“Why don’t you go home? You can’t do anything here,” I said, when I saw Jewel’s lips were blue.
She shivered but otherwise didn’t move. “You can’t do anything either, but I don’t see you going.”
“Well, there’s no reason for both of us to be here.”
“Then you go home,” she said stubbornly. “I’m staying until they bring him out alive or…. Either way, I’m staying.”
The whole night passed like that. The cold, the mute women, the urgent men. Toward daylight, they brought out one of them, and the women surged forward and scanned the blackened face. No one had to tell them he was dead. His head tilted at an impossible angle, his eyes unnaturally half open, slits of white against the black. He didn’t look at all like Luca, and so I was spared that moment when you think it just might be someone who belongs to you. The corpse was the son of the old woman. She came forward to wipe his face just to make sure, a few seconds of false hope. Then a single deep shudder, but not a tear . Maybe she’d lost others like this. She was old enough to have lost a husband or a brother. Accidents were not rare. Or maybe she’d wait to get home to cry. Whatever, she walked away ramrod straight.
Somebody started a soup pot and I got some for Jewel, whose face was by now as ashen as her cigarette butts. I knew it was useless to tell her to go home. All her life, she had seemed to give in, but I know, looking back, that she had never given an inch.
Two of the rescuers had to quit because of frostbite, but there were others to take the places of those who looked as dead as the dead man.
Soon some newspaper people started coming and we were really taken aback to see Jolene come up beside us. She had been chosen to write about the accident because Galen was her hometown. Jolene never could stand to be uncomfortable and she lasted about forty-five minutes before she went back to the inn. “I’ll interview the survivors,” she said in a sprightly way, “if there are any.”
A few hours later, they reached the place where the four remaining men were trapped. One by one, they were carried out, the first with a blanket over his head. It was not Luca. Luca was the last to be taken out, and when I saw it was him, I felt my heart stop, just like when you sneeze. He was so still, so still. I took his cold, limp hand and pressed it to my mouth, and then I saw something that made my heart rise. Steam. Vapor rising from his nose and mouth in the cold air.
They let me get into the ambulance with him, and I held his hand and whispered to him the whole way. I could say anything I wanted because he couldn’t hear. So I told him that I loved him, that I had always, always loved him, long before I had known it myself and that if he would live I would never be mean to him again.
They kept him in the hospital for a week and on the day he was to come home, I was nervous, wondering how I should act around him. I sat by the front window with my Rubaiyat in my hand, but I couldn’t read. I kept listening to hear him come up the walk.
When I heard his step, I went to the window and parted the curtain and saw him climbing the steps clumsily, with one leg that didn’t bend at the knee. He held a cane in one hand. If I craned my neck, I could see his face. He kept blinking and swallowing, and his jaw was working, as if it took courage just to knock.
I didn’t wait for his knock. I threw open the door with a gladness too strong to hide. But as he stood before me and I could see him up close for the first time since before the accident, the gladness drained out of me. Without meaning to, I recoiled from the sight of him. It was a stranger at the door, and not the familiar stranger I remembered. Who was this stooped man leaning on his cane, I wondered, and what was this terrible manhood that had settled on his features and made them leaden? How much more had been lost to him than the full use of his leg?
My eyes shifted awkwardly. For a split second, I moved to take his arm and then just as suddenly, withdrew it.
“Well, don’t just leave him standing there,” Jewel said, approaching from behind. “Let him in so I can look at him.” She put an arm around him and led him into the parlor. That had always been Jewel’s part to play with the guests, to soothe them. Mine was to discomfit them. She looked him up and down appraisingly. “Why, you’re fine, and none the worse for wear,” she pronounced, but her eyes lingered a moment too long on his leg and even from across the room, I saw him flinch. “Now you just sit down and chat with Darcy, while I go in and see to dinner,” she said, as if either one of us had ever been capable of chatter.
Our eyes met for a second before we looked away. I heard him seat himself with difficulty. I’d never thought about it before, but it must be hard to sit down when one leg doesn’t bend right. After he’d managed it, he pressed each of the five fingertips of one hand against the tips of the other and studied them. Then he stood up just as awkwardly as he’d sat down and went to poke the fire. After he had poked all the life out of the fire, he sat
