Away from Her

supplementary drink twice a day—someone stayed and watched while she swallowed it down. She got out of bed and dressed herself, but all she wanted to do then was sit in her room. She wouldn’t have taken any exercise at all if Kristy or one of the other nurses, and Grant during visiting hours, had not walked her up and down in the corridors or taken her outside.
    In the spring sunshine she sat, weeping weakly, on a bench by the wall. She was still polite—she apologized for her tears, and never argued with a suggestion or refused to answer a question. But she wept. Weeping had left her eyes raw-edged and dim. Her cardigan—if it was hers—would be buttoned crookedly. She had not got to the stage of leaving her hair unbrushed or her nails uncleaned, but that might come soon.
    Kristy said that her muscles were deteriorating, and that if she didn’t improve soon they would put her on a walker.
    “But you know once they get a walker they start to depend on it and they never walk much anymore, just get wherever it is they have to go.”
    “You’ll have to work at her harder,” she said to Grant. “Try and encourage her.”
    But Grant had no luck at that. Fiona seemed to have taken a dislike to him, though she tried to cover it up. Perhaps she was reminded, every time she saw him, of her last minutes with Aubrey, when she had asked him for help and he hadn’t helped her.
    He didn’t see much point in mentioning their marriage, now.
    She wouldn’t go down the hall to where most of the same people were still playing cards. And she wouldn’t go into the television room or visit the conservatory.
    She said that she didn’t like the big screen, it hurt her eyes. And the birds’ noise was irritating and she wished they would turn the fountain off once in a while.
    So far as Grant knew, she never looked at the book about Iceland, or at any of the other— surprisingly few—books that she had brought from home. There was a reading room where she would sit down to rest, choosing it probably because there was seldom anybody there, and if he took a book off the shelves she would allow him to read to her.
    He suspected that she did that because it made his company easier for her—she was able to shut her eyes and sink back into her own grief. Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. And sometimes he thought she closed her eyes to hide a look of informed despair that it would not be good for him to see.
    So he sat and read to her out of one of these old novels about chaste love, and lost-and-regained fortunes, that could have been the discards of some long-ago village or Sunday school library. There had been no attempt, apparently, to keep the contents of the reading room as up-to-date as most things in the rest of the building.
    The covers of the books were soft, almost velvety, with designs of leaves and flowers pressed into them, so that they resembled jewelry boxes or chocolate boxes. That women—he supposed it would be women—could carry home like treasure.
    The supervisor called him into her office. She said that Fiona was not thriving as they had hoped.
    “Her weight is going down even with the supplement. We’re doing all we can for her.”
    Grant said that he realized they were.
    “The thing is, I’m sure you know, we don’t do anyprolonged bed care on the first floor. We do it temporarily if someone isn’t feeling well, but if they get too weak to move around and be responsible we have to consider upstairs.”
    He said he didn’t think that Fiona had been in bed that often.
    “No. But if she can’t keep up her strength, she will be. Right now she’s borderline.”
    He said that he had thought the second floor was for people whose minds were disturbed.
    “That too,” she said.
    He hadn’t remembered anything about Aubrey’s wife except the tartan suit he had seen her wearing in the parking lot. The tails of the jacket had flared open as she bent into the trunk of the car. He had got the impression of a trim waist and wide buttocks.
    She was not wearing the tartan suit today. Brown belted slacks and a pink sweater. He was right about the waist—the tight belt showed she made a point of it. It might have been better if she hadn’t, since she bulged out considerably above and below.
    She could be ten or twelve years younger than her husband. Her hair was short, curly, artificially reddened. She had blue eyes—a lighter