The Weight of Waiting

The hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and resignation. I wore my father's fedora, the felt brim pulled low, as if the hat could shield me from what waited behind door 312.

Inside, Clara sat by the window, her swimmer's shoulders stooped. She'd once crossed the Channel at nineteen, strong and relentless. Now cancer was swimming through her bloodstream, and all her strength couldn't touch it.

"You're still wearing that thing," she said, eyes on my hat.

I took it off. Her hair was gone. "Clara—"

"Don't." She cut me off with that sphinx-like calm she'd mastered since diagnosis. Her eyes held riddles I couldn't solve, secrets she'd decided to carry alone. We'd been married twelve years, and I'd never felt farther from her.

Her brother Stephen was coming later. A bull of a man, loud with optimism and trite reassurances. He'd bring flowers and talk about miracle recoveries, unable to sit with the quiet truth.

"Remember the goldfish?" Clara asked suddenly.

Our first apartment. We'd won two at a carnival. They'd died within a week. We'd buried them in a houseplant, held each other and cried like fools over fish that had lived maybe seven days.

"I remember," I said.

"We were so young then." Her voice cracked. "Everything felt like the first time."

Outside, rain began to streak the glass. The hospice nurse had said it might be hours now. I wanted to beg her not to leave me. I wanted to rage at the unfairness, grab life by the horns and demand different terms. Instead, I just held her hand.

"Put the hat back on," she whispered. "You look like your father in it."

So I did. And we watched the rain together, neither of us swimming toward shore anymore, just letting the current take us where it would.