I Married A Dead Man (6 page)

               
Recovery was on a second, concurrent plane as well. Dimension entered into it as well as duration. The physical size of her surroundings expanded along with the extension of her days. First there was just a small area around her that entered into awareness each time; the pillows behind her head, the upper third of the bed, a dim face just offside to her, bending down toward her, going away, coming back again. And over and above everything else, a small form allowed to nestle in her arms for a few moments at a time. Something that was alive and warm and hers. She came more alive then than at any other time. It was food and drink and sunlight; it was her lifeline back to life. The rest remained unfocussed, lost in misty gray distances stretching out and around her.

               
But this core of visibility, this too expanded. Presently it had reached the foot of the bed. Then it had jumped over that, to the wide moat of the room beyond, its bottom hidden from sight. Then it had reached the walls of the room, on all three sides, and could go no further for the present, they stopped it. But that wasn't a limitation of inadequate awareness any more, that was a limitation of physical equipment. Even well eyes were not made to go through walls.

               
It was a pleasant room. An infinitely pleasant room. This could not have been a haphazard effect achieved at random. It was too immediate, too all-pervading; every chord it struck was the right one: whether of color, proportion, acoustics, bodily tranquility and wellbeing, and above all, of personal security and sanctuary, of belonging somewhere at last, of having found a haven, a harbor, of being let be. The height of scientific skill and knowledge, therefore, must have entered into it, to achieve that cumulative effect that her mind could only label pleasant.

               
The over-all effect was a warm glowing ivory shade, not a chill, clinical white. There was a window over to her right, with a Venetian blind. And when this was furled, the sun came through in a solid slab-like shaft, like a chunk of copper-gold ore. And when it was unfurled, the dismembered beams blurred and formed a hazy mist flecked with copper-gold motes that clung to the whole window like a halo. And still at other times they brought the slats sharply together, and formed a cool blue dusk in the room, and even that was grateful, made you close your eyes without effort and take a nap.

               
There were always flowers standing there, too, over to her right near the head of the bed. Never the same color twice. They must have been changed each day. They repeated themselves, but never in immediate succession. Yellow, and then the next day pink, and then the next day violet and white, and then the next day back to yellow again. She got so she looked for them. It made her want to open her eyes and see what color they would be this time. Maybe that was why they were there. The Face would bring them over and hold them closer for her to see, and then put them back again.

               
The first words she spoke each day were: "Let me see my little boy." But the second, or not far behind, were always: "Let me see my flowers."

               
And after awhile there was fruit. Not right at first, but a little later on when she first began to enjoy appetite again. That was in a different place, not quite so close, over by the window. In a basket, with a big-eared satin bow standing up straight above its handle. Never the same fruit twice, that is to say, never the same arrangement or ratio of the various species, and never any slightest mark of spoilage, so she knew it must be new fruit each day. The satin bow was never the same twice, either, so presumably the basket was a different one too. A new basketful of fresh fruit each day.

               
And if it could never mean quite as much to her as the flowers that is because flowers are flowers and fruit is fruit. It was still good to look at in its way. Blue grapes and green, and purple ones, with the sunlight shining through them and giving them a cathedralwindow lustre; bartlett pears, with a rosy flush that almost belonged to apples on their yellow cheeks; plushy yellow peaches; pert little tangerines; apples that were almost purple in their apoplectic fullbloodedness.

               
Every day, nestled in cool, crisp, dark-green tissue.

               
She hadn't known that hospitals were so attentive. She hadn't known they provided such things for their patients; even patients who only had seventeen cents in their purses--or would have, had they had purses--when they were admitted.

               
She thought about the past sometimes, remembered it, reviewed it, the little there was of it But it brought shadows into the room, dimmed its bright corners, it thinned even the thick girder-like shafts of sunlight coming through the window, it made her want the covers closer up around her shoulders, so she learned to avoid thinking of it, summoning it up.

               
She thought.

               
I was on a train. I was closeted in the washroom with another girl. She could remember the metallic sheen of the fixtures and the mirrors. She could see the other girl's face; three dimples in triangular arrangement, one on each cheek, one at the chin. She could even feel the shaking and vibration, the slight unsteadiness of footing, again, if she tried hard enough. But it made her slightly nauseated to do so, because she knew what was coming next, in a very few seconds. She knew now, but she hadn't known then. She usually snapped off the sensory image, as if it were a lightswitch, in a hurry at this point, to forestall what was surely coming next.

               
She remembered New York. She remembered the door that wouldn't open. She remembered the strip of one-way tickets falling out of an envelope. That was when the shadows really formed around, good and heavy. That was when the temperature of the room really went down. When she went back behind the train-trip, to remember New York, on the other side of it.

               
She quickly shut her eyes and turned her head aside on the pillow, and shut the past out. . . .

               
The present was kinder by far. And you could have it so easy, any given moment of the day. You could have it without trying at all. Stay in the present, let the present do. The present was safe. Don't stray out of it--not in either direction, forward or backward. Because there was only darkness, way out there all around it, and you didn't know what you'd find. Sit tight, lie tight, right where you were.

               
She opened her eyes and warmed to it again. The sunlight coming in, thick and warm and strong enough to carry the weight of a toboggan from the window-sill to the floor. The technicolored burst of flowers, the beribboned basket of fruit. The soothing quiet all around. They'd bring the little form in pretty soon, and let it nestle against her, and she'd know that happiness that was something new, that made you want to circle your arms and never let go.

               
Let the present do. Let the present last. Don't ask, don't seek, don't question, don't quarrel with it. Hang onto it for all you were worth.

7

               
It was really the flowers that were her undoing, that brought the present to an end.

               
She wanted one of them one day. Wanted to separate one from the rest, and hold it in her hand, and smell its sweetness directly under her nose; it wasn't enough any longer just to enjoy them visually, to look at them in the abstract, in group-formation.

               
They'd been moved nearer by this time. And she herself could move now more freely. She'd been lying quietly on her side admiring them for some time when the impulse formed.

               
There was a small one, dangling low, arching over in her direction, and she thought she'd get that. She turned more fully, so that she was completely sideward, and reached out toward it. . . .

               
Her hand closed on its stalk, and it quivered delicately with the pressure. She knew she wouldn't have been able to break the stalk off short just with one hand alone, and she didn't want to do that anyway; didn't want to damage the flower, just borrow it for awhile. So she started to withdraw the stalk vertically from the receptacle, and as it paid off and seemed never to come to an end, this swept her hand high upward and at last back over her own head.

               
It struck the bed-back, that part that was so close to her that she could never have seen it without making a complete head-turn, and something up there jiggled and quivered a little, as if threatening to detach itself and come down.

               
She made the complete head-turn, and even withdrew out from it a little, into a half-sitting position, something she had never attempted before, to bring it into focus.

               
It was a featherweight metal frame, a rectangle, clasped to the top bar of the bed, loose on its other three sides. Within was held a smooth mat of paper, with fine neat writing on it that blurred until it had stopped the slight swaying that her impact had set in motion.

               
It had been inches from her head, just over her head, all this time, but she'd never seen it until now.

               
Her chart.

               
She peered at it intently.

               
Suddenly the present and all its safety exploded into fragments, and the flower fell from her extended hand onto the floor.

               
There were three lines at the top, in neat symmetry. The first part of each was printed and left incomplete; the rest was finished out in typescript.

               
It said at the top: "Section--"

               
And then it said: "Maternity."

               
It said below that: "Room--"

               
And then it said: "25."

               
It said at the bottom: "Patient's Name--"

               
And then it said: "Hazzard, Patrice (Mrs.)."

8

               
The nurse opened the door, and her face changed. The smile died off on it. You could detect the change in her face from all the way over there, even before she'd come any closer to the bed.

               
She came over and took her patient's temperature. Then she straightened the chart.

               
Neither of them said anything.

               
There was fear in the room. There was shadow in the room. The present was no longer in the room. The future had taken its place. Bringing fear, bringing shadow, bringing strangeness; worse than even the past could have brought.

               
The nurse held the thermometer toward the light and scanned it. Then her brows deepened. She put the thermometer down.

               
She asked the question carefully, as though she had gauged its tone and its tempo before allowing herself to ask it. She said, "What happened? Has something upset you? You're running a slight temperature."

               
The girl in the bed answered with a question of her own. Frightenedly, tautly. "What's that doing on my bed? Why is it there?"

               
"Everyone who's ill has to have one," the nurse answered soothingly. "It's nothing, just a--"

               
"But look--the name. It says--"

               
"Does the sight of your own name frighten you? You mustn't look at it. You're really not supposed to see it there. Sh, don't talk now any more."

               
"But there's something I--But you have to tell me, I don't understand--"

               
The nurse took her pulse.

               
And as she did so, the patient was suddenly looking at her own hand, in frozen, arrested horror. At the little circlet with diamonds, enfolding the third finger. At the weddingband. As though she'd never seen it before, as though she wondered what it was doing there.

               
The nurse saw her trying to take it off, with flurried little tugs. It wouldn't move easily.

               
The nurse's face changed. "Just a moment, I'll be right back," she said uneasily.

               
She brought the doctor in with her. Her whispering stopped as they crossed the threshold.

               
He came over to the bed, put his hand to her forehead.

               
He nodded to the nurse and said, "Slight"

               
He said, "Drink this."

               
It tasted salty.

               
They put the hand under the covers, out of sight. The hand with the ring on it.