Chapter 5 — ST. BRENDAN'S, FOURTH FLOOR

The oncology floor at St. Brendan's is the fourth and it is quieter than you expect.

I told the woman at the desk I was there for Sarah Harrison and she asked if I was family and I said I was her father and she looked at a screen for a moment too long.

"She hasn't had any visitors."

"I know."

"For nine days."

"I know."

She gave me a badge with a sticker on it.

Room 412.

I stood outside 412 for forty minutes.

A nurse came past twice and the second time she stopped and said, very kindly, "You can go in, you know."

I said I knew.

She said, "Sometimes it helps if somebody opens the door for you," and she opened it, and then she walked away, which I have always thought was the single most professional thing I have ever seen anybody do.

Sarah was asleep.

I want to describe what I saw and I want to do it without decorating it.

She was thirty-eight and she looked sixty.

Her hair was gone. Not thinning — gone, and growing back in about a quarter inch of grey that should not have been grey for another fifteen years.

Her arms on the blanket were the arms of an old woman.

There was a line in her chest and two bags on a pole and a chart on the end of the bed that I did not read because I did not have the right.

And her face was still exactly her face.

That is the part nobody tells you. Everything else goes and the face is still the face, and the face was my wife's face, and she was asleep with her mouth slightly open the way she slept when she was four years old in the back of a station wagon.

I sat down in the chair.

I did not touch her.

She woke up about ten minutes later and turned her head and saw me and did not react at all for a moment, and I watched her work out whether I was a real thing in the room.

Then she said:

"Where are they."

Not hello.

Not my name.

Not you came.

*Where are they.*

I said, "They're at the Bluebird. They're all right. I paid the room through December and there's food and I put money on the boy's — Eli's — I gave him a card for the diner, he can eat there any time."

She closed her eyes.

She said, "Thank you," and it came out of her like the air out of a tyre.

And then she opened them again and said the second thing she said to me in twenty years, and it was not what I was braced for.

"You can't have them."