“In a couple of months you’ll be ready for the eye work,” the young doctor said.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “We mustn’t forget that.”
He turned away, looking as though his mouth hurt him.
They didn’t use the siren, and it awakened in me a childish disappointment. It would be fitting to arrive with siren, that sound which in our neat world has replaced the night cough of the unknown beast.
When they rolled me out onto the asphalt of the drive I lifted my head and looked at the house. This was where the big amiable clown who sometimes looked a little like V. Johnson had lived. All the details of it were sharp and it looked unreal, a house seen in a movie. I knew that all things would now look that way. Two eyes give depth perception. One eye gives everything a two-dimensional flatness.
Miranda Wysner, blinding white in the sun, stood tall and straight, with a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. A smile no one else could see.
Connie trotted delicately back and forth between the wheeled cart and the side door, telling everybody to be careful, please, don’t bump him on anything, and her voice was like the mirrored wind chimes in a lost lake house of long ago.
Connie had moved into the guest room across the hall from the bedroom we had shared — or rather the bedroom she had shared with George A. Corliss, who died in such an unfortunate accident. They put me in the big double bed, and the Hollywood frame creaked in a well-remembered way and I was very tired and went to sleep almost immediately.
I dreamed I was laid out in that room with candles at head and feet and the smell of flowers and soft chanting. I awoke in the purple-gray dusk and there were flowers and a distant chanting but no candles. The chanting was a muted newscaster, his Airedale voice tamed by a half twist of the dial. There were the sharp yelps of neighborhood children at play, and for a moment I was a guy who had taken a nap. Just a nap. Get up, go down, kiss Connie, mix the drinks, check the stove to see what dinner might be.
But Miranda came in with her starchy rustle and bent over me and put her hand on my forehead. “Cool,” she said. “Probably a little subnormal.”
“We’re living in a subnormal household. Where are you?”
“The next room. Beyond the bath. With both doors open, I’ll hear you if you cry out in the night.”
Connie smells sweet and dainty and feminine. Miranda had her special scent. Long illness makes the senses acute. Miranda smelled of medicinal alcohol, antiseptic, and, underneath, a deep perfume that throbbed. It was probably against regulations. It had a musky jungle beat.
“Maybe I’ll just whimper.”
“I’ll hear that, too.” There was just enough light so that I could see her teeth flash white. “I told her not to try to talk to you until tomorrow. Excitement, you know.”
“Just like a county fair.”
“I’ll bring your tray.”
When I awoke in the morning, a fat rain, oyster colored, viscid, was coming down in straight lines. I could see it bouncing off the roof peak across the street. The bedside clock said three minutes of six. Hospital habits. In three minutes Miranda came striding in with a basin of warm water, glass of cold, toothbrush, comb.
“I’ve put the coffee on,” she said. I had finished breakfast and was shaving with an electric razor when Connie came in, her pink housecoat belted tightly around her child’s waist, her face all cute and vacant with sleep.
“Goodness, you people get up early!”
Miranda turned from the window. “Good morning, Mrs. Corliss.”
“Good morning, nurse. Welcome home, darling! Oh, welcome home!” She came over to the bed. Miranda watched stonily. Connie bent and gave me that quick, hard kiss. I got my hand around the back of her frail neck and prolonged it. When I released her she took a step backwards, her eyes wide, bringing her hand up as though to scrub her lips, not quite daring.
“Well!” she said unevenly.
At the end of the week, I made four full circuits of the room. At the end of two weeks I went downstairs, dressed for the first time. The clothes hung on me. The more independent I grew, the more coldness appeared in Connie’s manner toward Miranda.
At the end of the second week she brought it to a head, in Miranda’s presence.
“George, I think we can get along beautifully now without Nurse Wysner.”
“I’ll leave in the morning,” Miranda said. “I’ll pack tonight. That is, if you really feel you don’t need me, Mr. Corliss.”
I gave the words the proper emphasis. “I can handle everything myself,” I said.
“You mustn’t get too confident,” Miranda said.
“I know my own limitations,” I replied.
“You two talk as if I weren’t here to help,” Connie said with small-girl plaintiveness.
“I’m certain you’ll be a great help, Mrs. Corliss,” Miranda said, starting bluntly, sliding into her odd breathlessness at the end of the sentence.
“Then it’s settled,” Connie said brightly, clapping her hands once, a habit I had at one time found almost unbearably sweet...
In the middle of the night Miranda’s hand against my cheek awakened me. The bed stirred as she sat on it. The night was as black as a sealed coffin.
Her whisper had the same quality as her speaking voice. “You can’t do it alone, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever it is that you’ve been planning, my darling.”
“May I take this as a declaration of your great and undying passion?”
“See? You can’t hurt me that way. You can’t hurt me by trying to hurt me. That’s a sort of secret we have. We’ve said more things with a look than we can ever say with words.”
“I’m touched, deeply.”
Her nearness was more vital than any caress. “You’ve got to let me help. You’ve got to let me share.”
“Why?”
“Doing something and never having a sharing of it is bad. Then it’s all on the inside. We can talk, you know. Afterward.”
Nurse and patient, probing together a deep and desperate wound.
“But I have a way and you aren’t in it.”
“Then there must be a new way. Two can think better. You might forget something important.”
“You’re accepting the correctness of the decision, then?”
“Only because it’s yours. I don’t matter. I’ve never had any strong feelings about right and wrong.”
“That’s a lie, Miranda.”
Hoarsely: “So it’s a lie! When you’ve seen the evil I’ve seen—”
“I’ll let you help on one condition, Miranda.”
“Anything.”
“We haven’t used the words yet. I want you to say the words we’ve been skirting so carefully. I want you to say them slowly. All the words. Now, what are you going to do?”
Her hands found my wrist and the moth touch was gone. Her nails dug in with a surprising force. “I am going to help you kill your wife and her lover.”
“Why?”
“Because they hurt you so badly, and it’s something you want to do.”
“But more than that. The other reason.”
“Because after it is done it will be something so strong between us that we’ll never be apart again.”
“Love, then?”
“No. Something stronger than that. Something more exciting.”
“You want half a man?”
“I’m strong enough for two. I knew it would be this way. Ever since that night I kept you from dying. You gave up that night. I sat and whispered in your ear why you had to live. Over and over. And you did.”
“It’s settled, then. Go in the morning. Be patient. I’ll come to you when I can.”
She left quickly, plunging towards the doorway, miraculously finding it in the blackness.