3
After that initial blank flutter, Jantzen comes around fast. Lisey thinks it must be a doctor thing - probably also a policeman and fireman thing. It was certainly never a writer thing. You couldn't even talk to him until he'd had his second cup of coffee. She realizes she's just thought of her husband in the past tense, and a wave of coldness stiffens the hair at the nape of her neck and puts goosebumps on her arms. It's followed by a sense of lightness that is both marvelous and horrible. It's as if at any moment she'll float away like a balloon with a cut string. Float away to ( hush now little Lisey hush about that) some other place. The moon, maybe. Lisey has to dig her fingernails deep into her palms to remain steady on her feet.
Meanwhile, Jantzen is murmuring to the Warner Bros. nurse. She listens and nods.
"You won't forget to put that in writing later, yuh?"
"Before the clock on the wall says two," Jantzen assures her.
"And you're positive this is the way you want to go?" she persists - not being argumentative about whatever the subject is, Lisey thinks, just wanting to make sure she's got it all perfectly straight.
"I am," he tells her, then turns to Lisey and asks if she's ready to go upstairs to Alton IU. That, he says, is where her husband is. Lisey says that would be fine. "Well," Jantzen says with a smile that looks tired and not very genuine, "I hope you've got your hiking boots on. It's the fifth floor."
As they walk back to the stairs - past YANEZ-THOMAS and VANDERVEAUXELIZABETH - the Warner Bros. nurse is on the phone. Later Lisey will understand that the murmured conversation was Jantzen telling the nurse to call upstairs and have them take Scott off the ventilator. If, that is, he's awake enough to recognize his wife and hear her goodbye. Perhaps even to tell his own back to her, if God gives him one more puff of wind to sail through his vocal cords. Later she will understand that taking him off the vent shortened his life from hours to minutes, but that Jantzen thought this was a fair trade, since in his opinion any hours gained could offer Scott Landon no hope of recovery whatsoever. Later she will understand that they put him in the closest thing their small community hospital has to a plague unit.
Later.
4
On their slow, steady walk up the hot stairwell to the fifth floor, she learns how little Jantzen can tell her about what's wrong with Scott - how precious little he knows. The thoracotomy, he says, was no cure, but only to remove a build-up of fluid; the related procedure was to remove trapped air from Scott's pleural cavities.
"Which lung are we talking about, Dr. Jantzen?" she asks him, and he terrifies her by replying: "Both."
5
That's when he asks her how long Scott has been sick, and whether he saw a doctor
"before his current complaint escalated." She tells him Scott hasn't had a current complaint. Scott hasn't been sick. He's had a bit of a runny nose for the last ten days, and he's done some coughing and sneezing, but that's pretty much the whole deal. He hasn't even been taking Allerest, although he thinks it's allergies, and she does, too. She has some of the same symptoms, gets them each late spring and early summer.
"No deep cough?" he asks as they near the fifth-floor landing. "No deep, dry cough, like a morning smoker's cough? Sorry about the elevators, by the way."
"That's all right," she says, struggling not to puff and pant. "He did have a cough, as I told you, but it was very light. He used to smoke, but he hasn't in years." She thinks. "I guess it might have been a little heavier in the last couple of days, and he woke me once in the night - "
"Last night?"
"Yes, but he took a drink of water and it stopped. " He's opening the door to another quiet hospital hall and Lisey puts a hand on his arm to stop him. "Listen - things like this reading he did last night? There was a time when Scott would have soldiered through half a dozen of those pups even with a temperature of a hundred and four. He would have cooked up on the applause and mainlined it to keep going. But those days ended five, maybe even seven years ago. If he'd been really sick, I'm sure he would have called Professor Meade - he's head of the English Department - and canceled the smuh - the damn thing."
"Mrs. Landon, by the time we admitted him, your husband was running a fever of a hundred and six."