Willnot Read Free Page A

anonymous benefactor stepped in.
    “That’s good, Stephen. And what will you do now?”
    “Whatever it takes.”
    “We’ve talked about this. Of all the ways it can end, none of them are good. Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors. What you have to do is start taking care of yourself.”
    “I will. After.”
    Trying for informality, even a bit of intimacy, I’d been standing by the desk; now I sat.
    “So why are you here, Stephen?”
    His eyes came silently to me and there we were, smack in the middle of our personal version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.
    “I won’t give you something to take the edge off. You know that. And you know how uncomfortable I am with being asked.”
    “It’s what you do, Doc.”
    “No. It’s not. I’m a mechanic, a tinkerer. I fix things, do my best to get them back in working order.”
    He smiled, the boy I’d once known surfacing briefly. “That’s all I’m asking. I’m so close, Doc, I have to keep at it. But five, six times a day I look around and don’t know where I am, how I got there. Or my legs start trembling, like I’m about to go down. Have to grab at walls, a table.”
    “Standard-issue anxiety, Stephen. Just like pain, loss, sadness, fear. Your body strikes back if you overuse it. So does your mind.”
    “Some nights I can feel myself going away, hissing or leaking out of my own body, like gas. Hear my teeth rattling like dice in a cup.”
    Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don’t, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so.
    Maryanne broke the silence, hurrying through the door to say she was sorry to disturb us. Twelve-year-old Jenny Broyles crowded in behind her, brother Dave behind Jenny.
    “There’s a problem.”
    Jenny held her hands out as she came up to the desk. “It got hit.”
    “We don’t know what kind it is,” Dave said.
    “A mockingbird,” I said. Its beak had been torn away, one wing broken. Its eyes were dull. My mother had loved mockingbirds.
    “We were at the park. It flew by, then fell.”
    “We didn’t know what happened. Mr. Edmonds was there—practicing his swing, he said. One of his golf balls hit it.”
    I told them I wasn’t much of a vet but would do what I could and took the bird into an exam room. When Maryanne joined me, I shook my head. Held the mockingbird in my palm and felt, or imagined I felt, the last beat of its tiny heart against my skin.
    I went out and told the kids. By the time I got back to the office, Stephen had left.
    Sam Phillips was waiting for his yearly insurance physical, so we took care of that: EKG, vitals and medication check, orders for lab work and CXR, followed by my usual recommendation that he schedule a stress test with the hospital and by my annual advice, rather more strident this time, that, given his age and family history, he really, really should have a colonoscopy.
    A run of quick calls followed. Nancy Meyers, the school nurse, brought in a couple of third-graders to be checked for what she feared might be measles but was a simple rash, probably allergic. Dan Baumgarden came for a two-week checkup and dressing change; I told him he’d soon be able to say good-bye to the drains and catheter. Mary Withers asked if I’d mind whittling her corns down to manageable size again. John Crabbe needed refills on his Tenormin and Zocor. I kept telling him the pharmacy would call me for approval and renew, but he cameanyway, every three months. I suspected I might be his only social contact.
    That was, mostly, my afternoon. About four, I started looking through the piles on my desk and found a mass mailing from one of those pay-for-your-funeral insurance things. Mail the tear-off back in and you’d receive full information, a valuable booklet to help you plan, and a journal into which you could record My Final Wishes . The mailing came addressed