Mr. Writer

  

“What? Did you come to gloat,” she sighs with a smile. She is hooked up to tubes and wires and reclined back in the shadows of the hospital room. He stands by the foot of her bed with a bouquet of flowers, notices no other flowers in the room, and no vase. The room is cold and sterile. There is no warmth in it. Even the ensconced and recess lighting appears cold and dim. He smiles at her through it.

“Of course. You know me. That is what I do. I gloat,” he replies, his sarcasm obvious.

“I have a bad heart, Ben. A very bad heart.”

“I know. I could have told you that twenty years ago.”

“You’re funny. I had a good heart then.”

“I know you did.”

“I am surprised to see you.” Her voice is weak and Ben, after asking her if she minded without saying a word, gently opens the drapes so that a little sunlight can filter into the room. He puts the flowers in a large hospital thermos of warm water that sits on a table. Throws away the plastic. The price tag he had already torn off. They appear top-heavy, but they don't topple over. She smiles at them.

“Thank you.”

He nods. “Do you have a vase, Katie?”

She exhales and one of the machines makes an erratic chirping noise above the regular sound of the aspirator and the murmurs of the other machines whose purposes are not apparent. “I am an empty vase, Ben. There is no other in the room.”

“That is pretty. Sad, but pretty.”

“You’re the one with the pretty words. You some bigtime writer now, I hear, huh?”

“Not so bigtime.”

She grins. “Not what I hear. I hear you're raking it in now. Doing very well for yourself. This is a small town, remember. Or have you forgotten, Mr. Writer?”

“No, Katie, I certainly haven’t forgotten that.”

She grins again, remembering how much she loved to tease him, looking at the bouquet of flowers. She thinks of the wildflowers that line her driveway and how when he moved in, the first thing he did was to tear out those ugly shrubs and replace them with flowers. He said he did it so every day she came home from work it would be like him giving her flowers, and because she often complained about those damn shrubs. “I am happy for you, Mr. Writer. You deserve it. You worked really hard.”

“You didn’t think so when we were together.”

“I just wanted you to come to bed, Ben.”

He pauses and rubs his face. “I wish I had.”

“No!” she smiles. “Then you wouldn’t have been a bigtime writer. That was your dream!”

“My dream was to make you proud and to make enough money so I could buy you things I could never afford.”

“I never wanted things.”

“Everyone wants things.”

“I wanted love.”

“You had love.”

She stops smiling. “Ben, I'm an empty vase. We weren’t a good match.”

“We were a perfect match. I just failed to convince you.”

“Don’t blame yourself for us. It was never about convincing me of anything. Sometimes the timing is off, is all. Two people can be in different places at different times and when they are finally in the same place, one might make a mistake and think that she wants something else.”

“Someone who comes to bed?”

“Someone who comes to bed,” she repeats.

“Are you married?”

“Divorced. You?”

“No. Neither. A heartbroken writer who stays up too late and drinks too much writes much better than a husband who takes a wife he doesn’t love to dinner parties and kids to the zoo.”

“Ben, you should have got married.”

“I could never find my vase,” he says.

 She sighs.  


“Fifty has hit me like a ton of bricks,” she says. “Everything was good, until fifty. The cancer and now the heart. Both in the same year. The big 5-0. So, I beat the cancer, but I’m not beating the heart, or so it seems. I’m on a waiting list but, you know, there are others on it, too. And it’s kind of depressing waiting for someone with my blood-type and all that to die in a car crash or something tragic. My life depends on someone else dying and having told a BMV worker who asks them a series of fifty thousand bland questions on a rainy Saturday if they want to be an organ donor. Isn’t that awful.”

“How are your girls?”

“Oh, they’re good. Grown now. I’d show you pictures, but my phone is dead and I don’t know where I put my charger. Maybe later. If you come again.”

“Do they come visit?”

“Yes. But they're busy.”

“And your family?”

“They too, often. This is a rare occasion that no one is here. Only you, Ben. I have missed you.”

“What about your ex-husband.”

“Engaged to a lady cop or something. He was never my bouquet of flowers. And I was never his vase. He sent a card once, though. Like one that comes from an insurance company.”

“You should have been the writer, Katie.”

“I learned from reading you. Oh, yeah. I read all your stories, Mr. Writer. I’ve seen all the movies, too. Every single one of them. Based on a novel by Benjamin Bradley, they say,” she smiles happily sitting up a little more. “And occasionally, I wonder if you were writing about me. Sometimes there is something that makes me think so. A particular memory. But my memories ain’t what they used to be.”

“Everything I write is about you.”

“Come on, Ben.”

“It’s true. It’s all about love and you are love. Just as I am. Some people are hate, or jealousy, or anger, or pride. But we are love. A perfect match.”

She turns and looks at the flowers and says again, “I'm an empty vase. I used to be crystal, but after years of being in a cupboard, I am dingy now and nicked up. There is a crack in the glass and likely I wouldn’t even hold water to keep any flowers livin'. The dust on the bottom of my soul is an inch thick.”

“I am going to steal that,” he smiles. “You’re good. It is as pretty as it is sad. You should never have been in a cupboard.”

A young nurse comes in and checks one of the machines then quickly leaves the room. She smiles at the 50-year-old couple, not giving their relationship much thought at all. She doesn’t say anything to either of them. She appears to be in a hurry and Katie's eyes follow her for a moment or two until she realizes she is not taking her anywhere. Katie had been told that one day they might come in in a rush to take her to surgery, so every time she sees someone who looks like they are hurrying, she thinks maybe there is a heart. Inevitably, she is let down.

“You know what I want, Ben?”

“What do you want, Katie?”

“I want to go to the ocean, the beach, and see the sea. See the sea - what do they call that, Mr. Writer?”

“Alliteration.”

“Yes! Alliteration. I want to alliterate. I’d love to write a story. You know, it wouldn't be anything like yours, but it'd be my story. Maybe our story.”

“It was too short.”

“Yes. It was,” she agrees.

Clouds pass in front of the sun and the room is dim again. Neither of them say anything for a while. There is a TV that is turned off and dark. He still stands, despite the open chair by her bed. He came too far to sit now. He is close enough to touch her, and though he wants to, he doesn’t. His hands stay at his side as though glued to the seams of his pants. There are tubes inserted in both her hands, shooting towards that armada of pumping and beeping machines, and an IV bag hanging on a metal pole.

“Why did you come, Ben?”

“You know why I came.”

“Yeah. I suppose I know why you came. But maybe I wanted to hear it. Flatter a girl, Mr. Writer.”

Ben draws a deep breath and creeps a little closer to her bedside. The short steps a scared kid takes at the dentist. He reaches out and touches her arm that is yellowed and thin as though it is turning into one of the tubes that are stuck in it. The machine chirps again. The aspirator wheezes. She waits.

But Ben doesn’t say what she has asked for him to say. “What beach would you like to go to, Katie?”

She smiles. “Destin, Florida.”

“Hmm. Destin?”

“Yes. Do you remember?” she asks.

“Yeah. Of course. How could I ever forget?” he says.

“Maybe the same house is still for rent. I could stay for a week. If I get a heart, I will have to wait a few months or so. That'd be July. July is a good time to go. Don’t you think so?”

“Yeah. I do."

"Will you come with me, Ben? If I can go. Will you come with me?” She holds back her tears and bites her chapped lips. As does Ben. He smiles at her.

“Of course, Katie. How could I refuse? I’ll go with you anywhere.” He takes a tube of Chapstick from the table by her bed and leans in to put it on her lips. She gazes up at him as he does, and he looks down at her.

“You trying to get fresh, Ben?” she smiles. She is as beautiful as he remembered her. Just a little faded and older. The gray in her hair accentuates her beautiful eyes and the contours of her face remain perfect to him as ever. He is blind to any flaw or the wrinkles of age that are no stranger to him. She doesn’t care she is not wearing makeup. She never cared. Not with Ben. There was a comfort in him she didn’t know with anyone else. And she never felt he would think less of her for coming undone because in love there is a kind of tsunami of dopamine for natural beauty and the face of the person you are with is always the prettiest, and their body is always the one body that shames all the swimsuit models and actors in the world.

Ben whispers to her as he caps the Chapstick and sits it back down on the table, “Are we so old, Katie, that we use phrases like ‘getting fresh?’”

She laughs and says they are. He smiles back, agrees, and carefully negotiates the tubes to hold her hand. He sits down in the chair and she turns her head to see him. After an hour or so of talking, she tells him she is getting sleepy and reluctantly closes her eyes. She tries to keep them open, but can’t. He watches her as she sleeps and he cries because he knows he will not see her again. He had talked to the doctors and due to the state of her condition, the chances of her getting a heart before she passes were one in a billion.

When she wakes up, Ben is gone and she wonders for a moment if she was only dreaming. The medicine makes her have weird and often vivid dreams, but it is usually something like clowns dancing with tigers on the ceiling, or purple octopuses driving Volkswagens. She realizes it was not a dream when she sees the flowers. But instead of being in a hospital thermos of warm water, they are arranged beautifully in a remarkable vase that looks to be hand-blown glass. Not something you can buy in the gift shop for certain.

She must have been asleep for a day, maybe longer, she thinks then. She has gotten considerably weaker over the past few weeks and she sleeps, and will sleep, more and more until the day she doesn’t wake up, which is how she hopes it will come if it must come. Sitting there alone, she wonders if he is going to come back. And every time she sees a shadow in her doorway, she hopes to no avail that it will be him. She prays he will come back.

The next morning, a nurse rushes in and tells her they have good news. There is a heart available. She gets about as excited as her body allows her to get. Her mother and stepfather come in and two of her three kids and her two grandkids. It is remarkable, she says. And through tears of joy, though with trepidation about what they have long called “the procedure” will entail, she briefly talks with her family about life and a future that was only yesterday in very grave doubt.

Another nurse ushers her mom aside and they begin to detach her from wires that have kept her living and they say something about having only a window of time to do this, so she lies still and lets them do what they need to do to get her to surgery where the doctors are waiting and ready. She doesn’t have much time to think, but she thinks about Ben and is ecstatic that they will be able to go to Destin again. The same house, maybe. Maybe they can bring her kids and grandkids. Maybe, her mother and stepfather, too, or should they go alone? They could take a walk on the beach at night. 

She then realizes she didn’t get his number, but it is of no matter. He will certainly come back when he hears the news. Her mom runs with her to surgery, holding her hand, saying last minute things. And though she has bad knees, she keeps up with the fast pace of the bed that tears down the hall like an Indy car.

“Mom,” she says, “I want to tell you who came back to see me. Ben! Do you remember Ben? Mr. Writer?”

Her mom is out of breath, but she smiles and says she remembers Ben.

“We are going to go to Florida. After I get better. We are going to go to Destin again.”

Her mom smiles back at her, tears in her eyes. “Yeah. I saw him and we talked for a bit. He mentioned Destin and said we’re all invited. He said he will see us there after you get your heart. He told me to tell you he loves you, but he had to catch a flight home. I think it was all just too hard on him seeing you this way. He seemed pretty sad.”

“So he doesn’t know about the heart?”

“No. I don’t think so. That was late last night, Katie.”

“Mom! Get his number and call him. Please. If anything bad happens, call him and tell him I love him. Tell him I don’t care that he wouldn’t come to bed sometimes and that he wrote so much. I understand everything now. It doesn’t matter anymore. But tell him I never, ever stopped loving him no matter what I said.”

“I will, honey,” her mom replies. “I love you!” Tears stream down her face as her daughter disappears behind the silver doors of surgery. She is left out of breath and standing behind them with wet cheeks. She can see her tired sad face, which she covers with her thin hands.

The procedure lasts for fourteen hours. The family waits in the waiting room and they come and go nervously. Doctors come and talk to them about what was happening. Afterwards, they don’t say much to each other. As excited as they are, each of them is filled with a sense of gloom and despair, as though sadness pours out of the ventilation which they have no choice but to breathe. There is the possibility she will not live through it, or the outcome that if she lives, the heart will not take. They pray that the heart is a perfect match. Her mom cries in both hope and despair. She can’t think of anything else right now.

A few hours later, the doctor comes out rubbing his hands. His smile gives them the result they anxiously awaited. “Complete success,” he says. “It is as though it is her own.”

When she is taken back to her room for recovery, everyone visits, gives her hugs and kisses, and they pray as they prayed before. They bring her flowers in vases that crowd the flowers Ben brought, which get pushed back on the table. Then after a few hours, everyone leaves besides her mom who stands around nervously.

“They wouldn’t tell me about whose heart it was, mom. They wouldn’t say. Do you know anything about it?”

“Katie, there is something I need to tell you. I don’t want to tell you, but I have to tell you because I'm your mom."

"Okay."

"The heart inside you is Ben’s.”

“Ben’s? Ben Bradley? My Ben?”

Her mom was the first to breakdown because she knew how it must hurt. And if there is one thing in the world a parent never wants to do, whether they are 30 or 80, and their child is 5 or 50, it is to hurt their child in any way. She composes herself as Katie cries, as though she passed her sobbing off onto her daughter. “He said he loves you. He bought the house in Florida you vacationed at all them years ago. He left the keys and a note. It’s yours, Katie. It’s all yours. He said finally he could give you something you wanted.”

“Wait. No! How? How did it happen?”

“He called 9-1-1 from the parking lot. He was in his rental car in the lot and when he saw the nurses exit the doors to find his car, he, um, well, he took his own life. He took it to give to you.”

“My God, mom!”

“We found out right after you went in. The doctor told us.”

The moon is full and glows upon the thick window glass. The drapes are pulled open and the lights are dim. Her mom went home after offering to stay. Nurses come and go to check her progress. Her heart is healthy, but she is broken. She looks over through tears that eventually subside. She looks at the flowers he gave her in the beautiful vase.

In July, three months later, the family flies to Destin to her new home. It is as she remembers it from twenty years ago. The extravagant vacation rental they could only afford with the tax return. There are a few new touches. But most of the same art, the same table and chairs. The same beautiful house with the Spanish-tile roof and palm trees in the yard. Same bed with a patio that has a view of the ocean. There is a framed picture of them standing on the beach on the nightstand. There are a few other pictures of them around the house.

She walks to the beach and stares out at the ocean. The moon is full and there is a light to it that reminds her of his eyes. She sits and smiles remembering collecting sea shells with him so long ago on this very beach. How he acted like such a kid back then, so full of life and so much in love with her, the girls, and life altogether. She draws a large heart in the sand with her toe and like a kid, she writes their names inside of it. At some point, the waves will probably wash it away, but she will draw it again tomorrow.

A few days later, she thinks to check the mail, and buried in a pile she finds a letter with her name on it, which is postmarked three months prior. The letter reads:

“Dear Katie, even when you broke up with me, I told you we were a perfect match. And so I was always right! Don’t ever be sad about us. The timing was perfect. I bought that house to give to you someday. It just took me twenty years to do it. I had to wait until you divorced as I didn't want to come between you and someone you may have loved. I did come with you to Destin, after all, and I am with you and will always be with you. I didn't tell you I love you before you fell sleep. Or that you are as beautiful now as ever. Even more. I’ve always loved you. Write your story! Love, your Ben” 

And so I did. Thank you, Mr.Writer.