?11?
ALL I KNOW how to tell you is that sometime between March and December Edith Goodnough decided by herself what to do with her brother. She didn’t consult anyone. It isn’t the sort of thing you can discuss with anybody else. What in the hell are you going to say?—look here now, if I do this and this, do you think it’ll turn out all right? No, Edith made up her own mind. It had to be her own private, solitary decision.
But I can tell you what it was she decided. I was there for the ending. And in these past three and a half months she’s had time to tell me the rest, to tell me how she filled those hours that led up to the end. We’ve talked a lot about it in that hospital room in town since the beginning of this new year. I’ve held her hand, watching that slow drip pushing life back into her through a sterile needle in her other arm, life she didn’t much want or care to continue anymore. I’ve seen her sleeping with her gray, troubled face turned toward me on a white pillow, been there too when she woke and asked, “Are you still here, Sandy?”
And I’ve said, “Yes. I’m still here. I’ll be here for a while.”
So I didn’t leave her and we would talk. She seemed to want to talk about it. Of course I was interested.
She said she woke that morning later than she wanted to. There was already more than enough light in the living room for her to be able to see Lyman clearly over there against the opposite wall in his cast-iron bed with the yellowing postcards pinned on the walls above him, the wallpaper itself discolored now behind the curled edges of the old postcards. She said she was a little panicky when she realized the hour. She had a lot to do. She got up out of bed in a hurry, dressed in house clothes, and went out to the kitchen to start coffee. When the coffee was going good she returned to the living room and woke her brother. Ordinarily she let him sleep until he woke on his own, and by December it was not unusual for him to sleep until noon when he would rise and shuffle about the house until she fed him and found some task for him to do, but that morning she woke him early so that they could eat breakfast together. Also, she wanted to be certain that he would go to bed promptly after supper. She had it all planned. It should have worked, too.