She had been reading, hadn’t she?
She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor’s frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband’s case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he’s doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door… but then suddenly realizes that this isn’t her living room after all, isn’t even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.
She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.
The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.
It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.
In the hospital, in the third-floor waiting room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what’s been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband’s bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.
Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book — actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program — the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor’s expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.
“Like the old Titan rockets,” he says. “Third stage fires, you’re up and out. ”
“What?” she says. “What was it you—”
“Mark’s latest tests, we need to discuss their results, ” he interrupts with the kind of patronizing abruptness medical professionals seem to take as their right, an exalted privilege bestowed on them the moment they recite the Hippocratic Oath. It is as though even the ones capable of showing some compassion — and Annie acknowledges that Lieberman has, by and large, been decent with her — must insist on reminding you they have other patients, other cases, more urgent demands than having to explain their findings.
“Laparoscopic exam revealed metastic tumors in the liver and gallbladder,” he says rapidly. “Statistically common once the disease has spread from the intestine to so many of its associated lymph nodes. Would have had a better chance with three lymphomas, but five is quite a bad crop. Very, very unfortunate. ”
Annie sits very still as she listens, but can feel herself crumbling from the inside out, truly crumbling, as if her soul is made of brittle, hundred-year-old plaster. She gives him a decimated look.
“He’ll be gone in five months,” she says, the absolute certainty behind those words filling her with horror and bewilderment. She feels weirdly detached from the sound of her own voice, almost as if she hasn’t really spoken at all, but is listening to a tape recording of herself, or maybe even some flawless impersonation issuing from a concealed intercom.
Dr. Lieberman regards her a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.
“Yes, five months, three days, to be precise,” he says. “We’re on the fast track now. Time runs by until there’s none left. ”
Perplexed by his comment, Annie looks at the watch.
Her eyes quickly grow enormous.
Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands, or markings of any kind.
She feels another chunk of herself give way.
Blank.
The face of the watch is blank.
“Stay calm, Annie, it tends to run a bit ahead,” Lieberman says. “There’s still a chance for you to say good-bye. ”
Annie suddenly finds herself out of her chair, and this time makes no attempt to catch her magazine as it spills off her thighs, landing on the floor at her feet. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch tower consumed by a roiling ball of flame. Its bold red copy — also less than altogether visible from where she stands — screams something about an explosion involving Orion, one of the mid-schedule ISS assembly flights.
Confusion churns within her. How can this be? Orion’s mission is still a couple of years off, and besides, the article had been an overview of the ISS program… at least she’d thought it had…
All at once Annie isn’t sure she remembers, just as she’d initially been unable to remember being at the hospital. Her memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.
“Your husband is in Room 377. But you already know that, you’ve been there before,” Dr. Lieberman is saying. He gestures toward the far end of the corridor. “Not often enough, perhaps, although I’m no one to talk. We’re both busy professionals. ”
Annie watches Lieberman turn in the opposite direction, her eyes following him as he starts up the hall. While his voice had remained neutral, that last remark had been superloaded with accusation, and she is unwilling to let it pass. He might think it is his God-given prerogative to relate his test results without climbing down off his perch to tell her what he means to do about them, but if there is some criticism he wants to level at her, then he damn well ought to be saying it in plain English.
She starts to call out to him, but before she can utter a sound, Lieberman pauses and looks back at her, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Turnips first and always,” he says, and grins. “I’d advise you to hurry. ”
Then he tips her a little salute and hustles up the hall, dwindling in perspective like a motion picture character about to vanish over the horizon.
I’d advise you to hurry.
Her heart stroking in her chest, she forgets about Lieberman and whirls toward the room in which her husband lies dying.
In instant later Annie is standing at its door. Breathless, she feels like she’s come running over to it at full tilt, yet has no sense of her legs having carried her from the waiting room, of physically moving from point A to point B, of transition. It is as if she’d been staring at Lieberman’s back one moment, and found herself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop herself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon her husband.
For his sake, trying to hold up.