BRUCE DID NOT WONDER. He knew. He had not a single doubt about what he would do after Teresa died. It played in his mind like a movie with him as the only character, its solo shining star. He knew before she died—seven weeks to the very day, it turned out, to everyone’s sorrow and surprise. The knowledge of what he would do did not come to him immediately, in the moment they learned that she had cancer, but later on that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, after they’d left the hospital and gone—amazingly—to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then driven home and lain in bed thinking they would make love, but then not been able to make love because they were weeping so hard and Teresa’s back hurt.
Her back did more than hurt.
Hurt was too small a word to contain what was going on in her back. It was killing her, she’d said before they’d found out about the cancer. Once she’d said it afterward too, about a week after they knew about the cancer, when the reality had hunkered down and stayed. “My back is killing me,” she’d muttered, turning to him in the kitchen, holding two glasses of water, one for each of them, in the short window of time they had when a thing such as holding two glasses of water did not seem to them an utterly Herculean task. He looked at her and for a moment they both hesitated, as if taking a breath in unison. They’d been balling their brains out since noon. Her back was killing her, they realized, and then they almost fell onto the floor laughing in hysterics. The water was dropped. The glasses were shattered. Their house was a madhouse from that moment on. Nobody gave a fuck about a glass.
It felt like a zipper, she’d explained to the doctor that day they’d found out. That her spine was a zipper and someone was coming up behind her and zipping it and unzipping it mercilessly. She’d almost cried saying this, almost seemed to grovel and beg. It pained him. He rose and went to stand behind her chair and rubbed her back uselessly. The doctor nodded his head, as if he’d known about the zipper all along, as if people marched through his door every day to complain about mechanical devices embedded in their spines.
Later, they learned her spine was a zipper, the cancer pulling it apart, stitching it back together in a way that it was never meant to be. Her lungs were also a zipper, and likewise her liver, and ovaries, and parts of her body they didn’t even know were there. It was like a root that went on and on, blocking the way no matter where they dug. Even the doctor used these words. The zipper. The root. Nothing was a metaphor. With Teresa’s cancer the most absurd things were literal.
And so Bruce, by necessity, was literal too. He wasn’t kidding when he decided that after Teresa died he would kill himself. He had not, in his life, in his before Teresa has cancer life, been the type of person to say, “I would just die” or “It made me want to die” or anything along those ridiculous lines, the way people did when they in fact had no intention or desire to actually die—when they thought they were being funny or needed to exaggerate a point.
Bruce was not a man to exaggerate. He would truly, absolutely, cross-his-heart die.
He would live through the funeral and then he would act. He reasoned this would give Joshua and Claire a moment to catch their breath, but not enough time to even begin to accept their reality. Reality for Joshua and Claire would be that, in one horrible week, they lost their mother and then their father. Not what they called their real father, a man named Karl they scarcely knew, but their stepdad, their Bruce, the guy they’d loved as their father since they were six and eight. Of course they would grieve their mother harder. Bruce did not begrudge them that, but still he knew his death would be a mighty hard blow. It did not make him happy to think of them and what they would do all by themselves; in fact, it pierced his heart. But the pain of that was not as great as the pain of having to go on living without their mother, and so his mind was made up. If this was to work, he could not afford compassion and he could also not afford pity. Not for Claire, not for Joshua, not for Teresa.
Regrettably, he had promised Teresa things on which he was simply not going to be able to follow through. At the time that he made the promises, he had not lied. The promises had been made dry-eyed and immediately, while they ate that first night in the Chinese restaurant, before he’d known what he would do. Of course he said he would raise her children, who were essentially both already raised.
“But they still need their mother,” Teresa had crooned, almost losing it entirely. Years before, she had told him that her secret way of collecting herself was to think of things, things that had nothing to do with anything. Often, she kept herself from crying by thinking can of beans, can of beans, again and again. In the Chinese restaurant, while she had gazed at the goldfish, he wondered if she was thinking can of beans. She didn’t seem to be. She seemed to be honestly concerned about the fish. Out loud, she wondered if they were hungry and looked around, as if for food, and then her eyes latched back onto him.
She told him she wanted to discuss this issue once and right away and then they would never speak of it again.
Yes, he would be there for Claire and Joshua, Bruce told her. Yes, he would be both mother and father. Neither of them at this point had actually absorbed the information that she was truly going to die soon. They’d been told, but they didn’t believe. For that blessed hour in the Chinese restaurant his future life as a widower played before him sweetly as a benign dream. It was the movie that played in his mind before the movie of him killing himself supplanted it. He would comfort Joshua and Claire in their grief. He would hold them and weep and remind them of all the things their mother had said and done. He would tell them things they hadn’t known—how their mother used to think can of beans when she didn’t want to cry. The three of them would go on a camping trip—perhaps they’d canoe down the Namekagon River like they’d done several times as a family—or to Florida, to Port St. Joe, where they’d been with their mother, before they knew him. This trip would heal their grief. They would laugh, they would weep, they would return home stronger and better and basically okay. They would take this trip annually, to commemorate the anniversary of her death. When they married he would walk them down the aisle and give them a special flower that represented their mother. Their children would call him grandpa or maybe simply papa, the name he’d called his own dad’s dad.
At the Chinese restaurant, Teresa had put her hands over his on the table. “I wasn’t questioning you. I hope you know that,” she said. “I know how much you love them. It’s just that I needed it all to be spoken out loud.”
She took her hands away and looked again into the pond and it was done.
There was nothing administrative to take care of. She had not written a will, but why should she? She had no life insurance policy. The land and the house would of course someday go to the kids. This, they hadn’t even thought to say.
Later that night almost everything he’d promised was washed away by his new plan. He decided he would live five, maybe six days without her. They would have the funeral and he would wait a day, letting everyone get a good night’s sleep, and then he would make his move.
Once the idea came to him it took about five minutes to make up his mind between rope or gun. He chose the rope. He was not a hunter. The gun in their house had been used for only three purposes: to scare away the raccoons that came on occasion to harass the hens, to scare away the porcupines that came to gnaw the wood of their front stairs, and to teach them all how to shoot the gun so they, when necessary, could scare away the raccoons and the porcupines. If he used the gun, there was a chance he would botch the job. He knew how to tie a knot. He knew how to tie seventeen knots, each perfect for one task or another. This, he owed to his mother, whose father had been a sailor on the Great Lakes and who had insisted that he learn all the knots that her father had taught her.
First he imagined the exact knot he would use, then he imagined the exact tree. It was a maple. It grew in the place on their land they called “the clearing”—a small meadow, the only meadow on their forty acres amid the trees—a good spot to die. The place calmed him. He and Teresa and Claire and Joshua had had many good times there. When he could honestly picture himself hanging dead from the maple tree in the clearing he was more sorry than ever about Claire and Joshua. But in this he had to be selfish. He knew what he could do and what he could not do and he could not go on living without Teresa no matter how much he loved her kids.
He hoped they wouldn’t be the ones to find him. But then, who else would? He imagined them trudging through the woods calling his name—at the time he decided to kill himself he didn’t know how quickly Teresa would die, so he could not know whether there would be snow in the woods or not—but for all of their sakes, he imagined there would be snow. Not this year’s snow, but next year’s snow. Snow that hadn’t even been formed yet, snow that wasn’t even remotely thinking about falling, snow that would be made in the sky and let drop to the ground in the farthest reaches of the time that the doctor predicted Teresa could be expected to live. One year. And so, in next winter’s snow Claire and Joshua would be trudging through the woods calling his name. When he had first met them he had told them his name was not Bruce. They had been waiting for him in the parking lot of Len’s Lookout, but when he finally pulled up, they ran, frightened as wild animals who were instantly tamed once he called their names. “Are you Bruce?” asked Claire, giggling and hopping on one foot. “No,” he’d said, “I’m Bruce, Bruce-Bo-Buce-Banana-Fanna-Fo-Fuce …” They shrieked with delight when he was done and begged him to sing it again. Then he taught them the song using their own names. They scared him a little, how fast they loved him, how they clenched his hands with theirs as they sang, how later, at dinner, they did not want to sit beside him but on him, fighting with each other over his lap.
These children whom he had met when he was twenty-seven, these children who had been born in a state where he’d never been, these children whom he had bossed and cajoled, kissed and scolded, grounded and applauded and taught how to drive a stick shift, they would be his search party of two.
He did not think they would make a big ruckus. At first they would believe that he was sad and had simply gone out to chop wood. He was a worker, they’d always known him to work, and they would assume that it was to work he turned in his grief. Slowly, dimly, they would wonder why they didn’t hear the chain saw, the ax. They would stand first on the porch and call his name, and then in the driveway. Finally, before dark, they would go out to look for him. Claire would most likely be wearing the scarf her mother knitted for her, red, soft wool, with a white star near each end. Her nose would run and, along with the mist from her breath, the whole mess would freeze on her chin and on the scarf that pressed against it. She and Joshua would stop walking and listen for him, then hearing nothing, holler his name. They would look at each other and then into the trees despairingly. Possibly, Joshua, on some gut instinct, would be carrying the gun.
He attempted to keep from imagining their faces in the moment when they actually came upon his body hanging in the tree, but he could not keep the image from surfacing in his mind and the grief that shot through him as he lay in bed beside Teresa was so great that he almost decided to live.
Then it dawned on him that he could write a note.
Of course he could, and he would. The note would be left in the middle of the kitchen table and they would find it well before beginning to wonder where he was. In the note he would strongly discourage them from going into the woods themselves. He would forbid them from going into the woods. He would command them to call the sheriff. This was precisely the kind of thing the sheriff was for. He would write that he was sorry and that everything he owned belonged to them. His truck, his tools, the house and land. He assumed they would assume this, but since they were not related by blood or in any way legally bound to him, he did not want them to have any trouble. His note would serve as his will. He would tell them other things they already knew but would need to hear one last time. That he had loved their mother and he loved them like his own children since day one. He would write that they should stick together and take care of each other—they only had each other now—and that someday in many, many, many years they would all be together as a family again, reunited in heaven. He did not necessarily believe in heaven, and they knew this, but neither did he not believe in it, and he hoped they knew this too. For the sake of Joshua and Claire he would become a believer in heaven. Heaven would soften the blow.
In bed that first night beside Teresa, and then later, while he sat next to her hospital bed or lay in the cot the nurses had set up for him in her room, he wrote his note to Claire and Joshua in his mind over and over again. He scanned for other details, things he might have overlooked. He pictured himself hanging in the tree. And then the dogs came running up, right into the picture. Thank God he was planning ahead. He would have to leave Spy and Tanner inside—shut into a room—so they wouldn’t dash out when Joshua or Claire entered the house and go directly to the clearing to howl frightfully up at him hanging in the tree, causing Claire or Joshua to follow them, inevitably drawn, curious and entertained, before having noticed the note.
He would see to it that they absolutely noticed the note. This was his solemn vow, his version of keeping his promise to Teresa. Her children would never have to see their “father” dangling by a rope, with a broken neck, dead in a tree.
At the very end, Bruce confessed his plan to Teresa while she lay in her bed in the hospice wing of the hospital, but she made no response. Her skin was the texture of dust, her body like that of a paper doll. He pinched her arm hard then—he had to do that sometimes, just to keep his sanity—and she opened her eyes like a drunkard and closed them and fell instantly back to sleep. They’d reached the point where her morphine dose needed to be so high that most of the time she slept or when she woke she spoke of things that made no sense—not even to her, when pressed to explain—though on occasion she was as conscious and lucid as if she’d simply arisen from a long, restorative nap.
“I’m going to kill myself,” he almost shouted, and then he put his head on the bed, too exhausted to weep. Again she did nothing. It was almost midnight. He’d just gotten off the phone with Claire, who’d called to report that she’d be there in the morning and at last—they believed—she’d have Joshua with her. They would arrive in the morning and then the long wait would begin, the vigil that the three of them would keep night and day in the hospital until it was—the words were ridiculous, Bruce thought, he didn’t even want to use them—over. Earlier in the evening a doctor had asked Bruce to come out into the hallway and informed him that Teresa was “actively dying.”
Afterward he hadn’t returned to her room. Instead he began walking, not knowing where he was going. The hallways were lit dimly, soothingly, good lights to die by, lit only by the glowing lights of vending machines, and punctured by the bright lights that spilled occasionally from patients’ rooms or the nurses’ station, a beacon at the center of everything. He passed the room of an angry hippie man who didn’t seem to be dying because he spent the better part of each evening dragging his IV to the third-floor patio where patients were allowed to smoke. He passed the room of an old man who was strapped into his bed by all four limbs. He passed the room of a frizzy-haired blond woman and noticed that she wasn’t there anymore, her bed now made with a clean white sheet, the room empty. Bruce had met her husband once. Bill. He imagined that Bill’s wife was dead now. He imagined it and didn’t feel a thing. Nor did he feel anything for the angry hippie man or the old man strapped in four places to his bed. In the smallest, hardest part of him he didn’t care if any of them suffered or died. He was sorry, but he couldn’t. To pity them would be to doom his wife.
He seemed to have no control over where his feet carried him. They carried him to the stairwell and then down five flights of stairs, each flight turned back on itself, until he had followed them as far as he could go. He went to the door that led back into the hospital and pushed it open.
Now he was in the basement, where the light was entirely different from the hospice wing. Brutal and fluorescent: a comfort to him. He walked down the long hallway. There was no one in sight. Maybe this is where the morgue is, he thought. Farther down the hall, in an industrial-sized kitchen, a black woman dressed in white stirred a giant pot of something with a paddle. He passed several orange, windowless doors, all of them closed. His earliest sexual fantasies had involved these sorts of mysterious doors that occupied public, yet seemingly forbidden, spaces. At the age of nine he’d been told by a friend’s older brother that gangs of beautiful naked women waited behind such doors, harems of sex-starved beauties, locked in, yearning for a man to walk through. He hadn’t thought of this for years, and a remote, perverse ache thrummed through him. He walked past a pay phone and then stopped and went back to it and dialed his home phone number. Claire didn’t pick up until the answering machine had and he’d spoken into it.
“Bruce,” she said, her voice sounding clogged, as if she had a cold, though he knew she didn’t.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Nothing … Josh—he’s allegedly out ice fishing with R.J. That’s what Vivian said. I’m waiting for him to come back and then we’ll come first thing in the morning. What’s happening there?”
“Things have …” How was he going to say it? He decided to say what the doctor had first said to him. “It seems as though this is it.” He wasn’t going to say what the doctor had said second. That she was dying. Actively.
“It?” howled Claire. She made a noise, like she was choking, gasping for air, but he pushed through it.
“So you should come with Josh as soon as you can.”
“But Josh is out ice fishing,” she said through her tears, her voice high-pitched and jagged. “And I’m afraid my Cutlass will get stuck if I drive out to the ice house to get him.”
“Well, then just wait until he comes back. We have some time, Claire. Come when you can.”
“Okay,” she said intently, as if he’d just given her a complicated list of instructions, and then hung up the phone without saying goodbye. He hung up too and then began to walk down the hall again, in the same direction he’d been heading, still not knowing where he was going or why. Maybe he would find a door that led out into the parking garage. He’d go there and look at cars.
“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice called from behind him.
He turned. He felt that he was being busted for something. Like trespassing.
“I could use a hand if you don’t mind.”
It was the woman who’d been stirring with the paddle in the kitchen. Before Bruce could move or reply, she turned and disappeared back into the doorway from which she’d emerged. He walked quickly down the long length of the hallway until he came to the kitchen again and he entered, weaving his way past enormous cooking machinery, until he got to where she stood.
“I need some muscle,” she explained. The woman’s hair was covered with a translucent plastic cap. She wore gold earrings shaped like turtles with little green gems for eyes. “I don’t know if they told you, but the guys in maintenance usually help me out when I need it since I’m here by myself for a couple of hours.”
He followed her to the gigantic pot that she had been stirring. It was full of a green liquid: Jell-O before it set.
“I’ve got to get this from the pot into these pans.” She gestured to more than a dozen pans lined up on a long wooden counter. “It’s real heavy, so it takes two.”
She gave him a pair of silver insulated mitts, burnt in places along each thumb. Bruce put them on and then gripped the handle on one side of the pot and the woman took the other handle and together they poured the liquid into the pans, working their way carefully down the counter, filling each one.
“Thanks,” she said, after they’d set the empty pot down. She took off her mitts and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. “How do you like it so far?”
“Like what?”
“Maintenance,” she said. “Aren’t you the new guy?”
He put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I was just taking a walk.”
“Oh!” She laughed deeply, throwing her head back. “All right, then. Well, I guess you fooled me,” she said, waving him away, turning back to her Jell-O. “I guess you’re just a Good Samaritan.”
He stood there for a few more moments, watching her slide the pans onto a cart that held each of them in racks, one on top of the other. She began to roll the cart, pushing on it with all of her weight, and he stepped forward to help her.
“I got it,” she said, pushing harder, so the cart pulled away from his hands. She opened a door that led to a walk-in cooler and then guided the cart in. “Happy St. Paddy’s Day,” she called to him. She came out of the cooler and slammed the door shut behind her. “It’s tomorrow. That’s why I made green.”
But by then he was already gone.
When he returned to Teresa’s room, Pepper Jones-Kachinsky was sitting next to her, holding her limp arm, two fingers pressed against Teresa’s wrist.
“I’m checking her pulse,” she whispered, without looking up.
Bruce watched her for several moments, the silent concentration of her face as she counted his wife’s heartbeats. Teresa didn’t stir or give any indication that she was aware of Pepper by her side, or of his presence in the room. She’d never met Pepper, technically speaking.
“It’s an ancient Chinese practice,” she said when she was done. “A holistic method. They believe you can learn everything you need to know about the condition of the patient from the pulse, and then you respond accordingly.”
He nodded. He didn’t have the heart to ask her what she had divined. He wanted only to be alone with his wife. Pepper came in the evenings to visit Bruce, and he imagined she’d been of some comfort to Claire in the daytime. He supposed he was grateful for that. Pepper meant well, and yet whenever he was in her presence it was as if a wasp were loose in the room.
“How are you?” she asked, standing up, coming to him. She took both of his hands and squeezed and looked directly into his eyes and would not look away. She did this every time she looked at him.
“Okay.” He turned to Teresa, and then Pepper did too. Teresa’s face in repose was as delicate and tranquil as a shell.
“Why are you here so late?” He gestured for her to sit on the vinyl couch and he sat in the chair across from her.
“I felt like coming down. I thought of you and I felt that I should come. That maybe you’d like to pray.” Immediately she closed her eyes and began, “Dear Lord …”
He bowed his head and lowered his eyes without closing them entirely and listened to her pray in a steady murmur while gazing at her shoes. Lavender Keds with clean white bumpers shaped like half-moons. He didn’t believe in God and neither did Teresa. Or at least not the version of God that Pepper seemed to be promoting, but he didn’t have it in him to say no. Certainly praying couldn’t hurt, even if it did make him feel remotely like a hypocrite, and remotely like the boy he’d once been, who’d been made to go to church each Sunday, to confession every time he’d sinned. Pepper prayed for Teresa’s health and recovery, for her peaceful passage if health could not be restored, for Bruce’s strength in the face of this suffering, and for that of all the people who loved Teresa. She asked God to watch over “all the children of the world and most especially Claire and Josh” and followed that with a formal prayer, something rote and vaguely familiar to Bruce, and then she crossed herself and reached out with her eyes still crushed shut and clutched his knee.
“Amen,” he said and she whispered amen too, saying it fiercely, almost savagely, without taking her hand from his knee.
When a decent enough time had passed, he said, “I appreciate it—you coming in. But you don’t have to. Actually … I thought I should tell you that my own beliefs,” he glanced at Teresa, “our beliefs—I mean, in God—are not that firm. We were both raised Catholic, but we didn’t stick with it. We aren’t in any way religious. So prayer …” He didn’t know how to continue without offending. Out on the street far below, he could hear a car horn blare for several seconds and then stop. “Prayer,” he continued, “is not going to be of much use to us.”
Pepper didn’t say anything. She went to the small table in the room, where they’d propped all the get-well cards, and picked one up and read it. It had a sepia-toned photo of a Conestoga wagon on the front. He wanted to rip it from her wrinkled hands.
She looked at him abruptly and put the card down, careful to prop it precisely as it had been. “Would you like a doughnut?” she asked, glancing toward a long box that sat near her coat and purse. She walked over to it and carried it to him, hoisting it up so he could choose.
He wasn’t hungry, but he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he took one—the first one his hand landed on, a glazed twist—and chewed it dispassionately as a beast in a field. When he was done he reached for his coffee, cold now, and took a swig. The coffee was strong and he intended to drink it all night. He didn’t want to sleep. Ever again.
“Thank you,” he said, setting his mug down. It said WYOMING! across the side; he’d taken it from the Family Room down the hall.
“They’re left over from my group that meets Monday nights.” She sat on the couch again and gestured for him to join her, and he did. “Speaking of which, that’s something you should know, Bruce. For afterwards. We have a group, ‘The Loss of a Loved One and Other Life Changes.’ It’s a family group. It meets once a week. You can all come together. We find that it—” she interrupted herself, a look of realization overtaking her face. “You know, we just did something that you may be interested in. In fact, it’s something I’d very much like to share with you.”
She stood and went to her purse, knelt to rummage through it, smiling at its contents, searching in the dim light of the room in each of its pockets and sections. She had an incredibly fit body for a seventy-year-old. She wore jeans with an elastic waistband and a sports bra that gathered her breasts into one firm bundle. She seemed constantly on the verge of turning a cartwheel.
“Here it is,” she exclaimed. “Heavens, this purse. All the doggone things I cart around!” She stood and came toward him, holding what he could now see was a purple marker, and took the cap off. “It’s a little exercise we did. Bow your head,” she said, as if she was about to perform a party trick. She parted his hair with her free hand and before he could agree or disagree, she pressed the tip of the marker to his scalp.
“Now,” she said, stepping back, replacing the cap on the marker. “I want you to remember that dot when you’re feeling sad or lonely. You can’t wash it off. Once it’s there, it’s there for life. It’s a reminder that you’re a special person. That you’re a child of God, which means that you’re never alone, Bruce. Not for a minute. It means that you are a beloved man who lives in the light of God’s love, as we all do.”
“How are the animals?” Teresa asked suddenly, her voice clear as a spoon against a jar.
They turned to her, startled. Bruce rushed to the bed.
“The animals? Fine.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Did you just wake up? They miss you—everyone does. The dogs are staying at Kathy Tyson’s now, until we can all be home.”
“Kathy Tyson?” She lifted her eyes to him. They appeared younger, bluer now because the rest of her had become so old.
“So they won’t be lonely. With us gone all the time they don’t have company.”
She smiled at him and her smile was like her eyes. The only two parts of her that were still that way.
“Would you like to pray?” Pepper asked from the foot of the bed, still holding the marker.
“Actually,” he said irritably, “we’d prefer if you’d—”
“Yes,” said Teresa, keeping her eyes on Bruce.
That night, despite the coffee, Bruce slept. Then woke. Then he flickered back to sleep and woke again, and again and again, as if a dumb but persistent hand attached to a stick was prodding him. At last he woke entirely, instantly, and sat up in his cot as if the hand had slapped him. He knew exactly where he was. Never in all of this did he forget where he was. The room was quiet, but recently so. The silence had a luxurious quality, as if in the wake of the terrible sound that had preceded it. Teresa was asleep, bathed in the gentle lights of the machines that were stationed around her head. He watched her face and then the noise came again—the noise he presumed had woken him in the first place—and he went toward it, a horrible high pitch from one of the machines. He pressed the flat buttons on the panel covered with numbers and indecipherable commands until the noise stopped. He stood staring at the display. Whatever he had done to silence the noise had caused the screen to rhythmically flash a series of zeros.
“You’re awake,” the nurse said as he glided into the room. His name was Eric. He carried a tray with a plate on it, covered by a dome-shaped lid. Teresa ate no matter what the time of day—or rather they tried to get her to eat, a thing that had become next to impossible. The evening before she’d allowed Bruce to spoon a sliver of a canned peach into her mouth and then chewed it obediently without seeming to taste it at all. The nurse set the tray down on the table beside Teresa’s bed and edged in next to Bruce and pressed several buttons on the panel and the zeros disappeared. “You were snoring like a baby when I came by here last.”
Bruce gazed at him dreamily, as if unable to comprehend what he was saying. His waking life had taken on the quality of dreams, his dream life, the quality of reality. “How’s your car running?” he asked after several moments.
“Fine,” Eric said. He was a chubby kid barely out of nursing school. Bruce had come to know and like him over the weeks of nights he’d spent at the hospital. Eric’s presence was undemanding and, most importantly, unconcerned. He hadn’t tried to talk Bruce into counseling, hadn’t told him how sorry he was, or how there were people “there for him,” or that his wife dying so quickly was actually for the best because now she wouldn’t suffer. Eric scarcely acknowledged that Bruce was having any trouble at all. In fact, he’d burdened Bruce with his own problem—a car that wouldn’t start on occasion or made a knocking sound upon acceleration when it did. Twice Bruce had gone down to the parking lot with Eric on his breaks to investigate the trouble with the car.
“Has she woken up?”
“No.” Then, “Once. About ten thirty, but just briefly. Maybe five minutes.”
Eric took Teresa’s wrist to check her pulse, watching the clock.
Bruce sensed that it was snowing. He felt that he could hear it falling outside or maybe he could smell it. He went to the window, drew back the curtains, and looked out.
“How’s her pulse?” he asked, turning back to Eric.
“Good.”
“There are these doctors. They base everything on the pulse. How to cure diseases and so on.”
Eric nodded pleasantly and wrote on the clipboard that was kept in a bin bolted to the wall by the door.
“They’re Chinese. That’s the kind of thing my wife’s into. Alternative things. I was thinking maybe I’d look into it, to see if they could help.”
Eric began to change Teresa’s catheter bag. Bruce turned back to the window and stared out the opening in the curtains. He’d been right. It was snowing, though spring was only a few days away. The wee hours of March 17, perhaps an hour before sunrise. Teresa’s parents and brother would be arriving that afternoon—they’d planned the visit weeks before, not knowing how sick Teresa would become, how quickly.
“I mean, you never know. I figure it’s worth a shot.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. He was fully dressed, in jeans, shirt, boots. He’d slept that way for the past sixteen nights. He became aware once more of the purple dot on his head that Pepper had made. It felt wet, as if it would smear if he touched it. And also slightly weighted, as if he were balancing a book on his head. After Pepper had left that evening he’d gone into the bathroom and attempted, uselessly, to get a look at it in the mirror. Of course he couldn’t see it. But it was there. It would stay. He felt it bore into him, a bullet from a soft gun.
He smoothed a hand over his hair and turned to Eric. “I’m not going to work anymore. I’m staying right here until all of this gets resolved. The kids are coming too.” He thought about Claire and Joshua, driving to Duluth now, he hoped. He ached for them.
“So you’ll need two more cots?” Eric asked.
Bruce nodded.
“I’ll submit a request form before I leave.” He placed the clipboard back in its bin and then removed his gloves, peeling them off from the inside out so that no part that had touched Teresa would touch him, and then walked out the door.
Bruce opened the curtains, wanting the light to wake Teresa when it came, feeling already how fierce it would be, the morning sun cutting against the new snow. He sat down in the chair beside her and opened the drawer of her nightstand and took the phone book from it. He had no idea where to begin, so he turned first to Chinese, though he knew that was ridiculous. Then he turned to Physicians and flipped through the pages, overwhelmed by the long list. He sat thinking for several moments and then paged through the list of doctors, scanning each name for anyone that sounded Asian and found a Dr. Yu. It was five o’clock in the morning, but such things didn’t deter him anymore. He dialed the number. “I need a healer,” he was going to say. Just like that. Maybe the Chinese doctor would know. Maybe he had a friend who would come and check Teresa’s pulse. The phone rang and rang, so long that the ringing finally stopped and there was an almost-silence that contained almost-sounds—faint crackling, glimmers of voices and conversations on other lines. He put the phone down and sat gazing at Teresa, who, though silent, had opened her eyes.
He said her name, shaking her a little. She remained perfectly still.
“Wake up, baby,” he said, shaking her harder. He put his hand to her face and at the very last moment she blinked. Though her eyes were open, she was neither looking at him nor not looking at him. She reminded him of one of those old-fashioned dolls with movable eyelids that close when you tilt them back and open when you put them upright. His mother had had one named Holly that he was forbidden as a child to touch without supervision, though he’d rarely cared to touch her, so deeply she’d creeped him out. He took the pillows from his cot and shoved them behind Teresa’s back, propping her up, so now she was staring in the direction of her feet instead of the ceiling. Her lower jaw hung slack, leaving her mouth slightly ajar. He pushed it closed, but when he let go it fell open again.
“The kids are coming,” he said. “Josh too—he was out ice fishing. And your parents and Tim, they’ll be here by three.”
If she would just make the smallest sound, the slightest motion, the most remote indication. Then he would be happy. All these days he’d been waiting for her to open her eyes and for her to keep them open, and yet now that she was doing that he wished she would close them. He placed his hand over her eyes, but they stayed open beneath it.
“You ready for breakfast?” He lifted the lid from the tray that Eric had brought in. A square of green Jell-O sat alone in a small bowl on a plate. He scooped some onto a spoon and held it to her mouth. “I made this for you, Ter. Open up. Honestly, it was so funny. I went for a walk and I ended up downstairs and then there was this kitchen and—”
She blinked.
“Here,” he said, and pushed the spoon into her mouth. “You’ve got to eat. If you don’t eat, how’re you going to get better?” Streaks of green liquid began to ooze from her mouth, dripping down her chin, but he wouldn’t look at her. He filled the spoon again and pushed another bite into her mouth, then turned to refill it again, but stopped himself and instead threw the spoon against the wall behind Teresa’s head with all of his strength. It ricocheted onto the wall at their side, then clanged to the hard floor beneath the bed.
After several minutes he took the cloth they kept nearby and wetted it in the sink and returned to clean her face with it, wiping the green stains from her chin and throat. He opened the tube of lip balm that sat on the table beside her bed and applied it to her slack lips.
“What do you want?” he asked, smoothing her eyebrows with his thumbs the way she liked.
She coughed once and her eyes fluttered shut, then opened again.
“Do you want me to say it’s okay if you die?” Pepper had told him this, that Teresa might need permission. That dying people will often wait until the people who love them encourage them to let go. “Because it isn’t, Ter. It’s not okay. You have a life to live, and we have our lives to live, and everyone needs you, so you can’t just give up now. Do you hear me?”
She made no move or acknowledgment of him. He sat silently watching her until light began to filter into the room from the window, soft and pale, first purple, then blue.
He bent and took his boots off and then pulled off his jeans and unbuttoned his flannel shirt and tossed them both onto his cot and crawled into the bed beside her and arranged the blankets over them. She wore only her hospital gown, and he pushed it out of the way so he could feel her skin against him.
“Let’s watch the sun rise,” he whispered into her ear and then closed his eyes. He stroked her arm, tracing his fingers down to her wrist until he found her pulse. It was strong, like he knew it would be. And fierce and small and fast. Like a force that could not be stopped or changed or helped or harmed. Like a woman who would live forever.