He’d sat beside me on the passenger seat today as I drove to the hospice, for once not fidgeting, pawing at the window, or trying to climb on to my lap. As we pulled into the car park, he sat up higher in his seat and looked directly at the low red-brick building that had been home to his owner for the last four weeks.
He gave a single soulful whine.
‘Can you sense him, Fletch? Can you tell that he’s in there?’
Fletcher looked at me with eyes that suddenly seemed knowing.
‘You have to be good today,’ I told him as I clipped the lead to his collar. ‘You mustn’t upset anyone.’
Adam’s dog looked at the tears coursing down my cheeks, as if to say that ship might already have sailed.
‘You’re here to say goodbye to him, boy,’ I whispered brokenly. Fletcher watched me with an almost human expression of empathy. ‘But I think you know that, don’t you?’
For two hours Adam’s dog sat beside the bed, within easy reach of the hand that fondled his silky ears the way it had donea thousand times before. And would never do again. As much as it broke my heart, I think having his old friend there helped heal something in Adam’s.
Towards the end of the visit, I lifted the dog on to the bed. There were intravenous drips and wires everywhere, but Fletcher, who was possibly the clumsiest hound in the world, didn’t disturb a single one. He simply lay down on the mattress and stared up at his owner with a devotion that matched mine. We both loved this man with all our heart. And tonight we were both going to lose him.
The hospice staff were invisible angels, slipping unobtrusively in and out of Adam’s room throughout the night, checking him, checking me, tweaking machinery, and then silently disappearing back into the shadows. Someone had turned off the harsh overhead lamp, leaving the room bathed in the subdued glow of the panel light behind the bed. It was still bright enough to see every detail of the face I’d planned on waking up beside for the next sixty years or so. The thought caught me unawares, and whatever I had been saying was lost in a broken sob.
‘Oh, babe,’ Adam said, managing to lift his arm off the mattress with a strength I thought he’d already lost. ‘Come here.’
I went to him, negotiating my way through the tangle of wires and tubes to lay my head on his chest. It was my favourite place to sleep, with the reassuring steady thud of his heart beating beneath my ear. Tonight its rhythm was off, like a song being played at the wrong tempo. It came fast in a flurry of beats, and then slow with excruciatingly long gaps before the next reassuring thump.
‘Adam will slow down,’they had told me.‘He’ll become drowsy and may sleep for long periods of time. He won’t want to eat or drink. Gradually his body will begin to shut down.’
‘Will it ... will it hurt?’I’d asked, my face awash with tears that I hadn’t bothered trying to wipe away.
‘We won’t let it,’the doctor had told me gently. ‘We’ll give him whatever he needs.’
Later I would replay those words over and over again. Because what my husband needed was the one thing that no one could give him: a miracle. A cure for the disease that was stealing him away from us.
‘Climb under the covers,’ Adam said now, his voice low.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed,’ I whispered, already kicking off my shoes and glancing worriedly towards the door as they hit the floor with a noisy clatter.
‘I don’t think they’ll throw me out for misbehaviour.’
‘Are we going to be misbehaving?’ I asked, trying to make him smile. Adam had the best smile of anyone I’d ever met.
‘I wish,’ he said with regret, his eyes looking deep into mine.
It seemed beyond wrong that even after all these years I could still remember the first time we’d made love and yet I couldn’t recall the last time.
All I knew was that it had fallen somewhere between growing vaguely concerned about Adam’s niggling symptoms, and the day we’d sat, white-faced and terrified, in an oncologist’s office.
‘Can you please just give it to me straight?’Adam had asked him.‘I don’t want some dressed-up version of the truth. Just how bad is it?’
The doctor had paused for a long moment. He hadn’t needed to look down at the test results or refer to the X-rays fanned out on the desk before him. He’d locked eyes with Adam.
‘Bad,’he’d said quietly.‘It’s bad.’
The minutes slid silently into hours. Staff changed shifts and the corridor outside Adam’s room grew quieter.
‘Talk to me,’ Adam said, as I lay pretzelled against him.
‘What about?’
He gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Anything. I just want to hear your voice. Tell me what you thought of me the first time we met.’
