The Wife Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

ambulance only two weeks ago, shaking with the thought that in no time I’d get lost wandering its vast and complex corridors.
    “You may go up now to the intensive care unit,” the Emergency nurses told me the night of the stroke. “It’s on the sixth floor. Take the elevator at the end of the hall and then just follow the signs,” and I could imagine the children laughing at that and saying, “You must be joking! Mother could never follow
signs
!” Because it
is
true that I once was deposited by car before our very own house, with William in full view through the front window sitting in his La-Z-Boy, the newspaper hiding his face, and I turned in confusion and walked away. Running after me, the children laughed, pointed me homeward. “Oh, Mother!” they cried. “You’ve got no sense of direction!”
    With my heart pounding, I set off the night of the stroke on a lengthy journey through many heavy swinging doors, taking me into a part of the hospital where the quantity of life seemed to diminish. Gradually the halls became emptier and more silentuntil I entered a round windowless theatre with a nurses’ station on a raised platform in the centre. Fanned out below it were a dozen transparent cells, where patients lay like insects under glass, so far removed from sunlight and the sound of the wind that I was afraid they’d forget these forces were calling them and never wake up again. I couldn’t help feeling that this unit was like a church, with the nurses and their technology on a high altar and the patients’ rooms like radiating chapels below. We, the supplicating visitors, passed like pilgrims in an ambulatory and entered the chapels, where we prayed silently over the sick, who lay immobile as stone effigies sleeping atop their marble caskets.
    In one of these cells I found William with his eyes closed and looking very pasty, like a figure in unfired clay. I sat on a chair and watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, thickened in his youth from pitching hay and swinging a sledgehammer and still powerful though he’s a man of seventy-three. I saw his heart tracing an alpine journey across a television monitor. From a suspended sac, a life-sustaining fluid dripped slowly into him. I imagined it carried like clear spring water through all the tributaries of his body until he floated in miraculous liquids, as on a pure mountain lake. In the dark windows, I saw my form and William’s reflected like two old actors on a bright stage, waiting for their forgotten lines to be whispered to them.
    Around three a.m. a nurse came along. She strapped a blood-pressure band around William’s lifeless arm.
    “Is he improving at all?” I asked. “Is he getting better? Is he going to die?”
    “Let’s not upset ourselves with questions like that, Mrs. Hazzard,” she answered so quietly that I was afraid William, with his eyes closed, might think he was indeed in church and refuseto wake up because he’s so angry with the pope, fat man in a white beany, smiling and getting fatter while the world starves. The nurse’s calmness alarmed me. Panic rose in my chest and I had the urge to shout, to run from room to room smashing with my purse at all the spotless glass.
    “Time,” said the nurse kindly. “Time is a great healer, for both patient and family. You must let time work for you as well, Mrs. Hazzard.”
    After the nurse disappeared, the thought of all the shapeless time ahead of us made me very tired. I decided to lie down for a moment beside William, feeling for the first time in decades that it was quite safe to do so, just as I’d believed on our wedding night that it was safe, because of course William was young then and confused and had not yet realized that he should be angry about life. His air force uniform hung neatly on a chair beside the bed, his train ticket to Halifax floating in the breast pocket. He’d meet up with his buddies at the station the next morning, travel to Nova Scotia, head