fuchs. And you are . . .” He opened the thin file he had been gripping under his arm and glanced at the contents. “You’re Simon Klamm’s wife?”
Hannah nodded, earning herself a sidelong look of astonishment from Lisa. When checking in, she’d thought it easier to say she was Simon’s wife, since she was worried the situation might be too serious for her to be allowed in to see her boyfriend. She knew from ER and Grey’s Anatomy that the poor girlfriends were always left hovering out in the corridor as loved ones underwent life-threatening brain surgery. Damned to nerve-racking ignorance, they had no legal right to know what was happening. The fear that such a thing could also happen to Hannah in the Eppendorf University Clinic might be a bit of overdramatization, but better safe than sorry.
“You can see him now. Please follow me.”
Hannah jumped up.
Lisa rose, too, and before the doctor could say anything, Hannah reassured him that “she’s the sister.”
“I like it,” Lisa whispered as they hurried after Dr. Fuchs.
“What, that you’re Simon’s sister?”
“No. That you’ve decided to keep your maiden name. I’m sorry, but Hannah Klamm sounds awful!”
Hannah suppressed a laugh and thumped Lisa in the side. The last thing she wanted Dr. Fuchs to see was the worried wife in a fit of hysterical giggles.
They followed the doctor through seemingly endless white corridors, past patients and waiting relatives. The hospital was packed to overflowing; even the hallways were lined with beds where people slept or lay looking miserable.
Hannah felt anxiety overtaking her. She hadn’t pictured the afternoon ending like this. Apart from the fact that no one in their right mind enjoyed spending time in a clinic, she suddenly remembered the period, about four years ago, when she had come with Simon to the hospital almost every day.
His mother, Hilde, had lain dying after fighting cancer for several months. An operation, chemo, radiation therapy—nothing had helped. She had a malignant tumor in her lung and had finally suffered a horrendous death—Hannah couldn’t think of it any other way—that lasted for weeks. More than once Hilde had whimpered that she couldn’t take any more and wished she could be released.
Simon and Hannah had only known each other for six months; it wasn’t long after their picnic by the Elbe that the doctors told his mother there was nothing more they could do. Although they hadn’t been together long, Hannah went with Simon on most of his visits, to support him during that difficult time. His mother was his last remaining family; his father had passed away over ten years before her, from the same evil disease.
Everyone knew that the death of a mother hit boys harder than girls. When Hilde died, Simon had been a young man of thirty-one, but he had cried like a little child at her funeral, and even months after her death he sometimes broke down in tears for no reason. Hannah felt helpless, with no idea how to comfort him.
Despite her reluctance to descend into the usual platitudes of “Time heals all wounds” or “We all have to go sometime,” she was nevertheless unable to think of any more appropriate words of wisdom. So she had tended to limit herself to taking Simon’s arm, stroking his head, and waiting for his tears to dry. Sometimes she thought it might have been easier if there’d been a brother or sister to share Simon’s grief, but he was an only child like she was.
As she scurried after Dr. Fuchs with Lisa and thought back to those times, she resolved not to be so hard on her boyfriend in the future. After all, Simon had coped with some serious crises in his life, and it was unfair of her to brush them aside with her customary “It’ll all be okay!”
She really had no right to talk. Her parents were both still alive and in the best of health. Even her grandparents on her mother’s side—Marianne and Rolf, eighty-five and eighty-seven—gave the impression that they intended to roam this beautiful planet for a good few decades more. And at ninety, Hannah’s paternal grandmother, Elisabeth, was the picture of sprightly vitality.
“Here we are,” the doctor said, tearing Hannah from her thoughts. They came to a stop outside a white door. He pressed the handle and entered, Hannah and Lisa on his heels.