A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

acquire during the hospital vigil, not to disturb a sleeping patient. For in such a place, sleep is precious.
    I shouldn’t disturb Ray of course. Yet—I have to tell him that I’m sorry—I can’t leave this room without trying to explain why I’d come too late—though there is no explanation—“Honey, I’m so sorry. I was just—at home. I was just home, I could have been with you, I—don’t know why. . . . I was asleep. It was a mistake. I don’t understand how—it happened.”
    How faltering my words are, how banal and inane. As I’ve become physically clumsy this past week—there are mysterious bumps, bruises and small cuts on my legs and arms—no mystery about the bumps on my head, which I’ve repeatedly struck while getting into and out of our car—so too I can’t seem to speak without faltering, or stammering, or losing the thread of my concentration so that I can’t remember what I’ve been saying, or why it had seemed urgent to say it. Most of what I’d talked about with Ray had been his work, his mail, household matters of the most ordinary sort. Nothing that I’d said to him expressed what I’d wanted to say. And now I can’t comprehend—I can barely remember, though it was only a few hours ago—why I’d gone to bed hours earlier than I usually did, why I’d imagined that tonight had been a “safe” time to sleep.
    That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
    Eating—I’d eaten a meal when I’d returned home. For the first time in days I had prepared an actual meal—a heated meal—and not eaten just a bowl of yogurt and fruit while working at my computer. And so I’d been eating when my husband had succumbed to the terrible fever that precipitated his death—the thought is repulsive to me, obscene.
    Inexplicable actions, behavior. The murderer who swears that he doesn’t remember what he did, he’d blacked out, no memory, not the faintest idea, and no reason, no motive—such behavior makes sense to me now.
    What is becoming rapidly mysterious is orderly life, coherence.
    Knowing what must be done, and doing it.
    This hospital room is so cold that I’m shivering convulsively. Though I have not removed my coat. My red quilted coat I’d been wearing when the speeding driver slammed into the front of our car and the air bags exploded pinning us in our seats.
    Soon, it will seem to me that Ray died in this car crash. Ray died, and I survived. Is that it?
    The two crashes will conflate in my mind. The crash at the intersection of Rosedale Road and Elm Road, the crash at the Princeton Medical Center.
    After the one, we’d walked away giddy with relief. In our relief we’d kissed, clutched at each other for the pain hadn’t yet started.
    In this room Ray had complained of the cold, especially at night, and when he had to wait in Radiology to be X-rayed. Despite the fever he was running, yet he’d been cold. Yet I can remember when Ray went outdoors in winter without a coat, in Windsor. Frigid wind blowing from the Detroit River, the massive lake beyond—Lake Michigan.
    Younger then, not so susceptible to colds.
    I am frightened—I don’t remember that person. I am losing that person—my husband—in that long-ago time before the wreck.
    My instinct now is—to locate a blanket, to pull a blanket up to Ray’s chin. He is lying beneath just a thin white cotton sheet.
    I know—I know!—my husband is no longer living. He doesn’t require a blanket, nor even a sheet. I know this and yet—I am not able to understand that he is dead.
    Which is why I seem to be waiting for some sign from him, some signal—a private signal—for we’ve always been so close, a single thought can pass between us, like a glance—I’m waiting for Ray to forgive me — It’s all right. What you are doing is all right and not a mistake.
    And even if it was a mistake , I love you.
    Just yesterday I was able to cry. In this room at