The Day My Husband Would Not Help

I got the kids up at six thirty. I did it slow, with a lot of sitting down. I made Sam’s oatmeal and I could not talk much so Hannah picked up on something being wrong and she went quiet and watchful the way she does. I got Lorraine her pills and her toast. I got everybody where they needed to be. Dale left for his route at seven without a word to me about the night, except, on his way out the door, with his travel mug in his hand, he said, “You get on top of that, now. I need you right this week.”

He needed me right that week. I stood at the counter and I could not breathe and the man said he needed me right.

I made it to about two in the afternoon.

I remember I was carrying a basket of folded towels down the hall to the linen closet, and I bent to set it down, and when I straightened up the room tipped and the black spots rushed in from the sides all at once and I could not get any air at all. Not a thin whistle. Nothing. I grabbed the door frame and I went down to my knees on the hall carpet with my mouth open and no sound coming out, and the only clear thought I had was that Sam would be home on the bus in an hour and he would be the one to find me.

Lorraine heard me go down.

She could not get to me. She was in her chair in the back room and by the time she got the walker and came around the corner it would have been minutes, and I did not have minutes. But she had the cordless phone in her lap because I had started leaving it with her, and she did the thing I had shown her a dozen times and never once thought she would need. She called Pam.

Pam Dubois lives across the county road from us. She is sixty, she raised four boys, she is a widow, and she can see our driveway from her kitchen window. Lorraine told her, in that flat scared old-woman voice, that Nora was on the floor and could not breathe. Pam did not hang up and call anyone. Pam was in her car before Lorraine finished the sentence, and she was through our front door in under two minutes, and she is the reason I am alive to type this.

I remember her hands. I remember her getting down on the carpet next to me and getting one arm behind my back and sitting me up and saying, “Okay. Okay, honey. I’ve got you. Up we come,” in a voice with no panic in it at all, and I remember thinking that was the first calm voice I had heard in twelve hours. She found my inhaler. She called 911 on her own phone with one hand while she held me up with the other. She told them our road and the mile marker and she said the words “severe asthma, not responding, blue around the mouth,” and I found out later that is the kind of thing you say to make an ambulance come fast.