“You…” He shook his head, smiling wonderingly, those alive and admiring eyes taking in her white, sand-abraded body glowing on the beach. He didn’t finish the thought; he stopped himself before finishing, having had an adult lifetime of just such discipline, and she didn’t know what it was he was going to say about her, though she knew she’d have the rest of her life to consider the possibilities. She had a sudden impulse to tell him something—to tell him everything, all her secrets, quickly, now, before the warmth began to fade, in the hope that there might be something she could continue to hang on to, a connection she might keep—
Keep? She almost laughed at herself. Even with the present moment grinning in her face, she couldn’t help turning the other way.
The end unraveled quickly. She was still processing what had happened, still replaying it in her mind as they walked slowly back to the hotel in silence, side by side, his hand touching her lightly on her back as they walked in a gesture that was part caress and part moving her onward.
“Guess this is it, then.” He stood outside his door. “It was a real pleasure spending time with you.”
His face was appropriately tender and somber, but she could feel the wind in him kicking up, this urgency running through him that was the opposite of what was running through her, and knew without saying anything that her desire to entangle and to linger had no chance against his need to get the hell out of the hallway and back on his own again.
“Should we … exchange e-mail or something? Hey, you ever come to New York on business?” She tried to keep her voice light, but he looked at her sadly.
She bit her lip.
“All right, then,” she said. She could do this. She did do this. He leaned down and kissed her, a dry husbandly kiss that still took away a tiny part of her.
*
She didn’t know his last name. She realized that later. She hadn’t needed to know, the limits of the thing being so clear that they hardly needed to be described. She’d wished, later, though, that she had it—not for the birth certificate, nor through any wish to reach out to him and complicate his life, but simply for the story itself, so that she could say to Noah someday, “One night I met this man, and it was the most beautiful night that ever was. And his name was—”
Jeff. Jeff Something.
But maybe she had wanted it that way. Maybe she had planned it that way. Because there was no finding Jeff Something from Houston, and it had only bound Noah to her more closely, made him even more hers.
Two
“But I’m not finished.” These were the words that popped unbidden out of Jerome Anderson’s mouth when the neurologist told him his life was functionally over.
“Of course not. Mr. Anderson, this is by no means a death sentence.”
He hadn’t meant his life, though; he’d meant his work. Which was his life, when you got right down to it.
“It’s Doctor Anderson,” he said. He quieted his panic by watching the neurologist sitting across the table, her elegant hands fumbling as she proceeded to tell him about his illness.
In the year since his wife had died, every woman he had met was simply Not Sheila, end of story. But suddenly he became aware again of the details that belonged only to living women: the way the doctor’s eyes were moistened slightly in sympathy, the rising and falling of the soft curves he could only barely make out under the white coat as she breathed. He saw the sunlight pooling on her glossy black hair as she sat at her desk, inhaled her smell of antibacterial soap mixed with something light, familiar—the citrusy scent of perfume.
Something stirred inside of him as he looked at her, as if he was waking up from a long nap. Now? Really? Well, nobody ever said the mind was simple, or the body, either. And together they could certainly get up to some mischief. That was fodder for a study. Do patients facing serious impairment or death find their sexual organs aroused? He should shoot Clark an e-mail about it; he’d been doing some interesting studies on the mind-body connection. They could call it “An Inquiry into Eros/Thanatos.”
“Dr. Anderson?”
The desk clock was ticking, and beneath that, he could hear the breathing of the two of them.
“Dr. Anderson. Do you understand what I’ve been telling you?”
Breathing, a word that inhaled and exhaled. Lose a word like that, and you lose everything.
“Dr.—”
“Do I understand? Yes, I’m not that far gone. Yet. It seems I can still decode basic sentence structures.” He felt his voice beginning to slip from his control, checked it with difficulty.
“Are you all right?”
He felt his pulse. Seemed normal, but he didn’t trust it. “May I borrow your stethoscope?”
“Excuse me?”
“I want to check my heart rate. See how I’m really doing.” He smiled, which cost him something, a mustering of flagging resources. “Please. I’ll give it right back.” He winked. What the hell. She was going to call psych on him any minute now. “Promise.”