CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Alex
Now
The doctor’s name was Patel. He was young for someone who delivered news like this. He had the careful eyes of a man who had learned, probably early, how to say devastating things without flinching.
I respected that, in an abstract way.
“The intracranial pressure has increased significantly since our last conversation,” he said. “We’ve done what we can to manage it. At this point, the brain activity we’re seeing is—” He paused. “It’s minimal, Missus MacAfee. I want to be straightforward with you.”
“Please,” I said.
“We’re looking at a situation where continued life support is sustaining bodily functions, but the cognitive activity required for any meaningful recovery—” Another pause. “It’s not there. It may not come back.”
I looked at Joshua through the glass.
The tube in his throat. The monitors. The stillness of him, which was unnatural in a man who had never once been still.
“What are my options?” I asked.
Dr. Patel folded his hands. “You can continue as we are and wait. Sometimes, in cases like this, there are unexpected improvements. It’s rare, but it happens.” He looked at me steadily. “Or you can consider withdrawing life support. We would make him comfortable. It would be peaceful.”
I looked at him through the glass.
“There’s no right answer,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“I know.”
“Take whatever time you need.”
“I’m not taking him off anything,” I said, when Dr. Patel came back for the chart. “His body started this on Tenth Street. His body can finish it. I’m not going to be the hand on the switch. Arthur’s father is in that bed. I won’t make myself the last thing he loses.”
He nodded. “We continue, then.”
I did not ask about the switch again.
Martina brought coffee she’d gotten from the machine down the hall. It tasted like hot brown water. We drank it anyway.
“He wouldn’t want this,” she said.
“I know.”
“You know that, Alex. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t someone who would want to be kept alive by a machine.”
“I know that too.”
She watched me. “But?”
I wrapped both hands around the paper cup. “Arthur.”
She was quiet.
“He’s young,” I said. “And his father is in there and if I make this decision—” I stopped. “He’ll have questions one day. When he’s older. He’ll want to know what happened and why.”
“And you’ll tell him the truth,” Martina said. “That the doctors gave you no real hope of recovery. That you did what was merciful.” She set her cup down. “Arthur is a perceptive child. He already knows more than you think he does.”
“He doesn’t want to go in there,” I said.
“No.”
“He said Joshua is in there,” I said. “Not that he wanted to go in.”
Martina said nothing to that. There was nothing useful to say.
I stared at the floor. “Do you think about what happens after?”
“After?”
“If I—” I gestured toward the room. “After.”
She looked at me carefully. “What do you mean?”
I didn’t answer right away. The question sat there and I couldn’t make it mean anything useful.
“I mean Arthur,” I said. “What happens to Arthur.”
“Arthur will be fine. He has you.”
“He deserves more than just me.”
“Then give him more than just you.” She said it simply. Like it was obvious.
I looked at the window.
Joshua lay completely still. The monitors beeped their slow, indifferent rhythm.
I thought about coffee. About Arthur’s lunch that I hadn’t prepared. About the sound the machines made when nobody was talking over them.
I felt very little. That was the part I couldn’t explain.
This was not the moment.
I made myself think instead about the actual decision in front of me, the one that belonged to this hallway and not to a desert I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
I thought about what Joshua would have wanted.
Then I caught myself, because I genuinely didn’t know.
We had never once talked about dying. We had talked about everything else.
Vacations, schools, which country club, which car.
And never the one conversation that would have actually mattered tonight.
That felt, suddenly, like its own small tragedy, a marriage so carefully arranged around its surfaces that it had never once touched down on anything real.
I thought about Arthur asleep at home, or trying to be, with Martina down the hall listening for him the way she always did.
I thought about what I would tell him, eventually.
Not the medical details, but the shape of it, the fact that his mother had stood in a hallway and not known what to choose, and had chosen anyway, because someone had to and there was no one else standing there.
That, in the end, was as close to clarity as the night gave me. Not certainty. Just the understanding that I would live with whatever I decided, and that living with it was the only promise I could actually make.
Martina left at seven to get Arthur. I sat alone in the waiting room for a while. Then I walked back to Joshua’s room and stood in the doorway.
I looked at him for a long time.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to answer.
“I’m going to let God decide. I want you to know that. I’m not going to be the one who—” I stopped. “I’m going to let whatever happens, happen. I think that’s the only thing I can live with.”
The monitors beeped.
I turned off the light in the corner. Left the room. Walked to the end of the hall and stood at the window that looked out over the hospital parking lot, where cars moved through the night like nothing was happening.
My phone buzzed. Martina. Arthur wants pizza.
I typed back. Get him whatever he wants.
I put the phone in my pocket.
Then I thought, quietly and without intending to, about the desert. About blue mountains at dusk. About the particular sound of a Harley-Davidson engine running flat out across open ground.
About the parking lot. About nothing.
I wondered if he was single.
I decided there was no way he was.
I wondered anyway.