“Greenwich first. My mother must be worried. Then Boston, I suppose.” She didn’t have to say more; her meaning was plain. Jonas would be home soon.
“I understand,” I said.
We took a cab to Grand Central. Few words had been spoken since her announcement. I felt like I was being taken to face a firing squad. Be brave, I told myself. Be the sort of man who stands tall with his eyes open, waiting for the guns’ report.
Her train was called. We walked to the platform where it awaited. She put her arms around me and began to cry. “I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Then don’t. Don’t get on the train.”
I felt her hesitancy. Not just the words; I felt it in her body. She couldn’t make herself let go.
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
People were hurrying past. The customary announcement crackled overhead: All aboard for New Haven, Bridgeport, Westport, New Canaan, Greenwich…A door was closing; soon it would be sealed.
“Then come back. Do what you have to do, and then come back. We can go someplace.”
“Where?”
“Italy, Greece. An island in the Pacific. It doesn’t matter. Somewhere nobody can find us.”
“I want to.”
“Say yes.”
A frozen moment; then she nodded against me. “Yes.”
My heart soared. “How long do you need to tie things up?”
“A week. No, two.”
“Make it ten days. Meet me here, under the clock. I’ll have everything ready.”
“I love you,” she said. “I think I did from the start.”
“I loved you even before that.”
A last kiss, she stepped toward the train, then turned and embraced me again.
“Ten days,” she said.
—
I made ready. There were things I needed to do. I composed a hasty email to my dean, requesting a leave of absence. I wouldn’t be around to know if it had been accepted, but I hardly cared. I could imagine no life beyond the next six months.
I called a friend who was an oncologist. I explained the situation, and he told me what would happen. Yes, there would be pain, but mostly a slow receding.
“It’s not something you should manage on your own,” he said. When I didn’t reply, he sighed. “I’ll phone in a prescription.”
“For what?”
“Morphine. It will help.” He paused. “At the end, you know, a lot of people take more than they should, strictly speaking.”
I said I understood and thanked him. Where should we go? I had read an article in the Times about an island in the Aegean where half the population lived to be a hundred. There was no valid scientific explanation; the residents, most of whom were goat herders, took it as a fact of life. A man was quoted in the article as saying, “Time is different here.” I bought two first-class tickets to Athens and found a ferry schedule online. A boat traveled to the island only once a week. We would have to wait two days in Athens, but there were worse places. We would visit the temples, the great, indestructible monuments of a lost world, then vanish.
The day arrived. I packed my bags; we would be going straight from the station to the airport for a ten P.M. flight. I could barely think straight; my emotions were an indescribable jumble. Joy and sadness had fused together in my heart. Foolishly, I had planned nothing else for the day and was forced to sit idly in my apartment until late afternoon. I had no food on hand, having cleaned out the refrigerator, but doubted I could have eaten anyway.
I took a cab to the station. Five o’clock was, once again, the appointed hour. Liz would be taking an Amtrak train to Stamford, to see her mother, in Greenwich, one last time, then a local to Grand Central. With each passing block my feelings annealed into a pure sense of purpose. I knew, as few men did, why I had been born in the first place; everything in my life had called me forward to this moment. I paid the cabbie and went inside to wait. It was a Saturday, the crowds light. The opalescent clock faces read 4:36. Liz’s train was due in twenty minutes.
My pulse quickened as the announcement came over the speakers: Now arriving at track 16…I considered going to the platform to head her off, but we might lose each other in the crowd. Passengers surged into the main hall. Soon it became clear that Liz was not among them. Perhaps she had taken a later train; the New Haven line ran every thirty minutes. I checked my phone, but there were no messages. The next train came, and still no Liz. I began to worry that something had happened. It did not occur to me yet that she had changed her mind, though the idea was waiting in the wings. At six o’clock I called her cell, but it went straight to voicemail. Had she shut it off?