Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [89]
Well, she is probably dead by now, I thought.
But if she was—this is how I worked things out—if she was, I would run no risk in going to the hospital and inquiring. Then my conscience or whatever you wanted to call it would be clear. I could write him a note saying that unfortunately I had been away, but had come as soon as I could.
No. Better not a note. He might show up in my life, thanking me. The word “buddy” made me uncomfortable. So in a different way did “remarkable accomplishments.”
Princess Margaret Hospital is only a few blocks away from my apartment building. On a sunny spring day I walked over there. I don’t know why I didn’t just phone. Perhaps I wanted to think I’d made as much effort as I could.
At the main desk I discovered that Charlene was still alive. When asked if I wanted to see her I could hardly say no.
I went up in the elevator still thinking that I might be able to turn away before I found the nurses’ station on her floor. Or that I might make a simple U-turn, taking the next elevator down. The receptionist at the main desk downstairs would never notice my leaving. As a matter of fact she would not have noticed my leaving the moment she had turned her attention to the next person in line, and even if she had noticed, what would it have mattered?
I would have been ashamed, I suppose. Not ashamed at my lack of feeling so much as my lack of fortitude.
I stopped at the nurses’ station and was given the number of the room.
It was a private room, quite a small room, with no impressive apparatus or flowers or balloons. At first I could not see Charlene. A nurse was bending over the bed in which there seemed to be a mound of bedclothes but no visible person. The enlarged liver, I thought, and wished I had run while I could.
The nurse straightened up, turned, and smiled at me. She was a plump brown woman who spoke in a soft beguiling voice that might have meant she came from the West Indies.
“You are the Marlin,” she said.
Something in the word seemed to delight her.
“She was so wanting for you to come. You can come closer.”
I obeyed, and looked down at a bloated body and a sharp ruined face, a chicken’s neck for which the hospital gown was a mile too wide. A frizz of hair—still brown—about a quarter of an inch long on her scalp. No sign of Charlene.
I had seen the faces of dying people before. The faces of my mother and father, even the face of the man I had been afraid to love. I was not surprised.
“She is sleeping now,” said the nurse. “She was so hoping you would come.”
“She’s not unconscious?”
“No. But she sleeps.”
Yes, I saw it now, there was a sign of Charlene. What was it? Maybe a twitch, that confident playful tucking away of a corner of her mouth.
The nurse was speaking to me in her soft happy voice. “I don’t know if she would recognize you,” she said. “But she hoped you would come. There is something for you.”
“Will she wake up?”
A shrug. “We have to give her injections often for the pain.”
She was opening the bedside table.
“Here. This. She told me to give it to you if it was too late for her. She did not want her husband to give it. Now you are here, she would be glad.”
A sealed envelope with my name on it, printed in shaky capital letters.
“Not her husband,” the nurse said, with a twinkle, then a broadening smile. Did she scent something illicit, a women’s secret, an old love?
“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Who knows? I will tell her if it is possible.”