Page 54 of Roadrunner

“He’s young,” I said. “And his father is in there and if I make this decision—” I stopped. “He’ll have questions one day. When he’s older. He’ll want to know what happened and why.”

“And you’ll tell him the truth,” Martina said. “That the doctors gave you no real hope of recovery. That you did what was merciful.” She set her cup down. “Arthur is a perceptive child. He already knows more than you think he does.”

“He doesn’t want to go in there,” I said.

“No.”

“He said Joshua is in there,” I said. “Not that he wanted to go in.”

Martina said nothing to that. There was nothing useful to say.

I stared at the floor. “Do you think about what happens after?”

“After?”

“If I—” I gestured toward the room. “After.”

She looked at me carefully. “What do you mean?”

I didn’t answer right away. The question sat there and I couldn’t make it mean anything useful.

“I mean Arthur,” I said. “What happens to Arthur.”

“Arthur will be fine. He has you.”

“He deserves more than just me.”

“Then give him more than just you.” She said it simply. Like it was obvious.

I looked at the window.

Joshua lay completely still. The monitors beeped their slow, indifferent rhythm.

I thought about coffee. About Arthur’s lunch that I hadn’t prepared. About the sound the machines made when nobody was talking over them.

I felt very little. That was the part I couldn’t explain.

This was not the moment.

I made myself think instead about the actual decision in front of me, the one that belonged to this hallway and not to a desert I hadn’t seen in over a decade. I thought about what Joshua would have wanted. Then I caught myself, because I genuinely didn’t know. We had never once talked about dying. We had talked about everything else. Vacations, schools, which country club, which car. And never the one conversation that would have actually mattered tonight. That felt, suddenly, like its own small tragedy, a marriage so carefully arranged around its surfaces that it had never once touched down on anything real.

I thought about Arthur asleep at home, or trying to be, with Martina down the hall listening for him the way she always did. I thought about what I would tell him, eventually. Not the medical details, but the shape of it, the fact that his mother had stood in a hallway and not known what to choose, and had chosen anyway, because someone had to and there was no one else standing there.

That, in the end, was as close to clarity as the night gave me. Not certainty. Just the understanding that I would live with whatever I decided, and that living with it was the only promise I could actually make.

Martina left at seven to get Arthur. I sat alone in the waiting room for a while. Then I walked back to Joshua’s room and stood in the doorway.

I looked at him for a long time.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to answer.

“I’m going to let God decide. I want you to know that. I’m not going to be the one who—” I stopped. “I’m going to let whatever happens, happen. I think that’s the only thing I can live with.”

The monitors beeped.

I turned off the light in the corner. Left the room. Walked to the end of the hall and stood at the window that looked out over the hospital parking lot, where cars moved through the night like nothing was happening.