The farewell
by Margot Miller
Suddenly alert, Ellen Stuart pushed away the bedcovers, sat up and switched on the light, squinting into its glare while her feet searched for her slippers. She grabbed her robe from the end of the bed, slipped it on without stopping to tie the belt, and went to look for her husband. He'd been restless, agitated, for a couple of weeks and had not been sleeping well. He was overweight, worked far too much, and ate too many meals in restaurants while entertaining clients. Ellen knew he was worried about himself because he had recently passed the age at which his father had died in his sleep of a heart attack.
Downstairs she could just make out the top of Alex's balding head tilted to the side above the back of the chair at the desk. He was in front of the computer, the screensaver providing the only dim light in the den.
"Alex, what are you doing up at this hour?"
He didn't answer.
Ellen hurried to his side.
"Alex! Oh God. Al! Wake up!"
Her shaking hand groped for the phone and lifted the receiver. She managed to punch 911. The dial lit up. Thank God. Alex was slumped toward his left side, eyes closed, right hand on his chest. She put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. Her hip jostled the keyboard and mouse. The screensaver disappeared and the page opened on the computer, giving off more light.
"9-1-1. Where is the emergency?"
For an instant Ellen was distracted by what she saw on the computer screen. A name jumped out at her: Zoë Lowell.
She turned back to look at Alex and gave her address. With her free hand she took Alex's wrist, forcing herself to pay attention, but aware that she wanted to read the email on the screen. Alex's wrist was warm but she couldn't feel a pulse. She extended her fingers toward her husband's neck and gently pressed there. Yes, a pulse. Thank God.
"What is the nature of the emergency?"
"My husband has passed out in his chair. I think he might've had a heart attack."
"How old is he?"
"Fifty-eight."
"Is he conscious?"
"I don't think so."
"Is he breathing?"
"Yes, yes. I can see his chest rising and falling."
"Is he taking any medications?"
"No, nothing. Well, yes, he takes Lipitor for his cholesterol."
"Does he have an Advanced Directive?"
"What?"
"Instructions for procedures in case of coma or a vegetative state."
"Oh. Yes, I think the hospital has that on file from when he had his appendix out a couple of years ago."
"Okay. An ambulance is on its way, ma'am. If he comes to on his own, just keep him calm."
"All right. Yes. Thank you so much." Ellen touched Alex's face. It felt cool. "Al, can you hear me?" He groaned. She said it again, louder, "Alex, can you hear me?"
"Mmm."
"Stay right where you are. Don't move. I've called an ambulance and I'm going to open the front door."
When she returned the room was dark again. The computer screen had gone back to the screen saver. She took Alex's glasses off his face and put them on the desk. Then she pulled over a nearby chair and sat beside him, putting her hand to her temple where a headache was starting behind her eyes. What was he doing at this time of night, reading mail from that woman? She wanted to touch the mouse, but Alex's eyes opened slowly in her direction.
"It's all right. The ambulance is coming." She patted his arm and tried to smile at him. She needed to go to the bathroom, but she didn't want to leave him alone. She pushed a hand through her long hair, absently twisting it behind her neck with one hand and pulling it over her shoulder. The gray shank had once been black and shiny. It was past salt and pepper now. Her mind raced. Should she call the children, or Alex's sister? Time enough for that in the morning. He was breathing. Okay. Thank God. Could be just a little indigestion.
The medics arrived, two efficient young men in blue uniforms. They asked a few questions, working quickly and quietly. While they took Alex's vital signs, hooked him up to an IV and started oxygen, Ellen ran to the bathroom. When she came back they were ready to wheel him out.
One of them was talking on a radio phone. "Fifty-eight year old white male with syncopal episode." Pause. "Yes, his pressure is 130 over 70 with a regular heartbeat. Respirations 14 and unlabored." Pause. "He's got oxygen, an IV at 80 ccs per hour of half normal saline solution." Pause. "ETA about twenty minutes."
At the open door, Ellen shivered in the chilly air as she watched them load Alex into the ambulance. When they pulled away, she closed it and rushed up the stairs. She threw off her robe and nightgown, pulled on underwear, a jogging suit, and a pair of tennis shoes. She folded her hair quickly into a clip, glancing briefly at her own gray eyes and into a face she hardly recognized. No time for such thoughts. She ran down the stairs to get her bag and coat.
As she passed the den, she glanced in. Alex would want his glasses as soon as he woke up. She went to get them from the desk and her hand brushed against the mouse. The screensaver disappeared and the email reappeared on the screen.
Zoë Lowell was an old girlfriend of Alex's from more than thirty years ago. Ellen knew the story well. Hardly conscious of what she was doing, she sat down and read the letter.
Dear Alex Stuart:
I am writing to tell you that Zoë Lowell is seriously ill and has asked me to contact you. Even though we divorced many years ago, Zoë and I have been fortunate enough to remain friends. She suggested I would find an email address easily enough by Googling your name as an architect in Chicago, and she asked me to write from her address to facilitate matters.
Zoë doesn't have long, a month, maybe less, so I hope you will get this message and respond as soon as you can. You can reach me at....
With her chest tight and something old and bitter rising in her stomach, Ellen closed the program and hurried outside to the car.
It was only twenty minutes to the hospital, but all the way Ellen found herself distracted by Zoë Lowell. There had been a time, not long ago, in fact, as she was cleaning the garden for winter, when she had looked up and seen a woman walking along the opposite sidewalk, a woman she thought reminded her of someone, yes, of the pictures she'd seen of Zoë Lowell years before. But she'd put it out of her mind. A chilly wind had picked up as the afternoon grew dark that day.
Ellen tried to pull herself back to the present and felt guilty that she was having trouble focusing. She should have dressed and ridden in the ambulance with Alex. She should have been at his side. One way or another, she had lived with the fact of Zoë Lowell for almost as long as she had known her husband. Was it the news about her that had caused Alex's heart attack?
When Ellen had met Alex he was almost thirty. She had asked him why he hadn't married before and he told her about Zoë. Ellen had put it out of her mind because she already loved Alex, although she knew, more and more as time went by, that Zoë remained a powerful memory. Alex continued to carry her picture under the small flap of his wallet. In later years, news began to appear in the papers about Zoë, often in the book sections and Sunday magazines, as she began to publish her research and photographs in coffee table books on archeology, and then she appeared on the best-seller lists when she wrote fiction set in pre-historic times. Ellen saw the reviews and she knew that Alex saw them too, but neither of them said a word. Ellen had not read any of Zoë's books, but suddenly she wondered if she should have.
In the Emergency Room, Ellen found the cubicle where Alex lay with his eyes closed. A medical technician was just finishing the EKG and handing it to a doctor when Ellen reached the cubicle where Alex lay in the bright light with his eyes closed. A nurse stood by.
"Anteroseptal heart attack. Send the blood for tropinin and cardiac isoenzymes STAT. Put on a half inch of nitropaste and give him an aspirin. And call Dr. Stedman. He'll need a cardiac cath."
Ellen watched anxiously as Alex was wheeled away. She was torn between worry for him and anger at Zoë for intruding into their lives again. But how can you be angry at someone who is dying? Don't we all want to be with the people we love when we are dying? She realized she was angry at Alex too. She was tempted to pace, but contained herself by sitting in the waiting room. The smell of the hospital, at once antiseptic and closed in on itself, made it hard to take long, deep breaths.
Finally, a nurse came into the waiting area and spoke her name. Alex was in his room and Ellen could join him. He was dozing under mild sedation. She asked the nurse, "When will he be able to talk? I mean seriously?"
"You'll have to give him a few days. Dr. Stedman will explain his condition. He's just coming in, but you'll want to spare your husband any stress you can."
Dr. Stedman arrived and led Ellen into the hall to speak to her quietly. He said Alex had been lucky this time, but there were numerous lesions in the arteries that could not be opened with balloons. Alex would need a bypass.
She went in to look at Alex once more. He seemed peaceful. She left his glasses on the bedside table and drove herself home. It was almost daylight. In the car she let herself feel the weight of her headache.
After she showered and got dressed again, Ellen sat down at Alex's desk to call their son, Marty. First, though, she reopened the email program. She clicked on the inbox and then on the message with Zoë Lowell's name in the subject line. She reread it and noted the contact information. Should she look around, to see if there was a trail of emails or a saved folder? No. She didn't have the energy. She wasn't sure she wanted to know if there was more to this than what it looked like. She picked up the phone, used the speed dial, and heard a groggy, "Hello."
"Marty, it's Mom."
"What... What time is it?" Marty was at college in California, two time zones away.
"I'm sorry to call so early. It's Dad. He's had a heart attack but he's okay now. He's in the hospital."
Marty was instantly awake. "When?"
"In the night. I woke up and he wasn't in bed so I went to look for him and found him slumped in his chair. He was reading email." Her voice trailed off. Was she going to explain all this to Marty and Jenny? How old do children have to be before parents can tell them who they really are?
"Whoa!"
"He'll have to have a bypass."
"Should I come home?"
"Well, probably not, but if you want to, I'm sure Dad would be glad to see you."
"I'll be there as soon as I can get a flight, this afternoon maybe."
"Okay. I have to call Jenny now. Bye, darling."
She had the same conversation with her daughter except that Jenny wouldn't be able to get a flight immediately. She had gotten a job in Rome right out of college as a business major with two foreign languages, and it was already mid-afternoon there. It would take her a day or two to arrange things.
With the calls made, Ellen's mind turned back to Zoë, a shadow on Alex's heart and on their marriage. She thought about the request from the ex-husband. Who could she ask for advice? Ellen's best friend was married to Alex's boss and she didn't know if she dared ask in that quarter. They might overreact, and Ellen certainly didn't want that. And no, she definitely did not want Alex seeing Zoë, even if she was dying.
*
The following morning Alex was awake, though slightly disoriented. He heard Ellen and the doctor in the doorway, and recognized Marty's voice. His mind, however, was on the email he'd read before he'd ended up in the hospital. Zoë Lowell. Hardly a day had gone by in more than thirty-five years that he had not thought of her at some level. And now she had a month or less to live.
The night they had met, she'd been walking with her girlfriends behind him and some of the fellows he was working with on the construction site that summer at a resort in Michigan. It was evening, about ten o'clock. The girls had had a few glasses of wine and Zoë playfully walked too close to him and stepped on the heel of his boot. He turned around and saw a pair of blue eyes amid regular features. She was working as a summer intern from Yale at a nearby historical site, excavations in the Old Fort Mackinaw, and that night she and her girlfriends had been celebrating her birthday. She was two years older than Alex, but it didn't seem to matter. They spent the rest of the summer in each other's company. They rented bikes to slip away to the beach, or they hiked on wooded paths. They'd made love for the first time in a copse of trees overlooking the lake.
Alex had no plans at that time to go to college. Zoë went home at the end of August, back to her privileged east coast university life. They wrote furiously at first, but by Christmas he hadn't heard from her in over a month. He sent his phone number because he didn't have hers. Long distance calls were expensive in those days and there was no internet. When two months had gone by, he decided she had just been having a summer fling and he'd felt foolish about how consumed he'd been with her. It turned out there had been letters, only he had never gotten them because, as his sister told him years later, their mother had thrown them away. He had blamed himself for not tracking Zoë down, for not telling her how much she meant to him, for not trying harder to find her.
The last time he'd seen her-it was ten years ago now-Zoë had been at a book exposition at the convention center and he'd gone without telling Ellen. He'd taken Zoë to dinner and, in the exhilaration of seeing her, had wanted to change his life, to go with her-anywhere, or make it possible to take her into his life. She'd asked him what was stopping him from making his life what he wanted it to be, and he'd come very close to telling her that Ellen would get half his pension if they split up and that he simply could not go back to the constant worries about money that had defined his parents' narrow lives. When he didn't answer right away, Zoë asked him why he'd come to see her. He thought a long time and finally said, "I loved you." He paused to calm his heartbeat. "I just didn't have anything to offer you. And I thought... " He told her about the letters that had been destroyed and his sister, Kathleen, telling him about it after their mother died. Zoë had been silent, lost in her own thoughts, and he'd decided to lighten the conversation before she could answer and get them into something they couldn't get out of.
"Anyway, you're well worth half a hundred!"
"Sorry?" Zoë seemed confused.
"Fifty bucks- the price to get into the convention hall for a single day." He exhaled the light groan of a man satisfied with what he beholds. She hadn't given him the warm smile, though, the one that forgave and understood and absolved all at once.
Half a hundred, but not half a pension. The comparison had hung in the air as if he'd said it out loud. She'd excused herself to go to the Ladies' Room. After dinner, as they parted, he had drawn her to him and kissed her deeply. She did not resist. And that was the last he'd heard or seen of her. He needed to read the email again, to contact the ex-husband.
Ellen and the doctor, with Marty behind them, entered the room and approached the bed. Alex opened his eyes.
"Hello, Mr. Stuart. I'm Doctor Stedman, the cardiologist assigned to you. How are you feeling this morning?"
"All right, I guess. Did I have a heart attack, then?"
"Yes, and you were lucky. But you're going to need a bypass. There are a number of blockages that can't be opened or stented. They're in difficult spots, and only a bypass will get around them."
"When?"
"As soon as we can get you ready and on the schedule. Possibly as soon as next week. I'll have to check with the vascular surgeon. If we can, we'll move it up."
Alex looked from the doctor to Ellen. He saw Marty and smiled, reached out a hand. Marty came forward and hugged him.
"Hey, Dad."
"Hello there, son." He felt his eyes tearing up, but turned back to the doctor at the end of the bed.
"Can I go home or anywhere else between now and the surgery?" The light from the window behind Ellen, to the right of the doctor, threw her into shadow, but he saw her jaw tighten as she inhaled and stood up straighter, watching him.
"You're going to need to lie pretty low until you regain your strength and until after the surgery, about six weeks post-op. You should be as good as new in about two months."
Alex's lips folded inward in thought. He said nothing but turned away from the glaring light that surrounded Ellen.
When the doctor left, Marty and Ellen sat down and the conversation turned to Marty's trip, his studies, the weather, sports. Ellen was quiet, letting Alex and Marty distract themselves with athletics. When she went to the bathroom, Alex asked Marty, "Can you bring me my laptop from home, son? There are some things I need to take care of."
"You're not supposed to work, Pops."
"I have to do one thing, just one thing."
Ellen came out of the bathroom and Alex had no time to say more.
"We'll be back this evening after Jenny gets in," Marty said, and then Alex was alone again. He slept away the afternoon without dreaming.
About six o'clock, when it was already getting dark, Ellen arrived with the laptop.
"Hey, thanks," he said. "That'll help pass the time." He said this as if he'd not asked anyone for the computer, and set it on the rolling table.
"Can I get you anything? I think I'll go for a cup of tea. Marty is picking Jenny up at the airport. They should be here in half an hour."
"A cup of tea would be nice."
*
Once alone in his room, Alex opened the laptop, turned it on, and nagivated to the email from Zoë. He buzzed the nurse.
When she finally came, he said, "I need a piece of paper and pencil, please. Got to write something down."
"You're not supposed to be working, Mr. Stuart." The nurse reached for the laptop. He clapped his hand over it.
"I'm not working. I have to call someone and I need to write down the number. I just need to let someone know where I am."
She pulled a pen and a note pad from her pocket, handed them to him, and waited while he scribbled.
"Now you just rest and put that thing away." She started to take it from him again.
"I think I can manage, thank you," he said with a tight smile, just as Ellen walked back into the room with two Styrofoam cups of tea.
The nurse retreated, saying, "You keep him quiet now, you hear, Mrs. Stuart?"
Ellen sat on the edge of the bed and Alex closed the computer. It lay between them on the rolling table. The space around them was temporarily cleansed of the sanitary hospital odor by the aroma of the tea.
Ellen said, "Has Dr. Stedman been in?"
"Not since this morning."
"How soon do you think they'll schedule the surgery?" she asked.
"I haven't heard anything since this morning when you were here," he said. He sipped his tea and changed the subject.
"Jeremy called, and Kath. Thanks for letting them know. Kath's coming tomorrow." Kath and Jeremy were his sister and brother-in-law.
Ellen took a deep breath.
"Alex, I..." But, as Alex looked into her face, Jenny and Marty came in. There were hugs and chatter and then the nurse shooed them all out.
Alone again at last, Alex dialed the number quickly, area code 415, San Francisco. He heard the phone ringing and felt his heartbeat increasing. He worried the machines he was hooked up to might signal the increasing pressure in his chest to the nursing station so he took a deep breath, and exhaling slowly.
"Hello," said a male voice.
"This is Alex Stuart calling. I received a message about Zoë Lowell."
"Yes. Thank you for calling." The voice was very formal. "This is Arthur Dulin. I wrote you the email."
"How is she? May I speak to her?"
"Of course. I'll let her know you're on the line." Alex felt his heart quicken again. She would be coming to the phone. He heard rustling and then the voice he'd have known anywhere.
"Hello, Alex."
"Hey Zoë. What's this about you being ill?" He tried to sound upbeat, as always.
"Oh, Alex. Thank you for calling. No, I'm not well. I guess Arthur told you." It was not a question.
"He sent an email, and it landed me in the hospital."
"What?" There was alarm in her voice. "I'm so sorry. Are you all right?"
"Just kidding, really. I'd been feeling low for a couple of weeks, and coincidentally when I got your message, I had a mild heart attack. I'm calling from the hospital."
"Oh, Alex, I'm so sorry. I won't keep you."
"I'm going to be fine, good as new in a few weeks, they say. What's going on with you then?"
"I have an inoperable cancer, a melanoma. It started in my left eye and was removed, leaving me blind in that eye, but it's reappeared. I'm not in much pain yet but it's moving fast," she said without hesitation.
"Oh, God. I'm so sorry." He paused and she waited for him to catch his breath. "You sound... resigned. You mustn't give up, Zoë," he continued.
"We've done everything. I have hospice care and Arthur and the children have rallied around." Alex felt his chest tighten, as if he were submerging in deep water. Tears were coming. He felt a knot in his throat.
"I'd like to see you, if I can get out of the hospital."
"Don't do anything to hurt yourself." And then, after a pause, "Alex, I just wanted to say good bye and tell you I'm happy I knew you all those years ago."
"Oh, God, I've got to see you."
"No," she paused. "You don't. I just wanted to tell you that."
"Ah Zoë, I loved you, you know that."
"I know, Alex. I've always known. Thank you." He heard her catching her breath, and then she whispered, "Bye now."
"Don't go."
"Look after yourself, Alex."
Then, very softly, he heard her say, "I'm going now," and the phone clicked.
Tears streamed down his face as the nurse rounded the corner and hurried into the room, clearly alarmed.
"Mr. Stuart?" She went immediately to check his monitors, taking the phone from his hand. "Shall I call your wife?"
"No. But thanks. I'm all right. Really, I am."
*
But the nurse did call Ellen. He'd been on the phone, she said, and she found him in tears. His heart was stable, according to the monitors. Ellen and Jenny and Marty headed straight back to the hospital.
In the car, Ellen was thinking as fast as she could. He'd have talked to Zoë. He'd have told her he couldn't travel. What if he'd had another attack? Should she tell Jenny and Marty about the email? Would it make a difference to them? To her? To Alex? What would they think? She felt terribly alone, panicky, as if she were slipping into quicksand as she negotiated the route back to the hospital in the rainy evening. A momentary flash of oncoming headlights blinded her.
"I want to tell you something," she said suddenly, before she had a chance to stop herself.
"What?" Marty said.
"It's about your father. He loved someone once, a long time ago, a girl from New York with more expectations than he had." Ellen felt her heart beating faster and a bit of a chill crept over her as she started to speak.
"She was two years older and going to university, back when he didn't know if he'd ever be able to do that. She went back to college after they'd spent a summer together. I guess they wrote each other for a few years and then it died off. The girl married one of her professors, I think. They were later divorced. She was an archeologist and then became a novelist."
Jenny and Marty were silent, waiting.
The rain had let up. Ellen took a deep breath. She'd got most of it out and not died from her own words.
"Is she famous?" asked Marty. Ellen could see his dark head and brown eyes in the rear-view mirror. She breathed again.
"Not like a movie star, but her name's recognizable in publishing, I guess. I haven't read anything by her."
Jenny stared out the window and said nothing. She seemed to be holding her breath.
"So, why are you telling us this now?" Marty asked for them both.
"Well, he got an email the other night. It might be what triggered this attack. She's dying, this woman, the old girlfriend. I saw the message on the screen."
"So that's why he wanted the laptop," mumbled Marty in the back seat, leaning forward with his elbows on the backs of the front seats.
"He kept in touch with an old girlfriend, all these years?" Jenny turned her head of dark curls toward her mother. Shock made her blue eyes flash-Alex's eyes, the bluest of blues.
I don't know that. I... it's not important."
"Not important? Mom! It's terrible."
"Jenny... "
Jenny turned back toward the window as Ellen stopped for a light. The windshield wipers flapped back and forth, keeping time with the involuntary beating of her heart. How easy it is to be young and to see things in black and white, she thought.
"We don't choose the people we fall in love with. They missed each other in time."
"Did you know when you married him?" Jenny was indignant. She hadn't heard much of what her mother was saying.
"Of course, but it wasn't like he was seeing her or as if he were going to leave me for her. I knew that. It's just that the people we love belong to us; they can't be shed or lost, even if they change or if they leave us, not even if we leave them."
Ellen paused a moment and the children were silent. Then, as she turned carefully into the hospital parking lot, she added with a faraway look, a sadness Jenny and Marty couldn't see, "But you don't forget." She spoke as if it were something all parents eventually tell their children.
"I was waiting for a time when the doctors would allow him to talk about it. I don't really want him to go see her, but I do understand why he... "
"I don't see how," Jenny interrupted, glaring out the window again. Marty watched his sister and his mother as Ellen pulled the car into a parking spot in the covered garage. Ellen turned off the car and turned toward her daughter.
"Jenny, I don't know how to make you see, but not one of us is the same person we once were. In five years, you'll be different from who you are now. You're already different from who you were back in high school or college."
Jenny burst into tears. Marty looked on, surprised.
"What's wrong, Jenny?" Ellen touched her daughter's cheek with the back of her fingers, and then reached into her purse for a tissue.
"Nothing." Jenny took a deep breath. "Well, not nothing. I mean, I just... I know someone who... "
Ellen waited to see if Jenny would continue, but the girl didn't say anything more.
"Then you will understand, in time." Ellen squeezed Jenny's shoulder.
As they got out of the car and walked silently to the cardiac floor, Ellen alternated between relief and worry about what she had told her children.
"Mrs. Stuart, you may go in. Only one at a time, please."
*
Alex was lying with his eyes closed, as if asleep, but he heard Ellen slip into the chair beside him. She took his hand, and he pulled it away, ran it over his balding head, and opened his eyes.
"Alex." She looked at him and waited until he turned, searching, toward her.
"I know," she said softly. Her effort to smile filled with the ache she felt. Tears were starting to form in her eyes. He looked harder at her now, as if for something he'd lost.
"I know about the email and Zoë Lowell. I shouldn't have read it, I suppose, but it was right there on the screen when they took you to the hospital."
He covered his face with his hands. With the thumb and middle finger of his left hand he pressed against his eyelids and two tears escaped into the hollows at the bridge of the nose. He pinched them away.
"It's alright, Alex," she said. She patted the hard expanse of the chest she loved to fold herself into, but he took her hand in his.
"Can you forgive me?" He looked at her now.
She paused, looking into his eyes and then away. "Loving someone, it's not something to forgive."
Alex looked at his wife, puzzled, as if he saw something that had not been there before.
"If I thought you could see her without it killing you, I'd arrange it myself," she went on. He searched her face for a clue to this incomprehensible statement. She answered the unasked question.
"Because I know you would do the same for me, if I'd carried that loneliness all these years." He stared at her. "If our positions had been reversed," she explained.
Alex blinked and said, "Ellen, you're amazing."
"No," she said. "I'm not. I'm just sure that loving her, and being loved by her, is what made you the man I fell in love with and married. I'm grateful for that in the end."
He squeezed her hand and then relaxed back on the pillow with his eyes closed. She put her cheek down against his broad hand. First one tear then another slipped down her cheek. She blinked her eyes and reached for a packet of tissues in her purse. When she looked back at him, he was quiet. She knew then that something was wrong, but before she could stand up or call his name, a nurse hurried in looking alert. She read the gauges and meters. An aide and an orderly appeared and Jenny and Marty followed them.
"What's wrong?" Ellen asked. "Is he all right?"
"Mrs. Stuart, can you give us room, please?"
"But he's all right, isn't he?" Ellen looked up at the nurse, then at Alex, and wiped her eyes.
"He's having some problems with his heart beat. Could you please stay out in the hallway for a minute?"
Ellen and the children stepped out of the room. A Code Blue sounded on the loudspeakers and a large cart propelled by two technicians rushed past them. A doctor nodded as he went in, followed by two more people, technicians of some sort.
They heard muffled voices, orders for medications.
Finally, the doctor emerged from the room, looking solemn. Ellen composed herself and stood to receive his news. She knew he would be startled by the slight smile that shaped her mouth, but she couldn't help it.
Margot Miller was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, 1972-74. After several years as a counselor and a decade of rearranging plants, furniture, and children's schedules, she earned a mid-life Ph.D. in French literature. She now writes fiction, poetry, does a bit of translation, and teaches French women writers (in translation) at the Academy of Lifelong Learning, Chesapeake Maritime Museum, St. Michael's MD. Her work has appeared in ChickFlicks, Write Side Up, Static Movement, Long Story Short, Subtle Tea, BluePrint Review, Salomé, Moondance, Mosaic Mind, Fringe, The Angler, Steel City Review, Toasted Cheese, and others. Margot Miller