Too Much Happiness

leaving the moment she had turned her attention to the next person in line, and even if she had noticed, what would it have mattered?
    I would have been ashamed, I suppose. Not ashamed at my lack of feeling so much as my lack of fortitude.
    I stopped at the nurses’ station and was given the number of the room.
    It was a private room, quite a small room, with no impressive apparatus or flowers or balloons. At first I could not see Charlene. A nurse was bending over the bed in which there seemed to be a mound of bedclothes but no visible person. The enlarged liver, I thought, and wished I had run while I could.
    The nurse straightened up, turned, and smiled at me. She was a plump brown woman who spoke in a soft beguiling voice that might have meant she came from the West Indies.
    “You are the Marlin,” she said.
    Something in the word seemed to delight her.
    “She was so wanting for you to come. You can come closer.”
    I obeyed, and looked down at a bloated body and a sharp ruined face, a chicken’s neck for which the hospital gown was a mile too wide. A frizz of hair-still brown-about a quarter of an inch long on her scalp. No sign of Charlene.
    I had seen the faces of dying people before. The faces of my mother and father, even the face of the man I had been afraid to love. I was not surprised.
    “She is sleeping now,” said the nurse. “She was so hoping you would come.”
    “She’s not unconscious?”
    “No. But she sleeps.”
    Yes, I saw it now, there was a sign of Charlene. What was it? Maybe a twitch, that confident playful tucking away of a corner of her mouth.
    The nurse was speaking to me in her soft happy voice. “I don’t know if she would recognize you,” she said. “But she hoped you would come. There is something for you.”
    “Will she wake up?”
    A shrug. “We have to give her injections often for the pain.”
    She was opening the bedside table.
    “Here. This. She told me to give it to you if it was too late for her. She did not want her husband to give it. Now you are here, she would be glad.”
    A sealed envelope with my name on it, printed in shaky capital letters.
    “Not her husband,” the nurse said, with a twinkle, then a broadening smile. Did she scent something illicit, a women’s secret, an old love?
    “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Who knows? I will tell her if it is possible.”
    I read the note as soon as I got down to the lobby. Charlene had managed to write in an almost normal script, not wildly as in the sprawling letters on the envelope. Of course she might have written the note first and put it in the envelope, then sealed the envelope and put it by, thinking she would get to hand it to me herself. Only later would she see a need to put my name on it.
    Marlene. I am writing this in case I get too far gone to speak. Please do what I ask you. Please go to Guelph and go to the cathedral and ask for Father Hofstrader. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral. It is so big you don’t need the name. Father Hofstrader. He will know what to do. This I cannot ask C. and do not want him ever to know. Father H. knows and I have asked him and he says it is possible to help me. Marlene please do this bless you. Nothing about you
.
    C. That must be her husband. He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t.
    Father Hofstrader.
    Nothing about me.
    I was free to crumple this up and throw it away once I got out into the street. And so I did, I threw the envelope away and let the wind sweep it into the gutter on University Avenue. Then I realized the note was not in the envelope; it was still in my pocket.
    I would never go to the hospital again. And I would never go to Guelph.
    Kit was her husband’s name. Now I remembered. They went sailing. Christopher. Kit. Christopher. C.
    When I got back to my apartment building I found myself taking the elevator down to the garage, not up to my apartment. Dressed just as I was I got into my car and drove out onto the street, and began to head towards the Gardiner Expressway.
    The Gardiner Expressway, Highway 427, Highway 401. It was rush hour now, a bad time to get out of the city. I hate this sort of driving, I don’t do it often enough to be confident. There was under half a tank of gas, and what was more, I had to go to the bathroom. Around Milton, I thought, I could pull off the highway and fill up on gas and use the toilet and reconsider. At present I could do nothing but what I was doing, heading north, then heading west.
    I