The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

September - Last Words (Part Six)

            My falling dream came back to me again that night. They had been a constant nuisance in December, but had tapered off as my real life began to take on the unsteady nature of the dream itself. In this one, I wasn't walking down the cobbled streets of Paris, I was in a garden. I walked along the back trellis that held all the flowers in the world, or what at least felt like all the flowers. There were sunflowers and hyacinths, of course, but also lilacs, roses, hydrangeas, daisies, a lot of others that I could not name, and then, orchids. I saw Gerard, if only for a split second, after those flowers, before that sensation of falling set in. It seemed to go on forever before I finally jolted awake, just before I hit the ground. I could have sworn I felt hands on me, but when I turned over to look, Hunter was still asleep. He was on his side, and still clutching his stomach like he used to do when he was pregnant. I knew from sleeping with him so often these past few months that he was in a deep sleep; I watched his eyes dart back and forth under the lids. Light broke around the curtains in the bedroom and the clock on the bedside table read almost six in the morning. I took a few more deep breaths, wanting so desperately to go back to the dream, back to where the orchids were again. But it was gone and I was awake now. I got up slowly, placing my feet down one by one, and left the bedroom. 

            I went downstairs to make food for Gerard and myself, like I had done every morning for the past few months, working on autopilot. Everything was the same as it had been, and considering last night between Hunter and myself, everything should have felt even better. But a tension still lingered around me. I held the plate of food and began the return trip up the stairs, and the anxiety descended more. I tried to push forward, thinking of those few split seconds in the dream where I had seen Gerard's face, his hair dark like it had been years ago, and pushed on. I needed to go to his room. I needed to see him before I left for work. I needed to know if he was okay.

            In my head, the lines of poetry repeated, going through me like a ghost. In the room, he comes and goes, talking of Picasso. I knocked on the door, and no answer came. He comes and goes, I thought again, and I finally put the plate of food down and stood in front of the entrance. I knocked again, one final time, and I just knew.  He was gone. The anxiety disappeared because I knew it had finally happened. I wasn't falling anymore. I didn't think that the culmination of all that stress would be this overwhelming conclusion. I hadn't let myself get that far ahead. But when I finally gathered the strength to open the door and face that reality, his state did not surprise me. Instead I was baffled by my own, because I was not scared at all.

            He was in his bed, half on his back and half to the side. He looked almost peaceful, as if he wasn't really dead at all. A smell lingered in the room, from a small pool of vomit on the far side of the bed. It was far enough away that it looked as if he had tried to get up, thrown up instead, and then just lay back down again. I swallowed hard, and tried not to breathe through my nose. I had to look away from that display to gather myself and that was when I noticed the whiteboard. It was blank. No madness, no names and dates, but blankness. Pure white. I scanned his night table for more clues and saw a bottle of empty pills that he had taken since the stroke, a glass of water, and one of his sketch books. I listened in the room again, holding my breath, and I heard no other sound than the mourning doves outside our windows in the early morning.

            There was nothing I could do or could have done, and I knew it. I didn't run away and I didn't try and reach for the phone. He was dead and had been for some time. I knew it would probably look like he had had another stroke. When they affect the brain stem, they could cause vomiting, Vivian had told me. She had witnessed this type of reaction firsthand, just before he had his second stroke and nearly fell down her stairs. While Hunter had tried to become an expert in Alzheimer's, her specialty had been those strokes that seemed to roll through her house. I knew how each person, having a different piece of his life and their own distinct knowledge, would see the situation and make their own interpretations from it.