Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [99]
There was a waiting area up there, a few benches, a few people, the inevitable television bolted to the ceiling, blasting talk-show noise into the hallway. That hospital smell of chicken-noodle soup and industrial cleansers, of blood and rubbing alcohol, filled the air. A mother sat with a toddler in one corner, a little girl she bounced on her knee. I’ll remember this, I thought, trying to catch my breath. I will remember all of this forever.
“Do you want to see him?” asked the nurse.
I did not. I wanted to hold in my memory the way he’d looked the first time I’d seen him in the Starbucks: healthy and fit, splendidly dressed, completely in control of the world around him, confounded by the coffee. Still, I nodded and let the nurse lead me down a hallway and into the tile-floored room where my husband had died.
Marcus lay on a bed, on top of dirtied sheets, alongside a single inside-out rubber glove. There were stickers pasted to his gray-furred chest, wires hooked up to box on a wheeled stand, an IV plugged into his arm. The room smelled like shit. His eyes were closed, his hair sticking up on the back of his head, and his face seemed to have somehow collapsed, giving him the look of a much older man.
“We need to get him cleaned up before the children see him.” My voice came out just right: clear and cultured, a voice used to being obeyed.
“Of course,” said the nurse. She went to the corner and picked up a phone. I reached out, smoothing my husband’s hair and realizing that what I’d suspected was undeniably true. He had been the love of my life. Every night, I’d fallen asleep with his arms around me and his face nestled in my neck. Every morning he’d brought me tea and kissed me. You’re my favorite person in the world, he would say. What will become of me? I wondered again, touching his forehead, feeling his skin, already cool and waxy, underneath my palm.
“What do I do now?” I asked.
The nurse looked at me, not unkindly. She had a ring on her left hand. I wondered if she had children, where she lived, what her life was like, if she was happy, if she was loved. “There’ll be a social worker coming along soon. She can talk to you about arrangements. Do you know what his wishes were?”
I almost laughed. His wishes were that we’d live together for years and years, that we’d travel, go to parties, go to dinners, go dancing. He wanted to buy a house in Vail and take his kids skiing. He wanted to sleep in on the rare Sunday morning he didn’t have to work, and then be woken up with a blow job. “I’m a simple man,” he’d always say when I was done.
“We’re having a baby.” My voice was faint. My hand was still on Marcus’s hair. He’s sleeping, I told myself, even though it didn’t look like that at all. His features had already started to change, to become somehow cruder. The nurse looked at me, surprised, first at my face, then at my belly.
“Oh, not me. A surrogate. She’s—we’re—due in May.”
The nurse looked like she didn’t know what to say to that. I sympathized. Congratulations? I’m sorry? Nothing was right.
There was a sink against the wall, a container of hand soap bolted beside it. In the bathroom, I found paper towels and, in a cabinet along the wall, a kidney-shaped plastic pan. I filled the pan with soap and warm water. Someone had sliced through his shirt and pants, and they lay like a discarded wrapper against him. “Can you help me?” I asked.
“Oh, ma’am, we can take care of that.”
“Please,” I said, and found that I was crying. “Please.”
She helped me shift his body, pulling off the clothes, throwing them away. I wiped off the backs of his legs and pulled the sticky plastic pads off his chest, found a brush in my purse and brushed his hair. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother,” said the nurse, helping me cover him