Joyce Oates - Sourland

Or had Matt said, “I’m sorry I need you to drive me to the hospital.”

Each way Sophie would hear. Like one entranced she would hear, and rehear. The surviving spouse would exhaust herself with just these two possibilities.

I’m sorry, I need you to drive me to the hospital.

I’m sorry I need you to drive me to the hospital.

No ambiguity about the word hospital !

Immediately Sophie knew, this had to be serious. Her husband wasn’t a man who went willingly to the doctor. Through his adult life he’d been indifferent, even careless of his health, as if there were something unmanly in taking caution. And now, that bravado had vanished.

Sophie asked him what was wrong. He said, “I think — my heart.”

I think — my heart. This too Sophie would hear, and rehear. A curious phraseology. My heart, I think would have been a more natural way of speaking but there was nothing natural about her husband’s behavior on that morning.

There would be other mornings in Matthew Quinn’s life. Several more mornings in Matthew Quinn’s life. But this was the final morning, of the life Sophie would share with him.

His heart! The previous summer Matt had had a bout of fibrillation — was that what the condition was called, fibrillation ? — after protracted physical exertion in the New Jersey heat. Stubbornly he’d been mending their eroded flagstone terrace at the rear of the house and this time too he’d come to Sophie — rapped on the kitchen window to get her attention and said apologetically that his heart was behaving “weirdly” and he couldn’t seem to “catch his breath” and would she drive him to their doctor? — which of course Sophie did, calling the doctor’s office on her cell phone from the car; and from his doctor’s office she’d driven him to the ER of the hospital which was less than a mile away and he’d been given an intravenous drug and sedated and in the morning successfully treated for his rapid and erratic heartbeat and by midday he’d been discharged, Sophie had driven him back home. And so now Sophie had every reason to think that the same thing would happen again. Telling herself It’s a routine procedure. We have gone through this before.

Hurriedly she’d dressed. That last morning of their lives together in haste assembling a traveling bag for Matt — underwear, toiletries — a clean shirt, socks — for possibly he’d be in the hospital overnight as he’d been the previous time. Sophie was chattering brightly, nervously. Sophie could not have said what she was telling Matt nor did Matt appear to be listening to her. He was fumbling to put on his trench coat — quickly Sophie came to help him. Strange to her, and disconcerting, that her husband was breathing as if he’d run up a flight of stairs.

Matt was fifty-six. Not a tall man but giving that impression. He’d become soft-bodied in the torso and midriff, he was overweight by perhaps fifteen pounds, the young lean husband she’d married in Madison, Wisconsin, had vanished. His dark hair had become sand-colored and was thinning at the crown of his head. His somewhat small gray-brown eyes were creased at the corners with a fierce inward concentration.

Sophie saw that Matt had washed his face and damp-combed his hair but hadn’t shaved. Metallic stubble shadowed his soft-jowled lower face like an encroaching shadow. She felt a stab of love for him — a stab of terror — for in love there is terror, at such times. She knew that if she went to kiss him he’d have stiffened, this wasn’t a gesture he would have welcomed right now. He wouldn’t have pushed her away but in his distracted state he’d have stiffened, drawn back. On his ghastly pale-blue lips a small fixed smile.

Worse yet: he’d have relented and kissed her to humor her. His lips would be icy, against her skin.

This had not happened. Yet Sophie felt the impress of the icy lips against her overheated cheek.

Still the wave of love for him flowed into her, like an electric current. She could not bear it, how she loved this man: the connection between them, that was in danger of breaking. Suddenly it was a possibility, the connection might be broken. Such desperate love Sophie felt for her doomed husband yearning and insubstantial as a tiny flame buffeted by wind. Such desperate love, she had to hide her face from him, that he wouldn’t see, and chide her.

She slid her arm through his — he didn’t resist, but leaned against her — surprising to Sophie, they were almost of a height as if the man who’d once been inches taller than she had become diminished overnight, aged.

She led him through the darkened downstairs of the house and to the door that led into the garage. Telling herself Exactly as it was last time. So it will be this time.

In the car driving to the hospital she spoke calmly asking Matt how he felt, if his condition was the same or if he felt worse. She asked him please to fasten his seat belt but he seemed scarcely to hear. In subsequent days, weeks, months the surviving spouse would see herself behind the wheel of the car which was not her accustomed place when she was with her husband for always her husband drove their car, not Sophie; she saw herself beside her stricken and distracted husband in their gleaming-white vehicle propelled forward by momentum as irresistible as the lunar tide or the sway of galaxies with not the slightest comprehension of where they were going or that their desperate journey was in one direction only, and could never be reversed. As time cannot be reversed. She would see herself as the bearer of Matthew Quinn to his grave. She would see herself as the person who betrayed him for never would he return again to their house. Never would he return to the life he’d so loved, in that house.

If she’d known: that Matt had slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. That he’d spent hours on the tax forms, instead of waking her and asking her to take him to the hospital.

Had he known how serious the fibrillation was? Or had it steadily worsened, while he’d worked on the tax forms?

She couldn’t bear to think He risked his life for something so trivial! For our financial well-being. For me.

Now he was gone from the house. The husband was gone, the husband would not return. Yet a dozen times a day she heard his voice — not as it had been on the morning of his departure but as it had been, before — nor did she hear his labored arrhythmic breath that had so terrified her — though the house was empty, deserted.

Except for the surviving spouse , the house was deserted.

The husband had vanished utterly in the way of the incinerated. Made not into soft powdery ashes but into coarse-grained ashes and bone-chunks “buried” in an aluminum container in a cemetery several miles from their house where for years they’d walked — for they were frequent walkers, hikers, bicyclists — they’d loved the outdoors in its more benign weathers — admiring the older, eighteenth-century gravestones and giant aged oak trees buttressed by iron rods like the fanciful drawings of invading Martians on the paperback cover of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. How innocent they’d been in those days! You could say how blind, how stupid. How utterly oblivious. Walking in the cemetery with no regard for what lay moldering beneath their feet.

Now, they’d been punished for their blindness. The deceased husband , the surviving spouse.

In a haze of anesthetized grief she’d purchased a plot in the quaint “historic” cemetery. At the open grassy area at the rear, where new graves were dug. Fresh graves, unrelenting. Matt’s “remains” were set beneath a small rectangular grave marker the crematorium provided. Set in frozen grass in what was called a double plot for which she barely recalled writing a check. In a kindly avuncular voice the funeral director had urged You might as well secure a double plot, Mrs. Quinn This is a practical step.