The Hard Chair

Theron

By the third night he had learned the chair.

He knew it the way a sailor knows a deck. He knew that the left rear leg was a quarter-inch shorter than the others, so that it rocked, faintly, if he shifted his weight to the right. He knew that the molded seat sloped forward at an angle designed, he felt sure, by a committee of ex-Calvinists, and that after ninety minutes the small of his back began to speak, and after three hours it began to shout. He knew that the armrests were too far apart for him to lean on and too close together for him to sleep between. He knew that, if he sat bolt upright with his head against the wall and his coat over his knees, he could achieve something that was not sleep but was cousin to it, a gray hovering state in which the monitor's hum became the tide at Ledge Point, and the pump's click a clock in the cupola hall, and the long hours passed like freight cars through a dark station.

And he knew, to the second, when the nurses changed.

Seven and seven. Bernadette on days, a lean whispering woman named Fitch on nights who wore sneakers with a thick sole and moved like a cat. At 6:45 the corridor began to fill with the tinkle of trays. At 6:58 Bernadette came in with her lanyard clinking and said, in the tone of a woman greeting an old sofa, "Still here, Mister?"

"Still here."

"Hm." She would look him over. "You've got a face like a boiled egg."

"I'm told it's an improvement."

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody. I'm hoping."

On the Tuesday she'd laughed. On the Wednesday she'd put a cup of coffee in his hand without a word. On the Thursday she had brought him a clean scrub top out of the supply closet, a boxy hospital blue one, three sizes too small, and said, "For God's sake, put this on over that shirt. I can smell the Egyptian cotton. It's offending the infection control officer."

He put it on.

He looked, he supposed, like a very tall and exhausted orderly. It occurred to him that he'd never been so comfortable in clothes.

…

She had not let him stay the first night.

That was the thing he kept turning over. It had seemed to him, in the hot blue dark of the room, with the drip clicking and the line of her heartbeat on the monitor, that she had permitted it. She'd said Yes. She'd let him in the door. She had fallen asleep with the chair a yard from her pillow and had never once told him to go.

But at 6:55 on the Tuesday she woke.

He had been awake for a full day and most of a night. He'd watched her sleep; he had watched the cuff cycle forty-one times (he'd counted: 138/92, 142/94, 150/96, a long slow dive to 134/88, with the magnesium, at four) and he had pretended, when Fitch came in at five, that he was not holding his breath. And when the gray light came up behind the blinds, and her eyes opened, and rolled to the ceiling, and traveled, slowly, around the room, and found him in the orange chair, he saw something rush into her face. It was a flicker, not of rejection but of recall; the whole wave of what had happened breaking over her at once.

"Hello," he said.

"Hi."

"How do you feel?"

"Like a roast." She licked her lips. "Is it morning?"

"Five past seven."

"Did I sleep?"

"Six hours. Very soundly. You snored, once, at three. I took it for a sign of recovery."

"I don't snore."

"I shall retract it."

She smiled, a small drowsy movement. It faded. She looked at the pump, the bag, the cuff on her arm, and he watched her check herself, as she checked a file, line by line, and arrive at the end of the page.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"I think you should go home."

He had expected it.

He'd been expecting it for eight hours. He had prepared the face he would wear, a calm, grave, accommodating one, and the sentence he would say, which was Of course, in a voice with no weight in it. He opened his mouth to say it.

What came out was: "Are you certain?"

It was out before he could stop it. He heard it, and closed his eyes. "I'm sorry. That was a question. I have no right to a question. Of course."

"No, it's—" She pushed herself up an inch against the pillow. It cost her something; he saw it. "It's okay to ask. I'm not— I'm not sending you away because I want you to go. I'm sending you because you look like a corpse and I'm going to feel guilty."

"I'm not tired."

"You haven't eaten in thirty hours."

"Bernadette says that's a lie. She says I had a cup of apple juice."

"Theron."

"Yes?"

"I need to figure out who I let in my room." She was looking not at him but at the ceiling, with a small, tight, careful frown, the frown of someone working a figure in her head. "Not just you. All of it. I need a— a list. I need to think about who I want here when I'm like this. Who I'd choose if there weren't any— history. And I can't do that with you in the chair."

"Why?"

"Because you're so good in the chair." The frown deepened. "Because it would be the easiest thing in the world to say stay. And I'd say it because I'm scared. And I'd say it because you're here. And I don't know if either of those is the same as wanting."

He sat very still.

The easiest thing in the world, he thought.

He knew precisely what she meant. For six months he'd been the easiest thing in the world. He had arrived at the door with a tool kit. He'd been the soup, the cradle, the smoke detector, the warm hand. He had been so convenient, so competent, so there, that it had never occurred to either of them to ask what would happen if he were not.

"That's fair," he said.

"Is it?"

"It's the fairest thing anyone has said to me in my life." He rose. It was a slow business; his knees cracked like kindling. "I shall be in the corridor."

"You don't have to be in the corridor."

"Then I shall be down the road. Or in the café. Or in the car park. I won't be far."

"Theron—"

"I won't be near either," he said, gently. "If you want a clear room, I shall keep it clear. If you wish me to be a number on a form, I'll be a number. But if you should need a person who can be here in twenty-six minutes—"

"Twenty-five," said Dess.

He blinked.

"Joelle timed it." Her mouth twitched. "She said you did twenty-six, and she'd bet money you'd do twenty-five next time."

"There is not going to be a next time."

"No." She turned her face toward the window, and he saw, with a little stab, that her eyes had filled again. "That would be terrific. Let's both hope."

He put on his coat.

At the door, with his hand on the frame, he turned. She had not looked back. She lay in the bed with her small white hand over her belly, her braid half undone on the pillow, and the first wash of morning gilding the edge of her cheek. He thought: I have seen the Atlantic from the deck of the Kittiwake in a full gale and I have never seen a thing so brave.

"I'll be at the end of the hall," he said.

"I know."

"If it's not that, it's the café."

"I know."

He went.

…

The end of the hall had a chair.

It was the same chair (orange, molded, bolted to a frame) but there were four of them in a row beneath a window that looked onto an air shaft, and a stand of dying ferns, and a poster on the wall that said HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR BABY TODAY? with the eerie, unmoored cheerfulness of a thing printed in 1996.

He sat in the second from the left.

He remained there for the better part of three days.

That was not, strictly, what she'd asked; she'd asked him to be not near. But the end of the hall was, by the hospital's measure, a waiting area, and the waiting area was public, and a man had a right to sit in a public chair if he did not enter a private room. He did not enter. He didn't look at the door. He sat with his back against the wall and his hands between his knees, and between six in the morning and midnight he saw, passing him in the corridor like an unfolding hand of cards, the people she had chosen.

Joelle came first.

She came at eight with a bag of bagels and her hair in a headband and an expression of ferocious hospitality. She stopped before him, took in the scrub top, and began to shake with laughter.

"Oh my God."

"Mrs. Baptiste."

"Oh my God. You look like an extra on Grey's."

"I understand it is the fashion."

"Eat this." She shoved a bagel in his hand. It was sesame, thick, still warm, with a slab of cream cheese the size of a paperback. "No. Don't thank me. I'm still mad. This is a humanitarian bagel. It's got nothing to do with you; it's got to do with the cost of a funeral."

He ate it.

It was the first food he'd tasted in a day and a half, and it very nearly made him weep.

"Did you hear the numbers?" he said, when he could.

"Last night's? One-forty over ninety. This morning's a one-thirty-four over eighty-eight." Joelle sat down heavily on the chair beside him with her own bagel, and tucked one foot under her. "They were happy with it. Adeyemi said she's cautiously pleased. She said if it holds, they'll drop the magnesium tomorrow."

"That is very good."

"It's very good." She chewed. "Don't you dare cry in my sesame."

"I'm not crying."

"Your whole face is leaking."

"It has been doing so for some time. I find I can't prevent it." He wiped his cheek with the heel of his hand. "Mrs. Baptiste—"

"Joelle. If you're going to cry on me, it's Joelle."

"Joelle." He turned his head. "I am not going to ask how she is, because you will tell me or you won't. I am going to ask only that you accept my thanks. For telling me. On Friday. And on Monday. I know that it cost you something."

"It cost me a fight with my husband."

"I am sorry."

"Don't be. He said I did the right thing. Then he said I did the stupid thing. Then he said, 'Are you sure about that man?' and I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Then why are we feeding him?'" She took another bite. "Terrence is an optimist. He wants to believe everybody's good. But he also thinks you have a face like a church."

"A church."

"He said, 'A very sad, very expensive church.'" Joelle licked cream cheese off her thumb. "He's not wrong."

Theron nearly laughed. He covered his mouth with his hand.

"Anyway," said Joelle, brisk. "I want you to hear this from me, not from her, because she won't say it. She made a list this morning. A real one, with a pen. Of who she wants in the room. Do you know who's on it?"

"No."

"Me. Colleen. Pratt. And one more."

He waited.

"Your mother," said Joelle.

He had the strangest sensation. It was as though the air in the hall, which had been pressing on him for three days like a damp cloth, had been lifted all at once and then dropped back in a slightly different place.

"My mother."

"She asked me to call her. Not you; not Dell; me. She said, 'Please telephone Mrs. Wexcombe, tell her I'm in the hospital and the baby's fine, and tell her she doesn't have to come.' And then she said, 'But I'd like it if she did.'" Joelle shrugged. "That's all I know."

"Did you ring her?"

"At seven-fifteen. She picked up on the second ring." Joelle's eyes were bright. "She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, in this voice like cut glass: 'Please tell Miss Rourke that I shall be there at ten.'"

"It is nine-fifteen."

"Yup."

"She is coming from Newport."

"She's probably already in the car."

He sat there.

"Joelle," he said, "my mother has not driven herself anywhere in eleven years."

"Then I guess it's a big day for her," said Joelle, and finished her bagel.

…

She came at ten minutes to ten.

He heard her before he saw her. It was the sound of heels on linoleum, light and quick and absolutely regular, a metronome sound, and then the soft, penetrating, unmistakable murmur of a voice asking a nurse the way. It was not a loud voice. It had never needed to be.

He rose.

She came round the corner by the elevators in a camel coat and a gray scarf, with her bag on her arm and a bunch of white tulips wrapped in brown paper, and she was alone. Dell stood at the far end, by the doors, with his cap in his hands, looking like a man who has brought a battleship into a pond. Constance paused. She looked down the hall. She looked at Joelle. She looked, at last, at him.

For a moment nothing was said.

She took in the scrub top. The stubble. The paper bagel wrapper in his hand. A small muscle moved in her cheek. It was, he thought, very like the look she had given him at eleven, the day he had come in from the lawn with a split lip and told her that he had fallen off the wall, and she'd known he was lying, and had decided, with exquisite courtesy, to allow it.

"Theron," she said.

"Mother."

"You look dreadful."

"So I'm told."

"I came here to see Miss Rourke."

"I know."

"Not you."

"I know that, too."

"Good." She gave a short nod. Then she crossed the distance between them in four of her light, level steps, and stopped before him, and for a moment he thought she was going to strike him. She did not. She raised her free hand and, quite deliberately, with the tips of two cold fingers, touched the stubble on his jaw, as if checking whether it was real.

"Have you eaten?"

"A bagel."

"One bagel."

"It was a very large one."

"Hm." Her fingers dropped. "Is she well?"

"Her pressure is improving. Dr. Adeyemi says—"

"I don't wish to hear what Dr. Adeyemi says. I wish to hear what you think."

He took a breath. "I think she's frightened," he said. "I think she is more frightened than I have ever seen a human being. I think she is also the bravest person I have ever met. And I think that she is trying, with every ounce of her strength, not to need me, and I think that I have no right to ask her to."

Constance regarded him a moment longer.

"That," she said, "is the first sensible thing you've said since the funeral."

She went in.

…

They were closeted for an hour and forty minutes.

He could not hear it. The door was shut. He sat in the second chair from the left and watched the minutes crawl round the face of a clock above the nurses' station, and thought about the pearl necklace, and about I did not need you to tell me about the will, and about the particular shape of his mother's mouth when she said Go away, Theron. He thought about how many times in thirty-six years he had seen her speak to another woman as an equal, and how few.

At 11:30 the door opened.

Constance came out.

She had been crying. He saw it at once; nothing in her face was out of place, but the powder under her left eye had a faint streak in it, and her hands, which were never anything but still, were closed rather tightly on the strap of her bag. She stopped in the doorway. She looked at him down the length of the hall.

She walked toward him.

"Sit," she said, as he started to rise.

He sat.

She sat beside him, in the third chair, with her bag on her knee and her back like a ruler. She looked at the poster on the wall for some time. HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR BABY TODAY?

"That's an unfortunate sentence," she said.

"I have been staring at it for two days."

"One wonders who approves these things." She drew a breath. "She is a remarkable young woman."

"Yes."

"She is not in the least afraid of me."

"No."

"She said, 'Mrs. Wexcombe, I'd like to ask you something, and you don't have to answer.' And I said, 'You may ask me anything.' And she said, 'Did Mr. Pryor ever show you Article Four before Kit died?'" Constance's voice was quite level. "I said that I was not prepared to say. She said, 'That's an answer.' I said it was not. She said, 'It's a very good one.'"

His heart began to knock against his ribs.

"What did you say?"

"I said she would be told." She folded her hands over the strap. "Not today. Not by me, at a bedside, in a hospital gown, with a drip. I don't intend to unburden myself over a patient. When it is done it will be done properly, in a room with a table, with the people who should hear it. And I want her well when I do."

"Mother—"

"I am not going to discuss it with you, Theron. Not because I'm angry, although I am. But because it is hers to hear first. She asked. I owe her that."

He swallowed.

"Did she say anything of me?"

"She said you were to be given a bed."

"A what?"

"She said, 'Please tell your son there's a cot in the family lounge on the fourth floor, and that I know he's been sleeping in a plastic chair, and that I'm not going to be the reason he's in traction.'" The corner of Constance's mouth lifted by about a millimeter. "She said it with the greatest dignity. I should hate to be the person to deprive her of it."

He put his face in his hands.

He couldn't help it. It was an impulse beyond decision; his head simply dropped, and he sat bent over in the orange chair with his hands over his face and his shoulders shaking, and he could not tell, in that moment, whether it was laughter or the other thing, and he did not much care. A small cool hand came down between his shoulder blades.

It stayed.

It lay there flat and light, the way it had when he was seven, in the cupola hall, on the afternoon of the broken glass. He felt its weight and its warmth and its slight, steady tremor, and he thought: she is touching me.

She has not touched me since I was a boy.

"There," said Constance, in a voice he'd never heard. "There. There now."

They stayed like that a long time.

At the end of the hall, a cart rattled by. A call bell chimed, and another answered it. The ferns in their dying row trembled in the draft from the vent. And on the wall above them, with the serenity of the unforgiving, the poster went on asking its question, to which, at that moment, in the lengthening light of a Wednesday morning in the maternity wing, a man and his mother might truthfully have replied yes.

…

He did one more thing that week.

He did not intend to. He told himself so afterward, and it was largely true. It began with Fitch, the night nurse, the lean cat-footed woman in the thick-soled sneakers, who came out of Dess's room at two in the morning on the Thursday and stood a moment at the nurses' station talking in a low voice with the charge nurse, and then walked down the dim hall toward the lounge where he sat, because he'd been dispatched there, with a pillow.

"Mr. Wexcombe."

"Mrs. Fitch."

"It's Ms. Fitch." She had a dry, flat, midwestern voice. "I wanted to say something, and it's not my business, and I'd rather you didn't repeat it."

"Of course."

"She's not sleeping."

He sat up.

"The magnesium's off," said Fitch. "Her numbers are good; they've been good for sixteen hours. But she's lying there with her eyes open. I've offered something mild. She doesn't want it. She says she doesn't like what it does to her head." She crossed her arms. "I've worked the night shift on this ward for nineteen years. I see this a lot. The body's fine. The pressure's fine. It's the mind that won't let go. Because she's alone."

"She is not alone. Her friends—"

"Her friends go home at nine." Fitch said it without cruelty. "They have kids. They have husbands. They have jobs. Nobody can sit up with her all night, and nobody's supposed to. But I've got fourteen patients. I can give her ten minutes an hour. And between the ten minutes she's got a monitor and a ceiling."

"What would help?"

Fitch's mouth thinned. "A person. A quiet one. Somebody to sit in the chair and not talk. A private-duty night nurse, if you can get one, from an agency. They're not cheap. But we've had them before. For women on long stays." She looked at him. "I'm not asking for money, Mr. Wexcombe. I'm telling you what I'd do."

He thought.

It was ridiculously easy. That was the horror of it. He knew a woman, a Mrs. Okafor-Hines, retired from the neonatal unit at Hasbro, who did exactly this for the wives of three of his board members. He had her number in his phone. It would take one call, no more; the agency would send a person on Friday night, and the bill would go to Wexcombe Marine, and Dess need never know that it had not come from the hospital. Joelle could carry the message. Joelle was already carrying messages. It would be the simplest thing in the world.

It would be simple, said a small cold voice in the back of his head, and she would be better for it, and she need never learn.

Which is what you have said about every other thing.

He sat there on the lounge sofa, in the hospital blue, with a thin pillow on his knee, and felt the old familiar machinery begin to turn. Arrange. Pay. Conceal. Provide. It moved so smoothly. It was so well oiled. It had been built for him at birth by a man in a tower, and every part of it was polished with love.

"Ms. Fitch," he said.

"Yes?"

"Would you do me a favor?"

"Depends."

"When you go back in, tell Miss Rourke that Mr. Wexcombe has been asked by a nurse to arrange a private-duty companion for her nights. Tell her that he can do so, at his own expense, via an agency, with a person whom he knows to be kind. Tell her that he will not do it without her say-so. And tell her," his voice caught, "that he can quite see how it looks."

Fitch stared at him.

"That's the most convoluted thing I ever heard."

"I am aware."

"Why don't you just do it?"

"Because I did that for four months." He rubbed his eyes. "And I should like to try, for once, to ask."

She was quiet.

Then she said, with the faintest softening of that flat, dry face, "You know, in nineteen years I've never had a man in this lounge say that."

"I expect that they were sensible."

"I expect they were scared," said Fitch. "But I'll tell her."

She went. He sat in the dark with the pillow. The clock above the door said 2:14. The ward breathed around him, its hush and its sighs, a hundred thousand heartbeats in a building the size of a hill.

At 2:31 the door of the room at the end of the hall opened.

Fitch stood there. She looked down the corridor, found him, and held up her hand with the thumb pressed against the first finger in a small tight circle. Then she pointed at the door.

He rose.

He walked down the dim hall in his socks, with his heart in his mouth, past the nurses' station, past the ferns, and stopped at the threshold of the room. It was quiet. A single lamp burned. She lay on her side on the pillow with her face toward him, and her eyes were open, enormous and dark, and a little amused.

"Hi," said Dess.

"Hello."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

"I wasn't asleep."

"I know. I could tell. You keep walking up and down the hall at four in the morning, and Fitch says your shoes squeak."

"I wear socks."

"You squeak in your socks." She shifted, with a small wince. "Come here. Don't come close. Just come where I can see you."

He came as far as the foot of the bed.

She looked at him. She had the oddest expression, soft and rueful, with a glint beneath it.

"A nurse," she said.

"If you want one."

"A kind one."

"Mrs. Okafor-Hines. Retired from the NICU. She is very quiet, and she does a great deal of knitting."

"Are you paying?"

"If you permit."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I shall tear up the number and put it in the incinerator," said Theron, "and I'll sleep on the sofa, and you needn't think of it again."

"You asked."

"I asked."

"Before you did it."

"I have been told it's the whole of the art."

She laughed. It was a small tired sound, but it was real, and it rose in the little room like the first bird before dawn. "Okay. Yes. Call her. But I want it in the ledger."

"The—"

"The ledger." She had put out one hand, palm up, as if offering the thing for inspection, a small blue-bound notebook that was lying on the table beside her pitcher. "I've been keeping it on the nights I couldn't sleep. There's a page for you. I opened it Tuesday."

He looked at the notebook.

"What does it say?"

"I'm not going to tell you." She drew the hand back. "But it's a long page. And the last line is blank. I haven't decided how to total it."

He stood at the foot of her bed with his hands at his sides, in a borrowed scrub top three sizes too small, in the lamp-lit dark, and felt a thing pass through him that was neither hope nor despair, but something plainer and larger. It was the sensation of a man who has stopped bracing.

"Goodnight, Dess," he said.

"Goodnight."

"I shall be down the hall."

"I know." She closed her eyes. "Theron."

"Yes?"

"Read to me?"

He stopped.

"I mean from the hall," she said. "Not in here. I don't think I can— not yet. But Joelle packed the book. And it's late. And if you stood outside the door, with it open a crack, I think I could hear."

He took The Wind in the Willows from the bedside table. It was a battered, dog-eared copy, with a green cloth cover and a Mole on the spine, and it opened of its own accord to the page where the corner had been turned down. He carried it to the door. He drew the chair from the corridor, the orange one, with its short left leg, and set it just beyond the threshold, in the light of the hall.

He sat.

The door stood open six inches. Through it he could see a strip of white blanket, and a hand, and the curve of her shoulder.

He cleared his throat.

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home," he read.

His voice, in the sleeping ward, was very low. It was the voice he had used for the small yellow rectangle, the voice for the lemon tree and the baby and the long night of the kitchen. He read on. The Mole threw down his brush. The Mole said bother. The Mole scrambled up through the earth, and came out into the sunlight, and found the whole sweet world waiting.

By the end of the first page, her breathing had slowed.

By the end of the second, it had gone even.

He read the third anyway. He read the fourth. He read until the lamp went out, and the corridor dimmed, and a little before six the window at the end of the hall turned the faint clean gray of a day that has not yet decided to be anything. And somewhere in the middle of a paragraph about a river, he realized that his left hand, holding the book, had stopped shaking.

He did not remark on it.

He turned the page.