Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  “I told her that,” Michelle said with a shrug. “She doesn’t believe me.” She looked back at the now rolled-up poster of Stevie. “Do you care?”

  Yes. “No. Why should I care?”

  “She thinks you’re jealous of her.” Michelle kicked off her shoes before crossing her legs.

  I mimicked the movement. “Of Stevie Nicks?” I asked, trying to lighten the conversation.

  Michelle chuckled. “No, silly. Of her. Cindie.”

  So, we were back to calling her Cindie. “Why would I be jealous of her, Michelle?”

  She shrugged again. “She says because she’s my real mommy.”

  I smiled the fakest smile of my life. “Sweetheart, I would be completely stupid if I didn’t know that.”

  Michelle threw herself back on her bed, her feet popping out and pointing toward me. I reached over and tugged on a big toe. She sat up, propped herself on her elbows. “I love you to bits,” she said. Words I’d heard Sylvie and her say to each other time and again in a torrent of giggles. Now, amazingly, also for me.

  “I love you to bits,” I told her.

  At about five o’clock on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, we piled into Westley’s car and headed for a downtown park where fireworks would explode in colorful displays of welcome to the new year beginning around midnight. Leading to that, a carnival, a few local garage bands, and some housewives-turned-craft-makers selling their goods entertained a crowd growing by the hour. Sylvie had ridden to the event with us rather than her family, but the girls vacillated between Westley and me and her parents whenever our paths crossed. For hours we meandered the park and rode the rides. I purchased a large homemade basket perfect for holding my books at the foot of my chair while Westley’s great purchases included cotton candy, candied apples, and footlong hotdogs. And, as the night’s chill grew, hot coffee for the two of us and cocoa topped with mounds of whipped cream for the girls.

  Near midnight, Westley returned to the car while Michelle, Sylvie, and I found the perfect spot to enjoy the fireworks. He returned moments later with a picnic basket filled with champagne for the grownups and ginger ale for the girls along with a variety of snacks I’d prepared earlier. For more than an hour we laid back on an old quilt brought from the recesses of a chifforobe at Miss Justine’s. “Perfect,” she’d said to me, “for such things as picnics and fireworks.” The four of us oohed and aahed at the displays of pyrotechnic brilliance shot into the blackness arching overhead. At one point, I looked at the girls who lay between Westley and me. Despite the noise and excitement, both were asleep, their hair tousled, their mouths agape. What little bit of their faces showed from the hoods of their jackets appeared wind-kissed.

  I sat up, sent a psst Westley’s way. He looked at me. I nodded toward the girls and he sat up, too. Looked. Smiled broadly, then leaned across them to share a kiss with me. One that began simply enough, then deepened. “Happy New Year, sweetheart,” he said.

  Who needed a coat? Warmth melted through my veins. My arteries. Every muscle in my being went to flame and marshmallows—something that had not happened in a while. I wasn’t blaming anyone—least of all Westley and certainly not myself. Between our jobs, Michelle’s schedule, and keeping up with a halfway decent social life, we had fallen into a “too tired to care” pattern. Or, perhaps we cared, but had become too tired to worry about it. But tonight, having shared a fun evening and a bottle of champagne …

  “Westley,” I breathed, his name forming a cloud around us.

  His brow raised. “How quickly can you pack all this up?”

  “How quickly can you drive us home?” I countered.

  He stood.

  I stood. “Go warm up the car.”

  But by the time we arrived home and put the girls to bed, Westley complained of being “just too tired.”

  That had been Thursday night. Or, Friday morning, according to how one calls it.

  Friday evening the weather went from cold to frigid. Rain that had fallen intermittently during the day turned to ice and grabbed hold of thick branches and limbs and snapped them like twigs. The electricity went out before nine. While Westley lit a fire, I pulled sleeping bags from our camping supply closet, then gathered the necessary items for making s’mores. After roasting and eating, we fell asleep to the sound of nature giving way to nature.

  The next morning the sun rose from her slumber to create even more of a mess. By midafternoon, Westley declared war on the chaos defacing our lawn, and insisted we all head outside to tackle “this unsightliness” as a family. For nearly an hour I gathered limbs and twigs, fanning pine needles and prickly cones that littered the front while Westley did the same in the back. Michelle carted the wheelbarrow back and forth between the two, all the while singing some song she’d learned at church, loud and off-key. I grinned at her enthusiasm, humming a little myself as the warmth of her childlike abandon filled me with contentment. This was life, I told myself. This was living. I had everything I never knew I wanted—a loving husband, a beautiful little girl, a job I enjoyed, a lovely home. We had friends we enjoyed and money enough in the bank that we could breathe and enjoy the time God blessed us with.

  I gathered what I hoped would be the last of the cones, then pulled off my gardening gloves in time to see Michelle darting around the corner of the house. Her arms and legs flailed about and her eyes held concern too mature for someone so young. “Mom!” she said, using a new term of endearment. “Daddy says come quick.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She stopped a few feet in front of me, hands dropped beside her powder-blue puffy jacket, her panting breath forming a cloud in the cold air. “He just says he needs you. He also says I’m to stay put.”

  There is a moment we can all look back on. A split second. A timestamp that divides everything from the beginning to that which will, eventually, play out to be the end. A moment when we don’t know something that is immediately followed by the knowing. Or … a knowing.

  I ran the same path Michelle had arrived on until I reached the expanse of our backyard. Westley sat on the edge of one of the Adirondack chairs that encircled a firepit in the far-right corner of the property. He’d been wearing a baseball cap earlier, but it now lay at his feet. His head was down, his shoulders dipped forward. Even from a distance I could see the pallor of his skin.

  I reached him, breathless. “What is it?” I asked.

  He looked up then, his eyes watered in fear and his face devoid of color, his skin glistening with sweat. He held his left arm against his chest with his right hand.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  “Ali,” he breathed out. “Something’s wrong.”

  I dropped to my knees in front of him, the still-wet grass immediately dampened my sweatpants. “What? Westley? What?” I gripped the arm of the chair and began to cry. “Oh, God,” I said, which was more prayer than exclamation.

  “Listen to me,” he said softly. “I don’t want to scare Michelle. So dry your tears, you hear me?” I nodded. “I need you to go inside and call an ambulance.”

  “Why?”

  “Sweetheart … do not scare Michelle.”

  “Are you—”

  “Allison. Just. Do. This.”

  I stood and, when I did, he released his arm to grab my hand. “Tell them—tell them no siren. Hear me?”

  I ran inside and dialed 9-1-1, giving them Westley’s instructions, explaining that we had a young child who didn’t need to be unduly frightened and telling them that we would be in the backyard. I ended the call, then dialed Sylvie’s mother. “I need to send Michelle to your house,” I said, my voice quivering. “I think Westley’s having a heart attack or a stroke or something.”

  “Oh, Allison,” Nikki said. “Of course. Do you want me to come get her?”

  “No,” I said. “That may scare her. I’ll send her to you on her bike.”

  I hung up the phone, ran to the kitchen, and peered out the back window. Westley hadn’t moved
and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Okay,” I said to no one, then turned and dashed to where Michelle lay on her back between the trunks of the pines, arms and legs spread wide, face peering out from around her coat’s hood. She stared at the clear blue sky as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do in the middle of a cold, desperate January day. And, I suppose, for a child, it was.

  “Michelle,” I said, steadying my voice.

  She sat up, her expression focused. “Hey, Mom? Is it okay if I call you that? Sylvie calls her mother ‘Mom’ and I think I’d like to call you that, too.”

  My smile wobbled but I managed to nod. “I—I like it,” I said.

  “Is Daddy okay?”

  “He’s fine …” I didn’t want my next words to become a lie, so I added, “Just not feeling real good. I think he tried to do too much.” I took a breath that then left my body in a cloud. “Speaking of Sylvie’s mom, she and I were just on the phone … she’s asked if you’d like to ride your bike down and play.”

  No questions asked, Michelle bound up, skipped to the opened-door garage, pulled her bicycle from where it rested against the wall near the stepladder and Westley’s power saw, and hopped on. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” she hollered as she pedaled down the driveway.

  “Have fun,” I yelled back, then returned to the backyard to find Westley sitting with his eyes closed. “Westley.”

  “Take my pulse,” he said when I reached him. “I’m trying, but I can’t seem to …”

  I dropped to my knees again, fear slicing me in half. What if something horrible happened to my husband because I didn’t know anything about anything when it came to medicine? I should have gone to school like Elaine, I reminded myself. I should have become a nurse. Then I’d know what to do. “Westley.”

  He extended his right hand, palm side up. “It’s not hard. Put the tip of your index and middle fingers on my wrist below my thumb.” His instructions came in pants. “Don’t use your thumb.”

  “Not my thumb.”

  “Your thumb has a pulse of its own, so …”

  “Okay.” I laid my fingertips along the edge of his wrist, felt it throb where cold met clammy flesh. “I feel it. But how do I—”

  “Your watch has a second hand, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at my watch as if I didn’t know the answer. “Yes.”

  “Wait until the second hand gets to a quarter hour and then count the beats for fifteen seconds.”

  “Okay.”

  I held my own breath as I counted the thumping under my fingertips, nearly losing count twice within the fifteen seconds. “Thirty-two,” I said.

  Westley took in a slow breath through his nostrils then released it from between his lips.

  “What does that mean?” I asked him.

  He turned his face toward mine, then glanced over my shoulder. “There they are,” he said, and I stood as two men in dark-blue uniforms rushed toward us. They carried black duffel-looking bags that appeared to weigh more than the two of them combined.

  “His pulse is thirty-two,” I said, wanting to be a part of the solution, a force behind the healing.

  “One twenty-eight,” Westley said, correcting me. “Shortness of breath, angina.” He took another breath. “I’m diaphoretic, as you can see …”

  Diaphoretic. Diaphoretic. A word I didn’t know. Elaine would know. But I didn’t and it sounded … not good. I took a step back and then another and another to watch through a tunnel of fear and apprehension as the paramedics worked effortlessly on my husband. Gasped as one of the men ran back to the front of the house only to return pushing a gurney. I crossed my arms against a chill that penetrated my bones, then looked down and took in my attire. A long-sleeved turtleneck under a sweatshirt with matching sweatpants, the latter wet from the knees down. Should I go to the hospital dressed like this?

  “Ma’am.” The remaining paramedic walked toward me. “You’ll want to follow us to Brady General,” he said. “We’re going to transport your husband—”

  I looked at Westley who peered over his shoulder at me. “It’s going to be okay, Ali,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. Just drive to Brady and go straight to the ER.”

  I walked to him, a knot forming in my throat, tears stinging my eyes. “Wes,” I said, leaning over to kiss lips that quivered beneath mine. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

  He chuckled. Actually chuckled, which brought a sigh of relief from me. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  Encouraged by his humor, I added, “I’m too young to be a widow.”

  “And you’ll have to go out and buy a new black dress …”

  “And pearls. Miss Justine would demand pearls.” With that, the paramedics continued onward.

  I started to turn away, to return inside for my purse, but he stopped me with, “Ali.”

  “Yes?”

  “Call Paul.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Michelle spent the following week with Sylvie’s family, the two girls joyfully pretending they were sisters while I spent the time sitting next to Westley’s hospital bed. Or pacing in chilled hallways while the doctors performed first this test and then that one. Praying. Begging God. Making every deal I knew to make as long as the Almighty held up his end and kept my husband alive.

  Julie called every day, offering wisdom and hope and letting me know that the folks Dean worked with were praying alongside me. Although certain none of them were making deals, I thanked her and them. Yet, I knew they were sincere in their petition. Still, I doubted they loved or cared about Westley—or even Dean—enough to strike a deal with God.

  Heather also called daily. She had, in the years of my marriage to her brother, met and married her own Prince Charming, Nathaniel, who programmed bank computers but who talked nonstop about leaving the rat race behind to plow his own farm. Heather also worked within banking—which was how she and Nathaniel met—during her days and tended to the most rambunctious three-year-old I’d ever encountered during her “off hours.” With each phone call she apologized profusely that she couldn’t “let go and come help me,” but I assured her I had all the help I needed.

  Paul and DiAnn took leaves of absence from their jobs, leaving their kids with Westley’s mother and father who drove across the state to help. Even though I slept at the hospital, my brother- and sister-in-law returned to our home each evening. But they kept daily vigil with me, listening to what the doctors said, what they advised. Then, on the day two men pushed my husband through double doors where he would undergo a double bypass, they stood on either side of me and held my hands until time to head for the waiting room. There they reminded me that Westley was young and strong and that he would come through this. DiAnn fetched coffee for the three of us, coffee we barely touched. It grew cold and formed a gray layer along the top until we tossed the remains into a lined trashcan. We made small talk, glancing occasionally at the television where a soap opera played out in all its drama.

  As if we needed more drama.

  Paul looked at his watch incessantly, an act that should have worked my last nerve, but instead prompted a “what time is it now?” from me. And each time he’d say, “Ten minutes since the last time I looked,” and DiAnn would sigh.

  “I’m going to get more coffee,” she said, not thirty minutes after we’d thrown away the first cups, then disappeared down the hall.

  “She’s stressed. She’s worried about Wes, missing the kids …” Paul explained. We sat side by side in the yellow-gold faux leather and wood chairs, the kind you only find in medical offices or cheap beachfront motels.

  “I worry about your mom and dad if—”

  “Don’t, Allison. Don’t even go there.”

  “And Michelle,” I choked out, knowing the only person in the hospital I could be completely honest with was Paul. I didn’t dare mention my fears to Westley. Didn’t dare add to his concerns of life and death. And I was still too afraid of DiAnn.

  Paul
leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees then turned his head toward me. “What did you tell her?”

  “Only that Daddy had gotten tired the day we worked in the yard and that he was in the hospital, but he’d be home soon and not to worry,” I spilled. “To enjoy her time with Sylvie.”

  A long exhale escaped from Paul as his attention went to his shoes. “Listen, uh—I should tell you that Cindie called last night.”

  “Oh, God. What did you tell her?”

  Paul straightened. “Nothing. I didn’t actually speak to her. She left a message on your answering machine.”

  “For Wes?”

  “No. Michelle.”

  Tears stung my eyes until a lone traitor slipped down my cheek. “Paul,” I whispered. “If anything happens to Wes … Michelle …” I couldn’t say the words. Couldn’t fully share my greatest fear. Losing Westley would be one thing—devastating—but losing Michelle on top of that would mean the end of my existence. She had become more than just Westley’s child, the toddler I took in so soon after we married. She was now my daughter as well. My little girl. Nearly every minute of every day revolved around her. How would I—

  DiAnn returned then with three fresh cups of coffee in a carrier, steam curling above the Styrofoam. She handed mine to me, then Paul’s to him before sitting and producing three donuts from a small white sack.

  “I told her Cindie called,” Paul said, reaching for his donut.

  “Don’t let her worry you.” DiAnn extended a donut toward me, but I shook my head. “Eat it,” she all but ordered. “You’ll be happy for the sugar rush later.”

  I took the pastry and bit into it, relishing its delectable warmth. “You heated them?” I asked, marveling at her consistent attention to detail.

  “They were under a warming lamp,” she said around her own bite, then swallowed. “Back to Cindie—seriously, do not give her another thought. You have to stay focused on Westley.”

  “They sort of go together,” I reminded her.

  “The three of you go together. Besides, Wes will be fine.”