Paul’s father shook his head and pulled her down the hall a few feet, motioning his wife away with his free hand. “The watchman found him on the floor in the boiler room when he made nine o’clock rounds. He was scalded bad, yeah, and he hit his head.” He stopped and looked into her eyes to gauge how she was taking the news. “You all right?”

She made a motion with her head. “How bad is he? Aunt Nellie said…”

Here the old man’s voice became low and soft. “Colette, baby, the doctor said he’s been overheated. He’s got some bad kind of heatstroke—plus his skull is fractured.” He looked at his shoes. “They say he might not last through today.” He stepped back, trembling at his own words, and she reached out to put her hand on the side of his neck. A tuft of shaving cream hung behind his earlobe and she made it disappear between a thumb and forefinger, just as she had done to Paul when they were first married. At the touch of the old man, she thought of the son lying in ICU, and how young she and Paul were.

In fifteen minutes they let her see him, but he was inert, ruddy, and swollen, his skull shaved and stippled with sutures. She was overcome with a terrible fear she couldn’t name, and she began to cry, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief as though to force the tears back in. The tubes and tape overwhelmed him; the monitors, drips, and drains kept him separate. Only his feet seemed uninjured, and she looked at them, white and tender, remembering he never went barefoot unless he was swimming.

After, she drove back to Tiger Island, ignoring the cane trucks, the drizzly road flying with mud. She stopped at the old brick church to pray, kneeling in the sweet waxy light until Altar Society ladies began to appear like ghosts, changing the flowers, dusting the pulpit.

At home she relieved Aunt Nellie and put her father down for a nap. Every hour Paul’s mother called, saying there was no change, and around eleven o’clock she picked up the phone after the first ring and said, “Hello, Mrs. Thibodeaux,” only to be met by a male voice with a Cajun accent she recognized.

“No, baby. This is Lester St. Pierre.”

She put a hand on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

There was a long silence on the line. The sheriff was sometimes slow to speak, a careful thinker. “We down here at the factory, trying to figure out what happened to Paul, you know?”

She sat down slowly next to the old phone table in the hall. The sheriff was crooked, of course, but he was not dumb. “It was a terrible accident. I don’t know what to think.”

“When did you see Paul last?”