Praying for Sleep

from one of the ambulances and put a butterfly bandage on the cut on Lis’s arm then retreated, saying only, “Hardly a scratch. Wash it.”
    “No stitches?”
    “Nup. That bump on your head, that’ll go away in a day or two. Don’t worry.”
    Unaware that she had a bump on her head she said she wasn’t worried. She turned back to Haversham and spoke with him for the better part of half an hour.
    “Oh, listen,” she asked, after she’d finished her account, “could you get in touch with a Dr. Kohler at Marsden hospital?”
    “Kohler?” Haversham squinted. “He’s disappeared. We were trying to find him.”
    “Hey, would that be a Richard Kohler?” The Ridgeton sheriff had overheard them.
    “That’s him,” Lis said.
    “Well,” the sheriff responded, “fella of that name was found drunk an hour ago. At Klepperman’s Ford.”
    “Drunk?”
    “Sleeping off a bad one on the hood of a Mark IV Lincoln Continental. To top it off, had a raincoat laid over him like a blanket and this skull, looked like a badger or skunk or something, sitting on his chest. No, I’m not fooling. If that ain’t peculiar I don’t know what is.”
    “Drunk?” Lis repeated.
    “He’ll be okay. He was pretty groggy so we got him in a holding cell at the station. Lucky for him he was on the car and not driving it, or he could kiss that license good bye.”
    This hardly seemed like Kohler. But nothing would have surprised her tonight.
    She led Haversham and another deputy into the house and coaxed Michael outside. Together they walked him to an ambulance.
    “Looks like that’s a broken arm and ankle,” the astonished medic said. “And I’d throw in a couple cracked ribs too. But he don’t seem to feel a thing.”
    The deputies stared at the patient with fear and awe, as if he were the mythical progeny of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. Michael, upon Lis’s solemn promise that it was not poison, consented to a shot of sedative and allowed his own wounds to be cleaned though only after Lis asked the medic to dab antiseptic on her wrist to prove it was not acid. Michael sat in the back of the ambulance, hands together, staring down at the floor, and said not a word of farewell to anyone. He seemed to be humming as the doors closed.
    Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.
    As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zinnias.
    The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn’t hear a single one of them.
    Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister’s arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.
    The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They’d glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn’t cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The greenhouse, for instance, had seen several howling tempests and had never been damaged until tonight—and even then it’d taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.
    Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, which, she supposed, meant he’d like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.

Epilogue
    The blossoms of the