What Would You Call It?

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It started off as a cold. That was what everyone called it, including the doctor, and there was comfort in the smallness of the word. A cold was something you carried around for a few days like loose change in your pocket. You drank soup. You complained about your throat. You slept beneath an extra blanket and watched afternoon television with the volume turned low. His wife brought him tea with honey and stood in the bedroom doorway telling him he looked terrible, which was the sort of thing only someone who loved you could say with tenderness. Outside, November worked its way through the trees, stripping them a little more each morning. He watched the leaves tumble past the window and thought how strange it was that the world could look so beautiful while you felt so miserable. By Thursday the fever arrived. By Friday the cough had settled deep inside him, somewhere beyond the reach of tea and blankets. On Saturday morning his wife said, "We're going back to the doctor." He did not argue.

Hospitals have their own weather. The light is always the same, whether it is midnight or noon, and time moves according to machines that beep and nurses who appear carrying small paper cups. He remembered pieces of those days rather than the days themselves: his wife's hand wrapped around his, the cold circle of a stethoscope, rain crawling down the window, a young nurse humming while she changed the bag beside his bed. There were words he did not understand and expressions on faces he understood too well. Pneumonia. Complications. Oxygen. Wait and see. At some point he became aware that people were speaking more softly around him. His wife slept in a chair with her coat folded beneath her head. Once, sometime before dawn, he woke and found her watching him. "You scared me," she whispered. He wanted to tell her he was scared too, but instead he squeezed her hand. It seemed enough. Sometimes love has no speech prepared for the important moments. Sometimes it simply stays in the chair beside the bed.

Three weeks later he stood on the back porch wrapped in an old wool coat, thinner than before and weak enough that the steps seemed farther apart than he remembered. The morning was cold and bright. Frost silvered the grass, and his breath appeared before him in little clouds that vanished almost as soon as they were born. His wife came out carrying two cups of coffee and handed him one. Neither of them mentioned the hospital. Neither mentioned the night when the doctor had quietly told her to prepare herself. A cardinal landed on the fence and remained there, impossibly red against the pale winter yard. They watched it together. He thought about how easily a life could turn on something ordinary, a cough, a fever, a Saturday morning, and how we walk through our days believing the ordinary things will always remain ordinary. His wife slipped her arm through his. The coffee was hot. The sun was coming through the bare trees. Somewhere down the street a dog barked, a car started, and someone dragged a trash can toward the curb. The whole world was beginning another unremarkable day. He had never been so grateful to be part of one.

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