He said, “Even when they do very tricky things, that doesn’t mean the rules are changed. We have to follow the rules, just as if everything were happening to someone else, to some people they want to keep, instead of to us. You did it their way, and you know there isn’t really any other way down from here. This is all we have left.”
“So if I knew all along?” she asked, prompting him.
“If you knew how it was going to be, then you had to know you were a part of it too.”
Not turning, still standing at the gray of the window, she said sadly, softly, “See? You keep understanding more and more of it. Sleep for a little while, darling. Then you’ll know the rest of it.”
At a few minutes past six, Dr. Samuel Barringer opened the door of room 11 in the intensive-care section. In the shadows of the room, he saw the young nurse standing in silhouette by the gray of the window, looking out, standing there with a look of wistful grace.
At the sound of the latch as he closed the door, she spun with a guilty start, greeted him in her gentle and formal morning voice, and handed him the clipboard with the patient’s chart and the notation she had made since his visit four hours earlier. He held it under the low light for a moment, handed it back to her, then reached through the orifice in the transparent side of the oxygen tent to gently place the pads of his first two fingers against the arterial throb in the slack throat. He stood in a half bow, his eyes closed, listening and measuring through his fingertips. He was a big blond bear of a man, simultaneously clumsy and deft, as bears can be.
The nurse stood, awaiting instructions. He told her he would be back in a few minutes, and he walked to the far end of the corridor, to the waiting room beyond the nurses’ station. Sylvia sat alone there, at the end of the couch by the lamp table, staring out the big window. The hospital tower was higher than the buildings to the west of it, and she could see the wide, slow river in the morning haze. Daylight muted the yellow glow of the lamp beside her.
She turned and saw him, and suddenly her dark eyes looked enormous and her face was more pale. “Sam? Is—”
“They didn’t call me back. I just came in and checked him, and I have a couple of others to check, and it’s standard procedure, Sylvie. No perceptible change.”
He walked past her to the big window and shoved his fists into his hip pockets and looked out at the new day.
After a little while, she said, “He’s been trying to take it easier since that little coronary. He really has. But you know how Dave is. He said he was going to weed his practice down to about eight very rich and nervous old ladies with minor ailments. Sam?”
He turned and looked at her, at the lean, mature vitality of her face. “What, honey?”
“What’s the prognosis, Sam?”
He shrugged his bear shoulders. “Too early to tell.” He looked out the window and saw a freighter being nudged into the channel by the tugs. He wished he were on it and that everybody on board was sworn never to tell Dr. Barringer where they were going or how long they’d be gone.
“Sam, please! That was a big one. Oh, God, I know that was a big one! Remember me, Sam? Eighteen years we three have known one another. I’m a nurse... was a nurse. Remember? You don’t have to pat me on the head, Sam.”
It was easy to remember the Sylvie Dorn of eighteen years ago, that chunky, flirtatious, lively girl, now a whip-slender matron, dark hair with the first touches of gray. Thirty-eight? Mother of Ricky, Susan, Timmy — godmother to his own pair of demons. And Dave is... was... is forty-two.
“Sam?” she said again.
He turned from the window and went lumbering to the couch, thinking of all the times you make this decision and then decide how to wrap words around it to match the person you tell. But this one was close to the past and all the years, close to the heart.
He sat beside her and took her hands and swallowed a rising thickness in his throat, blinked, swallowed again, and said in a pebbly voice, “I’m sorry, Sylvie. Dave hasn’t got enough heart muscle left to run a toy train. And there’s not one damned thing we can do about it or for it.”
She pulled her hands free and lunged against him, and he held her in his big arms and patted her as she strained at the first great hard spasmodic sob and got past it and in about two or three minutes pulled herself back to a control and a forlorn stability he knew she would be able to maintain.
She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and said, “Today sometime?”
“Probably.”
“Tell them you’ve given permission for me to stay in there with him, will you?”
“Of course. I’ll be in every once in a while.”
“And thank your dear gal for taking over our tribe, Sam. Sam? Do you think he’ll know I’m... I’m there with him?”
First, he thought, you throw the stone, and then you throw the lump of sugar. No point in telling her that death had occurred, that Dave, as Dave, was long gone and that the contemporary miracles of medical science were keeping some waning meat alive, in the laboratory sense of the word.
“From everything we can learn and everything we can guess, Sylvie, I feel certain that he’ll be aware of you being there, holding his hand.”
When the first gray light of the morning made the shape of the window visible, he dressed quickly and went out. He guessed that they would not be expecting him to leave that room so soon after arriving.
There were shadows of night still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him.