From the Corner of His Eye

unable to speak. Her mouth shaped words, but her voice deserted her.
        Halted by the unmistakable meaning of the expressions on these women's faces, Paul was grateful that Nellie was briefly stricken mute. He didn't believe he had the strength to receive the news that she had tried to deliver.
        The blessing of Nellie's silence lasted only until Hanna, cursed with speech if not with sufficient strength to stand, said, "We tried to reach you, Mr. Damascus, but you'd already left the pharmacy."
        The pair of sliding doors at the living-room archway stood half open. Beyond, voices drew Paul against his will.
        Spacious, the living room was furnished for two purposes: as a parlor in which to receive visiting friends, but also with two beds, because here Paul and Perri slept every night.
        Jeff Dooley, a paramedic, stood just inside the sliding doors.
        He gripped Paul fiercely by the shoulder and then urged him forward.
        To Perri's bed, a journey of only a few steps, but farther than unwanted Rome. The carpet seeming to pull at his feet, to suck like mud under his shoes. The air as thick as liquid in his resistant to his progress.
        At the bedside, Joshua Nunn, friend and physician, looked up as Paul approached. He rose as though under a yoke of iron.
        The head of the hospital bed was elevated, and Perri lay on her back. Her eyes-were closed.
        In the crisis, the rack holding her oxygen bottle had been rolled to the bed. The breathing mask lay on the pillow beside her.
        She rarely needed the oxygen. Today, needed, it hadn't helped.
        The chest respirator, which Joshua had evidently applied, lay discarded on the bedclothes beside her. She seldom required this apparatus to assist her breathing, and then only at night.
        During the first year of her illness, she had been slowly weaned off an iron lung. Until she was seventeen, she required the chest respirator, but gradually gained the strength to breathe unassisted.
        "It was her heart," said Joshua Nunn.
        She always had a generous heart. After disease whittled Perri's flesh, leaving her so frail, her great heart, undiminished by her suffering, seemed bigger than the body that contained it.
        Polio, largely an affliction of younger children, had stricken her two weeks before her fifteenth birthday. Thirty years ago.
        Ministering to Perri, Joshua had pulled back her blankets. The fabric of the pale yellow pajama pants couldn't disguise how terribly withered her legs were: two sticks.
        Her case of polio had been so severe that braces and crutches were never an option. Muscle rehabilitation had been ineffective.
        The sleeves of the pajama top were pushed up, revealing more of the disease's vicious work. The muscles of her useless left arm had atrophied; the once graceful hand curled in upon itself, as though holding an invisible object, perhaps the hope she never abandoned.
        Because she'd enjoyed some limited use of her right arm, it was less wasted than her left, although not normal. Paul pulled down that sleeve of her pajamas.
        He gently drew the covers over his wife's ruined body, to her thin shoulders, but arranged her right arm on top of the blankets. He straightened and smoothed the folded-back flap of the top sheet.
        The disease hadn't corrupted her heart, and it had left her face untouched, as well. Lovely, she was, as she had always been.
        He sat on the edge of the bed and held her right hand. She had passed away such a short time ago that her skin was still warm.
        Without a word, Joshua Nunn and the paramedic retreated to the foyer. The parlor doors slid shut.
        So many years together and yet such a short time…
        Paul couldn't remember when he began to love her. Not at first sight. But before she contracted polio. Love came gradually, and by the time it flowered, its roots were deep.
        He could recall clearly when he had known that he would marry her: during his first year of college, when he'd returned home for the Christmas break. Away at school, he had missed her every day, and the moment that he saw her again, an abiding tension left him, and he felt at peace for the first time in months.
        She lived with her parents then. They had converted the dining room to a bedroom for her.
        When Paul arrived with a Christmas gift, Perri was abed, wearing