Page 71 of The Midnight Hour
Two words I can choose to live by, even though it’s not easy.Especiallythough it’s not easy.
Slowly I release Sam and step back. He sniffs, running his wrist along his nose, before giving me a shamefaced smile. “Sorry.”
I smile faintly. “I wish I had a handkerchief.”
“Dad would have one.”
“You’re right, he would have.”
We are, I realize, already talking about him as if he’s dead, but he isn’t. Heisn’t. “Let’s go back and talk to him,” I tell Sam, and together we walk back up to the cabin.
That night the community votes on whether we can stay; it only takes ten minutes, but it feels like the longest ten minutes of my life. If we have to move on, I don’t know how we will, or where we’ll go. I’m worried it might hasten Daniel’s death, a prospect I can hardly bear to think about.
Fortunately, that’s not how it turns out. Vicky emerges from the main cabin, smiling.
“Come inside and get warm,” she tells us. “It was unanimous.”
The relief is palpable and sweet. I go back to tell Daniel, and he girds himself to join us by the fire in the main cabin. Vicky makes hot chocolate, an unimaginable treat, weak and watery as it is. This is a beginning of something, yet with a terrible ending wrapped inside it, but I’m still choosing.
And yet.
As we sip our hot chocolate, Vicky takes us through our days. We won’t be assigned jobs here the same way we were back at the NBSRC, but we will all have to chip in and if we aren’t pulling our weight someone will, she tells us with good humor, certainly let us know about it.
“So far, we’ve kept it casual,” Vicky explains. “Based on goodwill. We don’t want to turn into some work camp where you have to carry out orders. That’s not the point of life, even this life, such as it is.”
Daniel and I exchange amused glances; it’s almost as if Vicky overheard me complaining, back at the NBSRC. My sense of relief deepens; this was definitely the right choice, and I think we all know it.
Over the next few days and weeks, we fall into a rhythm of work—making meals, cleaning up, trapping and ice fishing, weeding the boxes in the greenhouses, harvesting the winter parsnips, mending both tools and clothes. Sheryl teaches me how to sew and I darn sheets for an entire afternoon, sitting by the fire, feeling like Ma Ingalls. Sam and Kyle become obsessed with fishing, and Ruby spends every moment she can in the greenhouses with Rose, who is our resident green thumb. Phoebe follows Mattie like her little shadow, and Mattie takes to the kitchen, learning tips and tricks from both Sheryl and Patti about how to make a couple of potatoes and a single swede go a long way.
Nicole and Ben find their place too, albeit a little more slowly. Ben has to drop his too-cool-for-this attitude, but soon enough he’s fishing with Sam and Kyle, and even gutting and cleaning the walleyes he’s caught. Nicole, unsurprisingly perhaps since she was an interior designer, knows how to sew and helps me with the darning.
Life both slows down and speeds up; the days pass in a blurof productive activity without anything feeling frantic or rushed, and yet they pass, and, as they do, I feel Daniel begin to ebb away.
I know better than to pretend it’s not happening. Time is too short and too precious for such pointless deception but oh, how it hurts, not to pretend. To be forced to acknowledge the reality that creeps closer every day.
At first, he went down to the lake to watch the boys fish, applauding when they caught a perch or a walleye or the occasional pike. It brought me such joy, to see him there, to hear the mingled laughter.
Then he stood on the deck, wrapped up well, and cheered them on from there, his hoarse voice carrying on the still winter air while the boys smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. Then it was from inside, in a chair by the big picture window, where he could still at least see them. And then it was by the fire, where he couldn’t, asking me how they were doing, his voice faint and hoarse.
And then it was back at the cabin, in bed, where he started to sleep all the time, stirring only to smile at me faintly and pick at the food I brought him. It was only a matter of weeks from the first to the last; by mid-December, I knew he wasn’t going to get out of bed again, not for any extended period of time, at least. How could something happen so fast? How could I let it?
And yet I was powerless, we all were, and that was part of the pain.
Adam didn’t have much to give to ease Daniel’s obvious suffering, but he’d kept some codeine from his practice and he offered it to Daniel, who, in typical fashion, refused it.
“Save it for someone who really needs it,” he told the doctor, who shook his head, smiling sorrowfully.
“Don’t you think you do?”
“Not for long,” Daniel quipped, his grin turning into a grimace.
“How bad is it?” I ask him one night while I sit with him. Everyone else is up at the main cabin, where they tend to congregate in the evenings. “Really?”
“I can handle it, Alex.”
“You don’t need to be strong for me,” I tell him. “Not anymore.”
He lets out a tired laugh as he leans his head back against the pillow. “You were always the strong one in our marriage.”
