19.

SHE DROPPED HER KEYS in their usual spot on the table beneath the coatrack. Sunlight seeping through the transom over the front door lit up the darkly paneled foyer, and white specks of dust moved in the bright light as she took off her coat and hung it on a peg.

“I kept calling out, Gilly, honey?” she tells the woman doctor. “I’m home. Is Sweetie with you? Sweetie? Where’s Sweetie? Now you know if you have Sweetie in the bed loving up on him, and I know you are, he’s going to come to expect it. And a little ol’ basset hound with his little short legs can’t be getting up and down off that bed by himself.”

She walked into the kitchen and set several plastic bags on the table. While she was out, she stopped at the grocery store, figuring she may as well while she was right there at the shopping center on West Cary Street. She took two cans of chicken broth out of a bag and set them near the stove. Opening the freezer, she took out a package of chicken thighs and set it in the sink to thaw. The house was quiet. She could hear the wall clock tick-tock in the kitchen, a monotonous, chronic tick-tock she usually did not notice because she had too much else to notice.

In a drawer she found a spoon. In a cabinet she found a glass, and she filled the glass with cold tap water and carried the glass of water, the spoon, and the new bottle of cough syrup down the hallway toward Gilly’s room.

“When I got to her room,” she hears herself tell the woman doctor, “I said, Gilly? What on earth? Because what I was seeing … It didn’t make sense. Gilly? Where are your pajamas? Are you that hot? Oh Lord, where’s the thermometer? Don’t tell me your fever’s gone up again.”

Gilly on top of the bed, facedown, naked, her slender back, buttocks, and legs bare. Her silky golden hair spilled over the pillow. Her arms stretched out straight above her head on the bed. Her legs bent like frog legs.

Oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord. Without warning, her hands began to shake violently.

The patchwork quilt and sheet and blanket beneath it were pulled down and hanging off the foot of the mattress, flowing off and pooled on the floor. Sweetie wasn’t on the bed, and that got caught in her thoughts. Sweetie wasn’t under the covers, because there were no covers, not on the bed. The covers were on the floor, pulled off and on the floor, and Sweetie was caught in her thoughts, and she wasn’t startled, hardly even aware, when the bottle of cough syrup, the glass of water, and the spoon hit the floor. She wasn’t conscious of letting go of them, and then they were bouncing, splashing, rolling on the floor, water spreading over old wood planks, and she was screaming, and her hands didn’t seem to belong to her as they grabbed Gilly’s shoulders, her warm shoulders, and shook her and turned her over, and shook her and screamed.

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