Dolores Claiborne(71)

Then it was gone, and I heard her moanin and cryin.

I couldn't believe she'd lived through that fall; can't believe it still. Joe hadn't been killed outright either, accourse, but he'd been a man in the prime of life, and she was a flabby old woman who'd had half a dozen small strokes n at least three big ones. Also, there wasn't no mud n squelch to cushion her landin like there had been to cushion his.

I didn't want to go down to her, didn't want to see where she was broken and bleedin, but there wa'ant no question, accourse; I was the only one there, and that meant I was elected. When I got up (I had to haul on the newel post at the top of the bannister to do it, my knees were so watery-feelin), I stepped one foot on the hem of my own slip. The other strap popped, n I raised up my dress a little so I could pull it off. . . and that was just like before, too. I remember lookin down at my legs to see if they were scratched and bleedin from the thorns in the blackberry tangle, but accourse there wasn't nothing like that.

I felt feverish. If you've ever been really sick n your temperature's gone way, way up, you know what I mean; you don't feel out of the world, exactly, but you sure as hell don't feel in it, either. It's like everythin was turned to glass, and there isn't anything you can get a solid grip on anymore; everythin's slippery. That's how I felt as I stood there on the landin, holdin the top of the bannister in a death-grip and lookin at where she'd finished up.

She was layin a little over halfway down the staircase with both legs twisted so far under her you couldn't hardly see em. Blood was runnin down one side of her poor old face. When I stumbled down to where she lay, still clingin onto the bannister for dear life as I went, one of her eyes rolled up in its socket to mark me. It was the look of an animal caught in a trap.

'Dolores,' she whispered. 'That son of a bitch has been after me all these years.'

'Shh,' I said. 'Don't try to talk.'

'Yes he has,' she said, as if I'd contradicted her. 'Oh, the bastard. The randy bastard.'

'I'm going downstairs,' I says. 'I got to call the doctor.'

'No,' she says back. She reached up with one hand and took hold of my wrist. 'No doctor. No hospital. The dust bunnies . . . even there. Everywhere.'

'You'll be all right, Vera,' I says, pullin my hand free. 'As long as you lie still n don't move, you'll be fine.'

'Dolores Claiborne says I'm going to be fine!' she says, and it was that dry, fierce voice she used to use before she had her strokes n got all muddled in her head. 'What a relief it is to have a professional opinion!'

Hearin that voice after all the years it had been gone was like bein slapped. It shocked me right out of my panic, and I really looked into her face for the first time, the way you look at a person who knows exactly what they're sayin n means every word.

'I'm as good as dead,' she says, 'and you know it as well as I do. My back's broken, I think.'

'You don't know that, Vera,' I says, but I wasn't wild to get to the telephone like I had been. I think I knew what was comin, and if she ast what I thought she was gonna ask, I didn't see how I could refuse her. I had owed her a debt ever since that rainy fall day in 1962 when I sat on her bed n bawled my eyes out with my apron up over my face, and the Claibornes have always cleared their debts.

When she spoke to me again, she was as clear and as lucid as she'd been thirty years ago, back when Joe was alive and the kids were still at home. 'I know there's only one thing left worth deciding,' she says, 'and that's whether I'm going to die in my time or in some hospital's. Their time would be too long. My time is now, Dolores. I'm tired of seeing my husband's face in the corners when I'm weak and confused. I'm tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight, how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side -'

'Vera, I don't know what you're talkin about,' I says.

She lifted her hand n waved it at me in her old impatient way for a second or two; then it flopped back onto the stairs beside her. 'I'm tired of pissing down my legs and forgetting who came to see me half an hour after they're gone. I want to be done. Will you help me?'

I knelt beside her, picked up the hand that'd fallen on the stairs n held it against my bosom. I thought about the sound the rock made when it hit Joe in the face - that sound like a china plate breakin all to splinters on a brick hearth. I wondered if I could hear that sound again without losin my mind. And I knew it would sound the same, because she'd sounded like him. when she was callin my name, she'd sounded like him when she fell and landed on the stairs, breakin herself all to pieces just like she'd always been afraid the maids'd break the delicate glassware she kept in the parlor, and my slip was layin on the upstairs landin in a little ball of white nylon with both straps busted, and that was just like before, too. If I did her, it'd sound the same as it had when I did him, and I knew it. Ayuh. I knew it as well's I know that East Lane ends in those rickety old stairs goin down the side of East Head.

I held her hand n thought about how the world is how sometimes bad men have accidents and good women turn into bitches. I looked at the awful, helpless way her eyes rolled so she could look up into my face, n I marked how the blood from the cut in her scalp ran down the deep wrinkles in her cheek, the way spring rain runs in plow furrows goin downhill.