A FINE FEBRUARY DAY

“Why do you always have to wash our cups and put them away before leaving the house?”

     “What?  Are you asking me a real question?  Will?”

     “I wonder about you sometimes.  That’s all.”

     “What do you wonder?  Why I wash the cups?  Should I be worrying about you?”

     “Now, May, don’t go getting cynical.  It doesn’t befit you.  I always do this, you know.  Watch you do things and wonder why you do them.  We’ve been married now, what, May, forty years?”

     “Forty-two.”

     “Forty-two, then.  It’s just exactly that, you know, that I see in you all the time and that makes me wonder.”

     “Exactly what?  I’m not following you, Will.”

     “That.  I say about how long we’ve been married, but you know how long, like you keep a running tally in your head, like if I asked how many years, days, hours, and minutes, you would know.”

     “Forty-two years, sixty-five days, nine hours, ten minutes, and seventeen seconds as of. . . .right. . . .now!”

     “Ha, you are a card, May.  You are and have always been.”

     “That’s why you love me.”

     “That’s why I love you.”

We were getting ready to leave the house.  May and I have always kibitzed like this when we did chores, or when we were getting ourselves ready to leave the house.  It was mostly a mindless habit.  I would throw out some absurd observation, and she would take me so seriously I always had to suppress a chuckle, and then we’d go at each other as we put on our coats, or wiped down the table after our meal, or put on our pajamas, or whatever.  Heck, we’ve been doing it for forty-two years, sixty-five days, and whatever.  I couldn’t foresee what would happen to us an hour after we left the house. 

     May went to the museum, as always, and I decided that morning I would ride with her and walk from the museum to my office on Main Street—which was a great morning exercise for me, if I didn’t stop at every shop along the way to chat with whoever I saw there, which is also so much like me that I seldom ever got the exercise the walk promised. 

     But this morning was sunny and warm.  We hadn’t had a sunshiny day for a while, but this morning the temperature had risen above freezing quite early, so that by the time I stepped to the sidewalk in front of the museum, after seeing May in and staying with her until she got the gift shop up and running, it was quite warm and bright and cheery.  The sidewalks were running with melt water, the snow quite rapidly dwindling.  The black wrought-iron fence around the little yard in front of the museum was popping up more than halfway through the snow that had been piled on it by the snowblower all winter.  It was that time of year when the heart lifts because of the change in the weather, and I always feel so young and frisky.  I looked forward to a vigorous walk, anticipated it, almost began to feel my knees limbering up already.  That’s when it happened.  I had got to the sidewalk, could see May through the window, took a deep and pleasurable breath, and collapsed unconscious to the sidewalk. 

     May had just glanced out the window when it happened.  She had the presence of mind to grab the phone and dial 911 before rushing out to me.  But by the time she got there, I was coming to.  For a moment I was rather blank and didn’t know where I was, what had happened, or even pretty much who I was.  I did recognize May, though, and she had such a look of grief-stricken horror on her face that she scared me half to death.  That’s when the ambulance arrived.  It came almost at the same moment the police car arrived.  I saw Comer get out of the driver’s side of the car and come round to the sidewalk.  He helped May get to her feet, then he stooped and grabbed my arm and helped me get up.  The EMTs came and, one on each arm, escorted me into the back of the ambulance.  Comer said he would take May to the emergency room as soon as she shut up the museum.  So, I was whisked away.  It would be a long time before I saw May again.  I couldn’t know how she would suffer. 

The EMTs talked me up pretty good in the ambulance, so that when we pulled up to the hospital, they had already reported the incident and had the right people there when I arrived.  After the tests and visits by the various specialists who examined me, I was wheeled to a room by an orderly and left under covers in a bed in a single room with an IV dripping its usual saline into me and a clip on my finger that read my pulse and a blood pressure cuff around my arm.  About two hours had passed since I blacked out, and I actually felt fine, didn’t want to stay in the room, and had begun to wonder why May hadn’t shown up. 

     I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat up.  I had no idea where my clothes were, since they didn’t seem to have come with me to the room.  But the phone was right there on the table beside the bed, so I lifted the receiver and punched the number of the museum.  I really didn’t expect May to answer, since I was sure she was here at the hospital, and that I would see her walk in any moment.  I hung up.  Just for the heck of it, I then punched the number for our house.  No answer.  That just confirmed for me that May was here. 

     I looked for the device that a patient uses to call for a nurse, found it lying on the bed, and pushed the call button.  The IV pole and the heart monitor stood beside the bed on the other side.  The blind was closed, so it was dim in the room.  In spite of that I could see my clothes were not there.  It took ten minutes or so, but eventually a nurse came in.  I asked her if she could find out where my wife was and make sure she could find her way here.   She smiled as though she had to humor me, said she would try to find her, and left.  After an hour, I pushed the call button again.  Again, it took ten or so minutes for someone to respond.  This time it was a different nurse.  She didn’t humor me.  She said only that they couldn’t do anything more than they did last time, which was simply to have her paged.  Apparently, she wasn’t in the hospital.

     That’s when I began to worry.  I pushed that damned button again and when the nurse arrived, the same one as the last time, she was out of sorts and made it quite clear that I was being a pest.  I told her I wanted my clothes, and when she hesitated, I told her I was going to leave the hospital either in my clothes or the hospital’s, and that if she didn’t want a scene she should find out where my clothes were.  She turned with a huff, and also with an attitude that communicated quite clearly that she was prepared to restrain me if it came to that.  I worried about her.  She was not the friendly type. 

     Escaping from a hospital is tricky business.  They’re not prisons and aren’t supposed to be places one escapes from, but one can’t just leave a hospital, not, that is, until they let you go.  So hospitals do have something in common with prisons.  Just try to escape from one and see what I mean.  That nurse never brought my clothes, May never came to the room, and no one was apparently concerned enough to even talk with me about it.  So far, no doctor had come to check up on me.  I felt, well, anxious.  I half expected Comer would come in.  But even he never showed up.  I thought I should at least try to get in touch with him, because he would very likely be able to explain what had happened to May.  I punched his number, and when the clerk at the station answered, I learned that Comer hadn’t been heard from since he left on the 911 call that May had put in.

     It was getting thick, now.  I am not the kind of person who can relax at a time like this.  There was no lying down in this damn bed.  I had removed the finger clip and the cuff around my arm and had been pacing the room with the IV pole and sitting on the edge of the bed, but now I pushed the IV pole to the door to look out into the corridor to see what there was to see and to begin planning.  I really couldn’t steal out of the hospital naked beneath this stupid gown open at the back.  Why couldn’t they let me keep my underwear?  I might almost have considered running if I had underwear on.  But I was naked, and that makes one feel helpless and vulnerable, dependent, exposed.  I was all of those things.  I would not be any of those things if I had clothes.  That had to be my first move. 

     But what to do?  It was getting late.  I still had my wristwatch on, and it was showing almost four o’clock.  Most of the day had passed.  The sun would be setting in a couple of hours.  It was still February, even though it had been warming up, and darkness still came early.  I didn’t want to leave the hospital in the dark.  It was a long four miles from the hospital to my house, and I expected if I did manage to get out I would have to walk all that way, and I didn’t want to do that in the dark.  So, there was some urgency to act as soon as possible.

     I could see the nurses’ station way up the corridor to my left.  My room was near the end, and on my right just two rooms down there was a closed double door that opened onto another part of the hospital, but I couldn’t remember if the orderly had wheeled me through those doors this morning.  I wasn’t all that familiar with the hospital, having been in it as a patient only once before.  Besides, it was always being added to, renovated, updated, so that from one visit to the next the place was never the same.  I decided to just slip through those doors, pushing the IV pole, and tell anyone who might stop me that I wanted to walk, that I couldn’t just lie in bed all day. 

     So I pulled the gown tight in the back, making sure it overlapped—an old man’s modesty cannot be denied—grabbed hold of the pole and pushed it into the corridor and steered it quickly as I could toward the doors.  “When at my back,” you know, the worry of that not-so-nice nurse seeing me in the few seconds it would take to get through those doors almost undid me.  But I reached them, pushed the door on the right open, turned back to look up the corridor to see if any nurse there was looking down at me, and seeing no one, let the door swing closed of itself. 

     I took a breath and smiled.  Next stop—the emergency room, where my clothes were last seen—at least by me.  I pushed the pole ahead of me and walked, making myself look unsteady, as though I was a sick old soul walking to build back my strength.  It took me a long time to find the emergency room.  When I came through the door from the lobby (yes, I actually pushed that stupid pole right through the lobby, because I saw the ER sign on the other side of it), I saw a nurse at the long counter where people had to go to get admitted for emergency care.  The room had a lot of people waiting, more than I would have expected in our little town, and the nurse was busy talking with a woman who had a child in her arms.  The child looked languid and seriously ill, and I felt out of place and was beginning to regret coming here.  But another nurse came from the ward behind

and, apparently concerned at seeing me approach, asked me why I was there. 

     I told her my name and about coming in this morning and that I wanted to find my clothes, because my wife was coming for me soon to take me home.  The nurse told me to take a seat.  So, I pushed the IV pole to a chair at the end of the row in front of the counter, and sat.  I looked at my watch.  It was getting to be four thirty, and I felt my anxiety shooting up.  I was practically vibrating in that seat.  The emergency room occupied a corner of one side of the main building, and there were large windows opening onto the street and parking lot. 

     It was still bright and sunny outside, and I occupied the time waiting trying to note everything the scene outside could tell me about the day.  I could see, for example, the passing cars splashing melt water onto the sidewalk.  It made me feel optimistic about getting out of there.  The nurse who spoke to me finally came through the door that opened into the ward and, seeing me notice her, gestured to me to come. 

     Excited now, I got up and didn’t fake being feeble, but pushed the pole quickly and stepped to.  She brought me to a little cubby-type room which had a key in the lock.  I remembered it.  This is where they made me undress when they admitted me this morning and made me put on the gown I was wearing.  From here they took me for the CAT scan.  Then on to other tests.  I never came back.  The nurse told me to collect my things and return to my room.  I felt like kissing her. 

     I had everything I had put on this morning when I left the house with May.  I bundled the stuff up inside my coat and grasped the bundle under my right arm, and pushing the pole with my left hand, I got out of the emergency room as quickly as I could.  I had noticed coming in that there were restrooms in the lobby, which served as the entrance to both the main hospital building and the emergency room.  I wasted no time.  The worst part of it was pulling the IV out.  But there was quite a bit of tape holding the needle in place, and I jammed a piece of paper towel under the tape in place of the needle and pressed it all down.  Then I dressed, put on my coat, and sauntered out of there like I was just a visitor going home.  It felt good to be outside in the sunshine.  But it was getting on to five o’clock now, and I had a mighty walk ahead of me.

     As I walked, I thought about May and Comer, where they could be, what had happened to them.  If I was anxious inside that hospital, I was doubly anxious outside it.  I made my way to Fifth Street at the south side of the hospital complex and made a right turn.  This street would take me clear across town to the avenue off which our residential road started.  It was a straight shot, about three miles, maybe a bit more.  I was used to walking about a mile, which May and I did for exercise a couple times a week.  Four miles, I knew, was going to tax me.  But there was nothing I could do.  I wasn’t going back to the hospital. 

The sun had gone down and darkness set in before I got home, and then another hour had passed, and no word came to me about May.  I had called both of our kids right off to see if they might have heard from her.  I talked a long time with each of them, and they were understandably worried.  I calmed them as best I could and left off with them.  There was no message in our answering machine, of course.  I was bone weary and near starved, not having eaten all day.  So I made myself a sandwich and a cup of tea and rested on the couch as I ate.  Then I called Comer’s home.  His wife was worried also.  It was untypical of him to not call her when he was going to be delayed.  I tried to calm her as well.  But there was no calming myself.

     I had begun to reflect on the possibilities.  Something had obviously happened to Comer and May, and whatever it was was continuing to happen.  At times like these, how can one keep from imagining worst case scenarios?  I found myself trembling.  I had no ability to do anything.  Our car was parked in the lot behind the museum, and Comer, whom I would have called first to help deal with a situation like this, was missing!  May and I had friends we might call to help in an emergency, and so I began to think about what I might ask someone to do.  How did I need help?  I needed help.  Yes.  But help doing what?  I couldn’t think. 

     I couldn’t think because I kept imagining horrible things happening to May, and I was thinking about what if?  What if?  May and I had been married forty-two years.  I had never before thought about what life would be like without her.  I looked around the living room, at the paintings on the walls, the drapes, the piano, the couch across from me, and everything seemed so strange, so empty.  I could almost hear my heart beat.  There have always been times when I was at home and May was out, but the house never felt like this before.  On the wall beside the door to the dining room hangs a picture May and I bought when we were on our honeymoon.  It is a painting of a girl strumming a guitar, but it is all done in shades of blue, and the painting is called the “Blue Guitar.”  The girl looks reflective and absorbed as she strums.  But at this moment that look seemed to express a mourning so profound that I began to cry.

     I got up from the couch and went into the kitchen where our phone hangs on the wall beside the door that opens on the basement stairs.  Just for the hell of it, I opened the basement door and hollered down the stairs, “May!  May!  Are you down there?”  I felt so ineffectual.  I wanted to grab the phone off its hook and call someone.  But I didn’t know what to say.  I began to pace back and forth from the sink to the windows on the opposite side of the room.  Perhaps, I thought, I should at least have someone drive me to the lot behind the museum so I could fetch the car.  This way, in the morning, if May and Comer haven’t shown up, I will at least be able to get about.  But May had the keys.  What to do about that?  And then I remembered that we kept a spare key, the second key that came with the car when we bought it, in a cup in the cabinet in the garage, just in case we lost our main key.  I went out the back door off the kitchen and walked along the curved walkway to the back door of the garage.  There was still snow on both sides of the walk, and the day’s melt water had already frozen, which made the walk slippery.  “Careful,” I said to myself as I skidded into the snow on my first step out the door.  “Careful, or you might end up lying here all night and waking up frozen dead in the morning,” I said out loud.

     The key was exactly where it was supposed to be.  I put it in my pocket and went back into the kitchen, shaking with the cold.  I pulled the phone off the hook and punched in the number of our neighbor next door. 

     “Hello, Jeanette?  Is Paul home?  Can I ask a favor of him?  I need someone to drive me up to the museum.  It’ll only take five minutes.  Yes, now.  Thanks, Jeanette.  I’ll come over right now.”

     They moved into that house twenty years ago, and over those years May and I have been so much a part of their lives and their kids’ lives that we are almost like family.  I threw my coat on and went out the front door and down the drive and out into the street because the snow was too deep on the grass to even attempt crossing the yard.  Coming up their drive, I saw the light in the garage come on and at the same moment the garage door going up.  Paul backed out and I got in beside him.

     “What’s going on, Will?” he asked. 

     “Our car got left behind at the museum and I need to fetch it,” I said, mostly because I didn’t think I could talk about what was happening without falling to pieces.

     He drove silently, and I sat equally silently.  I could sense that he felt something was going on, but he had the tact not to pry, and I was grateful.  I promised myself to talk with him as soon as that was possible. 

     We came to the museum, and Paul made a right turn and drove alongside the lot.  The entrance was down the block, and he slowed, expecting to pull in and up to our car.  But I was impatient, and I didn’t want to have to fake driving away and then coming back after he had driven off. 

     “This is fine right here, Paul.  Just stop and I’ll get out.  No, no, you don’t have to pull into the lot.  Right here.  Good.  Thanks, Paul.  Sorry to disturb you.  But many thanks.”

     I got out in the street, and he pulled away.  I watched him a moment until he reached the corner and turned again.  Then I carefully crossed the street and climbed the ridge of snow left by the plows at the curb, got my feet under me on the sidewalk, and walked into the lot.  I could see our car just where May had parked it this morning.  It had gotten cold, and my breath vapor filled the air as I huffed from the exertion of climbing over that ridge of snow. 

     May never locked the car.  In our small town, I was thinking, everybody knew everybody, and no one was a carjacker, and there was nothing in the car anyone would want to steal, like a fancy speaker system for the 90 track CD/DVD/Video/Stereo/Xbox/Whatever that young people mortgaged their houses to put in their cars.  I was working up my spleen with that thought, the better to distract myself from the futility of it all—having the car was not going to solve the mystery of what happened to May and Comer. 

     That’s when I noticed the front right fender of a car behind the hedge that screened the back door of the museum from the parking lot.  That hedge was filled with snow and was an even better screen now than in summer when it was in full leaf.  I could only just see the headlight and a part of the bumper.  When May comes to work, she parks the car in the lot and walks around to the front of the museum to let herself in through the main door.  Seeing a car at the back door aroused my curiosity because it shouldn’t have been there.  I put the key back in my pocket and walked over to the hedge, curious as to what I might see as I peeked around it.

     It was Comer’s patrol car!  I slapped myself in the forehead.  Of course, this is why no one has seen it.  It’s been here all day, out of sight behind the hedge, but why?  I looked into the front seat, and there were Comer’s cell phone, his clipboard and pen, and his keys in the ignition.  The door was unlocked, of course.  He obviously intended to come right back.

     “Where are you, Comer, old boy?” I said out loud. 

     I looked then at the back door of the museum, and it occurred to me that he very likely intended to pick up May here.  But why?  His prowler was parked in front when the ambulance took me away this morning.  May had merely to go back inside, turn off the lights, and come out and lock the door.  She should have been at the hospital five minutes after I got there.  My heart began to race.  Why was the prowler here?

     I stepped quickly to the door and grabbed the knob, but it wouldn’t twist open.  It was locked.  “Damn,” I said out loud.  Then I banged on the door and shouted for May and Comer and put my ear to the door to see if I couldn’t hear a response from inside.  I did it again and again, but I heard nothing from inside.  “Damn,” I said again out loud, feeling like my worst-case fear might be playing out as I banged and shouted.

     What was the likelihood that the front door was unlocked?  If May was going to come out through the basement, she would have locked those doors from inside.  The basement door is self-locking, so she would just have to let it close of itself after coming out.  But it didn’t make sense her coming out from the basement.  Unless, of course, she had some errand down there to tend to before closing up.  I tried to think if May had said anything about that this morning.  But I couldn’t remember her saying anything at all about it.  No.  She didn’t.  But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have some reason to go down there and asked Comer to go round back to pick her up.  That would have saved her from walking through some snow before getting to the sidewalk and coming round front.  Maybe. 

     I was thinking this as I made my way to the front of the building.  I climbed the steps and reached for the handle of door.  It was the kind of handle that had a lever on top of it which one had to depress with one’s thumb to pull the deadbolt back.  I worked that handle every which way.  The door was locked.  I didn’t know what to do.   

     I was, however, becoming more and more certain that May and Comer were inside.  I could go round back, I thought, and use Comer’s cell phone to call for help.  The patrolman who came would know what to do.  This seemed like the wisest course of action.  But the wisest thing to do is seldom what we end up doing during an emergency.  I didn’t want to wait, to have to explain, to try to convince the patrolman that he needed to break into the museum, which he would be reluctant to do.  So, when I got back to the door, I walked over to the nearest basement window and just kicked the damned thing in.  I got down on my knees, with the usual aching difficulty and usual thought that I wasn’t going to get up again, leaned down to peer in, and saw nothing but darkness.  Then I shouted in, and listened.  The hair on the back of my head stood up as I heard what sounded like an “mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.”  It was barely audible and seemed to come from far away.  But it was definite.  I wasn’t imagining it. 

     It was so low, I couldn’t tell whether it was a man’s or woman’s voice.  But the sound of it filled me with joy.  With an energy I haven’t felt in years, I cleared the glass fragments from the window frame and stuck my legs through and pushed the rest of myself in as quickly as I could.  I fell about six feet to the concrete floor and landed with an “umph” and a thud.  I was in.  Getting up off all fours was painful, but I leaned against the wall to help.  In all the years that May worked in this building, I don’t think I have been down here twice.  I had no idea where the light switches were, and I had no cigarette lighter or book of matches in my pockets.  So, I called out.

     Again, I heard the muffled response.  I have to find the light switch, I thought.  I felt for the wall with my right hand, figuring I’d just follow the walls until they brought me to a door where I should find a light switch.  But when I took my first step, the pain in my right ankle, which felt while I was standing still like I had twisted it, shot up my leg and made me freeze.  Damn, I thought, I can’t walk.  Standing was painful, but walking seemed impossible.  I shuffled close to the wall, with the pain again shooting up my leg, and leaned against it, trying to take the weight off my leg.  I called out again, saying, “May?  May?  Is that you?”  And again I heard a muffled response.  It must be May, I said to myself.  Who else could it be?

     “May, keep responding so I can tell where you are,” I said again.

     And again I heard the muffled voice going, “mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.”

     I listened, turning my head this way and that, and could tell that the voice was definitely coming from somewhere outside of this room.  It was so dark that I couldn’t see anything.  The basement windows didn’t admit any light, mainly because there were no lights in the parking lot, and the nearest street light was at the corner on the far side of the lot.  I could still hear the “mmmphs” coming from what seemed like the front of the building, that part of the basement where the steps from the foyer at the main entrance descended. 

     There was nothing else to do but bear the pain and make my way to where the voice seemed to come from.  So, leaning on the wall, stepping lightly on my right foot, I began to shuffle along.  I came to the end of the wall and felt the wall just in front of me, and turning to my left, continued shuffling.  Thinking back to the last time I had been down here, I could recall that there were two large rooms, arranged from front to back, and that off the room at the front there were both a bathroom and a storeroom for supplies.  The whole back room was used as a storeroom for the pottery and jewelry, the fabrics, prints, frames, and other museum possessions that didn’t require climate control.  I recalled that the wall I was now walking along was the one that opened into the large front room and that there should be, indeed, a light switch at the door.  My eagerness urged me to step more quickly, and though the pain was bad, it was beginning to subside.  I could limp along without having to shuffle, an improvement. 

     Finally, I felt the door jamb.  I could hear the voice more clearly now, and I was sure it was May’s.  What in the world is going on? I thought.  I felt around the jamb for the light switch, found it, and pushed it down.  The room flooded with light.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  The front room was still dark, though a good deal of light came through the door, and this light cast huge shadows forward, making the room look eerie.  There were large objects in this room—a kiln, a huge fan, a bench, free standing shelves, drafting tables, easels—the sorts of things one would find in an art museum.  The light at my back threw my own shadow into the room, which added eeriness to eeriness.  May was still mmmphing.  So I said to her, “OK, May, I got a fix on you.  I’m coming.”

     I could tell her voice was coming from either near or in the storeroom.  I felt along the jamb on the other side for the front room switch, but couldn’t find it.  So I felt along the jamb on the opposite side and found it there.  Light flooded the big front room.  I limped across the room, sidled around the shelves and the kiln, bearing right towards the storeroom, the door of which was open.  Inside, May and Comer were lying on the floor, tied and gagged.  May was twisting around and trying to sit up.

     “Easy, easy, May,” I said, “I’m here, I’m here.”

     But she had a look of fear in her eyes.  She kept glancing toward Comer.  That’s when I noticed he wasn’t responding, or moving, at all.  I looked at him as I untied the gag on May.  I could see he was breathing and sighed in relief. 

     “Comer was banged on the head,” May shouted.  “He hasn’t come to.  Oh, God, Oh, God…”

     “He’s breathing, May,” I said.  “He’s breathing.”

     “Go call an ambulance.  Here, untie me, Will, get me loose,” she half screamed, twisting against her bonds. 

     “Ok, OK,” I said, “take it easy.  Give me a chance.”

     As soon as she was free, she went to Comer and looked into his face.  When she saw he was breathing, I could see she calmed a bit. 

     “We were robbed, Will.  That miserable creep came in right behind Comer, and soon as we got through the doors, he clobbered Comer with something I couldn’t see what, and poor Comer fell down.  That guy forced me down here and tied me up and left me, and…”

     “OK, OK, now’s not the time for this.  Let me run upstairs and call the police and an ambulance.”

     “Yes, hurry, Will.  Hurry.”

     I helped her to her feet.  She didn’t look any the worse for wear.  Thank god, I thought.  She’s all right.  She’s all right. 

     I left her with Comer and limped up the stairs.  That was rough going.  I would have to take something stronger than aspirin when this was finally all over.  I got to the counter where the register was.  That’s where the phone is kept.  I dialed 911.  The dispatcher, alarmed by what I had told her, said to hold tight and help would arrive soon.   

Well, it’s over!  May had been lying in that room since shortly after eight in the morning, some fourteen hours before I got there.  Comer had been in a coma.  May didn’t know he was alive until I told her he was breathing.  With my collapse in the morning and hospitalization, and with no one else working the museum, she couldn’t anticipate being found all tied up down there for God knows how long.  Her imagination visited all sorts of possibilities.  Thinking Comer was dead, she expected to die alongside him, and for long periods became still and gave into the sensations of it.  It was horrible, she said, and at first she couldn’t talk about it. 

     But when she could, she said some surprising things.

     “What kept going through my mind, Will, as I lay there was that you had had a stroke.  I kept seeing your coat and pants all wet when Comer helped you up, and that made me think, I don’t know why, that you were going to die.  It sounds so stupid now.  But it was real to me then.”

     “You were pretty stressed out, May.  Who knows what would have gone through my mind if our positions were reversed.”

     “It didn’t matter that you had gotten up and went on your own two legs to the ambulance, or that you told me you were all right and asked Comer to get me to the emergency room.  All I could see was you in a hospital bed dead or dying and I was unable to be with you. I felt so trapped.”

     “I’m here.  I’m fine.  It’s over.”

     But it wasn’t over for her.  She kept returning to that time in the storeroom over and over, talking it through so she could fix what it meant to her solidly in her head.  I had to listen.  That was my job.  Listen and say nothing.  But it was fascinating.

     “Your being dead was all I could imagine during that time, and I was certain I was going to follow you, that that was how it happened to old people who had been married as long as we were.”

     I put myself in a chair next to her and from time to time reached out to touch her, her hand, her shoulder, her back.

     “When I heard the banging on the door and then the window being kicked in, and then heard you holler through, I came back from the dead, Will.  It was the sound of your voice.  It was like resurrection, the relief was so intense.  It was the greatest thing I had ever felt.  I kept making that noise, you know, through the rag I was gagged with, to try to get Comer to respond.  I thought he had to be dead when he showed no sign of being aware.  My excitement was so extreme I couldn’t imagine Comer not sharing it.  Unless he were dead.  And so he had to be, I was sure of it.  When you said he was breathing, I didn’t believe you.  I just knew you couldn’t tell, it having been so dark in there all that time.  But then you finally got me untied, and I went to him and looked at him, and touched his face, and he was alive.  That was another kind of resurrection, Will.  A different kind.  It was like finding myself after being hopelessly lost—in a forest or a desert—and thinking I’d never be found, and then suddenly….”

     I couldn’t imagine May’s feelings.  She replayed these moments over and over, and I listened.  They came to form in her mind a story that explained her life, explained who she was.  I have to say that she did change after that day.  I couldn’t kibitz with her like I used to.  I didn’t have the heart. 

    In the end, though, she had gotten the worst of it.  Comer never came to after the blow that dropped him, so he was never aware.  But May, she was never out and was aware of everything the whole time.  Comer had to take a month’s convalescence leave, but he’s all right.  We’re all all right.  And life goes on.  Thank God.