After Forever Ends (75 page)

After a time, he spoke.

“Silvia,” He said softly, “I’m dying.”

It was like a brick to the face. My knees buckled. I tried to move, to turn around, but he held my arms with his hands and pulled me against him. Even in his eighties he was still so strong he could overpower me with no effort. He had never done that before. He had never restrained me, but right then he wouldn’t let me turn. He was whispering in my ear in calm, even voice, saying words I didn’t want to hear.

“Rubbish!” I told him.

“The pain I’ve been having…it’s cancer, Love, and it’s a bad.” He was holding me as if I were not even struggling.

“No,” I said quietly, “No. No…”

He just kept talking.

“No! No! No!” I shook my head, “No!”

He droned on.

“No! No! No!” I was trying to kick him in the shins now, trying to stomp on his feet. Anything to get away from those words. “I’m dying…it’s cancer, Love…” I wanted loose. I wanted to run away. I didn’t want to hear anything he had to tell me. I didn’t want to know. “Shut up!”

“I saw the pictures today. I’ve been telling you that I was visiting Alexander, but the truth is he was taking me to see doctors. The cancer’s in my liver and my kidneys. It’s been there awhile. I’ve only got one kidney working and it’s not doing so well. The cancer’s in my lungs, too. They showed me, Sil. It’s there. It’s a small amount, but…”

“Stop this, Oliver!” I demanded, “Shut your noise!”

“I can’t stop it! If I could I would! It’s time you knew! I’ve been living with this for weeks!” His voice was rising, “I don’t want to leave you. Not ever, but it doesn’t seem I’m going to have a choice. It’s gone too far!”

“They can cure cancer!” I yelled.

“They can, but not this! It’s too late! I’m stage four, Love!” He struggled against me now, keeping me from going wild, “If I accepted treatment I’ll be sicker than I would be without it and I’ll just die the same!”

“I want a second opinion!”

“That was the third, Silvia! It was the third opinion! Do you think Alexander would allow me to give up so quickly? They all said the same thing! I didn’t get help in time! I didn’t have the normal symptoms, not in time…” There was desperation in his tone, “I’m eighty-five years old! It’s just what it is, Sil! It’s what happens to everyone! We’re born, we grow old and then we cross the veil…”

“NO!” I screamed. Finally able to break free, I whirled on him and knocked him back with my fists. Strawberries flew off the table and scattered across the floor, the bowl shattered, “No goddammit! Are you listening to me, Oliver? I said NO!” I shoved him again. Not in sixty-eight years of marriage had I as much as raised my fist or, heaven forbid, actually hit him.

He stumbled backward, more out of shock than concussion.

“NO!” I shouted again.

It wasn’t even that I was angry. The truth is that I was not angry at all. How could I be angry with my husband for being ill? He hadn’t decided to go and get cancer. He was still active. He was still funny and good. He still had people who loved and needed him. He hadn’t chosen this! How could I punish him for something he had no choice in the matter of? No, I was not angry. I was terrified. I had met Death once long ago and he hadn’t even paused to give consideration to me. He’d snatched my baby right out from inside my body. He didn’t stop to watch me suffer, he never heard me scream and sob and beg him to be merciful to Cara. Death didn’t pay attention as Oliver worried and prayed for me while I lay unconscious, bleeding in a hospital, or care that he’d left that young man to mourn a daughter that he would never know. Death has no eyes and no ears, Lady Folia had said, but I knew his secret.

Ice, Death is made of, and if he couldn’t see or hear me, I had to find a way to shatter him.

“You took my baby,” I slammed my hands against the counter, “But you will not take my husband! You will hear me! You will see me! You will take your horrid, stunning blue sky and you will leave us alone!”

Oliver was staring at me with wide eyes, but he was silent. He let me scream and throw things around the kitchen. He let me kick a plastic bucket until my foot went through it. And then he let me run outside into the garden and scream some more.

“Where are you? Show yourself again, you immense and filthy coward! I’ll kill you! You’ll not have him, Death, you stealer of babies!” I picked up a shovel and swung it through the air, letting it go and skid harmlessly through the grass. “You’ll hear me! I met you once and you took what you wanted, but not this time! This time it’s not just a wee baby you have to spirit away! Defenceless she was! No, this time it’s Oliver Dickinson and his wife and we’ll have nothing of you! You will leave him alone or you will take us both together! Do you hear me, Death? You bloody, stinking, foul coward!” I was screaming so loudly that it hurt my throat, “You can’t have him and leave me! You’ll take both or no one at all!”

Thoughts were pouring through my mind. I had known Oliver was sick. I had known it for a long time. It was me who first noticed he was slowing down, sleeping late into the day. Age, I told myself, he deserved the rest. But then he caught a bad cough he couldn’t get rid of, so bad I saw him one day cough up blood. It was the same day I noticed his eyes were turning dark yellow where they should have been white. He went to see a doctor, had a million tests run and hadn’t gotten any better, but he’d kept telling me they hadn’t found anything seriously wrong other than scar tissue in the liver.

“You lied to me! You said that there was nothing wrong!” I roared and turned on him. “Why did you lie to me?”

His expression was the same as the one our sons would wear when they were little boys and I would lose my temper on them. He looked very much like a child that had been scolded and felt sincerely bad about it. It was odd, that look on an old man’s face.

Oliver sat on the stoop and sighed, “Because, Silvia, I couldn’t say it. I didn’t have the courage. I couldn’t face it. How could I ask you to?”

“I'd have faced it with you, Oliver! You fool!” Tears were pouring down my face, “We would have faced it together! We would have done it together! All our lives we’ve done everything together and now you have the nerve to think that you can go get cancer and die on your own? You shared this with whom? Alexander! Brilliant!” I couldn’t see. I started toward him, but I tripped over something and fell. I ignored the pain in my elbow as I pulled myself to my knees, “I’m your wife! You are not going anywhere! You are not going anywhere without me!”

Oliver came across the garden and put his arms around me. He made sure like he always had that I was not hurt.

“Now, Silvia, please,” He wiped the dirt off my arms, “I need you to be strong. We’ll get through it together like we always have. I’ll love you still even more after I’m gone. That’s part of the magic.” He was crying, “Please, Silvia, I’m afraid. You’ve always been the strong one. I couldn’t have done a thing without you. It was always you, Sil. Always you. You kept me going. I couldn’t have lived without you and, Love, I don’t have the courage to die a decent death without you, either. I need you. Don’t you know it? I have always needed you and I need you now more than ever.”

I buried my head into his shoulder, “Why?” I clung to his arms. My body wracked with sobs. “Why you? I don’t want to be left behind! I don’t want to be without you! I can’t! Seventy years we’ve had and it is not enough! Why couldn’t we have gone off the road and into the water like your grandparents? Why, Oliver? Why would Death take you away from me now? Oh, Ollie…I need you, too!”

Oliver and I had been together in that garden and laughed innumerable times. We had run naked through it; we had conceived a child there. We had sat in it and watched the sky too many nights to try to remember. We had chased our children and played with our dog in it. We’d left sweets for elves and talked with trees and seen our daughter married there. That garden was our haven. It had always been our little paradise.

That day was the first time in sixty-eight years of being married and living in the wood that the two of us had ever had any inclination to just sit in the grass and cry together.

When we were calm he told me what his wishes were.

“I know we didn’t see this coming,” He seemed so together when he said it, as if he was talking about the pipes bursting or the car crapping out in the dead of winter, “But it’s just something we have to deal with. We have a lot to work out. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay. Hopefully a good while. We’ll have to see.”

“I can’t imagine you not being here,” I could feel my bottom lip begin to quiver.

“Silvia,” He looked me straight in the eye, “I will be here. Don’t you know it? I promised you, Love. Even if I’m gone for a little bit I’ll always come for you. The grave can’t stop me from that. Nothing can. It’s you and me, Sil. You and me and that will never, never change. Have faith in that like you always have because it’s as true as me loving you.” I nodded and stared hard at the ground, forcing myself not to cry. Oliver continued, “I don’t want to tell the children I’m ill. Not until we have to. It’ll upset them and I don’t need the stress, to be honest, and neither do you.” He was absently peeling a blade of grass, “I’ve spoken to the oncologist about treatment and it’s out of the question. I’m too old for a kidney transplant. That was the first thing Xander said, ‘Take mine!’, but neither of us is in any condition for a surgery like that. Besides, my liver is shot to hell. I don’t want chemotherapy just to be sicker than I would have been without it. It won’t buy me that much time. The cancer’s too advanced.”

“You’ll need pain management,” I said quietly, still staring at the ground, “I don’t know much, but I know cancer is not kind.”

“Toward the end I want you to hire a nurse and let her take care of all of that. I don’t want you having to wipe my arse when I’m too ill to help myself nor will I have Lucy doing it.” I nodded. Oliver put his finger under my chin and tilted my head up so I was looking him in the face, “For the record, Sweetie, I had a better life than I’d ever dreamed. There is not a day I would change. Not a decision I wouldn’t make the same. There is not a thing that I regret. My days were filled with love and joy because I had you with me. I owe all of that to you.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Yeah, I do,” He rubbed my neck, “Now listen to me. This is very important, mind. You can make any decision you want once I can’t make it for myself, but you have to promise me this. I do not want to leave the wood. I do not want to be put into any hospital, no matter how bad I become. I need you to promise me that. I need you to promise me that I can spend whatever time I’m allowed here in the place I love the most with the people I love the most. That would be here with you, Alex and Lucy. Promise me you won’t move me until I’m gone.”

“I swear it, Sweetheart. I wouldn‘t have it any other way.”

“Thank you,” He answered softly, “And, please, Love, I don’t want anybody trying to save me, either. No great lengths to prolong what can’t be avoided. My name’s been written down and when it’s called, let me go as I was meant. In my time.”

“I will. It’ll be the hardest thing I ever did, but I will.”

We were quiet for what seemed forever. “It has to be right,” Oliver wasn’t looking at me when he finally spoke, “Even though it doesn’t seem it, it has to be. The universe has its way and we don’t always understand it, but we have to trust that all natural things are as they should be. We have to have faith in our time.”

“I wish I knew how much time we had.”

“We have forever, Love,” He drew me close, “We have forever.”

Alexander and Lucy came out to the wood the next evening. Alex seemed peaceful as he embraced his brother, but Lucy obviously was not. Alex must have only told her recently because she looked like she’d just seen an accident.

“Oliver, I…” Lucy began to speak, but immediately choked up. Instead of words, she threw her arms around him and held him as if he were slipping away. “Oh, Ollie!”

“Now, now, Lucy,” Ollie rocked her and patted her back, “No tears. Not right now, yeah? I’m still here. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right!” She sobbed, “Nothing about it is all right!”

“It is what it is. I take it in moments. This moment, I’m all right and I really need you to be, too. I can‘t take you falling apart on me right now. Can I ask you not to?”

“I’m sorry,” She wiped her eyes.

“Don’t be sorry. Just be all right. For me.”

“OK. I’ll try.”

He looked lovingly down at her and kissed her lips, “Thank you.”

“I love you, Oliver.”

“I love you, too, Lucy. My sweet little sister. Little Lucy Cotton. I‘m so bleeding lucky!” He hugged her again, “I am! I am really the luckiest bloke who ever lived!”

Oliver had already discussed his wishes with his brother. It was obvious since they sat us down in the garden and positioned themselves side by side so Lucy and I were in a circle with them. They were going to tell us something important and they wanted us looking at them when they did it. Lucy and I listened while our husbands finished each other’s thoughts and sentences.

“This was the happiest place ever,” Alexander’s voice was mild, “When we were boys we’d come here every chance we got. It felt more like home than our house Welshpool ever did.”

“You may not believe that my brother and I spoke about things that were serious when we were boys,” Oliver’s tone was the same as Alex’s, something like vanilla would sound blending into a warm cup of coffee if it carried a tone, “But from time to time we did. We didn’t know anything about death until our grandparents died, but when they did we decided that we wanted to be buried there,” He pointed at a clearing between two trees, “Because we thought the trees were twins like us.”

“But Oliver hid in an old travelling trunk when we were nine and it locked on him. He was in there kicking and screaming until Mum pulled him out. After that he had this horrible fear of being shut inside of anything, so when we got to talking about dying, he’d have nothing of being locked in a box and set under the earth.”

“Oh, hell no!” Oliver shuddered, “To be asleep and wake up inside a box buried all that way under the dirt! I’ll have none of that and take no chances with it, either.”