FOR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES as she finishes her bath, Dwight’s deep regular breathing is the only sound coming from the next room. Not even the drain’s centrifugal rant manages to interrupt his descent into the depths of a calmer place where, for minutes or hours, he might hope to inhabit someone who is not himself. Almost like old times.
She stands in the bathroom rubbing moisturizer on her body—everywhere but on her breasts, which, just these past few days, she’s turned superstitious about touching. She puts on her robe and turbans her hair with a towel. On the robe are forget-me-nots, season-less and charming, giving the impression, in a certain light, if one rules out a host of other factors, that she is every age she’s ever been.
Escaping the mirror, she walks into the next room.
He’s rolled onto his side, toward the middle of the bed. On the pillow by his chin there’s a liver-colored patch of dried blood and a larger absorbed blot of darkened cotton where he’s drooled in his sleep. His bottom lip looks swollen and painful.
She stands watching him. To see him sleeping on this bed again is to see a part of herself that’s never quite woken up. A wave of feeling for that young woman moves her. A part of her is animal, too; neither of them is static. Under his eyelids and rough stubbled cheeks now, the pale, surprisingly hairless skin at his wrists, the powerful twitching shoulders, Pyrrhic battles are still being fought: even in repose, his muscles quiver and rage at invisible enemies, who will never be beaten.
The difference, she is starting to believe despite her instincts, is that he’s finally learning to live with his hands gripping only his own throat. The only person he dreams of hurting now is himself.
With delicate, almost loving concentration, she unlaces his shoes and pulls them off. She covers him from the waist down with the quilt sewn in the Crown of Thorns pattern that’s come down from her mother’s mother. Like a baby blanket obsessively clutched for too many years, it has turned ragged at the edges and is slowly disintegrating. She covers him with it anyway. And then she turns off the lights and leaves him to sleep in the once familiar darkness.