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Show 61 Nineteen Long before her eyes are open Annis can feel the bed, its so well-familiar contours, the small lumps and hollows that make a bed one's own. She moves just slightly, and finds the pattern into which she and her husband have fit their bodies together over the past half-century. They have conceived their children in this bed, suffered their illnesses in this bed, wept together here in this bed after the death of Luel, but in all the nights and afternoons and mornings in this bed, after the love or weeping or contented conjugal laughter would come the time for sleep, when John would turn on his side toward her, she would turn also on her side, away, and she would fit her smaller body into the angle formed by his. They would lie together motionless, their bodies touching all along their lengths, like one spoon nestled in another, and he would fold his arm gently over her. Sometimes she would feel a tiny, most gentle shuddering of his body, a kind of contented convulsion, at the moment of sleep; sometimes, she knew, he would feel the sleep coming to her. But now she sees faces hovering over the bed, and only from time to time can she surface from the depths of her sleep to see them. Roddy. Evan. Both sons appear, leaning over her, their faces concerned; they seem to appear at intervals, though she has no sense of how far their visits are apart, how long they last, or why her sons are here. Sometimes it is a strange face, one she does not recognize, which bends over her in a cautious, professional manner; sometimes she talks with this face, though later she will have little recollection of what she said, or what this face said to her. Her condition is sheer |