Knowledge

The call came in around 6am. It was unusual for him to call at all anymore. To call now, after the last month, was unusual enough that even semi-consciously, she answered. Most likely the call was an accident, a screen responding to an errant hand. 

            In less than a minute, she was sitting upright trying to understand why he wanted her to know this. He was in the hospital, had been there since last night. Eddie, his brother, insisted he go to the ER when a coughing spat sent him to his hands and knees on the sidewalk. 

            She didn't know what to say. Was he wanting her to visit? A cough couldn't be that serious. He'd probably be discharged before she could even get to the hospital.

            "Are you in pain?" It seemed like a safe question. 

            "No."

            "Is Eddie there?"

            "No."

            She stared at the ceiling, frustrated by the quick return to a familiar standstill. 

            "Do you want me to visit?" she asked reluctantly, unsure what else to say. 

            "You don’t have to." This meant he wanted her to. If he hadn't, he would have said so directly. He was like that, very insistent about what he didn't want and less so about what he did. 

            She didn't know what she felt as she climbed up the stairs from the metro. She hadn't seen him in weeks. They weren't together anymore. If asked by a stranger maybe she would have classified them as friends, but even that was a stretch. They shared a history, that was probably the most accurate description. 

            Theirs was love, she knew that. In her thirty years, she'd never loved another person like she had him. She felt confident that he felt the same and not just because he had said as much. 

No casting director would have paired them together. She was a small-town girl turned well-educated government employee; he was a city-bred fighter who now trained professional boxers. He was older than she was with a life that shared nothing in common with her own. For a year, their differences made no difference at all. Maybe in that first year she thought it was a forever love. During the last two, she knew otherwise. 

It was a slow and painful disentanglement of their lives, mostly achieved by her own uneven insistence. Her love for him was profound, making the sound reasons for breaking up with him have to fight an uphill battle to convince her heart. The reasons for the breakup were hard to explain to someone observing the relationship from the outside. A difference of values, driven by their generational difference, seemed trivial given the love that onlookers could so easily detect. 

She struggled to explain her reasoning, to him, to others, at times to herself. He had views about women that increasingly collided with her life. A difference of values was about more than a difference of opinion, she had come to learn. Values create expectations. Expectations impact trust. And trust is a relationship. Without it, what is there? 

He didn't want her traveling so much for work. She wanted him to be interested in her work, including the reasons for the travel. Every time she left, there was an argument about it. Disagreements about actions evolved into doubts about feelings. 

She wanted time by herself. Their small apartment made this challenging. His distrust of her desire for solitude made it more so. She liked people and loved him, but throughout her life, she sought time alone to balance time with others. For their first year, she thought he was the exception to her doses of solitude. But no, she needed time to herself. She realized only later how that first year laid the groundwork for his distrust when she asked for time apart. 

Looking back, she wondered if he had come to agree with her or simply given up trying to dissuade her that love wasn't enough to overcome life. When they finally parted ways, she felt certain that it was for the best and believed, at least at the time, that he finally felt the same. 

            She couldn't recall the last time she'd been inside a hospital, and yet the smell that met her at the door was somehow familiar. All hospitals smelled the same. Perhaps it was a smell that all humans carried with them from the birthing room. Babies are born knowing how to nurse and what hospitals smell like. 

            Outside his door, she tried to figure out what she would say to him. A nurse forced her hand. "You can go on in, Hon. He's just resting."

            "Oh, okay, thanks," she said and hastened inside. 

            He was sitting upright in the bed. Other than the morose hospital gown he wore, he looked just like he always did. He was too old to fight in the ring, but only the slight gray around his temples gave it away. His body was, and she imagined always would be, that of a fighter in his prime. 

            "Hi," she said, easing her way over to him. 

            "Hey," he smiled. He actually smiled, bringing an involuntary smile to her own lips. "Don't be afraid," he smiled again at her tentative approach. 

            "I'm not. How are you?"

            "Fine. Probably be out of here soon."

            "That's good. Did they diagnose the cough?"

            "Something about my lungs."

            Presumably the doctors had provided more detail than that, but it was like him to sum it up in the simplest way possible. If she asked him, she was sure he would say medical terms are for doctors. What use are such terms to him? 

            They chatted amicably for a few minutes. She asked about Eddie, and he asked about their dog, now her dog. The conversation couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes. Over that short period of time, she tried to keep the conversation normal, tried to keep off her face the knowledge that came to her like a dumbbell settling in her gut. 

            Jaxon was dying. Nothing he said implied that. She hadn't talked to the doctors. She had nothing to point to for proof and yet would have bet her own life on it. Her tears gave her away.

            "Hey, I'm okay, Tes. Bad cough is all." He reached up to her face and tried to brush away the tears cresting her eyes. 

            "You just look so miserable in that ridiculous gown," she teased, trying to make light of something that wasn't. 

            She stayed without being asked. She stayed while the doctor came in to check on him and assured him that he would be out of the hospital by the end of the week. There was an infection in a pocket of Jaxon's lung, and the doctors would want to be sure it was gone before they released him. The doctor said all this as if Jaxon had merely a cold, a nuisance but nothing more.

            She wanted to grab the doctor by his white lab coat and force him to tell her the truth. Why lie? It didn't change what she was certain the doctor had to know. Jaxon was dying. Maybe not by the weekend, but soon. Mostly, she knew he would never leave the hospital. It was cruel for the doctor to suggest otherwise. 

            Tessa's mother was clairvoyant at times, proven to the family by a select handful of undeniable events. As a child, Tessa had wanted to inherit the gift, if that's what it was. No matter how hard she tried, however, she detected little of the future outside the astrology column. Standing there now, her face immune to the knowledge held captive in her mind, she wondered if her mother experienced this often. Did her mother know things that the world would not allow her to share? 

            Jaxon was dying. He would never climb into the ring again. His fighters would never again win a fight because of the sage instruction he passed to them in sixty second increments during a fight. 

            She couldn't do anything to change any of it. As certain as she was about his fate, she knew she could not tell him. He needed to believe he would soon be back in the ring training his fighters or she feared what he might do to hasten the end. 

            All of this swam through her mind on her way home from the hospital, as she walked her dog, as she made dinner, as she went to bed. It was a fateful coincidence that he was in the hospital that she passed by on her way to the office. 

            Without him asking, she knew to visit him the next morning and on her way home from work that same day. Each time she came into the room, he smiled and reached for her hand.  

At the end of the week, she was the only one not surprised by the doctors' decision to keep him in the hospital for another week. After that next week, she knew it would be another. Her conviction about his fate never wavered, nor her guilt about knowing that which no one else knew and which she could disclose to even fewer. 

She couldn't save him, but she could do this, she thought on the ninth day as she held his hand. She could be there for him. All the reasons for their separation lay outside the hospital, and he would never leave the hospital. Here, in a strange twist of fate, they could be them without life getting in the way. 

Effortlessly, they settled back into the couple they once were whenever she came to visit, always touching and looking at one another as if words were conveyed with the flick of an eyebrow or tilt of a lip. As he deteriorated, she held his hand. When he could no longer recall truth from fiction, he remembered her and would smile every time she came into the room. 

For however long he had left, she would be his and he hers. She understood somehow, without putting it into words, that being with him while he died would change the course of her life. Just like it would change the rest of his.