Chapter 46 Chapter Forty-Five

Crawford dozed off beside his wife, and when he awoke just before three o'clock in the morning, Bella gasped for breath and shifted in bed.He sat up straight and took her hand. "Bella?" She took a deep breath and let it out again.She opened her eyes, for the first time in days.Crawford pressed his face close to hers, but he thought she couldn't see him. "Bella, I love you, boy," he said.Or maybe she could still hear. Fear swept across the walls of his chest, like a bat in a room, circling inside him.Later, he took control. He wanted to find her something, anything, but he didn't want her to feel that he had let go of her hand.

He pressed his ear to her chest, and he heard a faint heartbeat, a flutter, and then her heart stopped, and nothing could be heard, only a strange, cool pounding sound.He didn't know if the sound came from her chest or just his own ears. "May God bless you and always be with him ... and your family," Crawford said, hoping his words would come true. He lifted her from the bed and sat against the headboard.He held her in his arms, her brain dying slowly, and with his chin he pushed Shazhong away from what little of her remaining hair.He didn't cry.He has cried enough. Crawford changed her into her favorite and best nightgown, and sat for a moment on the edge of the raised bed, holding one of her hands to his cheek.The hand is square and dexterous, bearing the marks of a lifetime of gardening, and now it is speckled with the needles of the IV.

When she came in from the garden her hands smelled as sweet as thyme. (“It’s like you’ve got egg whites on your fingers,” the girls used to say to Bella about sex at school. She and Crawford joked about it in bed Boy, all those years ago, all those years ago, last year, it was all joked about. Don't think about it, think about something nice, something pure. That's a pure thing! She wears a round hat and white gloves , was going upstairs in the elevator, and that was the first time he whistled, a passionate tune adapted from the bizin dance. In the room, she still laughed at him, and her pockets were full of messy things Full, like a child.)

Crawford tried going to the next room—if he wanted to, he could still look back at her through the open door, and see her lying peacefully in the warm light of the bedside lamp.He is waiting, waiting for her body to become a ritual object, to leave him, to leave the person he is holding on the bed, to leave the person he still regards as his lifelong partner in his heart at this moment, so that he can call They came to take her away. He hangs his empty hands, palms forward, at his sides.He stood at the window, looking at the empty east.He was not waiting for the dawn; the east was only the orientation of the windows.