by Lia Matera
She’d fallen for him at first sight. He had lines of good temper leathered right into his face. He was ranch scruffy and unpretentiously willing to sit and listen to her chatter. He even laughed at her lame jokes. And he told her the first time he heard her say it that she was absolutely wrong about being fat, he thought she looked just right.
From their very first date, she’d felt guilty. Oh lord, she was wasting his evening. She’d look around the restaurant and see all the women her age who’d kept their figures and had the most refined expressions on their faces, and she’d think, He should be with her, not me. She deserves him. If he wasn’t with me tonight, someone better would have him.
She brought it up a few times, but it seemed to make him mad. He didn’t understand at first how hard it was for her.
For instance, at first, he used to talk about his dead wife. They’d gotten married when they were nineteen and stayed married thirty years, until she was killed in a car crash. He’d never gotten over it, he told her.
She’d burst into tears. He’d thought then that she was just tenderhearted, but it wasn’t that. It was that Missy, the first wife, should still have him. She was clearly so far superior that it wasn’t even right she should be living in Missy’s house or riding in the four-wheeler Missy had bought.
Every time he mentioned Missy, it tore her apart. She would cry in secret for days. She would try to harden her heart toward Hank so that the relationship would die out, and he could be left with the memory of that deserving woman instead of the reality of stupid, inadequate her.
When it finally dawned on Hank what was happening, he tried to talk it over with her, insisting that it didn’t lessen his feelings for her to have loved someone else once. But when he said that, it was like cold steel in her heart. She only wanted to pack her things and flee. She could see he tolerated her out of kindness, and that it must be torture to a heart that had known the love of Missy.
For a while, he was angry at her. He’d been married thirty years, he cried. Was he supposed to never mention anything that happened in all that time because it involved Missy? That was silly. That was unfair to him. She needed to get it over it.
He sounded just like her brother when he screamed at her that way. “Leave me alone, fatty! Tag after someone else for a change! Get a life!”
It hurt her even more when Hank finally accepted she’d never be able to deal with it. He stopped speaking Missy’s name. Talked about his past only in ways that made no hint of Missy’s presence. It was so artificial and obvious, it just about killed her. She’d wrecked part of his joy and happiness by being stupid about things. Knowing that was constant hell. And yet she couldn’t get past it, couldn’t hear Missy’s name—or not hear it when it should have been mentioned—without turning inside out.
She’d had some bitter cries over the years, wanting desperately to find the strength to release Hank, to give him the chance to find a saner, nicer woman.
Every time they met a woman she liked, in fact, it hurt her terribly. She should let Hank go, and she knew it. She didn’t deserve him.
And yet, selfishly, she was grateful he ignored her altruistic outbursts. But she watched him grow more and more wary of them, more and more careful of what he said and how he acted in company, because the least show of social warmth made her sure she should step out of his life right now. And feeling that way, she’d get all fragile and crazy, secretly searching his pockets and papers, or crawling to her corner of the bed and not letting Hank near her.
After Hank’s first stroke, when she had to nurse him and help him, and it seemed like another woman might not want to, then they’d finally found some happiness. For a long time, his speech had been slurred, so he hadn’t been able to blunder into emotionally mined territory. She’d helped him in every way she could then, feeling a ferocious sympathy for his torment. He’d always been so active, poor darling, riding the ranch, splitting the wood, mending the fences. It had been torture for him, a year in a wheelchair, another year with a walker. He’d only put his cane aside last month.
And now here she was, lying uncovered on the bed again. And she was scared, too scared to move. Because he’d begged her: if it ever happened again, she mustn’t let them save him. At his age, he’d never be able to come back to anywhere near the point he was now, not again. And he couldn’t survive the immobility, not again. For him, it was the worst claustrophobia.
He’d had a lawyer write him up a piece of paper saying if he ever got to the point where he was too sick to live productively, he wanted to die naturally. He didn’t want machines and chemicals keeping his body alive if he couldn’t use it.
In the abstract, she understood. She felt that way about herself, too. Especially after seeing all poor Hank had suffered, with a tube up his nose for food and liquids, and a catheter in him, and bruises on his body, and sores under his eyes because they teared uncontrollably.
But on the other hand, with her to help him, he’d made it back the first time. And for once, she’d felt really useful and special. Almost worthy of his love and company.
All this went through her mind in a flash when she made her snow angel arm sweep and felt the bed cold and empty. But maybe it was just a knee jerk of dread to ward off the jinx. She always did think the worst thing first, to get it over. Maybe Hank was okay, maybe in the kitchen having early oolong.
But this time it didn’t feel like she was just being silly. Nearly frozen with cold and fear, she scooted her size twenty-two pink pajamas across the bed, peering over the edge as if over the cliffs of hell.
Her heart felt like a hot rock in her chest: There he was on the floor.
“Hank! Oh, Hank.” Her voice bled.
She slid down beside him.
He looked so old, her wonderful Hank. His eyes were half shut and his mouth was open with his tongue tip protruding. His skin looked yellow, settling into deep caverns beneath his stubbled cheekbones. His breaths were the shallowest rasps, his lips were turning blue. She’d never seen him look so dreadful, not even that other awful morning.
With a thin wail, she reached a multiply-ringed hand toward the antique-reproduction phone by the bedside, the one that replaced Missy’s pink princess, just as she’d replaced all Missy’s furniture and fittings. She dialed 911, and cried for a while into the mouthpiece before she could even speak.
When she knew the paramedics were coming, she sank back beside Hank and stroked his cold face. He was barely breathing. He looked almost dead. His pupils, visible through half-open eyes, were different sizes.
Months ago, the doctors had warned her. The blood thinners he took every day since his stroke would keep Hank from having another stroke from a blood clot, but if he had the kind caused by bleeding in the brain, the anticoagulants would make the stroke worse. The bleeding in his head would go on and on, killing more and more brain cells, leaving only random sparks of consciousness in a paralyzed body.
To Hank it was the ultimate horror story. Don’t ever forget, he told her a thousand times. If the paramedics come, show them the paper in the nightstand drawer. Don’t let them do anything to save me. I couldn’t take it, honey, it’d be living hell. Even weak from his first stroke, he’d grabbed her shoulders tight and shaken them. Don’t let them keep me alive in hell, honey. Don’t let them.
She watched him now and felt the dark cold loneliness to come. She reached a hand to the drawer and withdrew the paper. DO NOT RESUSCITATE, it read across the top. She slipped it into her pajama pocket, lost in swirling memories of his kindness and maleness and devotedness.
“Oh Hank,” she whispered. “I always loved you so much, I always wanted you to be happy and have everything you deserved. I’ll never be happy without you, Hank.”
There was a sudden flutter in his breathing. “Pain,” he gurgled, his voice a wet, small croak of a thing. “Gone. Can’t feel body.”
She knew in her he
art what he was telling her, what he was begging her. Begging her to remember the paper in the drawer.
“I’ll do what you asked, Hank. How could I not?”
“Missy,” he choked. “Aw, look what a gorgeous girl I married.”
She drew back as if slapped. What she’d always feared: Missy was the one, the gorgeous one love of Hank’s life. Missy’s name on his lips now. After she’d finally convinced herself he loved her. That her nursing had made her worthy of him.
“Coming, Missy.” His voice was a little louder. His eyelids fluttered open, and he stared ahead with mismatched pupils. “Coming back to you now, my beauty.”
She looked down at him, frozen in her vortex of rejection. It always came back to this: every man had left her for someone. As soon as there was someone else to be with, he was gone—every man starting with her own brother.
And now Hank, too.
“Remember …” His speech was slurring, fading. “Dancing in Paris?”
She’d refused to go to Europe on a honeymoon because he’d been there with Missy. Everything everywhere would remind him of Missy, she was sure. So they’d gone to Florida, which he hadn’t much liked because she was always too hot and tired to do anything.
“‘Member? Alps? Walking?”
He looked at her and his face, so white and skeletally sunken, managed to wear the faint ghost of an old happiness.
“Coming back to you, Missy …” Then he stopped breathing. Just stopped. Grew more pale and almost blue.
For what seemed an eternity, she watched him. She imagined his soul rising to embrace the beautiful, fun-loving, intelligent mate of his spirit, the incomparable Missy. She saw them laughing and happy and full of tears and remembrances, with not a backward glance for her.
It tore at her. How wrong she’d been to tell herself she should let him go to someone who deserved him. It wasn’t true. It had never been true. She didn’t care who deserved him. She wanted him, fiercely and with her whole heart. And she didn’t care if she didn’t deserve him. He was hers. She had loved him and nursed him. She had finally earned him.
She screamed when she heard the doorbell. Then, walking as if with a twisting knife in her back, she stumbled to the doorway.
In their police-like uniforms, two paramedics stood before her. She waved her arm behind her, hot tears spilling down her cheeks.
She remained rooted in the doorway while they pushed past her with their bags and plastic devices.
She trailed behind them finally and overheard one of them mutter, “Not good.”
While his partner inserted a plastic tube into Hank’s mouth, he looked over his shoulder. “We’re going to try to resuscitate him. How long has he been this way?”
“Stopped breathing, oh God.” Her voice was a foolish twitter. “Minutes ago. Maybe five?”
The paramedic shook his head again. “There’ll be substantial deficits if he does recover. Permanent brain injuries. He could be a vegetable.” It was said kindly, for all the harshness of the message. “Do you know if he has a Do Not Resuscitate order on file at the hospital?”
She stopped breathing herself for that moment. She saw him dancing in Paris with Missy. It was wrong, it was too late; he was her husband now, not Missy’s. “I don’t think so,” she whispered.
“He doesn’t have a document around here saying he doesn’t want to be resuscitated in a situation like this?” The paramedic seemed to be appealing to her. Telling her Hank’s fate would be a cruel one if he lived.
Her hand went to her pocket. She could feel the stiff sheet of folded paper. I can’t give him up.
And yet she always thought she could and should give him up, give him to someone worthy of him, someone like Missy. It was he who had always insisted they remain together in spite of her “jealousies.” Now it was clear: she’d hung on as hard as she could every step of the way. And she’d hang on now.
“He’d want you to save his life,” she said. “He’d want you to try, no matter what.”
She watched the paramedic attach a bellowslike bag to the tube in Hank’s throat. She watched Hank’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall until a bit of color returned to his cheeks.
There would be no dancing with Missy today. Missy was not his wife anymore. She was.
Dream Lawyer
“Dream Lawyer” was first published in Diagnosis: Dead, ed. Jonathan Kellerman, Pocket Books, 1999. It was reprinted in The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, ed. Ed Gorman, Forge, 2000 and
First Cases, Volume 4, ed. Robert J. Randisi, Signet Books, 2002.
“Picture this: a cabin in the woods, a hideaway, practically no furniture, just a table and a cot. Nobody for miles around, just me and her. I’m trying to keep her from collapsing, she’s crying so hard. Her tin god’s up and turned on her.
“She’s got a gun there on the table, and I’m not sure what she’s thinking of doing with it. Maybe kill herself. So I’m keeping myself between her and it. I’m up real close to her. Even crying doesn’t make her ugly, her skin’s so fresh. Tell the truth, I’m trying not to get excited. Her shirt’s as thin as dragonfly wings, she’s all dressed up expecting him. She should be hiding from him, but all day she’s been expecting him. She’s been dreading him but hoping he’ll come, hoping he’s got some explanation she hasn’t thought of. Except she knows he couldn’t possibly explain it away. That’s why she’s tearing herself up crying.
“She’s so beautiful with the light from the window on her hair. But she’s talking crazy—what she’s going to do now, how she’s going to tell everybody. Forgetting the hold he has on her, on all of us, how protected he is and how cool.
“And then … in he comes. She shuts up right away, surprised and terrified. I can tell by how stiff she gets, she’s hardly even breathing. She’s too freaked out to say any more. That’s when I notice him there. But he’s not paying attention to me. He’s looking her over—her crying, the dress-up clothes she has on—and you can see he’s making something out of it.
“She looks around like she’s going to try to run. Big mistake. He goes cold as a reptile. I’ve seen it happen to him before. And then he picks up the gun and shoots her right in the face. Just as cold as a snake.
“That was my first thought, that it wasn’t the person I knew, it was some … life-form, something outside my understanding with its own rules of survival like cockroaches. Because how could he just aim her own gun at her and blow her head off? Without blinking, without a word? After all she meant to him.
“I’m just about dying of shock right there on my feet. Compared to her, I’m nobody to him, nothing, just a bug that rode in on his cuff. Maybe that’s why he says, ‘I won’t kill you. I don’t have to.’ He starts walking out. At the door he turns. ‘If I have to kill you later, I will. But not like this. By inches. You’ll see it coming a long way off, Juan. You’ll see it coming for miles, so don’t look back.’
“That’s all. He didn’t try to explain anything or change her mind. He didn’t say a word to her, not even good-bye. He just killed her like she didn’t matter. Like she was a fly and he was a frog. Zap. And then he left.
“By then I could hardly even stand up. I could hardly make my feet move to look closer at her. I wish I never did look. Did you ever have a bee get squashed on your windshield? That’s what her head looked like. I wouldn’t have expected so many colors of … Her face was blown right off except one part where there were still curls caught in a hair clip.
“I could barely keep on my feet much less figure out what to do about it. It was clear she was dead. Or wouldn’t want to be saved, if she wasn’t. So it was no use calling nine-one-one.
“And as to him, well, my God, how was anybody going to believe me? With all his followers and his credentials—who’s going to take my word over his? And what did he mean about don’t look back? What would he do to me, this reptile
-man who could blow away someone that loved him and that probably he loved, too. What would happen to me if I told anybody?
“I wish I could say I was confused over the trauma or something, but I was probably more scared than anything. That’s why I left her there. I was too scared to do anything else, just too damn scared. Because I felt like I’d finally seen right inside him and found the devil there. I hit the road and stuck out my thumb, just trying to get some distance, trying to keep myself together.
“You probably know what happened after that. It took the police a while to catch up to him. They were looking for me, too. They knew I was there at the cabin from finding my fingerprints and hairs and like that. When they found me, I could hardly get any words out, I was still so scared. I guess they didn’t trust me to stay and testify against him—they put me in custody, in jail. I wanted to get word to him, beg him not to do anything to me, beg him to understand it wasn’t my fault, that I’d have shut up and stayed gone if I could. But I knew it was useless.
“When it was his lawyer’s turn to do something, she had all these reasons I shouldn’t testify. What it came down to was, I couldn’t prove it was him and not me that killed Becky. I pointed at him and he pointed at me. And I guess in some legalistic way, we canceled each other out. However the technicalities worked, the jury never heard the whole story. So there was no way for them to figure out the truth, not beyond a reasonable doubt. I don’t blame them the way some folks around here do.
“Some people wrote to the newspapers that they should have put me in prison whether I did it or not, because Becky was dead and somebody had to pay. And if it wasn’t going to be Castle, it should be me because we were the only ones there in the cabin with her.
“I can understand how people felt. It makes me sick to know he shot her and got away with it. And her, poor thing, all dressed up in case he was going to melt at her feet, hoping he’d come clean to everybody just to keep her respect. That’s the part that hurts the most, that she was good enough to hope so even with what she knew about him.
