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this.”
     
     
    “You’re wrong,” she says. “And I’ll find you some glasses, I promise.” She covers him with several wool blankets. “I know it’s damp. I’ll turn the heat up a little, but you’ll have to be strong. We can’t take any chances. I don’t want the oil company showing up unannounced. My husband pays the bills on this house; just enough heat so the pipes don’t burst. If I turn up the heat, he’ll know, see. He’s smart, he’ll figure it out. These blankets should do for now. Don’t fight the drugs, Michael. You need them now. Promise me. In a few days you’ll feel better, stronger. I know what I’m doing,” she says, her voice gaining confidence. I know what I’m doing. “I worked in a nursing home once, they taught me certain skills. I took care of my father when he was sick. For months I did it, in this very house. I’m at St. Vincent’s all the time; I’m a volunteer. I watch the nurses, I see what they do. I’m not stupid. I learn fast. I’m here to help you. You have to believe that. You have to trust me.”
     
     
    Soon the pills take hold of him and his eyelids flutter with sleep. Using scissors, she cuts him free of the wretched clothes. She fills a bucket with water and takes up the soap and a washcloth in her hands. Gliding the soap across his limbs reminds her of her father, in the very last days of his life, and she recalls with tenderness how very close they were at the end, when it was just the two of them. When you walk somebody up to the great white gates you are their angel and there is no one else. This was what she’d done for her father. And she is willing to do it now for the doctor, if that is necessary, but she hopes it isn’t. The doctor is going to live, and they are going to get through this awful thing together, and she is going to help him, and he is going to help her.
     
     
    Tending to him she feels a sweltering intimacy. The cloth wanders down his chest, onto the concave plain of his belly, lingers just above the waistband of his undershorts. Gently, she tends to his cuts with alcohol preps and ointment, then dresses him as best she can in some of her father’s old clothes. An hour passes as she sits by his side, watching him sleep, whispering prayers. A calm falls over her, consumes her, as though she has swallowed a strange and wonderful pill, the effects of which she cannot predict.
     
     
     
Driving north, winding through humble rural towns, she finds a supermarket. The long yellow aisles are drafty, smirking with the stink of boiled ham. Music drones overhead, distracting her from her thoughts. Randomly, she tosses items into her cart: canned meat, tins of sardines, canned salmon, crackers, shortbread cookies, cashews, chocolate. The cashier hardly looks at her, preoccupied with bagging the items, and she finds herself discreetly touching her wig to make sure it’s on all right.
     
     
    Back in the car she drives behind the market to the Dumpster and tosses in the plastic bag that contains the doctor’s clothes. Fifteen miles north, where the snow is deeper and the roads have not been plowed, she finds a hardware store with warped wood floors and scrawny hovering cats who eye her suspiciously. In the musty silence she purchases several cans of kerosene, a new kerosene lamp, a Coleman stove, a heavy chain, and an expensive padlock. The burly clerk helps her carry the items out to the car. He coils the heavy chain into her trunk and slams it shut, the wind crawling up her neck.
     
     
    Driving back to her father’s house she passes the graveyard where her mother lies, and the caretaker’s stone cottage, its windows covered with boards. She feels a rush of terror as she pulls around to the back of her father’s house and parks in a cluster of pines, hoping it will snow some more to cover her tracks. Scattered amid the glittering white powder she notices the splintered walls of a birdhouse, a dented beer can, a dead field mouse. She