Tess sat on a wooden chair beside her husband’s bed in a curtained cubicle lit only by a small square nightlight in the wall near the floor. The rest of the Intensive Care Unit was one large room with twenty or so cubicles along two walls. It was dimly lit and quiet. She could hear the rain and wind outside, the tubular wheeze of someone’s respirator a few beds down.

Chick’s shoulder and chest were wrapped in some kind of tape. His right arm and left leg were each in a cast, and the leg hung in a sling from a metal frame over the bed. His head and face were swollen terribly. Earlier in the night, his cheeks and forehead had looked as yellow as oleo, and Theresa didn’t know how long she could wait for the knowledge of what that man’s hands had done to him.

Both his doctors said it wasn’t uncommon to stay unconscious after sustaining a severed clavicle, a crushed elbow and wrist, a broken femur, and a sprained neck. And God, if all that wasn’t enough, it was the neck that worried them, the bruised handprints on each side of it, that, and Leo’s description of a blue face, of that big one not letting go. If he squeezed off the artery flow for longer than four minutes, they said, just 240 seconds, then her husband could be in a coma. They were watching for any swelling of his brain.

Chick’s good hand was swollen too. Tess held it with both of hers. It was moist and callused and frighteningly warm. Leo had told her the whole story twice, and she was glad he had tried to do something to stop those men; hearing that made it easier to see the boy appearing so healthy and untouched. The policeman said it looked like one of the men had stood over her husband and swung the bat when he was already unconscious, once down on his elbow, once down on his wrist. Then the man-Floyd Starrett, she was sure- must have stepped back to really put his weight into the last one, the one that actually cracked the long bone in Chick’s thigh.

Tess took a deep breath, and when she let it out she was crying again. Exactly a week ago she had watched Chick push that barbell over his head in the rain in the backyard on top of Spoon Hill. And there, with the sky tearing itself open with electricity, she’d let herself linger on a rumor of solitude, let herself hear the news she would bring to her children, that their father who had drifted so far away wasn’t going anywhere anymore.