The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [4]
The pills must have been losing their effect because she no longer felt as if her hands had been cast off from her body, and a thorn of pain went through her thumb when she tried to bend it. She was lying on her side, looking directly at the woman in the second bed, whose blue eyes watched her as she winced and gritted her teeth. “I cut my thumb. What happened to you?”
The other woman struggled free of her reverie. When she spoke, it was like a small bird pausing to appraise the landscape as it hopped across the grass, carefully forming each sentence before moving on to the next: “The car flipped over on the interstate,” and then, “We hit an ice slick when we were going over the river,” and then, “There was the truck carrying the steel rods, which we missed, but after that there was the concrete pillar,” and finally, “Jason was driving. Not me.”
“Who’s Jason?”
“My husband.”
“Is he all right?”
“They won’t tell me. They say I need my rest. But I don’t see how he could have …” Her voice sank out of hearing. “I kept asking him if he was okay—‘Are you okay? Answer me if you’re okay’—but he wouldn’t, wouldn’t answer. He just hung there upside down in his seat belt.” Already Carol Ann had seen several hours of footage about the strange illumination of the injured. She imagined an incandescent lightbulb flooding the car with light until it burned out with a pop. She watched the woman swallow and then bow her head, inadvertently pulling her hair taut. “Every morning he left a note for me on the refrigerator with a different reason he loved me. He never missed a day. I write them down in my book. Would you like to see?”
She indicated the journal lying on the cabinet between their beds. Carol Ann reached for it and let it fall open to a random page: I love those three perfect moles on your shoulder—like a line of buttons. I love the sound of your voice over the phone when you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re doing a crossword puzzle from me. I love your lopsided smile. I love the way you leave a little space between each piece of bacon on your plate: “amber waves of bacon.” I love the way you sway and close your eyes when you’re listening to a song you like—a dance, but only from the waist up. I love that moment in bed when you first climb on top of me, and the uprooted smell we leave behind when we’re finished. I love the feel of your hands on my cheeks, even when they’re “ ‘cold as tea.’ ‘Hot tea?’ ‘No, iced tea.’ ” I love the fact that when you accidentally pick up a hitchhiker, what you’re worried about is that he’ll steal the DVDs you rented. I love your fear of heights and bridges. I love the way you can be singing a song, and all of a sudden it will turn into a different song, and you’ll keep on singing and won’t even realize it.
Carol Ann shut the journal, letting the silk bookmark trail over her wrist. “That’s beautiful.”
The woman in the other bed nodded, and it might have been intuition, or commiseration, or just the last timed dosage of the blue pills Carol Ann had taken, but she could tell that what she meant to say was, Yes, it was beautiful. It was. It was.
“You keep it,” the woman told her.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do. I couldn’t bear to read it again.”
“You don’t want to give something like this away. It’s too intimate.”
The silence that followed had a strange bend to it. It drew itself out while an old man pushed a walker with tennis balls on its feet to the nurses’ station at the far end of the hallway, then pivoted around with a series of metallic clacks. Eventually the woman let her breath run out, turned her face away, and said to Carol Ann, “You don’t understand at all.”
Later that day, around four in the afternoon, Carol Ann was watching a hawk wheel over the pine trees outside the window when the woman in the other bed lit up like a signal mirror. The glare was so bright that it suffused the