The Illumination

remember?”

He paused, made a decision, nodded. “Right. Well. The situation is that the hospital is facing a budget crunch. We either have to cut hours or cut jobs. I’m supposed to make the decision for the A&E.”

“Arts and entertainment?”

“Pardon? Ah. No. Accident and emergency.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Make life a little harder for everyone, as opposed to a lot harder for someone. The staff won’t be happy about it, but I’ve weighed all the options, and it seems like the one that will do the least harm. You know, ‘First do no harm’ and all.”

“That sounds like the responsible choice.”

“Yes. Well. Nobody can say I’m not conscientious. It might be my one shining virtue.”

“What’s your one shining vice?”

He amused her by pondering the question. “Nostalgia,” he answered eventually, and a few seconds later, “Self-pity.”

“I think we share a shining vice.”

She spent another day lost in pain and reverie, staring at the patients bearing their light past her door and dozing off between outbursts of noise from the television. Every so often someone would arrive to feed her, medicate her, or change her bandages, and if she was sleeping she would rouse herself, and if she was hurting she would try to hide it. The tip of her thumb was gathered together in a smart little pucker around her stitches. She could only presume that, like a sausage, it had been hollowed out to make room for the skin to close. There was a fairy tale that had disturbed her when she was a child, too young for school, and she thought about it now, the one about the quarreling couple who waste all their wishes attaching sausages to each other’s noses. Her mother used to read the story out loud to her, and whenever she reached the illustration of the poor wife tugging at the sausage on her nose, a look of cross-eyed fury on her face, Carol Ann insisted that she turn the page. She always rushed to put the book away the second the story was finished. There it would stand on its shelf, giving out an aura of indignation and menace, just as her teddy bear gave out an aura of sleepy affection, her toy box an aura of cheerful excitement, but the book was fixed against the backdrop of her room, and it had been for as long as she could remember, and it never occurred to her that she could simply get rid of it. She must have fallen asleep while the nurse was working over her because she seemed to spend the next few hours locked in a small stone house with her husband, the two of them trading wishes like insults. She woke up just in time to see the same orderly who had watched her claim the journal a couple of weeks ago take a few steps into the suite, shake his head as he realized who she was, and say, “Perfect. Just great. Wrong room.”

That evening, before he left for home, Dr. Alstadt stopped by to ask her how her day had gone—and also, she could tell, to allow her to ask about his. Somehow, without trying, over a scant few conversations, they had transformed themselves in each other’s eyes from doctor and patient to two fragile human beings, both afflicted by nostalgia and self-pity. When she asked him how everything had gone in the field of arts and entertainment, he said, “About how I expected it would. Everyone hates me a little, but no one hates me passionately.” He reached up to grip his shoulder, rolling his head in a slow circle. She saw a dozen vines of light swaying on the back of his neck. They were thicker than the ones she had noticed before, and he said, “Ah, yes, my neck. It always gets like this by the end of the day.”

“Turn around.”

He must have thought she wanted to take a closer look at the spot because she surprised him by using her good hand to work the tension out of his muscles. Each white tendril grew brighter as she bore down on it with her fingers, then much softer as she eased away. When she was finished, Dr. Alstadt made a tiny halting sound of pleasure.

She was in the hospital two more nights before he allowed her to go home.

I love the photograph of you your parents keep by the front door, that little girl in her glasses and her Holly Hobbie dress. I love the way you kiss. I love the way you shake your head when you yawn. I love the “magically delicious” doodles you make when you’re talking on the phone: stars, moons, hearts, and clovers. I love to look up and see you sitting beneath the lamp in the living room—reading a book, or staring out the window, or chewing the end of a ballpoint pen. I love how soft your hands are, even though hand lotion is disgusting goop and you’ll never convince me it isn’t. I love the way you line your brushes up on the vanity like silverware. I love knowing that if there’s a restaurant I want to try, I’ll get to try it with you; if there’s a movie I want to see, I’ll get to see it with you; if there’s a story I want to tell, I’ll get to tell it to you. I love your giggle fits. I love the names you’ve had picked out for 25 years: “Mira” if it’s a girl, “Henry” if it’s a boy.

The journal lay on the walnut table by Carol Ann’s sofa, and though she had finished nearly a quarter of it, she still had to remind herself that it was not a continuous outpouring of unbroken passion, that every sentence represented a small, isolated profession of love, separated from the ones that came before and after it by the hard line of a night’s sleep. The book was like the row of squares on a calendar: each piece held nothing more than the bare outline of a single day. It seemed to reveal the couple’s marriage as fully as any diary, though, and the further she read, the more intimately she felt she knew them. The husband’s name was Jason, and the wife’s name was Patricia, and their relationship was as open and playfully chiding as it had been on their wedding day. They drove to the lake to picnic and swim, and they rented Woody Allen movies on the weekend, and though she liked spicy food and he did not, they took turns cooking meals for each other on their old gas stove. Carol Ann had seen the light fade from the woman’s body but had failed to learn her name until she reached the journal’s seventeenth page, when she came across the line, I love sticking your name in songs where it doesn’t fit the rhythm: “Patricia Williford, why don’t you come to your senses?” The fact that the two of them were no longer kissing each other’s shoulders, or taking their rings off when they did the dishes, or dancing but only from the waist up—it seemed like a frightening mistake. And even if there was a Heaven, she thought, and even if they were together in it, that would not make it right.

She was finding it difficult to concentrate at work. In part it was the weather, a sudden string of gentle blue days that had lured thousands of birds into the air, but mostly it was her thumb, which still throbbed with pain, throwing up obstacles around even the easiest tasks. Answering the phone, punching the space bar on the keyboard, opening the window, retouching her makeup, maneuvering a bag of chips through the sliding gate of the vending machine—every hour presented her with another puzzle to solve. She knew she was in trouble the moment she got home from the hospital and found a pile of newspapers scattered on her welcome mat. Right away she realized she could not pitch them up to herself with one hand while she held on to her pocketbook with the other, as she ordinarily did, so she slipped off her shoes and spent an aggravating few minutes trying to kick them inside. The glass door kept swinging shut in the wind, though, and the papers came bounding back at her with a terrible banging noise, and finally she had to give up, put her purse on the accent table, and kneel down to collect them one by one. As soon as her wound finished healing, she knew she would be able to use her left hand again, but until then she would just have to keep bobbling through her days like a steel marble in a tilting maze game.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, she left work early for an appointment with her physical therapist, a briskly competent but slightly abstracted woman who seemed to view human beings as a simple collection of joints, muscles, and nerve bundles. At the beginning of each session, she would greet Carol Ann with a short conversation like—

“How are you doing this afternoon?”

“I’m all tangled up inside.”

“Super! Now let’s focus on that hand of yours.”

—then lead her through a series of exercises designed to improve the strength and dexterity of her thumb, or what was left of it. There was the “thumb press,” which involved flattening a barrel-shaped lump of clay into her palm. The “thumb abduction,” a maneuver resembling a leg lift with her hand filling in for her body. The “isometric thumb extension,” in which she made a hitchhiking gesture while her therapist applied pressure with an index finger. And then there was the “putty pinch” and the “prayer position” and half a dozen others. Her therapist had her repeat each of the exercises in three sets of ten, counting off the repetitions—one, two, three, you’re doing good, five, six—while Carol Ann nodded along and pretended she thought it was helping. The glow that had been concentrated in her thumb would gradually spread across her entire hand, following the extensor in a long line up her forearm, and by the time the hour was over, anyone who saw her stealing through the