Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin

slowly crunching his dry food. Presently, he returned and took up his former pose, a neatly folded cat.
    “Hope that is seen is not hope,” Father Paul read from Romans. “Why hope for what is already seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with eagerness and patience.”

    Now, on this December night early in the eighth month after Rudy’s death, Christina, in his chair, raised his/her glass (what is the sound of one glass toasting?) and took a determined but rational sip of the Gigondas “Oratorio.”
    “To hope,” she said, gazing at her own absent place on the sofa. “What did you see when I was sitting over there, two yards away from you?”
    “I saw you, my love. In your varied manifestations. In your married vanifestations.”
    “I’ve missed you. There were things left unfinished. I thought we would have the summer together. You said, ‘We still have some more time together.’ Your last words to me. Did you really think so?”
    “I
hoped
so.”
    “I went home and read a novel. I was never able to finish it afterward. It’s not her fault, but I won’t ever read that writer again. I read until two or three in the morning. You were sinking but I didn’t know it. I’m glad you had Edward, the same nurse who was with you eleven Aprils ago when, as you put it, ‘I made my maiden voyage to intensive care.’
    “Edward said I could call him at home and he told me all I wanted to hear, which was everything. How delighted you were to see him when he came on duty. How you filled him in on the intervening years, our trip to Sweden for my book, the last time we traveled together, what you had been writing, the operas and musical plays we wrote together.
    “ ‘But then,’ you told him, ‘my life slowly changed and I could do less and less.’
    “Around ten, you had chest pains. The heart doctor ordered a drip of nitro and some morphine. You settled down and slept some. Toward morning, your oxygen started dropping, more diuretics were administered, a blood test showed dialysis was needed. Your kidney doctor was on vacation, so his associate came and you signed the papers. Then your blood pressure began to drop, your breathing got shallow, they administered more diuretics, and when the doctor was putting in the catheter for dialysis, your heart rate dropped and you lost consciousness: not enough oxygen to the brain, Edward explained. They called code blue, the crash cart came, all your numbers were sky high, the pH of your blood changed, and Edward and the other nurses realized at a certain point in the resuscitation that they had just lost you.
    “ ‘We were devastated,’ he said. ‘We stood around the bed holding hands. We were in a daze. This man was affecting all of us. His energy was still there.’
    “ ‘He’s a man I’ll never forget,’ said Edward. ‘I was surprised that a man so sick could maintain such a high level of consciousness right to the end.’
    “You were conscious enough to bring your life story to completion, with Edward as the listener.
    “At seven-thirty the phone woke me. I picked it up, expecting your rumbly voice, instructing me what to bring, sweater, socks, in case they were keeping you another day.
    “But a stranger asked for me by name, and when I said, ‘Speaking,’ he identified himself as the doctor on duty at the ICU. ‘I have bad news,’ he said. ‘Rudy didn’t make it.’
    “ ‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ For those few seconds I guess I was still clinging to the thinnest semantic thread: ‘didn’t make it’ maybe meaning you’d lost consciousness or not responded, something just short of hopeless, but on this side of death.
    “But no.
    “Then I heard myself asking, ‘Is it all right if I come and see him anyway?’
    “When I got to the ICU, a nurse came out, weeping, and asked me to wait a few more minutes outside your room—four-fifteen—while she finished ‘getting you ready.’ I stood with my back to the nurses’