I sat up slowly, moving with the careful deliberation of someone balancing on the edge of a cliff, gripping the nightstand for support. My hands looked skeletal in the gray predawn light filtering through the lace curtains Walter had hung for me thirty years ago. When had I lost so much weight? The bathroom scale said I’d dropped twenty-three pounds in three months. The doctor, a young man who barely looked at me during the appointment, said it was normal at sixty-eight. “Things slow down,” he’d said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Your metabolism changes. Your body adjusts.”
But this didn’t feel like adjustment. This felt like dying.
I made it to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, gripping the sink for balance. The woman staring back at me from the mirror looked like a stranger—skin pale and waxy, gaunt cheeks, eyes sunken deep in dark purple hollows. My nightgown hung on my frame like it belonged to someone three sizes larger. I looked like the photographs of cancer patients in medical brochures.
The kitchen was easier to navigate if I kept one hand on the wall. I ran my palm along the chair rail Walter had installed thirty years ago, back when Steven was in high school. He’d sanded it for hours until it was smooth as glass, then applied three coats of clear varnish until it gleamed like honey in the sunlight. His meticulous work covered every surface in this house: the oak cabinets he’d built from scratch in the garage, the built-in bookshelves in the living room with their perfect joints, the banister he’d carved by hand with patterns of leaves and vines.
Walter had built this house. Not hired contractors or construction crews. Him. Two full years of sweat and weekend labor, 1982 to 1984. He would come home from his day job at the machine shop and work on our house until it was too dark to see, building our future with his own capable hands. Steven was just a toddler then, barely two years old, following his father around the construction site, trying to hold the toy hammer Walter had given him, mimicking his daddy’s every move.
I filled the coffee pot at the sink, my hands trembling slightly. Through the window above the faucet, I could see the massive maple tree Walter had planted in the backyard the day Steven was born. It was forty-five years old now, its trunk thick and strong, its roots deep and unshakeable. Walter used to say that tree would outlive us all.
Two weeks ago, an ambulance had come screaming down our quiet street, lights flashing red and blue against the neighbors’ windows. I’d been too weak to stand that morning, had collapsed on the cold bathroom tile. Nancy from next door, who had a key for emergencies, found me there and called 911. The hospital had run endless tests—blood work, CT scans, EKGs, questions I was too foggy to properly answer.
A young doctor with kind brown eyes and prematurely gray hair pulled up a chair next to my hospital bed, his expression serious.
“Mrs. Bennett, your blood work shows significantly elevated carbon monoxide levels,” he said gently.
I blinked at him, trying to process the words through the fog in my brain. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’ve been exposed to carbon monoxide, probably chronically over an extended period. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector installed in your home?”
