"Mark, please, tell me what you mean--"
"My girl," he breaks in. "Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. "
She winces as his grip tightens.
Us. We.
Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?
Annie can scarcely guess.
No, that isn't the truth. Not really.
The simple, inescapable truth is that she's afraid to guess.
His grip tightens.
She wishes she could see his face.
"You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, " he says.
Annie still doesn't pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him--
The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn't know the answer, but realizes now that what he's wearing isn't a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband's vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.
It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.
The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: "H2 pressure's dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!"
On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander's console, and then over to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.
Again, what she sees is not unexpected.
"Stay calm, Annie, we're on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody's making it home!" the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.
"The world spits us up and out, so where's our goddamned parachute?"
He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.
Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she's been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn't understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.