The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [78]
Seeing Eddie, who’d been so relieved, so relieved, to hear he’d had nothing to do with my pregnancy—that was the hard part. I told Andrea the breezy hellos came easy after a while, but they never did. With every encounter, I remembered what was at stake. I remembered the witness. I waved to Eddie across the cul-de-sac and said, “How’re you doing?” and responded when he asked the same, “Great! Great!” A pretense that went on for years and years.
You’re always amazed what you’re capable of. You swallow the lump in your throat, bite back the heart-pounding fear of discovery. If the rush of blood in your ears makes it impossible to hear what you’re saying, you talk all the same.
You smile and move forward.
You don’t retreat.
Chapter 19
November 20
It happens again the week before Thanksgiving.
The patient in question this time, Harold Fetterman, is seventy-three years old, a large, gregarious man scheduled for surgery on an ingrown toenail. Sitting on the examining table, unembarrassed by the unruly tufts of white hair that cover his chest and ample belly, he exchanges a few pleasantries with her, then grows quiet to let her listen to his heart. He’s been through this before. Julianne’s fingers begin to tingle the moment she touches him with her stethoscope.
This is a new phenomenon, the sensation running through an instrument instead of coming directly through contact with the skin. Her fingers begin to tingle, then burn. The blood thrumming in her ears is far too loud to let her listen to anyone’s heartbeat but her own.
The blackness that swiftly follows seems to emanate from Mr. Fetterman’s chest. It surges through her hands, into her arms.
Somehow, she allows it—the savage, coursing sizzle in her blood, the trembling weakness. The visceral knowledge of a failing body, crumbling toward death. The rape by something that does not and should not belong to her, entering all the same, claiming her, and then, satisfied, gone. Somehow, she manages not to flinch.
Though she can’t escape the sense that she’s going to faint, she also knows with deep certainty that she won’t. Though she can’t elude the pain, as wrenching as physical pain but not physical, and somehow worse because of that—yet even at its peak she stands a little apart from herself, watching. Analyzing. Trying to make sense.
When the weakness dissipates—after only a few seconds, though it feels like hours—she is aware, more than she was the other times, that if this is the Angel of Death calling, it is not calling for her. To that extent, she is free of it. She is free right now. It is calling for Harold Fetterman.
Without knowing any more than that, without having listened to his heart or been privy to any more of his medical history than what he’s just told her, she excuses herself to tell Peter she thinks he’s on the verge of a heart attack.
By the time Julianne returns to the examining room, Mr. Fetterman’s color is a little gray. He hasn’t complained or said a word, but his expression has grown uneasy. “My chest feels a bit tight,” he tells her moments later, just before the ambulance screams up to the front door. “I’m having a bit of trouble breathing.” Julianne is about to sound the alarm when the EMTs rush in, maneuvering their gurney, and Mr. Fetterman is whisked to the hospital less than a mile away.
Afterward, she stands rigid in the corridor, trembling. Denise, the other nurse who does physicals, puts her arm around Julianne and guides her to a chair in an empty examining room. “Sit down in here awhile, honey,” she says. “It’s a shock. Anyone would feel like you do.” Denise brings her a glass of water. Julianne drinks it, then stares at the wall. She doesn’t know how much time has passed before Peter comes in. “The hospital called,” he says, “to say how fortunate Harold Fetterman was to have such a serious coronary event caught so