The Day My Husband Would Not Help

The day my husband would not help me breathe was the day everything in our house changed

The attack started a little after four in the morning, the way the bad ones always do, when the house is dark and cold and there is no one awake to tell you that you are not dying.

I woke up already sitting forward. That is how I know it is a serious one. My body sits me up before my mind catches up, like it is trying to get the weight of my own chest off my lungs. The air in the bedroom felt thick, like breathing through a wet dish towel. Every time I tried to pull a full breath, it stopped about halfway in and whistled back out, high and thin, that sound I have hated my whole life because it means the next hour is going to be a fight.

I have had asthma since I was six years old. I know the stages of it the way a farmer knows weather. I know the tight cough that means I have two days to get ahead of it. I know the wheeze that means today is going to be careful. And I know this, the four a.m. sitting-up, the shoulders climbing toward my ears, the little black spots at the edge of everything, which means I am past careful and into the part where I need help.

I reached for my rescue inhaler on the nightstand and took two puffs and waited for the shake to come into my hands. It came, but the breath did not open up the way it should have. I took two more. I was not supposed to. I did anyway. My heart went to hammering from the medicine and my lungs stayed shut like a door with the swelling painted over it.

Beside me, Dale was asleep on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes.

Dale is my husband. We have been married fourteen years. We live on the edge of Rook’s Branch, Missouri, which is not much more than a grain co-op, a Casey’s, a Methodist church, a feed store, and a diner called the Blue Hen where the same eleven men have been drinking the same coffee since before I was born. Dale drives a delivery route for a beverage company three counties wide. He is a big man, loud in a room full of people, quiet in a room with just me. People in town like him. He coaches Cole’s summer ball team and he can fix anything with a motor and he will give a stranger the shirt off his back.

He will give a stranger the shirt off his back. I want you to hold onto that while I tell you the rest.

I put my hand on his shoulder and shook him. “Dale,” I said, and it came out as half a word because I did not have the air to finish it. “Dale, I need you.”