light as a milkweed pod which is ready to burst open and disgorge its filaments into the wind. "Thank God you were here."
"I almost wasn't," Bill replied, following Ralph into the living room and still fiddling with his hat. He made Ralph think of old Dorrance Marstellar with his book of poems. I wouldn't touch him anymore, if I were you, old Dorrance had said. I can't see your hands.
"I was on my way out when I heard a hell of a thud... it must have been her falling..." Bill looked around the storm-darkened living room, his face somehow distraught and avid at the same time, his eyes seeming to search for something that wasn't there. Then they brightened. "The door!" he said. "I'll bet it's still open! It'll be raining in! I'll be right back, Ralph," He hurried out. Ralph barely noticed; the day had taken on the surreal aspects of a nightmare. The ticking was the worst. He could hear it in the walls, so loud now that even the thunder could not blot it out.
He put Carolyn on the couch and knelt beside her. Her respiration was fast and shallow, and her breath was terrible. Ralph did not turn away from it, however. "Hang in there, sweetheart," he said.
He picked up one of her hands-it was almost as clammy as her brow had been-and kissed it gently. "You just hang in there. It's fine, everything's fine."
But it wasn't fine, the ticking sound meant that nothing was fine.
It wasn't in the walls, either-it had never been in the walls, but only in his wife. In Carolyn. It was in his dear one, she was slipping away from him, and what would he ever do without her?
"You just hang on," he said. "Hang on, you hear me?" He kissed her hand again, and held it against his cheek, and when he heard the warble of the approaching ambulance, he began to cry.
She came around in the ambulance as it sped across Derry (the sun was already out again, the wet streets steaming), and at first she talked such gibberish that Ralph was sure she had suffered a stroke.
Then, just as she began to clear up and speak coherently, a second convulsion struck, and it took both Ralph and one of the paramedics who had answered the call to hold her down.
It wasn't Dr. Litchfield who came to see Ralph in the third-floor waiting room early that evening but Dr. Jamal, the neurologist. jamal talked to him in a low, soothing voice, telling him that Carolyn was now stabilized, that they were going to keep her overnight, just to be safe, but that she would be able to go home in the morning.
There were going to be some new medications-drugs that were expensive, yes, but also quite wonderful.
"We must not be losing the hope, Mr. Roberts," Dr. Jamal said.
"No," Ralph said, "I suppose not. Will there be more of these, Dr. Jamal?"
Dr. Jamal smiled. He spoke in a quiet voice that was rendered somehow even more comforting by his soft Indian accent. And although Dr. Jamal did not come right out and tell him that Carolyn was going to die, he came as close as anyone ever did during that long year in which she battled to stay alive. The new medications, jamal said, would probably prevent any further seizures, but things had reached a stage where all predictions had to be taken "with the grains of salt."
The tumor was spreading in spite of everything they had tried, unfortunately.
"The motor-control problems may show up next," Dr. jamal said in his comforting voice. "And I am seeing some deterioration in the eyesight, I am afraid."
"Can I spend the night with her?" Ralph asked quietly. "She'll sleep better if I do." He Paused, then added: "So will I."
"Of gorse!" Dr. jamal said, brightening. "That is a fine idea!"
"Yes," Ralph said heavily. "I think so, too."
So he sat beside his sleeping wife, and he listened to the ticking that was not in the walls, and he thought: Some day soon-maybe this fall, maybe this winter-I will be back in this room with her. It had the feel not of speculation but of prophecy, and he leaned over and Put his head on the white sheet that covered his wife's breast. He didn)t want to cry again, but did a little anyway.
That ticking. So loud and so steady, I'd like to get hold of what's making that sound, he thought. I'd stamp it until