I gave her one quick look. The dash lights hit the white-ridged bone structure of her face so that the shape of the skull was apparent. The mouth was wide-screaming, lip-spread. Her voice told me that she had known.
I came down hard on the brake. The car went into a long skid toward those posts. I let up on the brake, accelerated it straight, came down on the brake again. This time the skid was the other way so that the car headed toward the brink, still skidding sideways. I could hear only the scream of tortured rubber, then the jolting metallic scraping as tires were rolled right off the rims. I couldn’t bring it out of the second skid. The front right wheel smacked the posts and the car spun so that I lost all sense of direction. For a moment it looked as though the car were spinning in one spot, like a top, completely ringed about with the white posts. Then it hit again and I was thrown toward Miranda. I tried to find her with my arms but I couldn’t.
The crescendo of sound was fading. The car jolted, lurched, stood absolutely still in a world where there was no sound.
I got out. Other cars stopped. I looked for Miranda. I couldn’t find her. The tow truck had a spotlight on it, and so did the trooper car. I made them shine the lights down and search down the slope. They looked and looked. After I told them a little more about her they stopped looking and they were most polite, and they took me to a doctor who gave me white powders.
I was in bed for ten days. I told Connie everything. She was very grave about it all and kept her eyes on my face as I answered every one of her questions.
By the time I was on my feet the car had been repaired. I didn’t care what happened any more. I didn’t protest when she took me to the gas station. Conner acted odd, and the questions seemed to embarrass him. He said, “Why, sure, a few times Mrs. Corliss cashed checks with me, and I guess I turned some of them over to Louie as part of his pay.” Louie came over and shuffled his feet. He looked younger than I’d remembered. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t hold it in his Bogart way.
“Louie,” she said, “have you and I ever had a date?”
He stared at her. “What the hell! What the hell, Miz Corliss!”
“Have we?”
He manufactured a pretty good leer. “Well, now you bring the subject up, if you want a date, I’d—”
“Shut up!” Conner rasped.
“Get behind the wheel, George,” Connie said, “and take me to the Unicorn.”
I found the street. It wasn’t there. I tried two other streets and then went back to the first one. I parked and went in a cigar store and asked what had happened to it. The man told me he’d been there twelve years and there’d never been a place of that name in the neighborhood.
We went home. I sat on the living-room couch. She pulled a small footstool over and sat directly in front of me.
“George, listen to me. I’ve been checking everything. That address you gave me. It’s a parking lot. There aren’t any old Victorian houses on that street made over into apartments. There’s no local record of a nurse named Miranda Wysner. I brought you home from the hospital and took care of you myself. They told me I should put you in a psychiatric nursing home. They thought I was in danger from you. You said some pretty wild things about me in the hospital. I took the risk. For the first two weeks you were home you called me Miranda as often as you called me Connie. It was, I thought, the name of some girl you knew before we were married. Then you stopped doing that and you seemed better. That’s why I thought it was safe to let you drive again. You were almost rational. No, you were rational. If it had been just almost rational, if I had thought that you were in danger, I wouldn’t have permitted it. The steering did break when you had your accident. That’s because the garage you took the car to installed a defective part.”
I said haltingly, “But... you. The way you acted towards me. I know that I’m repulsive to you now. This eye and all—”
She left the room, came back quickly with a mirror. “Take off the patch, George.” I did so. My two eyes, whole again, looked back at me. I touched the one that had been under the patch.
“I don’t understand!” I cried out.
“You were convinced you had lost an eye. They gave up and decided to humor you when you demanded the patch. And as far as my turning away from you in disgust is concerned, that is precisely what you did, George. Not me.”
I sat numbly. Her grave eyes watched me.
“I followed you that night,” I said.
“I went for a walk. I didn’t want you to see my cry again. I’d cried enough in front of you — until I thought that no more tears could come. But there are always more tears. Funny, isn’t it? No matter how many already shed.”
“Why have I done this to you?” I demanded.
“George, darling. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. It was the depressed fracture, the bone chips they pulled out of your brain, the plate they put in.”
“Miranda,” I whispered. “Who is Miranda? Who was Miranda?”
Connie tried to smile. Tears glistened in the gray eyes. “Miranda? Why, darling, she might have been an angel of death.”
“When I nearly died, she was there...”
“I was there,” Connie said, with an upward lift of her chin. “I was there. And I held you and whispered to you how much you had to live for, how much I needed you.”
“She said she whispered to all of them on that borderline.”
“Maybe she does.”
“Take me in your arms, George,” Connie said.
I couldn’t. I could only look at her. She waited a long time and then she went alone up the stairs. I heard her footsteps on the guest-room floor overhead.
We went to the cabin on the lake. I was sunk into the blackest depths of apathy. Once you have learned that no impression can be trusted, no obvious truth forever real, you know an isolation from the world too deep to be shattered.
I remembered the thin pink skin of her wide lips, the lurch of her walk, the unexpected competence of her hands.
I do not know how many days went by. I ate and slept and watched the lake.
And one day I looked up and there was Connie. She stood with the sun behind her and she looked down at me.
The smile came then. I felt it on my lips. I felt it dissolving all the old restraints. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. The great shuddering sighs of thanksgiving came from her. She was my wife again, and she was in my arms, and everything between us was mended, as shining and new as in the earliest days of our marriage.
She wept and talked and laughed, all at once.
That night a wind was blowing off the lake.
When she slept I left her side and went to the windows. They look out onto the porch.
The old rocking chair creaked. Back and forth. Back and forth.
It was no surprise to me to see her sitting there. In the rocker. There was a wide path of reflected moonlight across the black water, and her underlip was moist enough to pick up the smallest of highlights from the lake.
We smiled at each other the way old friends smile who have at last learned to understand each other.
You see, Miranda knows about the drop from the top steps to the lakeshore rocks.
I turned back to gather up my small and dainty wife in my arms.
They Let Me Live
The silly woman from the alphabetical agency kept trying to move in on me as I lay on top of the blue canvas of the hatch cover. The weary little ship chewed its way doggedly across the Pacific, and I thought I’d never be able to soak up enough sun. The doc in Calcutta had grinned like a well-fed cat when he told me that I had better just pretend that I had been dead for a year. There was a lot to think about, and the dumpy girl yawped at me until my head ached. I grunted at her for four days and finally told her that it was too bad she was a lady because that made it impossible for me to tell her what was wrong with me. She stiffened and then nearly went over the side trying to get off the boat deck.