Chapter Thirty-Six
Sharon
Higher Love by Steve Winwood
I’ve only been gone forty-five minutes but I can’t help but look for the lit candle on the desk as I approach the nurses’ station. Forty-five minutes is plenty of time for somebody to die and for that candle to be lit. I’ve seen it happen a handful of times myself during my time on this ward.
It’s a small relief when I see the candle hasn’t been lit. Only a small one.
Kate said I should shower after my walk, but I’ve already spent too much time away from Danny. It’s a physical pull, what I feel to be back at his side. The thought of him losing consciousness for good or worse when I’m not there… it’s too dark and heavy and agonising to even entertain.
When I pull back the curtain to Danny’s cubicle, I’m surprised to see Kate sitting up on the bed.
Sure, she did it yesterday with me, but she had been in her jeans and jumper, not her nurse’s uniform like she is now.
It’s both disorienting and deeply comforting to see her in this relaxed, intimate pose with Danny.
I suppose it’s because I’m looking at the two people I love most in the world connecting.
How I wish they could have longer together.
How I wish I could have longer with Danny.
How I wish I could have longer with Kate.
I refuse to think about that. Now is not the time.
I’ve made my feelings clear and Kate has…
not provided any further clarity or reason for me to think a relationship with me is what she wants.
It’s painful, that fact, like a knife’s edge piercing my heart over and over again, but it’s a pain I have to ignore.
Because my heart, my body, my mind can only manage so much grief right now.
And still, despite it all, despite the loss I am about to face head-on, I feel something like contentment and calm just watching them. The two people I love most in the world.
So that’s what I do. I watch them.
It must be a few minutes later when Kate finally turns and sees me.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” she says on a sigh. “I don’t… I don’t know… I don’t think…”
I move closer to her and Danny. She doesn’t need to say anything. The fact that she can’t even form a sentence tells me enough.
Standing behind Kate, close enough that my chest touches her back, I place my hand over their already-joined fingers. Kate’s hand is noticeably warmer than Danny’s and that hurts me. But it’s one pinprick in a thousand that I know will consume me if I’m not careful.
“I have to ask,” Kate sniffs. I think she’s been crying. “Would he want a priest here? He was raised Catholic, wasn’t he?”
“No,” I say quickly. “He worshipped only at the church of hedonism.”
Kate laughs softly. “Good for him,” she says. “Anybody else you think would want to be here?”
Orla asked me this on Sunday when she thought he was fading away.
I’d racked my brains for the names all the friends he would go out with – more names than I had faces for.
I’d thought about Hugo and Oliver, the only friends of Danny’s I knew well, and how they’re both already gone.
I think about how quiet the phone has been since Danny’s diagnosis.
My answer is the same now as it was then.
“No, nobody. Just me.”
Kate wriggles her hand free from between mine and Danny’s and leans forward so our bodies no longer touch.
“Where are you going?” I demand before she is standing fully.
“To give you space,” she looks down at Danny. “I think he’s close.”
I look at Danny, and I hate how I can see how challenging each breath is for him. How slow and strained and unnaturally his chest moves, even with the oxygen, and I’m not ready for this. I should be. I should be. But I’m not.
“Then stay,” I say in a quiet, pleading voice. “Please don’t leave me now.”
“Sharon, I—”
“Of course, if you can’t, that’s fine. But I’m scared.” I hold her gaze and her eyes are as glossy as mine feel. “I’m so scared and you were there when others have passed. I saw you sit with Peter and Noel. I—”
“I can stay,” she interrupts me to say. “I can stay. I just didn’t know if you wanted me to.”
“I want you to stay always,” I say on a huffed-out, slightly manic-sounding laugh.
The last few days, no, weeks, have rid me of all my armour and all my layers of skin and flesh and muscle underneath.
I’ve been stripped to the bone and I have nowhere to hide, so what’s the point in hiding how I feel about her?
Much to my devastation, she doesn’t say anything and she continues to move. But when I watch her walk around to the other side of the bed and sit down beside Danny, I release the breath I was holding.
She gathers his hand in both of hers and she keeps her eyes on his face. I position the chair so I can sit as close to him as possible, and I do the same, scooping up his limp hand and pressing it to my face.
“Oh, Danny boy,” I say. He once told me his mother used to call him that. I hope he doesn’t hate me for saying it now, but that’s what he looks like. A little boy.
“He was talking a moment ago,” Kate says and she sounds bewildered, like she hasn’t witnessed hundreds of poor people’s lives just disappear before her very eyes. “He was talking about you.”
My tears flow and I debate internally whether I should move Danny’s hand off my cheek because he’ll be able to feel them and I don’t want his last moments to be even close to worrying about me and my pain.
But what if he’s already beyond that? What if he can’t hear us anymore?
What if he can’t feel the heat of my cheek and the slickness of my tears? That somehow feels worse.
Besides, I’m too selfish to create more distance between us. I need his hand close. I need him close.
“He loves you,” Kate continues and I’m grateful because I’m too overwhelmed to speak. “He loves you so much.”
“I love him,” I splutter and I bring my other hand up to his face, running my fingers through his hair and stroking the much-too-hollow side of his cheek.
“I know,” Kate says.
“We would joke,” I sniff. “He’s the only man I’ll ever love, we’d say. And it’s true,” I sob. “It’s true.”
“You never told me how you met,” Kate prompts and she sounds so calm I wonder if she’s morphed into nurse mode again after her wobble a moment ago. I don’t care. I’m just glad she’s still here.
“At my work. He was temping in the canteen. I think he noticed that nobody would sit with me at lunch,” I sniff again.
“I wasn’t cliquey with the other PAs. They were all short skirts and hair spray and having affairs with their bosses.
And I was… well, you know what I’m like.
And I was never in a million years going to sit with the entitled twonks that were the lower-level consultants.
So I sat alone. And I didn’t mind it, really I didn’t.
But Danny, one day, he sat down next to me and asked me if I knew that two of the board members, two male board members, were having an affair.
I think he told me because he could just tell I was gay and he thought I’d find it amusing.
I did. Unprofessional, yes, but intriguing.
Every day after that he would somehow find ten minutes during his shift to sit next to me and gossip about who else we thought was gay, or queer, whatever. ”
I kiss Danny’s fingers. I hope he can hear me, because I don’t think I’ve ever said what I’m about to admit to him before.
“He was the first person who saw me as gay, as a big butch lesbian, and was drawn to it. He didn’t just accept or tolerate me,” I shudder, hating those words when perhaps six months ago I would have just loved for those to have been verbs my mother could have embraced, “he wanted to be close to me. He wanted to be around me. He wanted me in his life. And I wanted him in mine. He got fired a month or so after. Maybe for giving me extra portions for free, or maybe for some other transgression, but a week after he disappeared from the canteen – something that literally made me want to cry, I should add – he sent me a letter with his phone number. We met up for a pub lunch the following weekend and well, we have been friends ever since.”
Friends. It’s really not an adequate word for what Danny and I became.
“Family,” Kate adds, like she can read my mind. “You became family.”
“Yeah, we did.” I kiss his fingers again.
My tears had slowed while I was reminiscing, but that was only temporary as I start to sob quietly again.
“I’m so glad you had each other,” Kate tells me, and maybe, Danny too.
And then silence falls. As silent as it ever is on the ward.
Mumbled conversations in other cubicles are still audible.
The rolling of wheels and clattering of metal still reach my ears.
Even the occasional ripple of laughter finds us, but I am fixed only on the rise and fall of Danny’s chest, and the way his breath rattles, even through the oxygen mask.
It gets to a point where I start to believe each breath is his last. Each one gets harder and harder and harder until I’m actually hoping that his body doesn’t have to labour for more air.
I’m actively wishing him the peace of stopping, of surrendering, of letting go, all while I plead silently with my whole body that he stays, stays with me.
“I’m scared too,” Kate says out of the blue. The words rush out like they’ve been on the tip of her tongue for many minutes.
“But you’ve… you’ve done this before. Many times.”
“No, not about that,” she turns to look at me. “I’m scared about… us.”
“Us?” I frown.
“I want… an us.”
My heart stalls, my breath holds. “You do?”
“Yes, but I’m scared I’m not… enough. I’m scared you’ll realise this one day soon or maybe a year or two down the line and you’ll leave me. My job, it’s not easy to live with, for a partner. And me… I’m not easy either.”
“When did I ever say I wanted easy?” I ask in little more than a whisper. I’m aware of how inconvenient the time and place of this conversation is, and yet I suspect that’s exactly why we’re having it now.