by John Updike
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His wife’s familiar and beloved figure has been replaced by that of Nelson, who is also unhappy.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.
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