The humming advanced on her again, became a deep-throated roar. The room became a dark-blue pinwheel, spinning madly, rapidly darkening around its edges as it spun.
“We’ll fool them, Vern, we’ll go together,” she thought hazily. The darkness had reached the center of the pinwheel now; only a pinpoint of blue remained at its exact core. Glass tinkled somewhere far off, but that had nothing to do with her.
The pinpoint of blue went out and there was nothing.
She was very thirsty and she kept drinking air. Such delicious air. It poured down her and she couldn’t get enough of it. She couldn’t see anything. She was inside a big tent, something like that anyway, but she could hear a murmur of voices. Then there was a blinding flash of light and the delicious flow of air stopped for a minute. Then the kindly darkness returned, the flow of air resumed.
“She’s coming up. She’ll be all right.”
“Wonderful, isn’t it? You’d think just a whiff of it, anyone in her condition—”
The flash of light repeated itself. Then again, and again, faster and faster all the time, like a flickering movie film, and suddenly it stayed on permanently, there was no more darkness, and her eyes were open.
She was violently sick and, although she thought that was a bad thing, the faces all around her looked on encouragingly and nodded, as though it were a very good thing.
“She’s O.K. now. Nothing more to worry about.”
“How’re the other two?” someone called inside to another room.
“The wife’s O.K.,” the voice of somebody unseen answered. “The husband’s gone.”
They picked her up — she must have been on a stretcher — and started to carry her out. Just before they left the room with her, a desolate screaming started up somewhere within the house. “No, no, don’t stop! Bring him back! You must! Oh, why couldn’t it have been me instead? Why did it have to be him?”
They carried Janet Miller out and put her into the back of an automobile, and she didn’t hear any more of the screaming.
A pallid, mournful figure came into the room with the nurse. It was hard to recognize Vera in the widow’s weeds. This was two days later.
“You’re going home now, dear,” the nurse told Janet Miller cheerfully. “Here’s your daughter-in-law come to take you back with her.”
Janet Miller blinked her eyes. No, no, no. It was no use. They didn’t know the old code she and Vern had had.
“Can you manage it?” the nurse asked Vera.
“I have a friend waiting downstairs with a car. If you’ll just have somebody wheel the chair down for me, we can take her right in it with us.”
She was taken down in an elevator, still blinking futilely, rolled out to the hospital driveway by the orderly, and a man got out of a sedan waiting there. So now she saw her son’s other murderer for the first time.
He was taller than Vern had been and better-looking, much better-looking, but his face was weaker, didn’t have as much character in it — the kind that the Veras of this world go to hell for.
He and the orderly lifted her out of the chair and got her onto the front seat of the car. Then the chair was fastened to the outside, in back. It was too bulky to go inside the car.
Vera got in next to her — she was between the two of them now — and they drove away from the hospital. She hadn’t been kept there all this time because of the gas, of course, but simply so she could be cared for properly during the first, acute stages of Vera’s “grief.”
“That cost plenty!” Vera said explosively as the hospital receded behind them.
“It looked good though, didn’t it?” he argued. “Anyway, what the hell. We’ve got plenty of it now, haven’t we?”
“All right, but why waste it on her? What’re we going to do, have her hanging around our necks like a millstone from now on?”
The shoulders of both of them were pressed against hers, one on each side, yet they spoke back and forth as though she were five miles away, without pity for her helplessness.
“She’s our immunity. How many times do I have to tell you that? So long as she stays with us, under the same roof, looked after by us, there won’t be a whisper raised. We gotta have her around — for a while anyway.”
Vera flipped back her widow’s veil, put a cigarette in her mouth. “I’ll have time for just one before we get up to our own neighborhood. Gee, I’ll be glad when this sob-act is over!”
She threw the cigarette out of the car, lowered the veil again, as they turned down the street that led to the house that had belonged to Janet Miller’s son. A residue of smoke came through the mesh of the veil, made her look like the monster she was.
Vera went in first, head bowed in case the neighbors were looking. He carried Janet in his arms, came back for the chair and took that in afterwards.
“Now come on, clear out,” Vera said to him as soon as Janet had been installed in it. “You can’t begin to hang around here yet; they may be watching.”
“Let me get a pick-up, at least,” he growled aggrievedly. “What’s the idea of the bum’s rush?” He downed two fingers of Vern’s brandy with a single streamlined motion, from decanter to tumbler to mouth.
“I thought you were the one wanted to be careful. We gotta take it easy.”
She came back into the room again after she’d sped him on his way, slung off her widow’s hat and veil. She found Janet’s eyes fastened on her remorselessly, like two bright stones.
She helped herself to a drink like he had, a little jerkily, not quite so streamlined. “Now I’m going to tell you one thing,” she flared out at her unexpectedly. “If you want to stay out of trouble, keep those eyes of yours off me. Quit staring at me all the time! I know what you’re thinking. You may as well forget it; it won’t do you any good!”
His visits increased in number and lengthened in duration each time until, about three weeks after they’d brought her back from the hospital, they were married. They didn’t announce it, of course, but Janet Miller heard them talking about it when they came home one day, and he didn’t leave the house again from then on. He just moved in with them, so she knew what it meant. She found out what his name was then, too, for the first time. Haggard, Jimmy Haggard. Murderer of Vernon Miller.
The community at large would probably think it was one of those “whirlwind” courtships. Young widow alone in world turns to only person who has shown her sympathy in her distress — very natural. Its haste might shock them, but then after all, another three or four weeks would elapse before it could be definitely confirmed, and by then it would seem that much less abrupt.
Janet Miller lived in a state of suspended animation for a while, a trancelike condition between being dead and alive. She undoubtedly drew breath and imbibed nourishment, so technically she was alive, but little more than that could be said for her. Not only the voice was gone now, but the other two primaries had gone with it — the sun and the blue sky. None of the three would ever return again. And so she would surely have died within a month or two at the most, for sheer lack of will to live, when slowly but surely a spark ignited, a new vital force began to glow sullenly, taking the place of the three that had vanished. Revenge.
From a spark it became a flame, from a flame an all-consuming conflagration. She was more alive now than she had ever been since her disabling catastrophe had overtaken her. Fiercely it burned, by day, by night. It needed no replenishment, no renewal. Time meant nothing to it. Hours meant nothing, days meant nothing, years meant nothing. She would wait. She would live to be a hundred, if need be, but she would wreak her retribution on this pair before she went. Surely, inescapably. Someday, somehow.