A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [19]
I was sitting with my eyes shut, in the hospital lounge, remembering that night in the bathtub, when the elevator bell rang and Howard stepped out onto the newly washed floor. “How is she?” he asked, sitting down, putting his arm around me. I could hear his heart beating. I tried resting my cheek on the metal snap of his shirt pocket. Howard was the most potent man in Wisconsin. I had smelled him in my stupor from the lounge on the third floor when he was out in the parking lot, I was sure of it now.
“Her eyelids fluttered this afternoon,” I said. I had been alert then, coming up for air after a strenuous supplication. Dan had come from room 309 shouting for Theresa. It was possible, I thought, that Howard would make the miracle take place. The power of smell would bring Lizzy back into herself.
“What does it mean?” Howard asked.
I shook my head. I wanted to wake up to find Emma and Claire in the next room. I would scream at them for pulling each other’s hair, and we would resume our happy life. I would have recklessly given away anything to find that I had only slipped into another dimension, like Scrooge did every Christmas Eve. I was in a preview of the possible future and when I got back to earth and turned over several new leaves, all would be well. The fluttering eyelids might or might not be meaningless, according to the rumors that had circulated in the lounge.
I had admired Howard from the start because of his beauty and the way he stood back quietly, both observing and not judging, a remarkable combination, I had thought. He was everything my father wasn’t. He wept at movies, he loved auctions and thrift stores for their antiques, and he occasionally made a comment out of the blue that was killingly funny, well worth the wait. He knew about things: He knew how matches were made, what to do if a swarm of bees landed in a tree, how to bandage a wound, start a fire, make a candle, kill something for dinner. If he said he did something twenty times or twice, or one thousand times, it was accurate. He didn’t ever stretch the truth or embellish. It was his code, to be scrupulously honest. I had thought there was no occasion to which he could not rise.
“Howard,” I whispered into his shirt snap. “What am I going to do?”
He rubbed his hand over his freshly shaven chin. “What happened?”
I tried to swallow but my tongue felt thick and bristly, like a Brillo pad. “I don’t—” I could hardly stand the feel of what was my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “I don’t know.”
He pulled me hard against his chest. That was comforting. Being held so firmly you couldn’t injure anything. I could imagine spending the rest of my numbered days on the hospital sofa. The second time I had crashed the car into the stone planter by the garage he had said in his owner-of-the-manor voice, “Alice, you’re going to have to tell me what happened.” He was waiting. It was his nature to move, to work, to produce. He was going to wait for me for a while. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said after a minute. “It happened so fast, while Emma was in the bathroom.” I realized, as the words came past my teeth, that I had edited out the time I had spent in the basement and upstairs. “Where are Emma and Claire?” I asked. “How are they?”
“I called Nellie,” Howard said.
His face was like a Cro-Magnon’s. He was all crags, and he had shaggy eyebrows, a looming forehead; he would have looked wonderful in a cave painting. He would have been a Cro-Magnon celebrity, on the cover of Cro-Magnon People, the most handsome, nearly modern man of the year. His eyes were set too close together. It made a person feel crosseyed just to look into them. Howard’s mother, Nellie, had come from St. Paul, Minnesota, eight hours away. She had come because it was a real emergency. I rested in the thought of how repulsive I found Reverend Joseph Nabor. I pictured him calling his mother when he got home and telling