table and grabbed it off the wall. "Hello?" Silence, broken only by breathing. "Hello?" Ralph repeated. There was one more breath, this one almost loud enough to be an aspirated sob, and then another click in his ear. Ralph hung up the telephone and stood looking at it for a moment, his frown putting three ascending wave-lines on his brow.
"Come on, Helen," he said. "Call me back, Please." Then he returned to the table, sat down, and began to eat his small bachelor's supper. He was washing up his few dishes fifteen minutes later when the phone rang again. That won't be her, he thought, wiping his hands on a dishtowel and then flipping it over his shoulder as he went to the phone. No way it'll be her. It's probably Lois or Bill. But another part of him knew differently.
"Hi, Ralph."
"Hello, Helen."
"That was me a few minutes ago." Her voice was husky, as if she had been drinking or crying, and Ralph didn't think they allowed booze in the hospital. "I kind of figured that."
"I heard your voice and I. I couldn't... "That's okay. I understand."
"Do you?" She gave a long, watery sniff, "I think so, yes."
"The nurse came by and gave me a pain-pill. I can use it, too my face really hurts. But I wouldn't let myself take it until I called you again and said what I had to say. Pain sucks, but it's a hell of an incentive."
"Helen, you don't have to say anything." But he was afraid that she did, and he was afraid of what it might be... afraid of finding out that she had decided to be angry at him because she couldn't be angry with Ed.
"Yes I do. I have to say thank you."
Ralph leaned against the side of the door and closed his eyes for a moment. He was relieved but unsure how to reply. He had been ready to say I'm Sorry you feel that way, Helen in the calmest voice he could manage, that was how sure he'd been that she was going to start off by asking him why he couldn't mind his own business.
And, as if she had read his mind and wanted to let him know he. wasn't entirely off the hook, Helen said, "I spent most of the ride here, and the check-in, and the first hour or so in the room, being terribly angry at you. I called Candy Shoemaker, my friend from over on Kansas Street, and she came and got Nat. She's keeping her for the night. She wanted to know what had happened, but I wouldn't tell her. I just wanted to lie here and be mad that you called 911 even though I told you not to."
"Helen-"
"Let me finish so I can take my pill and go to sleep.
Okay?"
"Okay."
"Just after Candy left with the baby-Nat didn't cry, thank God, I don't know if I could have handled that-a woman came in. At first I thought she must have gotten the wrong room because I didn't know her from Eve, and when I got it through my head that she was here to see me, I told her I didn't want any visitors. She didn't pay any attention. She closed the door and lifted her skirt up so I could see her left thigh. There was a deep scar running down it, almost all the way from her hip to her knee.
"She said her name was Gretchen Tillbury, that she was a familyabuse counsellor at WomanCare, and that her husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife in 1978. She said if the man in the downstairs apartment hadn't gotten a tourniquet on it, she would have bled to death. I said I was very sorry to hear that, but I didn't have a chance to think I want to talk about my own situation until I'd had it over." Helen paused and then said, "But that was a lie, you know.
I've had plenty of time to think it over, because Ed first hit Me two years ago, just before I got pregnant with Nat. I just kept... pushing it away."
"I can see how a person would do that," Ralph said.
"This lady... well, they must give people like her lessons on how to get through people's defenses."
Ralph smiled. "I believe that's about half their training."
"She said I couldn't put it off, that I had a bad situation on my hands and I had to start dealing with it