Every once in a while, she caught a show on cable called Jackpot Diaries. People from around the country talked about winning whatever it was they had won. They talked about elation, and the way their lives were changed, and how happy they were now that they didn’t have to worry about money. What happened to her was nothing like that. She did finally figure out that she could take the day to go to Brain-tree and not worry about getting fired, but she felt no elation, and no sense that her life was changing in any meaningful way. What happened was that something inside her stopped. All of a sudden, she wasn’t afraid anymore, she wasn’t panicked, she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night with her mind racing, wondering how she was going to solve this or that or the other financial crisis in a sea of financial crises that would never end. All of that came to an end, and what was left was what she was now, this eerily calm person, this person for whom any emotion at all was an event. Maybe she should have packed up and moved someplace else, just to put her life back on whatever track she’d thought it was on when she was fourteen. Maybe she should have done something spectacularly stupid to bring herself to her senses. She could have bought herself a fur coat, or jewelry, or something she didn’t need.
The problem was that money was not the issue; money could not flx what had really been broken. She was glad she didn’t have to worry anymore. She was even glad to own the Home News, because it structured her life and gave her a place to go every day. Other than that, she was neither sad nor glad about anything. When she woke up in the morning she only cared to note that she was still alive, and that that would have to be enough.
She went back to Jack’s bedside and picked up his right hand to look at it. It was covered in bandages, but she knew where all the wounds were: the ones on the fingertips; the ones on the palms; the thick sticky gash at the very center. It was wrong for things to happen the way things had happened to her. It was wrong for things to happen to ordinary people in the world like Jack.
Suddenly she felt very cold, and very tired. It seemed to her that she had been awake for hours and hours, maybe even days. She would have hated winter and everything that went with it if she could have worked up the energy, but all she could do was want desperately to be away from here. She hated hospital rooms. She hated hospitals. She especially hated the sense of inevitability that went with them, the sense that you were going to die, we were all going to die, no matter how much we didn’t want to, no matter how hard we tried not to. That was the thing she had hated most about her mother’s dying, that sense that failure was assured, that failure was the only option.
She walked out into the hall and looked down in the direction of the nurses’ station. Leslie would be there, at the desk, reading a book or tidying up files. She couldn’t leave the ward empty while Jack was still on it. Even so, the ward felt empty. The whole hospital did. Around her and around Jack there was nothing but empty rooms, bed after bed carefully made up with fitted dust covers that would have to be taken off and replaced by real sheets if the time ever came to admit somebody. She walked into the room across the hall and looked around. Her mother hadn’t been in this hospital when she died. She had been in a hospital in Boston, where the real doctors were, and the real medical services. Margaret’s Harbor was a place for house wives’ knees and golfers’ elbows, and the stray heart attack, the one that came in the night after the day you’d spent on your boat, the day that had been perfect in every particular. Failure was the only option. Once you knew that, you had nothing left to do in your life.
Linda went back into the hall again, and then back into Jack’s room. He was fine. He was breathing normally, in spite of all the drugs he had in him. She went to the window and looked out again. She was aware that she was only pretending to have something to do. She was really only pacing, back and forth, marking time. She had done a lot of pacing in her time.
She had left her down coat on the visitor’s chair, a green plastic and pressed-wood thing somebody had shoved into a corner where nobody would ever want to sit. She got the coat on and went back to Jack’s bedside. His eyes were closed. His hair was dark and damp and matted with sweat. He did not seem to be sweating now. It was just his hand that was damaged. Nobody had taken a knife or an ax to his throat.
Linda buttoned up her coat and went into the hall again. If she was careful, she could get to the elevators and outside without having to stop and talk to Leslie. She hated to stop and talk to people. She never had anything to say, and they always seemed to be expecting something she couldn’t give them. She didn’t want to talk about Jack, or what she would do without him at the paper for the next few days. Or few weeks. She wondered about those drugs. They weren’t supposed to do any permanent damage. They were only supposed to make you forget. Then again, you weren’t supposed to take enough of them to pass out cold.