Volt: Stories Read Online Free PDF

turned a wedding band on his thin finger. “Don’t you want whoever did this to you to face due justice?”
    Winslow shut his eyes. “ I did this.”

15
    The nurse told Winslow he had a visitor. Winslow expected Bently or Ham. In walked Sadie. He studied her face, her silver cross, hair dyed the color of wheat, waiting for her eyes to prove she was real. She crossed the room and piled clothes on the chair by the window; his favorite green flannel shirt, jeans, his old brogans.
    Then she turned and asked the nurse to see the doctor. He saw her eyes. It was really her. Winslow couldn’t breathe. His body shook and electric pain tore through his ribs. He quietly moaned as Sadie, without a word, followed the nurse from the room.
    Sadie remained in the hall while the nurse helped Winslow button his shirt, buckle his belt, tug on his boots. The nurse helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him out. Then Sadie took the nurse’s place.
    They rolled down a long tiled hall, Sadie silent behind him, and out into the parking lot. A gray sky hung low, the day unseasonably warm. Their truck sat in the far corner, out near the highway. In the field across the road, patches of soil showed through the snow. Beyond the field were hills dense with trees. The urge lingered to run into those woods, to hide away from the world.
    Then they were at the truck. Sadie opened the door and Winslow climbed gingerly into the seat. He gazed out the windshield at the wintry hills. Sadie hardly glanced at Winslow. She covered him with a quilt as one might prepare a delicate piece of furniture for a long haul.
    The truck descended a ramp to the interstate. They got up to speed and merged behind a semi. The wheels droned and the cab shook and Winslow tried to hold it down, but the pain and silence were too much. Tears ran hot down his face.
    “Tell me if you need to stop,” was all Sadie said.
    They were the first words she’d spoken to him. Winslow swallowed to steady his voice. “How long a drive we got?”
    “Five hours.”
    So long he’d walked, so much wandering, and now mere hours by truck. The land outside was open plains, the hills still in sight but fading, and though there was no quelling the pain in his side, Winslow leaned against the window and the glass cooled his face.
    Rain ran down the windshield and the wipers thrummed. Winslow pretended to sleep, watched Sadie through his lashes. Her face was shadowed, but even through the darkness he believed he saw something altered in her face.
    Sadie had never been able to lie to Winslow, her feelings always true in her eyes. From their first date in high school he’d teased she was incapable of keeping anything from him, and understood his ability to read her as a function of their love. Now he read nothing, and the place behind his sternum, what Winslow considered his heart, felt hollow with the possibility her face had nothing left for him.
    He lolled his head and trained his eyes on the road. Brake lights flashed, a semi kicking mist. The wipers cleared the glass, but he could not see far enough beyond the road to know where they were.
    They crossed the wide river, overflowing its banks, oil-black current churning through the boles of trees. The tires sang over the bridge. On the other side, Winslow read a billboard for the Chestertown Inn, where they’d stayed for their tenth anniversary. He remembered a featherbed and a room of sunshine and Sadie’s sweet breath on his cheek.
    “Got the hay harvested,” Sadie said, the first either had spoken in hours. “Fred Halliday helped. Store paid pretty well.” Set back from the road was a favorite restaurant of theirs, the Angus, a mammoth black steer on its roof. “Bought that old calico from William Bennet. The one Betty’d ride sometimes. It was a wild hair, but she’s a good old horse.”
    Winslow wanted more words. Any words. Even the casual felt comforting. “How are William and Betty?”
    “Alive,” she said, and