Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

15

What I remember comes to me in private mental snapshots-some slightly fuzzy or badly framed, some of people, others of ceilings, ambulance roofs, or views of the sky. All of them are in random order. The one constant theme, like music accompanying a slide show, is the pain. It is the pain, I’ve come to think, that stimulated my taking the snapshots in the first place. Whenever it hit badly enough, I came into focus, more or less, just as a dozing concertgoer might be jarred awake by an occasional off-key note before nodding off once more.

There are many clear, full-face, but troubled portraits of friends-Tony, Ron, Sammie, Gail, Billy… even my younger brother Leo, a butcher from Thetford and the gentle custodian of the remnants of my family. All there, I knew, to lend me comfort, to see how I’m doing, but all looking as if they’ve lost their best friend. There is one of Willy, of course, that’s a little different. He’s farther away, standing straight and viewing from a distance. When I wasn’t taking photos but just leafing through them until the next spasm woke me up-I came to think he was looking at me as he might a dead dog in the street. But then he’s a special case; and he did show up.

Toward the end, more lucid, although still keeping to myself in dark unconsciousness, I knew that’s what was going on-that they were visiting me-fitting themselves awkwardly in between the IV poles, the electronic monitors, the EKG machine, and a bunch of other equipment that kept a steady watch on me. But having no memory of their visits apart from these disjointed images-and judging solely from their expressions-I knew I wasn’t doing too well.

I eventually found that out for myself when the familiar painful stimulus led to a moving picture instead of a still. I watched in grimacing fascination as a young nurse, her eyes intent on her task, manipulated something below my line of sight. It was dark all around us, the only light coming from a freestanding gooseneck lamp she had beside her and the familiar green, red, and amber glow from the various instruments plugged in all around me.

“Ow.”

She stopped, and turned to look at me, her face darkening in the shadow, which in turn highlighted the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled. “Good morning.”

I moved my head slightly to take in the surrounding gloom. “Morning?”

“Figure of speech. It’s 2:00 a.m. How are you feeling?” Her voice was soft and clear.

“Not too good. What are you doing down there?” To me, my voice sounded like it was coming from inside an echo chamber and my throat hurt like hell. I didn’t know if I was whispering or shouting.

“Changing your dressing. Sorry if it hurts a bit.”

I caught my breath at an extra jolt, remembering how painlessly the knife had slipped in. “He did a hell of a job, I guess.”

She smiled again, her eyes back on what she was doing. “That he did. He said lots of other people would’ve died from less. You’re a tough guy, Mr. Gunther.”

She hadn’t known whom I’d meant, and I was too tired to explain it to her. Also, there was something uplifting in the way she spoke, after all those grim-faced snapshots, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I passed out instead, launched on a new career of collecting movie loops-small segments of action, usually of nurses like her, sometimes of doctors-always brought on by the pain. Some of these loops had dialog, occasionally as coherent and reasonable as that first one, but they tended to be a little repetitive. The time of day and concern for how I was feeling were two popular subjects. And there were other times when the movie and the soundtrack were completely out of whack, when lips moved without sound and words floated by out of context. I got more of those grim looks at those times, and eventually, like a precocious toddler, I learned to keep my mouth shut when the audience frowned.

A breakthrough came when I woke not from pain, but from a gentle pressure on my forehead-something warm and smooth-a caress-and I opened my eyes to see Gail looking down at me.

“Smile,” I asked her.

She smiled-genuinely-the pleasure reaching the small crinkles near her eyes. “Hi. You’re looking better.”

I waited for the pain, for the lights to fade and the movie to end as usual-some of them had been that short-but nothing happened. I took advantage of it to study her more closely, in the flesh, instead of in the recesses of my mind. She didn’t look better. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair tangled and unwashed, and her cheeks gaunt and shadowed with exhaustion.

“You look terrible.”

The smile spread to a chuckle. “Thanks a lot-you’re to blame for most of it.”

I felt a familiar tug on my ability to focus-my brain longing to return to its black hole of peaceful contemplation. My sight darkened and blurred. But I didn’t want to go this time. I shifted my weight slightly, and the hot poker did the rest-my eyes cleared and my mind resurfaced.

That obviously wasn’t all it did, however. Gail suddenly leaned forward, her expression intent. “Are you okay?”

I unclenched my teeth. “Yeah-sorry.” I raised an arm to touch her, to set her at ease, and saw a thin, almost bony hand come into view-pale, slightly wrinkled, and scarred by several old IV sites along the forearm. Instead of squeezing her shoulder, I flexed my hand several times, as if at a loss to explain its function.

She interpreted the gesture. “You’ve been here a long time, Joe. Weeks. You came close to dying a few times.”

Her tightly controlled voice suddenly meshed with her ravaged appearance, and I felt terrible about my earlier flip comment. I put the stranger’s hand to use and gripped her arm. “Gail, I thought about you-about being with you-just after he stabbed me.”

She smiled again. “Swell.”

I held onto her harder. “No. It was strange. It was peaceful and didn’t hurt. I was just lying there in the water, thinking of how nice it would be to be with you. You were the one thing I could think of that helped.”

The words sounded awkward to me, unfamiliar and slightly juvenile. I was angered at my own lack of eloquence, knowing without being told of the hours she must have spent by my bed, putting aside her own pain so she could accompany me through mine.

“I guess it worked” was what she said, but the smile lingered in her eyes.

I wanted to ask her how she was doing, if her own suffering at the hand of our mutual nemesis had eased any since we’d last visited. I wanted to find out what had happened to Bob Vogel, and what her reaction was to that. But it was all beyond me. My vision closed in again, I saw my hand fall away from her arm, and this time I couldn’t bring myself to move. Just as I shut down, I saw Gail lean forward to kiss me.

The next visitor I knew about was Leo, my brother, who woke me up as any truly professional butcher might-by getting a firm grip on the meat of my upper arm.

He smiled as I opened my eyes. “Jesus, Joey, you’re scrawnier’n hell.”

I focused on his tired face-broader and darker than Gail’s. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” I croaked, clearing my throat.

He slipped his arm behind my neck and tilted my head up to receive some cool water from a cup with a bent straw hanging out of it-his years of tending our invalid mother showing in his gentle dexterity. “I knew you’d want some of this-all that crap they had stuffed down your throat. I couldn’t believe it.”

I finished sipping and he laid me back, suddenly peeling back my upper lip and looking at my teeth. “Boy, we ought to do something about that, too. I brought a toothbrush, okay?”

I stared in wordless amazement at the brush he whipped out of his shirt pocket, his tired eyes gleaming with the bright glow of success. “That’s another thing I knew they wouldn’t think of. Has Gail tried to kiss you yet?”

“I don’t… I think so. I’ve been kind of groggy.”

He burst out laughing and produced a crumpled tube from another pocket, from which he slathered a thick dollop onto the brush. “God, no wonder she hasn’t said much-must still be catching her breath.”

I blinked a couple of times, trying to banish the tendrils of a deep sleep from my brain. “Leo, what’s been going on? Where am I?”

He raised his eyebrows and dipped the brush into the cup. “You don’t know? Open your mouth.”

I raised a hand to hold him off. “Don’t. I can do it.”

He handed it over cheerfully. “I doubt it.”

I took the brush and tried to use it, my fingers trembling with the effort. After only a couple of strokes, my entire arm felt heavy, and I missed my teeth completely, delivering a swatch of foam across my chin.

Leo shook his head, satisfied by his foresight. “Give me that. You’re making a mess.” He took it away and set to work, neatly and gently. “You’re in Lebanon, New Hampshire-the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center-and you’ve been under for three weeks, Joey-gram-negative septicemia-that’s what they said you had. Fancy for blood poisoning. What the knife started, your own guts spilling into the rest of you almost finished. You had the docs scrambling a couple of times. Bad fevers, seizures, times you were delirious-you gave ’em a run for their money. They tell me you lost forty pounds just lying here. By the way, who’s paying for all this?”

I gurgled something, and he shrugged, “Oh, right. Sorry. Here-” He brandished the all-purpose cup. “Spit.”

I spat.

“The reason I ask, you got first-class all the way-police escort for the ambulance from the dam; helicopter ride up from Brattleboro; the best surgical team they had to offer here… You know how long they worked on you?”

I knew better than to try to answer. When Leo was on a roll, there was no point trying to stop him.

“Eight hours. Gail and I were sitting outside the whole time. They tried getting us to go home, but forget that. Anyway, it was the same bunch working on you the whole night. I thought docs were a little overpaid, you know? But when I saw the head guy-when he came out to tell us you’d pulled through the operation-he looked like he’d earned his keep. That son of a gun looked beat. You know what I mean?”

He punched me gently on the shoulder and then immediately leaned over me, his eyes inches from mine. “Damn, you okay? Got a little carried away. That didn’t hurt, did it?”

“It’s okay, Leo.”

He was already massaging the shoulder with his big paw, doing far more damage than he had with the punch. He suddenly stopped again and took my face in his hands, as he might a small child’s. His face was serious and troubled, in abrupt contrast to the beaming expression he’d been showering on me so far. “You’re doing okay now, aren’t you? Feeling better?”

I tried to nod between his hands and muttered through puckered lips, “Fine-a little tired.”

“I know you’ve been banged up before-even out like a light for a couple of days-but this time… I don’t know… You really had me scared. You actually died a couple of times, you know that?”

I tried shaking my head politely, with less success.

He glanced up at the machines crowded around me. “Hadn’t been for all this stuff-and all the people here-you would’ve been history.” He paused, his eyes gleaming brightly. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, said, “Don’t do it again,” and disappeared as magically as he’d appeared.

My days became more normal after that. I woke up when most people normally do, I had conversations with beginnings, middles, and ends, and I began to feel more a part of, if not the regular world, then at least a highly regimented corner of it. Then I was moved from Intensive Care to a regular room and introduced to the far less pleasant realities of physical therapy-a harsh enough contrast to make me yearn for the good old days of suspended animation.

I was in the rehab gym, bathed in sweat from both exertion and pain, when I got my first news of what had been happening outside the hospital walls. Tony Brandt appeared on the threshold one day and came over to where I was sitting slumped on the bench of a Universal weight machine, trying to catch my breath.

He perched trimly on a barbell rack and smiled at me. “Lifting your own weight already?”

I answered with a short, exasperated laugh. “More like the weight of three gerbils-if that.”

He tilted his head and looked at me appraisingly. “You look pretty good. Some guys would kill to lose forty pounds in their sleep.”

I just looked at him sourly.

His voice softened subtly. “How are you?”

Ever since I’d woken up, that had been the topic-for me, for the doctors, nurses, therapists, for my friends. I spent so much time either responding to that question or pondering it myself-my fingers gingerly running along the long tender scar that extended from where Vogel had stuck me in the side, right across my belly to where the surgeons had gone in to patch me up-that I was beginning to wonder whether obsessions could be picked up like germs. I didn’t want to leave this hospital feeling like every bowel movement should be up for appraisal.

“I’m getting better,” I answered blandly and changed the subject. “I heard we got Vogel, but nobody around here knows the details.”

Brandt gave me a rueful glance. “Has Sammie been by?”

I reached back into my catalogue of mental snapshots. “Yeah, but before I was conversational. Why?”

“There’s some controversy about whether Vogel gave up before she nailed him with her flashlight, or the other way around. According to him, he thought just the two of you were behind him-that the rest were coming from the other end-and that he might be able to get around you. But he said after he knifed you, supposedly in a panic, by the way-hear the insanity plea coming? — that he realized you two had reinforcements, so he gave up, raised his hands, and then got nailed by Sammie. She put him in the hospital, too, but just overnight.”

I wiped my face with a small hand towel and straightened up, feeling a little stronger after my rest. “Tell her thanks when you see her. You realize the rest of his story is total bullshit. He knew we weren’t alone. Sammie shouted up the ladder to the others just before he stuck me. He heard them as clearly as I did. Is that how he’s trying to weasel out of this? That he gave up and we creamed him?”

Brandt pulled a face and shook his head. “That’s just his first line of defense. He also says he was innocent-another con framed by the pigs-and that he ran off because he was convinced we were going to persecute him. He said he’s never set eyes on Gail Zigman and that on the night in question his car broke down on his way back from work, and that he spent a couple of hours underneath it jury-rigging a repair.”

“What kind of breakdown?”

“Punctured oil pan. We checked the car out and found the repair, all right-he put a screw in the hole-but we also went to the place he said it happened, and the road’s clean as a whistle. According to his own testimony, there was oil all over when he was through.”

“Did he go for help anywhere?”

“Nope. Supposedly, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or the illegal car, so he did it all on his own. He said it was a long time before he found out what was wrong, put the screw in, replaced the oil, and went on his way.”

“He had extra oil?”

“Yeah-says he uses almost as much oil as gas.”

I nodded in agreement. “Car smokes like it was on fire. And of course he happened to have the perfect screw for the job.”

“Naturally. And when we hit him with the discrepancies, he went stone cold on us. Told us we were a bunch of fuckers out to get him, and that he’d see us in court.”

“What?” I asked, surprised. The popular technique was to stall the process until damn-near all the principals were dead of old age. “Who’s his lawyer?”

“Tom Kelly-he got the nod from the state when the public defender’s office claimed conflict of interest.”

“Is Kelly playing the see-you-in-court angle, too?”

Brandt scratched his head. “I don’t know. It’s a little early-they haven’t even had the status conference yet. After the oil-in-the-road story blew up, Kelly approached Dunn with a plea, but he withdrew it in mid-negotiation. Now, no one knows what he’s up to. He asked for a change of venue, of course, but there was a wrinkle there, too. He said he’d accommodate Dunn by requesting an out-of-county jury instead of actually moving the trial. According to Kelly, that’s because he’s being sensitive to Dunn’s schedule, since Dunn’s out politicking every minute he can find. But according to the scuttlebutt, Kelly made the offer so he can humiliate Dunn on his home turf. Of course, that only works if Kelly’s got a secret weapon, and as far as any of us can see, all he’s got is the last deck chair on the Titanic.”

“What was the plea they were working on?”

“Well, given the rape and the attack on you-not to mention shooting the power-company guy-he’s looking at a life sentence, easy. I think Dunn was offering fifteen to thirty on the rape alone before Kelly lost interest.”

“What’s Dunn’s attitude?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “He’s licking his chops. He knows damn well the case won’t come to court for a year or more, especially with Kelly acting so cagey, so he’s going around to every rubber-chicken banquet in town bragging about putting Vogel in jail in record time. He’s making hay off you, too, since your getting stabbed makes Vogel look guilty as hell. And it’s working. The press is buying it; Women for Women has said it was a job well done, although they’ve started a ‘justice watch,’ as they call it, to make sure Dunn doesn’t let Vogel off with a slap on the wrist. Jack Derby is trying his best to inject a little reality-pointing out that Dunn didn’t have anything to do with Vogel’s arrest-but that just looks like sour grapes. Dunn’s making out like a bandit in the polls. Kelly backing out of the plea process just made it sweeter.”

“You smell a rat?”

Brandt shook his head. “Oh, no. Tom Kelly’s a good guy, but this is a tough one for him. You built a strong case, and he’s got an asshole for a client. He’s going to have to come up with something awfully flashy to beat it. Far as I can see, it looks like Dunn’s been handed a prize bull at no cost. I think Kelly’s being secretive for his own sake, not because he has anything.”

From across the room, my physical therapist looked up from another of her patients and gave me a stern look. I sighed and shrugged apologetically to Tony. “I better get back to it, before she has me doing laps. One last thing, though-how did the power-company guy turn out?”

“Better than you. They pulled a bullet out less than an inch from his heart. He’s already back at work part-time, doing paperwork.”

I shook my head at the workings of fate. “I wonder why Vogel hung around after he shot him?”

Brandt made a face. “That much we did get out of him. Vogel thought the poor bastard had gone all the way down the Glory Hole-that he was dead and out of sight. It was going to be dark in a couple of hours. He doubted anyone would come hunting for the truck before it was due back in, so he was planning on waiting till nightfall and then hitting the road. Lucky for us.” He paused awkwardly and then smiled. “Well… lucky for some of us.”

He rose and patted me on the shoulder, I thought a little gingerly. “Speaking of which, I know what you’re going to say, but you’ve got a Medal of Honor coming your way.”

“Oh, please.”

“It’s not just for you. It makes the department look good, too. We can make it very low-key-a private ceremony.”

I made a face. “I’m really not interested, Tony.”

He looked down at me as if I was becoming more trouble than I was worth. “All right, here’s another argument for accepting it. James Dunn is organizing an award of his own for you-some sort of ‘outstanding achievement’ plaque from the State’s Attorneys’ Association.”

“Jesus Christ… ”

“If you’d agree to the Medal of Honor, it would steal some of his thunder, and you could insist that both awards be given at the same time, in private. Otherwise, he might just bushwhack you with a bunch of press people and slap you with it like a subpoena, whether you like it or not.”

I let out a deep sigh. “Let me think about it, okay?”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Sure-when do your doctors think you can come back to us, by the way?”

“A few more days here, then three weeks at home with my mother and Leo. They’re only twenty minutes away, and these folks want me back in every three days for a while to check me out.”

“Gail’ll be there, too?”

Gail had been a constant presence since I’d come out of my coma, keeping me company, bringing me newspapers and books, watching TV with me when I became too tired to do anything else, including sleep. She was commuting from Thetford, where she’d been staying with my mother and Leo, like some career-path traveling nurse, displaying much of her old take-charge stamina and making few references to her own troubles. Tony’s question made me realize how much I’d become used to her being continually nearby.

But distracted by that thought, and pondering the unaccustomed ripple it caused across my emotions, all I said to him was, “Yes, she will.”

Tony had taken my self-assessed physical prowess as a joke. In fact, a bench press of three gerbils wasn’t far off the mark. Several days later, when I left the hospital under Gail’s supervision, I did so in a wheelchair-and not because of the hospital’s insurance requirements. I could only manage a few dozen feet before dizziness and exhaustion set me down. The septicemia had sucked my energy down to near empty. Tony may have been right about my having found the perfect diet, but I knew replacing the lost weight with muscle would be hard work, even if I was already brushing my own teeth.

My dread was compounded by the expression I’d seen on Leo’s face as the physical therapist outlined my training regimen earlier. He’d rarely been so receptive. I knew that, bighearted to a fault, he was going to fix me up as good as new in record time-or kill me in the process.

Which made him a co-conspirator with Gail, since she’d already told me that she’d cornered the hospital nutritionist and designed a diet for me. Notions of raw tofu and cold bean gruel filled what was left of my panicky imagination.

Initially, I’d planned to return to Brattleboro, transfer my records, my case, and my outpatient status to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, and recuperate at home on Spam and fruit cocktail. But that, it had been made clear early on, was out of the question. Not only did Leo use the excuse of a prolonged and long-overdue visit with our mother as a pretense to torture me-but Gail also had seemed eager to stay away from Brattleboro. I didn’t begrudge her the tactic; I also didn’t miss the irony that I felt more useful to her as an invalid than as a friend during her time of need.

As partners, however, Leo and Gail made a distinctly odd pair. As exuberant as Gail was thoughtful, as boisterous as she was quiet, and as physical as she was cerebral, my brother-on the surface-seemed made of the very stuff Gail was not. In addition, his passion for cars from the fifties and women with short attention spans were precisely those qualities which Gail tended to view with suspicion. And yet the two of them had hit it off from the first time they’d met, some fifteen years before.

Gail was not alone in her generous view of Leo. I think most people saw him in the same light that my mother’s generation had revered Will Rogers, he who’d never met a man he didn’t like. Leo was one of the world’s optimists. A butcher who ran his own shop far off the beaten track, just down the hill from where he’d always lived with our mother, he’d created such a reputation for honesty and goodwill that people drove dozens of miles to do business with him. To enter his shop was not only to be guaranteed good meat at fair prices, it was to have your anxieties momentarily washed away by his nonstop cheer and compassion. He greeted everyone equally, with enthusiasm and an eye for their troubles. He had an encyclopedic memory for names and, more important, remembered from visit to visit the course of people’s lives, which imbued in his customers the same trust they might have reserved for a respected psychologist. For a small-town, high-school-educated meat man, his was an impressive aura, all the more so since he was totally unaware of its effect.

So I was tucked under the wing of these two oddly compatible friends, and driven across the Connecticut River to the Thetford farm where I’d grown up.

It wasn’t a farm any longer, actually. The fields had been sold off to a neighbor after my father’s death. But my mother and Leo still owned the house and barn, and we all three still referred to it as “the farm.” It was located off the connector road between Thetford Hill and Thetford Center, where Leo had his shop, and despite its proximity to the new interstate, it retained for me all the isolated sweetness of my early memories. Before and during the Second World War, when I and certainly Leo were too young to enlist, we’d been the closest knit as a family-my youthful, vigorous, well-read mother, who’d injected in her sons a love of books and a respect for all people; my much-older father, soon slated to pass away-taciturn, hard-working, undemonstrative, and gentle; and the two of us.

That, however, was then. Now, my mother was in a wheelchair, restricted to the ground floor and reduced to watching TV, her cherished reading victimized by failing eyesight, and Leo, for all his charm and parochial success, was running the risk of becoming an overage roué, tooling around in rough-looking vintage cars and dating women who shared his disinterest in commitment.

That, in any case, was my dour state of mind as we drove up to the place. It was a mood that Leo, Gail, and my mother-when at last I was wheeled into the living room to greet her, wheelchair to wheelchair-worked instinctively to overcome, filling the evening with good food and chatter, almost to excess.

When it was finally over, and Leo was putting our mother to bed, I looked over at Gail sitting on the same sofa I’d bounced on as a child, her long legs stretched out, her head tilted back against the pillows, her hands slack beside her. She looked like a loosely assembled collection of tired body parts.

“Well, I guess that’s done.”

She gave me a sad smile. “Was it that bad?”

“No,” I admitted. “Maybe a little unreal.”

“It’s a lot to deal with, Joe. You and I aren’t the only walking wounded around here.”

I realized my sadness earlier had a secret sharer-one who’d been living here for several weeks now.

“So what’s the bad news?” I asked fatalistically.

She smiled to lighten my concern. “It’s nothing dramatic. Your mom’s starting to slow down a lot, and pretty suddenly. She has to go to the doctor more often, she gets tired more easily, her innards aren’t functioning as well as they used to… ‘I’m just winding down’ is how she put it to me-but I also think what happened to you sort of brought it into focus for both of them.”

I sighed and shut my eyes momentarily. So much happening in so short a time, leaving everyone at loose ends.

“That’s not to say she won’t live another twenty years,” Gail added hopefully, if without much conviction.

I opened my eyes and looked at her again. “And Leo?”

She paused, searching for the right words. “I think he’s worried he might lose the center of his universe.”

I thought about the butcher shop, his adulating clientele, his unending string of girlfriends, the car collection in the barn-Caddies, Mustangs, Corvairs, what-have-yous, all under tarps, all used for special occasions, like a selection of suits hung in a closet. So much window dressing for what had always been Mom and Leo. I saw for the first time the fragile thread by which Leo’s life was held together. Not that my mother’s dying would destroy him-I gave his inner strength more credit than that. But Gail was right-it would break his heart, and perhaps leave him ruing some of the choices he’d made along the way.

In that, I realized watching Gail, he wasn’t alone.

Gail had moved a double bed into what my mother had proudly titled the library, knowing that few other farmhouses in the state had an entire room that could be so called. My father had catered to this one presumption and had lined the walls of an erstwhile parlor with floor-to-ceiling shelves, which my mother had eventually filled with an eclectic, much-read collection-a passion for the two of us of an evening, my father being content to watch the fire and smoke a pipe, while Leo built models and read car magazines.

It was the heart of the house, as far as I was concerned, and I was grateful Gail had thought of it.

I did notice, however, as I slowly and laboriously undressed, that I was not to sleep here alone. A night table by the left side of the bed had a small collection of Gail’s things, and some of her clothes were neatly piled on a nearby chair. I could tell by the wrinkled pillow next to mine that she’d been using this room for some time.

I was pleased by that, but it made me wonder how to behave. Amid all the trauma that had befallen her, and the emotional, legal, and public uproar that had attended it-not to mention what my mishap had contributed-we’d never had a chance to get privately reacquainted. The prospect of sleeping with her, along with the sexual implications that carried, made me wary.

I climbed under the covers, naked, as was my custom, the bed’s embrace a mixed blessing. Gail moved about the dimly lit room, busying herself with her few belongings, avoiding looking at me, and finally broke the palpable tension in the air by grabbing her pajamas and leaving for the bathroom down the hall.

I lay on my back, my eyes on the ceiling, listening. The couch in the living room was long and wide enough to accommodate either one of us, should the need arise. There was even my old bedroom upstairs, which is where I’d thought she’d been bunking all along.

I glanced at the small lamp by her side of the bed, wondering if it would be helpful or too suggestive to turn it off, and thought again of the upstairs bedroom. Why hadn’t she used it? Why had she instead moved in here, knowing it was the room I would occupy? Was it to get used to the idea? I imagined her lying here, as alone as I was now, considering the prospect of my eventual arrival just as I was anticipating hers. You always think these things will get easier with age.

I didn’t hear her coming in her bare feet. The door just swung open and she was standing before me, in thin cotton pajamas, her toilet bag in her hand. She gave me an awkward smile as she crossed over to the chair she’d commandeered for her things and put the bag down.

“You feeling okay? Dinner go down all right?”

I watched her standing in the middle of the room, her hands by her sides. “Yes. It was great. Where’d you get the bed?”

“Leo put it together. I think he got the frame out of the barn. I don’t know where he got the mattress. Is it comfortable enough?”

I didn’t answer, but kept looking at her. “Gail, I’d be happy to use the sofa-”

She stopped me with her hand, suddenly held up. “No. I did this on purpose. I need to find out if I can spend the night with a man and not feel afraid.” Her voice was tight but strong, her convictions overriding her own nervousness.

She moved to her side of the bed and turned off the light. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the milky moonlight that angled in through the uncurtained window. I saw her-in vague pale shadow only-quickly remove her pajamas. She slid into the bed next to me and tentatively touched my chest with her hand. Instinctively, I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to me, reveling in the familiar way she nestled her head against my chest, the smell of her hair rich in my nose. She draped her leg over mine and I felt the softness of her naked breasts and stomach against me. At that, a sigh-almost a shudder-escaped her.

“How’s it feel?” I finally whispered.

She moved her face so her lips just touched mine. Her voice, wreathed in the sweetness of her toothpaste, was serious and thoughtful. “So far, so good.”

I kissed her gently and gave in to the best sleep I’d had in well over a month.