Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“You’re being morbid again, Doc. But you know, it’s not a bad idea,” she says, perking up to her old self. She’s able to eye me now. “Of course I don’t have to say that I wish you would live forever. But”—and she pauses—“I do think I’ve made it clear that I believe I’m the agent to list your beautiful home someday, and I hope all the time that I’m that lucky woman. But there’s not a bone in my body that wishes that day to come any sooner than never.”

“I thought sharks don’t have any bones,” says a familiar voice, and I see it’s Renny Banerjee coming through the doorway, a sly expression on his smooth chocolate face.

“Ha, ha,” Liv can only answer, taken aback and also, subtly and obviously, tickled by his presence. This is an expected surprise.

Renny, surveying the room, says to me, “I asked at the desk whether you had left, Doc, and they said they didn’t see how, with all the flowers still arriving.”

“We’re on our way out,” Liv replies tersely, pointing to the giant lily bouquet. “That one’s yours, Mr. Banerjee. If you so please.”

“I please.”

“Thank you.”

We thus march out as three, Liv with my bag over her shoulder and two smaller arrangements, one in each of her hands; Renny hardly apparent behind the lilies; and I ambling under my own power, having already refused two offers of a wheelchair and nurse, the latter walking along with us anyway. I don’t tell anyone — including Dr. Weil, when he came earlier for a pre-discharge exam — about the strange burning in my chest that I awoke to this morning, an ever-angry tingle that feels to be webbing my lungs each time I breathe in tiny, almost electrical bursts. As we first gain the hall, I think there’s a chance I might actually fall down. But I steel myself, for though it would be perfectly pleasant to stay indefinitely (and idle with Veronica Como), I don’t want the messiness of further diagnoses and tests and proposed courses of treatment — in a phrase, the complications of complications. Simplicity seems all, or at least my expectations of it, which are my house and morning swims in the pool and my strolls down to the village, to view all the good people and shops.

At the ground-floor elevator bank, we come out and there is Mrs. Hickey, waiting to go up to the children’s ICU. She greets me with warmth. I ask the heavyset nurse if she’ll excuse us for a moment, and she complies with a hard grunt. Renny and Liv don’t know Anne Hickey, of course, and don’t pause on their way to the automatic doors. They hardly said a word in the elevator, only the four of us in the car, though I caught them gazing at each other quite intently if not lovingly, at least as yet; and so I tell them to go on to the parking lot, where I’ll catch up to them soon, and they exit, murmuring, a mini-procession of my flowers.

Mrs. Hickey is nicely dressed in dark pants and black shoes and a short, woolly red jacket. It could be a church day, from her appearance, though I can see it is probably her attempt to maintain an optimism and order in her days, for both Patrick and Mr. Hickey. She looks slightly haggard otherwise, circles about her eyes, with the pallor that comes from lack of sleep. But she smiles kindly and takes my hand and we sit on a bench in the waiting area.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t come visit before you left. I tried, but you were always resting or with the doctor, and I didn’t want to drop in unexpectedly.”

“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” I say, feeling remorseful already. “I’m the one who’s sorry that I didn’t have a chance to visit with your son while I was here. I could go up with you now—”

“Please, Doc, your friends are waiting for you outside. And I see you’re not moving so quickly. Not like usual, anyway. Maybe you can come back, but only when you’re feeling yourself again.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Of course I am,” she says, trying to reassure me. “Besides, Patrick has hardly been awake the last few days. He’s had much better weeks. I know he’ll feel better soon, and when he does I’ll call you right away.”

“Okay, that’s a deal.”

“You bet it is,” she replies, still holding my hand, and quite tightly. She looks down into her lap, and suddenly I realize she’s crying.

“Mrs. Hickey,” I say, crouching closer to her. “You must hold on as best you can. It will be very difficult, but you have to, a little longer. Your son is counting on you.”

She nods and whispers, “Yes, he is.”

“The doctors will find a heart for him, and soon enough Patrick will be home, playing in the store.”

“I hope James is around for that,” she says, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. “He’s been terribly angry of late. I haven’t seen him for days, and I don’t know if he’s even been in to see Patrick this week.”

“Is it the money problems with the store?”

“It’s always money problems. But they’re mostly over now. He’s really decided to give up.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s going to give everything back to the bank. The whole building, the apartments, the store, everything. We haven’t paid the mortgage in some months, you know, because of Patrick’s bills. Business has been slow anyway. It has been, truthfully, ever since we bought the store from you. We only have about a month of insurance left. A few days ago we had a fight, and it was terrible. He said he wished they’d find Patrick a heart or not, and I went crazy. I asked him what he meant by ‘a heart or not,’ and he said we couldn’t go on like this anymore, waiting for something that might never come, and maybe not work anyway, with the hospital costing us fifteen hundred dollars a day. I asked him if he really thought that way and he didn’t answer. Then I told him to get out.”

“It was a natural response.”

“I know, but now I wish I hadn’t. Sometimes, Doc, for a second, I’ll think that way, too, but I don’t want to admit it. James has been so frustrated with the business these last few years. It’s never really worked for us. Then Patrick got sick and everything fell apart. We’re losing everything, and I don’t blame James for saying those things. He’s under so much pressure. He was wrong to say it. But even I can’t blame him anymore. I don’t. Am I an awful mother, Doc? Am I horrible?”

“You’re nothing of the kind, Mrs. Hickey.”

“I’m glad you think so,” she says, letting go of me now. Wisps of her light hair fall down over her temples and brow, and from this angle she reminds me of the obituary photograph of a younger Mary Burns, the clear, high sheen of the skin, the tender brow. “You’ve always been kind to us, and I hope you know that I appreciate it. James will, too, someday, when all this is over. We’ve just had bad luck with the store and he blames you for it, though there’s no reason why he should. You sold us a nice business and it seemed like the next day the whole economy went sour. Somehow James has this crazy idea in his head that you sold us a lemon, that you knew the business would only get worse but made out as if otherwise. But even if that were true, I say we should have realized it ourselves, caveat emptor. I don’t know why I’m getting into this except that nothing seems good for us these days, and I guess it would be nice to hear that it’s all a run of bad luck that has to end soon.”

“That must be what it is,” I tell her, not wanting her to think ill of the store. “Bad luck can come but it cannot last, either. I know this myself. You do what you can under extreme circumstances, perseverance your only goal. After the difficulties, you can begin again, but you must put behind you what has occurred. Like your husband’s words, for example. They were spoken under great duress, which makes people most unlike who they really are. We talk of people rising heroically in times of adversity, but I think that’s rarer than we’d like to believe. I’m sure Mr. Hickey is remorseful for his thoughts about Patrick, just as deeply as you are. The task now is to forgive and forget.”