Read Online Grace by Linn Ullmann - Free Book Online Page B

feel his cheek.
    “For heaven’s sake!” Mai burst out laughing.
    But Johan silenced her, saying, “I’ve . . . I’ve been thinking.”
    “I see.”
    “I want you to hear me out without interrupting. This is important. I need your help, Mai. I need you . . . more than ever.”
    Mai nodded.
    “I’m sick, but I’m going to fight it. You know I want to fight it. I may even recover completely . . . I
may
recover, you know . . . but if not—”
    “Johan,” Mai interrupted gently, “why don’t you just take one day at a time? You’re feeling better now, aren’t you? Can’t we enjoy this time together without thinking too much about it?”
    “I want to get certain things sorted out now,” Johan whispered. “So that I can live out the rest of my time with you in peace. That’s all I want, Mai, a bit of peace.”
    “You’re not going to get any peace as long as you keep trying to predict the future,” Mai retorted. “I could have a heart attack tomorrow, right? Bye-bye, Mai! There’s no point looking too far ahead.”
    “You have to listen to me,” Johan pleaded. “I
am
fighting. I don’t want to die. But I need you to help me if . . . if my illness should become a burden”—he struggled to find the right words—“a burden to us both.”
    “You’re not a burden.”
    “But if I become one—”
    “I don’t think of you that way,” she snapped.
    “I worry about the pain, Mai.”
    “Pain can be eased. And I’ll be with you. I’ll always be right there with you.”
    He looked at her with gratitude. He said, “I worry about the humiliation. I don’t want you to see me like that. I don’t want your last memory of me to be the
stink.
I remember when my father . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
    Mai looked at him and took a breath. “I understand what you’re saying, but . . .”
    He waited for the rest, but nothing else came. He wanted to know what was supposed to follow that
but.
He wanted to know whether she was going to repeat
I’ll be with you,
maybe say
I’ll always be right there with you, no matter what.
But she said no more. She began clearing the table. He contemplated her hair, which she had put in a long gray braid, and her big hands with their short, clean nails, a narrow white crescent at the tip of each: a sign of good health, she had once told him. Alice’s nails had been flimsy and ragged, and she was always absentmindedly nibbling at them. Sometimes she would have them painted pink. She’d come home and flutter her hands, those teeny Chinese hands, in front of Johan’s face and ask him if he thought they were pretty.
    He looked at his own unclipped fingernails: narrow white crescents at the tips. Once he had put his palm up to Mai’s and said, “We have similar hands, you and I.” But she had pulled her hand away, saying it was bad luck to compare them. Mai had promised that she’d be with him always. Hold his hand until it was over. Mai’s was the good hand he wanted to be the last thing he sensed in this life. She would take his hand in hers and lead him to the other side.
    He had always thought of Mai’s hands in this way—as good hands, patient hands. She who was always so quick could suddenly draw her body very close to his. It was the way she stroked him, the lingering progress of her hand across his stomach and down, the fact that it was so slow, so easy and slow. Other women didn’t have hands. Only Mai had hands.
    Before they went to bed that night, Mai lit a fire. The August summer smacked of fall; the wind was blowing hard, and—after months of long, light-filled evenings—darkness had fallen suddenly and unexpectedly. Johan and Mai sat in their chairs with their books. It might have been any ordinary evening, Johan thought, if not for the nausea, a gob of vomit in his gullet that would not go up or down. And the conversation with Mai that had concluded with the word
but.
Was she going to say that she would be right there with him whatever