Fever Read Free Page B

colds, a broken bone in his foot.
    At noon the head nurse who had been on duty when Colin was admitted came in and read the record of his vital signs and intake and output of fluids that lay on the stand by his bed.
    “That’s better,” she murmured, then went out without saying anything more. Cecilia meditated on this till the nursing shifts changed at three and the new nursing team came in and clustered around Colin’s bed. She was about to ask if he was improving when the new head nurse said to the others, “A slight improvement here.” Cecilia could see no difference, except perhaps that the unnaturally bright colour in his cheeks had faded.
    After they had gone, she stood beside his bed.
    “Did you hear that, Colin?” she asked. “They say you’re getting better.” Colin’s eyelids flickered and he looked at her with that same well of darkness behind his eyes.
    “The blueness of things,” he said, in a voice that might have been awestruck, had it not been so faint.
    “The antibiotics are working,” she said. There was no response. She wanted to reach down and shake him. She was his wife, she had been his wife for fifteen years. They had children. What right had he to ignore her in this way? The doctors and nurses whisking in and out of his room barely glanced at her, spoke to her only occasionally, waited politely for her to leave the room before they pulled the curtain around his bed to do some unspeakable thing to him. Was she of no account at all? But Colin had become a stranger, while the man she had gone to bed with the night before was not. She tried to summon some remorse for what she had done, or sympathy for Colin lying so ill and in pain, but all she could feel was anger.
    At six the nurse who took his vital signs replied, when Ceciliaasked her, that Colin’s fever was still elevated, and she smiled at Cecilia in a commiserating way.
    “A little change this afternoon,” she said, “but now he’s much the same.”
    Around seven Colin said loudly, in a clear voice, “Let me sleep,” then, more quietly, “I’m tired and the music lulls me.” Cecilia put her hand on his forehead. It was damply cool now, and beads of cool sweat sat on his upper lip. He didn’t respond to her touch and after a moment, she took her hand away.
    At nine she went back to the hotel. The man she had slept with wasn’t in the lobby or the restaurant. She went directly to the bar, stopped in the doorway and peered from table to table through the smoky gloom. He was seated on a stool at the bar and when he glanced back and saw her standing in the doorway, he stood at once, put some money beside his half-full glass, and came immediately to where she waited for him. They went to the elevator, got on, and went up to his room.
    This time their coupling was less dramatic, less violently experimental than it had been the night before. Lying beside him on his rumpled bed before she returned to her room, she said, “Today when I tried to talk to him, he said, ‘the blueness of things.’ What do you suppose he was dreaming about?”
    “Or thinking,” he said. “Or maybe he was somewhere else.”
    “Do you think he’s trying to tell me something?” Cecilia asked. “No,” she answered her own question, “I don’t think he is. But what did he mean?”
    “Maybe he’ll be able to tell you when he wakes up,” the man said. “You should write down what he says so you can ask him.”
    “If he wakes up,” she heard herself say, and refused to amend or qualify what she had said.
    “Do you love him?” he asked her.
    In the same unemotional voice she replied, “Yes, or I did whenI married him and we’ve been married fifteen years, so if I don’t love him anymore, I don’t think it makes any difference.”
    “Tell me then …” he said carefully, and paused. “Tell me. Do you ever wish that …” He paused again. “Do you ever wish that he would die?”
    “No,” she said. “Why would I wish that?”
    He