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Still...

Nancy Christie

    Still, he thought, staring unseeing out his office window, she could have called. She could have let him know where she was, that she was okay, that she’d be home later.
    “They said her condition could stabilize,” his words spoken aloud although there was no one to hear them. “They said sometimes it takes a while for the drug to work. They said...” but there he stopped because he wasn’t sure what they had really said and what he had thought they said and what he had wanted them to say but perhaps they couldn’t.
    Still, time and again he had told her that, no matter what, he would be there for her.
    “I promise,” just last night, when they were washing up the dinner dishes, “I promise that you won’t be alone. I’ll be with you every step of the way, right there with you.”
    He remembered the look she gave him-sad and pitying and just a little angry-as though she was thinking that he was making a vow that he couldn’t possibly keep, and she knew it and he should know it, too.
    “Tell me,” he had begged in frustration, trying to wipe away that expression from her face, “just tell me what you need, what I can do! I’ll do anything, anything at all! Just ask!”
    “Die for me?” she murmured. And then she walked away, heading to the living room where she had taken to sleeping, instead of curled next to him in their bed.
    He wiped the last glass, set it on the shelf and hung the towel to dry. Later, when he glanced in before going to bed, her back was to the room, to him. And the next morning, when he came in to make coffee, she was already gone.

    Twenty miles out of town, she stood on the embankment, shivering a bit in the chill autumn air. She watched the geese settle for a brief rest on the lake before they traveled to a warmer, more hospitable climate. Last night’s conversation-well, not really a conversation since she only said that one sentence-played in her mind.
    I’ll do anything, he had said and maybe he meant it but it was easy to make promises when no one would ever know that you had failed.
    And did it matter in the end? Did anything matter? There was nothing they could do-they knew that, she knew that. And she was tired of the pain, of waiting for the inevitable, of trying to be hopeful when there was nothing left to hope for.
    She wasn’t like him. He wasn’t ready to give up. Even after all the results were in, he had hope still.

    The geese, disturbed by the unexpected sound, took flight. Then, after a few minutes, the lake was once again calm and serene, not a ripple to betray what had transpired, the surface still as night, still as the grave, still....

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