EPISODE EIGHT: THE VISITOR WITH NO NAME
I flew back to New York four days after that first visit, which felt, at the time, like abandoning her, though I understood even then that it was the opposite. There were things that could not be done from a hospital day room in London: an apartment to give notice on, a job to resign from properly rather than simply vanish out of, a family who would need, eventually, some version of an explanation for why their son had decided, with no warning they would consider reasonable, to relocate his entire life across an ocean for a woman he could not yet fully explain even to himself.
My parents took it the way I expected, which is to say with the specific, controlled concern of people who had already lost one child and had spent twelve years quietly, carefully, trying not to lose the other one to the version of grief that simply stops living without ever technically dying. My mother asked if I was alright more times than either of us could comfortably count. I told her, as close to the truth as I could manage without the whole of it sounding implausible, that I had met someone, that she was very ill, and that I did not know how much time we had, only that I intended to spend whatever there was of it somewhere she could see me if she wanted to.
Noah drove me to the airport. He did not ask the questions I could see sitting behind his eyes the entire drive. At the gate, he only said, "Go," in the tone of a man giving a friend permission he suspected that friend had already given himself, and I have been grateful for that word, small as it was, longer than I have been grateful for almost anything else that autumn.
I rented a room in London within walking distance of the hospital, a narrow, unglamorous flat above a launderette that smelled permanently of warm cotton, and I arranged my days entirely around visiting hours the way I had once arranged my weeks around a single Saturday hour that no longer existed.
I did not tell her who I was. I want to be honest about how deliberate that was, and how much less noble it felt from the inside than it might sound from the outside. I told the nurses, and eventually Sophie herself, that I had come across her work through an old gallery listing, that I'd been an admirer for some time, that I happened to be in London and had heard, through the kind of vague professional grapevine that explains nothing and satisfies everyone, that she wasn't well. It was not entirely a lie. It simply left out the one detail that would have turned a polite visit into a confession neither of us seemed ready to survive yet.
For the first several days, she treated me exactly the way you would treat a stranger who claims to admire your work and shows up, slightly too often, at your hospital bedside. Polite. A little wary. Amused, in the particular way she was amused by almost everything, but carefully so, the amusement of someone keeping a visitor at the specific distance reserved for people who have not yet earned anything closer.
It was an afternoon in her second week that undid the distance, though neither of us said so out loud at the time.
I had pulled a chair beside her bed, the vinyl kind hospitals seem to order in bulk from some catalogue of deliberately uncomfortable furniture, and while she was talking, describing a panel she wanted to redraw, I found myself, without deciding to, tapping three times against the arm of it. It was an old habit, older than I could trace, something my hands did before I said anything I considered important, a private little rhythm I had never once thought to notice in myself until I saw her stop mid-sentence and look, not at my face, but at my hand.
"Do you listen to a lot of old music," she asked, in a tone that tried, and did not quite succeed, at sounding casual.
"Sometimes," I said, which was true, and also nothing at all.
"There was someone," she said, slower now, choosing each word with visible care, "who used to do that. Three taps. Every time before he said something that mattered." She was not looking at me anymore. She was looking at some middle distance past my shoulder, at a memory rather than a room. "I never told him I'd noticed."
I did not say anything. I have thought, many times since, about what would have happened if I had simply said her name then, my actual voice this time, in the actual room, the way I had said it once already at an empty bus stop with no one to hear it. I did not. Some instinct, cowardly or wise, I still do not know which, told me the truth was sitting in that room whether either of us said it aloud or not, and that saying it might collapse something neither of us had finished building yet.
"He sounds like he mattered to you," I said instead.
"He did," she said. "He does." And then, before the silence could ask either of us to go further than we were ready for, she smiled, the old quick smile I recognized from a voice rather than a face, and asked if I'd brought the watercolors she'd requested, and just like that, without either of us naming what had almost happened, we let it pass back into the safety of ordinary things.
I brought her watercolors after that, and new pencils when her old ones wore down past any reasonable length, and I spent afternoons sorting loose pages of her sketchbook into some order she directed with more precision than her tired hands could manage alone. I read dialogue back to her when her eyes grew too heavy to track her own handwriting, and somewhere in the accumulation of those small, unglamorous tasks, I understood, completely, that the woman across from me and the voice I had loved for five months were not two separate people I was somehow managing to love at once. They were the same person, exactly the same person, only tired now in ways the four o'clock line had never let me see.
She still made me laugh, more than I expected a woman in her circumstances to bother trying. She still delivered her jokes with the same timing, the same delight in her own audacity, even when the effort of a longer sentence cost her more than either of us wanted to acknowledge. I learned, slowly and with more difficulty than I expected, how to sit beside her without trying to fix anything, without offering the kind of relentless, well-meant optimism I suspected she had already been subjected to by every kind stranger who ever learned what she was facing. I only sat. I only listened. I have come to believe that was the harder and more useful skill.
It was in the hospital's small garden, on an afternoon warm enough that they'd wheeled her chair out into a patch of real sunlight, that she told me what she actually wanted.
"I don't want people remembering me through a chart," she said, watching a pigeon investigate the leg of an abandoned chair with total, undeserved confidence. "Diagnosis, stages, dates. I want there to be one thing, at least one, where someone can point and say, she made this, and it was beautiful, and it was hers."
"The manuscript," I said.
"The manuscript," she agreed. "I want to finish it. I don't know if I have the hands left for all of it. I might need help with things I never used to need help with."
"I'll help you," I said, before I had fully thought through what that would mean, though I do not think, even now, that thinking it through further would have changed my answer.
She turned to look at me then, longer than she usually allowed herself to look at anyone, as though she were trying to memorize something before deciding whether it was safe to trust it.
"If someone doesn't have very much time left," she said, "would you stay until the last page? Truly. Not out of guilt. Not because it would look unkind to leave."
"If she'll have me," I said, "I'll stay."
She held my gaze a moment longer, and something passed over her face that I did not fully understand until much later, a kind of grief that arrives early, grief for a thing that has not yet happened but has already been decided, and then she nodded, once, as though I had passed some test she had not told me I was taking.
The following afternoon, she asked me to reach into the drawer of the small bedside table and bring her a folder she kept there, worn soft at the corners from handling. Inside was the manuscript itself, dozens of pages, some inked, some still pencil, and she turned, with unhurried care, to the very first page and held it out for me to read properly for the first time.
At the top, in her own hand, were two names, side by side, the way a story sometimes announces its two halves before it has decided how they'll come together.
Protea. And beneath it, in the same careful lettering: Mr. Glenn.
I looked at the page for a long time before I trusted myself to look back up at her.
"You knew," I said. It was not really a question.
She only smiled, the tired, knowing smile of a woman who had been carrying a secret so much larger and so much longer than I had ever carried mine, and said nothing at all, which was, I understood, its own complete answer.