Instinctively his gaze swerved back to the medication dispenser on the coffee table. There, in Friday’s chamber, lay the usual troika: white, yellow, and blue. Untouched. Unconsumed.
“Well, Christ!” he shouted. “I could’ve told you that!”
Before she could stop him, he snatched the pills and dry-swallowed them. “There!” he cried, shoving the container away.
Dr. Landis had already averted her eyes, as if he had just started to undress himself. She was still looking away when she said, “Why don’t we give it a few minutes to kick in?”
“Why the hell not?”
Here, he decided, was one benefit of getting old. You weren’t obliged to make conversation. You could just sit in silence. Indeed, as the minutes passed, the only sound was the pattering of his Timex quartz on the bathroom washbasin. (Why hadn’t he worn it?) If anything, it was the light that was making noise. Bright one moment, gray the next. He could’ve sworn he was nodding off, but every time he looked over at Dr. Landis, she was exactly as he had left her, patient and abiding.
“You don’t remember me,” she said at last.
“Sure I do.”
“Then you remember what we talked about. The last time we talked.”
“Naturally.”
“Then you won’t be surprised to learn how sorry I am.”
His confusion registered now as a dull ache, rising up from his extremities and gathering in the joints.
“What’ve you got to be sorry for?” he demanded. “I’m the one ought to be—”
“When it comes to this part,” she said, “I’m always sorry.”
There was, in fact, a new warmth in her hazel eyes. A warmth too in her white hand, pressing on his.
“We only have a few minutes,” she said.
For what? he was going to ask, but she was speeding straight on.
“Now if you promise not to get up or cry out, I’m going to show you a piece of paper. Is that all right with you?”
“Like I’ve got a choice,” he grumbled.
“It’s a piece of writing, okay?”
She drew out a sheet of taupe stationery, folded in half. With soft fingers, she spread it out on the coffee table.
“Hank, I’m going to ask if you recognize the handwriting.”
But he misunderstood. He thought she was asking if he knew how to read. As if he could forget that! D. E. A. R. Dear. H. A. N. K. Hank. Dear Hank.
Why, it was a letter to him. Of course it was.
“You should keep reading,” she said.
This is you talking, Hank. YOU.
He frowned down at the words. Noted the strange curlicue of the h, the heavy dot over the i, the rather showy underswoop of the y. It was his own cursive, staring back at him.
“This… this doesn’t…”
But as his fingers glided across the page, he realized they were moving in perfect synchronicity with each letter. Forming each word as it came.
With an inrush of air, he heaved his head back up. “I don’t…”
“Keep reading, Mr. Hank.”
You failed the test, Hank. Which means we’re calling it a day, you and I.
I know this will be hard for you.
Living’s a tough habit to kick, I get that. But long ago I—we—decided we didn’t want to hang around past our due date. Not if it meant being a burden on the kids.
Kids. Kids…
You don’t remember their names, I know. But the worst part is you don’t remember HER name. And that’s why it’s come to this. Because long ago we decided that if we couldn’t call her back anymore, life wasn’t worth living.
Stop reading, he told himself. Stop.
But his eyes, without his volition, kept scanning, and his brain, that fevered contraption, kept interpreting, and the words rolled on… .
We gave it a good run, didn’t we? We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. And nothing to fear. It’s just… quiet… from here on out. You won’t even know we’re gone.
And if we’re lucky, if we’re really lucky, we’ll get to see her. Trust me. That would be nice.
Say goodbye…
His breath was growing ragged now as he raised his eyes to the woman on his bed.
“You… you don’t work here at all.”
She smiled softly, shook her head. “I work for an organization called Timely Endings. You don’t remember, but you contacted us two years ago.”
“But… but who gave you this letter? Who told you to—”
She pointed to the bottom of the page. There, like some childish prank, lay his own name, in his own hand.
Hank Crute
As real as anything could be. So real that everything around him grew more preposterous the more he contemplated it. Corned beef and Mrs. Sylvia and Stewart Granger. Bingo Night and hair styling with Miss Desdemona. The cord that bound him to Morning Has Broken, to waking and sleeping, had without another thought been severed. There was nothing to do now but drift.
From somewhere in the slipstream he could hear Dr. Landis’s not-unsympathetic voice. (“We always make sure our clients write their own letters in advance. Just so they know it was their idea. It’s always their idea.”) He could see—just barely see—her soft white hands refolding the stationery, returning it to her leather satchel. (“Your account is paid in full, and there won’t be any problem with medical examiners.”) He could feel the air vibrating around her slender alabaster form as it rose. (“And of course your children will know nothing. We are the soul of discretion.”) For a time she seemed to be floating away with the rest of his world, until suddenly, shockingly, she was kneeling beside him.
“Hank,” she whispered. “This is what you wanted. When you still knew what you wanted.”
“I didn’t… I didn’t…”
I didn’t want this.
But what was this? What was not this? There was no way of separating one from the other.
“It’s all right,” she said, her breath stirring against his cheek. “I’ll stay with you.”
In that moment, how beautiful she loomed (though he could no longer see her, though he had forgotten her name). Her creamy white hands, pressed snugly over his. Her face, soft and plangent, parting now before another face. A face he recognized from the moment he saw it… parting now by the tiniest of fractions to emit a name…
Celia.
Dear God, it had been there all along. Her name. And with it a whole caravan of sensory data. A smell of sage. A crimson mouth. A drily tickled voice. Hair feathered across a pillow.
Celia. Celia.
If he could just speak it, he might yet stay tethered to the here and now. He might buy himself another month, another year. But his tongue had thickened into a slab, and his throat had dried to flint, and his lungs were crouching like beggars over their last remnants of air. So that when the end came for Mr. Hank Crute, his wife’s name was nothing more than soundless drops, bathing his stilled brain.
Among the Morning Has Broken residents, no one took the news of Mr. Hank’s death harder than Mrs. Sylvia. She told anyone who would listen that she and the late gentleman had enjoyed a special rapport. Only minutes before he died, he had promised to escort her to the Stewart Granger movie and then to dinner. How sad, and at the same time how fitting and beautiful, that hers should have been the last face he saw.