It was bitterly cold and spitting rain as Abe hunched over the wheel of the idling Subaru, Ruth beside him in the passenger seat, a cotton knit throw blanket across her lap for warmth, her empty stomach protesting.
“You warm enough?” said Abe.
“Yes, thanks,” said Ruth.
“You must be famished,” said Abe, as though he could hear her thoughts.
Being famished was only one of the sensations presently rattling around in Ruth’s body. And there were far more troubling thoughts vying for position at the front of her mental queue: not surviving the surgery, the nagging and very real possibility of leaving Abe and Megs to fend for themselves. Ruth hoped Abe couldn’t intimate those thoughts, as well.
“A few degrees colder and this will turn to snow,” Abe observed. “God, I hope not. The hill will be a mess.”
“The line is moving, honey,” said Ruth.
Indeed, the vehicles in front of them had already begun loading at a crawl, thunk-thunking over the steel ramp onto the car deck, a sensation as familiar as closing the refrigerator, even after all these years since they’d last caught a ferry. Among the first to board, they were ushered clear up front to the open bow of the vessel, from whence Ruth peered out over the choppy surface of the water across the harbor, remembering the old creosote factory, gone for decades. Eagledale, once a smattering of old houses clinging to the shoreline, was built up with bigger houses now, and more of them, crowding out the quaint old seasonal residences. The entire island, even the remotest reaches of the south end, had gone that way the past thirty years, though Bainbridge still managed to maintain some of its woodsy charm, at least from a distance.
Once the ferry had passed Wing Point and cleared the harbor, the Seattle skyline made its appearance to the east under a low, slate-gray cover of clouds. My, how Seattle had grown since Ruth had first laid her hungry eyes on it as a child of ten years old. That was long before the fair, or the needle, or the stadiums, back when Smith Tower was the regional landmark, once the tallest structure west of the Mississippi, its neoclassical elegance now dwarfed, hardly visible in a forest of modular steel and glass.
“You’re nervous about driving in the city, aren’t you?” said Ruth.
“Why would I be?” said Abe.
“I’d be nervous,” she said.
Neither of them had driven in the city in fifteen years. When they made the trip across the sound at all anymore, it was the Kingston run, where they’d park at Kyle’s house, five minutes from the terminal in Edmonds. Anne had made them promise they’d take a cab to Swedish, but Abe insisted on driving Ruth himself in the familiarity of her own car. And he was right, it was a comfort, despite the impending anxiety of getting through downtown and up the hill.
Ruth hardly recognized the city anymore. The viaduct was gone, and she found that she missed it somehow. The old ferry terminal had been wholly reimagined, along with the rest of the waterfront. Where the old wharves and brick buildings along Alaskan Way had once offered a soft landing, albeit a grimy, rugged one, maritime travelers were now confronted by a thirty-story wall of urban high-rise development, a steely blockade dedicated to late capitalism that offered little hint of the regional culture that predated it, its lone flourish of frivolity being the great Ferris wheel at Pier 57, a twenty-five-dollar-per-ticket tourist trap that might have been built anywhere. None of the new skyscrapers embodied the dignity or conceit of the Seattle Tower, with its art deco flair, or the King Street Station, with its stately clock tower, or any of the nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth-century structures with their familiar skins of granite, and brick, and terra cotta.
Upon offloading from the boat, Abe’s demeanor quickly progressed from visibly anxious to flustered.
“Which damn lane am I supposed to be in here?” he said. “The boat used to empty straight onto Marion. Now I’m two blocks south and there’s three lanes. Is that Columbia or Yesler? Can I go straight?”
Ruth knew that to offer any guidance would only agitate him more, especially since she had no idea herself in which lane they ought to be, but if she had to guess she would have stayed in the middle lane. As it happened, Abe ended up doing exactly what Ruth would have done, proceeding straight through the light at Alaskan Way and shooting up Yesler. It should have worked perfectly. But within three blocks, construction diverted them south, and a block after that diverted them back west, then south again, until they were back on Alaskan Way, where, halfway to the stadium, they backtracked north before they finally managed to forge a path east, though not before they almost ended up on I-90 East.
Fifteen minutes later, having circled the block twice, white-knuckled and hunched at the wheel, Abe piloted the Subaru safely into the Swedish parking garage.
“Easy peasy,” he said with a feeble smile.
“Looks like the hard part’s over, anyway,” said Ruth.
Abe gathered Ruth’s overnight bag from the back seat, and they struck out in search of the elevator. Checking in on the eighth floor, they were conducted to a pre-op staging area, where a young nurse with brawny forearms and tiny hands presented Ruth with a white, open-backed gown.
“I’m Brooke,” she said. “Put this on if you would. And go ahead and lay down in bed.”
Ruth let the grammatical blunder pass, a restraint that had taken the better part of fifty years to cultivate, as Brooke pulled the paper curtain closed and stepped out of the room.
“Lie down in bed,” she whispered to Abe. “Lay requires a direct object.”
Abe stood by as Ruth disrobed, holding the flimsy garment aloft so that she could easily slip into it. When Brooke returned, she began checking Ruth’s vitals with the mechanical efficiency of a seasoned professional.
“Have you had any medications today?”
“No,” said Ruth.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I ate a bowl of cottage cheese around eight thirty last night.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Everything is in order here. Dr. McGonagle will be in shortly to brief you.”
Ten minutes later McGonagle appeared, an impressive figure, maybe six foot two, square-shouldered and deeply tanned, like a man who spent a good deal of time on golf courses. He exuded capability, though it was hard to tell whether it was earned or practiced.
“How are you feeling?” he said, briefly engaging in eye contact before turning his attention to Ruth’s chart.
“Good,” said Ruth.
“I see you’re up six pounds,” he said. “That’s what we’d hoped to see.”
“It was him,” she said, indicating Abe. “He all but forced me to eat.”
“Well done,” said McGonagle. “Have either of you got any questions?”
Again, Ruth let his grammatical gaffe pass.
“How long will the surgery be?” said Abe.
“I can’t say until we get in there,” he said. “We anticipate somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours. As I explained previously, we’ll make the incision here, at the jawline, and go in under the flap. You’ll likely lose a few teeth and the lymph node along with the bone.”
Now that it was about to happen, Ruth found herself impatient to begin, to get the ordeal over with and put it behind her, behind them, to live, or hopefully live, with the results. She was not frightened, not the way she’d expected to be. With three and a half weeks to prepare for the possibilities, she’d resolved herself to put her faith in God, a transfer of agency that allowed Ruth to face the procedure with the same stoicism with which she’d endured childbirth four times, including fifteen hours of labor with Maddie.
After a twenty-minute wait, two orderlies came for Ruth, stationing themselves on either side of the bed, and began wheeling her out into the corridor. They paused in their progress long enough for Abe to lean down and gently plant a kiss on Ruth’s forehead, even as he clutched her hand in his own.
“I love you,” he whispered into her ear. “It’ll soon be over, then you can just lay in bed and I”ll take care of you.”
“Chickens lay in beds, people lie in them. Didn’t they teach you that in business school?”
She could see Abe’s eyes were troubled as she gave his hand a final squeeze. Poor, dear Abe looked pale and bewildered standing there in the corridor, slightly stooped, his jaw a little slack, his skin almost transparent under the glare of the fluorescent lights.
Once in the arena, they transferred her onto the operating table beneath the brilliant glow of the surgical lamp. Somebody put the mask in place over her nose and mouth, even as somebody else administered the IV to her wrist with a dull prick.
The disembodied head of Dr. McGonagle was soon hovering above her, making small talk.
“Tell me about your last vacation,” he said. “Where’d you go?”
Before Ruth could answer that seven years prior, she and Abe had flown to his cousin’s funeral in Columbus, Ohio, the thought eluded her as her eyelids grew heavy, and darkness fell upon her.
Abe waited two hours in reception with nothing but his thoughts to occupy himself before hunger drove him down to the cafeteria, where he ate half a turkey wrap and drank a cup of decaf before returning to his post, alternately inquiring at the desk for updates and dozing off in his chair. Four hours passed, then six, and still no word from the surgeon.
Finally, shortly after dusk, Dr. McGonagle emerged with an update.
“The surgery was more complex than we initially expected,” he explained to Abe, who was intent upon the surgeon’s every word. “The growth had advanced considerably. Thus, the six-and-a-half-hour surgery.”
“Is she okay?” said Abe.
“She did great, she hung in there like a champ,” said McGonagle with the pride of a pitching coach. “She’s stable now. We’re keeping her in the ICU just as a precaution, but she should be in her own room by morning.”
“When can I see her?”
“Tomorrow,” said McGonagle, setting an encouraging hand upon Abe’s stooped shoulder. “You’d best get some rest. Are you at the Silver Cloud?”
“Yes,” said Abe.
“Good. Check back in the morning.”
McGonagle was in the act of leaving when Abe addressed him once more.
“How did this happen? What caused this?” he said.
McGonagle considered it briefly. “Just bad luck, plain and simple,” he said.
The Silver Cloud seemed like a terrible name for a hotel associated with a hospital, where lives hung daily in the balance. Silver clouds seemed to suggest that heaven was the foregone conclusion. The place was reasonably priced, or so Kyle had assured his father, though a hundred fifty-nine plus taxes per night hardly seemed like a bargain when Abe could still remember paying eight bucks a night for the honeymoon suite at the Camlin Hotel. Though the hotel was nicer and the room larger than it needed to be for Abe’s purpose, the location couldn’t be beat. His sixth-floor window afforded Abe a view directly across the street at Swedish, where Ruth presently lay (or was it laid?), apparently stable, and likely insensate.
He ordered a Tuscan chicken sandwich from room service and waited on the bed, still too anxious from the day’s events to kick off his shoes. When the food arrived twenty minutes later, he ate half of it without relish, then set the chrome-covered plate out in the hallway.
Anne was the first to call, around six thirty.
“Why haven’t you answered my messages?” she said.
“What messages?”
“I left three messages on your cell.”
“I don’t think my phone works in the hospital,” he explained. “Besides, I have no clue how to find my messages, let alone listen to them. You may as well ask me to land on the moon.”
“How’d it go?” said Anne.
“It was considerably worse than they thought,” he said. “She lost seven teeth, a lymph node, and half her tongue. Not to mention a good portion of her left tibia, now fused to her lower jaw.”
“I thought they were just shaving some bone.”
“We all thought that,” said Abe.
“She’s okay, though?”
“She’s stable, whatever that means.”
“Have you seen her yet?”
“No.”
“Where are you now?”
“At a hotel, across the street from the hospital.”
“How’d you get there?”
Abe lapsed into silence.
“I told you, it’s across the street. I used the crosswalk.”
“I mean, how did you get up the hill? Did Kyle pick you up?”
“No,” said Abe.
“Then, you took a cab?”
Abe’s silence was as good as a confession.
“You drove, didn’t you? Dad, when are you going to accept your limitations? There’s no shame in being ninety years old, but you can’t go about acting like you’re thirty-five.”
“I got here, didn’t I?”
“This time,” said Anne. “Do I need to fly out, Dad?”
“No,” Abe insisted. “I can take care of her.”
“What about Kyle or Maddie?”
“What about them?”
“Can one of them come stay with you for a while, or take shifts, or what about insurance, maybe Medicare will cover some in-home care? Dad, you gotta get some help.”
While Abe himself suspected he might be in over his head when it came to caring for Ruth through what promised to be a brutal convalescence, under no circumstances was he prepared to make this concession to his eldest daughter. On the contrary, Anne’s skepticism of his ability to care for Ruth only fortified Abe’s assertion that he was up to the task.
“She’s my wife, I’ve lived with her for seventy years, I know everything about her, I can damn well take care of her as well as anyone, especially some stranger.”
Anne must have convinced Kyle, too, because when he called a half hour later, he broached the subject of his mother’s care before he even inquired about the success of the operation.
“So, what happens when she leaves the hospital?”
“We’re not there yet,” said Abe.
“There’s gotta be some kind of aftercare resource in place through Swedish, right? Or what about the Fred Hutch clinic? Let me make some calls.”
“No,” Abe insisted. “I’ve got everything covered.”
“When can I see her?”
“I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
“You holding up okay, Dad? You sound tired.”
“I am tired,” said Abe. “Which is why I need to get some rest. I’ll keep you updated.”
Even Maddie, their disorganized child, either the most or the least adaptable of their progeny (the jury was still out), was prescriptive regarding her mother’s treatment going forward.
“She’s not a car, Dad,” she observed, the little Pomeranian yipping in the background. “You don’t just start removing parts and filling her with chemicals, then run her out on the road again for another fifty thousand miles. She needs some kind of holistic healing, and I don’t mean radiation. You cannot do this alone, Daddy. I’m going to drive up on Friday, and we can—”
“No,” said Abe. “Thank you, sweetie, but no. Let me handle this.”
When Abe finally set his phone down around nine forty-five, he gazed dully at the black sheen of the thirty-six-inch flat-screen in front of the bed, at the burnished, fake-hardwood dresser beneath it, his mind occupying a state beyond exhaustion, mercifully indifferent to the mechanics of the quotidian world. This lasted but the briefest of moments before the pressing reality of his immediate future asserted itself once more.
Finally, Abe kicked off his shoes, then liberated himself from his sweater, then his pants, piling them on the club chair opposite the bed. In only his drawers and T-shirt and socks, he stood at the sixth-floor window and looked across the street at the hospital, still a hive of activity at night—for illness and misfortune never rested.
It had begun to snow lightly. Innumerable windswept flakes, tiny and ephemeral, seeking purchase in the solid world before their time ran out, sticking to anything that would have them, slowly and deliberately beginning to accumulate on the roofs of neighboring buildings, the ledge outside the window, and eventually, on the street below. Somewhere in that great edifice across the way, his wife and best friend, his co-conspirator and confessor, the mother of his three surviving children, lay unconscious in a strange bed, hooked to machines, with tubes up her nose, fighting for her life. It was not even Christmas, and yet already it seemed the heart of winter was upon them.