Shepherd thought of the Tuesday night when she told him she’d given notice. They just need me to stay on till they find a replacement, she said. Another week or so. And, smiling, she’d added. You can live with that, can’t you?
As it turned out, Ginnie was the one who couldn’t live with it.
They celebrated her decision with wine and take-out meals from the best Italian restaurant in the world, just down the street. Drunk and laughing, they made love in the living room, progressing in giddy stages from the couch to the rug to the bare hardwood floor in the foyer.
And the next day Timothy Fries had visited the clinic.
Fries was a street person who had spent most of his life shuttling from one psychiatric ward to another. Doctors had variously diagnosed him as acutely psychotic, manic-depressive, paranoid, and schizophrenic. Every pharmaceutical treatment had been tried; none had achieved more than transitory success. He had periods of lucidity, then relapsed into craziness. His family had given up on him. He had no friends, no home, no job, no life.
When his path had crossed Virginia Shepherd’s, Fries had been thirty-two years old, penniless, ragged, and constantly afraid.
Ginnie did clerical work at the clinic, freeing up the staff nurses for more important duties. Part of her job was to interview incoming patients to elicit their medical histories.
On that Wednesday morning two years ago. Fries had entered, complaining of a headache. He had visited the place twice before, but always on weekends, when Ginnie wasn’t around.
Had she been familiar with his case, she would have known that his headaches were psychosomatic, a product of his belief that larval worms had crawled into his skull via his ear canal and were presently feeding on his brain.
As it was, she knew only that the man in the anteroom was emaciated and scared and in pain. She asked him the standard questions, marked down his more intelligible replies.
He was mentally ill — this much was evident from his scattershot thought processes and muted affect — but she didn’t judge him to be either paranoid or dangerous.
And so she made an error, a small error, hardly important.
She turned away from him to put her clipboard in the out basket. That was all.
In that moment Timothy Fries lunged at her, and she felt something sharp and hot burst through the bunched muscles at the base of her spine, and there was a rush of numbness in her legs, a dizzy collapse, an impression of chaos as nurses and doctors filled the anteroom and dragged the shrieking man away.
He had found a knife, a rusty treasure scavenged from the trash, and had concealed it under his coat when he entered the clinic. Apparently he’d become convinced that the clinic itself was responsible for the worms in his brain, and he was determined to take revenge.
Anyone who worked there could have been his target. Ginnie just happened to be convenient.
The blade had severed her spinal cord but hadn’t killed her. She lingered in the hospital for two weeks.
During that time Shepherd left her room only once a day, for an hour, to go home, shower, shave, and change his clothes.
The doctors did what they could. They injected Ginnie with massive doses of methylprednisolone to minimize the swelling that could choke the blood vessels near her spine. They gave her morphine when her legs spasmed. They ordered soft-tissue massages to prevent the loss of muscle tone in her legs, and antibiotics to ward off infection.
Even so, after ten days they knew enough to tell Roy Shepherd that his wife was unlikely ever to walk again. Having suffered a complete transection of her spinal cord, she had neither feeling nor voluntary movement below the waist.
Shepherd remembered the blank stretch of time that followed his conversation with the doctors. Numb, disoriented, he walked blindly out of the hospital and stood on a walkway near a stand of palo verde trees. He blinked at the sun. He tried to think.
Then he saw a hummingbird alight briefly on a green branch before launching itself in hectic motion.
It flew so fast, with such ease, darting from bush to bush in search of nectar, wings strobing in the sun.
Ginnie had been like that once. Always moving, a blur of energy and purpose. Shepherd had loved that quality in her. He recalled walking with her in Reid Park when she abruptly challenged him to a race and started running, her legs swallowing distance in long strides, and her dark hair billowing behind her.
Shepherd had caught up with her and won, but what he recalled more vividly than the race itself was the electric charge that shivered through him when he saw her spring into action, this lithe creature who was all speed and air and laughter.
He thought of this, watching the hummingbird until it had darted away into a blue haze of distance and he was alone.
Then he went back inside the hospital to tell Ginnie the news. He said it gently, of course, but the truth was sharp-edged, and it could not be softened. When he was done speaking, he held his wife’s hand. Ginnie was silent for a moment, and then she said she wasn’t really surprised.
It looks like I’ll be spending more time in front of that computer than I’d counted on, she added, and incredibly she managed a brief, wan smile.
The smile told Shepherd that things would be all right. His wife’s spirit was intact, even if her body was not. She would recover.
That night, at Ginnie’s urging, he went home to sleep in his own bed. He was exhausted. He’d had perhaps twenty hours’ rest in ten days.
Yet he woke in the middle of the night, his heart racing, a headache inflaming his skull.
And he knew.
Something was wrong.
He threw on his clothes and drove to the hospital. When he got there at 4 A.M., he found a team of doctors and nurses engaged in a frantic rescue operation in Virginia Shepherd’s room.
Later he learned that she had suffered a condition called autonomic dysreflexia, common in cases of spinal cord injury. Despite the antibiotics, her urinary tract had become infected; because she had no sensation in the lower portion of her body, there had been no burning discomfort to serve as a warning of the problem.
Thirty minutes before Shepherd’s arrival, at perhaps the exact moment when he had awakened with a premonition and a pounding migraine, Ginnie’s blood pressure had spiked, stopping her heart, and her cardiac monitor had triggered an alarm at the nurses’ station.
Epinephrine and defibrillators were used to restart her heart, but her blood pressure continued to climb, and again she went into cardiac arrest.
The second time she could not be revived.
At 4:45, Shepherd was informed that his wife had died.
He stood in the hallway, trying to take in this news that was at once so simple and so impossibly complicated.
Did she feel anything? he asked the doctor finally. I mean… any pain?
The doctor said a sudden, severe headache was normally the only symptom the patient reported.
Shepherd nodded. His own headache, which had blinded him with pain for more than an hour, had gone away at 4:33 precisely.
It was the exact moment when Ginnie had gone away too.
He lived alone now, in the modest brick house in the cul-de-sac off Fort Lowell Road. His friends advised him to sell the place, put the memories behind him, but he wanted those memories, painful though they were.
He had changed nothing in the den where she worked. The computer was still there, untouched in two years. Sometimes he stood in the doorway of the small, untidy room stacked with books and paperwork, and he imagined that he saw her sitting at the keyboard, perhaps in a wheelchair, perhaps not.