Free Unsaid: A Novel by Neil Abramson

is, staring right at him, illuminated by one last, small light—the office name plate.
    Joshua walks over to it and, with a slow shake of his head, slides the wooden slat engraved with my name from its spot.
    With my name under his arm, Joshua turns off the remaining light and quickly walks out into the heavy shadows of a November evening.
    Prince meows loudly after him.
    Still dressed from the day that ended many hours earlier, David sits on the edge of our bed with the dogs and several of my cats asleep nearby. Although he grips a photograph of the two of us walking on the beach, he stares at the television, which is tuned to a station that has long since signed off.
    Our bed was a good place for us. Of course there was sex, but almost more than that, it held so many moments of non-physical intimacy because I was often already in bed by the time David got home. It was also the place where David was the least serious and defensive, and where his work life was the farthest from his mind.
    So bed was where we had late-night conversations about nothing more significant than which flavor of ice cream is the most difficult to make and which melts the slowest, shared laughter at a TiVoed sitcom, or debated which one of us would get up in themiddle of the night to let a cat in through the bedroom window and then, only minutes later, back out again.
    These are all the small interactions that fill the many, many hollows of married life.
    But David is not thinking about these memories tonight. I can tell that he’s not because there’s not even a hint of happiness recalled around his eyes. Perhaps he is thinking of a different bed—my hospital bed. There are no great—or even good—memories of that bed.
    By the time I was back in the hospital for the final time, I was mostly unconscious, hooked up to monitors that precisely measured the life leaving my body. We didn’t really need the machines to tell us what was happening. My pallor and sunken features spoke clearly that the time for hope had long since passed.
    David, pale and exhausted from lack of sleep, sat beside me hour after hour. He was supposed to share this vigil with Liza, my college roommate, closest friend, and champion, but more often than not he asked to be alone with me.
    Throughout our marriage, Liza’s contradictions had always irritated David. She smokes cigarettes before and after her yoga class, drinks wheatgrass juice with lunch and cosmopolitans with dinner, and can quote extensively from the Old or New Testament (she was a religious studies major before she became a psychologist), but would have a hard time identifying the governor of New York. And when it came to romantic entanglements, of which there were many, Liza had all the self-restraint of squirrel in a bag of peanuts. Still, she was fiercely devoted to me—and by association, my husband. Despite her idiosyncrasies, whatever comfort David found toward the end, he found in her.
    On my last day, Liza summoned David into the hallway outsidemy hospital room. David was on the brink of tears. “She’s still hanging on,” he told her. “This is torture.”
    “But that’s what you’ve been asking of her,” Liza said gently. “It’s all been about the fight to stay here with you. She won’t abandon you.”
    “That’s over now.”
    “Is it? Is it over for you?”
    “Do I have another choice?”
    “I think before she goes, she needs to know that you’ll be okay. Give her your permission to stop the fight and let go.”
    “Come on, she’s not even conscious. Don’t start with the new-age crap. I can’t do the
Touched by an Angel
thing right now.”
    Liza put her hands on David’s shoulders. “You need to say good-bye and release her.”
    David’s eyes flashed. “But it’s a lie! It’s all a damn lie!”
    “I know, honey. But sometimes lies are the only truth you’ve got.” David backed away from Liza, and her hands dropped uselessly to her sides. “I’m going to smoke. You