The Probable Future

“Oh, please. Jimmy Elliot is such an idiot. Who’s afraid of an onion?”

Stella felt more cheerful after this discussion, and she wound up eating three slices of pizza after carefully picking off the sausage. Hap’s father ate in the den, in front of the TV, and Dr. Stewart was on the phone and didn’t come into the kitchen until Hap and Stella were washing up.

“Go ask your dad if he wants some coffee,” Dr. Stewart suggested to Hap, and when Hap had gone off to the den, the doctor came to stand beside Stella at the sink. He could tell that she was a girl who looked straight at death, and he appreciated this trait in a person. It was good practice to stare into the abyss, rather than turn and run the way so many did.

Brock Stewart had seen more people die than he could put a number to, and it always amazed him to see how individual the process was. Strong men he’d expected to go easily called for their mothers and wept. Honorable people whispered they were ready to sell their soul to the devil if need be, in exchange for one more day, a single hour longer, a breath or two more of this life they held so terribly dear. Then there were the deaths he had dreaded, sorrowful, untimely endings, that had turned out to be smoother than expected, like a stone thrown into still water, like a sigh. That baby Liza Hull had given birth to nearly fifteen years ago, born prematurely with a heart defect so tragically irreversible the neonatal unit at Hamilton Hospital had told Liza from the start the child had a matter of months at the most. Liza was already divorced from her husband, one of the Hathaway cousins from Boston who joined up with the Merchant Marine, and so Dr. Stewart had gotten in the habit of stopping by and keeping an eye on the baby’s decline.

Liza called him when the end seemed close. She wanted her daughter to be at home when it happened, and that’s the way it was, the three of them in Liza’s bedroom in the little apartment above the tea house as dusk fell through the trees. Dr. Stewart had tried to prepare himself on the drive over. He assumed this would be one of the toughest deaths, a new life cut off almost before it had begun, a young mother left with nothing, but in fact the night turned out very differently from what he’d expected. Brock Stewart thought he had seen everything, but he’d never experienced a silence and a beauty of the magnitude he was privy to in Liza’s apartment. The way Liza held her baby close and let her go at the same time, the way their breathing settled into a single rhythm, so that the only way he knew the baby was gone was from a subtle shift of air, and then a sob.

In Dr. Stewart’s experience, the moment of death was always accompanied by an expulsion of breath that was unlike any other. It was as if the spirit arose from the body to join with the air, as if the essence of an individual could no longer be contained by mere flesh and blood. This was the moment when Liza Hull bent her head and kissed her baby’s lips, and the spirit appeared to move into her. For an instant it did, indeed, seem as if they were one being.

The doctor sat there with Liza all night long. He figured this poor woman was owed at least that: a night without sirens and ambulances, without death certificates. She deserved those few extra hours of peace when the world stood still. In the morning, when light was just beginning to crack open the sky, Doc Stewart phoned down to Hamilton Hospital and gave the hour of death as 5:30 A.M. When the time came, Liza draped a blanket over her child; she was ready when the ambulance arrived.

Thank you, she said before she left, going downstairs by herself, the baby in her arms. You were with me when I needed you.

Brock Stewart had already been a physician for many years at that point. He’d seen it all: cancer, heart failure, the slow withering of disease, the utter surprise of accidental mortalities, including two boys who fell through the ice in the marsh and froze to death holding hands. But the night Liza’s baby died, he went out to his Lincoln, the car that could get through anything—mud, or snow, or floods—and he cried. In Liza Hull’s bedroom something had happened, a sort of acceptance the doctor had never experienced before. All this time he’d been fighting against death, his enemy, his dragon, invincible, unbeatable. Now he saw he’d been mistaken. It was as if he’d seen only one stone, but not the river that rushed around it. Death was his constant companion, he understood that now. It followed him into houses, arm and arm, there beside him every time he walked through the streets, as much a part of what he did as the lives that were saved, the babies born, the fevers broken.

Thank you, he said to Liza Hull, as he sat in his parked car and watched the ambulance go slowly on its way to the morgue at Hamilton Hospital.

That was why he’d wanted Hap, whom he loved so, to be a doctor. He wanted his grandson to know what that moment had felt like, what it was like to be sitting in your parked car as daylight opened up the night, as the sky shone silver; how it felt to be with someone at the most important hour in their life. Well, the boy clearly wasn’t cut out for it, but this girl Stella was another matter entirely.