Life Expectancy

Jimmy.
        Kevin's going to be busy. You don't want to make things harder for him."
        "But I've got to-"
        "I know," Carlos interrupted. "But when we get to the hospital, she'll go straight to surgery. You can't follow her there, either."
        Reluctantly, I stepped back.
        Closing the doors between her and me, closing the doors on what might be my last sight of her alive, he said, "Your dad will drive you, Jimmy. You'll be right behind us."
        As Carlos hurried forward and got in the driver's seat, Dad appeared at my side and led me out of the street, onto the sideValk.
        We passed the manger where angels, wise men, and humble beasts watched over the holy family.
        A small spotlight had burned out, leaving one of the angels in shadow.
        In the otherwise lighted tableau, this dark form with half-furled wings looked ominous, waiting.
        In the driveway of my parents' house, crystallized exhaust vapor plumed from the tailpipe of Dad's Chevy Blazer.
        Grandma Rowena had moved the SUV out of the garage and readied it for our use. She stood there, dressed for a ham dinner, coatless.
        Although she was eighty-five, she could just about break your ribs with a hug.
        Pumping the siren, Carlos swung the ambulance away from the curb. A policeman waved him through the nearby intersection.
        As the siren rapidly receded, Grandma pressed something into my right hand, kissed me, and urged me into the Blazer.
        The policeman at the intersection waved us through, and as we drove toward the hospital, I regarded my clenched right hand. The fingers were crusted with my blood and the blood of my beloved wife.
        When I opened my hand, I discovered that Grandma, who for a while had been upstairs with Mom and the kids, had retrieved from Lorrie's jewelry box the cameo pendant that I had given her when we were dating.
        The pendant was one of only three things to survive the fire that destroyed our first home. As delicate as it was, it should have been lost. The gold chain and the gold-plated mounting should have melted.
        The carved white soapstone cameo of a woman in profile should have cracked, blackened.
        The only damage, however, was a slight discoloration of a few locks of the woman's soapstone hair. Her features were as finely engraved as ever they had been.
        Some things aren't as fragile as they appear.
        I closed my bloodstained hand around the pendant, clutching it so tightly that, by the time we reached the hospital, my palm ached as if a nail had been driven through it.
        Lorrie was already in surgery.
        A nurse insisted on taking me to the ER. The bullet Beezo had fired at me in the living room had ripped the cartilage of my right ear. She cleaned the ear and flushed the clotted blood out of the eustachian tube. I refused to submit to anything more than a local anesthetic while a young doctor stitched me up as best he could.
        For the rest of my life, that ear would give me the look of a battered boxer who had spent too many years in the ring.
        As we were not permitted to stand watch in the hallway outside the operating room where they had taken Lorrie, and as she would be transferred to intensive care when the surgeon had finished, Dad and I waited in the I.C.U lounge.
        The lounge was cheerless. That suited me fine. I didn't want to be coddled by bright colors, soft chairs, and inspiring art.
        I wanted to hurt.
        Crazily, I worried that if a numbness of mind or heart or body overcame me, if I admitted any kind or degree of exhaustion, Lorrie would die. I felt that only by the sharpness of my wretched anguish could I keep God's attention and be sure that He heard my petitions.
        Yet I must not cry, because to cry would be to acknowledge that I expected the worst. By such an acknowledgment, I would be inviting Death to take what he wanted.
        For a while that night, I had more superstitious rules than those obsessive-compulsives whose daily lives are governed by elaborate domestic rituals and codes of conduct devised with the intention of magically warding off bad fortune.
        For a while Dad and I shared the I.C.U lounge with other haunted people. Then we were alone.
        Lorrie had been admitted at 8:12. At half past nine, Dr. Wayne Cornell, the surgeon tending to her, sent a nurse to speak with us.
        First,