He woke to a nurse adjusting a drip, an analgesic running through a catheter.
She gave him his pills, called him darling — as she seemed to call everyone — and showed him how to use the pato (the bedpan for number one), and to ask for the chata (for number two) if he needed it.
She cleaned and dressed his right foot.
Someone else brought breakfast. It would be the same — or almost — every day for a month.
He had his glasses back.
Hellen handed him his book and his phone.
Messages poured in, calls too.
He told the story.
To keep himself amused, he shifted the details, changed the rhythm.
And to avoid worrying people, he told it with a kind of humour and lightness — without brushing it aside, but without drama either.
He knew — he’d learned it when Jennie, his first wife, died — that if you don’t dramatise, others can speak calmly, even smile.
He wasn’t trying to be brave.
He didn’t want pity.
He knew, as the surgeon had said, that this would take months:
bed, wheelchair, crutches, cane… four to eight months, depending on how the bones chose to behave, before he’d recover something close to his old independence.
The left ankle, the surgeon would later explain, would be far less flexible.
The right would remain fixed at ninety degrees.
He didn’t ask himself Why me? or What did I do to deserve this?
Instead — without quite knowing why — he began asking how he might use this time.
For a long while he’d felt it wasn’t that he lacked time, but that he wasn’t living it as fully as he could.
Something had to change, though he hadn’t known how, or when, or where to begin.
The lift had decided for him.
Perhaps this was the moment to take stock.
To tie up loose ends.
To think about the path behind him.
And if not to prepare the future, then at least to prepare himself for whatever the future might bring.
His future? What was that, exactly?
How had he imagined it when he was his children’s age — more than sixty years ago?
Could he ever have guessed that his life would fall, almost neatly, into stretches of ten years or so?
No.
More than sixty years ago, he had only just discovered that he could fly.
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