“They say....” She could hear a tremor in her voice, a turbulence beneath the calm she wanted to project, and she tried to tame it. “They could be wrong, they say two to six months. It’s stage four. It’s...not just the colon anymore. Other places too. The liver....” Her brain suddenly seized. She had felt this before, when she and Hugh were telling their children, and she’d thought that if she didn’t say the words, it wouldn’t be so. She would not say the words, not all of them. Or any more of them.
Marg leaned back, flushing. She ran her fingers through her hair, loosening it, the eggplant highlights, the brown, the coppery red.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Syl. I want to see him.”
Sylvia felt herself growing monumental and rigid, like a statue. “Not now, not yet.”
After the accident they would get together for board games on Saturday nights—Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly, Trouble—games from their childhood made grown-up with whiskey and wine and delicate wraps that in those days Marg used to put together in the kitchen with finely chopped vegetables and cured meats. Sometimes Sylvia brought a friend—male or female—and sometimes Hugh and Marg had another couple or a few friends of their own. But often it was just the three of them. Marg had been grateful. It let them reestablish themselves, she said. But they were reestablishing themselves, all of them, in a different configuration, although they didn’t know it then. Marg would go to the kitchen to make more wraps and Sylvia would stay with Hugh to keep him company.
Hugh, confined to a wheelchair, became visible and affable in an entirely new way: the stubble on his chin, the three sharp lines on his forehead when he laughed, the gestures of his wide hands. The way he could turn anything into a wry joke, the way that he could move from those jokes to full, attentive seriousness. But mainly, it was the questions he asked. As if nothing could be more interesting than Sylvia’s answers. Sylvia had grown so accustomed to being in Marg’s shadow that she’d forgotten what it was like to be so completely noticed. And so when Marg thanked Sylvia, Sylvia said that it was she who should thank Marg, she hadn’t really appreciated Hugh before. Marg had raised her eyebrows. Her own appreciation of Hugh was diminishing at a rapid rate during that period, something Sylvia knew of a little from Marg herself and learned more about from Hugh after the affair began. She wondered, in fact, if she might be doing Marg a sort of favor, taking Hugh off her hands. And when they finally told Marg, it was like that at first. A little.