The Whispers

The Whispers - Part 2

And then there was more light. But this light was milky, diffuse, more like a slow dawning. She opened her eyes and had to close them immediately. The brightness was so hot and white that it hurt. There was a low murmuring, as if someone were reading softly from a book. What was Alfie doing? Reading to one of the girls? No, that wasn't right. It was morning, and neither of the girls had let them read aloud since the third grade.

She forced her eyes open. Strange to see her father-in-law, Gus, sitting there in the too-white room. He looked so much like Alfie. Not as big, not as handsome, but that same sweetness and laughter dancing behind impossible periwinkle eyes. He had a thick leather volume opened in his lap and he was reading. Oh, wow. He was reading from the Bible. She was dreaming. What a strange dream.

And then the pain-her neck, her back, her head. Her throat. Oh, God, what was in her throat, her nose? And then the sounds of the machines all around her, a measured beeping and whirring, growing urgent. She tried to move, but she couldn't. A strangled noise escaped her. She saw Gus startle.

"Eloise," said her father-in-law. He was looking at her, eyes wide. He stood, the book dropping to the floor. "Oh, thank the good lord, Eloise."

He started weeping, dropped to his knees beside her, and took her hand.

"Thank God," he said. "Thank you, God."

Then he got up and dashed away from her. Don't go! she wanted to yell but couldn't. Her body wasn't working, wasn't following the commands from her brain. Don't leave me here! Where am I? What's happened? Panic rushed up hard and fast, and was a weight on her chest, a bag over her head. She couldn't breathe.

"Doctor! We need a doctor!" she heard Gus yelling. His voice was broken and frantic. "Somebody help us!"

And then the room was full-nurses in pink scrubs, a too-young doctor. A light shining in her eyes, hands on her body. Too much talking back and forth, loud and nonsensical. She was fading in and out, there and then not there. How long did it go on? What was happening to her?

Then a voice, stern and cutting above the others, told her to exhale, as hard as she could. She obeyed. It was like the worst fire, the deepest most uncontrollable gag, as they pulled the feeding tube from her. What a violation, to shove something hard and unyielding down a soft and tender place. The body revolts, rejects. She couldn't even cough, just gasped and wheezed while someone spoke to her in soothing tones.

Just try to relax. You're okay. It's okay now. But, of course, it wasn't okay. Not at all. She knew that; she could feel it. The world had bent and broken in two. It would never be whole again.

• • •

Slowly, over the next day, Gus reluctantly fed her bits and pieces of the enormous, indigestible tragedy that had taken Emily and Alfie from her. Following the collision with the semi, which had sideswiped the driver's side of the car, Alfie and Emily had been killed instantly. Eloise had been in a coma for six weeks while her husband and daughter were buried without her. The accident had left Amanda physically unscathed, but so deep in a state of PTSD that she hadn't spoken a word since the accident. Her younger daughter hadn't shed a tear, had barely eaten enough to keep herself alive. Gus wasn't even sure she was sleeping, since every time he looked in on his granddaughter at night, she lay as stock-still as when he'd tucked her in, with her eyes wide open. He and Alfie's mother, Ruth, were taking turns; when Gus was with Eloise, Ruth was with Amanda, and vice versa. They, too, were staggering under an unbearable burden of grief.

But who? But how?

A truck driver, high on the methamphetamines that he had taken so that he could drive his rig longer and faster to make more runs, to make more money, to buy more meth supposedly, had finally exhausted the limits of his wakefulness and fallen asleep behind the wheel of his semi. He had simply drifted into their path.