Her voice is low. Not unkind. The kind of voice that has been trained on a lot of people who were not calm.
I try to answer and my throat gives me nothing. I cough instead. The cough rakes up through my chest and I know at once that I have been breathing smoke for an hour and my lungs remember it. I turn my head and cough into the pillow. The woman in the chair doesn't move to help me. She waits. When I am done she leans forward and picks up a glass of water from the nightstand and holds it out.
"Small sips."
I sit up on one elbow. My left hand goes to take the glass and the pain in my palm stops me. I look down. A strip of white gauze is taped across the outside of my left hand from thumb to wrist. There is a small brown stain at the center of it. I remember the window. I remember hitting the window. I remember the shape at the treeline.
I take the glass with my right hand.
The water is cold. It hurts going down. I take two sips and hand it back.
"More in a minute," she says.
She puts the glass back on the nightstand. She sits back in the chair. She has the stillness of somebody who has spent a lot of her life in rooms where moving is the wrong thing to do. I recognize the stillness because I have my own version of it.
"Where am I?”
My voice comes out nearly whole. It sounds like somebody else's voice. A woman who has been smoking for twenty years.
“A cabin," she says. "Forty miles northwest of the city. In the hills."
"Whose cabin?”
"Mine." She pauses. "I'm Max Hale. I'm a firefighter. I'm off duty tonight. I saw the fire on my way home."
I look at her.
I have spent eleven years reading men at dinner tables. Eleven years of watching for the beat between the question and the answer. The beat where the lie lives. I watch her and there is no beat. She says she saw the fire and she looks at me and she does not look away. I cannot find the lie in her face. That is either because there is no lie or because she is very good, and I am not going to know which it is this morning.
"My husband," I say.
She shakes her head. Once. Not theatrical. A clean no.
"I got you out," she says. "I couldn't get to the east wing."
The east wing. Where Daniel was. Where Daniel has been sleeping since Tuesday, in the suite with the brass door and the decanter on the sideboard and the reading lamp he never turned off. The east wing that I saw glowing through the transom of the front door, orange all the way down the hallway. The fire went through the east wing first.
I wait for the grief.
I wait for it the way you wait for a contraction, with the understanding that it is going to come and that it is going to be large. I have been married to Daniel for eleven years. I have lived in his rooms and sat at his table and worn the pearls he put around my neck on the first anniversary and the diamonds he put on my wrist on the fifth. I have been the woman in his photographs at charity events. I have been the woman at the head of his Thursday dinners. The grief is supposed to be a big animal coming up out of the dark.
It doesn't come.
There is a small flat gray space where the grief is supposed to be. In the flat gray space I can feel my own pulse and the pillow under my cheek and the wool of the quilt and the water cold at the back of my throat. I can feel that my husband is dead and I can feel that I have slept better in the last two hours than I have slept in three years, and both of those facts are in the gray space at the same time, and the gray space does not get any bigger.
"I'm sorry," Max says.
"Thank you."
The word is automatic. It comes out the way thank-you comes out at the end of a benefit dinner, and I hear it leave my mouth and I know that it is not the right word for this room, and I don't have a right word yet, and Max does not push me to find one.
"You can sleep more," she says. "You breathed a lot of smoke."
"Did I have anything on me? When you brought me in."
"A nightgown. A wool throw." She tilts her head toward the foot of the bed. "The throw's on the chair. The nightgown's in the bathroom. I rinsed it. There's blood on the hem. I didn't know if you'd want me to throw it out."
"Keep it, please."
