Jonah lay on the couch, head propped on a pillow he’d not recalled placing there himself. Slack, immobile, body poached in sweat. Vision swampy. Tracers of pain flared through each vein, each capillary. He opened his eyes. Slits. Saw a semblance of her face through the quavering air as she came and went, yet he felt her always present. He shut his eyes again and fought the nausea.
A cloth, cold and damp, pressed to his forehead.
His putrid hand soaked in a bucket of warm salt water.
How did she know what to do?
He drifted.
Dreamed.
Home, the sun pouring through the breakfast nook in the kitchen, the smell of bacon and eggs and coffee, daughter on his lap giving him a peck on the cheek, her arms wrapped about his neck loosely and a round pink face so full of love and innocence gazing up at him it was all he could do to leave her and set out into the world for a day of work. She was there, too, Rebecca, standing in the doorway to the hall taking them in, her husband, their daughter. Her face, too, shining. Glowing. The kitchen saturated with sunlight, growing warmer, brighter, until it blinded, caught afire and burned them all to ash.
He started awake, weeping.
A hand touched his cheek.
He took it in his and held it there.
“Sally,” he said. “Sally.”
And he was gone again.
Falling.
Endlessly.