Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“How’s the pain?”

We do this on a scale of one to ten: standard stuff. “Five.”

“I know you, so I’ll write down seven.” He frowns optimistically as he reads the chart. “It says here you’re eating. Don’t know how, with the goop they serve. Makes airplane food look like the ‘21.’” Dick furrows his ample brow at me. “How’s the breathing?”

“About the same.” I don’t know why I always lie to him. “Maybe a little worse.”

Again he writes. Finally, he puts the chart aside and takes a chair by my bed. Always the problem: the bed is elevated, like an altar. The angle makes talking awkward.

“Here’s the question, Harry. Do you want to go home? Because if you do, there are things that can be done.” He nods me along. “To make you comfortable.”

He is asking me where I want to die, of course. It is not a question one longs to hear. And yet I am glad he has asked it.

“What things?”

He reaches to the floor where his bag, openmouthed, rests. From the interior he produces a pamphlet, tri-folded and glossy, which he stands to give me. Good Shepherd Hospice it reads, and beneath that, Information for the Family. The illustration is a simple line drawing of a tree.

“There are others. But this is the one I recommend.”

I am too tired to read it. A good idea, well-meaning to a fault, but the details, I know, will depress me. “Have you talked to Meredith about this?”

He realizes what I have said before I do. “Meredith, Harry?” Dick shifts in his chair.

“Don’t look at me like that.” I close my eyes and breathe. “Franny, I meant. Have you talked to Franny?”

“We’ve spoken about it. She says it’s up to you. A nurse will come to the house every day, to monitor your comfort. More, as things progress.”

I am suddenly exhausted. More than exhausted-I feel like a cup that somebody has spilled. My eyes refuse to open; the air seems to wander aimlessly in my chest, finding no purchase. To breathe at all seems hardly worth the bother. This is what is meant, I suppose, by things progressing, all of a sudden.

“Harry?”

At a distance I hear Dick’s voice, asking me if I want to sleep-am I sleeping, is that it? But it is not just sleeping-and then the sound of his brogans creaking on the floor as he lets himself out. A murmured conversation in the hall: Hal’s voice, and a woman’s-Sally? Frances? The voices swirl into one another like vapor; I sense a continuous flow of activity around me, and yet I am apart from these events, filled with an inexpressible calm. Time is passing, has passed. My mind goes here and there, telling its usual stories-strange things, like Sam’s dying, and Meredith, and Mauritz on fire, and Joe and Lucy and the thing that passed between us-but ordinary things as well: pouring milk onto oatmeal in my parents’ kitchen on a winter morning my father planned to take me ice-skating; running alongside Hal as he pedaled his bicycle up our street for the first time, his elbows wobbling on the handlebars, his face filled with all his pleasure and alarm; standing at the counter at the Wanamaker’s on Market Street in Philadelphia at Christmastime to select a scarf for Meredith; the lake and mountains, and a perfect hour years ago, casting a flyline over water as still as God’s held breath. I move through these memories like a ghost, until they no longer seem to be separate stories at all; they are one and the same, indistinguishable and without pause, and the realization of this fact comes upon me in a burst of sweetness the likes of which I have never felt before.

When I open my eyes, the sky beyond the windows is dark as ink. How much time has passed I do not know. A woman is sitting in the chair by my bed; a nurse, I see, though she is new to me. She is young, with a round face and dark hair; she wears a bit of makeup, both darkening and drawing attention to the delicacy of her features. Beneath her smock I see the gently swollen belly of her pregnancy. The clock on the bedside says it is after one: one A.M. The middle of the night, but what night? I feel as if I have been away for days.

She looks up at me and smiles pleasantly. “Look who’s awake.” Something is in her hands; knitting needles, I see, and a ball of white yarn. She brings these to rest in her lap. “Well. How do you feel?”

“I’m-” My tongue is heavy as wood in my mouth. “Thirsty.”

She puts her needles aside and rises to fill a cup from the pitcher on the bedside table. She leans over me and pours small sips of water into my mouth. All around her is the smell of summer leaves.

“There now. Enough?” I manage a nod, and she returns to her chair, and her knitting. “That was quite a nap you took,” she says, not looking at me.

I watch the tatting motions of her needles. The sight is enveloping in a way I cannot express: it seems to cross the boundaries of my senses, as if I am watching a symphony, or listening to roses. Do people know about this? Why have I never watched anyone knit before? I feel this new awareness with my entire body, just as I feel, strangely, that we are the only two people in the building. More than feel: I know this absolutely. It is a fact of nature. We are alone.

“That would be the morphine,” she says.

“What?”

She is rolling up her yarn. The sight is so beautiful I want to weep.

“Where is everybody?”

“Here and there.” She raises one of her needles and twirls it about. “Around, around.”

“What… day is it?”

But she does not answer. Her needles click and pause and click again. She pulls a sleeve of yarn along one needle and I see what she is making: baby booties.

“It’s all right to sleep if you want. I’ll watch over you. Just sleep. It’s all you need to do.”

“Those are for your baby?”

She smiles. “Oh, I’m not pregnant.”

And I see that she is not. Why did I think that she was? She is far too old to be pregnant; she is sixty, or even seventy. She is old as I.

“I have a boy.”

Her hands pause. “I know your boy. Sam? He’s a fine boy.”

“You know him?”

“You must be tired, Harry. It’s all right. You sleep. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

My eyes have closed again. Her words seem to have traveled a great distance to reach me, like a voice across the waters. In the seat by my bed, her needles work away.

“Franny will be along soon. You can be sure of that. And Hal. Everybody.”

“Everybody.” The word is a sweet morsel in my mouth.

“That’s right. Everybody. Meredith, and Sam. All of them. That’s how it is, Harry. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“I did.” I cannot be sure I have even said these words aloud. “I think I did know it.”

“Because that’s the secret, Harry,” she tells me. “That there are no secrets. Not about this.”

Why Harry’s weird insistence on a dry fly? The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat. We’ve had folks up here who would fish only for salmon, and then only in the rivers; folks who wouldn’t spit on a smallmouth but would marry a trout if they could. There’s the old bamboo vs. graphite argument, of course, the high-tech crowd and the low-tech crowd; for every well-heeled investment banker who shows up with a custom-made graphite cannon and enough hand-tied flies to make a down payment on a condo in Vail, there’s always another (we call him “the professor,” whether or not that’s what he does, though it usually is) who fishes for “historical accuracy” (I kid you not), marching around the woods with a twelve-foot twig and a copy of Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which, if you haven’t read it and don’t mind the bad spelling, should come in pretty handy if you’re ever in seventeenth-century England with some free time to fish.