Life Expectancy

keyed in 911 and endured two rings, each eternal.
        When the police operator answered before the third ring, she was a woman I knew, Denise Deerborn. We had dated twice. We liked each other well enough not to waste each other's time on a third date.
        I spoke urgently, voice raw and trembling: "Denise, this is Jimmy Tock, my wife's been shot, Lorrie, she's been shot bad, we need an ambulance, please, now, please Aware that our address had appeared on the computer in front of Denise the moment that the connection had been made, I wasted no more time with her, dropped the receiver, letting it dangle on its cord and bang against the cabinetry.
        I knelt at Lorrie's side, in her spreading blood. Beauty this perfect and this pale usually could be found only in sculpture, on marble monuments.
        She appeared to have been shot in the abdomen.
        Her eyes were closed. No movement under the lids.
        Pressing fingertips to her throat, I felt and felt, and feared the worst, then found a pulse-rapid and weak, but a pulse.
        A sob exploded from me, and another, until I realized that even though unconscious, she might hear me and be frightened by my grief. For her sake, I controlled myself, and although my chest heaved with sobs unexpressed, I let out only the ragged sound of my panicked breathing.
        Although she seemed to be unconscious, her respiration was rapid, shallow. I touched her face, her arm. Her skin felt cold and clammy.
        Shock.
        My shock was emotional, to the mind and heart, but she suffered physiological shock from the violence of the trauma and the loss of blood. If her wounds didn't kill her, shock might.
        She was lying flat on her back, an ideal position for treatment.
        After folding a dish towel, I eased it under her head merely to cushion her. Only her feet should be raised.
        I pulled cookbooks from nearby shelves, made a pallet of them, and carefully elevated her feet about ten inches.
        Combined with plummeting blood pressure, heat loss could prove deadly in her condition. I needed blankets but dared not leave her side long enough to sprint upstairs and get them.
        If she died, I would not let her die alone.
        The adjacent laundry served also as a mud room. I plucked winter coats from wall pegs.
        Again in the kitchen, I blanketed her with coats. My coat and hers.
        Annie's, Lucy's, Andy's coats.
        Lying beside her, heedless of the blood, I pressed my body against hers for what warmth I might provide.
        As a siren rose in the distance, I felt her throat. Her pulse wasn't any stronger than before, but I assured myself that it wasn't any weaker, either-and knew that I lied.
        I spoke into the delicate shell of her ear, hoping that she would hold fast to my voice, that my words would tether her to this world. I said things I can't remember, assurances and encouragements; but soon I had been reduced to three words, the greatest truth I knew, repeated with urgency and passion: "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you…"
        My father urged the worried neighbors to move back, off the front-porch steps, off the walkway, onto the lawn among the Christmas figures.
        Immediately behind Dad came two paramedics, wheeling Lorrie out of the house on a gurney. She lay unconscious beneath a wool blanket, receiving plasma through an IV drip.
        I moved at her side, holding high the bottle of plasma. The paramedics preferred the assistance of a police officer, but I trusted only myself with the task.
        They had to lift the gurney down the steps. The wheels met the walkway with a clatter, rolled squeakily toward the street.
        My mother was upstairs in the girls' room with all three kids, comforting them and making sure they didn't look out a window.
        Half a dozen police vehicles angled along the street, engines idling, their arrays of emergency beacons painting the snow-crusted trees and the surrounding houses red, blue, red, blue. The ambulance waited curbside, behind the Mercury Mountaineer in which Konrad Beezo had arrived.
        Kevin Tolliver, the paramedic who would treat Lorrie en route to the hospital, took the bottle of plasma from me and climbed into the back of the ambulance as his partner, Carlos Nunez, shoved the gurney into the vehicle.
        When I started to climb inside, Carlos stopped me. "No room,