The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [112]
It turns out this is just the right suggestion. They want to be together, three brothers, once close, now not so close, especially with Elise tagging along. But a movie—yes. They’re at such unsettled ages right now. In ten years, twenty, they’ll be close again, in some new paradigm that includes wives and children. She can imagine them at Christmas in that distant future, in a room where all the other faces are, to Julianne, strangers. She doesn’t see herself in that scene. They won’t need her. In the largest sense, they don’t need her now.
She calls Doug and tells him she’s going to bed with a headache. This is not, she realizes, the way to treat a man you once thought you would marry. But he sounds relieved.
The empty house feels unsettled when the boys leave, the air still vibrating with the morning’s pent-up energy. Julianne walks through the rooms, planning to pick up whatever scraps of wrapping paper and ribbon and other detritus that may still be lurking, but the house is amazingly clean. Someone has even vacuumed. Probably Will.
When the phone rings, she almost snatches it up without checking the caller ID, just to have something to distract her. She sees Bill’s number just as her hand touches the receiver, and pulls it back as if it is hot. “Just wanted to see how everyone’s doing,” Bill says on the machine. He sounds lonely, though he has a wife and daughter to keep him company.
Uncharacteristically, Julianne is tempted to call back and say the boys are at a movie. Her real motive, she supposes, would be to tell him about Harold Fetterman’s visit. There’s no hostility in that, or neediness, either—though it occurs to her that the reason she could never have married Doug is because it would have been torture to live with a man from whom she has to keep secret the deepest part of her life.
Bill is the one, after all, who thinks she ought to seek a job where she can use her skills more fully. Maybe she will. His passive-aggressive approach always makes her wary, but for now, his suggestion seems less like an effort to get control of her than advice from someone who’s trying to be a friend.
After two or three circuits of the house, she is at last calm enough to sit down. Harold Fetterman believes she saved his life. Who knows? Maybe she did. At the very least, her sensitive fingers bought him some time, which he seems to be enjoying. She was wrong, the day he got sick, to think his survival meant only a few brief months of pain and fear when ignorance might have been better. Clearly, the man is glad to be alive.
It comes to her then that she also gave Paisley the gift of time. Not a pleasant or happy time, but immeasurably valuable all the same, in ways she hasn’t understood until now.
Another nurse might not have asked Paisley the right questions. Might have noticed how healthy Paisley looked and never felt her diseased liver at all. Julianne has seen that happen. If not for Julianne, it might have been weeks before Paisley’s condition was diagnosed. She would have been much sicker by then, had much less strength to prepare her children for what was to come. Paisley would have hated that. If no one could cure her, what Paisley would have wanted most was exactly what Julianne gave her—the chance to say a proper goodbye.
Julianne doesn’t know how Eudora Nestor, the other patient who died, spent her final months. Did she have a family? A business? Does it really matter? If she realized she’d been given a chance to settle her accounts, Julianne senses she, too, would have been grateful.
Even so, the idea that it will happen again, as she’s sure it will, makes Julianne shudder. The tingling that magnifies itself into liquid fire, into darkness incarnate, the sense that death is running through her veins, is something she’ll always dread. Anyone would. It is a brief enough blackness, but horrible all the same.
Yet if she’s really able to help people finish what they came here for, perhaps the pain is worth the price. There are times when you allow it,