The Letter in the Bedside Drawer
For twelve years, there was an envelope in my bedside drawer that I never opened.
It sat under a Bible, a tube of hand cream, my reading glasses, and a little stack of birthday cards from my grandchildren. A plain white envelope, sealed, with one word written across the front in my husband’s slanted handwriting.
Margaret.
Some nights, I took it out and held it. I turned it over. I ran my thumb along the flap.
Then I put it back.
Robert gave it to me three days before he died. He was in a bed at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, with tubes in his arms and his skin the color of old paper. He pressed it into my hand and held my fingers closed around it.
“Promise me something, Maggie.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t open this unless something happens that you can’t explain.”
“What kind of something?”
He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were wet.
“You’ll know,” he said.
I promised.
And for twelve years, nothing happened that I couldn’t explain. My husband died. My children grew older. My grandchildren had children of their own. The maple tree in the backyard got taller, and my knees got worse, and the house got quieter.
Then, at eighty years old, my body started changing in a way I couldn’t explain.
And I finally understood what Robert meant.
My name is Margaret Whitmore. I’m eighty years old.
I’ve raised three children, welcomed seven grandchildren, and watched four great-grandchildren become part of our family. I was married to Robert Whitmore for fifty years. He sold life insurance for Charter Oak Mutual in Hartford for thirty-eight of them. He wore the same brown suit to work for a decade. He clipped coupons. He drove a Buick until it had two hundred and eleven thousand miles on it.
He was the most ordinary, dependable man I ever knew.
That’s what I believed, anyway.
After living through so much, I thought there was very little left that could surprise me.
I was wrong.
It started six months ago, in the spring.
At first, my waistline seemed a little bigger than usual. I noticed it when I was getting dressed for church. My navy skirt pulled a little at the button.
I assumed it was ordinary weight gain. I’d been eating too many of the lemon cookies my neighbor, Dottie, brings over on Thursdays. At my age, everything settles somewhere.
Then my favorite gray trousers stopped fitting.
By June, I couldn’t close the zipper on any pants I owned. I switched to loose cotton dresses, the kind with no waist at all. I told myself it was because of the summer heat.
By August, my stomach was round and hard and swollen, like a woman five months along. Bending down to tie my shoes made me short of breath. Sitting in Robert’s old recliner felt like sitting with a bag of groceries in my lap.
I tried not to think about it.
When you’re eighty, you learn that if you go looking for problems in your body, you’ll always find some. So I stopped looking. I wore my loose dresses and ate less and told myself it would go away on its own.
On the first Sunday in September, the family came for dinner.
They do that once a month. It’s the only thing I’ve asked them for since Robert died.
My oldest son, Thomas, came with his wife, Sarah, and their two youngest grandchildren. Thomas is sixty-one. He’s an accountant, like I always knew he’d be. Even as a little boy, he lined up his crayons by color and counted them before bed.
My daughter, Claire, called on video from Phoenix, where she’s lived for twenty years. The grandchildren held the iPad up to the pot roast so she could see it.
Daniel couldn’t make it. He’s my youngest. Fifty-six. He’s a high school history teacher in Glastonbury, and he was chaperoning some kind of field trip.
I’d made pot roast and mashed potatoes and green beans with almonds. The same meal I’d made for Sunday dinner since 1970.
Halfway through dinner, Thomas set down his fork.
“Mom, I want to talk to you about the house again.”
I sighed. “Thomas, not tonight.”
“It’s always not tonight. We need to talk about it sometime.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “You’re eighty. The stairs are steep. The furnace is thirty years old. The property taxes went up again. Eight thousand four hundred this year.”
“I know what the property taxes are. I pay them.”
“You pay them out of Dad’s pension and your Social Security, and there’s barely anything left over at the end of the month. I’ve seen the statements.”
He has, too. Thomas has had power of attorney over my finances since I had pneumonia three years ago. I signed it in a lawyer’s office in West Hartford when I was too tired to argue. It was supposed to be just for emergencies. Thomas doesn’t really believe in the word just.
“I talked to a place in Avon,” he went on. “Brookside Senior Living. It’s beautiful, Mom. They have a library and a garden. Independent living to start, and assisted living if you need it later. The house would sell for at least four-ten. Probably more. That would cover Brookside for years.”
“I’m not moving to Avon.”
“Mom—”
“Your father and I raised you in this house. He planted that maple tree. I’m going to die in this house, Thomas, and you can sell it afterward and buy yourself a boat.”
The grandchildren went very quiet.
Thomas’s face got red. He picked his fork back up and stabbed a green bean.
That was when Sarah spoke.
Sarah is Thomas’s wife. She’s a dental hygienist, soft-spoken, and she married into this family thirty-four years ago and has never once called me anything but Mom. She’s the kind of person who notices when you’ve lost weight, or when you’re limping, or when you’ve been crying.
She was looking at my stomach.
“Mom, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, sweetheart.”
She hesitated. Then she said gently, “Have you spoken to your doctor about the swelling?”
Everyone looked at me.
I laughed lightly and patted my dress. “Sarah, I’m eighty years old. My body doesn’t work quite like it used to.”
But she didn’t smile.
“Margaret,” she said. She never uses my first name. “I really think you should have it checked. Please.”
Thomas looked at my stomach too, then. Really looked, for the first time all night.
“Mom,” he said slowly. “How long has it been like that?”
“A little while.”
“How long is a little while?”
“Since spring, I suppose.”
He stared at me.
“Since spring? Mom, that’s six months!”
“Don’t shout at me in my own dining room.”
“I’m not shouting. I’m—” He put his hands flat on the table. “You need to see a doctor. This week.”
“I’ll call Dr. Abrams’s office tomorrow,” I said.
“Dr. Abrams retired three years ago, Mom.”
I’d forgotten that.
Sarah reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“I’ll make the appointment for you,” she said. “If you want.”
I promised I would do it myself.
I didn’t.
Three nights later, I woke up at two in the morning.
There was a strange pressure in my belly. A heaviness, low down, like someone was pressing on it from the inside. I lay on my back in the dark and tried to breathe slowly.
Then I felt something move.
A fluttering. A shifting. Like water sloshing in a jar. Followed by a deep, tight fullness that made it impossible to lie still.
I put my hand on my stomach.
Something shifted again under my palm.
I’ve had three babies. I know what it feels like when something moves inside you. This was nothing like that. And at eighty, with my husband twelve years in the ground, I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be.
For the first time, I was really frightened.
I lay there until the sun came up. I didn’t sleep. I just kept my hand on my stomach and listened to the clock in the hallway, the one Robert wound every Sunday for forty years, and that I still wind every Sunday now.
At seven o’clock, I called Daniel.
“Mom? Is everything okay?”
Daniel’s voice is the one in my family that sounds most like Robert’s. Low and calm, with a little gravel in it.
“Daniel, could you take me to the hospital? I think it’s time I found out what’s happening.”
He didn’t ask any questions. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He was there in fifteen.
He came in through the kitchen door with his car keys still in his hand and stopped dead when he saw me sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe.
“Mom,” he said. “Oh, Mom.”
I tried to smile. “I know. I look like I swallowed a beach ball.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it had gotten this bad?”
“I didn’t want to worry anyone.”
He crouched down beside my chair and put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it gently.
“That’s what we’re here for,” he said. “You know that.”
“Your father always said that.”
“I know,” Daniel said, and something passed over his face that I didn’t understand. Something heavy. Then it was gone. “Come on. Let’s get you dressed.”
At St. Francis, they took me back quickly. I think it was the size of my stomach. The nurse at the front desk took one look and said, “Let’s get you a wheelchair, dear.”
The doctor was a woman named Dr. Helen Parker. She was maybe fifty, with short gray hair, sneakers, and very steady hands. She asked me questions about my symptoms, my appetite, my bathroom habits, the fluttering. She pressed on my belly in several places. She frowned a little at what she felt.
“Mrs. Whitmore, I’d like to do an ultrasound right away.”
“All right.”
A technician named Rosa wheeled in a machine and turned off the overhead light. She spread cold jelly across my stomach and moved the wand slowly from side to side, studying the gray shapes on the screen.
She was quiet for a long time.
She adjusted the machine. She pressed harder. She tilted her head and looked at the images from several angles. She clicked some buttons and saved some pictures.
Then she said, “Excuse me for one moment,” and stepped outside.
I looked at Daniel. He was sitting in the plastic chair beside the bed, holding my hand.
“Do you think something’s wrong?”
He squeezed my hand. “Let’s hear what the doctor says.” 