A Stranger's House by Bret Lott Page B

what I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
    We made it to the emergency room. He jerked the van to a halt, jumped out and came around to the van door, had it pulled open and slammed in place before Sandra had gotten out of her seat.
    He looked at me as I eased out of the van, scooting across the floor while Will, squatting next to me, still held my hand tight. Mr. Gadsen looked at me, started to reach out to help me, but drew back against the van, whispering, “I’m sorry,” once more. My right arm around Sandra’s shoulder, the other hand still held by Will, the three of us wobbled toward the building. The doors shot open, but I hesitated, looked over my shoulder back at Mr. Gadsen. He was still leaned up against his van, his head down. He rubbed his eyes, slowly shook his head.
    Then came the stitches, and the shots.
    Tom came into the bedroom. He was already dressed, and sat on the edge of the bed. He said, “How’d you sleep?”
    â€œDid I scream?” I asked. “I mean, did you hear anything?”
    He looked puzzled, said, “No.” He moved his hand to my face, ran his fingers back through my hair. “Did you have bad dreams?”
    I could still feel the hard knot in my stomach, could still feel my hands shaking, but I lied. “No,” I said. “Not at all. Just sleep.” I looked away from him. There was, I felt, nothing I could tell him. It was only a dream, my dream, drug- and anxiety-produced sleep laced with thoughts of children we’d never had.
    â€œGood,” he said. He put his fingers to my face, and I could feel the backs of them against my cheek, the wrinkled, bony joints, the nails just touching.
    He said, “Are you up to going out? Getting out of the house and going up to Chesterfield?”
    I whispered, “Sure.” I closed my eyes, opened them. I looked out the window. The sky was the same brilliant blue as yesterday. Clear and cool. “I need to get out of here.”
    â€œFine,” he said, and leaned over and kissed the top of my head. He stood, and it seemed he had grown taller overnight, that he’d become a different, bigger man suddenly.
    He moved to leave the room, but stopped. From the corner of my eye I saw a bird fly past the window, slice through the blue. I turned to the window, but the bird was long gone. I looked back at Tom. He hesitated, then smiled. He leaned against the doorjamb, and said, “I forgot to tell you. Yesterday, Janet over in copyediting was typing in some report about a wreck on Route 9 and 47, there at the bend in Hadley.” He looked down, still smiling, and crossed his arms.
    Here was Tom again, winding up with another of his stories from work. It was something he’d started when we were dating, his telling me weird but true stories from the newspaper. He would bring me stories from his excursions around the Pioneer Valley, gossip from the office. He still did it, too, every time he thought I was down about something.
    â€œJanet got this little story about a wreck,” he went on, “and it turns out to have been her ex-husband who was in it. He’d been driving his Cavalier along 47 and hadn’t even slowed down to pull onto 9, and just slammed into some Smith girl on her way to the mall. Janet hadn’t heard anything about it.”
    I looked at him, said nothing.
    Still he smiled. “Janet’s ex only twisted his knee in the wreck, and the Smithy wasn’t hurt at all. But Janet went ahead and changed the story. She punched right into the machine that her ex had broken his neck, that the Smithy was dead, and that he’d been arrested on manslaughter charges.”
    The adrenalin was fading in me, and I couldn’t help but give a smile. Janet, whom I’d met at a Christmas party a couple of years ago, was small and nervous and talked a lot and, I knew, was still in love with her ex-husband; at the party she’d shown me his picture