John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Tears are in Janice's eyes constantly ever since the blue police lights appeared but this remark and the old man's wise and kind manner freshen them. Dr. Morris paid closer attention to Harry toward the end than she did. In a way since those glimpses of him shining on the basketball court she had slowly ceased to see him, he had become invisible. "Did he mention me?" she asks, wondering if Harry had revealed that they were estranged.

The old doctor's sharp Scots gaze pierces her for a second. "Very fondly," he tells her.

At this hour in the morning, a little after nine o'clock, with dirty breakfast trays still being wheeled along the halls, there is no one else in the ICCU waiting room, and Nelson in his own agitation keeps wandering off, to telephone Pru, to go to the bathroom, to get a cup of coffee and some Frosted Flakes at a cafeteria he's discovered in another wing. The waiting room is tiny, with one window looking toward the parking lot, damp at the edges from the lawn sprinklers last night, and a low table of mostly religious magazines, and a hard black settee and chairs and floor lamps of bent pipes and plastic shades, they don't want you to get too comfortable, they really want the patient all to themselves. While she's in this limbo alone Janice thinks she should pray for Harry's recovery, a miracle, but when she closes her eyes to do it she encounters a blank dead wall. From what Dr. Olman said he would never be alive the way he was and as Dr. Morris said, sometimes it's time. He had come to bloom early and by the time she got to know him at Kroll's he was already drifting downhill, though things did look up when the money from the lot began to be theirs. With him gone, she can sell the Penn Park house. Dear God, dear God, she prays. Do what You think best.

A young black nurse appears at the open door and says so softly, yet with a beautiful half-smile, "He's conscious now," and leads her into the intensive-care unit, which she remembers from last December- the central circular desk like an airport control tower, full of TV sets showing in jumping orange lines each patient's heartbeat, and on three sides the rows of individual narrow bedrooms with glass front walls. When she sees her Harry lying in one of them as white as his sheets with all these tubes and wires going in and out of him, lying behind the wall of glass, an emotion so strong she fears for a second she might vomit hits her from behind, a crashing wave of sorrow and terrified awareness of utter loss like nothing ever in her life except the time she accidentally drowned her own dear baby. She had never meant never to forgive him, she had been intending one of these days to call, but the days slipped by; holding her silence had become a kind of addiction. How could she have hardened her heart so against this man who for better or worse had placed his life beside hers at the altar? It hadn't been Harry really, it had been Pru, what man could resist, she and Pru and Nelson had analyzed it to the point of exhaustion. She was satisfied it wouldn't happen again and she had a life to get on with. Now this. Just when. He called her stupid, it was true she was slower than he was, and slower to come into her own, but he was beginning to respect her, it was hard for him to respect any woman, his mother had done that to him, the hateful woman. Though all four of their parents were alive when they courted at Kroll's she and Harry were orphans really, he more than she even. He saw something in her that would hold him fast for a while. She wants him back, back from this element he is sinking in, she wants it so much she might vomit, his desertions and Pru and Thelma and all whatever else are washed away by the grandeur of his lying there so helpless, so irretrievable.

The nurse slides the door open. Above his baby-blue nose tubes for oxygen his blue eyes are open but he doesn't seem to hear. He sees her, sees his wife here, little and dark-complected and stubborn in her forehead and mouth, blubbering like a waterfall and talking about forgiveness. "I forgive you," she keeps saying while he can't remember for what. He lies there floating in a wonderful element, a bed of happy unfeeling that points of pain now and then poke through. He listens to Janice blubber and marvels at how small she grows, sitting in that padded wheelchair they give you, small like something in a crystal snowball, but finer, fine like a spiderweb, every crease in her face and rumpled gray saleswoman's suit. She forgives him, and he thanks her, or thinks that he thanks her. He believes she takes his hand. His consciousness comes and goes, and he marvels that in its gaps the world is being tended to, just as it was in the centuries before he was born. There is a terrible deep dryness in his throat, but he knows the sensation will pass, the doctors will do something about it. Janice seems one of those bright figures in his dream, the party they were having. He thinks of telling her about Tiger and I won but the impulse passes. He is nicely tired. He closes his eyes. The red cave he thought had only a front entrance and exit turns out to have a back door as well.

His wife's familiar and beloved figure has been replaced by that of Nelson, who is also unhappy. "You didn't talk to her, Dad," the kid complains. "She said you stared at her but didn't talk."

O.K., he thinks, what else am 1 doing wrong? He feels sorry about what he did to the kid but he's doing him a favor now, though Nelson doesn't seem to know it.

"Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!" the kid is yelling, or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one eyebrow, so they grow up against the grain. He wants to put the kid out of his misery. Nelson, he wants to say, you have a sister.

But does he say it? His son's anxious straining expression hasn't changed. What he next says, though, shows he may have understood the word "sister." "We phoned Aunt Mim, Dad, and she'll get here as soon as she can. She has to change planes in Kansas City!"

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. "Don't die, Dad, don't!" he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.

"Well, Nelson," he says, "all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad." Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.