Void in Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

so,” I said. “Would you like to get some coffee?”
    “Actually, I’d like to eat something. The nurses have been very kind. But I haven’t been very hungry.” She shook her head. “Suddenly I’m famished.”
    The nurse directed us to the cafeteria—down the corridor to the end, go right to the elevators, down to the lobby, take a sharp left…
    She chatted compulsively along the way. The doctors had been so honest with her, the nurses so thoughtful, the chair she dozed in so uncomfortable. I murmured at the right places. If it hadn’t been for the way she kept digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands, she might have fooled me. That plus the fact that she avoided mention of Les.
    I got a salad in a plastic-topped container with a little aluminum foil envelope of Thousand Island dressing and a cup of coffee. Becca took a chicken salad sandwich and tea. We transported them on tin trays to a corner table.
    Doctors and nurses dominated a group of tables near the middle of the large cafeteria. They talked loudly and laughed often and were constantly coming and going. A bored female voice summoned them periodically over an invisible speaker. Here and there around the perimeter huddled citizens like Becca and me, mostly in pairs, picking absentmindedly at their food and whispering solemnly. They seemed to be waiting for bad news to find them.
    I squeezed the dressing onto my salad. Becca tore the cellophane off her sandwich. She lifted it to her mouth, hesitated, then put it down. She said, “Dammit.” Tears welled up in her eyes and then spilled out. She neither wiped them away nor covered her face. She cried silently but without self-consciousness, and when I started to move to her, she gestured to me to stay where I was.
    It probably didn’t last more than a minute. To me it seemed much longer. Then she fumbled a tissue from her bag and wiped her face.
    She smiled wanly at me. “That’s been coming on for a while. Sorry.”
    “You’re lucky you can cry. It’s supposed to make you feel better.”
    “I’ll do it some more, no doubt.” She bit into her sandwich. “This is delicious,” she mumbled.
    She wolfed down her sandwich while I ate my salad and watched her. She had once been beautiful, and perhaps she would be again. But time—or tragedy—had marked her, sucking the life from her skin and cobwebbing an intricate pattern of tiny lines onto her face. Tendons rose starkly from the backs of her hands. I wondered how she’d look after a good night’s sleep.
    “We didn’t have a very good marriage,” she said abruptly. “I think Les was being kind to me by marrying me. I loved him in my simple, naive way, this brilliant, bizarre man. He was older than me. Experienced. Well traveled. Everything that I wasn’t. He had been married once before. Lester was not a conventional man. He liked to make his own rules. I never really got to understand him. At first it didn’t matter. Then it mattered desperately to me. He didn’t care. He never tried to help me. Oh, I think he cared for me. Or cared about me. But I didn’t really matter to him. I just wasn’t important. He knew how I felt about his—his eavesdropping, his skulking and sneaking and spying. I despised it. He didn’t care about that, either. I always knew something would happen to him. Whenever he was gone, I would wait there, waiting for what was going to happen. The other night was déjà vu. I’d seen it before. It had happened so many times in my mind already. It’s terrible to say, but I am so relieved that it won’t happen again.” She looked at me, and her smile momentarily transformed her face. “You see, Mr. Coyne, this has liberated me.”
    I nodded, willing her to go on, sensing her need.
    “After we got married, the magic went away. Les lost interest. I suppose I did, too, although now and then I tried to recapture it. We’ve been married six years. On our anniversary last fall, I prepared a special meal. Silly