فصل 45

CHAPTER 45

Shortly before 3:00 A.M., Crawford, dozing beside his wife, came awake. There was a catch in Bella’s breathing and she had stirred on her bed. He sat up and took her hand.

“Bella?”

She took a deep breath and let it out. Her eyes were open for the first time in days. Crawford put his face close before hers, but he didn’t think she could see him.

“Bella, I love you, kid,” he said in case she could hear.

Fear brushed the walls of his chest, circling inside him like a bat in a house. Then he got hold of it.

He wanted to get something for her, anything, but he did not want her to feel him let go of her hand.

He put his ear to her chest. He heard a soft beat, a flutter, and then her heart stopped. There was nothing to hear, there was only a curious cool rushing. He didn’t know if the sound was in her chest or only in his ears.

“God bless you and keep you with Him … and with your folks,” Crawford said, words he wanted to be true.

He gathered her to him on the bed, sitting against the headboard, held her to his chest while her brain died. His chin pushed back the scarf from the remnants of her hair. He did not cry. He had done all that.

Crawford changed her into her favorite, her best bed gown and sat for a while beside the high bed, holding her hand against his cheek. It was a square, clever hand, marked with a lifetime of gardening, marked by IV needles now.

When she came in from the garden, her hands smelled like thyme.

(Think about it like egg white on your fingers,” the girls at school had counseled Bella about sex. She and Crawford had joked about it in bed, years ago, years later, last year. Don’t think about that, think about the good stuff, the pure stuff. That was the pure stuff. She wore a round hat and white gloves and going up in the elevator the first time he whistled a dramatic arrangement of “Begin the Beguine.” In the room she teased him that he had the cluttered pockets of a boy.) Crawford tried going into the next room—he still could turn when he wanted to and see her through the open door, composed in the warm light of the bedside lamp. He was waiting for her body to become a ceremonial object apart from him, separate from the person he had held upon the bed and separate from the life’s companion he held now in his mind. So he could call them to come for her.

His empty hands hanging palms forward at his sides, he stood at the window looking to the empty east. He did not look for dawn; east was only the way the window faced.