Destined (37 page)

We passed through a series of long,
shiny, brightly-lit hallways, catching little glimpses of the dramas going on
inside the rooms along the way, like the cells on a strip of film. There was a
rhythm to the placement of the doorways to my left and my right, and it matched
the pounding inside my head as I walked along. I slipped my arm through Tony’s
and held on for dear life. As we moved deeper into the huge breathing, buzzing,
hive of a building, it got darker and quieter. The scenes in the rooms we
passed became sadder and more dramatic. The walls turned from green, to blue,
to pink. The hallway seemed to close in as though we were entering a smaller
space through a funnel, approaching the
sanctum sanctorum
, the very heart of the hive.

The Intensive Care unit was a solemn
place. Against a backdrop of high tech equipment, which was everywhere, people
wearing scrubs moved silently about their work. A doctor wearing a white jacket
and stethoscope over his weekend golfing clothes was talking quietly to
someone’s family members outside one of the five curtained patient areas.
Nurses with sweet, soft faces looked at us with kindness in their eyes. Michael
looked inquiringly at the nurse standing behind the station counter, who seemed
to be expecting us. She nodded at him and smiled. He led us to the last cubicle
and pulled back the curtain, motioning for us to enter and closing the curtain
behind us.

The space inside the tiny room was
packed with stainless steel equipment, miles of wires and cables, and various
monitors with glowing LED lights and dials. It looked like the place where Dr.
Frankenstein gave life to his monster. And lying on the bed, if you could call
that grasshopper-shaped machine a bed, was my poor Henry. There were wires and
tubes attached to him in several places, and his skin looked gray. He was
wearing a hospital gown with his limbs exposed, long and skinny. He looked a
million years old and extremely frail, like I could easily have picked him up.
His eyes were closed and he did not move, but then I saw his chest rise and
fall very slightly.

I went to the side of the bed and
reached for his hand, but I flinched when I saw that an IV needle was attached
to his forearm. I didn’t want to disturb it, so I put my hand lightly over his
instead. He felt alive, warm. Tony came up behind me and stood close, putting
his hand on top of mine and Henry’s. We gazed at him in silence. He looked very
ill. I teared up and felt like crying but held it back, realizing that my
headache had started to abate and I had regained a little bit of self control.
Tony’s hand felt very warm on top of mine. I tried to conduct his energy
through to Henry’s hand, below mine. The three of us communed while we watched
Henry breathe in, and out.

In a minute Michael opened the curtain
again and smiled at us, motioning with his head for us to go. I looked back at
Henry from the doorway. He did look very peaceful, and the expression on his
face was relaxed, serene. I felt that he was out of danger, that he was going
to be OK. I was incredibly glad that we had been allowed to see him tonight.
Somehow, it allayed my worst fears and allowed me to move on.

On the way home I called Siri on
Tony’s cell phone, even though it was three o’clock in the morning. She answered
after the first ring.

“How is he?” she asked in a hushed
voice. I heard a child mutter sleepily in the background.

“He’s going to be OK, but he did have
a heart attack,” I answered.

“How bad?”

“I don’t think they know yet.”

“So he will be in the hospital for a
while?”

“Yes, we’ll find out more tomorrow.
They’re doing tests.”

“It’s very late, Emily, don’t worry
about the store tomorrow morning. Bella and Amy and I can handle it until you
get in.”

“Thank you, Siri. See you tomorrow,” I
said, glad to know it was true. We would all see each other tomorrow, thank
goodness.

We drove home to Tony’s house and went
straight to bed, holding each other close as we lay thinking in the dark, too
tired to sleep. I drifted off around dawn, finally giving in to relaxation and
trying to center my scattered thoughts on a positive outcome.

Two weeks later, Henry was back home
and we had settled uneasily into a routine. He was installed in his domain on
the second floor, and we were bringing his meals up to him. He was on a very
strict diet, so Siri and I were cooking for him several times each day. The
doctors were concerned about building up his strength, and they said he was
underweight. They told us this was a common problem with older people who lived
alone, since cooking for only one person seemed like too much trouble. Tony had
bought a little mini-fridge for the study, and we kept it stocked with
beverages. I had set up a tea-making station on the corner of Henry’s desk,
bringing up the old electric kettle from downstairs, where we replaced it with
a new one.

I had never been in Henry’s bedroom
before, but now I was getting to be quite familiar with it. Furnished with old
dark walnut furniture, with floral wallpaper and white lace curtains, it still
showed many signs of Margaret’s presence. Her portrait, in a black oval frame
with a simple ivory mat, stood on the tall dresser where Henry kept his
clothes. The matching chest of drawers and vanity table had been hers, and her
perfume bottles and knickknacks still sat on the lace-covered tops. Her mirror,
comb and hairbrush were made of silver inlaid with mother-of-pearl birds and
flowers. A beautiful carved teak box from India held her jewelry. Inside the
large closet, her clothes occupied the deepest recesses, pushed to the back but
not removed, nearly gone but never forgotten.

Tony had temporarily moved back into
the rooms on the third floor of Henry’s building, and he was living in two
places at the moment. Three if you counted my apartment, where we spent some
time as well. He laughed and said this was nothing new to him. But it was
putting a strain on our relationship, and we missed each other at night too
often, especially after how close we had been before.

I felt funny about being with Tony
right upstairs over Henry’s head, so we had taken to sneaking off to his place
or mine during the days, snatching random opportunities to be alone together,
to snuggle and make love. It was fun in a way, we turned it into a game. We
pretended to be international spies meeting for a top-secret affair. But we
usually slept alone at night, and that was very sad, for me. I was a total
sucker for this man. It was like an addiction to some chemical substance, and
the chemical was his pheromones. He smelled so absolutely wonderful to me that
a sniff of his neck would make me high, make me spin away with fireworks and
flashing stars going off in my head. He smelled like fresh-baked cookies to me,
and it made my mouth water.

Henry’s insurance covered the cost of
a visiting nurse and physical therapist, both of whom came by on a regular
basis. They gave us instructions for his care that we followed religiously. I
wasn’t sure how much longer the benefits would last, but he was recovering
well, and there were a lot of us nearby to help. The whole neighborhood had
pitched in, one way or another. It was very heartening. Henry was a bit
embarrassed by it all. Whenever Josie came over with something special for him
and labored up the long stairs to deliver it personally, his cheeks turned pink
and his blue eyes twinkled. She sat in the visitor’s chair we had placed next
to the bed and watched him eat, talking constantly. He loved it and was perky
for hours. Josie nourished him in more ways than one. I hovered in the hallway
and listened in for a while one time. She was talking to him about Margaret.

“Remember the time we all went up to
that lake, at night, and Margaret says, let’s go swimming, and you and T go in
the water buck naked?” Josie asked, and they both burst into laughter. “You two
was so funny lookin’, you’re all skinny and white, with your little white butts
shining like the moon! Her and me, we couldn’t stop laughing,” she said, wiping
her eyes with the back of her hand.

Henry ate another bite of the special
low-fat turkey lasagne she had cooked for him.

“Those were the days, my friend,” he
said regretfully. “Life was a lot of fun then.”

“It still could be, you old fool,” she
said, shaking her finger at him sternly. “You just gotta get up out of that bed
and come see the world! Life is good, Henry. You need to remind yourself of
that.”

There was a moment of silence in the
room. I tiptoed away, back to the study where I’d been boxing up a shipment of
books to be sent out. I had taken over the Internet business, which turned out
to be quite substantial. Siri and Bella were in charge downstairs now, with
Amy’s help, but we all found reasons to be passing Henry’s open door on the
second floor whenever possible, to look in and see if he was awake and might
feel like a chat.

Bella and Siri and I snuck up the
stairs to the third floor one morning while Tony was out jogging. They had
never seen it before. It had obviously been a fully functioning apartment at
some time in the past. At present it was partially furnished and needed some
updating. Where downstairs the space was divided into a few rather large rooms,
up here the same footprint had been arranged very differently. There were three
bedrooms, a study, a livingroom, a dining room, a kitchen big enough to hold a
table and chairs, a pantry, and a very nice full bath containing both a stall
shower and a claw foot bathtub. The girls looked at the spacious layout
enviously, especially Siri, whose family of five was packed into a four-room
apartment. Tony’s little suitcase was in the master bedroom, where we had made
up the big bed with clean sheets. A couple of his shirts were hanging in the
closet and a razor and toothbrush were in the bathroom, but otherwise there
were no signs that he was in residence. He wasn’t spending much time up here.

Tony had heard back from the
University and was going for a second interview next week. It was a good thing
he didn’t have other commitments at the moment, because he was really bearing
the brunt of Henry’s needs. While the rest of us worked to keep Henry’s business
healthy, Tony worked on the man himself. Up early every day to go running while
the visiting nurse was with the old man, Tony made breakfast for two and
carried it upstairs on a tray. Tony sat in the visitor’s chair and they ate
together. They were often still up there talking and laughing when I came in at
eight. I usually went up first thing to check on everyone, taking away the
dirty dishes when I went down the back stairs to start the day’s baking.

Tony helped Henry with his personal
needs, for which we all were extremely grateful. I was glad we women didn’t
have to intrude on his privacy in order to take care of him. My job was to cook
and keep the money coming in. During the days, everyone took a turn checking on
our good-natured patient, and someone was up there sitting with him for much of
the time when he was awake. Henry joked that he had never had such a
charismatic personality before the heart attack, so it had obviously made him
more attractive in some way.

We had brought one of the little lunch
tables up from the shop and set it up in Henry’s study, so that as soon as he
could get up and walk around a bit, the three of us could sit there together
for dinner. Afterwards, Henry usually watched TV in his bedroom for a little
while before falling asleep. This was a chance for Tony and me to play spy vs.
spy in the kitchen, while we did the dishes. Sometimes this involved shutting
ourselves into the pantry to make out in the dark, which was amazingly
tantalizing. It was hard for me to go home alone after that. I really, really
missed Tony when I lay under the skylight alone at night looking up at the
stars, feeling the memory of our kisses still tingling on my lips.

Henry was improving every day, and
that was the most important thing. He got up out of bed and started to walk up
and down the hallway. He got out of his bathrobe and into his regular clothes
and came into the study, at first to sit and watch me at the computer, telling
me what to do about this and that, and then eventually to sit in front of the
monitor himself again.

When I first checked his email to
reply to any urgent matters I had discovered that Henry had an extensive
ongoing correspondence with many people from around the globe. I sent a note to
all of them saying he would be offline for a while due to illness. Many of
these people were very concerned to hear it, sending back cheerful messages in
various languages, which I dutifully printed and delivered to him. I learned
that while Henry didn’t have any actual relatives that we knew of, his family
of friends stretched far and wide. His influence was felt strongly by many of
us. Little by little his strength began to return, and the melodious sound of
his “Farewell!” as he hung up the phone was soon echoing through the halls,
just as it used to.