Her eyes quickly grow enormous.
Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands, or markings of any kind.
She feels another chunk of herself give way.
Blank.
The face of the watch is blank.
“Stay calm, Annie, it tends to run a bit ahead,” Lieberman says. “There’s still a chance for you to say good-bye. ”
Annie suddenly finds herself out of her chair, and this time makes no attempt to catch her magazine as it spills off her thighs, landing on the floor at her feet. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch tower consumed by a roiling ball of flame. Its bold red copy — also less than altogether visible from where she stands — screams something about an explosion involving Orion, one of the mid-schedule ISS assembly flights.
Confusion churns within her. How can this be? Orion’s mission is still a couple of years off, and besides, the article had been an overview of the ISS program… at least she’d thought it had…
All at once Annie isn’t sure she remembers, just as she’d initially been unable to remember being at the hospital. Her memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.
“Your husband is in Room 377. But you already know that, you’ve been there before,” Dr. Lieberman is saying. He gestures toward the far end of the corridor. “Not often enough, perhaps, although I’m no one to talk. We’re both busy professionals. ”
Annie watches Lieberman turn in the opposite direction, her eyes following him as he starts up the hall. While his voice had remained neutral, that last remark had been superloaded with accusation, and she is unwilling to let it pass. He might think it is his God-given prerogative to relate his test results without climbing down off his perch to tell her what he means to do about them, but if there is some criticism he wants to level at her, then he damn well ought to be saying it in plain English.
She starts to call out to him, but before she can utter a sound, Lieberman pauses and looks back at her, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Turnips first and always,” he says, and grins. “I’d advise you to hurry. ”
Then he tips her a little salute and hustles up the hall, dwindling in perspective like a motion picture character about to vanish over the horizon.
I’d advise you to hurry.
Her heart stroking in her chest, she forgets about Lieberman and whirls toward the room in which her husband lies dying.
In instant later Annie is standing at its door. Breathless, she feels like she’s come running over to it at full tilt, yet has no sense of her legs having carried her from the waiting room, of physically moving from point A to point B, of transition. It is as if she’d been staring at Lieberman’s back one moment, and found herself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop herself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon her husband.
For his sake, trying to hold up.
She takes a deep gulp of air, another. Then she reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.
The light inside is all wrong.
Odd as it may be for her to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit her vision. Although she can see the foot of her husband’s bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of gauze, she sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Mark’s legs under the blankets, sees that he is resting on his back, but his face…
She thinks suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone’s features are concealed to protect his or her anonymity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being led toward their arraignments by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person’s face ought to appear.
That is how Annie sees her husband from the doorway of Room 377 in the hospital where he will die of cancer in five months and three days. Five months, three days that have somehow collapsed into a dreadful and inexplicable now.
“Annie?”
Mark’s voice is a hoarse whisper. Its weakness shakes Annie, and for an instant she thinks she is going to burst into tears. She covers her trembling lips with her palm.
“Annie, that you?”
She stands there, trying to regain her composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Mark’s bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes her feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.
Finally she lowers her hand from her mouth.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s me, hon. I’m here. ”
He slips his right arm partially out from under his blankets and beckons her with a feeble wave. His face is still a blur, but she has no difficulty seeing the gesture.
Her eyes fall briefly on the sleeve of his pajama.
“Come over here, Annie, ” he says. “Hard to talk when you’re standing there by the door. ”
She steps forward into the room. His sleeve. Something about it isn’t right, something about the color of it—
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” he says. Pulling his arm further out from underneath his blankets and tapping the safety rail of his bed. “You belong with me. ”
There is a harshness in Mark’s voice, an anger that has become huge within him in recent days — but although Annie often brushes up against its sharp outer edges, she is aware that the cancer is its real target. In the beginning it had flared up from beneath the surface only on occasion, but its progression has matched that of the disease, consuming him, ravaging his personality. He is resentful of his loss of independence, resentful of his inability to care for himself, resentful of his neediness… and beyond all else resentful of having his future stolen from him by something as insipid and indiscriminate as an uncontrollable growth of cells. Annie has come to accept those feelings as constants that she is helpless to relieve, and can only hope to skirt past on delicate tiptoes.
She wades through the filmy light toward her husband. His IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so she walks around its foot to the right and rolls back his plastic hospital tray in order to approach him.
Suddenly his hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches her wrist.
“Give it to us, Annie, ” he says. “Let’s hear how sorry you are. ”
She stands there in shock as his fingers press into her with impossible strength.
“We trusted you,” he says.
His fingers are digging deeper into the soft white flesh under her wrist, hurting her now. Though Annie knows they will leave bruises, she does not attempt to pull away. She looks at Mark across the bed, wishing she could see his face, mystified by his words. Their hostility is more intense, more cuttingly directed at her than at any time in the past, but she can’t understand why.
“Mark, please, tell me what you mean—”
“My girl,” he breaks in. “Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. ”
She winces as his grip tightens.
Us. We.
Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?
