“Professor, I’m so very sorry—”
“May I touch her?” I ask, brushing over his apology and inching closer to her side.
“Yes, that should be fine. One of the nurses will be in shortly to explain more about the routines they have in place. They will be well placed to discuss Mrs. Hobbs’s day-to-day care. Here, let me give you some time alone together.”
For a second, it is as if we are newlyweds again, the B and B owners beating a hasty retreat in case we are about to jump each other before the door has even swung shut. I would give anything to be back there now—Maggie wild and impulsive, me straitlaced, awkward, yet somehow always enough for her.
She seems smaller here, propped up against those awful hospital-issue pillows. Her hands rest on the sheet, as dainty as ever, the cannula sitting flush against the prominent veins and her papery skin. There is no chair by the bed. Clearly I am not expected to stay. How can I leave her here? She would be so frightened, were she awake. Frightened by the situation, certainly, but more by having no one to speak to, no one with whom to share her observations and every other waking thought. I know I have let Maggie down. I know she has needed so much more than a silent sounding board over the last few months.
When I touch her now, slowly, as if trying not to frighten a skittish neighborhood cat, her hand feels warm. It is so horribly unnatural. Even on the warmest summer evenings, I could always rely on Maggie to place her cool hands on my forehead after the cycle home. I have spent a lifetime being called upon to act as a human glove and draw some circulation back into her palms. Now this? We needed each other. But more than that, we chose each other, we wanted each other—you will never know just how great that feels until it is taken from you.
Behind me, there is a shuffling. I turn gently, without breaking contact with Maggie. A nurse has arrived, the blue plastic covers over her shoes rustling on the linoleum as she takes readings from the screens at the back of the room. I have no idea how long she has been there, but she notices when I look round, and I sense she may have been sent to keep an eye on me.
“I can bring you a chair, if you’d like?” she asks, her Yorkshire accent warm and reassuring. “It can’t be good for you, all that standing.” She is clearly young. She can’t be more than, what, twenty-five? She has the sort of easy charm that Maggie always had, a way of lighting and lightening up a room all at once. It sends me right back to forty years ago, the drizzle and the streetlamps and a drunken rendition of “Good King Wenceslas” providing the soundtrack to our first encounter.
“Shall I?” she prompts, interrupting my trip down memory lane. “Really, it’s no trouble, I promise.”
“Thank you. I’d be very grateful.”
For the best part of twenty-four hours, I have kept it together, but it is at this very act of human kindness that I feel I am ripe to come undone. The nurse returns shortly and even goes to the trouble of folding the seat out for me. I suddenly feel like the guest of honor at the most unpalatable picnic of my life.
“What’s your name?” I ask, not bothering to try to decipher her name tag in the dimness or run the risk of scrutinizing another woman’s chest at my wife’s bedside.
“Daisy,” she says. “None too dainty like one, though, I’ll admit.”
I try to smile. The whole bottom half of my face feels as if it is cracking with the effort.
“I am sorry, really very sorry to see this,” Daisy says, noticing as the corners of my mouth begin to drop. For a minute, maybe more, we both watch Maggie, her chest rising and falling with regimented efficiency, her lips slightly parted as if in a permanent state of surrender. Everything about this is not her. The discipline, the hush, the fuss of nurses providing the sort of kindness Maggie spent a lifetime expending and eventually being punished for.
“You can speak to her, you know,” Daisy says. “It’s so quiet here, often people feel scared to speak aloud. But you have to push through that. Let your wife hear your voice.”
I gulp. I wonder what Daisy would say if she knew. She seems so much wiser than her years, and I’m sure she has seen more than her fair share of suffering in this line of work. Even so, could she understand?
I think back to the day my voice first failed me. I was so close to confessing what I had done. I’d seen the consequences laid out before me, and the guilt was so pure, so overwhelming, that I knew I had to tell Maggie. The words were on the tip of my tongue, or at least I thought they were. I had braced myself as I tiptoed up the stairs to our bedroom.
Then I rounded the corner and I saw her in the half-light, struggling to sit up to reach a glass of water on the bedside table, a shadow of who she used to be, and I knew I couldn’t risk hurting her any more than she already had been. She was barely hanging on; I couldn’t bring her more bad news. I couldn’t tell her what I had to, not when it meant she would leave me. Every day when I couldn’t speak, in the silence, I lived with that same guilt, the same burning shame. I was suffocating myself, but somehow anything was better than the thought of telling Maggie what I had done and losing her forever.
Daisy clears her throat lightly to bring me back in the room. “I’m no doctor, don’t get me wrong, but I can say what I have seen, and sometimes it is a familiar voice that will do it, more than these tubes ever will. The patient hears you. It reminds them of all the good things they have to wake up for. Spurs on the recovery, you know?”
I don’t know, but I nod regardless. I can see how much she cares about Maggie, even if she is just one of an extensive list of patients. Daisy has large fingers, long and thick, but they move so tenderly as she works to straighten the fabric at Maggie’s neck where it has bunched up under the tubes. It’s the sort of gesture I know Maggie would appreciate.
“You could tell her your news,” Daisy prompts. “You’ve probably got plenty to say anyway, after the day you’ve had. Or maybe there’s something that’s been on your mind that you want to share?”
“Well, I’ve certainly got that.” My attempt to sound lighthearted comes out as it really is—sheepish and forced.
“Pardon? I didn’t catch that. You’re muttering,” Daisy says, taking one final reading from the monitor next to Maggie and flipping her pad shut.
“Sorry—yes, I do have something I need to tell her. Something important. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her before.”
The understatement alone is enough to crush me. I press my fist hard against my lips and force myself to look at Maggie square on. How did I never realize just how small and fragile she has become? She has always been tiny—a good foot shorter than me. The first winter we lived together, I couldn’t wrap my head around the sheer volume of jumpers she needed to wear on her minuscule frame just to function around the rental flat. The dubious central heating didn’t help matters, Maggie hopping from one foot to the other like an aerobics instructor while I bashed at the buttons in the boiler cupboard to no avail. I learned early on that she brought her own warmth wherever she went.
“Now isn’t the time to be hard on yourself. Ease Maggie in. Don’t blurt it all out, mind—you don’t want to scare her away. Definitely not at first. Try to keep it positive. Remind her she’s loved. Tell her about all those times you showed her that.”