By Annette Leavy
“There you are,” he says each morning. He seems amazed she is still there.
“Here I am,” she smiles back. Where else did he think she would be? When they moved him to in-patient hospice five days earlier, she had moved in with him, brought her toothpaste, a few changes of clothes, and the novel she was reading. She woke before he did, washed her face, and dressed to be ready for him.
This morning she had doubled over the sink. Her sobs made it impossible to stand upright, but then, sensing she was late for him, she stuffed her tears back inside.
“What’s the matter?” he asks as she sits down beside him.
“I’m okay.” She sips her coffee and then corrects herself, “I’m sad about you.”
Later, after the breakfast he would not touch had come and gone, he asks, “What’s that black cloud over my eyes?” His curious eyes no longer glint brown and green. They have turned a flat, frightening, heavenly blue, and his right eye often doesn’t bother to open.
She gulps, “I think it means that you’re dying.” The hospice pamphlet had informed her that sight goes first among the senses.
He turns away from her and clutches the other side of the bed, wailing.
Has her honesty been cruel? Who should tell him if not her?
The nurse, Mandy, whose cheek bones are puffed with years of care, whisks into the room.
His arms reach and beseech as Mandy tries to massage them back down by his side. “My Reiki won’t work,” Mandy says. “Do you want to get in bed beside him?”
“Yes,” she exclaims, realizing that’s what she wants. If Mandy hadn’t offered, she might have felt afraid to hold her husband.
The nurse moves his body to one side of the bed to give her room.
It’s awkward, uncomfortable in the narrow hospital bed. Her left arm stretches across the pillow to hold his head, while she curls herself around him. She drapes her right arm across his body as lightly as she can. Everyone says bone pain is the worst.
He twists and turns, cries out, twists and turns some more, even after Mandy has filled his IV with morphine.
She holds him and strokes him and feels calmer than she has in weeks. If she holds him long enough, maybe he will settle into her body and they can take a nap. She tries to breathe her love inside him.
He never truly settles. Instead, his body jerks and twists until he has pushed her bottom and legs off the bed. She clings onto him as best she can.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I can’t make you come,” he says.
She almost laughs. Almost flushes with happiness. Even now, she thinks, after I told him he was dying.
“Oh honey, don’t worry about that. You did plenty,” she says.
The small of her back is now hanging in mid-air off the mattress. She feels the sciatic pinch where her hip meets her pelvis. Finally, she eases herself off the bed and plops into the chair.
The room is an airless tomb. The one corner window lets in no light. She needs a walk and a cup of coffee. She tells him, I’ll be back soon, but when she returns, he is asleep or somewhere that is no longer with her. At four, her son arrives to give her a break.
“Go home for the night,” Mandy says. “You’re no good for him if you’re exhausted.”
She does just that, takes a shower, empties her inbox, eats supper, drinks some wine, and sleeps in her own bed with the dog at her side until the night nurse calls at six the next morning, “Come now.”
By the time she arrives they have combed his unruly curls off his forehead and arranged his body, so newly dead that she can stroke it and feel something like life underneath the sheets.
Annette Leavy is a writer and psychotherapist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have appeared in The Blue Lake Review and The Capra Review. “The Free Temple” was a finalist for the 2022 Rash Award in Fiction and will appear in the next issue of the Broad River Review.