Free Viral by Emily Mitchell Page A

leave my father?” her son Harry asked the gerontologist who administered the battery of tests. “If that doesn’t count as crazy, I don’t know what does.”
    The doctor looked at him and shrugged.
    â€œI can’t comment on whether your mother is making a sensible choice in this matter,” he said. “But she is able to talk about her decision with perfect clarity. Being sane is in no way related to being wise.”
    â€œBut what do you think we should do about it?” her elder daughter Karen asked.
    â€œThere isn’t anything you can do,” the doctor said. “I suggest you take her home.”
    So they did and for a while they didn’t hear anything further about Lucinda’s plans to leave her husband. They decided among themselves that her desire must have been a passing fancy, a phase, a strange fit that she has gone through as a result of her recent move.
    But it was not. About a month later, with the reluctant help of her younger daughter Cynthia, Lucinda moved her belongings out of the apartment she and Fred shared in the Golden Years Retirement Community and got her own apartment in another, similar community nearby . She petitioned for a legal separation. She spoke to a lawyer about filing for divorce.
    Her children were furious with her. One after another they came to see her, her two daughters and one son, and they told her how angry her decision had made them, how selfish they thought she was being. How could she leave her husband now? Their father, they said, was old and not very well. He’d been through treatment for cancer a couple of years before, which no one thought he would survive. But he had survived it and recovered, although he never gained back all the strength he lost during his chemotherapy. Every day during that difficult time, Lucinda had gone with him to the hospital where he would be wheeled down the corridor by the same strong and friendly nurse with long blonde hair and peppermint-pink lipstick to the treatment room. Then Lucinda would wait while he was given the dose of chemicals and afterwards she would accompany him home. And in all that time she never faltered, never expressed impatience with him, was as steady and devoted as it is possible to be. When the doctor reported his tumor gone, she celebrated with the whole family, and since then none of her friends or relatives had detected anything significantly wrong or altered between her and her husband. Why, then, was she leaving him now?
    Lucinda did not answer them, at least not in the way they wished to be answered. She merely said that it was what she wanted and she was sorry if it hurt them but she had to do what made her happy with what she had left of her own life. Then she smiled and changed the subject to something trivial and pleasant: the flowers she was planting in her window boxes, the outings she took with her friends to go shopping and to the movies. She seemed content.
    For his part, Fred was extremely upset and bewildered by Lucinda’s decision to leave; he could offer his children no insight at all into what had happened between him and their mother. After Lucinda moved out, he remained living in the apartment they had shared, surrounded by the belongings they had acquired through their long years together: the many souvenirs from their trips abroad, the photographs of their children, the gifts they’d been given by friends—a hundred daily reminders of his wife’s vanished presence. After his initial shock, he settled into a solitary routine; he would breakfast alone, then spend the morning reading the paper. Then he would go down and swim slowly up and down the pool in the recreation center until he was tired. Then he would have dinner with other people from the retirement community, friends, or sometimes one of his kids. He rarely had to dine alone. Occasionally he would run into his wife in one of the restaurants in the complex or in the community