and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.
Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Look at me, still in my pj top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.”
Sam shrugged. “It was nothing.”
Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. “Daddy, is she ...”
“She’s sinking,” Herb said. He seemed calmer now. “Conscious, but sinking. She’s been asking for you, Johnny. I think she’s been holding on for you.”
“My fault,” Johnny said. “All this is my f ...”
The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it firmly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn’t remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.
“Don’t you ever say that,” Herb said.
“Jeez Dad!”
Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. “Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.”
Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.
“Don’t you ever blame yourself.”
“But she was watching that damned ...”
“News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled ... then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water.” Herb leaned closer to his son. “The doctor won’t come right out and tell me, but he asked me about ‘heroic measures.’ I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don’t you ever blame yourself for her mistake.” Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. “God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.”
“Can I see her?”
“Yes, she’s at the end of the hall, Room 35. They’re expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don’t ... let her die thinking it was all for nothing.”
“No.” He paused. “Are you coming with me?”
“Not now. Maybe later.”
Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.
Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn’t remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches—later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn’t have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.
He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That’s what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.
“Are you Mrs. Smith’s son?”
“Yes.”
“Johnny?” Her voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice—God help him—made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That’s better. That’s what she looks like. Like she’s had a bad shock.