Ending by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page B

labor. Dr. Block had said something vague to him about all those tests—something about metabolic disorder and low-grade infection. Jay was no fool—he wasn’t getting well, and yet he made no demands to know more. I believed then that he did know and that it was just a matter of acknowledgment, of giving consent and embracing terror.
    Cautiously we examined one another’s knowledge and we mumbled words about the mysteries of the human body. Yet we did not say even one word that suggested good-bye. We stayed close to the room and Martin’s voice, avoiding any private place in which to lay out our feelings. We tried not to speak in very clinical terms either, keeping flesh in its proper place as an object of love. Yet when we spoke about the children, grief and longing showed plainly on his face.
    It was decided that I would bring them to the parking lot of the hospital so that Jay could see them from the window of the room opposite his. It would be an odd excursion for the children: to be at the hospital, but not allowed upstairs, to see Jay, but only as a remote hazy figure they could not really identify. Would they remember him?
    I helped them with their snowsuits and scarves and we drove to the hospital. I kept thinking, they’re very young, they won’t even remember this. What could I recall from those distant days when I was only three-four-five-years old? And what had I invented because it filled an empty space and satisfied longing?
    Paul was just coming out of babyhood. I looked at him quickly as I drove, at the baby softness of his features. You could not imagine bone under such delicate perfect flesh. His fingers were still tapered, cushioned at the base, and I saw that they were dirty, that there was dirt under the short papershell pink of his nails. He sighed and pushed them out of sight, into his mouth.
    He would look like Jay, I realized with a thrill of terror. Jay had looked like that when he was a baby. Those deep-set eyes, that sweet curling mouth. Only the flattened bridge of his nose saved him from beauty. People would say, “You look just like your father.” He would remind me, as his features, his final self emerged from this compressed beginning of a man. Maybe his voice would be like Jay’s too. They learn language from us. A year ago Paul had only a few words and he listened to us and then he began to string them together. He watched Jay and imitated gesture too. He tried to throw a ball, to run, to hold a fork the way his father did. Sometimes he shuffled through the apartment, endearingly awkward, wearing Jay’s shoes. And when Jay winked at him, Paul would try desperately to wink back, his mouth working, his whole face contorted with the effort and the ecstasy of imitation. “That’s good, honey,” Jay told him. “You’ve almost got it now.”
    But Paul would not consciously remember this day or the ones before it. There would only be a fragmented series of events, confused and distorted. A sense of the car’s motion perhaps, the pleasant joggling reminiscent of the cradle, and the peculiar taste of his own fingers. Going to see someone once, somewhere, and then coming home again.
    But Harry would be different. Five was a more established age anyway. He could write his own name in broad uncertain letters and he would be going to school in the fall. And Harry was like me, a hoarder of experience. He stood on the back seat of the car on his knees, looking through the window at the rushing landscape, gasping lightly at the corpse of a car-flattened animal and saying nothing. I was jealous for him because his brother had been favored by fate and would be more lovable for all time to come. Suddenly I wished that he too could look like Jay instead of like me, that I could will some of Jay’s gestures and features onto him, as if I were dividing property fairly and squarely among the heirs.
    Then we were at the hospital and they waited in the car while I went into the lobby. I called Jay