The Probable Future

III.

OLD ELI HATHAWAY had taken ill; the end, it was now abundantly clear, would come the way he always suspected it would, with his heart. First he was brought to the hospital in Hamilton, then taken to Boston to see the specialists, and just when he felt he had become a parcel that was undeliverable at any address, he was brought to the nursing home in North Arthur, at the very end of Hopewell Street. In spite of his age, Eli was strong; he’d had a series of cardiac incidents that another man wouldn’t have survived. With a family history of cardiac trouble and early death, he had done his best to stay away from matters of the heart. He had never married, or had children, nor had he spent a cent of his family’s money, which had increased over the years as the remaining properties from the original Hathaway land grant were sold off, acre by acre. Eli didn’t need to work, he had chosen to drive a taxi; he enjoyed the fact that everyone in town knew him by name. As he aged, people in Unity decided he was charming rather than ill tempered. His neighbors brought him dinner and Christmas pies; Enid Frost, who ran the ticket office at the train station, had fixed Eli Hathaway coffee each day for the past twenty-two years without ever asking for a donation to the coffee-break fund.

Now, at the nursing home, Eli was grumpy, and who could blame him? All the nurses wanted to do was to prick his fingers with needles to test his insulin level or take another vial of blood to check his white count. He was dying, you didn’t need a test to see that, and he was none too happy about it. A new driver, a fellow from Monroe, had bought Eli’s taxi, dirt cheap, and he was probably already overcharging people that needed a ride home. Eli had never asked for more than five dollars and none of his passengers would have guessed that his account in the savings bank was so large that the bank president, Henry Elliot’s brother, Nathan, invited him to Thanksgiving dinner every year. The bank oversaw all of the Hathaway investments, because Eli was convinced financial affairs took too hard a toll on the heart, and he had all that cardiac history to consider. All this time, he’d been a rich man who had driven a taxi, who considered a pair of shoes worthless if they didn’t last a good ten years. But even if he had used his wealth, what difference would it have made? He would have still wound up in the nursing home, his life reduced to his most essential belongings: a bag of clothes, a shaving cup, a pair of eyeglasses that weren’t much good, a straight-edged razor the nurses wouldn’t let him use, and the silver star he wore on a chain around his neck.

When Dr. Stewart came to see him, Eli didn’t recognize the doctor at first, even though he’d been Eli’s physician for forty years. Eli thought the doc was some old boy from the next room who was roaming the halls, giving people checkups for the hell of it. Eli pulled the sheet up to his neck and told the doctor to get out, but he stopped cold when he noticed the girl. He recognized her immediately. Dr. Stewart leaned down to ask if Eli knew where he was, but Eli waved him away.

“Rebecca’s here,” he said. He felt his pulse thrum and there was a sweet taste in his mouth. “I must be dying if you’re here.”

Eli Hathaway closed his eyes and waited for heaven, or hell, if that’s what was in store for him. When nothing happened, he opened his eyes again. There in front of him was Dr. Stewart and the girl with black hair, both peering at Eli as though he were a dancing chicken or a man from Mars.

Standing there, on a Saturday morning, at an hour when other girls her age were still in bed, Stella saw that Eli Hathaway would die in this room when a massive heart attack came; in less than twenty-four hours his eyelids would flutter and his breath would rise up, all at once. Another girl would have been afraid of Eli, of the scent of death that clung to him, of his crumpled body and the blue veins so very close to the skin, but not Stella. Here in the nursing home, death was everywhere; Stella had spied it in every hallway, in every room. Some of the deaths were so quick, they were easily missed in the time it took to blink. Others were long, drawn-out, not what you’d wish for anyone, not even your worst enemy. In the dining hall of the home, Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she’d been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

In Eli’s room, Stella looked over at Dr. Stewart and was certain he saw what was about to happen just as clearly as she did. Her grandmother had told her that Brock Stewart was the most honest man in five counties, but in Stella’s opinion, he was a liar, just as she herself was. He’d lied on their last visit to the nursing home, for one thing. Stella saw the look on his face when an old woman, wheezing and spitting up blood, asked if she were dying. Dr. Stewart had brushed the question aside and talked instead about the patient’s grandchildren and about the lush spring, brought on by the record rainfalls in April. There are lilacs growing right in through the window, the woman said cheerfully, setting her original question aside. When I close my eyes I still see purple. I hear bees.