No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,70
anniversary I was planning when I came home late one night an’ found Annie still up and waiting for me. She’d been crying, though she’d fixed her hair an’ washed her face to try to hide it. I still saw the stains on her cheeks an’ the flush of color that said something was wrong. A hundred ideas came an’ went in a second, most of ‘em revolving around what kinda monster she’d had ta kill. I knelt in front of her. “What is it, doll?”
“I saw a doctor today.”
All the building blocks of my world went out from under me. I thumped down onta my heels, wonderin’ how my hands had got so cold so fast, an’ tried not to sound shaky. “How come?”
“It’s been almost five years, Gary.” Annie’s voice wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard from her, all remote an’ hollow. She wasn’t quite looking at me, but I wasn’t sure she was looking at anything at all, the way her eyes were bruised an’ empty. “We should have had at least one baby by now.”
Hot an’ cold rushed my face, part relief an’ part terror. My heart was hammering loud enough I thought the world could hear it. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it, doll. Guess I figured we had lotsa time.”
“No.” Just one hard word, like she couldn’t make herself say anything more.
Another tremor went through me, shaking down dreams I didn’t hardly know I had. Lil’ boy-shaped dreams, an’ lil’ girl-shaped ones too. Dreams with little faces like Annie’s an’ big broad shoulders like mine, an’ dreams with high laughing voices and stomping hurrying feet. They hardly had shapes to ‘em, those dreams, until they started to fall. Then I could see ‘em all clear as day, toothless grins and white wedding dresses, falling down like rain. And like rain, they hit the earth an’ disappeared into sparkling splashes of nothin’.
There wasn’t anything I could say, sitting there in that ruin. I got on to the couch and pulled Annie into my arms. She didn’t wanna let me, staying stiff and upright, but I held on until inch by awful inch she leaned into me. Not relaxing, and feeling like she might never relax again, but at least I was holding her.
It came out in bits an’ pieces over days, how the doctor said she seemed all right but that it couldn’t be any surprise to a nurse that sometimes a real bad sickness, like a fever, could leave someone unable to have kids. She couldn’t talk about it for more’n a minute without getting stiff and hurting again, an’ all I could do was keep saying I loved her, right up until she threw a mug across the room an’ screamed, “I know you love me! Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’m afraid it’s not enough?” an’ collapsed into tears.
I couldn’t catch her in time, she fell so fast, but I dropped down beside her an’ held her again. She fought like a wildcat, hitting and screaming with a kinda horrible incoherence that made all the sense in the world. She was a nurse, she understood how it could happen to somebody else, but when it was her, when it was her own body betraying her, an’ she wouldn’t let me say it wasn’t, ‘cause to her way of thinking, it was, no matter what all her studies might say, when it was her it was unbearable. An’ what if me loving her wasn’t enough, if she couldn’t give me babies, an’ I kept sayin’ it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, darlin’, I had her, I wasn’t gonna want somebody else, but not even the tears rollin’ down my own face convinced her, not for days an’ weeks, until the worst of the pain had passed. I still caught it on her face some days, though, as the years went on. I’d see it when she was looking at other people’s kids, an’ all I could ever do was hold on an’ never let go.
We had our ups an’ downs over the years, an’ we had our moments of the world turnin’ upside-down, when some kinda magic reared its head again, but the truth was, we never had a worse time than that, not ‘til the doctor told us Annie was dying of emphysema.
I had a headache start up about then, pounding at the back of my skull like a devil tryin’ ta get out. I was the smoker,