Free The Wife Tree by Dorothy Speak Page B

they were grimy and didn’t let in the sun. I thought of the intensive care unit, a bell jar at the heart of the hospital, where as soon as a fingerprint appeared on the glass, a custodian was called in and it was immediately rubbed off.
    Here, the patients who weren’t lying in their own defecation or calling like children for their lost mothers drifted out of their rooms after lunch. The ward was like a cemetery with these patients floating about, so white of hair and skin that they seemed like ghosts. I looked at their watery colourless eyes, at the housecoats sliding off their thin shoulders. Shuffling along in disposable paper slippers, which rasped on the dull tile floors, they paused in front of a bulletin board. Posted there in large cut-out letters was the message:
The day is: Wednesday. The season is: Autumn. The weather is: Sunny. The next holiday is: Christmas. The next meal is: Supper
. They turned away unchanged by what they’d read, if in fact they could still read at all. From a speaker above our heads spilled a voice paging this doctor and that doctor, the same names repeated over and over, for it seemed the doctors never came.
    When I found William’s room, I saw that they’d pulled the tubes out of his nose and arm and urethra, and that they were no longer pouring miraculous liquids into him or tracing the behaviour of his heart on a television monitor. He looked shockingly thin and strangely naked without his tubes and electrodes and plastic bags. He slept until the supper trolleys rattled onto the floor at four-thirty, filling the ward with the smells of canned gravy and bitter tea. William wouldn’t eat. Pushing his tray away, he turned to me and slurred, “You see…”
    Strangely, these first words spoken since the stroke failed to fill me with joy. I realized that, while some days I’d longed to hear William speak, there were other times when I wasn’t so very anxious for him to open his mouth, because it seems that for so long he’s spoken for both of us.
    But he could go no further. I stepped closer to the bed. He tried again. “I can’t…” but once more his voice trailed away. His eyes bulged with concentration and I sensed the pressure of the message trapped in his head, pushing like water against a dam. He looked at me with a small bewildered smile, his eyes filled with fear, his face cleaved down the centre like an earthquake’s rift. Which half, I wondered, is the man I know?
    “What is it you want, William?” I asked quietly. “Tell me. I’m listening. What can I get you?”
    He said what sounded like
kitchen kitchen kitchen
. With his finger he drew a U shape over and over on the table.
    “A letter? The letter U? A cup? A curved road?” I said, perplexed that I could not understand this new language of his. “Write it down, William,” I urged, drawing a pencil and paper from my purse. He took the pencil, looked at it, puzzled, tried to put it in his mouth. Seeing this, I felt a wind blow through me, cold as the wind that cut through William in the prairie winters, turning his bones to ice. I took the pencil from him, noticed my own hands shaking as I wrote
William
in capitals on the paper and showed it to him. He stared at it without recognition. Beneath it I wrote
Morgan
in even larger letters, but he didn’t understand that either and I saw for myself how meaningless the two words looked, stacked one on top of the other. William sighed and stared out the window. Following his gaze, I wondered what he saw out there, if he could still remember the words
sky clouds trees
.
    “Maybe, William,” I said, offering a thin hope, “maybe if we put your teeth in, you might be able to speak more clearly.” Then he glared at me, his face turning very red and he swept the supper tray from the table. The dishes crashed down, soft foods sliding across the floor, metal lids rolling cheerfully into the corners of the room.
    “Ge out!” he shouted at me. “Ge out!” And I