Read My October for Free Online

high, separated by sprawling parking lots. City buses drove through the grounds, stopping at the front doors of each building. Hannah passed the Sunnybrook Regional Cancer Centre and walked purposefully toward the main building, or M-Wing as it was called, whichhoused the Emergency Department, the Intensive Care Unit, and rooms for patients like her father, recovering from recent trauma. She hoped she looked like she belonged here, like a good and dutiful daughter come to visit, and not some strange, dripping creature, hair full of twigs and leaves, recently crawled up from the ravine.
    The guard sitting inside the entrance did not even give her a glance as she entered. She kept her pace, striding with a steady stream of other people down the wide, well-lit corridor. Her father was out of intensive care. He had been moved to the fourth floor and assigned a private room. Hannah didn’t know whether that was good luck or the residue of Alfred Stern’s past prominence.
    She passed a snack shop with the snappy name of Bistro On the Go, and inhaled smells of coffee and sugar-laden pastries. She was hungry. And she had to pee. She stopped at a washroom. Over the door, a mural of water lilies hung: a failed attempt at good cheer.
    The elevator was brand new and made of glass, ascending a see-through tube in the middle of the courtyard separating the old hospital building from a recent addition. As part of the renovations, immense wooden butterflies had been suspended from the ceiling. They were supposed to make you think of nature, but to Hannah they looked menacing, a squadron of pterodactyls waiting for the signal to attack.
    By the time she reached the fourth floor and stepped out of the elevator, the muscles of her back and neck were tense. She walked quickly down the hallway to her father’s door. It was closed. The handwritten sign Connie had put up yesterday was still taped to it: Family Only. The F was lopsided, dwarfing the other letters.
    For several days, there had been trouble with visitors. The news of Alfred Stern’s stroke had travelled fast. People came at all hours. Former colleagues and clients, judges, professors from the law school at the University of Toronto, where he’d lectured, old friends, and two women who identified themselves as former secretaries.
    Family only. Connie was worried about hands. She could control her own hygiene, and Hannah’s too, to a certain extent. But other people were impossible. The day before Hannah arrived, a judge had pranced in (Connie’s words) and proceeded to blow his nose before taking Alfred’s hand in his own and clutching it with great feeling.
    A woman in a pink pantsuit came down the hall pushing a meal trolley taller than she was. Hannah watched in alarm as she moved quickly and sightlessly toward an orderly wheeling an empty bed in the opposite direction. At the last minute, the orderly called out to her and disaster was averted. A bell rang in the nursing station. A monitor beeped in a neighbouring room. The names of doctors boomed over the public address system.
    Family only . In other words, herself and Connie, now that her brother had gone back home. It had been years since Hannah had felt anything more than a perfunctory connection to Alfred and Connie. They kept in touch. She dropped by when she had business in Toronto, and occasionally she called from Montreal. But was this what family amounted to? It had been four years since her parents had last seen Hugo. Seven or eight for Luc.
    She opened the door. The room was bathed in soft grey light. The curtains were closed, and all the lights were off save the one at the head of the bed, for which there was no switch.
    Her mother was not there. Alfred Stern was alone, propped on a heap of pillows, his mouth open, snoring.
    He looked shrunken, smaller than yesterday even, when they had moved him here. His eyelids trembled and his skin was yellow.
    Hannah moved closer to the bed. Her