“I was merely trying to reassure her, Mr. Hope.”
“About what?”
“I told her she would get well. That if she tried hard enough—”
“That’s a lie.”
“It was the family’s decision—”
“No matter how hard she tries, she’s going to die.”
“Mr. Hope, really, I feel you should discuss this with your wife’s uncle. I was trying to help her maintain her spirit, that’s all,” the doctor said, and turned on his heel and walked off down the corridor. My mother-in-law died the following week. She never knew she was dying. I suspected it came as a total surprise to her when she drew her last breath. I kept thinking of her that way; as dying in surprise. I loved her a lot, that woman. I think she was one of the reasons I married Susan.
I sat now beside my daughter, and wondered if I could ever tell Aggie how I’d felt about my mother-in-law. Wondered if I could ever tell her about Sebastian getting hit by an automobile, and about this family vigil at this hospital, where another loved one was fighting for life. Would it mean anything to Aggie? Would the death of Sebastian, whom she had never seen and did not know, mean anything more to her than the death of my mother-in-law? I realized all at once that I was already thinking of Sebastian as dead. I squeezed my daughter’s hand. I remembered coming home from Chicago, after we’d buried Susan’s mother. Joanna was waiting at the door with her sitter. We had not told her on the telephone that her grandmother was dead. She asked immediately, “How’s Grandma?”
“Honey...” I said, and did not have to say another word.
Joanna covered her face with her hands, and ran to her room in tears.
There was a computerized memory-bank we’d shared together for the past thirteen years, Susan and I. Into it we had programmed a mutual set of experiences that could be recalled at the touch of a button or the flip of a switch. Susan’s mother was a part of what we had known together, and loved together. I wondered now what would happen when at last I mustered the courage — yes, courage — to tell Susan I wanted a divorce. Would I be able to get past the first word, “Honey,” before she, too, burst into tears? It was funny how the word lingered, how we continued using it as a term of endearment, even though it had long ago lost any real meaning, at least for me. But it had been fed into the computer — HONEY, EXPRESSION OF AFFECTION, SUSAN/MATTHEW — and there was no changing the data now, except through direct confrontation. Susan, I want a divorce. Click, whir, the tapes would spin, the new information would be recorded and replayed, SCRATCH SUSAN/WIFE, SUBSTITUTE AGGIE/WIFE. But when that happened, would I have to change the memory-bank as well? Would I have to pretend I’d never been in that hospital room with my mother-in-law weeping helplessly against her pillows, my hand clutched between her own? Would I have to forget her?
Sitting on that wooden bench, watching the bubbles rise in the fish tank, expecting to hear momentarily that Sebastian was dead, I wondered what my mother-in-law would say if she were still alive and I came to her with news that I was divorcing Susan. I thought perhaps she would listen with the same dignity she might have given news that she was dying. And afterward, she might take my hand between her own two hands as she’d done that day at the hospital, and look directly into my eyes in that level, honest way she had — Jesus, how I’d loved that woman! Susan used to have the same direct way of looking at me. It had vanished somewhere, perhaps to wherever it was that Susan herself had gone.
Her mother would want to know why. She would hold my hands and say, But, Matthew... why? And I would say, Mom, we haven’t got along now for the past five years, we thought the move to Florida might help, we thought there was something about Illinois... my job there, the people we knew there... that was causing us to drift apart. But we’ve been living here for three years now and nothing’s changed, except that it’s getting worse all the time, a day doesn’t go by that we aren’t fighting...
Mom, I’m not happy.
I don’t love her.
We’re neither of us the same people we married almost fourteen years ago; it seems ridiculous now that we ever thought we’d stay the same. We should have hoped instead that the person each of us eventually became would be someone we could still love. I can’t love her anymore. Jesus, I’ve tried. So what can I do, Mom? What else can I do but leave her? And my mother-in-law, if she were still alive, might say, Matthew, do what you have to do. Maybe she’d say that. And then maybe she’d ask me if there was another woman, yes, I was certain she’d ask that. And when I told her there was, she might want to know about her, might ask... no, I didn’t think so.
As I sat beside my daughter waiting for word about Sebastian, I realized the relationship would end right then and there; I would be divorcing Susan’s mother together with Susan. I was suddenly grateful that I’d never have to face her, never have to tell her I was moving out of her life. But the relief I felt was out of all proportion to the reality of the situation — my mother-in-law was dead, there wasn’t the faintest possibility I’d ever have to tell her I was divorcing her daughter. And I realized then that it was Susan I didn’t want to tell, Susan I was reluctant to confront, perhaps even ashamed to confront. Did I simply go to her now and say, “Honey...” I would choke on the first word, knowing for sure that I was about to short-circuit the computer forever, wipe the tape entirely clean, program it with new people and new experiences that only with time might become memories to recall.
The thought was frightening.
I did not want to push the MOTHER-IN-LAW button one day and conjure Aggie’s mother who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and whom I’d not yet met. No. I wanted to recall Susan’s mother, who’d held my hand in hers and told me she was trying. When I pressed the DAUGHTER button, I did not want the daughter of Gerald Hemmings to appear, his daughter, I did not want to see baby pictures of Julia Hemmings, I did not want their memory-bank to become mine. When I pushed DAUGHTER, I wanted Joanna to fill the screen of my mind in full color, twenty times larger than life, Joanna smiling, Joanna shoveling soggy cornflakes into her mouth, Joanna falling and splitting her lip when she was three, Joanna, my daughter.
And when I pressed the button that had PET printed on it in bright green for Sebastian’s eyes, I did not want Julia’s goldfish to appear, which I’d seen in Julia’s room, the room of a little girl I had not yet met, the room of a little girl who was not my daughter but who would become my daughter, my stepdaughter, my whatever-the-hell the moment I changed the computer, the moment I fed into it all this new data — no! When I pushed the PET button, I wanted to see Sebastian’s big masked face and those emerald Irish eyes of his, I wanted to recall all the marvelous things about him, the way he stalked lizards as though they were dinosaurs, the way his ears twitched when he was listening to the Modern Jazz—
“Mr. Hope?”
I looked toward the open door. Dr. Roessler still had his hand on the doorknob. There was no need for him to say anything further. I knew the moment I saw his face that Sebastian the cat was dead.
He really hadn’t had a chance.
Dr. Roessler had been forced to operate at once. In order for Sebastian to begin breathing normally again, there had to be a vacuum between his lungs and his ribs; the torn thorax had to be sutured immediately. But there were other problems as well. A rib bone had been driven into one of his lungs and had punctured it. His pelvis was crushed. There was a huge rupture in his diaphragm, between the chest and abdomen. Dr. Roessler told us he would have preferred treating him first with massive doses of cortisone and I.V. fluid, hoping to stabilize his condition, waiting a full twenty-four hours before surgery. But there had been no choice; Sebastian was taken into the operating room the moment he was brought in.