Free The Afterlife by John Updike

to the address Arlene had given him.
    She was standing in the vestibule of her building, and came out carrying a little suitcase, walking very carefully, with short slow steps. When he jackknifed awkwardly up out of the car and moved around it to take her bag, she lifted a hand in alarm, as if fearful he would bump against her. She wore a loose heavy cloth coat, but, even so, he could see that her shape was not right—her middle was not just thick but swollen. The street lights didn’t help her color; her face looked greenish, waxy, with hollows like thumb-marks in wax beneath her eyes. She smiled at the intensity of his inspection. Arlene, whose mother’s parents had emigrated from Macedonia, had a certain stiff old-world mannerliness, and Fredericks sensed her determination to make this mannerliness see them through. Though his car, double-parked, forced the street’s two lanes of traffic to squeeze into one, with some indignant honking, he made his own movements as unhurried as hers, and set the suitcase in the back seat as gently as if it contained her pain.
    She slammed the door on her side but remained a bit hunched forward, her profile silhouetted against the side window, beneath the slashed and taped canvas: her sharp high-bridged nose, her lips’ prim set over her slightly protuberant teeth. He asked, before easing in the clutch, “O.K.?”
    “Just fine,” she said, in a voice surprising in its normality. “You’re sweet to do this, Marty.”
    “Not at all. Which hospital?”
    She named one a mile away. The rush hour was at its worst, as darkness deepened, and there were many stops and starts. She rested a hand on the dashboard at one point, as if to braceherself, then abandoned the posture, as perhaps more uncomfortable than it was worth. The car was rusty and old and gave a jerky ride however delicately he shifted. “Sorry,” he said, more than once.
    “You’re doing fine,” she said, almost condescendingly.
    He couldn’t believe a taxi wouldn’t have been better. It was as if she had decided to accept, now, his rejected invitation to see her home. “Sorry the car’s cold; the heater should come on any minute.”
    “I don’t feel the cold.”
    “Is your—is this, ah, a sudden thing?”
    “It’s been coming on.”
    “They know at the hospital you’re coming?”
    “Oh yes. They do.”
    “Is it going to be a long stay?”
    “That’s up to them. My assignment is to deliver the body.”
    The body
. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “About what, Marty?” They had broken free of the traffic for a block and were gliding along smoothly, between four-story bowfronts, beneath trees that in a month would have leaves.
    “That your body’s, uh, acting up.”
    The glide ended; a cross street, a principal artery, was jammed solid. “I expect it will all be all right,” Arlene said, after a second of tense silence in which she saw that the stop was not going to be jarring. Her voice had the false, light tempo of someone issuing reassurances to a child.
    “I do hope so,” Fredericks said, feeling foolish and puny relative to the immense motions, the revolutions of mortality, taking place inside her, next to him in the shuddering, cold, slashed cave of the car.
    She said, more conversationally, “You adjust. You come to terms with it.”
    “Really?”
    “Oh yes,” Arlene said simply, as if he were in on the secret now—as if he and she were now on the same side of the mystery growing within her. But he couldn’t imagine death’s having a human size, finite enough to come to terms with. The car heater was producing heat at last, as the hospital’s lights came into sight. She directed him to a curved side street that became a ramp. As he gently pulled up at the entrance, Fredericks had the impression of bustling all-hours brightness that an airport gives, or a railroad terminal in the old days—a constant grand liveliness of comings and goings.
    He said, scrambling to extricate himself from