She takes a deep gulp of air, another. Then she reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.
The light inside is all wrong.
Odd as it may be for her to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit her vision. Although she can see the foot of her husband’s bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of gauze, she sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Mark’s legs under the blankets, sees that he is resting on his back, but his face…
She thinks suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone’s features are concealed to protect his or her anonymity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being led toward their arraignments by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person’s face ought to appear.
That is how Annie sees her husband from the doorway of Room 377 in the hospital where he will die of cancer in five months and three days. Five months, three days that have somehow collapsed into a dreadful and inexplicable now.
“Annie?”
Mark’s voice is a hoarse whisper. Its weakness shakes Annie, and for an instant she thinks she is going to burst into tears. She covers her trembling lips with her palm.
“Annie, that you?”
She stands there, trying to regain her composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Mark’s bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes her feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.
Finally she lowers her hand from her mouth.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s me, hon. I’m here. ”
He slips his right arm partially out from under his blankets and beckons her with a feeble wave. His face is still a blur, but she has no difficulty seeing the gesture.
Her eyes fall briefly on the sleeve of his pajama.
“Come over here, Annie, ” he says. “Hard to talk when you’re standing there by the door. ”
She steps forward into the room. His sleeve. Something about it isn’t right, something about the color of it—
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” he says. Pulling his arm further out from underneath his blankets and tapping the safety rail of his bed. “You belong with me. ”
There is a harshness in Mark’s voice, an anger that has become huge within him in recent days — but although Annie often brushes up against its sharp outer edges, she is aware that the cancer is its real target. In the beginning it had flared up from beneath the surface only on occasion, but its progression has matched that of the disease, consuming him, ravaging his personality. He is resentful of his loss of independence, resentful of his inability to care for himself, resentful of his neediness… and beyond all else resentful of having his future stolen from him by something as insipid and indiscriminate as an uncontrollable growth of cells. Annie has come to accept those feelings as constants that she is helpless to relieve, and can only hope to skirt past on delicate tiptoes.
She wades through the filmy light toward her husband. His IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so she walks around its foot to the right and rolls back his plastic hospital tray in order to approach him.
Suddenly his hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches her wrist.
“Give it to us, Annie, ” he says. “Let’s hear how sorry you are. ”
She stands there in shock as his fingers press into her with impossible strength.
“We trusted you,” he says.
His fingers are digging deeper into the soft white flesh under her wrist, hurting her now. Though Annie knows they will leave bruises, she does not attempt to pull away. She looks at Mark across the bed, wishing she could see his face, mystified by his words. Their hostility is more intense, more cuttingly directed at her than at any time in the past, but she can’t understand why.
“Mark, please, tell me what you mean—”
“My girl,” he breaks in. “Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. ”
She winces as his grip tightens.
Us. We.
Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?
Annie can scarcely guess.
No, that isn’t the truth. Not really.
The simple, inescapable truth is that she’s afraid to guess.
His grip tightens.
She wishes she could see his face.
“You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, ” he says.
Annie still doesn’t pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him—
The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn’t know the answer, but realizes now that what he’s wearing isn’t a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband’s vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.
It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.
The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: “H2 pressure’s dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!”
On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander’s console, and then over to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.
Again, what she sees is not unexpected.
“Stay calm, Annie, we’re on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody’s making it home!” the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.
“The world spits us up and out, so where’s our goddamned parachute?”
He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.
Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she’s been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn’t understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.