Free Grace by Linn Ullmann

happened?
    “Say it, Mai!” he whispered. “Talk to me!”
    He looked at her sitting there in the firelight, her mouth half open over her book, like a little girl with her first detective novel. But Mai is a middle-aged woman, he thought with some satisfaction, even with that girlish aspect. She, too, is mortal, just like all little girls who think they will never die. But the worms will crawl through the locks of little girls too. He smiled and looked at her. It could end here, he thought. Two old friends, Johan and his wife, in their chairs, reading their books in front of the fire on a late-summer evening.
    He studied her. The glossy gray braid had grown straggly in the course of the day, sprouting stray hairs in all directions. A pair of round reading glasses perched on her nose, and her face was warm and rosy. He reached out to stroke her cheek but checked himself, reluctant to disturb her.
    It could end here. No pain, no howling or fear or degradation. Just this moment—Johan and Mai and the fire in the hearth—and then a long, black night.
    Johan shut his eyes and thought of another woman.
Mamma.
    From time to time before she died, they would meet at a coffee shop for muffins and hot chocolate. One day he asked her to tell him about his father. Usually they didn’t talk about anything in particular. She would tell him about her insufferable neighbor, the ladies at her bridge club, her long solo expeditions to the old department store downtown. When he asked about his father, she started to say something but stopped abruptly. She looked at him and whispered, “I can’t.”
    Her small lined face turned to his, and her eyes glistened.
    “You don’t understand. . . . Every time I try to picture Pappa, all that comes to mind are those last days. Pappa covered in . . . Pappa was suffering something terrible, Johan. And there was nothing I could do to help him. It’s as if these images have erased all the others, the good ones. There were so many good images. Pappa and I had a good marriage. He was a good man. But all I’m left with are these horrible memories. I can’t push them away. I can’t wipe them out. I try, but I can’t do it.”
    Johan heard Mai yawning, and soon her book slid onto her lap. The fire had gone out. Neither of them spoke. They simply got on with doing the usual things a husband and wife do every night, without disturbing each other, without getting in the other’s way. Turn down the bedcovers. Brush teeth, go to the bathroom, wash hands. Kiss good night. Turn out the light.
    But Johan knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. He rarely slept now, but he didn’t keep Mai awake complaining about it. He had a headache, a dull pain over his right eye, as if some irate little man had driven a fist into his forehead; not that it was unusual to have a headache when the weather was changing so fast. The nausea was worse—it just would not go away—and the comforter was too warm and smelled a little funny, and he couldn’t get comfortable. He tried to visualize all the healthy cells in his body smothering the unhealthy ones, the way a psychologist had advised him to do. But instead he found himself visualizing the opposite: death to the healthy cells. He cursed that psychologist, all the rotten psychologists and their rotten advice. He just lay there feeling worse and worse.
    “Johan, are you all right?” Mai’s voice was soft. She wasn’t sleeping after all.
    Johan said, “Give me your hand. I’m afraid.”
    Mai gave him her hand. “Don’t be afraid. I love you.”
    His voice broke. “Will you help me when I can’t take it anymore? When it gets to that point, will you help me?”
    Mai lay still and gave his hand a squeeze. Neither of them said anything.
    For a long time they lay like that, hand in hand in the dark. Johan shut his eyes. He was conscious of her hand and her breathing and her scent and her half sleep, and sleep for him soon seemed possible. His nausea abated, his headache