Free The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg Page A

she wants is to say that she’s scared, and for him to take her into his arms and simply hold her. But if she does say that, Coop will sigh and say, “Why are you scared ? You don’t even know anything yet. Go back to sleep.” And then he will do precisely that.
    The truth is, she does worry too much. On four separate occasions when awaiting medical test results, she diagnosed herself with terrible diseases; and then it turned out she was just fine. But this time is different, it really is. This time it feels as though something has come into her house and sat in her darkened living room, waiting for her to come upon it. And now that she has, it has said, Ah. There you are. Don’t be turning on the light, now .
    She pushes the bedclothes off and sits up, slides her feet into the slippers she keeps at her side of the bed. She reaches for her robe, pulls it over her nightgown, and stands for a moment looking at the dim outlines of the furniture in her bedroom: the bed, the night tables and lamps, the antique writing desk, the armoire, the little French sofa and the table that sits before it. Her eyes follow the sweep of the draperies, the line of the velvet cushion on the window seat. She can’t make out the images in the various paintings, but she knows full well what they are, and she loves them, every one. Everything has become precious: the slippers on her feet—her feet ! She looks back at Coop, still sleeping soundly, and tiptoes out of the bedroom.
    When she was a girl, she thought of old age as a kind of insulting, almost humorous infirmity. You got gray and wrinkled, you couldn’t run or even walk fast, you couldn’t see or hear very well, you spoke in a voice that trembled and cracked, you rubbed your aching knees with hands whose knuckles had gone knobby and high. That was all. It astonishes her now to think how she was so unaware of the smorgasbord of frightening diagnoses, or the need for constant doctors’ visits, or the mountains of pills required just to keep up the ever-deteriorating status quo. Her own parents died young, in their late fifties, in a boating accident when they were on vacation in the Bahamas, so she never saw them deal with the trials of living a long life. Cooper’s parents also died relatively young. But she has seen her neighbors Harriet and Arthur Gilbert begin to decline in terrible ways. They were in their early sixties when she moved here, robustly healthy, very active and happy people who went out often: to friends’ houses for dinner, to the symphony, to art exhibitions and county fairs. They loved taking long walks around the neighborhood. Now most of their outings are to doctors’ offices. Last week Candy ran into them as they returned home from the neurologist Harriet has been seeing, and Candy asked how things were going. “We didn’t get the news we were hoping for,” Harriet said. “Nothing awful, but not the news we were hoping for.”
    “We decided we are entering the time of life where true courage is called for. True courage and a sense of humor!” Arthur said.
    “And faith ,” Harriet said.
    “Well,” Arthur said. “One always needs that.”
    In the kitchen, Candy starts a pot of coffee. Then she’ll go out to the front porch to see if the newspapers have been delivered yet. She and Cooper get three papers: The New York Times, The Boston Globe , and The Wall Street Journal . Coop looks at all three, but normally it’s all Candy can do to get through the Globe . It’s because she doesn’t like to skim, as her husband does. If she’s going to read a newspaper, she’s going to read it.
    She steps out onto the porch and shivers, pulls the edges of her robe closer together. It is still night-cool, a few stars remain in the sky, and the moon looks half erased. The papers are there, lying in a jumbled pile, and she gathers them up with a kind of relief. Today she will read all of them in order to have something to do before she goes to the doctor’s