Soon, she felt sure of her husband. She knew his dark face and the extent of his passion. She'd scream at him, as if it mattered. As if anything mattered, although they both knew it was not the case. She could tell, by the shadow of his eyes that this time, it was for real.
'What have you done, Ray?' she whispered, but to herself, as she cleaned up the mess in the kitchen.
After she'd put away the bits of food and the broken pieces of plate – her mother's plates, the ones they got at the wedding – she went to look for her husband.
She found him sitting in the back yard. Well, crouching would be more accurate. He huddled in the grass, rocking back and forth, like a big child and wheezing.
Lorie thought it was the high-pitched whine he let out that scared her the most.
'You have to talk to me, Ray,' she said, sitting down beside him. She didn't try to comfort him, she didn't even try to touch him. Ray didn't work that way and when the shit hit the fan, he preferred to be on his own.
That's the way I'm gonna be, for better or worse, so I better get used to it, he'd say. And Lorie never minded this, although maybe she should have.
She just remembered being so in love with Ray, with the sex and the arms and the chocolate and the wine...She didn't know where it all went.
And now, it didn't matter. The graying man in the grass nodded at his wife, but looked in the opposite direction.
'The doctor said I've got a month.'
Let your house do the dirty work.
He was mumbling the words, over and over, like some lost man's prayer. He sat on the couch, in his knitted slippers that didn't slip on the floor. Lorie watched her husband and thought, as she did more and more lately, of the good old days. Funny, she'd sworn she'd never be that kind of person, but it seemed she couldn't hold her promise.
But the fact was that if she thought about the present, she'd probably slit her wrists. He wouldn't know. He didn't know much of anything lately. Half the time, he didn't even know who she was.
And it was all a bit too much for Lorie – how this had happened, how their life had turned shitty side up in a matter of days and how her strong, independent husband had been reduced to this blabbering idiot. She bit her lip at the thought. How could she think of him this way, when it wasn't poor Ray's fault.
She had to.
That was it, she had to. Because if she did not, she'd have to admit to herself that maybe somewhere deep down inside, her husband, her happy, headstrong, clever, normal husband still existed. Maybe he looked out at her, through the eyes of this...this creature and screamed. And she couldn't think that. She couldn't live with such a sentence.
The truth was she blamed herself, that was another truth she didn't like to think about. But she'd known. She'd felt it, even before that day in the yard, when he told her that the doctors didn't even have a name for this disease. How can that happen, she thought, how can they not have a name for something. They know. They should know.
But nobody knew what was eating away at her husband's brains.
Helping Charlene to prepare some of the meal took her mind of it. Charlene was the...well, not the maid, exactly. The woman who came to check on him and to help care for him. What was she called? Lorie was sure there was a word for it. The woman...the...
Carer.
Fuck. The carer,the nurse. She was afraid, she was so afraid. Because if they didn't know what it was...they couldn't know if it was contagious either. She let out a gasp, as she peeled the onions and Charlene touched her elbow.
She would've liked to reassure this woman that life would be fine, that she would eventually get over her husband's imminent death.
Only they didn't call it that. They called it passing. Over her husband's passing.
But she couldn't. Nobody could.
Lorie sat out in the ill-fated yard, biting her sandwich as she watched Ray watch the trees.
He didn't say much nowadays, he just sat and stared, which only strengthened her fear that somewhere, the sane Ray still existed.
'Ray...' she tried.
Her husband turned to face her and stared, for once, at her. And Lorie felt like she had in the old days, when they were first seeing each other, she felt a piercing shot to the heart, like his eyes went straight on down.
He shook his head.
'They're coming for you, too, Lorie.'
She felt so frightened, as if a chill had suddenly come down and engulfed them. And then, he smiled, from ear to ear, and winked, like he used to.
Lorie couldn't speak. She just looked at her husband and wept. For the first time since she'd learned of his nameless, bastard disease, she allowed herself to cry for her husband.
Ray looked out across the landscape and whispered, 'let your house do the dirty work...'.
