Page 99 of Power Play

It was the first outright lie I’d told him since August. It seemed to sail right past him, and I was left holding a towel, disappointed, which made no sense at all.

He drank a glass of water at the sink with his back to me. I wanted to put my face between his shoulder blades and stay there, fever and all.

He set the glass down. “Delaney. Anything you want to tell me?”

“No,” I said.

He turned around and leaned on the counter and watched me. He’d opened the door for me, plainly, and all I had to do was walk through it and say I think I’m sick.

“I’m going to turn in early,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t believe me, and he let me leave the kitchen anyway.

Sunday started badly and got worse, and the worst part happened on the kitchen floor. I lost most of the morning to a stretch where Iris watched cartoons and I sat with my eyes closed and my hand on her back, which I was calling supervision.

Then I was in the kitchen holding the tap, and a cupboard door was four inches from my face and I couldn’t work out how my face had gotten there. I got down carefully, one hand on the counter, and landed against the dishwasher with a glass I’d apparently filled in the other. The tile was wonderfully cold through my leggings.

Then the garage door rolled up.

He rounded the kitchen doorway with his backpack still on one shoulder and stopped short with his mouth open.

“Hi,” I said.

He didn’t set the backpack down. He dropped it, and the buckles clattered on the tile. Then he was crouched in front of me, his hand on the side of my neck and then wide across my forehead, cool and dry and enormous. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“I’m fine. I sat down.”

“Yep.”

“It’s Sunday. The recycling⁠—”

“Give me the glass.”

“I’m fine, I just⁠—”

“Delaney.” He put his other hand over mine around the glass, and his voice didn’t rise at all. “Give me the glass.”

I gave him the glass. I fought him on none of the rest of it.

He got an arm under my knees and one behind my back and stood up with every pound of a grown woman in his arms, and didn’t shift his feet once. I said his name, one time, with an objection buried in it. He said, “I know,” and kept walking. Even burning up, I thought about the last time he’d picked me up, and where he’d put me down.

He carried me through the short side hall off the kitchen and put me in my own bed instead of his. His was at the end of his own hall, on the other side of the house, and I’d been in it on Tuesday, but he brought me to the casita, to my own quilt and the cat who’d claimed my pillow, because a woman who was ill wanted her own room. He’d worked it out for himself and never remarked on it.

He took my shoes off, put the wastebasket beside the bed, a can of ginger ale and the medicine syringe on the nightstand, and an envelope against the lamp for the dose times. He read the thermometer with the little screen lighting him under the chin. “Hundred and three point four.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It’s right.” He crouched down so we were level, which he did for Iris. “Why?”

I couldn’t produce a single sentence that was both true and sayable.

“Delaney.”

“Because I’m the one who’s supposed to be able to do it,” I said.

He was quiet a while. “Yeah,” he said. “I know how that one goes.”

Around the middle of the night I sweated through a shirt and couldn’t get it off. The cotton had turned cold and heavy and glued itself across my face. I got it as far as my shoulders and my arms wouldn’t finish the job, and I said a word I never used in front of children.