The 100 Year Miracle by Ashley Ream

Author:Ashley Ream
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781250088024
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

22.

Harry had lost thirty pounds or more since he had gotten sick, but a grown man who had lost thirty pounds was still a grown man. It had taken everything Tilda had to keep them both upright going down the stairs. They had taken a lot of breaks, and there was one point when she was afraid she was going to lose her balance and send them both ass over tea kettle. But there they were.

She’d gotten Harry down to the second floor. He needed to use the bathroom, but he had yet to install any grab bars, which was something else Tilda added to her to-do list. His pride allowed only so much, so Tilda left him there, holding on to the countertop while she went to fetch his cane. It took him a while, but he managed to get himself over to the toilet, down, and back up again. Or at least he told her he did. She stood outside in the hallway on the other side of the shut door.

He let her help him into bed and to remove his khaki pants and cardigan sweater, shoes, and socks. He kept his boxers and his T-shirt on. His right foot was turned in, and his calf and thigh muscle on that side were already shrinking from disuse. His skin, unable to cope with the rapid change and too old to be very elastic anyway, hung a bit around his ruined parts. His bicep, too, was nearly gone, not any bigger than his forearm. His right hand was like his right foot, no longer in the shape it should have been.

Tilda thought she’d want to turn away from these things, that it would be painful to see her former husband like that—ruined, disabled, deformed. But it didn’t bother her, at least not in that way. Seeing the wounds on his body rather than just hearing about the causes of them in his nervous system made Harry seem vulnerable to her. You didn’t blame a wounded bird for pecking at you when you tried to help it.

Tilda covered him with a blanket and turned out the light. In the corner of his room was a wooden chair. It had one of those seat cushions that tie with little bows in back, which was not the sort of thing she would like, but just then she was grateful for it. Her body had been through enough that night. A little cushion was what she needed.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” he asked.

It was dark enough that Tilda couldn’t really see him, only the lumpy black outline of him and the bed, just slightly darker than everything around it. He did not want her to call Dr. Woo, and she had not. But she wasn’t at all confident in that decision. She needed to see how things would go, at least for a little while, before she could close her eyes. Heaven forbid something worse than a fall happened while she was asleep.

“I will in a little bit,” she said.

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