She walked him down old city streets of old memories. When they arrived, even as he walked the hallway, he was still intent only on making the distance.
But he was not so far gone, for when he saw her in the hospital bed, swimming in that awful blue gown, he knew at once what it had all been for, why he had started off and why he had struggled, and it wasn’t to win, it wasn’t for God, and it wasn’t stubbornness or pride or courage. He went to her and she looked at him standing over her. All time and distance between them collapsed, and without any mental searching for the word, he said to her, “Hello, banana,” and then reached out to take her hand.
She was ready, she had been all packed up and ready to go. She’d made her amends and given herself final rites in a church of her own devising, godless, none of that superstition that cancer patients, some former incorrigible atheists, suddenly invent out of desperation. She had actually heard from another woman in the ward that God had created cancer, with its lag time between diagnosis and death, to give the disbeliever time to reform. Chemo and radiation weren’t cures. They were modest foretastes of the hell the unrepentant could expect if they persevered in their godlessness.
When it came to God, she thought, ordinary people were at their most inventive.
God, if He was anything, was the answer to the mystery of why you got sick. She knew about the tree and the serpent and the temptation and the fall, but call that the broader cause. She wanted the revelation of the biological confoundedness. If He’s in the details, He should be able to explain them. Upon dying you get paperwork that takes you step by step — the reason for the first errant cell, the exact moment of its arrival on the scene, and then, and then — and when you finish reading, the coffin light goes out, and you roll over for your eternal rest. That was the extent to which she permitted herself to believe in the existence of God.
Before he suddenly walked into the room, she hadn’t heard from Tim. If he was dead, she wanted to believe that when his suffering ended, he was finally given an explanation, that his paperwork listed the cause or causes and unlocked the mechanics and offered a justification. That would be the least God could do for him.
Which was wishful thinking, no less than that of the conversion-through-cancer nutcase down the hall. Death was God’s secrets extended into eternity.
Her modest size could not afford the weight she had lost. The tendons in her neck showed when she strained to sit up. To touch her back was to feel along an exotic scale of ribs and spine. She kept her hair in barrettes as a way of doing something with her hair at least. So few people had sent flowers. Dr. Bagdasarian had stopped by with tulips, and Becka’s boyfriend had sent a mixed bouquet, and Michael, of course, who still loved her. She could not have made it any plainer to Michael and yet he would probably stand at her graveside as she was being lowered into the ground and profess his devotion once again. She didn’t want it. Yet she did want more flowers.
They were counting on something new, a clinical trial. She was in it for everything she had.
She hoped he’d died indoors. She didn’t think it was likely but the alternative was unthinkable, dying in a frozen field, or in some doorway in a distant city, alone until some inquisitive soul bent down, and the gapers started to cluster, and the cops found nothing, no wallet, no phone, nothing, and so had no next of kin to call. That was how they came to mourn him, she and Becka, without really mourning him, a totally unsatisfying way to mourn. Then he walked into the room, ravaged by the acts of time, thinner than she had ever known him to be, who knew every inch of him by touch, sundered from every appearance of happiness, suffering every ailment except immobility, and it took everything in her power to attribute his reappearance to the determination of a man who loved her, and not to a merciful act of God.
After Becka left with Jack, he drew a chair over to her bed and explained where he had been and how he had come to be there.
“I thought the worst,” she said.
“That I would be alive and look like this?”
The film of tears that glazed over her dark and hollowed eyes quivered as she smiled. She squeezed his few fingers, no less bony and fragile than her own. “I think you look devastating,” she said.
“Devastated?”
“As handsome as you ever were.”
“Now there is a tender lie,” he said.
They got reacquainted after so long a time apart. He said little at first because there was so little to say, confusing his experiences on the road for the ordinary banality of endurance. They came to know him at the hospital, where she referred to him as her husband again, and they adjusted to the sight of a man they would ordinarily expect to be tending to in a room of his own walking in and out of hers. He did not smile at them, at the nurses at their station. He hardly even cast them a glance. He said nothing unless it was to ask for something on her behalf, and he came and went like a tinker or beggar, in the same hitchhiker’s outfit, if not the very same clothes, and with a heavy backpack swaddling his skinny frame.
Though returned to her at last, his body continued its demands and he was forced to leave her at a moment’s notice. This was a new twist in an old cruelty, as time now meant so much more to him than those odious deposits of downtime and distant walks that had come to define these latter years. They could not say how much time she had left, and to leave under such circumstances was prodigal, ridiculing any sentiment of homecoming.
He discharged the walks with dutiful resignation, the way a busy hangman leaves for the day without scruple or gripe, and then he turned around and walked back.
“Where do you go when you leave?”
“I go lots of places.”
“When you left yesterday, where did you go?”
“Yesterday I went to the beach,” he said.
He removed from his pocket a smooth seashell with a swirl of brown leading into its dark hollow. The top of the shell spiraled to a sharp point. He put the shell in her hand and then sat down in the chair in the corner.
It was the perfect shell, exotic and intact. This was no Rockaway shell or Coney Island shell, not even a Jersey Shore shell. To get a shell like this, you had to walk to the Caribbean.
“Where did you get this? You can’t find a shell like this around here.”
“I told you. I went to the beach.”
“What beach? What was it like?”
“At the beach? It was cold.”
“What did you see there?”
“Well,” he said. “I saw nothing, really.”
“You walked and walked,” she said. “You must have seen something.”
“On the way I remember seeing an old woman. She was in her nightgown but with a heavy overcoat. She wore a pair of pink boots and she was raking leaves in front of a brownstone.”
“What else?”
“People leaving a building for the evening.”
“What else?”
“I ran my hand along a chain-link fence.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. That’s all I remember.”
“In all that time?”
“That’s it,” he said.
For the first time he began to pay attention to the things he saw on his walks, so that when he returned to her, he had observations of the outside world to share. They were fleeting, they were middles without beginnings or ends, but they were diverting — for him to witness, for her to hear. She soaked them up. They seemed just as much nourishment as whatever the doctors were providing.
He realized he might have been doing it wrong for years. He might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he had paid attention from the beginning. But that would have been hard. That would have been for himself. It was easier now, doing it for someone else.