“Tell them what you gave me, sweetheart,” she prompted encouragingly, referring, perhaps, to a pair of earrings, a bouquet of flowers.
“What I gave you?” he replied, puzzled.
Lately she often said and did things that he didn’t understand. At first he’d thought it was merely nerves. She was anxious by nature, becoming agitated in heavy traffic, on dark corners, in crowded shops. When she’d refused to answer the door for the mail carrier, he’d supposed that she’d been spooked by one of those creepy documentary crime shows she liked to watch.
“You know what I mean,” she asserted, her glassy green eyes sliding over his.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Utterly bewildered now, he leaned over to reach for her quaking hand and then withdrew when she retreated, balking at his touch.
He’d even been entertained when she’d begun naming those who might be after her.
“The president of the PTA wants to kill me,” she’d declared in a deadpan voice.
He’d chuckled. “And why would she want to do that?”
“Several years ago I made fun of a blouse she was wearing. She’s never forgotten it.”
The anecdote seemed less amusing now.
“Please, honey,” she urged. “You won’t get into any trouble. I’m not even angry. I’m sure you didn’t really mean to hurt me. Just please tell them; tell them now, before it’s too late.”
He should have insisted, that day last week when he’d come home from work to find her punching holes in the kitchen ceiling with a tire iron.
“What the hell are you doing?!!” he’d cried, coughing as he inhaled a cloud of dust and insulation.
“My father’s hiding in the crawlspace. I don’t know what he’s planning.”
“Your father’s dead, Sheila.”
“I never saw his body. Did you? You know how he hated me. He always hated me.”
And now they were here, confined to this sparkling white room, surrounded by the infernal flashing and beeping of ominous machinery. The culmination of the nightmare of today. The chest pains, the shortness of breath, the terrible headache, all seemingly without cause. A panic attack, he’d suspected. Had diligently driven her to the hospital, just in case. But this…he hadn’t expected this.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he answered at last, peering sadly into her hollow eyes. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She sighed and let her head droop gently back upon the pillow, her scraggly chestnut hair splayed in disarray about her elongated face and neck.
After the kitchen incident, he’d gently suggested that she seek help. Mental help.
“Lots of people go to psychiatrists, honey,” he’d reassured her. “I just hate to see you so worried all the time.”
“I’ll think it over, Tom,” she’d replied with such sweet reasonableness that he’d let the matter drop, convinced that she’d come around of her own volition.
She was rousing again, as if in response to his thoughts; was leaning towards him, her eyes meeting his, suddenly blinking with tenderness, recognition of the man she called husband. She held out a single shivering hand, palm up and open, in gesture almost of believing, of welcome, of reaching out to him with hands and heart. “Tom,” she said quietly, with feeling, and his heart leapt, and his hand, too, leapt forward to take hold of her, to pull her from the depths over which she was so precariously poised, to cling desperately, intently to her; mind, body and soul.
She jerked suddenly away; tore herself from the proffered handhold; grasped instead the wire secured to her chest. Slowly she turned to face her attendants. “He’s not going to admit it, is he?” she mused dolefully, seeking pity in the eyes of the hovering physician, the wide-eyed nurse, and then lapsing into an exhausted, anguished, waking dream.
Tom gazed longingly at her, the woman he had so lately loved, who had so lately loved him. Wept as she transformed before him, her eyes falling out of focus, no longer seeing the world around them but a hidden, more frightening one within. Watched his wife journey to a place where he could never join her, a place where she would live alone now; a place without him.
Lori Schafer is a part-time tax practitioner and part-time writer residing in Northern California. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Springfield Journal, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, Every Day Fiction, The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Romance Flash, Every Day Poets, Leodegraunce High End Flash Fiction, E-Romance, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Ducts, and That’s Life! Fast Fiction Quarterly. She is currently at work on her second novel. Her blog may be found at http://lorilschafer.blogspot.com/.